Last Call for the Living (30 page)

Her attention returned to the television, to Shelley Winters and those cute kids, trying to reconnect moments from her own childhood.

Nothing came.

She went to the kitchen, returning to the couch with a glass, ice and a bottle of bourbon.

Lucy maintained a steady drunken buzz through the rest of the film, in awe of Mitchum and his scary tattoos and—even scarier—the songs he sang as he stalked the children.

Her good eye glazed, a memory of a man she once knew creeping into her mind.

She hummed a remembered tune and watched through the windows as the sun went down.

*   *   *

… safe and secure
from all alarms, leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.…

Lucy often wondered if she was a good person. She would take inventory of all the bad things she did, like when she worked at the bank she took fifty bucks every day for two months and forced balances, but they never caught on and she quit just in time.

Never cared for foreigners or minorities. With those people her step definitely slowed a bit back at her old job at the Jube County probate court. It wasn't until she finished nursing school and started taking care of people that Lucy achieved some sort of fulfillment. As if she'd righted herself from crashing into rocks. Redeemed herself a little in the eyes of the Lord or karma or whoever was keeping score.

But the worst was when she wanted to kill Charlie before he was born. Her aunt told her to flush it out with Coca-Cola, but then they got to talking and there were a couple of other ways. Like taking a needle up there or pulling it out with a coat hanger.

Her aunt said the baby at that stage would be real small.

Wouldn't look like nothin', Lucy's auntie had told her. After the fight with Hicklin, she thought for sure Charlie would be retarded or damaged, but she went through with it. Glad she did, too. He was such a joy to raise. A quiet, precious little thing who looked like her in some places, in some places …

*   *   *

Lucy's false eye
floated in a bowl by the bathroom sink. When she moved the bowl, the glass orb would bob in the soapy water. The pupil and iris of the acrylic twin would roll one way, then the other, canting to the motion of the water. At times the eye seemed to be looking at her, as if it had something to say.

Before bed she washed and dried her face. The empty socket was gray and puffy, the eyelid drooping like a broken awning. She was proud of her injury, as a ravaged victim of conflict would be proud to have survived. A haggard sister of the Civil War, a whore routinely beaten and whipped.

“What have I to dread, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms…”

*   *   *

She was up
before the sun, having gone to bed with the chickens, a pint of whiskey in her bloodstream. She decided on grits.

Lucy dropped a teaspoon of salt into the briskly boiling water. Added the grits and a raw egg, some butter. She stirred.

The first cup of coffee had restored her balance. The sun was just starting to peek over the hills to the northwest. Her garden desperately needed tending, having gone neglected most of the month. Tomato and squash she rarely ate. She had tried okra, but it never took. At least the baby beets and carrots always came out great. Lucy canned them, brought the vegetables to the girls at the hospital. Of course, she always had some for Charlie. Lord knew what he did with them. Probably blew them up with his rockets.

She ate at the kitchen table. Chased her breakfast with two aspirin. Her hand shook when she poured a second cup of coffee. She gripped the mug tightly, easing it to her lips. Both hands shaking now, white-knuckled. The mug stinging her palms.

Moments later a coughing fit sent Lucy into a tailspin. She reached for a box of tissues, just in time to hack a gob of phlegm. She wadded the tissue, put it in the pocket of her robe. She lit a cigarette without thinking. Too accustomed to the way her body ached. That general, imprecise awfulness. She turned on the television and caught an early-morning traffic report.

Commercials.

She changed the channel. Another affiliate. A news ticker scrolled along the bottom of the screen, the anchor reading breaking news. “The suspect is considered armed and dangerous … authorities believe … to be in North Carolina … national forest…”

Lucy brought a hand to her mouth. It was a picture of Charlie she'd given Sallie Crews. Up on the screen. Along with another picture of a man Lucy no longer recognized.

