Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem Read online

  He’d smiled, revealing intact teeth as long and yellow as old piano keys. I’m some kinda everything, the man had answered, the sound of his voice like the gurgle of a spring deep in a limestone cavern. He’d asked the old guy to play a little, trying to stay awake. Gator Rollins drove more miles per month than any sane man would attempt. And a little music from an old man might help his eyes stay open, since he didn’t drink coffee.

  Words didn’t exist to describe what that man had pulled from those strings. His hands that looked old and skinny as garden tools had worked the strings and frets with an unheard of mastery, drawing forth a drone like a bagpipe, a drone like a hurricane. It had to be some special kind of open tuning, a guitar playing that full scale, that strong bass. He didn’t know the songs, but they were long and familiar. They twisted and hung and cried out and broke, wracked to death and brought back to life by the long yellow fingers of the stranger beside him.

  The man had played for a hundred miles. He stopped. He placed the guitar in that case as if he were placing a body in a coffin for its eternal rest. He’d snapped that case shut and trailed one of his long yellow hands on it protectively.

  He’d pulled over at that same rest stop, and they sat at idle. Gator looked out at the Free Coffee booth, considering his options. He’s decided to give the old man one chance to surrender. I’ll buy it. Name your price.

  There is no price. This one came to me after a hard fall from a high place. Helped me get back on my feet. I might give it away, but I’ll never sell it.

  The old man had blown his one chance. Gator smiled. I’ll sell my soul.

  The old man smiled back. Your soul is already mine.

  And Gator had put his hands around that man’s neck. He’d squeezed tighter and tighter, waiting for the stillness under his hands. That satisfying stillness. But the old man’s stillness was that of patience, not death. The second Gator let go, he’d arranged his collar, kicked open the door and dropped his hellish instrument to the asphalt.

  I’ll see you again. That long-toothed smile, those hellish eyes. The old man had taken his case by the handle and headed off to the coffee kiosk. What was a man to do? He’d driven away. Figured he’d forget that man and that sound, that aching wail of strings and pain, the drone of eternity that issued forth from the hole of that old black guitar.

  He’d never forgotten, never.

  He’d followed rumors, false leads, dead ends. Finally, he’d sat up at the Blue Moon Tap Room and heard about a giant black guitar from the Right Reverend Henry Heaven. How he’d been hearing talk of a little girl roaming the streets of the park at night, looking for a place to play the guitar inside. I can help you get that guitar if you can help me with something else, the Reverend had offered. I’ve gotten myself into something of a situation here, and I have a little package that needs to go north. I hear you can help me get set up in a place where such arrangements are not unheard of. And in return, that guitar will be yours.

  Finally, Gator had it. The need to finger those frets was like electricity through his fingertips. But that nasty little girl was attached. She held onto that guitar like that old yellow man held on to it, like she’d grown around it and couldn’t be torn away.

  “That guitar’s too big for you. Way too big for you.” She said nothing. “Tell you what, I got a guitar right back there in my sleeper cab that’s ten times nicer than what you got in that case. I’ll trade you, how’s that.”

  She looked straight ahead.

  He wanted her to look at him, he wanted her to be afraid. “You’re not even afraid, are you. Well you know what? I’m not afraid of anything either. Every bad thing in the world that can happen has already happened to me at least once. I have nothing left to fear. But you have plenty to fear, little girl. Unless you give me that guitar. I’ll take you home if you give it to me.”

  “I’ll get home just fine on my own, thank you.”

  What a mouthy little brat. He looked at the guitar case. He craved to open it, to make sure it was the one. It had to be. “Why don’t you open it up and let me hear you play it. I could teach you some things.”

  “I don’t want,” she said firmly, “to know anything you might teach me. If I wanted someone to teach me something, I’d ask my mother.”

  He saw the sign.

  Free Coffee

  There were curves ahead, and he had to slow. Those curves that nearly got him, every time, that unaccustomed swerve for which he was never prepared.

  He looked in his mirrors. Saw the lights coming on too fast.

