Side by Side

19

Dixie Smoot just hoped the little bitch tried something. She’d love to see the look on her skinny face when Dixie gave her a good lesson about what happened to people who looked down their noses at other people.

The kid was finally asleep. A little cough medicine in his juice sure took his little foot off the accelerator.

Dixie wasn’t exactly the mothering kind, but she kind of liked the baby. He was cute as a puppy, but kids were all more pain in your ass as not. Not like a dog you can feed and water and leave outside as much of the time as you wanted.

This old trailer was good enough to stay in during hunting seasons, but the coating of dust that covered every flat surface like rust was disgusting. The guys expected Dixie to do the cleaning, but she only did so when Peanut himself told her to do it, and as lightly as she could get by with. Soon as you swept it up, more took its place. Outside, the ground was covered with an inch of the flour-fine silt, and it fell off your shoes onto the linoleum. The TV screen was always murky on account of it, and it got in your hair, your clothes, and under your fingernails so you always felt nasty. It didn’t bother the boys, but nothing bothered her brothers. Well, except Ferny Ernest, the baby. Everybody else called him Click but her. He never came out here to the trailer, because he didn’t much care one way or the other about hunting. He didn’t like poison ivy, chiggers, or snakes, or spiders. The others-Buck and the twins, Burt and Curt-would roll naked in chigger grass and pack their jaws full of poison ivy if they had to in order to slaughter a deer or a turkey or anything else that was made out of meat. During deer or turkey season you couldn’t find a Smoot unless you were riding a buck through the woods.

The land, about 940 acres of woods, clover fields, and water holes, was for hunting. The place was thick with game, and Peanut and the boys spent a fortune on keeping it that way. And Lord help you if you was to get caught poaching on it. People who knew the family would leave a wounded deer they’d tracked there for the buzzards before they’d risk being caught by the Smoots while dragging it off their land.

Dixie worked out at Gold’s Gym. She could bench-press 270 pounds. She spent part of her day in there going from one machine to the other until she was sweating to beat the band. She couldn’t outwrestle her three older brothers, because they were a lot bigger, and stronger than bulls. Buck loved staying bulked up and was proud to say that nobody had ever kicked his ass. Not even when he was a Marine, which he was before he got dishonorably discharged for something he would never tell anybody about. Part of Buck’s trouble was the steroids that kept his face broke out, but he’d always just been mean as hell for no good reason. You couldn’t like Buck if you tried, and that was how he liked it.

Dixie had heard from Burt, who was mad at Buck, that his older brother had been feeling the skinny woman up, saying she asked him to screw her, and that he was going to do just that before it was all over. If you were a woman, you wouldn’t want to spread your legs for Buck, because he couldn’t get aroused unless he was hurting the girl. That was just how he was, and everybody in the family knew it.

Dixie was just as tough as her three older brothers were and smarter than all three of them put together. She didn’t get as much money as the boys, but that was supposedly because they got their hands dirtier. Peanut had always said that planned killings were man’s work. Dixie did whatever her daddy said to, and if he told her to cut somebody up and throw the pieces in the river, she could do it as well as her brothers could. What did testicles have to do with getting bloody?

Dixie’s instructions had been straight. Peanut said she was to watch the pair until he said kill them. She was to make sure that none of her brothers messed around with the woman because it wasn’t right to do it to her under such pitiful circumstances. But Peanut didn’t tell Dixie she couldn’t teach her a lesson or two.

Dixie looked down at the sleeping child and, despite telling them to get it done, she’d bet the damn twins were out looking for deer signs, and hadn’t yet put a shovel blade into the ground.