*   *   *

Lucy phoned every
number from every business card, leaving a dozen messages for Sallie Crews to call her. She watched the morning news programs for another hour, desperate for information, but apparently there were more important things happening in the world. Anxiety and tension gave way to fatigue. She lay down on the couch and closed her eyes, dozing with her cell phone clutched in one hand.

In her dream they had found Charlie and the man who took him. Her son was coming home a hero, they said. She walked toward him. Charlie wore a flak jacket and looked unharmed, escorted by two police officers. She called out his name, raising her arms to him as if to squeeze the life from his body.

Just a couple more feet …

But Charlie and the officers ignored her, walking by, Charlie not even blinking. She pleaded with her stone-faced son, unable to comprehend the blankness in his eyes.

They helped him into a police cruiser and closed the door.

She charged the car but was restrained by unseen arms. She could only watch as Charlie was driven away.

In the dream there were so many things she wanted to say.

But words jammed in her throat, her mind like a mailbox stuffed with returned letters.

*   *   *

Her head snapped
at the sound of an engine in the driveway. She got up quickly, tying her robe and watching the screen door at the end of the hallway. A pickup truck backed into the carport.

Her heart beat faster. She tilted an ear to the rumbling sound of a muffler going bad.

They gawd.

Charlie appeared. He carried two duffel bags and supported a distressed-looking man under the arm.

Lucy ran to her son, verging on hysteria, her bathrobe falling open. Charlie glimpsed her breasts before Lucy took him in her arms, kissing his cheeks and neck and head.

“Charlie! Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!”

He had rarely seen his mother without her artificial eye.

Hicklin had retreated to a corner, propping himself up with the help of his shotgun.

“My baby … my baby came home!” she panted.

Charlie embraced his mother halfheartedly, unable to think of anything appropriate to say. He dragged her to the couch in the living room. Hicklin wavered in the background, peeking through window blinds at the street outside.

Lucy glanced over her son's shoulder, turning her single eye on
him.

Charlie's hand was quick to cover her mouth.

And stifle the scream in her throat.

*   *   *

They'd been in
the pasture near the old pond. It was nearly dried up. Cows grazed randomly around the edges under a bright hot sun, chewing, looking at one another. Switching their tails as if it was the highlight of a long workweek. Lucy laughed and ran from her cousins, going into the barn to hide.

She wasn't paying attention as she passed the ladder to the loft with its stored bales of hay and dusty, webbed corners, the black-and-yellow daubers buzzing around. Her uncle was repairing some steps on the ladder and pieces of wood were stacked haphazardly, some with nails sticking out. When Lucy heard her cousins' voices she turned, but her foot caught on a board at the bottom of the pile.

They scattered as Lucy fell sideways. Hands instinctively extended, but they couldn't protect her face. Happened so fast. Lucy felt the nail go into her eye at an angle. She didn't scream so much as make a terrible noise. A guttural sound. At age eleven she'd had her share of scrapes and bruises but nothing as scary as that.

It felt like a wasp had stung her right on the eyeball. Lucy yanked her head away and started crying. The sharp point of the nail tore out most of the cornea. She couldn't believe what was happening. She reached for what looked like pieces of fat on the ground. Hot tears and that terrible pain came next.

Her cousin Sara found her. Her other cousin, Dirk, ran for his father.

Lucy had lost something she could never have back. They tried to tell her she would still be pretty and eventually she would forget it had ever happened. And they were wrong. A small nail had redefined who Lucy was, and would forever be.

*   *   *

Sallie Crews smoked
her third bummed cigarette, studying a report from the Bureau of Prisons while conferencing with her equivalent at the SBI in North Carolina. Detective Moye ran toward her with a cell phone, sprinting from twenty yards away. She hung up and watched him approach. The kid was in great shape.

“Agent Crews!”

“Tell me something worthwhile,” she said.

