Desperation Road : Now a Major film release 2023 E-Book

Michael Farris Smith

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 463

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

"Michael Farris Smith is one of the best writers of his generation, and this very well may be his best work" — Tom Franklin In the vein of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone and the works of Ron Rash, Desperation Road is set in a rough-and-tumble Mississippi town where drugs, whiskey, guns, and the desire for revenge violently intersect and collide. For eleven years, the clock had been ticking for Russell Gaines as he sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. His time now up, and believing his debt paid, he returns home only to discover that revenge lives and breathes all around. On the day of his release, a woman named Maben and her young daughter trudge along the side of the interstate under the punishing summer sun. Desperate and exhausted, the pair spend their last dollar on a motel room for the night, a night that ends with Maben running through the darkness holding a pistol, and a dead deputy sprawled across the road in the glow of his own headlights. With dawn, destinies collide, and Gaines is forced to decide whose life he will save — his own, or those of the woman and child? Desperation Road is a gripping, guttural thriller of redemption and human frailty. It is due to be turned into a film of the same title starring Mel Gibson. Praise for Desperation Road: "Smith is a meticulous craftsman who evokes his protagonists and their world with patience and subtlety" — Publishers Weekly "Outstanding" — Ron Rash "As rich and alive and wounded as any you'll find in contemporary fiction" — Wiley Cash "Both poetic and brutal, Desperation Road is a gorgeous and violent book." — Ivy Pochoda

Leseprobe

DESPERATION ROAD

For eleven years the clock has been ticking for Russell Gaines while he sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. His time now up, and believing his debt has been paid, he returns home only to discover that revenge lives and breathes all around. On the same day of his release, a woman named Maben and her young daughter trudge along the side of the interstate under the punishing summer sun. Desperate and exhausted, the pair spend their last dollars on a motel room for the night, a night that ends with Maben running through the darkness holding a pistol, and a dead deputy sprawled in the road in the glow of his own headlights. With dawn, destinies collide, and Russell is forced to decide whose life he will save – his own or that of the woman and child?

About the author

Michael Farris Smith is the award-winning author of Rivers and The Hands of Strangers. Rivers was named in numerous Best Books of the Year lists, and garnered the 2014 Mississippi Author Award for Fiction. His short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his essays have appeared in The New York Times, Catfish Alley, Writer’s Bone, and more. He lives in Columbus, Mississippi, with his wife and two daughters.

Other books by Michael Farris Smith

Rivers

The Hands of Strangers

For Presley and Brooklyn, may your little lights shine

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to Birney Imes, Maridith Geuder, Matthew Guinn, Andrew Kelly, Erinn Holloway, Sean Doyle, Daniel Woodrell, Jason Richman, and Yuli Masinovsky. A special thank you to Lee Boudreaux and the team at Lee Boudreaux Books and Little, Brown. Another special thank you to Ellen Levine, who arrived at just the right time. A final thank you is for Sabrea, may you never grow tired of carrying me.

And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,

then your light will rise in the darkness,

and your night will become like the noonday.

– Isaiah 58:10

The past is never dead.

– William Faulkner

1

The old man was nearly to the Louisiana line when he saw the woman and child walking on the other side of the interstate, the woman carrying a garbage bag tossed over her shoulder and the child lagging behind. He watched them as he passed and then he watched them in his rearview mirror and he watched the cars pass them as if they were road signs. The sun was high and the sky clear and if nothing else he knew they were hot, so he pulled off at the next exit and crossed the bridge over the interstate and headed back north on I-55. He’d seen them a few miles back and as he drove he hoped there would be a damn good excuse for what they were doing.

He slowed as he approached them and they walked in the grass, the girl slapping at her bare legs with her hands and the woman slumped with the weight of the garbage bag. He pulled onto the side of the interstate and stopped behind them but neither the woman nor the girl turned around. Then he shifted the car into park and got out.

‘Hey!’

They stopped and looked at him and he walked over. Their cheeks red and sweaty from the heat and traces of a sunburn beneath the streaks of the blond, almost white hair of the child. The woman and the girl both wore shorts and tank tops and their shoulders were pink and their legs spotted with scratches and insect bites from walking in the rough grass on the side of the road. The woman dropped the garbage bag to the ground and it hit with a thud.

‘What y’all doing out here?’ the old man asked. He adjusted his hat and looked at the bag.

‘Walking,’ the woman said. She squinted as looking at the man meant facing the sun and the little girl folded her hands over her eyes and peeked between her fingers.

‘You need some help? She don’t look too good,’ he said and he nodded toward the child.

‘We’re trying to get up to the truck stop. At Fernwood. You know it?’

‘Yeah, I know it. Another ten miles or so. What you got there?’

‘Gonna meet somebody.’

‘Somebody with a car?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Come on and get in. Y’all don’t need to be out here like this,’ he said and he reached down and picked up the garbage bag.

‘It’s heavy,’ the woman said.

