Young God: A Novel (6 page)

“What do you think?” Coy Hawkins says.

He slices the pads off each of Renee’s fingertips.

“Ax,” Coy Hawkins says.

Coy Hawkins jams the butt into what’s left of Renee’s mouth. Then he raises the ax above his head and brings it down hard on Renee’s neck. Nikki bangs into the tree behind her.

“Fingerprints and teeth.”

She stares at him.

“Nikki.”

“What?”

“You’re shaking like a leaf.”

“No, I ain’t.”

“Trash bags,” Coy Hawkins says.

After they’ve finished she looks at the blood on the ground.

“It’ll rain,” Coy Hawkins says.

Coy Hawkins carries the heavy bags. Nikki follows with the light ones. She waits for him to look where the money’s buried. But he doesn’t once turn his head.

“Are you mad?” she says.

Wesley’s car is gone from the yard. Coy Hawkins looks at the place where it was. Then he goes to the pickup. He flips back the tarp and hefts the heavy bags up into the bed.

“Where’s Angel?” Nikki says.

“Throw her clothes on the trash pile,” Coy Hawkins says.

Near the other trailer Nikki thinks she sees Levi, sitting on his bike in his pajamas.

THE NORTHERNMOST PART OF THE COUNTY
is wilderness. It’s a state park that straddles the county line. It has trails that end in sheer drops. It’s had fugitives hiding in it. Hunters get lost in here all the time.

The pickup jerks from the gravel road to grass and then a dirt path. They climb at ninety degrees. Branches slap the windows. Coy Hawkins pulls the emergency brake and Nikki slams against the bench seat.

It’s dawn now.

“We gotta hike this last little bit,” Coy Hawkins says.

He throws the bags out of the bed.

It is so much heavier going up. The light bags thud against Nikki’s legs. They’re hiking forever. Finally Coy Hawkins crouches below a boulder and Nikki takes huge gulps of air.

He takes out his knife and slashes all the bags of Renee.

“So the animals will eat her.”

Nikki grabs the laces of Coy Hawkins’s boot.

“Please don’t call DSS on me. I can’t go back there.”

He looks at her fingers. Coy Hawkins wipes his face on his sleeve.

“You ain’t going back there now,” he says.

He holds on to a trunk to stand up. He tosses a bag over the boulder. He reaches back until all five bags are gone and then he shakes his hand like Nikki has forgotten one.

“Come here,” he says.

Nikki looks at him.

“Come here,” he says.

He pulls her up to stand beside him.

“Look at this.”

Nikki looks where Renee went. She didn’t realize they were this high. It is like she could touch the blue mountains. Blue froths everything. Blue fog puffs from the gorge below.

“The Blue Ridge Parkway,” Coy Hawkins says.

He points off in the distance at a floating road. Up here the air is like cigarette smoke.

She has the weird feeling he’s going to push her. He’s still holding her by the arm.

“Can we go?” Nikki says.

“What kind of daughter does that?” Coy Hawkins says.

“Does what?”

“Brings her father a whore.”

SHE TRIES TO HIDE
what she’s doing.

“You seen that lighter?” Nikki says.

She hunts from one end of the trailer to the other. Eventually she comes to stand in front of the TV.

“She’ll probably come back,” Nikki says.

“Who?” Coy Hawkins says.

NO SIGNAL.
Nikki stares at it.

When she looks at Coy Hawkins he’s turned in his chair to face her. He has his arm propped up on his elbow. He has his chin in his hand.

“What?” Nikki says.

“You wanna rob a drug dealer?”

THREE

COY HAWKINS
stands behind Nikki with his arms laid over her arms, his hands cupping her hands, his fingers on top of her fingers. As they pull the trigger he rams his shoulder into her shoulder.

“Don’t flinch.”

He walks over to Levi. He picks up his beer and points with it.

“Go ahead,” Coy Hawkins says.

Nikki raises the gun at the big house again.

SHE WATCHES HIM
push a brush through the barrel. She watches him drop oil on a rag and shine the black metal. The parts fit back together in hard snaps and the magazine clicks in last. He wipes his hands on a rag.

“The first time’s the worst,” Coy Hawkins says.

“I done it before,” Nikki says.

He cuts his eyes to her.

“Wesley Harrell,” she says.

