The Girls With Games of Blood (13 page)

She sighed and said, “All right, for a minute.”

He crawled into the window, and closed it behind them.

Leonardo sat with his back against the trunk. He could leave and be back in Memphis long before dawn. Or he could see what these two talked about, and what effect he’d had on Clora.

He tried to recall the sensation of being a live teenage
boy. There must have been urgent feelings, and needs, and the kind of intensity only possible when emotions are new. He hadn’t experienced a new emotion in half a century.

He climbed higher to get a better view.

Clora had no patience for Bruce Cocker tonight. On a good day he was stuck-up, vaguely stupid, and treated her like a pet he owned. He refused to be seen with her in public, and she knew why: he was the son of a legend, and she was considered white trash.

Yet because of her aching loneliness, she had accepted his attention on his terms. Since the end of the school year she’d had no visitors, been nowhere without her father, and had spent far too much time alone with her thoughts. When Bruce first called her two weeks into the summer vacation and suggested a meeting, she could hear his friends snickering in the background. But the thought of another human being, whom she could talk to and touch and make laugh, was too much for her. So she agreed.

She suspected that on that first night, when she met Bruce out behind the barn, his friends waited in his car down by the highway. She thought she heard the distant sounds of laughter and car doors. But it didn’t matter: he’d kissed her, and touched her breasts, and told her she was beautiful. She was glad to let him bend her over the fender of the ancient Oldsmobile parked in the weeds. For those brief minutes she felt alive and not alone.

In the weeks that followed she allowed him to visit again and again, making him scale the outside of the decrepit house like a knight visiting an imprisoned princess in a tower. When they were alone, away from his friends, he became kinder, quieter, more vulnerable. He treated her gently, and she could pretend they were a real couple.

Now, though, something was different. She stared at him as he stumbled through her room, half-drunk already, and picked up her lighter. He wriggled his hand into the pocket of his tight jeans and emerged with a badly rolled joint, creased from his exertions. “Let’s relax a little, what do you say?”

“You do what you want, I’m not in the mood,” she said, deliberately sitting on the little stool in front of her vanity. He sat on the bed and patted the mattress beside him. She shook her head.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I just don’t feel like it, is all.”

“Oh.” He nodded sagely. “On the rag.”

“I’m not on the rag, I just don’t feel like fooling around. And you’re not helping things. What are you doing here, anyway? You’re supposed to call first.”

Bruce lifted his shirt and displayed his back. A long red welt ran parallel to his spine. Clora gasped and said, “What happened?”

Bruce lowered his shirt. “My dad’s getting worse. He drinks all the time now, and then talks about how everyone’s out to get him.”

“Are they?”

“Some are, I’m sure. He pisses a lot of people off. Not getting reelected sheriff really hit him hard.” He kicked off his tennis shoes and they hit the floor with two loud thuds.

“Quiet!” Clora hissed. “My dad might hear.”

Bruce fell back on the bed, his hands behind his head. “Mom used to tell him that it didn’t matter what people thought about him, as long as they respected him to his face. I think he needed to hear that. Now there’s no one to tell him.”

“You can tell him.”

Bruce laughed coldly. “No thanks. He already smacks me enough for having a smart mouth.”

“My mom used to tell Daddy that we had all we needed
here. I don’t think it was true, but she made him believe it.”

“Did she believe it?”

Clora shrugged. “I don’t know.
I
don’t. That’s why I can’t say it to Daddy. And he knows I just want to get out of here as soon as I’m old enough.”

“Does he hit you?”

“Daddy never hits me. He just gets this sad kinda faraway look and sighs a lot.”
And asks me for favors I’ll never tell
anyone
about,
she added in her mind.

“I wouldn’t mind that,” Bruce said. “Better than getting licks with a belt.”

Clora lay down beside him and slid her hand under his T-shirt. “It hurts worse than you think.”

“Worse than a two-inch-wide strip of leather across your bare ass?”

“Maybe not worse, then. But different.”

He fondled her nearest breast with a mechanical, proprietary grip. It did nothing for either of them. He said, “Will you suck me off?”

“I told you, I’m not in the mood.”

“Please, honey. I need it.”

She melted at the word “honey.” He seldom called her by name, let alone with any sort of endearment. She pushed his shirt up and kissed just below his navel, where the little trail of hair led down to his crotch. He unsnapped his jeans and slid them down to his knees.

As she moved to comply with his wishes, she tossed her long hair to one side. He sat up. “What’s that on your neck?”

She looked up at him. “Bug bites or something. Why?”

His face darkened with rising anger. “It’s a hickey, ain’t it? You’re seeing somebody else. Was that his truck parked down the road?”

She glared at him. “I’m about to give you a blow job, Bruce. Maybe you should pick the fight
after
.”

“
Is
it a hickey?”

She sat up angrily. “No, it’s not a hickey! Look!” She tore off the Band-Aids and tilted her head. “See? Something bit me. Twice.”