  He tried to laugh. “See, it’s all about communication, Babygirl.” He picked up the radio, holding it tenderly in his hand like a snake-handler caresses the head of a rattler. He depressed the switch. “Say something to your mama, now.”

  Her mother’s voice came over. “Tadpole, you there?”

  But she didn’t answer. She was at the door with that guitar case in her arms, and she was ready to go. But he was steadily accelerating, and at this speed, he could barely manage the radio and the wheel. “Where do you think you’re going?” She said nothing, just stood there, waiting to fly. “Don’t even think about it, girl.” She wasn’t just thinking about it. She was doing it. He felt the pull and suck of the wind from the open door. His load began to swing. His voice was finally angry. “You hear me, kid? I’m going so fast right now that you’ll be a red smear when you land.” What a fool she was. One arm around the guitar case and one hand holding the passenger strap, she was ready to walk out on the night air on the thin wire of her own foolishness.

  He depressed the button, his voice was a high-pitched, angry buzz. “I don’t want her, I just want the guitar!”

  Her mother’s voice came from the receiver. “Tadpole, don’t be foolish, now. I see that door swinging out beside you. I’m right back here. Give that man the guitar and he’ll slow down and let you out. I’ll be there to get you in a second. Uncle Memphis is on the way too, Tadpole. We’re coming to get you.”

  “This guitar is NOT HIS!”

  “Tadpole…”

  “NO!”

  The headlights behind him reflected in his mirrors, filled the cab with a warm radiance like the ghostly light of dawn. He dropped the radio and put both hands on the wheel. The load was going crazy behind him as he tried to find the magical physics of centrifugal force that would keep him on the road. They were going to jackknife.

  He turned to curse the child. She hung there beside him, one arm around the neck of that guitar case, her hair snaking around her pale face. Her cotton nightgown snapped and billowed like wings.

  She flew.

  FISHTAILING HAS AN awkward grace. Time slows, and it seems that all is not necessarily lost. There seems to be a possibility that steering will be possible, that the strong arms of a trucker will wrestle the treacherous wheel and win.

  But what’s twisted will not right itself. Torsion takes hold.

  There are few sights in this world as awe-inspiring as the torque of a big rig as it strains, folds, gathers itself up to spring. That midnight blue rig lifted from the earth and headed for heaven, there to hang, all metalline grace and captured momentum. The fall is not nearly so beautiful. Just a drop, a slam, an ugly end-over-end that seems as if it will never be over.

  The bittersweet smell of crushed grass and torn earth lifted in the eerie quiet that followed. He couldn’t move, but there was not a mark on him. The cab had come to rest amid a field of alfalfa.

  Gator’s nostrils filled with the sweet odor of the grave he’d escaped.

  HER RIG SAT in the ditch, brakes smoking. Raven walked the shoulder. Whatever remained of her daughter was a hundred feet back. She would have to pass what remained of him on the way to find her. Annie waited somewhere back there by the side of the road. That was nothing new for Annie, was it, Raven thought, being left behind somewhere like she didn’t matter. She would have to go back and find what was left of her, to gather it up, to grieve, to find a way to live on without the only
thing that had ever mattered to her in her life. The only goddamned thing.

  I love you Annie Leigh. I always have. It didn’t matter where you came from. Even when you were a tadpole inside me, making me road-sick and giving me hemorrhoids, I knew I’d do whatever I had to, to keep you safe. But girls are never safe.

  No one understood why she’d left her child behind with her mother who wouldn’t be quiet and her father who hid himself to escape the sound of her mother. Oh, how to explain it. It had seemed so safe. But it didn’t matter, did it? He’d found them anyway.

  She could hear the sound of his dying rig, the groans and snaps, a hiss, a dripping. The burnt odor of spilling fuel. She stopped to see the wretched, twisted glory of the rig and stared. He stared back, his eyes as flat as pennies on a railroad track passed over by a train. She stood, a monument of grief by the groaning, leaking wreck, staring at the dead eyes of the father and the killer of her child. He blinked. His hands, locked on the wheel, twitched.

  Raven had always had something to lose, before now. Now, there was nothing. Her hand moved to the hatband, where she found them.

