Dirtbags (28 page)
Authors: Eryk Pruitt
What little energy he had appeared to be fading fast. He leaned on the knife with all his weight, and it gave, going through the judge, all the way to the hilt. It hit something Rhonda reckoned could only be floor. Calvin fell off the body and rolled onto his back. She saw black tar pooling and spreading beneath him.
“Calvin, you’ve been shot.” She stayed put. Kept her distance.
“The judge called you a whore,” he said. He grimaced, then screamed through clenched teeth. All the frustration and pain and not mattering worth a shit left him in that scream. Everything. His shoulders sagged along with the rest of him and he lay there on that floor, bleeding out. Much quieter, he said: “Son of a bitch called my wife a whore.”
She opened her mouth to speak. Watched her husband die. And, suddenly, after a lifetime of knowing the score—knowing the cards been dealt—she felt as if she’d never known shit. As if she’d been playing the wrong cards the entire time. Or worse, the right cards in the wrong game. She watched the man’s blood pool and wondered if she’d ever known a damned thing at all.
She certainly hadn’t known Calvin Cantrell. Her honor had been put to question, and Calvin sought to end the entire world in order to preserve it. No other man in her life ever lifted a finger to do half as much. In her heart of hearts, she knew he probably did it all for himself, but no one—not even her daddy—had gone to war on her behalf. On so many occasions, when cards were down and sides were chosen, she had found herself on the shit end of the stick. Calvin had sought to change that.
Of course, she realized most of that was probably not true. But, for the first time, she had choices. Her turn to choose had already begun, and believing this was on her behalf would be the first choice she made. The second would be to repay him. Dead or alive, she owed him something. She had a debt and it was high time she repaid a debt out of honor, rather than the other.
She put first a foot to Judge Menkin’s side for leverage, then grabbed the knife in his chest with both hands. She took a deep breath and pull, pull, pulled with everything she had. It was buried deep within him and she had to wrest it free of cartilage and rib and muscle and every other damned thing he had inside him but that knife came free and she held it and looked at it a moment before quickly rolling over and finding her husband.
Even in the dark he looked intense. He looked like nothing peaceful, even in death. She touched his lips with her hand and decided from this point forward, no matter what happened, she would follow through. She would follow through with everything. Be laser-focused. The rules had not only changed, but she would have her turn at writing them.
Calvin’s eyes stared directly above him, at some point beyond the ceiling. She looked into them and smiled. “Goodbye, Mister Twenty-Two,” she said.
And with that, she set to carving.
Eryk Pruitt is a screenwriter, author, and filmmaker living in Durham, NC with his wife Lana and cat Busey. His short film FOODIE won several awards at film festivals across the US. His fiction appears in
The Avalon Literary Review, Pulp Modern, Thuglit, Swill,
and
Pantheon Magazine,
to name a few. In 2013, he was a finalist for Best Short Fiction in
Short Story America.
His first novel
Dirtbags
will be published in April of 2014. A full list of credits can be found at
erykpruitt.com
.
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