The old man grunted as he tossed it over his shoulder and the woman and child walked behind him to the long, silver Buick. He opened the trunk and set the bag in it and the woman followed the child into the backseat.

He watched the woman in the rearview mirror and tried to talk to her as they drove but she looked out the window or looked down at the child as he spoke, only giving one-word answers to questions about where they’d been or where they were going or what they were doing or what they needed or if she was sure there was gonna be somebody there to meet them at the truck stop. In the air-conditioning her face lost its color and he saw that there was a vacancy in her expression when she answered his questions and he knew that she didn’t know any more about what they were doing or where they were going than he did. The woman’s face was thin and he could only see the top of the girl’s head in the mirror but she seemed to look down, maybe from exhaustion or hunger or boredom or maybe some of all of it. He hadn’t been around children in a long time and he guessed she was five or six. She sat quietly next to the woman, like a wornout doll. The old man finally gave up talking to the woman and let her ride in peace, figuring she was happy to be sitting down.

In minutes the sign for the truck stop appeared above the trees on the left side of the interstate and he pulled off the exit and drove into the vast parking lot, where the big trucks moved in and out. Around to the right side of the truck stop were the diesel pumps and a row of motel rooms. The old man drove to the left of the truck stop, through the gas pumps and past the gift shop and truckers’ showers and changing rooms and he stopped at the door of the café, which had its own separate entrance at the back.

‘This all right?’ he asked the woman and she nodded.

‘C’mon, baby,’ she said to the girl.

The old man walked around to the trunk and lifted out the garbage bag and set it down on the concrete. Then he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet and he picked out forty dollars and he held it out to the woman.

She bowed her head and said thank you.

He nodded and said he wished he had more but the woman told him that was plenty. She hoisted the bag and took the girl’s hand and thanked the man with a half smile and he held open the door of the café for them as they walked inside. He watched them through the glass door. A countertop and row of bar stools lined the right side of the café and the little girl tapped her fingers on top of each stool as they walked past and the woman dropped the bag on the floor and dragged it across the linoleum. He watched until a waitress took them to a table next to the window and he started to go in after them, to give them his phone number, to tell the woman to call him if her ride didn’t show up and that he’d do what he could. But he didn’t. Instead he got back into the Buick and he crossed over the interstate and drove along the highway, back toward home, where he parked underneath the shade of the carport and where he would then go inside and sit down with his wife at the kitchen table. He would tell her about the woman and the child and when she asked him what he’d been doing driving toward Louisiana in the first place he wouldn’t be able to remember.

2

The little girl ate two grilled cheese sandwiches and a bowl of chocolate ice cream and the woman ate a plate of biscuits and gravy and they each drank several glasses of iced tea. It cost more than she wanted to spend but the way the child’s face seemed to swell with each bite was satisfaction enough. If only for the moment.

After the bill was paid, they sat in the booth without talking, the girl using the crayons the waitress had given her to decorate the blank side of the paper menu. Maben counted her money and she had seventy-three dollars. She folded the bills neatly and stuck them into the front pocket of her shorts and she looked out the window across the parking lot at the row of motel rooms and she thought briefly of getting a room, taking long baths, watching television, and then sleeping with the girl next to her. Between clean sheets. With the air conditioner blowing and the door locked. The girl said look Momma and she held up the paper and showed her a blue a and a red something. Maybe a b. And either a green c or an l.

‘That’s good, Annalee,’ Maben said. The child smiled and then she put the paper down and she drew a circle and began to create a face. The waitress walked by and asked if they needed something else.

‘How much are those rooms?’ Maben asked.

‘About thirty-five, I think,’ the waitress said. ‘I’ll find out for sure.’

‘No,’ Maben said. ‘That’s okay. You got a pay phone?’

‘That way,’ the waitress said, pointing at the door. ‘Through there at the bathrooms.’

She touched the top of the girl’s hand and said I’ll be right back and then she followed the directions to the pay phone. A phone book hung from a metal cord and she opened it and began to try to remember the names of the people she used to know. Tried to think of a friend or some down-the-line cousin. Something. Somebody. She looked at the names in the phone book as if one might reach up and poke a finger in her eye and say hey look it’s me. But it didn’t happen. Too much time in between. Too much stuff in between. The kind of stuff that was supposed to make you feel good and it did in the first instant but then it only confused you or rotted you away and tricked you into thinking you needed more. Too much of it. She gave up on names and then she turned to the Yellow Pages and it took her a couple of minutes but she found a shelter that looked like it might help. On Broad Street. She thought she remembered where that was. She ripped the page from the phone book and folded it and stuck it into her pocket and she walked back to the table. It was another five miles to McComb and another two or three miles at least from the interstate to downtown and Broad Street. She didn’t know if the child could go any farther today or not. And there was no guarantee that the shelter would even be there. She had tracked them down before only to get to the front door and find a faded note taped across the top explaining that due to lack of funding we regret that we have closed. Please call the police in case of an emergency.

