The Maid's Version (15 page)

He decided to get away and aimed for the door again, but of a sudden felt awful, small, silly and small and awful, and turned around to go kick out the flames he’d made but didn’t want now. He stumbled on the first stair, wobbled backwards reaching for anything to hold him upright and heard three men snapping at each other in the alley just outside the door—“No, you won’t, either.”

“I can’t have you parking that juice in here, so—”

“For chrissake, grab him, you Irish donkey.” Then the same voice said several words so snarled and low their specifics were lost, but the tenor of the snarling was easily understood, and Glencross began again to fall and reached out, knocking something made of thin metal to the floor at the same moment that two gunshots were fired near the door, their reports lost in the music to those upstairs, maybe, but not in the garage, and the men with guns heard the metal clank and spin on concrete, saw a silhouette of Glencross, and shot. It felt like a shove, a hard nudge in the arm, but he raised a hand and touched blood and the suddenly burning staircase tapped heat to ground and a thin trickle of blue flames ate grease stains, gas stains, any stains on the floor and moved fast as a bad idea to the vehicles parked inside. He crawled toward escape in white linen, not exactly hidden, bottle cracked in his pocket, whisky running down his legs, past tires that were already holding flames, and stood then, and would always feel certain he was at that instant shot at again, at least once, but he made the door and ran. He looked back and saw them coming while flames behind began to rear up and hiss. He went into the alley—he was seen by folks sitting in the upper windows to catch a cooling breeze, but none who survived understood what they were seeing or who was running—and the gunmen were so near he leapt sideways over fences and scooted on grass across yards, under bushes, but did not feel hidden and ran on in a whitish crouch. He heard the hoodlums searching, but turned onto Curry Street and dove into a backyard. (Judge Swann’s, and both Mrs. Swann and her hired girl, Bettina Wenders, saw him from the back porch so clearly that Bettina thought he was calling on the Judge and said, “No, no, he’s resting now.”) He went over another fence and pushed up Hill Street and the world behind him broke open and flew into the air, and he turned to the sky fired by a risen fount of orange that swayed in a tower much taller than the skyline, and became still, saw a building crumpled to bits flung in the air and people falling, and he was unable to move, unable to move or look away, heard the enormous shrieks, the cries, the roasting in their agony, and would never know a day or a night when he didn’t.

Daniel Woodrell was born in the Missouri Ozarks, left school and enlisted in the marines the week he turned seventeen, received his bachelor’s degree at age twenty-seven, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and spent a year on a Michener Fellowship.
The Maid’s Version
is his ninth novel.
Winter’s Bone
, his eighth novel, was made into a film that won the Sundance Film Festival’s Best Picture Prize in 2001 and was nominated for four Academy Awards. Five of his novels were selected as
New York Times
Notable Books of the year.
Tomato Red
won the PEN West Award for the Novel in 1999, and
The Death of Sweet Mister
received the 2011 Clifton Fadiman Medal from the Center for Fiction.
The Outlaw Album
was Woodrell’s first collection of stories. He lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.