  One last cigarette. One last match.

  MEMPHIS, THE STATE Patrol, and the paramedics arrived to the sight of a relaxed black silhouette backlit by the lights of a wreck.

  “RAVEN! MOVE BACK!”

  His words were lost in the hellish roar of combustion. She landed ten feet from him, her eyebrows singed away, unconscious. She was alive, paramedics attending her, but there was no getting near the rig. Memphis charged that inferno as if charging Hell. He tore away his hat, tore at his hair, cursing the very idea of a God. No God could exist, if such a thing as this could happen.

  His Annie Leigh.

  He fell to his knees. The last prayer of the desperate man who has lost all faith, but rallies enough to ask for the impossible. Lord, let her have died immediately, he prayed. Don’t let my Annie Leigh have burned up in there. Please God, please have spared her that. Amen.

  Memphis stood, raised his arms and let out a roar of mourning and anguish. He issued his challenge to the beast of grief. Daring it, begging that beast to eat him alive.

  Kill me, he roared. Kill me now.

  “SHERIFF?”

  He knelt beside the stretcher that held his niece. They had her strapped to a backboard. Memphis set her hat on her chest and looked from her hard face to the burning wreckage in the morning light.

  “Sheriff. Sheriff? Sheriff.”

  Speech was beyond him.

  “Sheriff, please. Sheriff, look.”

  He lifted his head to the sight of an angel. An angel in white coming toward him. It was his sweet little Annie Leigh, come to say good-bye. Her shredded white gown hung around her like feathers. Her chin, elbows, wrists and knees were skinned bloody, but the blood sparkled like mica. She carried an old black guitar that was nearly as large as she was. She was smiling.

  “Hey Uncle MEMPHIS!” she called, “guess WHAT!”

  Raven’s eyes fluttered at her daughter’s voice. “Get these damn straps OFF me,” she growled. In seconds, he had. She sat up, put on her hat, and turned her head.

  In his life, he would never see anything as holy as the light in her silver eyes.

  Raven rose from the stretcher and flew to her daughter on wings of her own.

  ANNIE LEIGH CONSENTED to go to the hospital in the ambulance, but only if they let her ride in front and run the siren. Raven, calm as ever, climbed in beside her. Her hands weren’t even shaking.

  Memphis’s hands shook as he watched them leave. His knees knocked. His eyes watered. His nose ran. Twitches ran like tiny rodents up and down his spine, and a looseness in his bowels threatened to disgrace him completely. He had changed into something deliquescent that might dissolve completely under the weight of another revelation.

  He felt Garth’s hand on his arm. “You all right, Sheriff?”

  He was not all right. If I could just hide somewhere, he thought, just crawl off under a porch and hide until I could get myself together. He looked at his deputy with naked appeal. Garth steered him to his cruiser.

  Once behind the wheel, Memphis put his head on it and moaned.

  The men and women of the State Police and the men of the Ochre Water County Sheriff’s Department were aware of many things, that morning. Hawk-eyed with hunger for a resolution to the mess that was the life and death of Gator Rollins, nothing at the crime scene went unnoticed. They were acutely aware of every detail of the crime scene, the wreckage, the evidence, the time of day, the witness reports. As they swarmed the scene, even the color of the smoke was duly noted.

  But not a one of them saw a tall, grey-eyed man sitting in a patrol car, his cheeks flowing over with the limits of his own humanity.

  Some things, a person just doesn’t look at.

  Thursday

  IT WAS THURSDAY morning, and the most contented man in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park was no longer content. He itched from head to toe. His hands rummaged through his locks as if they were sorting snakes, as if his torment could be shaken free like the louse that fell by the cracked nail of his largest toe.

  “Lord, send relief.”

  His hands moved to scratch at his bitten, scabby neck. He tore at the skin, tears in his eyes, his teeth grinding with frustration.

  “I am bedeviled.”

  He stood and reached for his back, his privates, his stomach. It was more than bugs. Years of not bathing had left him with crotch rot, butt rust, and between-the-toe fungus that made his toes appear webbed. His body was nothing more than a collection of maddening itches. He dug and writhed and came dangerously close to taking the name of the Lord in vain.

