Red Grass River

TWENTY-NINE

December 1924

A GUSTY GRAY EVENING OF UNSEASONABLE RAIN A FEW DAYS BEFORE Christmas. He arrived home and parked the car under the wide live oak to one side of the house and cut off the motor. The rain pattered on the car roof as he buttoned his yellow rainslicker and tugged down his hat.

He was just about to get out of the car when the passenger-side door opened and a figure in sopping clothes and a black hat with a wide downturned brim streaming with rainwater stood there holding an army .45 pointed at him.

“Give me it.” She coughed wetly several times—hacking so hard the veins stood out on her neck.

It took him a moment to recognize her. He’d not seen her since the raid on the Ashley whiskey camp when she sat against a tree with blood stating her pantleg and running from her hair. That had been not quite a year ago but she looked to have aged far beyond that. She was obviously sick—perhaps with only a bad cold, although the cough sounded bad enough to be consumptive. Her eyes were redly swollen.

”Give me it!” she said, and again fell to hacking, her eyes straining on him, flooding with tears.

“Give you what?” he said. “And you best get that gun off me right goddamn now.” The tightness in his voice surprised and angered him.

She coughed wetly and leaned into the car and cocked the pistol. “I didnt come all this way to listen to your bullshit,” she said in a strained rasp. “Give me it or I’ll put one in your brainpan and you best fucken believe i mean it.”

“Now just hold on,” he said, raising his hands slightly, palms out. He shifted his weight imperceptibly, readying himself. “What makes you think I got it? I wasnt even there. Everybody knows that.”

“You got it,” she said. “I know you do.” She leaned closer and put the muzzle within inches of his eye. “Now give—”

Another hacking fit before her and she sagged under its force and her eyes lost focus and in that instant he snatched and twisted her wrist and took the gun from her and grabbed her by the shirtfront and the shirt ripped as he pulled her forward onto the car seat and off her feet and her hat fell away and her hair spilled onto the car seat as he wrestled her around onto her back. She kicked and struggled to right herself but he pinned her under his weight with one hand and pressed the pistol muzzle to her cheekbone just under her eye.

“You sorry bitch!” he said. “Point a gun at me! I ought blow your brains out.”

“Give me…it,” she said, sickly breathless, coughing and half-choking, mucus coursing from her nose, her hands weakly pushing at his flexed arm pinioning her. “Give me.”

“I aint got it!” His voice sounded made of tin.

“Liar!” she rasped. “Black liar! I know they gave it to you, I know it! You dont—” She gagged on mucus, her face darkening, and for a moment he thought she might strangle to death. But she managed a deep rattled breath and said, “Give me it or kill me, you son of a bitch—or I’ll kill you, I swear I will. I’ll kill you if I got to”—she hacked, choked, rasped on—“if I got to crawl on my hands and knees through hell.” She seemed entirely indifferent to the pistol muzzle against her face.

Her breasts were heaving and one was almost wholly exposed where her shirt had torn. Fixed on his face, her eyes burned redly in their dark hollows. It’s all of him left in the world, you low bastard. It belongs to me. Give…me…it.”

She struggled in his grip with a sudden rush of strength and it was all he could do to hold her down.

“God damn, woman, you wanna get shot?” he said. She craned her head forward and tried to bite his arm. He cursed and hit her in the mouth with the gun butt and split her lip against her teeth and her strength swelled in her fury and she tried to spit blood up in his face and then she was choking again and fell back and turned her head aside and hacked up bile and mucus onto the car seat. She gasped as someone drowning. “Give…me…it,” she managed. “Give me it….”

She looked up at him with her burning eyes and he saw that she was not even a little bit afraid, not of anything. Not of him not of pain, not of dying. Not of any truth of trial in the world.

And he knew that was not true of himself. And felt his chest tighten with an awful familiarity. Felt his own breath hard to draw.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re crazy as he was.”

But he knew it was as she’d said: he would have to give it to her or he would have to kill her.

Oh hell, he thought. Oh hell.

He drew away from her and she scrabbled to her knees on the car seat and turned her wild face to him as he probed under his slicker and into his vest pocket and took out the watch and fob. He had never shown it to anyone for fear of the questions it would raise—and so had not derived the pleasure from its possession he thought he would, the pleasure he thought was his due.

She looked on it and her face fell. She was crying softly and could not take her eyes off it as he removed it from the chain and gave it to her. She cupped it in her hand and smiled on it through her tears.

And then closed her hand tightly around it and lashed the fish into Bob Baker’s mouth with all her weight behind it.

The punch snapped his head back and he felt a top tooth give and before he could recover she was out of the car and running hatless into the ghostly twilit rain and he saw her vanish into the pines.

An hour later the world was gone dark and the rain was falling hard again. The windows of Bob Baker’s house showed warmly yellow and his wife and daughters were within and waiting for him to come home.

And all the while he yet sat in the car and stared into the rainy blackness as though he might descry some wild thing lying in wait, watching him and grinning at the hard beating of his heart.