BAD TRIP SOUTH (17 page)

Emily started to cry, her shoulders heaving. “It’s all right,” Carrie said. “Don’t cry, baby, it’s going to be all right no matter what happens.”

#

YOU might think I shouldn’t love my father for what he’s done to my mother. The funny thing is I can love part of him and hate the other part. The part that is my father who rode me on his shoulders at the Thanksgiving Parade, the part that took me into Clarissa’s Toy Shop downtown and bought me the prettiest porcelain doll they had for sale, the part that beamed over my report card grades--that’s the part I love.

People, even parents, don’t come all in a box with a bow tied around it, like a present--pretty and new and something you always wanted. They’re made up of pieces and bits, some of it smooth like jewels shining and some of it jagged glass that can cut your heart out. You have to love what you can and stay away from the rest.

The one thing I couldn’t forgive him for is when he said he’d kill Mama if she tried to leave him.

The one thing that surprised me about my mama was how she didn’t care. She said she’d go anyway. For the first time in our lives she was ready to stand up to him even if he threatened to take her life for it.

Maybe it was all these days under the strain and the fear with Heddy and Crow. It was also probably because she saw how Heddy touched Daddy and how he responded to her. That one sudden touch and the smile from it caused my mother to break out and say what she had to say, to face what she had to face. She had loved my father once and now she had to get away from him. She said it was to prove to me she could do it, but the truth was it was something she had to do to save herself.

When Heddy told us she would be the one to kill us, I knew it was the truth too. Heddy didn’t say anything she didn’t mean. I could tell by watching Crow as he listened to my mama that he would never hurt her in any way. He was a killer, he’d already killed people in front of us, but my mother had found one of those jeweled parts in him and he’d never find his dead broken glass soul to cut her out of his life.

It seemed to me then that things were getting really complicated. Over three days and two nights Heddy and my daddy were interested in one another. And Crow was interested in my mother, though she was older than he was. It made me dizzy to think of it. It made me nervous.

Even though I knew now that Crow wouldn’t want to hurt Mama, Heddy so far had not shown me any part of her that wasn’t broken. It was like she was a shattered mirror and every piece of it had a crack from top to bottom, from side to side. If anyone could murder us, she could, and it wouldn’t bother her a bit. But would Crow let her do that after what I saw in his eyes for my mother? Where would his loyalty lie in the end? He always did what Heddy said, but when it came to putting a bullet in me or my mother, would Crow let that happen?

I didn’t know which one of them would win out in that contest. Heddy was the strongest, but maybe Crow hadn’t been tested properly yet.

It was odd to hope that this man, this killer, would be the one to save us. But it was all we had.

The new van they’d stolen rolled down the highway across Texas. Outside the windows lay desert land, cacti, and little dusty towns that dozed like old shaggy cats lying spread out in the sun.

Daddy stayed completely still in his seat staring out the window, saying nothing. Crow watched everyone carefully. He made my skin crawl the way he watched us.

I daydreamed a little, remembering our house, the sidewalk in front of it, the street with the trees growing down each side shading the walk. I played there. It was where I learned to ride a bike and to skate. I had friends when I was little. We played games in the front yard and built Kool-Aid stands to sell cups of lemonade on summer days. But when I got older, around nine, I started to realize my friends wouldn’t like it inside my house where there was so much silence and unhappiness. If you walked into our house from outside, you’d feel a chill. It wasn’t natural in our house. It was like a freezer and we were all frozen in our places.

I stopped inviting friends over and they stopped inviting me to their houses until finally I had no friends left at all. It was better that way, just the three of us in the house alone, keeping the secrets.

I used to sit in my room and stare out the front window at the street thinking what I would be when I grew up and I could get away from my parents and the sadness they shared. I would be good, mostly. I would never be mean to another single person, never make anyone cry, never raise my hand to another. It’s the lesson I’d learned and maybe the only one. It got to the point that I couldn’t even harm an insect, couldn’t swat at a fly on my arm or mash a big black ant if it crawled up my leg.

The horror of what I’d seen Crow and Heddy do was a hundred times worse than what my father did when he raised his hand to my mother, but in some ways not really any worse. They killed quickly, taking life in a flash. Daddy had been killing Mama slowly all of my life and, longer, years of cutting away her love until she was half dead before she could manage to say she’d take it no more.

I’d sit on her bed and place a wet folded washcloth over her black eyes and ask her to talk to me, but she couldn’t. She was too dead inside to tell me she was going to recover. Yet by the morning, she’d rise, wash her face, apply the thick pancake make-up and the tinted glasses, and she would go to school with me where she taught and I attended my classes. She’d do what she had to do, I guess, when she had to do it.

No one ever questioned us. Not me or Mama. Daddy was on the town’s police force, what could they say? Maybe they were afraid he’d arrest them. For whatever reason the principal, Mr. Haddway, never called me in and he never asked Mama if she was going to be all right, if she needed help, if he could be of assistance.

It was as if only the kids were the honest ones. They whispered about the black eyes and bruises. They kept away from me so that I ate alone in the cafeteria and was never picked for any side in the games during gym.

I always thought that was for the best because I couldn’t tell them why things were this way or how they would ever end. I never wanted to talk about it. Everyone else had a best friend. I didn’t want any best friends because you had to tell them everything and I couldn’t, just couldn’t.