He had said he’d be right back but she had known by the sound of it that he was lying. But he’d at least left a hundred dollars on top of the television. And he’d left the bag filled with her clothes and the child’s clothes outside the motel room door. It wasn’t as bad as it’d been before. She had almost felt a small victory in being left sympathetically. But that didn’t change the fact that the van was gone and he was gone and she had already forgotten his name and she and the girl had been left alone again in a room that didn’t belong to them. So they’d started walking. Three days ago. Going back to Mississippi because there was nowhere else to go. New Orleans had been no good and Shreveport had been no good and all she got from Beaumont had been the creation of the little girl and she didn’t know why she thought they should head for Mississippi other than that was where the trail had started. She had left with nothing and she was coming back with nothing but another mouth to feed. And now that she was back the heat rising off the asphalt didn’t look any different from the heat rising off the asphalt anywhere else. She had half expected something magical to occur once they crossed the state line and maybe it had with the old man giving them a ride and forty bucks. And as she looked at the ice cream dried in the corners of the child’s mouth she decided that was about as much as she could expect.

‘Momma,’ the girl said.

‘Yes.’

‘Are we in Mississippi yet?’

‘Yeah, baby.’

‘Can we stop walking now?’

‘Almost.’

‘Can we get one of those rooms?’

‘Stop asking questions and come on.’

They had slept off the road, walking into clumps of forest that stood back from the interstate, their clothes spread out across the leaves and dirt, eating packages of crackers and potato chips and drinking Cokes and breathing more easily in the cover of the night. They smelled and she knew it and once the girl was finished coloring they walked out of the café and through the gift shop and back toward the truckers’ quarters. They ignored the truckers only sign and went into the women’s dressing room. Maben stood next to the shower stall while the child bathed herself and after the child was finished and dressed the woman took a shower and felt a relief in the filth that ran down her body and washed down the drain. They took turns drying their hair underneath the hand dryers and the woman found clean T-shirts and shorts for them in the garbage bag. She told the girl to wait in the dressing room and she walked into the convenience store and stole a small bottle of lotion and she returned and lathered the child’s red arms and face and neck and then she did the same for herself. She then washed their socks in the sink and she wrung them and dried them under the hand dryer while Annalee lay stretched across the tile floor with her head resting on the garbage bag. By the time the socks were dry the girl had fallen asleep and Maben sat down next to her and leaned her head back against the wall and prayed that no one would come into the dressing room while the child rested.

She had discovered that once things started to go bad they gathered and spread like some wild, poisonous vine, a vine that stretched across the miles and the years from the shadowy faces she had known to the lines she had crossed to the things that had been put inside her by strangers. It spread and stretched until the vine had consumed and covered her, wrapping itself around her ankles and around her thighs and around her chest and around her throat and wrists and sliding between her legs and as she looked down at the girl with her sunburned forehead and her thin arms she realized that the child was her own dirty hand reaching out of the thicket in one last desperate attempt to grab on to something good. She stroked the child’s hair. Admired her small hands folded underneath her cheek. And then she lay across the floor next to her. There were times when it was impossible to sleep as all the evil in the world seemed to gather in her thoughts and she couldn’t figure out how to keep the child from it and there were other times when all the evil in the world gathered in her thoughts and exhausted her to the point where she couldn’t fight it anymore and this was one of those times when she gave up and with her head across her arm and her arm against the cold tile floor, she slept.

3

They were awakened by a stout woman in black boots and a Waylon Jennings T-shirt. They sat up and rubbed their eyes and then they got to their feet and the woman asked them what they were doing.

‘Nothing,’ Maben said and she brushed at the child’s hair with the palm of her hand and then she picked up the garbage bag.

‘You need a ride or something? I’m going down toward New Orleans after I get some food in me.’

‘We’re all right,’ Maben said and she took the girl’s hand and they stepped out of the dressing room. They walked outside and sat down on the curb. The afternoon was falling away as they had managed to grab a couple of hours of sleep, polite or indifferent bathroom patrons stepping over and around them until the stout woman decided to ask. Maben wondered if they had time to make it to the shelter or if they would be stranded again in the night. If there would be a place for them. If they could help her get a job. If they had coloring books. If they could stay for a day or three days or a month. If.

She looked at the motel rooms across the parking lot. She looked at the girl. They had been on the side of the road or in the woods for three days.

‘Come on,’ she said to the girl and they walked back inside and to the cash register in the café where the room keys hung on hooks on a wooden board nailed on the wall. The girl who had waited on them stood behind the register stacking receipts and she looked up and said I thought y’all were gone.

‘Not yet,’ Maben said. ‘We want one of those rooms if you got it.’

‘Sure,’ the waitress said and she put down the receipts and she took a notebook from below the counter. She opened it and made a couple of marks and she said it looked like room 6 was free. Thirty-five dollars even.

Maben pulled the folded bills from her pocket and as she counted out the money the waitress looked down at the girl and asked her name.

‘Annalee,’ the girl said. Then the girl looked up at the woman and said my momma’s name is Maben.

