BAD TRIP SOUTH (2 page)

Kids’ minds are better at surprising you than grown-ups. I almost always know what grown ups are really thinking. Kids think crazy stuff so you can't figure them out that easy. Their thoughts leapfrog all over the place and hardly make any good sense at all.

As soon as I heard Crow say we were the ones, I looked up at Daddy to see if he heard, and I knew he hadn’t, that maybe Crow hadn’t said it outloud. I should tell him, that's what I thought, I need to tell him the boy and the girl at the door want something from us. But Daddy's mouth was in that tight line it gets when he's still mad. And Mama was already off to the souvenir counter, looking at silver bracelets and earrings with dangling feathers and rings with turquoise chips in them. She liked stuff like that. She wore a turquoise pinkie ring she'd gotten in Tennessee. Daddy had never really bought her nice jewelry--you know, the gold kind with diamonds and all--couldn’t afford it, he said.

Maybe if I'd told Daddy about Crow, if I'd taken the chance on Daddy getting mad and yelling at me, nothing ever would have happened. Daddy had his service revolver along in the car. He had his badge in his wallet.

He could have arrested them. For something. For staring like that. For wanting to use us that way. At least he would have been ready for what happened when we came out of the cave tour.

And I wouldn't be here now having to tell you how all the bad things happened.

And I wouldn’t have to listen to this noise, I thought, watching the nice detective now instead of the ceiling. Because I wouldn't be here in a big border city police station, all alone, so awfully all alone.

#

"THEY’RE the ones," Crow said. "Got a nice car. They come out of the tour, we'll take the keys."

Heddy glanced from beneath her silvery blond lashes at the sun beating down on the parking lot. It seemed to her it was pouring like hot lava over the cars. She frowned, feeling a trickle of sweat start down her spine. She really hated getting all sweaty and smelling like a crate of dead fish.

It was the middle of the week, not many tourists at the caverns. Only three vehicles were parked out front. Two of them looked too old and beat up to make it to the state line. She felt a lust start up in her heart for the shiny new Buick Riviera the family owned. Leather seats...cold blasts of air conditioning...power windows...stereo speakers... They must have money. What could it be like to have money like that? The car cost more than any house Heddy had ever lived in. Just about any new car today cost more than the shacks she’d had to call home. Right now her mom lived in a green and white thirty-four foot trailer that she’d picked up for five hundred bucks and a blowjob she gave the crippled owner who said he was dying anyway, take the damn trailer, what the hell good was it to him? It was shabby and full of termites, but it was probably the best “house” Heddy had ever stayed in.

"We can wait for those people to come out of the caverns if the search party doesn't find us first,” she said now, forcibly bringing her attention back to the problem at hand.

"You think they're this close?" Crow shivered a little, as if the fear he'd kept at bay for hours when they'd been on the run had returned, crawling up his back to sink pinchers into the base of his neck.

Heddy seemed to be reading the clouds. She hugged his waist tighter, snuggling her shoulder into his armpit. He didn’t smell good, particularly, but he smelled like a man and she loved the smell of men, no matter how sweaty. "It only took us an hour to get here by foot. They'll find the car, and then they'll head here, just like we did. If they can follow us across the state, they can follow us here. We don't have a lot of time."

Crow swung his large black leather satchel bag around to the front of him and patted it. "Where'd you get the piece?"

"Bandy. He said it shot good. The one I have shoots good too."

"Well, we know they shoot good, don’t we? You pay him?"

Heddy squirmed away and picked at a line of freckles that marched up her left arm.

"I said, did you pay him? I guess no answer means you paid him on your fucking back. I never trusted Bandy. He'd steal gold from a dead man's teeth."

"What's it matter how I paid him, we got the guns, didn’t we? And I was waiting when you skipped, wasn't I? Who's your baby? Who’s always there for you?"

Crow smiled a rare smile, this one dripping with the lust he felt for the girl. "Yeah, you're my baby. I'd still be back in that cell, wasn't for you."

She snuggled into his arm again, breathing deeply and smiling all inside just to be in the circle of his scent. "We have to take that family with us. That's what we have to do."

"Why the hell would we want to do that?" He glared down at her, his black brows knitting together. He knew she was smarter than he was, but it still burned him up when she came up with stuff he hadn't thought of. She knew that, but there wasn’t much she could change about the arrangement. She made the plans. She called the shots. That’s how it had to be.

"We just grab the car, we won't make it to the line. They'll tell, Crow. They saw us. They can describe us. Then the cops will know what kind of car we’re driving. On the other hand, if we grab the mom, pop, and kid, they're insurance. We can drop them off somewhere, after we're far away from here. I don't want you put back in prison. We can't take chances, no chances. I’ve got you now, I don’t want them taking you away again."

"Yeah, I can see that. Hell. Company. I didn’t really want company around. Who's gonna drive?"

She kissed him, nibbling softly on his bottom lip. She said, "I will. You sit in back with the gun on the kid. Everything will be fine. We'll be on the other side of Missouri by dark."

"God." He sucked in her lip, then covered her whole mouth, twirling his tongue around hers until she felt the beginning of his erection. She gently disengaged, pushing him back. He was breathing hard. "I don't know if I can wait,” he said.

She reached down, patted the bulge in the crotch of his jeans. "Yes, you can. You've waited for four years already."

#

DADDY bought the tour tickets and called Mama over to join the guide. Crow and his girlfriend didn't go on the tour. They were still outside, by the door, like they were waiting for a ride to pick them up. I know now they were waiting for us to get through the caverns and leave so they could get the car.

