BAD TRIP SOUTH (25 page)

When the little girl, Emily, started lagging back, he knew he wouldn’t be holding his little group together much longer. They must have walked for miles and hadn’t seen but two other living beings in passing cars gliding ghost-like down the streets.

He must find them somewhere to rest. If he didn’t find some place safe soon, he thought there would be a revolt. Either Heddy would drop over drunk in the gutter, Jay would make a break for it, or the little girl might sit down and refuse to move again. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to carry her.

It was that kind of night, after all. Things going all wrong, going all to hell. All he could think about was the guys back in St. Louis had tracked his movements to the motel he and Heddy stayed in the night after the murders and the robbery of the loot. Could they have then had a tail on him when he dropped the manila package in the mailbox? If they could have fished it out they wouldn’t have had to track them down here, having recovered the main amount of what had been stolen from them.

Unless they’d watched him closely, how could they have known what hotel..? He remembered then the van and how they’d let the one guy live at the abandoned fishing camp up in the middle of Texas. That man knew the van. They simply tracked it down, the goddamn van. It made him want to slap his head in wonder at how stupid they’d been.

Shit. It was like he and Heddy had been dropping a trail of crumbs all the way. If they’d only tried harder to find another car to take. They had
known
the assholes wouldn’t give up trying to recover the money.

Hell. If only they hadn’t picked up this fucking family who were a noose around their necks. If only he’d been straight with Heddy.

If only he had Evel Kneival’s motorcycle and about one tenth his courage, he’d jump the fountain in Vegas.

That made him smile. It was not all lost, that was the point he needed to keep in mind. They’d gotten out of the hotel and evaded what surely would have been their deaths. He had a lot to smile about.

If only he could find a place to lie down until dawn. The muscles in the back of his neck were so tense and bunched when he turned his head he felt like a mannequin just coming to life.

The housing development ended abruptly on the edge of a flat field hemmed by barbed wire. Ahead Crow could see one more house sitting by itself, a silhouette in the distance. It was an old white frame farmhouse set apart from the field by a ring of tall leafy trees. No lights. No cars, either, as far as he could tell.

“
We head over there,” he said, pushing Jay in the small of his back and hauling Heddy along by one of her arms. He had never seen her so ditzed. He thought if he let go of her, she’d fall flat on her ass in the road.

No dog barked as they moved up the rutted dirt road toward the house hidden in the trees. Thank goodness for that, Crow thought. He didn’t trust or like dogs, would have shot every damn mongrel he met if left up to him.

One time when he was sixteen he’d been robbing what he took to be an empty house. A big black mongrel with a face like a Mack truck came out of nowhere and bit him in the thigh, hanging on for dear life. It hurt like a motherfucker. He’d had to slam the dog in the forehead with his flashlight over and over again to get him to loosen his hold. He had the scars to prove it. Since then he had no more use for dogs than he had for a hole in his head.

There were no lights on in the house and still no evidence of a vehicle. The closer they came, the more it seemed to Crow that the house was deserted. He was sure of it when they entered the circle of trees and could see the tall rectangular windows that blinked wide curtainless eyes at the stragglers in the front yard. The door stood open to the night and any stray creatures that wished to make it home.

He breathed a sigh of relief. He thought if he had to get involved with any more hostages at this point, he’d go berserk and kill the whole goddamn bunch.

“
No one lives here,” Jay said, hesitating at the edge of the weedy yard.

“
Aren’t we lucky sons of bitches?” Crow said, prodding the man forward. “Get your ass in there.”

“
This doesn’t look like Mexico,” Heddy complained bitterly, looking around the weed patch and swaying at the end of where he held her arm. “This
does not
look like fucking Mexico.”

Crow let out an exasperated sound, a cross between a raspberry and a sigh. “It’s just a place to stay until there’s light,” he said. “C’mon, Heddy, let’s go inside, you can get some sleep.”

“
I don’t woan sleep.”

“
Yes, you do, trust me.”

“
I wouldn’t trust you to wipe mud off my shiny white ass, Crow.”

He ignored her bad temper and hustled the Andersons ahead of him up the worn steps to a small porch, and in through the sagging door.

It was just awful. That was his first thought and it was born out on closer inspection. Mexicans must have used it for a layover from the Rio Grande. There were bottles and cans, used baby diapers, even piles of human excrement dotted with toilet paper in the corners.

“
God,” he muttered, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. It reminded him too much of some of the places he had to call home when he was a kid on the run. He’d stayed in warehouses, condemned buildings, rat- and roach-infested apartments where the ceilings had holes large enough that you could see the stars and make out the Milky Way.

“
Looks like your kind of place,” Jay said.

“
Looks like your grave yard, man.” Crow pushed him once more to make his point before guiding Heddy over to a wall where he lowered her to the floor.

“
Pick a spot and go to sleep or just keep quiet,” he told the family. “I’ll have good news for you in the morning.”

“
Such as?” Jay wanted to know.

“
Will you let us go then?” Carrie asked.

It was Emily that Crow looked at when he let the news out. She had been staring at him the whole time, all the way down the driveway and into the house, just as if she was puzzled by what he was going to do with them. Now was the time to let her know. She was just a kid, after all, none of this was her fault.

“
Yes,” he stated simply, still speaking to the girl. “Tomorrow me and Heddy light out for the border and you’re free to go.”

“
Why not tonight?” Carrie asked.