‘She didn’t ask that,’ Maben said and she handed the money to the waitress.

The waitress turned and took a key from a hook and gave it to Maben and she smiled again at the girl. Then she said, ‘Be sure and keep your door locked.’

‘Why?’ the girl asked but Maben told her to come on and they walked across the parking lot toward the room. They stopped to let a big rig pass in front of them and when they started again the child began to skip along, anticipating sitting on something soft and watching television.

They had watched cartoons and the weather. Sat on the bed with their shoes off and legs stretched out. Sipped cold drinks from the vending machine. And now the girl was asleep with the television screen flashing across her clean body in the dark room. Maben walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. The parking lot was lit with yellow ghoulish light and more trucks populated the lot, settling in for the night. She could see across the lot into the windows of the café and the waitresses outnumbered the customers. She had spent more than half the money and now she felt stupid. If for whatever reason she didn’t find what she hoped to find tomorrow on Broad Street, if the place was full or closed or simply not the kind of place they needed, then she had made a big mistake. Seventy-three dollars was not much money but take away thirty-five and another eight for lunch and it really wasn’t much.

She walked over to the television and changed the channel to a news station and looked at the time on the bottom right of the screen. Ten after eleven. She walked back over to the window and sat down in a chair and again pulled back the curtain.

At least we don’t stink anymore, she thought. Keep your door locked, she remembered the waitress saying but she didn’t understand the warning. It seemed as though people were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

It was then that she noticed two girls at the edge of the parking lot who hadn’t been there only a second ago. As if they had shot up from holes in the ground. One white and one black. They were dressed alike. Short denim skirts and white tank tops and flip-flops. Each held a small purse. Maybe sixteen, Maben thought. The white girl had her dark hair cut short like a boy and the black girl wore a red bandanna tied around her head. They walked together into the middle of the parking lot and then the black girl pointed at the purple truck and the white girl pointed at the black truck and then they separated. Maben watched as each girl walked to her chosen truck cab and stepped up and held on to the sideview mirror and tapped on the window. The door of the purple cab opened first and the black girl crawled inside. The white girl tapped again and adjusted her skirt and then the door of the black cab opened and she also crawled inside. The curtains of each cab were then pulled closed.

Maben counted and there were nine more trucks in the lot.

Nine times thirty. Two hundred and seventy dollars.

Nine times fifty would be four hundred and fifty.

She looked across the room at the thirty dollars wadded up on the table next to the television.

She had done it before and she hadn’t thought about it in a long time, forcing herself to remove it from her memory. And as she thought about it now she felt as if it had been someone else. She had done so well forgetting it that she couldn’t remember when it had been done and where it had been done or how many times it had been done but only that it had been done in a time when she had been backed into some dark and desperate corner by the rabid dogs of life.

She watched the trucks and wondered if those girls were old enough to drive. Wondered where they came from. Wondered if those men had ever once considered that those girls hadn’t long ago been children. Or still were. Or maybe they never had been because they’d never had the chance. She looked at Annalee and realized what might await her if things didn’t turn around and then she took a deep breath and looked back across the lot and then there was the vision of that night so many years ago. And that boy. That beautiful boy. Them sitting together on the tailgate parked on Walker’s Bridge. Underneath ran the water of Shimmer Creek and alongside the creek and surrounding the bridge stood thick forest, the trees holding the bridge close, almost protecting it. The truck filling up the width of the bridge, its wooden rails leaning and rotting. Declarations of love long gone carved into the wood with pocketknives and bottle openers. The moon full and its light giving shadows through the trees and creating the illusion of an army of still ghosts lying in wait. The stars were many and beneath the music coming from the radio the crickets and frogs formed an abstract chorus over the trickle of the running water and she knew it was right. Knew he was right. So she told him to crawl up into the truck bed and lay down. Don’t ask just lay down and don’t look up and he obeyed and then she stood and she moved away from the truck bed and walked to the edge of the bridge. Don’t peek, she said. She looked up into the sky for reassurance then she took off her T-shirt and removed her bra and stepped out of her shorts and her panties. She knelt and piled her clothes in a loose stack on the edge of the bridge. She stood and a chill ran over her body but she opened her arms and felt the moonlight and it held her like a pair of warm hands. She looked into the truck bed at the boy who had been telling her that he loved her. And she started toward him but then the dark was interrupted by the hum of an approaching car and the glow of headlights appeared over the hill, headlights that came fast, exposing themselves in two bright bursts before she could call out to him, before she had time to pick up her clothes and the car never slowed down. And she heard herself scream out to him as she hurried off the narrow bridge and onto the side of the road and she turned around in time to see the car meet the front of the truck. She ducked with the roar of the crash and Jason’s tall and lean body was shot out of the truck bed and into the night as if he were meant to fly. The sparks and the screech and sound of twisting metal and running down that rough road toward the nearest house light. Breathing hard and running harder but feeling as if she were going nowhere, as if the house light were moving away from her as she ran toward it with her clothes tucked under her arm and forgetting she was naked until she finally ran into the yard and she stopped to put on her shorts and shirt. She left her bra and panties next to the front steps and she beat on the door and beat on the door, certain they would think they were being attacked or robbed and she began screaming out words like bridge and cars and help and please God until a light came on inside and the door opened and a man with gray hair peeked at her and believed that something was horribly wrong. And then getting in the car with him and driving down the road while his wife called somebody. Maben unable to answer his questions, only focusing ahead into the dark with anxious eyes and wanting Jason to be standing there as the headlights shined onto the bridge. She wanted to see him standing there wiping the dirt from his face and arms and saying damn that was close. But then seeing nothing and calling out and hearing nothing and then watching while the blue lights and the red lights topped the hill and then watching while the flashlights shined into the woods at the twisted and smoking heap of car and truck and then hearing them say we got a live one and telling herself it’s him it’s him it’s got to be him and then it was the other one. The one that interrupted.

