BAD TRIP SOUTH (8 page)

But Crow didn’t love my Mama and he wasn’t thinking about kissing. He just wanted to do the sex thing in a bed with her.

I looked at the back of Heddy’s head and wondered what she’d do if Crow bothered my Mama. She might get jealous and kill them!

Then I looked at Mama staring out the window and knew she had no idea what was ahead of her if we didn’t get away from Crow and Heddy. She didn’t know she was going to have to do...stuff...with someone she didn’t know, someone who scared her.

I tried to think what to do. Crow kept his gun and my Daddy’s gun in his purse. If I could ever get my hand in there without him seeing me...

But he kept it too close. He hugged it like you hug a baby doll. It was a fat purse and it had to have all kinds of stuff in it besides the guns and the tinfoil squares of drugs and the Wrigley’s gum. I’d never get it away from him. He might be skinny, but he was real strong. When he picked me up from the bathroom floor it was like he had picked up a bag of apples. He had all these muscles in his arms from being in prison and working out, he said.

“
Where we going now?” Crow asked of Heddy once he got his fill of staring at Mama.

“
I’m going to head south soon,” she said. “Soon as we make that quick stop at my mom’s.”

“
I wish we didn’t have to make that stop. I’ve been dreaming of Mexico. I really did check out some books teaching Spanish like you said, Heddy, but I didn’t get far with them. About all I picked up from the Chicanos in Leavenworth was
frijoles
and
puta
.” He laughed. “Yeah, we be going down into sunshine country.”

“
You’re heading for Mexico. Why can’t you let us go?” Daddy asked. It was the first thing he’d said all morning.

“
Because I like you,” she said, giving him one of her lopsided grins. “Didn’t I prove that last night?”

“
People we know are going to report we haven’t called in. They’ll tell the police we were at the Long Horn Caverns. They’ll put it together and know you’re in our car.”

“
Bullshit. You hear that bullshit, Crow? Is that the biggest bullshit you ever heard or what?”

“
Yeah, I hear the motherfucker. What if he’s right?”

“
He’s making it all up. They didn’t call anyone when they were at the caverns. That was a tourist stop thing, spur of the moment. No one knows they went there.”

“
That right, Cop? You’re trying to fool us? I could hurt you for that.”

Then something crazy happened. Daddy grabbed the wheel and hauled it hard to his side of the car. Crow was slammed against the car door and me and Mama fell over on him. Heddy was screaming like some kind of cat, real high scary sounds. The car ran off the road and jumped a ditch. We hit a barbed wire fence, knocking it flat. We went bumping and careening before Heddy stomped the brakes and we slid around in the middle of a cow pasture.

Daddy was out of the car and running hard as he could back toward the highway. It was a two-lane road and there weren’t many cars. One went by now and then, but not right when he was running toward it.

Crow fumbled open the back door and fell out onto his shoulder yelping. He scrambled up and pulled out his gun. He aimed it and shot at Daddy.

I was trying to get out of the car too, but Mama held me fast by the back of my shirt. I saw Daddy drop. There was the shot and then he dropped to the ground. I thought he’d been killed.

“
Daddy!”

Heddy was out of the car by then, taking the keys. Crow and Heddy ran toward Daddy, both of them waving guns and I thought I was going to faint. Everything started getting black around the edges, like the world was squeezing in toward the center where Daddy lay.

I saw him sit up. I saw his grim face with dirt on it. I saw Crow reach him first and shout something. Then Heddy got there and she leaped right onto Daddy, knocking him to the ground again. She was yelling and clawing at his face while he tried to keep her off him.

The eerie thing was what happened next. Crow started laughing. It was this wild laugh that made the black and white spotted cattle move across the field away from us like we were way too alien for their company. He laughed so hard, he doubled over and held his stomach, he laughed so hard.

Then I knew Daddy wasn’t shot and he wasn’t dead. He’d hit the ground to keep from being shot in the back. And Crow was laughing at how Heddy was trying to claw Daddy’s eyes out. He thought it so funny it almost killed him.

I turned to Mama quick and said, “Mama, Crow wants to take you to bed.”

Her eyes got really round and she said, “Emily, how do you know something like that?” It sounded like she very much disapproved of me saying it.

“
I...I can’t tell you, but that’s what he wants. He’s going to do it too and if he does, Daddy’s going to try to stop him and he’ll get hurt. He may get shot.”

“
How do you know these things, Emily? I have to know how you know.”

“
I...I hear stuff. I hear what people think.”

Mama stared at me like I had grown horns in the top of my head. “I mean it, Mama. I’ve always been able to do it. It’s real weird, but I’m not lying. Like right now, I know you’re thinking ‘She can’t do that. No one can do that. That’s telepathy! There’s no such thing!’”

Mama’s mouth dropped open. “You
can
read minds! Oh my god.”

“
You have to believe me. Crow’s going to do something to you and if he does, everything’s going to go bad, real bad.”

“
C’mon,” she said, “let’s run.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me out the other side of the car.

It was like Crow read my mind too because he stopped laughing all of a sudden and turned around. He saw us beginning our sprint across the field, Mama pulling me along with her by the hand. He shot at us and just like Daddy, we stopped and we squatted down. I thought I’d heard the whiz of the bullet as it passed us by in the air, but that was imagination, I’m sure. You don’t really hear bullets whiz through the air, that’s for cartoons.

Crow yelled, “Get your asses back in the car!”

