BAD TRIP SOUTH (11 page)

“
So they know you stopped here, at this motel. Jesus Christ, Heddy..!”

“
Whoever it is, they would have known no matter where we stopped. What we have to do now is stay on watch.”

“
I dunno...maybe if we offered to give the money ba...”

“
Crow!”

His head came up at how she’d interrupted him. “What?”

“
We ain’t giving back nothing, nothing, you hear me? It’s ours. We need it and we’re keeping it. So just get that out of your head.”

“
You took something you shouldn’t have,” Jay said in a voice that showed he was interested in all the details. “It’s not the cops you’re worried about now, is it? Don’t you know you’re involving innocent people in your screwed up little affairs? You need to let my wife and child go at least.”

“
Tie him up,” Heddy commanded. “I’m going out to find something to eat.”

Crow bound Jay and pushed him onto one of the beds. He left Carrie and Emily free. He started pacing the room, passing the bed where Jay lay, and watching him carefully the way a hyena watches a crippled antelope on a wide-open plain.

“
What’d she get you into?” Jay asked. “I know you do what she says and you think she’s bright, but now she’s dropped you into a world of trouble, hasn’t she? How smart is that? Maybe you ought to try making your own decisions for a change.”

Crow passed a small lamp on a table opposite the bed, grabbed it, ripped the cord from the wall and hurled the lamp at Jay’s head. It missed, muddy brown glass shattering against the headboard. Carrie gasped and Emily let out a short scream before she covered her mouth with her hand.

“
Go ahead,” Crow warned. “Keep it up and see what it gets you. Talk about Heddy some more why don’t you? Bad mouth her when her back’s turned. You think I don’t know what you’re doing? Split us, turn us against one another, that’s what you’re doing. I’m not completely STUPID! Do I have a sign on my back saying I just joined the human race?”

Jay kept quiet. He glanced at his wife and back at Crow still standing over the end of the bed, furiously slapping at one thigh with his hand, the repetitive action a nervous tic.

“
I’m not saying a thing,” Jay finally said.

“
It’s about goddamn time, man. I get tired of it and there’s no predicting what I might want to do to you. But it won’t be pretty so keep it zipped, okay?”

“
Must be the mob you stole something from,” Jay said.

“
Oh
man
!” Crow was on the bed like a flash, pummeling Jay in the gut with both fists while calling him names and threatening to shut his mouth permanently. Jay’s hands were tied behind his back and all he could do was head-butt and knee the other man. Carrie rushed to rescue her husband and Emily was at her mother’s back, trying to pull her away from the melee.

Carrie hauled back on Crow’s leather vest until he slipped to the floor. He jumped to his feet, fists up, glaring at her. “I ought to give you some of it,” he said.

“
Please, please,” she said, “can’t you stop this, can’t you just stop it? Please, stop it.” Tears slipped down her face, making snail tracks of silver over the tanned smooth planes of her cheeks.

It was as if window shades had snapped up in the depths of Crow’s eyes to let in the light of reason. His fists relaxed and he stepped around the bed. Carrie tried to turn away and to wipe her face. He put his arms around her body, pulling her into his embrace. She turned her head away from him and he reached up and brought her face back to his own. He looked down into wet brown eyes and said, “You’re a good woman, taking up for your man that way. I’ve always been a fool for good women.”

Carrie tried to break away, but he held her. Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips on hers. When he was done, he let her go so that she stumbled back. Crow turned to Jay on the bed where he was trying to get back his breath from the beating he’d taken. “You see what I did? You need lessons or something? You hit a woman like this, you bastard? Even I wouldn’t hit this woman. And you think you’re better than I am, don’t you? You’re the law, you’re The Man, and I’m this scum you like to step on. But I’d never hit a woman willing to stand up for me. Live with that why don’t you?”

Crow spit toward the bed then moved to the window to look out for Heddy. A war between hatred and passion fought on in his brain so that he couldn’t look at Jay or he might kill him and he couldn’t look at the woman or he might want to take her. Here, now, no matter what anybody thought.

#

IT was like Crow was a wild puppet. Someone invisible pulled his strings and he danced. When he went for Daddy in the motel room that second night, I thought he was going to kill him then. How many times now had I worried my parents would be killed and they’d survived? It was like watching Wily Coyote falling off cliffs, blowing himself up, getting flattened by anvils. He died and he died and he died trying to catch the Roadrunner, but he didn’t really die.

I was afraid I’d start thinking that way about us. If we kept getting close and yet not dying, maybe it wasn’t real. But it was, the threat was very real and every time Crow attacked Daddy I thought it was for the last time. It made my whole insides go crazy. I got gas and had to go to the bathroom to pass it so no one would hear. I think it’s real nasty and embarrassing to pass gas in company. I’d just want to die if I did it in front of anyone. I got a headache and stomachaches and even my legs started hurting, I don’t know why.

It’s real hard on you to want to get away from someone and you can’t. Your whole body gets tight so that your fingers twitch and your neck shrinks down into your shoulders and your stomach’s always doing flip-flops or knotting up. I could put my hand flat on my stomach and feel the knot, like a ball of string I’d swallowed in my sleep.

When we’d stopped at the trailer where Heddy’s mother lived with the dogs and the messy stuff on the floor, I think we all lost our tongues. Mama and Daddy never said a word. Not even when we left and we could see how upset Heddy was. I told the woman my name and she got onto Heddy for keeping me hostage, but it didn’t do any good. I could tell it wouldn’t. I had gotten some of the cold thoughts streaming off Heddy when we were on our way again and I could tell she’d never listened to her mother, about anything. She thought her mother didn’t love her. She thought she was unlovable and ugly and she was so full of hatred that I knew none of us better say anything to her. It took hours for her to snap out of it and find a motel.