Coy Hawkins points his clean gun at one of the walls of the kitchen.

“Oh yeah,” he says.

SHE LOOKS AT HIM.
She is startled by the bandanna around his face. A second ago he wasn’t wearing it. He pulls up his hood. He nods at her.

She knocks on an apartment door, the welfare apartments in town that are gray and wooden and drop down to the riverbank.

When the peephole darkens she takes one step back. The door catches on its chain.

“Hey,” Nikki says.

A man stares at her.

“Who are you?”

“Nikki,” she says.

“Who?”

“Can I use your phone?”

“What?” he says.

Nikki holds up Coy Hawkins’s cell.

“Mine’s dead.”

The man’s eyes flick up and down. Nikki smiles at him. She’s wearing a dress with see-through parts. Her cat’s eyes are slightly crooked but her lips are very red. When Angel left she left everything.

Nikki jams her knee inside and touches his. He’s older than Coy Hawkins. His cheeks are cut by two deep lines.

“Hold up,” he says.

As soon as he slams the door Nikki takes two steps back, and when he opens it again, wide, unchained, Coy Hawkins pivots off the outside wall and slugs a baseball bat into the man’s gut.

“What the fuck,” the man grunts.

She crawls underneath him while Coy Hawkins smashes him over the back.

No one’s in the living room. She turns a right for the kitchen like Coy Hawkins said. The other man, the important one, is sitting at a table. His name is Lee Church. He is nothing like she pictured him. She raises the gun and surges at him.

“Drugs and cash,” Nikki says.

He looks surprised.

“Drugs and cash.”

He just sits there. She starts to panic. She hears Coy Hawkins’s bat behind her. She stomps her high heel on the linoleum and lets out a little shriek.

“Are you stupid? This is a motherfucking stickup.”

Lee Church puts his cigarette in an ashtray and then he puts his hands up.

THEY’RE PULLED OFF IN THE WOODS,
out in the county. Coy Hawkins has a Ziploc bag of cocaine in his lap. Nikki has rubber-banded bills between her feet. That went well, Nikki thinks.

“Don’t use your real name next time,” Coy Hawkins says.

“Why not?” Nikki says.

He dips the pickup key in the Ziploc. He looks at her. In the overhead light his face is like wax.

“Bump?” he says.

COKE SMELLS COLD AND CHEMICAL
like the inside of a refrigerator. It’s what back then smells like, now when she thinks of it. Nikki takes a drag off Coy Hawkins’s Kool and its blast of menthol is the best thing that’s ever been in her mouth.

The interstate reels out. The sign says thirty miles to Charlotte. Coy Hawkins has called somebody on his phone. It’s not really dead. This time he’s going to sell, Nikki thinks. She is giddy and she can’t feel her teeth.

They have already passed over the service road. They have already passed over the gorilla pimp. They could be going anywhere.

SHE LOOKS AROUND ALERTLY.
She sniffs drip up her nose.

“Where are we?” Nikki says.

“Kannapolis,” Coy Hawkins says.

“Where?”

On both sides of a wide street every house is the same. They glow up in the headlights of the pickup, white and sagging. After a while Coy Hawkins stops in front of one.

A Mexican man opens the door.

“Where the fuck you been?” he says.

Coy Hawkins shrugs.

“Trying to stay out of trouble, man.”

Nikki follows him in. The house’s living room is strewn with little girls’ toys. There’s a blow-up castle in the middle of it. Coy Hawkins and the man go into what must be the kitchen. They close a bed sheet behind them.

“You can’t go in there.”

Nikki looks at her. The little girl is curled on the couch, holding a baby doll and wearing a tutu. She is five or six. Nikki puts her hands on her hips.

“Why not?”

“You’re not supposed to,” the little girl says.

“Why?” Nikki says.

“Because you’re a girl.”

“What?”

Nikki thinks she sees the little girl smirk.

“My mom can’t even go in there,” the little girl says.

Her tutu is much pinker than Nikki’s hair used to be. Nikki kicks a Barbie Corvette out of the way of her feet.

“Hey,” the little girl says.

Nikki sits beside her.

“My mama’s dead,” Nikki says.

The little girl makes a face.

“She killed herself,” Nikki says.

The little girl drops her mouth on the doll’s head.