Through the haze of the years the night came back to her with clarity and punch as she stared with empty eyes across the parking lot. A car horn sounded and shook her loose and she turned and walked over and sat down at the edge of the bed and put her hand on the child’s leg and watched her small chest rise and fall in a heavy sleep.

It wouldn’t take long, she thought. It never had before. At least the way she remembered it. They never took long. Fifty dollars. No less. Maybe forty. The child was sleeping like the dead and would never know she was gone. She stood and put the room key in her pocket and she walked over to the sink and brushed her hair that hung limp against her head. She pushed it around with her fingers but nothing changed and then she wiped her eyes with a washrag and she kept telling herself that they didn’t take long. They never take long.

4

‘Son of a bitch,’ Ned said as he looked over the top of the glasses on the end of his nose. He sat at the end of the counter with a cup of coffee and the newspaper he had been waiting all day to read. The floor had been swept like he had asked and the dishes had all been washed like he had asked and there was only one table of customers. Three old women smoking and working crossword puzzles. He had only glanced at the front page headlines when he noticed the two girls walking across the parking lot. One white. One black. The same two he’d had to call in before.

He got up from the counter stool and walked over to the phone next to the cash register. He dialed the sheriff’s office and when the woman answered he said, ‘Hey. This is Ned over here at the truck stop. We got a couple of girls walking around knocking on doors again.’

‘All right, Ned. They don’t quit, do they?’

‘Don’t look like it. Don’t y’all ever keep them?’

‘For what?’

‘I don’t know. Scare them or something.’

‘They don’t scare too easy. We’ll send somebody on over.’

‘Fine.’

He hung up the phone. Watched the girls as they pointed at the different trucks. He could have gone out himself and run them off but they would have walked down the road and come back as soon as he was inside. Don’t get paid enough for that shit anyhow, he thought. He walked to the end of the counter and sat down with his eyes turned away from the window and he opened up the newspaper that would be today’s for only another hour.

5

Maben opened and closed the door of the motel room quietly. She had already decided which truck she was going for and she walked directly to it, a blue truck with the rebel flag painted on its front grille. She climbed up onto the step of the driver’s side. The curtains were pulled. Dark inside. She touched her fingertips to the glass. Caught her reflection. Her child slept less than fifty yards away. She felt nauseated already.

And then she pulled her hand away from the window. Bit her lip and told herself to trust that tomorrow would be better. That she would find something to help. This ain’t no way to start over. And she stepped down off the truck and touched the room key in her pocket. She turned to walk back to the room and she saw the cruiser. It had pulled into the parking lot with its lights off and sat idling, the silhouette behind the steering wheel watching her.

Clint didn’t mind this call and he didn’t mind messing around with the girls because he liked what they would do with the cruiser parked off the road to keep from going to jail. He liked the free pie and coffee Ned gave him for running them off. He considered these perks of a job that didn’t pay enough. He watched the woman in shorts stepping down off the rig and she wasn’t what he was expecting. Not the black girl and the white girl who he wouldn’t even have to say anything to. He’d just open the back door of the cruiser and wave them over and they’d say hey deputy and crawl in the back and an hour later after they had done what he wanted them to do he’d drop them off on the side of the road in front of the house where they said they lived and make them swear to give it a week before they headed back over there.

He was happy to see something new.

He got out of the cruiser. Hands propped on his gun belt and his face smooth and his hair parted. Too old was the first thing he thought.

‘Hey,’ he said.

Maben stopped.

‘What you doing out here?’ he asked. He spoke with the confidence of a man who knew that he had the power.

‘Going to my room.’

‘Not what I hear. Ain’t legal to go in them trucks and do dirty things.’

‘I didn’t go in no truck. I said I’m going to my room,’ she said. Then she reached into her pocket and took out the room key and showed it to him as if this were the evidence that would free her.

He moved on over to her and took the key from her fingers. He held it up to the light and inspected it. Then he gave it back to her.

‘The manager called us. Supposed to be a family place.’

‘I didn’t do nothing.’

