Bull Mountain(52)
“Holly, one more thing.”
“What’s that, Mrs. Burroughs?”
“Another thing about Clayton. Once he gets his mind set to something, there’s no stopping him until it’s run its course. Not until it’s done. So I’d be extremely careful what exactly you set him on.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Kate watched the twin red taillights fade to black before she gave her hands permission to shake.
5.
“I’m sorry, baby. It was a onetime thing. It won’t happen again.” Clayton was barely conscious, drifting off on their bed as he spoke. Kate covered him with the quilt and stroked his rust-colored hair. There was no point in trying to talk about anything now. Clayton waking up in his boots and dirty clothes with a monster hangover would have to be penance enough. She’d deal with the rest later.
“It’s okay, Clayton. Get some rest.”
Within seconds he was out, and the snoring began. He snored only when he drank. She stayed there, sitting on the bed, running her fingers through his hair for a few minutes more before getting up to put the rifle back in the gun cabinet. She walked into the kitchen and used her foot to slide a small wooden step stool out of the pantry and position it in front of the refrigerator. She stepped up, moved a few bottles of vitamins out of the way, and opened the high cupboard. She pulled out the bottle of bourbon. The bottle she wasn’t supposed to know about. She stepped down, opened another cabinet, and took out a rocks glass. Waterford crystal. Expensive. A wedding gift from some friend she’d drifted out of touch with years ago. She carried the whiskey and the glass to the front door, careful not to let the screen door creak and wake up Clayton. Like that would happen. He’d sleep through a hurricane right now. She sat down on the porch swing and held the bottle up to the moonlight. It was a little over half empty. A full two, maybe three, inches below the thin black pen mark she’d put on the back label. Last time she checked, it was at an inch. She closed her eyes and sat quiet, swinging there, listening to the mountain’s nightlife competing for the chance to sing her to sleep. She poured herself a drink and set the bottle down beside her. She held the glass for a long time, staring at it, rolling it between her palms before she finally poured it out on the porch and cried.
CHAPTER
16
ANGEL
1973
1.
Angel rested her forehead against the cool glass of the bus window. The tree line buzzed by in a blur of greens, browns, and reds. Every so often she tried to focus on a single point of interest and moved her head to break the blur, but there was nothing to see she hadn’t seen a hundred times before. She’d hitched every inch of this highway over the course of the past five years in an effort to escape her life, but always ended up headed back in this direction. She’d spent the last of the money the big black man from the hotel gave her on the bus ticket. If she had done what he told her and gone to a hospital, she might still have it all, but she didn’t. She went to Pepé, her pimp. It’s true what they say about young gullible women thinking their tormentors love them. Angel was walking, talking, battered proof. Pepé said he cared about her. Promised to take care of her. Swore to her no other man would put hands on her she didn’t want there. He told her hospitals led to uncomfortable questions, and that led to police, which led to jail. He would never let that happen to her. He’d protect her, and his protection was absolute. Except, his protection consisted of taking all her money, putting a needle full of opium in her arm, and getting a bunch of Hispanic yes-men to hold her down and shove her shoulder back in place while she drooled into a dirty sofa cushion. She didn’t remember all of it, just flashes of color, sweaty faces, and laughter. One of them, the one Pepé called El Cirujano, stitched up her face where that bastard from Georgia had cut her. She hadn’t pulled the gauze off to examine the damage. In fact, she’d avoided her reflection altogether since it all went down. Right now she was fine with never seeing her face again, but she knew something bad was festering under there. Pepé kept her doped up for God knows how long, relegated to the back room of that double-wide, until it dawned on him that nobody would want to f*ck a skinny whore in her condition with a face that looked like raw hamburger. That’s when the dope stopped coming and the sick started. Almost two months she’d stayed cooped up in that shithole. She knew it would be just a matter of time before he’d kill her and have his boys toss her body in a dumpster somewhere. A far cry from the life she’d come out here for. She’d thought to stash one of the C-notes in the lining of her bra, and the first chance she got, she slid it under a corner of carpet. When the time came to bail, she took that money and the clothes she had on and climbed out the trailer window. She made a beeline to the bus station where Pepé had first scooped her up so many months ago and bought a ticket for the first bus home. Why didn’t she just go to the damn hospital? Why was she so stupid? Why was everyone else always right, and she got everything so terribly wrong? She moved her forehead around on the window, using up all the coolness of the glass, and closed her eyes. She knew going home was just the latest in her lifelong series of mistakes.
2.
The young man sitting next to Angel in the aisle seat fished a bag of peanuts from the rucksack on his lap. “You want some?” he asked, shaking the bag toward Angel. He was chubby in a man-child kind of way, with a full head of tightly curled brown hair. He wore blue jeans and a Florida State sweatshirt that sported the same Indian-head logo also embroidered on the rucksack. He was obviously in his twenties, but the rosy cheeks and chub made him look younger. He seemed nice enough, letting her have the window seat when she got on the bus, and, so far, he hadn’t mentioned the bandages on her face or the dirty denim shirt and sweat-stained tube top she was wearing. She could tell he was fighting it, but he’d managed to keep his eyes off her tits this whole time as well, and she was thankful for it. She had caught him stealing glances at her bony white legs for the past few miles. She used to like being ogled. It made her feel pretty, but now it just made her feel ill.