He turned from Emily to her mother. “If you have to ask that you’re not as smart as I thought you were. Now sit down and alla you shut up.”

He heard the swish of liquid from behind him and knew Heddy was at the bottle again.

Goddamn her.

#

WOUND up, unable to stop, like someone popped new batteries into her. The Energizer Bunny. That’s what I thought about how Heddy got going that night in the farmhouse. It wasn’t long till dawn. My eyes were tired and felt scratchy, and I was thirsty. I thought I could put my head in Daddy’s lap and go to sleep, but Heddy had been drinking like crazy. Once she started talking it was like a river washing over us. Even Crow couldn’t get her to stop.

“
You think this house is bad? Hell.” She slurped from the bottle, emptied it, and threw it across the room where it slid and hit the wall. She rummaged in her purse and brought out another bottle, a full, unopened one. When Crow tried to take it from her, she took a swing at him. He put up his hands in surrender and said, “Okay, fine, drink that shit till your eyes fall out for all I care.”

“
I guess you think I’m gonna tell you about all the dumps I’ve had to live in. Well, I’m not!” Heddy said. “You think I’m pissed off my mother’s husband hit me so hard in the face I can’t even move half my mouth. Well, I am! I’ve been pissed off ever since. That’s how I live--pissed off and pissed on. He got a dull knife through his ribs for it, though, so I figured it evens out. People like you...” She waved her hands at us and made a face before taking another swig from the new bottle. “People like you feel sorry for people like me, but I’m here to tell you you’re dead, you’re walking around dead people. At least I’ve lived a little.”

“
Take it easy, Heddy,” Crow whined. He had moved closer to her and now sat cross-legged not far away. His gaze kept shifting between Heddy and us where we were huddled together near the center of the open room--the only area not littered with trash.

Moonlight spilled across the floor like a silver river coming through the door. I couldn’t see it, the moon, but it had to be out there just above the edge of the trees. I shivered from the damp air and scooted over closer to my father. He hadn’t been saying much at all and neither had Mama. Now that Crow had promised to set us free once it was morning, we could all stop worrying about it. There was no reason for them to hurt us. Even when we told they’d gone into Mexico, no one would ever find them.

But was my Daddy still going too? He’d said he was.

While Heddy ranted on about her sorry life, I looked at Daddy from the sides of my eyes. Would he really leave us? For Heddy? For drunken and full-of-hate Heddy?

I closed my eyes to shut out Heddy’s voice. I felt a purple wave of sadness coming off her. Once it touched me, I’d be swamped under all those feelings like under a big wave coming into shore from an ocean. What did Daddy think of her now that he could see her drunk and disorderly just like the people he put in jail?

My eyes flew open and I turned my head to stare straight at my father. He was crazy about her! I had picked that up like a radio picking up a strong station for just a second or two before it fades out again. He wasn’t disgusted by her drinking like the rest of us were. He thought she was exciting, she was unpredictable, he thought. She was very dark and scary, like a storm cloud filled with streaks of lightning. He was...he was...I don’t know how to say this except to just say it. She turned him on.

My father wanted her for his lover, drinking or not, deformed mouth or not, criminal or not.

Then information came to me that made my head reel. Heddy wasn’t the first woman he’d liked this way. There had been others, women from the street in our town, even women on the police force, women Mama never knew about. A lot of women.

I wished I’d never found that out. It made me so unhappy that I wanted to cry again.

I moved away from Daddy. I didn’t want to be near my father anymore. I made up my mind never to meddle in his thoughts again. If he wanted Heddy that much, he was lost to us anyway. Mama sure didn’t need him.

He had been cruel to her; I understood that really for the first time that night. How cruel he’d been. He might have been my father, but I stopped loving him like one that night once I knew he was no better than the two people who had kept us prisoner so many days. He was just a criminal of another sort. All his crimes were hidden away under cover. He beat his wife, he went to bed with strange women, and he would break the law and give up his family for the love of money and sex with Heddy.

“
...Even Crow doesn’t know about my life, not really,” Heddy was saying. When he tried to protest, she shushed him real loud with a finger to her lips.

“
And Crow don’t know me too damn much because if he did, he wouldn’t have tried hiding most of the money from me.”

Before Crow could say anything else, Heddy felt around in her big purse again and produced her gun. She didn’t wait to aim it, but waved it high. She pulled the trigger, shooting above Crow’s head. The shot filled the house, the burst of fire from the cylinder and the noise made us all jump and let out scared noises. The smell from the gunfire caused my nose to wrinkle up and I put my hand over it.

Mama grabbed my hand and pulled me under her arms. “Please don’t,” she said. She was crying and her voice was all wavy and trembly.

“
Hell, what’re you doing, Heddy?” Crow got to his feet and moved halfway across the room from her. “Someone will hear that.”

“
Someone will hear that,” she mimicked and fired again, this time to her right, at the wall. Plaster splattered onto the floor.

My ears were ringing. I wished we could get out of the house, run for the door and disappear across the field toward the other houses where we could find some help. Crow promised us we could go free in the morning, but here we were in terrible danger just before we could get away from them. Heddy had gone crazy, that’s what had happened. The whiskey made her careless and mean.

“
Heddy, put down the gun.” Daddy also came to his feet and took a step toward her.

“
This motherfucker tried to screw me out of the money,” she said, waving the gun at Crow.

“
I know, I know, but shooting him now won’t solve the problem. You keep shooting and someone might call the cops.”