THUGLIT Issue One - [11]

“Hello boys,” she says to me. “Where you headed?”

They was all looking at me. I could tell if I didn’t say what was needful, no one else would.

“Right here,” I said.

She wasn’t no kind of fighter, Griselda Harlan. She backed out of the entranceway leaving the door swung open and we piled in. Crowded in that front room where a couple gas lamps hissed. Good fire going in the stove. The table laid for two, glasses and china. Ryne was in there, all right. Eyes twitching like a trapped creature. He had on a clean shirt. The only man there whose shirt was.

“Hello fellas,” Ryne said. “Looks like I wasn’t the only one feeling neighborly this evening.”

“Some more neighborly than others,” I said.

Griselda bustled over to the stove, put on a kettle.

“You can leave off with the coffee,” I said. “You know why we’re here.”

Griselda clanged down the kettle. I could see her hands shaking.

“We all got to look after one another,” said Ryne.

Sherrill spit on the floor.

“Cut the shit,” said Weizkowski.

“Hey now,” said Ryne. “There’s a lady here.”

“Ain’t no lady I can see,” I said.

The room got quiet.

“Now boys,” said Ryne, holding out his hands.

“You been fooling where you ain’t ought to of been fooling,” I said.

“We can’t have it,” said Weizkowski.

“Hell, boys,” said Ryne, “it ain’t what you think.”

“No, it’s worse,” I said. “Ain’t it, Griselda?”

Griselda looked at Ryne to say something else but he never did. He ran.

He crashed out of the back bedroom window, screeching like a little girl. We got turned around, banging into one another and back out the front door, Griselda’s china smashed to the floor.

Like I say, it was a year’s worth of weeds out there. Out back of the house they was tall as a man. That and we was half-cocked, in no kind of condition to go tracking in the dark. We might of gave up the whole business but for who stepped out of the weeds.

Cora.

“This way, Pa!” she said. “Come on!”

Wasn’t nothing for it but to do like she said. We followed her over the cracked alkali ground. She knew the lay of the land but good. Ran us right up the little draw where Ryne was trying to make a hidey hole out of a fox den.

Things might of gone different for him if he hadn’t run, so that a ten-year old girl had to smoke him out for us. Now our blood was up. We glugged down the rest of that whiskey and yanked his trousers down and took out a sharp knife. Held Griselda, made her watch, sobbing. After, I saw Harlan’s cur loping away into the night with Ryne’s manhood.

*****

Cora, she hung tight to me the whole ride home. Six miles over the hills, cold wind cutting us all the way. First couple miles, didn’t neither of us say nothing.

“He going to live, Pa?” Cora finally asked.

“Not well. But he ain’t going to die, if that’s what you mean.” We rode on a ways. “You understand, don’t you?” I asked.

“You can’t go rutting someone you ain’t married to,” Cora said.

“That’s right.”

“I like this horse, Pa.”

“He’s a good one, all right.”

That Mustang was, too. He’d ride me right up into the mountains and carry the furs out. Keep me off the wages. Cora behind me patted the Mustang’s shanks.

“You going to take me up with you after the bears?” she asked.

“How’d you know about that?” I said.

She shrugged. “I know.”

Magpie by Hilary Davidson

The sheriff who called about my mother-in-law’s death sounded genuinely sad about it. “She looked like she was called up to the Lord all peaceful-like,” he said, in a deep voice that had a lingering drawl to it. “She went in her sleep, I reckon. I’m sure she didn’t feel no pain.”

He told me that she’d died of a heart attack, and that it had probably happened a couple of days earlier, given the state in which she was found. “Couple of her near neighbors hadn’t seen her about, so they went over, and then they called me. Poor Mrs. Carlow. Let me give you my number so your husband can call me.”

I dutifully wrote it down, then folded the paper and put it into my purse. It was just before noon, and Jake was probably with a patient, maybe even in surgery. Telling him the news about his mother over the phone seemed heartless. I could drive to his office and reveal all in person, but given that he hadn’t spoken to his mother in years, that seemed like overkill. The news could wait until evening, after he got home. There wasn’t anything either of us could do about it now. His mother had lived in the western edge of Ohio, close to the border with West Virginia. Jake and I were in Los Angeles, where we’d moved for his medical practice. We’d been there almost five years, and even though his roots were in hill country and mine were in Cleveland, the West Coast felt completely like home.

Jake surprised me an hour later, the tires of his Porsche squealing into the driveway. I met him at the door.

“My mother’s dead,” he said. We clung to each other for a while.

“I’m sorry, baby.”

“Ludy said they think she died in her sleep.”

“Ludy?” I pulled back. “You talked to your sister?”

“She called to tell me what happened.”

“She called your office?” My stomach suddenly clenched into knots. “How did she…”