He scowled and muttered defensively, “Well, the way you people live out here, it’s a wonder I ain’t got the crabs from you already.”

She glared at him. “Get out of here, Bruce,” she said coldly. “I mean it.”

“Or what? You’ll call Daddy? My daddy’d kill yours without a second thought. And get away with it.” He fastened his jeans and stomped to the window. “You know why? ’Cause you’re
trash
.”

She felt tears in her eyes as he opened the window and clumsily crawled out onto the roof. He turned and stuck his head back. “If I find out you’re seeing somebody else, I’ll kick
his
ass, then yours. You just pass that along.” Then he was gone.

Clora sat on the bed, then scooted off the spot Bruce’s body had warmed. She cried openly, her emotions roiling out of control. And she was more tired than she could remember. She lay down and drew up her knees, then pulled a pillow over her head. The light switch by the door might as well have been in another town.

Leonardo watched Bruce totter across the roof and climb down the pipe. He felt no animosity toward the boy; he had simply behaved according to his nature, like an animal might. Nor did he experience any real sympathy for Clora. Instead, he wondered if the apparent change in her attitude toward Bruce was a result of his influence on her. It had to be; but exactly how?

He peered back in the window. Clora was curled on the
bed, the pillow over her face. The soles of her bare feet were black with dirt.

When he returned to the truck, he discovered that Bruce had petulantly slashed one of the tires before he left. He sighed in annoyance, opened the tailgate, and retrieved the spare.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, on Thursday, Byron Cocker drove slowly up the Crabtree driveway at 8:15
A.M
. He wanted to catch the man doing something wrong, something Cocker could then hold over his head. He was still steamed over the lost vehicle, and while he mainly sought revenge over the Russkie who’d stolen it from him, it was Crabtree’s lack of respect that allowed it to happen. That had to be rectified as well; he might no longer be sheriff of McHale County, but Cocker still had to live here.

Dark Willows appeared deserted as it came into view. He parked at the far end of the drive to keep anyone from leaving, and got out of the car. The dog galumphed from the house barking, but Cocker just snapped, “You git on outta here!” and it reversed course, dashing under the porch.

Cocker strode across the still-damp lawn. Midges danced in the sun, dispersing their clouds as he passed through them and immediately re-forming in his wake. He stamped loudly onto the porch and knocked on the edge of the screen door. “Open up!” he said in his best warrant-serving voice. “Jeb Crabtree, I know you in there!”

After a moment he heard the floorboards creek, and the
inner door opened. Clora Crabtree, dressed in what appeared to be just a large red kerchief tied around her torso and a pair of worn denim short-shorts, squinted out at him. “Mr. Cocker,” she said in surprise, although her voice was too weary for much enthusiasm. “You’re here awful early.”

“I need to see your daddy, Clora.”

“I don’t know where he is,” she mumbled. “He was gone when I woke up this morning.”

“Open up, then. I need to use your bathroom.” It would give him a chance to plant something incriminating that he could return and “discover” later.

“I ain’t supposed to let anybody in when Daddy’s not here.”

His trained cop instincts immediately pegged her slurred speech and squinted eyes as something more than a reaction to the sun. “Clora Crabtree, are you stoned on the pot?”

“No, sir,” she said immediately. “I’m just a little under the weather this morning. Must be the heat.”

“Your daddy’s got a lot of property around this house. He wouldn’t be growing a little something on the side, would he?”

The implication seemed to penetrate her fog. “No, sir. You know my daddy, he’d never do something like that.”

“How about you?”

“No, sir, I swear. I ain’t smoked it, and I ain’t grown it. Sir.”

She also still hadn’t opened the door. Cocker was about to make that an issue when Jeb Crabtree’s voice called, “That you, Sheriff?”

Cocker turned. Crabtree, dressed in grease-smeared coveralls and wiping his hands on a rag, came around the corner of the house and up onto the porch. “I’d shake your hand, Sheriff, but I might get it all dirty.” He saw Clora through the screen and said, “Christ Amighty, girl, go put some clothes
on. Wearing nothing but a dishrag, that’s just plain unacceptable.”

“Yes, sir,” Clora said demurely, and scurried off into the house.

Crabtree smiled, forcing his voice to stay casual. His eyes betrayed his fear, though. “What can I do for you this morning, Sheriff?”

This time Cocker did not correct him. “I need some information from you, Jeb.”

“If I can.”

“How would I find that fella who bought that car the other day?”

Crabtree chuckled. “I don’t rightly know. He paid cash, took the title, and skeedaddled. I never even got his phone number.”

Cocker slammed the heel of his right hand into the nearest porch column. He hit it as hard as he could, and it creaked under the impact. Dust and debris drifted down on the two men. The nerves in that hand hadn’t worked properly since he’d been shot up, so Cocker felt little of the pain he should have. And the look on Crabtree’s face was enough to justify it anyway. “So you don’t even know where he took the car once he bought it?” Cocker asked.