‘I saw you up on that truck over there,’ he said and then he looked at her legs. At her dirty shoes. He then studied her face. Haggard and worn but a pointed nose that seemed like it might have once been part of something pretty and gray eyes like slick dimes.

‘How old are you?’

‘I got a kid over there in my room. I got to get back.’

‘Not right now. You gonna have to come along with me.’

‘I told you I didn’t do nothing.’

‘That ain’t what Ned said.’

‘Who the hell is Ned?’

‘Don’t matter to you,’ he said and he grabbed her skinny arm and she pulled back but she mostly pleaded I didn’t do nothing. I got a kid in there I told you. He opened the back door of the cruiser and then he twisted her arm behind her and she couldn’t fight it and she went face-first into the backseat, flopping over on her shoulder. He slammed the door before she could get up straight. He looked around the parking lot to see if Ned might be watching or if he might get an appreciative wave from somebody. But there was no one. She pleaded I didn’t fucking do nothing and my baby is over there I done told you I didn’t do nothing go knock on that truck and ask. I didn’t do nothing. He got in and sat down behind the wheel and he turned around and told her to shut up and then he made a U-turn in the parking lot. Please officer I didn’t do nothing. Please.

And that was the part he liked the most. When they started to beg. He stayed on Highway 48 between Magnolia and McComb. Nothing out there but a pool hall and a liquor store and then later on a bait shop. When she started to cry he told her to stop it. You ain’t going to jail. If you were going to jail you’d be handcuffed already. Then he asked her name.

‘Karen,’ she said.

‘Karen,’ he repeated. ‘I got a cousin named Karen. She ain’t a whore like you, though.’

‘Where we going?’

‘Now, Karen. I’m the one driving.’

She stopped crying. She stopped talking. She sat with her arm resting on the door, staring out the window as the deputy drove along the two-lane highway. Clean white lines along the sides and reflectors dotting the middle that shined like diamonds in the headlights.

It was an easy one for her to figure out.

He turned off onto another road that was flanked by flatlands and after another mile he turned onto a bumpy, thin road that had been patched so lazily and so often that the radar and the radio on the dashboard rattled as the cruiser thumped along. Barbed-wire fence stretched along each side of the road and he soon slowed down and then he came to a stop and he turned off the headlights. Maben looked around and there was not a visible light in any direction. He reached above the dash and turned down the volume on the radio. The parking lights remained and an orange glow surrounded the cruiser as if to signal the demons from the dark.

‘Look here,’ he said and he tapped on the rearview mirror.

‘I guess you know I’m about to come back there,’ he said. Their eyes meeting in the mirror. ‘Girl like you shouldn’t care. Figure it this way. You’re still getting paid but with a get-out-of-jail-free card instead.’ He gave a small laugh and said something to himself she didn’t understand. And then still with this low and brooding laugh he unbuckled his gun belt, the leather cracking as he slid it around his waist.

He held it up and said see here. We’re gonna be friends. He set the gun belt on the front seat and then he opened the door and got out and he untucked his starched khaki shirt from his starched khaki pants. He opened the door slowly. Leaned his head down and told her to move over toward the other side. She scooted away from him and he sat down beside her on the seat. He told her to take off those dirty shoes and she did. He told her to take off her shirt and she did. And he kept on telling her things to do. And she kept on doing them. Keeping her eyes closed when he’d let her.

6

When he was done he got out of the backseat and he dressed standing next to the car. He saw her doing the same and he said don’t worry about that. We ain’t done yet.

Maben pulled her shirt on over her head and ignored him.

He leaned down and with a smirk he said, ‘You think I’m playing?’ She put on her shorts. And then he reached into the backseat and snatched her by the back of her neck and pinned her down on the seat and she let out a groan at the strength of his grip.

‘Take it back off. You hear me?’ he said in a whisper with his mouth against her ear. ‘We ain’t done.’ He let go of her and she sat up slowly. Wary of being slapped or worse. She pulled her shirt back off and she said I thought that was what you wanted.

‘It was.’

‘I did everything you told me. I got a kid back there. I swear to God.’

‘If you got a kid back there then you’d damn sure better do what I tell you. What you think would happen if that kid’s momma gets picked up for whoring herself out? Kid left alone in a motel room. Guessing there ain’t no food or nothing in there either. What you think would happen? You’d better keep on listening.’

She didn’t answer. No reason to. She started praying that Annalee would stay asleep. Wouldn’t wake up and believe her momma had left her. She hoped that like most nightmares this one would be over by daybreak and that she could be sitting in the bed next to Annalee as if nothing had happened when the child first opened her eyes.

Clint left the door open to the backseat. He was that sure. He got into the driver’s seat and turned up the radio. Nothing going on. Then he took a phone out of the glove compartment and he dialed.

‘Got us some new entertainment,’ he said. ‘Come on out and I’ll show you. Yeah, same spot. Yeah, y’all can both come. Ain’t nothing on the radio. Looks like we got all night. Same deal as always.’