Mama was crying, no noise, and just fat tears rolling down her face when we stood up and started for the car. I told her, “Mama, you can’t fight them. If you and Daddy fight them, they’re going to kill you.”

“
I know,” she said.

“
I’ll think of a way to help us,” I said.

“
Oh, baby, Oh Emily, you’re just a little girl,” she said, tears choking her.

“
I mean it, Mama. I’ll think of a way. Didn’t I help you sometimes when Daddy was bad? I found a way of letting you know he was coming home mad. Just don’t fight them.”

I’d led Daddy off into other avenues of thought sometimes when he started getting mad. I’d ask for help with my schoolwork or say there was a phone call for Mama--anything to break his attention to doing harm to my mother. Most of the time it worked. I knew how to get a grown-up’s attention off the track and onto something else.

Daddy was back at the car with Crow and Heddy. Now Crow was angry. He was so mad it looked like a black cloud had descended over his head. Laughing hadn’t helped him any. He pushed Daddy back into the car and slammed the car door so hard it sounded like a thunderclap.

He got into the back seat with us and shook his head as if he were disappointed. He said, “Run off again, and your kid gets a bullet in the back, Carrie.”

“
Don’t hurt her,” Mama said. “It was my fault.”

“
Of course it was your fault!”
“It was this motherfucker’s fault,” Heddy said, putting the car into gear and turning it around slowly in the low grass of the field.

Daddy just sat there. Crow said to him, leaning over the seat, “You try that shit again and I don’t shoot over your head next time. You could have killed us all, a stunt like that. Who do you think you are, Sly Stallone?”

“
I’m bigger than him.”

“
The hell you are!” Crow took his fist and knocked Daddy in the back of the head. “You’re bigger’n me too, but I’ve got the gun, you fucking pig!”

“
You keep hitting me and we’re going to go around, bud.”

“
What’d you say? Pull over, Heddy!”

“
He’s jerking you around. Shut up, Jay. You’ve done enough today. Jay, you grab this wheel again and I’ll fucking kill you myself.” Heddy drove through the ditch and onto the highway again, the back bumper dragging the ground as it cleared the ditch. A car or two had passed, but no one had noticed the commotion in the field.

“
You want to go around with me,” Crow said, in a different voice, a low growl of a voice, “and I’ll take your balls for a necklace. Don’t mistake me for one of your small town candy-ass pussies you put your chokeholds on and beat senseless with a nightstick. You underestimate me and you’ll find yourself in a grave, friend.”

“
Listen to him,” Heddy said. “He’s not lying to you.”

“
I’d like to take my chances,” Jay said.

“
No. You wouldn’t.” Again Crow bopped him in the back of the head with a closed fist. “And if you don’t shut up, I’m going to make Heddy pull down some back woods road so I can put a bullet between your macho-man eyes.”

“
Daddy, don’t,” I said, getting really scared.

“
Jay, please,” Mama said, sighing so hard it filled the whole car.

Jay nodded as if to say Okay. Okay, for now. Okay, but I’m going to take the little creep down when I get the chance, just you wait and see.

#

HEDDY knew if they headed south for the border from St. Louis, they would have been caught on the road right away. It’s where they would be expected to go from the Long Horn Caverns.

Driving into the state of Kansas was to throw off the tails and to find a circuitous route down south. It was also a way to get to say goodbye to her mother. She didn’t love her. Well, she guess she did, in a way, but the woman was her entire family, the only one she had, and if she was going to leave the country, she had to say
something
to the only family she knew.

It took longer, going west then south, but it was the only way to stay away from the cops. By now they must have plastered Crow’s image all over the papers and the television news.

“
Crow, tonight you have to change your looks.”

She was driving south across the state now and bored with the flat land, the vistas of green summer fields. She had no idea what was growing there. The closest she’d ever been to a farm was the St. Louis zoo.

“
Why’s that, baby?” Crow asked. He had snorted another hit of crank. He sounded like a kid on a drunk. It made her want to reach into her purse and take a sip of Jim Beam. But she never did that in front of people. She’d do it when she could stop for gas and go alone into the bathroom. And she’d take more than a sip, by God. All her nerve ends screamed for the bitter fire of whiskey.

“
People know what you look like by now. Some store clerk or gas station jockey’s gonna make you.”

“
I don’t wanna cut my hair,” he said.

She glanced in the rearview mirror at him. Eyes dancing, those heavily lashed black eyes. His skin so white it was almost blinding. Black beard stubble on his cheeks. And his hair, wavy and long and black as night. She liked it a lot, long hair was her thing, but on Crow it had to go.

“
Doesn’t matter what you want. We have to shave your head.”

“
What?” He came up in the back seat, eyes menacing now. “I said I ain’t cutting my hair.”

“
Yes, you are.” She would brook no argument on this. With his head shaved, he would look completely different. And she had to get those earrings out of his ears.

“
Heddy, I know you’re trying to help, but I’m telling you right now, the hair’s staying.”

She grinned at the road ahead. He’d do what she said. He knew he wasn’t going to make it without her. He would still be in Leavenworth if it weren’t for her. She was the brain and much as he might protest, he listened in the end.

She saw a Gulf station and slowed. “I’ve got to get gas and take a piss. You watch them,” she said to Crow.

“
I need to go to the bathroom too,” the little girl said.

“
After me,” Heddy told her. “You just sit there quietly and don’t aggravate Crow until I get back.”