  “Lord! I need vinegar!”

  He slammed out of the trailer and slung letters up almost without looking.

  Look upon the thy creatures; they are filled with hatred;

  And earth is the haunt of violence.

  —Psalm 74: 20

  “As is my own body, Lord. A plague, a pestilence is upon me. Send relief, and now, Amen,” he prayed.

  IT WAS A Thursday morning in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park. Unbeknownst to most of the tenants, Gator Rollins had entered a final and permanent sleep. Everyone else slept, as well.

  Rhondalee slept carefully to one side of a queen-sized bed under her shiny quilted satin spread, her hair in curlers, her face naked and grey, her mouth nearly lipless without the application of cosmetic enhancement. It had taken her some time to get back to sleep after her daughter had rudely awakened her looking for some old guitar. And then she’d had the bald-faced gall to criticize Rhondalee for the fact that her granddaughter was a wild, roaming, thoughtless little girl who slipped out windows in the middle of the night. Like that was her fault.

  She twitched and twisted as she dreamed of her husband.

  And Tender, wherever he was, was he dreaming of her? Did a thin strand of psychic catgut, a wire woven of disappointment and history, stretch from one to the other, plucking and playing them with tones of possible reconciliation?

  Or were their dreams as dissonant as their lives?

  ISAAC SLEPT IN Levi Skinner’s yard, arms and legs flung wide.

  He’d spent the previous evening in Ochre Water. After his fight with Raven, he’d hitchhiked to the Shake and Ache and spent thirty dollars on beer. He was propositioned by three barmaids. He wasn’t interested in any of those women of indeterminate age in suntan pantyhose and cutoffs, but he felt heartened by the presence of alternatives.

  One got off early and took him to the diner, batted mascara-encrusted eyelashes at him, bought him a plate of eggs. They flirted, talked, laughed. She’d given him a good squeeze under the table. But that was all. He’d hitched a ride back to the Park at dawn, lurched back to the place where he expected to find the tractor-trailer, planning to enter it on a hungry raid like a marauding bear scenting groceries at a campsite. “She left me here!” he roared to the sky, before his big body spread like a fallen star on the sm
all patch of grass that Levi cut with a Kuboda lawn tractor.

  He’d have one hell of a hangover when he woke up.

  IN THE EARLY hours of Friday morning, the officers of the law descended upon the Cactus Arms Motel. Memphis had sufficiently recovered to lead the investigation.

  There wasn’t much to see.

  Memphis himself noticed something white trailing out from under the lid of the toilet tank. He took the top off to find a hanky that bore the embroidered initials “GR” in the corner. His nimble fiddler’s hands undid the knot, and out tumbled the Horseshoe, the Cross, the Shamrock. Four more rings were scattered in the bottom of the tank.

  The three men were wedged into the dingy little bathroom. Memphis was uncomfortably aware of his fellow officers, their uniforms, their elbows, their inquisitive eyes. Their badges.

  “It looks like we have everything we need right here.”

  “The Reverend’s rings.” Hiram’s jaw hung lower than a fat man’s bottom in a hammock. “If Gator Rollins wanted those rings enough to kill for’em, wouldn’t he have tooken’em with him?”

  Deputy Garth had pasted the largest, whitest smile Memphis had ever seen across his face. Like a toothpaste ad. “Maybe he was in such a hurry he forgot. Don’t you ever forget things, Hiram?” He gave Hiram a hearty clap on the back that echoed off the shower enclosure. “Let’s go look for anything else he forgot, okay? Let’s go look in the main room.”

  Garth urged Hiram out of the bathroom like a big dog.

  Memphis leaned hard against the wall, his face as white as the tile. He picked up a towel and got to work.

  He stepped out after a few minutes, the towel slung over his shoulders. Hiram was busy eating through the contents of the room’s mini-fridge and watching TV. Garth quietly passed his superior officer a pair of down-at-the-heel pink moccasins. Then he studied a paint-by-numbers desertscape hanging on the motel room wall while Memphis slid the shoes into his pocket.