There was one other couple who went on the tour with us, an old man and woman who walked real slow. I tried to listen to the guide, a pretty girl with a turned-up nose who looked like a high school cheerleader in her tight uniform. She told us about the caves and the story how outlaws hid out in it a long time ago, and before that, how the Indians held powwows in the caves, burning fires, eating antelope and buffalo. I tried to listen, but I kept looking back behind us, thinking Crow would be there so I missed a lot of what the girl guide said.

It was cold and got colder in the caves as we walked through them. There were little lights along the pathway and more lights shining on some of the walls and the ceiling. The air was thick with damp and smelled like a grave deep, deep, deep down in the earth. Those stalag...things hung from the ceiling, like swords about to drop, and they stuck up from the floor, like tall muddy anthills. I would have thought it was neat except I couldn't stop worrying.

I tugged on Mama's hand and whispered, "Did you see that man when we came in?" She shushed me because the girl guide was talking about Old West outlaws. She didn't even hear what I said. Mama’s a schoolteacher and she doesn’t like me to interrupt when people are talking. Especially when they’re teaching you stuff.

Toward the end of the tour, I got near Daddy and took his hand. He looked down at me and smiled a little. I said, "Daddy, there was a man watching us when we got here."

He said, "Is that right?" But he wasn't really paying attention. He kept watching the girl guide as she walked ahead of us, swinging her flashlight around the cave walls. He thought she was pretty. He watched her bottom and hardly ever blinked.

Mama didn't care--though I think she noticed it too--but I wished Daddy wouldn't look at girls that way with Mama right beside him. He used to think Mama was the prettiest girl there was. He was jealous of her and some of his fits came from thinking she would like someone else better than him. But now he liked how the girl guide looked so much he hardly knew Mama was alive. He wasn't listening to how important it was Crow was watching us and talking about us when we walked inside.

Realizing Daddy wasn’t going to hear what I said either, I dropped his hand and hung back, following both my parents while I chewed the inside of my lip. All I could do was hope Crow wasn't there when we came out of the caves. Maybe he'd change his mind and find someone else to bother. Maybe he'd already found someone and they'd left. I could have, well…listened in to his mind to find out if he’d left, but I really didn’t want to do that. For some reason I knew I wouldn’t like what I’d find inside his head. Just looking at him and catching little stray thoughts from him was bad enough. I sure didn’t want to go looking into his thoughts if I didn’t have to.

I've seen bad people before. That’s something you have to know about me. I might be ten, but I’m pretty old for a little kid. Probably because all these years I’ve heard grown ups talk in their heads and I know stuff other kids just don’t know. That's how I knew something was wrong with Crow and Heddy. I knew they were bad people. Heddy, that was her name, Crow's girlfriend. She was just as bad as Crow, that was obvious to me the minute I walked past her and saw her funny mouth, and her eyes that were shiny and trying to be normal, but weren’t normal at all because they let too much of her
out
when she looked at you.

I think sometimes Daddy turned bad from being around so many bad people. It's like getting sick. You catch stuff from people, colds and the flu and measles. If you're only around bad people, maybe you catch what they have that makes them that way. Daddy had to arrest drunks and thieves and a couple of times he even arrested killers. Sonny and Jimmy Cochran, two brothers who shaved their heads and wore sleeveless tee shirts. “Stone killers” Daddy called them. They broke into old Mrs. Lampisi's house one night real late, thinking she’d stay sleeping. When she got up and surprised them, they beat her to death with their fists and kicked her a lot. It was the big army boots they wore that probably killed her. I don’t like to even think about it. Daddy didn't know I knew about them, but it was in the newspapers, pictures with their bald heads shining like wet grapes and their eyes--real cold and hard looking, like people who don’t care about living anymore. Eyes like Heddy had.

Daddy had once been a policeman in Charlotte for two years before I was born, and he used to talk about that at the kitchen table with Mama, how awful it was on the street, how lowdown, he said, people could be. "And they're no damn better in a little town,” he said, like he was biting down on a bitter lemon.

I don't guess all policemen get infected like Daddy did, but that's what happened. Like something in his head turned sour and he had to take it out on someone. Mama was handy, she was the goat. Isn't that what they call it? The goat that gets all the blame?

If Daddy had been watching when we went into the caves he would have known how bad Crow and Heddy were, but this time he just wasn't all there. He was thinking about Mama leaving him and taking me away. He was fuming, like a volcano, heating up to the point he'd blow. He couldn't see anything or anybody, but the way the house would be empty back in our town when we got home from the vacation.

Then he could only see the girl guide, in her brown pants uniform, pretty and young like my Barbie dolls. All blonde and perfect, dolly-like. If she had been my Barbie, I’d have put a shiny black ballgown on her and red high heels on her little feet.

That's how Crow surprised my daddy, taking advantage of a man who isn’t thinking straight.

We came from the tour, our eyes watering in the sunlight after being down in the dark caves, and before we were halfway across the parking lot, Crow came up behind my Daddy and said, "Don't give me any trouble if you want your kid to live."

He had one hand on my shoulder, pushing me along. His hand felt tough, hard, and mean, like if it had teeth, it'd bite me. I saw Mama's mouth drop open. She said, "Jay..?" Suddenly Heddy was beside her, taking her arm, talking to her so softly I couldn't hear what she was saying.

Daddy looked over at me and I saw in his eyes he remembered what I'd said during the tour. About the man watching us. And he was sorry, then, and angry, because now he was helpless to stop what was happening.

He tried anyway. Daddy was turning into a bad man, but he still loved us. He still knew what was right and wrong.

"Take your hand off my daughter. What do you think you’re doing?"