The Bourbon Thief(22)
Something exploded.
...you better believe if you don’t shape up and grow up and do what your grandfather tells you to do, you will end up with nothing. I will not let you screw this up, not after all I’ve put up with.
It’s high time you earn your place in this family. Your mother thinks you’re getting a bit too big for your britches. She told me to take you down a peg or two.
This was why Momma left and didn’t come back. This was why. Because her mother had sold her, sold her out to her own grandfather. Sold her body to him in exchange for Red Thread. Her mother...that coward, that bitch, had driven away, leaving her alone with him so she didn’t have to hear her daughter’s screams. And her grandfather, this vile piece of shit, was going to rape her until she was knocked up and he could marry her off. He wanted a baby boy so bad he was going to make her have it for him. He would fuck her until she gave him one. If the first baby was a girl, he’d fuck her again and again and again. All for his dirty kingdom. If she could, she’d burn to the ground, right here and right now. She wanted fire, fire everywhere. She wanted her grandfather burning in hell and her mother burning right next to him and the house burning down, taking all of Red Thread with it.
Tamara pushed against her grandfather’s chest as hard as she could. Then she saw something.
A brown pool of water crept in under the door. She noticed it first. Her grandfather was too preoccupied undoing his pants to notice anything. But when he turned his head, he saw it, too.
“What the hell?” he said, his brow furrowed in frustration and confusion. For one second he looked the other way. For one second his mind wasn’t on her and what he was doing. For one second the water rapidly rushing into the room was more important than anything, even this.
That one second was all Tamara needed.
With her free hand she grabbed the lamp off the nightstand and smashed it against his head. He screamed and blood burst from his temple. In a daze he slumped onto his side, his hand over the bleeding wound, swearing and blinking, and Tamara wriggled her way out from under his bulk. Frantically she looked around for a weapon—anything would do—and saw a heavy silver candlestick on top of the dresser. Two inches of water surrounded her ankles as she stood up off the bed. Two inches and rising fast. The candlestick was heavy and square—art deco, a gift from her grandmother—and when she slammed it down onto her granddaddy’s head, it made a soft and awful thudding sound. He keeled over, not moving, not a muscle.
A gust of wind brushed across her body, lifting her hair. Ice-cold wind like someone had left the door open to winter and called it inside.
Tamara stood there and giggled a little. She’d gone to a slumber party two weeks ago and they’d played Clue. Miss Scarlet in the bedroom with the candlestick...
Noises came from the side of the house, jarring her from her delirium—something falling over, something else cracking and wood splintering like a door coming off the hinges. The water in the house was a foot high now, muddy and stinking and ice-cold. The shattered remains of the lamp covered the bed like glitter. In the window seat sat the bottle of Red Thread. Tamara picked it up and smashed it against the wall. The red ribbon around its neck fell into the water. She fished it out and grabbed her grandfather’s hand, twisting the ribbon around his index finger. He moaned and Tamara gasped. The water reached her knees.
Tamara grasped her grandfather by the ankles and dragged him off the bed. She couldn’t get any traction at first, but terror gave her strength. She tugged and lugged and pulled. His penis hung out of his unzipped pants like a fat earthworm. If she had garden shears handy, she would cut it off his body.
With one final yank on his belt loops, Tamara heaved him off the bed into the cold dirty water. And then, because she knew she had no other choice if she wanted to survive this night, she grabbed two fistfuls of his Lee Majors hair and shoved his head under the water.
Some part of his brain must have registered what was happening to him. He thrashed hard after the first inhale of muck, but she had the advantage now and wasn’t going to lose it. She held him down until he stopped moving and, to be on the safe side, long after he stopped moving.
When it was done, she stood there looking at him there in the water, floating, seaworthy as a garbage bag. He didn’t look like a person anymore.
From the other room came a screeching sound—the river rearranging the furniture. Tamara ripped the silky pink cover off her bed and shook the broken glass out of it. Wrapping it around herself like a shawl, she waded through the now knee-deep water to the door. The house had gone mad. Chairs floated. Papers and books bobbed on the surface like toy boats. The smell of sewage permeated the air. Somewhere a light flickered and Tamara had a new fear then—electrocution. She heard a squeak and saw movement in the water—a gray rat swimming down the hall to save itself. Panicking, Tamara forced her way past a china cabinet now turned on its side and floating and made it to the stairs. She rushed upstairs to the bathroom and hit her knees in front of the toilet. For what felt like an hour she wretched and vomited. She threw up so hard her throat tore and she urinated on herself. She could taste blood in her mouth.
Then the lights went out.
Tamara blinked, letting her eyes adjust to the dark. With the pink blanket around her again, she dragged herself to her feet and felt her way down the hall to her grandfather’s office. It faced the highway instead of the river. If the water kept rising, it would be the last room to flood. The door wasn’t locked, and if it had been, she would have busted the door down for the pleasure of breaking something. Inside the office she saw a black box on the desk. In the dark the telephone looked like a cat curled up and sleeping. Should she call for help? She didn’t know. She’d been warned once not to touch the telephone in a storm, but it wasn’t lightning. Carefully she picked up the receiver. The line was dead. She was all alone in the house with her grandfather’s dead body.