He turned off the phone and set it on the seat next to the gun belt. He looked around at Maben through the safety glass and said me and you about to have some company. I’d suggest you be on your best behavior.

She held her shirt against her chest and he laughed at her modesty. She felt the wild, poisonous vine beginning to choke her. She looked at the door. Wide open. Wanting her to run or do something he could blame her for. She didn’t know if it would be a few minutes or half an hour but soon there would be three of them. At least. And she didn’t believe that she wasn’t going to jail when it was over. She didn’t believe that he thought she had a kid back there and even if he did he didn’t seem to care. At some point Annalee would be discovered by a maid or leave the room and wander around looking for somebody and then there would be a phone call and that would be the end of the only thing she had left that mattered. She looked across the quiet, flat countryside. No lights and no answers.

‘Want me to get out and wait for them?’ she asked.

He looked around as if he were waiting for someone else to answer. It’d be a good story he could tell one day if he had her sitting on the hood like some sexual ornament.

‘Might as well. You gonna have to get out anyway. Don’t put nothing on.’

‘It’s off already. Like you told me.’

‘Then come on.’

She scooted across toward the open door, her skin sticking to the seat. He got out from behind the wheel and led her around to the front of the cruiser. She sat down on the hood and it was hot on her bare ass and she hopped up. She asked if she could get her shirt to sit on and he said okay and he turned and looked up the road and waited on their headlights. She noticed him looking away and she leaned across the front seat and unlatched the pistol from the belt and when he turned around she was standing there. Her naked body illuminated in the orange glow of the parking lights. Pointing his pistol at him.

‘You gotta be kidding me,’ he said and he was getting ready to laugh again but he didn’t have the chance as she blew a hole in his throat. He went to his knees and she walked around to him and he squeezed his throat with both hands and the blood flowed black in the strange light and he lunged for her and she stepped back and he fell facedown. He rolled over, clutching at his throat. Tried to get back to his knees and she shot him twice more and he fell flat and still.

She lowered the pistol and then dropped the pistol and put her suddenly shaking hands on top of her head but she didn’t have time for that so she grabbed her clothes and shoes from the backseat and hurried to get dressed, starting to cry in heaves but she stopped herself. You can’t start that now and she went back to the front of the cruiser and he hadn’t moved and wasn’t going to and she picked up the pistol. His phone rang in the cruiser and she knew it was them and she looked into the backseat once more to see if there was anything of hers and then she started running down the road. Away from the cruiser she could hardly see her next step but it didn’t slow her and she ran to the end of the road and she hoped she was turning the right way and she kept running as hard as she could run.

A curve lay ahead and she noticed the headlights shining from around the bend and she dived off the side of the road into the high grass, lying flat and wishing she could lie flatter. The car passed without noticing and she waited until the taillights were specks and then she began running again. She didn’t know how far she had to go but she knew it was far. Her legs burned, the muscles already tired from walking in the heat for three days. But she ignored the pain and pushed and pushed. She ran with flailing arms and legs and she gasped for breath as the fear rose and came out of her in stuttered cries. Sweating and gasping and switching the pistol from hand to hand as if expecting one of them to know what to do with it. Her knee rose and knocked it from her grasp and the pistol bounced away in the dark. She screamed shit motherfucker and then dropped to her hands and knees. Feeling for it in the roadside gravel and calling out to it and then begging God to show it to her. The dust stirred and the rocks shuffled from her hurried hands and then she found it and she was up and running again. It was then that she heard the sirens.

She ran on until she could see the lights from the truck stop and as she ran closer she tried to think if anyone had seen her in the parking lot. If anyone had seen her get in the car with the deputy. He hadn’t called it in. Hadn’t talked to anyone when he picked her up. Had only used his phone to call his buddies to tell them to come on out and have at her. The first siren was joined by more sirens and she imagined the lights flashing around the dead man because she had seen them before. She imagined his open and dead eyes and the blood draining into the bends of the rough road and the crimson streams that the men in uniform would be careful to step around. The body slumped and folded as if it did not have bones and the open sky that gave no answers.

She stopped when she reached the edge of the truck stop parking lot. She didn’t know how long she had been gone. All she knew was that she had made it back and that no one had seen her on the road. She paused before she walked into the lot. Fought to catch her breath and then she stuck the pistol in the back of her pants and tugged her shirt down over it. She stopped at the end of the motel rooms and leaned against the brick wall. Looked for anyone moving around. Looked for anyone in the café staring out the window. Across the lot a man stood at the front of his rig smoking a cigarette. When he was done he walked over to the café and went inside and she watched him sit down at a bar stool with his back to the window.

She waited until the man with glasses on his nose came over and handed him a menu and when the man walked away and into the kitchen Maben crossed hurriedly in front of the motel rooms. Room key in her hand. And when she got to number 6 she found Annalee standing in the window. Her eyes red and her hair tousled as if she had been trying to pull it out with her small hands. Maben unlocked the door and didn’t speak but only knelt and hugged the child who was sweating and panting and crazyeyed. As she hugged her, out the window Maben saw the black girl and the white girl across the way. Standing next to the garbage bin behind the café and counting their money.