Moye gestured with the phone. “Got a positive ID on the pickup. A rookie patrolman on call just saw who he thinks is Charlie Colquitt and the suspect at a house next door to his mother's. Ninety-seven-sixty-six Tulip Street. Ten minutes from the square. SWAT and hostage are en route.”

“Ninety-seven—? That's Lucy Colquitt's address.”

She took off at a run with Moye, them leaping across stones at the creek like fugitives themselves. On the ghost road a caravan waited. They followed a local deputy to the highway and headed south, wide open with sirens and light bars.

These things used to excite her more, Crews realized. Snaking through highway traffic. A confrontation with the hunted, justifying all the hours of work, all the manpower and resources. Not eating enough. Not sleeping enough.

These things
used
to excite her.

This time she had a premonition that it was going to end badly.

*   *   *

“This was a
goddamn mistake,” Hicklin said, watching as Charlie eased his mother down onto the couch, trying to reassure her that everything was okay.

“Don't you recognize him?”
Charlie said needlessly.

Hicklin just shook his head, glaring around the living room at the stupid knickknacks and collectibles, the country décor. It unsettled him in a way he couldn't have anticipated.

He hadn't trusted his better judgment. The
other
voice was nagging him.

Off them both and get the fuck out of here!

Charlie remained on the couch, soothing his mother with gentle pats and strokes. Lucy clutched him, moaning, rocking. Hicklin peered between curtains, looking up and down the street. He hustled to the kitchen. Drew the blinds. In the living room again he removed the bulletproof tactical vest from his duffel bag and struggled into it. His whole right side felt useless, but the pain was the least of his concerns at the moment. He took out four magazines procured from Lipscomb and secured them in the pockets of the vest. Charlie watched him.

“Don't you see, Momma? It's him,” he said, pleading. “He needs help, Momma. He's hurt. We've got to help him.”

“Just tell him to take what he wants and get out,” Lucy said.

“But it's … Look at him!”

Lucy framed Charlie's face with her hands and kissed him gently on the forehead.

“What
happened
to you, Coma?”

“I'll tell you one day, Momma. Right now we're a family again. And we need to help him. He's got a bullet stuck in his back!”

Lucy refused to look in Hicklin's direction.

“You never had a father!” she shrieked, slapping her son with weak and flailing blows. Charlie struggled to get a grip on her wrists.

“Shut her up,” Hicklin said.

He shook his head in disbelief.

“This was a huge motherfuckin' mistake.”

Hicklin turned and walked into the kitchen, fingering the blinds so as to see out the window above the sink. Nice quiet street. No traffic. He began to pace.

Kill these two assholes,
the voice said again.

He raised the shotgun subtly, as if to fire from the hip, aiming it at Charlie from the kitchen.
Do it. Do it and bail.

The boy's back was to him. Lucy's one eye filling with tears behind a mess of hair.

Do them both.

Then put the goddamn 12-gauge in your mouth.

Nice little house on a quiet street. For a lot of men it was routine to be in a house like this with a wife and kid. Hicklin shuddered. He didn't need some epiphany to realize how fucked it all was for him.

He lowered the shotgun and leaned it against the kitchen table. Lit a cigarette and listened. Lucy halfway down the hole of a breakdown, Charlie trying to reason with her, talk her off the ledge. It was beyond anything Hicklin could have imagined.

What a homecoming.

He glanced at the furniture, the ceramic collectibles. Photos of Charlie everywhere. The boy was her life, pathetic as that was. Hicklin felt no real connection among the three of them. To that house. Lucy had gone on to make something of her life. Live it as best she knew how.
And what had you done?

So was it really her? His mind was stalled. He could hardly look at her.

He could only remember Lucy like a character from a long-forgotten TV show. A mental mirror he dusted off, but the reflection remained dull. Himself at twenty, twenty-two. A mean, lost, ugly feeling came over him.

On the couch Charlie held his mother as Lucy brought her lips to his ear and whispered.

“I swear before God you never had a father!”