When Heddy came back she brought Popeye’s Fried Chicken, red beans and rice, and coleslaw. No one could eat a thing except Crow. He ate like a big dog, shoving it in, eating with his mouth open, making smacking, chewing noises. I had to look away from him to even get myself to take a bite from a chicken leg. I guess nobody ever taught him any table manners. Maybe he never had a mother or father to teach him. Maybe he was one of those runaway kids who grow up on the streets--like Daddy called him--a gutter punk. Still, didn’t he know how awful it was to watch him eat with his mouth open?

After we ate, Crow tied us up and then Heddy brought out a big razor machine from a shopping bag. It was a scary looking thing, black, with a row of teeth along the edge. If she had wanted to torture us, that was the instrument to use, it seemed to me.

Crow grabbed his hair in both hands and said, “No, uh uh.”

“
You keep that hair and you’ll wear it back to prison. Or worse.”

“
What could be worse?”

“
The lab people catch us.”

Daddy lifted his head from the bed. “Lab?”

“
Ignore him,” Heddy said, frowning at Daddy.

“
I might take off a couple inches,” Crow said, eying the electric razor.

“
You’ll take it all off. I’ll give you a burr cut. Let’s go in the bathroom so you can sit on the toilet seat.”

Crow grumbled and swore, but he let his hair be cut off until all he had left was a half-inch of fuzzy black like a monk’s cap covering his head. When he looked in the mirror, he yelled and stomped into the room where we were lying on the beds.

“
This is for shit, I look like a skin head, I look like a Jew ready for the showers! I never should have let you talk me into it.”

I almost laughed seeing him. He looked like a kid who just joined the army. His ears were too big, sticking out from his head like Dumbo, the elephant. His eyebrows were too thick, black as worms covered in dirt. Everything about his face looked too large and cartoonish without the long wavy hair that had made him look almost handsome in a hoody-street-boy sort of way.

“
Take off the earrings too,” Heddy said. “And go through Jay’s suitcase, find one of his shirts to wear. Hang up that vest, we’ll leave it here. It smells anyway.”

“
Why do I have to do everything? What about you?” He reached up to slip out the silver arrows dangling on chains from his pierced earlobes.

“
The cops don’t have photographs of me.”

“
But the guys in St. Louis know you.”

Heddy rustled in the shopping bag lying on the table and brought out a wig. It was short, dark brown, and curly, like the head of a mop. Her own hair was long and sandy blond; it fell in a part in the middle of her head and looked like it needed a good cut. “I didn’t forget,” she said. She waved the wig at him.

“
Maybe you could have bought me a wig too, goddamn it.”

Heddy moved up to him and circled her arms around his waist. “Now, now. Who’s your baby?”

The wig hung from her hands behind his back now. She kissed Crow, opening her mouth so I saw her long pink tongue. They kissed for a long time. I watched. I couldn’t stop watching them. They weren’t like anyone I’d ever known. Being with them was like visiting a weird people zoo and getting a chance to look at the new freaks on exhibit someone had found in some strange country I didn’t even know the name of.

When she stepped away from him, she put on the wig, struggling to tuck her own hair beneath it. She looked like Shirley Temple from those old black and white movies my Mama watched on TV sometimes.
Little Miss Marker
. Except for her mouth, that made her ugly.

Crow laughed at seeing her. They began a pinching contest. First he reached over and pinched her boob and then she pinched the skin on his belly, then he pinched her earlobe. They chased one another around the room, hopping on the beds, stepping over us, pinching and playing chase and laughing out loud to beat the band, just like kids do.

I have to tell you something now I don’t know you’ll understand. While Crow and Heddy were playing games and acting funny, I started liking them. I don’t mean that I liked them a lot or anything, or wasn’t scared of them anymore. But just for those few minutes I realized they used to be little kids who had never done anything wrong. Those kids were inside them now, prisoners, just like my Daddy’s nice little kid-self was inside him, hidden away. And my Mama’s brave little kid-self was inside her, staying quiet so no one knows it’s there, no one knows how much courage she has.

Do grown-ups all have their kid-selves inside them yet? I didn’t know, but that’s what it looked like. Crow-the- kid and Heddy-the-kid got loose that evening in the motel room and there they were, wearing wigs and thinking up disguises and playing chase like nothing in the world was wrong with them that couldn’t be fixed.

Then Crow did something that made me stop liking the silly kid games they were playing. He hopped on the bed where Mama was sitting and pinned her on her back. He called to Heddy, “You think it’s time I sample this one?”

“
Hey, go for it. Fair’s fair.”

Before I knew it I was out of the chair and pulling on his arm, trying to get him off my Mama. Daddy was up too, off the side of the other bed and reaching across the mattress saying, “You don’t touch her, you bastard.”

Crow pushed Daddy away, causing him to fall back. Heddy said in a deep voice, “You move away.” We turned to see her and she had a small handgun pointed at Daddy. “Fair’s fair, I said. Get over there, on the other bed,
now
.”

Crow crawled off Mama and stood between the beds, tying Daddy’s hands behind him and his feet at the ankles. Daddy said, “You better not do it.”

“
Hide and watch, Jaybird.”

With Daddy all tied up, Heddy got hold of the back of my hair and marched me toward the bathroom. I said, crying now cause I couldn’t help it, “Don’t hurt my Mama.”

“
No one’s hurting nobody. Get the hell in there.” She pushed me inside and shut the door. She called through it, “And don’t come out unless I tell you to.”