Drifting South. Charles Davis

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ He doted on her more than most men ever did, buying her fancy garments or a hat or even flowers, stuff he didn’t need to buy because he always paid his turn with her in advance. I guess he just wanted to spend more money on her.

      I didn’t think back then that Ma deep-down loved Uncle Ray like some folks you see do in movies. He didn’t love her in that way, either, but she seemed to care for him in a more than tolerable way. He stuck around long enough even when he wasn’t forced to, to show me how to do things like use that razor and how to load and shoot a gun—by not paying mind to what’s going on around you or the stirrings in you at that moment, but to just keep eyeballing the front sight and make sure it stayed in the middle of what you wanted to hit, and then keep squeezing that trigger nice and slow no matter if your hands were shaking because they were gonna be shaking if someone was shooting back at you.

      “Nice and slow,” he said over and over.

      I must have squeezed the trigger on his empty wheel gun a hundred or more times in Ma’s apartment as he’d lay a dime on the barrel. He told me I could keep the dime when I aimed in and squeezed the trigger and the dime was still balancing.

      I eventually got to keep that ten cents, and got to pocket about a dollar’s worth more change over the weeks as we’d keep practicing. One day when we walked to the edge of Shady, he finally gave me a real bullet to put in his gun.

      I hit an old chicken-pecked pie tin from thirty paces away that he’d hung from a locust tree branch.

      Dead center.

      He took his revolver from me and said, “You don’t need any more shooting lessons.”

      The gun bucked up and backward and I brought it down to squeeze the trigger again, but when I did Mr. Charles was flat on his back in the middle of Main Street. His hat had fallen off, and looking at his thin white hair laying in the muddy street, I now knew for certain that it was him. Ma was crying hysterical and she ran over and kicked the pistol out of his hand even though he wasn’t moving.

      I looked down at Uncle Ray and he wasn’t moving, either. Not even his quick eyes, which were wide-open, staring at the sky.

      Then Amanda Lynn screamed to the top of her lungs.

      I’d just fallen down, almost like my legs were yanked out from under me. I believe it was her scream that helped me to get my head back together and shake off whatever had gotten hold of me. I came to and then stood so I could get a good look at her to make sure she hadn’t got shot, too. When I did, I could hardly stand up so I looked down at myself, wondering if I’d been shot. I didn’t see blood coming out of me anywhere, and I looked back at Amanda Lynn. She had both hands up to her face, still screaming, and when I went to touch her, she put her arms around herself and backed away from me all of a sudden like I was something bad she didn’t want to be near.

      I just stood there shaking. Everything had happened so fast that I wasn’t sure what had just happened. I wasn’t even sure what I’d done until I felt a heavy weight in my left hand. I looked down at the revolver and dropped it into the dirt and felt even more dizzy when I saw smoke drift out of the barrel. I was sure I was gonna fall over so I went down to both knees as a foul taste came up in my throat. I saw Ma was now laying across Uncle Ray.

      Some kind of wailing I’d never heard before came from inside her, then she looked around scared to death and ran a couple of steps over to me. Ma grabbed Uncle Ray’s gun and it seemed like she didn’t know what to do with it, but needed to keep it as she kept looking at the crowds. She finally eased it into a robe pocket just before she pulled me up gentle and looked me over. It looked like she wanted to say something but couldn’t get nothing out. Then she looked again at all of the faces staring at us. There wasn’t a sound in Shady Hollow but for the sounds of our breathing.

      Ma turned back to me and then looked over Amanda Lynn while trying to take in quick deep breaths. Then she pointed at an old Chevrolet sitting about twenty yards from us in a weedy field between Goldie’s Pawn and the old burned-down horse livery.

      “Take. Take. That car. Now.”

      The way Ma couldn’t talk right made me shake even more than I was doing. Then I wondered if maybe she was talking right but I just wasn’t hearing things right. I looked over my shoulder at Amanda Lynn and she flew toward me and grabbed me around the waist from behind. I could feel her shaking, too.

      “Why’d Mr. Charles—” I started to ask Amanda Lynn.

      Ma got right up close to my face and talked in a rush like her mouth worked right again but she was still all out of breath. “There may be more of them here and they’re gonna try to kill you. You have to leave. Now!”

      I stared at Ma and then pulled Amanda Lynn around where I could see her. Her eyes looked wide as quart jars. She’d quit screaming but her face had gone a sick-looking shade and she didn’t even look like the girl she just was a minute or two before. “Why’d he do such a thing? Why’d he—?” I asked her.

      She couldn’t speak so I tried to read her wide eyes, but I’d never seen them like that and couldn’t make a word out of them. I couldn’t tell nothing about her except she was terrified.

      I turned back to Ma when Ma said, “She can’t go.”

      I got all choked up and fought back the bad tastes in my throat and my eyes filled up with water. “What’s happening, Ma?”

      Ma turned from me and kept scanning the crowds. She turned back. “You have to go. Right now, Ben. Right now.”

      “It just don’t make no—”

      Ma grabbed my hands and barely got out, “They found us and more will come. You have to go!”

      “We been hiding from somebody?”

      She peered down and then stared straight into my eyes as best she could even though it looked like she was falling apart. “I’ve been hiding you,” she said.

      “From who?”

      “I have to get your brothers.”

      “I ain’t leaving without you all.”

      She squeezed my wrists hard. “You’re gonna do exactly what I say.”

      “But why do I have to… What ain’t you saying?”

      Ma shook her head and the far edges of her eyebrows sunk down like there were lead sinkers tied to them. Then all of us turned to look when we heard men yelling coming from down the street. Their voices broke the dead quiet of the crowds.

      Ma turned back to me. “I’ll find you and explain things. I’ll find you when—”

      “I can’t leave—”

      “We all may be in danger. You have to—”

      “Can’t the elders protect us?”

      “Not from this,” she said.

      As I was trying to make sense of what she’d just said, we all noticed how the people were starting to mill closer to us. Ma pulled out a roll of money from her bosom, shoved it as far down into my back pocket as it would go, and then grabbed my hand and put a car key in my palm with her fingers cold and wet as a drip from an icicle.

      She СКАЧАТЬ