It’s probably four in the morning. They watch TV. It’s a flat screen with all the channels. Nikki doesn’t understand because it’s in Spanish.

“She left me when I was a baby,” Nikki says.

She doesn’t know why she just said that. She smells something like burning ketchup.

“You smell that?”

The little girl says nothing. Nikki looks at the bed sheet.

“What is it?”

“Papi,” the little girl says.

Nikki stands up and the girl cuts her eyes from the TV. For a second they stare at each other. The little girl is not going to be as pretty as her. If she touched the little girl she would be gooey, Nikki thinks. Nikki sits down again.

When the bed sheet opens Coy Hawkins is carrying a different grocery bag than the one he came in with. He snaps his fingers at Nikki.

“My daughter,” Coy Hawkins says.

The man looks at her briefly.

“HOW MUCH DID YOU GET FOR IT?”

“Half a ki of heroin,” Coy Hawkins says.

Nikki’s eyes dart to the bag between her feet.

“What?”

On the way home they stop and buy party balloons.

THE HEROIN IS BLACK.
It’s sticky. It’s shiny.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing,” Coy Hawkins says.

They’re in the kitchen. They’re sitting at the card table. Coy Hawkins has ripped open the bag of party balloons.

“It ain’t white,” Nikki says.

“It’s black tar.”

“It’s what?”

“Mexican shit,” Coy Hawkins says.

He breaks off a tarry black chunk.

“You got everybody up here snorting pills and paying what?”

Nikki shrugs. Coy Hawkins answers his own question.

“A dollar a milligram. Eighty dollars for one fucking eighty,” he says.

He nudges the black chunk onto a balloon’s head. He turns the balloon inside out, knots it, pushes it through so that it’s right side out, and knots it again. He holds it up.

“How much you think this costs?”

“I don’t know,” Nikki says.

“Ten dollars.”

“What?”

He clips it to a scale and hangs it before him.

“Tenth of a gram,” he says.

He tosses it to her.

“Whoever brings this shit up here first is gonna make a killing.”

Nikki just stares at him.

“I’m trying to teach you something,” Coy Hawkins says.

She is not paying attention. She is thinking about how much better it would be if the table were covered in cash. She looks at the black lump. It doesn’t even seem like that much. Her jaw is still going from that one bump.

“Pills are the same as heroin?”

Coy Hawkins laughs.

“Yeah,” he says.

The balloon is blue. It’s tiny. Nikki looks at it again.

SHE YAWNS.
When she stumbles into the kitchen a man and a woman are sitting there. They turn to her. Then they turn to Coy Hawkins.

“It’s cool,” he says.

He has a roll of tinfoil.

He tears off a sheet. He quarters it and rips it into squares. He burns the side of one piece with his lighter. He sticks heroin to the other side. He wraps another square around a pen and pushes it out and makes a straw.

He holds up the heroin foil. He flicks his lighter under it. There is a long crackling as he pulls up smoke. He lifts his head with the straw between his lips. He blows out and the whole kitchen explodes in burning ketchup.

Nikki leans against a wall.

Coy Hawkins fixes a second foil and passes it to the woman.

“See how it slides. Chase it,” he says.

The woman waves her hand.

“I smoked Oxys before,” she says.

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Coy Hawkins says.

She looks insulted but when Coy Hawkins flicks the lighter she lowers her head.

The man peers over the woman’s shoulder. When the woman has a coughing fit the man takes the foil from her and lights it for himself.

“Shooting’s better,” Coy Hawkins says.

He shivers.

“You get that rush.”

The woman shakes her head.

“I don’t fuck with needles.”

“You’ll get over it,” Coy Hawkins says.

“How much?” the man says.

Coy Hawkins throws out a handful of balloons.

“Tell your friends,” he says.

The man is picking up the balloons that fell on the floor. He’s stuffing his socks with them. Nikki feels light. She watches the burnt-ketchup smoke settle onto everything, onto a missed patch of hair on the man’s shaved head.

Nikki drops her foot on a yellow one. She curls her toes over it. The man looks at her. He narrows his eyes. She glares back at him.

“What?” she says.

The man scratches his leg. He sits up.

“Fucking Coy Hawkins. In the flesh,” he says.

NIKKI SITS
on the bathroom floor to concentrate. Smoking heroin’s harder than it looks.