Toward evening the first day we were in the stolen van Crow started talking after he had some of the drug in his purse. He swiveled toward us and said:“I’ve got a whole lot of money here.” He patted his leather bag. Patted it, patted it like a puppy.

Heddy heard him and warned, “Crow...”

He flipped his hand at her as if to say go away, you bother me, then continued. “I haven’t counted it, but it’s a lot of money, more money than your ole man’s ever made in his entire life. What do you think of that?”

Mama said, “It might get you killed.”

Crow laughed. “Likely as not, unless we get across that border before they catch up with us.” He turned and looked out the square back windows. “I don’t know who’s back there. They might be back there, all right.”

“
Why don’t you shut up, Crow? Damn. Do not. Do you hear me? Do not get paranoid on me.”

Again he ignored Heddy’s command. “With this kinda money, I can buy a castle in Mexico. One on a hilltop by the ocean, maybe, and hire me a bunch of Mexicans to wait on me hand and foot. We could all go on down there and live like kings...except for
him
.” He pointed a bony finger at the back of daddy’s head.

Mama just blinked hard and looked sad. Outside dark fell and the headlights of oncoming cars tracked against the tinted glass like wild eyes striking the curved glass and sliding off into darkness. I think Mama knew like I did that Heddy wouldn’t let him kill my daddy and not us. She’d never let us live in a castle on the beach with Crow. It was all a pipe dream, a fairy story. Only we were all Little Red Riding Hood and Heddy was the wolf. The Big Bad Wolf.

#

MAYBE it was because Carrie finally said and did what his own mother never had the guts to say or do that Crow came to have his feelings for her. Her determination combined with her fragile demeanor and frail looks, made her heroic in his eyes. In his whole life he’d never held up anyone as a hero. Through the juvenile halls and foster care system he’d only run into shits, real shits. People out to use, abuse, and confuse him. Old story, a really depressingly familiar old story, one he knew wasn’t much different from a million other stories he’d heard while in the joint.

His own mother, for not standing up for herself against his two-fisted shit of a father, had paid the ultimate price. The brain damage they discovered in her last hospitalization left her without her own name, much less her son’s. She was put into a place where she never came out again, dying senseless and alone.

Crow never went to see her, even after he was on the street and free. He didn’t want to look again on her empty eyes and watch the slobber dribble down her chin. If he had to see that again, he’d go up like dynamite and kill every motherfucker in sight.

It’s what made him hate Jay with a passion you don’t generally hold for a stranger. It became more and more clear to him that he might be Carrie’s savior by being Jay’s executioner. She might never forgive him for it, and the kid would never forget her father had been murdered at his hands, but, nevertheless, he would have put one son of a bitch out of this world who needed it and there was something to be said for that. The problem with the plan was that something was cooking in Heddy’s brain about the guy. He knew when she liked a guy and she liked this one. She took more shit off him than she should have; she wouldn’t let him go. Could it be that she was stuck on him the way he was getting stuck on Carrie? It was like he and Heddy were tripping over themselves to find new bed partners. Straight ones. Square ones.

It was turning into a hell of a mess, so tangled he couldn’t get it undone.

Heddy pulled the van into the deserted gravel parking lot of a country stockyard outside the city limits of Abilene, Texas. The sun had been down for a couple of hours and the wind-washed town of Abilene blinked with oil field lights to the north of them.

Crow could smell the creosote-soaked timbers and the rotten-egg stink of oil derricks. He could hear in the background the steady
thump-thump
of the drilling rigs pumping black gold from the bowels of the earth.

“
I wonder why anyone lives way the hell out here,” he said. It gave him the heebie-jeebies. He shivered all over with a chill.

Heddy asked, “What did you buy at the store?” He showed her the lunch meat and bread and cheese. She told Carrie, “Make sandwiches.”

Crow didn’t think Heddy was acting right, not like herself, but he wasn’t sure what was wrong. She left the driver’s seat and told him to get in the back, let her sit down. He did as she said, bouncing a little on the sofa in the back. He watched as she turned on the TV with the remote and scanned both channels that came in clear enough to see before settling on “Jeopardy.” She hadn’t looked him in the eye once.

“
What burr got up your ass?” He asked.

“
I’ve been watching you in the mirror,” she said.

“
What’s that supposed to mean?”

“
I’ve seen how you look at her.”

Crow glanced over at Carrie making the sandwiches. The little girl was helping her. Both of them were assiduously ignoring the conversation. In the front seat Jay still sat unmoving and silent. At least he knew his place--which was outside the pale.

“
What’s your point, Heddy?” He never figured her for jealousy. Hadn’t she screwed Jay? Right in front of him? And did
he
get his britches in a bunch over it? Hell no! There wasn’t any room between them for being jealous. It was an emotion neither of them had kept around for very long. He no more owned a piece of Heddy than he could own the moons of Jupiter.

“
I say we dump ‘em here. When we take off in the morning, we go alone.”

Crow hawked out a laugh. “Yeah, and before we hit the border, we have a thousand cop cars surrounding this boat. That makes perfect sense, Heddy. We’ve come this far...”

“
You’re not taking her with us!” Heddy was off the bench seat, turning, and throwing the remote control at his face. He ducked in time before it struck him, his mouth hanging open at her sudden vehemence.

“
Hey, take it easy...”

“
We should have dumped them in the beginning. We never should have brought them along!”

“
Well, it’s a little late for that. And it was
your
fucking idea, remember?”

“
It’s not too late now. I don’t want them with us anymore.”