7

In the southern Mississippi swamp you can watch the world awaken as the pale yellow sun edges itself between the trees and moss and widewinged cranes. Dragonflies buzz and raccoons come out of their dens and crawl along fallen trees. Turtles situate themselves onto stumps that will later become sunsoaked and hidden things slide beneath black water with murderous patience and skill. Limbs too old to hold themselves up any longer bend and break like old men accepting their marshy graves. Reptiles slither and blackbirds cry as the early light slashes and relieves the deep and quiet night.

This was the world that Russell thought of as he sat with his head leaning against the bus window. Getting up early and driving his daddy’s truck out Highway 98 and turning toward the Bogue Chitto River and then driving onto a gravel road that ran alongside the thin river until the road simply ended. Getting out of the truck and taking the .22 rifle from behind the seat and walking half a mile until the ground became soft and then soggy and then stepping high to keep from bogging down and making it to the one-man boat tied to a willow tree. Muddy to his knees and climbing in and paddling out into the swamp and listening and watching and feeling like a part of what was happening. Sitting through the break of dawn and the light gaining strength and burning through the early haze and the air alive with the calls of birds and the hungry things searching for food. The .22 across his lap. Shot less and less with each visit as he had come to feel like a violator. The unnatural ring of his shot, which scattered the small and unknowing things and added blood to the water and he eventually only carried it with him in case of an alligator or some other fantastic creature rising from the black and starving for skin and bone. This was the world that filled his thoughts as the bus headed south on I-55. The world he remembered being part of as a younger man. As a boy.

It was a straight shot eighty miles south down the interstate and there had been enough rain during this last week of June to keep the countryside green but light shades of brown appeared in patches and suggested a drying out was in store if there wasn’t some relief. Babies cried off and on and an old man snored in the seat behind him and the bus smelled of exhaust and he was taken away from thoughts of his youth and forced into thoughts of the man he had been when he was taken away. He had told himself he wasn’t going to do it. Wasn’t going to stare out the window and lament what he had lost, like some hapless guy in some hapless moment but he wasn’t able to resist. There she was. Brown hair and filling her young woman body in young woman ways, excited about a wedding, dancing with him late into the night, lying close against him in the dark. He listened to the babies cry several seats behind him and he wondered about the kids they might have. About the house they might live in. About the backyard that might be at that house and about them sitting in wrought-iron chairs and drinking bottled beer and watching those kids run around the yard chasing fireflies. The bus charged on, a great rectangular mass of metal and glass and he imagined himself returning from a long trip to that woman and those kids who would be waiting on the front porch of that house and then the old man who had been snoring snapped awake with a shout and startled Russell and freed him from these images. He arched his back and stretched. Looked down at his hands and rubbed his thumbs across the small scars that were scattered across his knuckles and the tops of his hands. Scars that hadn’t been there when he left.

He had spent his first week of freedom in a mandatory seminar for ex-cons that attempted to reacquaint them with the real world. He and six others wore street clothes without shackles and were driven in a van from the gates of the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the Delta to a Motel 6 on the back end of a truck stop off I-55 on the south side of Jackson. He had been unable to sleep. The room too quiet. The air conditioner too cold. Concern that the guy he was sharing a room with might do something. Anything. After doughnuts and coffee in the mornings they would go into a big room at the end of the hallway on the first floor and sit around a sprawling wooden table and listen to Mildred Day. She referred to herself as a reentry counselor. Somebody you only want to see once. Somebody you want to forget. A no-frills middle-aged woman with thick wrists and thick ankles and a thick waist. She educated them on finding work and maintaining contact with parole officers. She explained the differences in the price of living. What a gallon of milk cost. What car insurance cost. How much you make at minimum wage.

After three days of this, with the lure of the free world just outside their door and evidently too much to bear, two of the ex-cons skipped out around midnight and headed to Jimmy’s, a south Jackson strip club with pink neon women shining over the front door and highdollar drinks inside. Mildred Day had warned them and the next morning when they didn’t show up for breakfast she made a phone call and then went on about her business with her remaining students. At lunch she announced that the two stragglers had been picked up smoking cigarettes outside a convenience store and that they were currently on their way back to Parchman for another six months. She then said if any of you would like to join your buddies, Jimmy’s has no cover charge until nine o’clock and drinks are half price until ten. Russell looked around at the other four men and they all shook their heads though visions of naked girls danced in their thoughts and one of the cons remarked to Mildred that those must have been some damn fine titties if they was worth another six months.

The remaining days passed with less excitement. She took them to the mall and the grocery store. She had them practice filling out job applications and identifying themselves as ex-cons. With certain eyes she stood in front of them and said out of the seven original members of the group, four of you will wind up back in prison. Two of you are already there. It’s up to you. When the week was up each man had gate money and a manila folder tucked under his arm filled with everything the Mississippi Department of Corrections believed he needed to become a functioning member of society.