Next morning, a little after eleven, a man come walking down the road. Tall and lean in a flannel shirt and dungarees, with what looked like a rucksack thrown over his shoulder. I was getting ready to throw a couple pennies at him when I noticed something familiar in the slant of his shoulders.
Dudley.
“Lost your ride?” I called.
He didn’t answer, just grabbed me by the hand. Before I knew it, we was circling round to the back of the store. He didn’t have no loving in view this time, ’cause once we was out of sight of the road, he flung down his rucksack. That’s when I realized it were a shotgun case. With two double-barrels poking out.
“What the hell,” I said.
“Shut up,” he said, “and listen. That feller who threw the brick through your window? The one got his arm chewed up?”
“’Course.”
“That was Tom Goggins.”
“Who is?”
“A handyman, does odd jobs for my uncle. The other day, I seen he had these bandages all up and down his arm, and I asked him what happened, he said he got bit by a skunk.” Dudley looked at me. “That weren’t no skunk, Melia. Now, old Tom, he ain’t a bad sort, but he’s down on his luck, like a lot of folks, and he ain’t too particular about the work he takes on.” Dudley paused. “It was him put the bullets in your house, Melia. He didn’t have no choice, he said my uncle had him over some kinda barrel, only he wouldn’t say what.”
In my head, I saw a whole new stack of mug shots. Biding their time in some other compartment of Harley Blevins’s office.
“So I went to my uncle,” said Dudley. “Asked him straight up if he was at the back of this.”
“What’d he say?”
“‘If I was you, I’d recollect who puts this roof over your damn head.’” Dudley give his head a shake. “So I said, ‘Tell you what. You can keep your roof.’ And I walked out.”
His voice was hushed as he told it. Like he was watching it happen to some other wretch. And now he leaned a little closer.
“Tom Goggins left town today. He told me he couldn’t do that dirty work no more, said it was eating him inside. Said next time something happened here, it was gonna be more ’n just a couple rounds.”
“The sheriff,” I muttered.
“He ain’t gonna do nothing,” said Dudley. That’s when he reached down and pulled one of the shotguns out of its case. “Take it,” he said.
“Oh, hell, I don’t even know how to use the damn things. I sure as shit don’t want ’em round Janey and Earle.”
“You don’t got no choice now.”
“The young man has a point,” said Hiram, pushing his head round the corner of the building.
Smiling softly at us, he drew the other shotgun from Dudley’s bag and cradled it like a length of wood. “Over-under double-barrel. Used to know my way pretty well around these.” He pulled the butt into his shoulder, pressed his cheek to the stock, and rotated the barrel toward the house’s roofline. “Hope you got something a little better than buckshot.”
“Three-inch shells,” said Dudley.
Hiram lowered the barrel till it was pointing at the ground. “Where you hanging your hat these days, son?”
“Nowhere, kinda.”
“Well, it just so happens we’ve got a room over the store.”
Dudley looked at me, and I looked at him.
“Oh,” said Hiram, “I’m not gonna sugar it for you. Room’s hotter than damnation in the summer. Colder than an Eskimo’s ass in the winter. Tolerable nice in spring, but you can’t keep the window open too long or you’ll get all fumey from the gas.”
Such a dazzlement, hearing my own words circle back to me.
“So what do you say?” said Hiram.
“It’s right decent of you, Mr. Watts.…”
“No, it’s not. It’s not even my property. Amelia’s the one that’s got to sign off.”
My face got a grain warmer.
“Hearing no objections,” said Hiram, “I will consider the deal closed. Now, then, son, why don’t I show you to your new digs?” His right hand rested lightly on Dudley’s shoulder as he walked him back round the store. “You’ve come at just the right time. Earle’s heading back to school in a week, and we’re going to need a fella to man the pumps. Seems to me you’d be perfect for the job. Think on it, will you? Say now, have you ever eaten chop suey? No? Well, strap on the feed bag, brother.…”
Dudley went to sleep an hour before nightfall. Stumbled back down the next morning in some old clothes of Hiram’s and drunk three cups of joe, one after the other. “Put me to it,” he said.
So for the rest of the day, he mopped the service bay, cleaned gutters, charged batteries, stacked fan belts and lamp bulbs and radiator seals, changed tires, cleaned oil. He might’ve gone straight through to nightfall, but Earle was mad to practice his shooting, so off they went into the hills behind the house, Gus following hard on. Don’t know how far they traveled, but from time to time, you could hear a little crack echoing back down on the hills.
“Lord,” said Janey, flopped in her bed. “You’re jumpy as a cat.”
“I ain’t no such thing.”
“Then why’d you just draw the bolt on the door? We don’t never draw the bolt.”
“Wind’s kicking. You want the door blowing in on us?”
She squared her jaw and glared at me. “What if it does?”
“Well, then. All the dust and unmentionables from the road.”
“Unmentionables,” she said.
“Shut up and go to sleep.”
To my vast surprise she did, a little after eight. Dudley and Earle come back not long after, carrying their rifles over their shoulders and dragging the last threads of daylight with them. Me, I made a real stab at sleeping, but I knew it weren’t no use, and after what felt like ever and a day, I got up and threw an old raglan sweater over my shift and tiptoed outside.
Hiram was snoring on the porch swing, and Gus, he was lying in a bundle of old tarps. His head cut toward mine, and one of his bristly ears ratcheted up.
“Good boy,” I said.
It’d been a long time since I’d climbed the steps to the room over the store. They was steeper than I recollected. Also, the knob turned slower. But turn it did, all the same, and I gazed into the bluing shadows and found the outline of him in the bed. For a while I listened to his breathing. Then I eased myself onto the mattress and pressed myself, light as I could, against his back. He stirred and started to rise.
“Don’t,” I said.
So we laid there like that, neither of us making a move. If his head so much as twitched my way, I’d give it a swat. “Hsst.” Then I’d nudge my chin into the back of his neck. He hadn’t had a bath since Christ knows when, but I didn’t mind. The sweat and the dirt—the smell of fermenting apples in his hair—it was him.
After some time, I hooked my arm round him.
“Okay if I talk?” he said.
“I guess.”
But he held off for a spell.
“I wanted you to know I’m sorry,” he said.
“You didn’t do nothing.”
“All those times you said my uncle was doing evil on you, and I never believed.”
“Well, he’s your kin,” I said. “You’re supposed to take his side.”
“Point is I’m sorry.”
Even in the dark, I could see how the little hairs on the back of his neck stirred when I breathed on them.
“Reckon I’m sorry, too,” I said.
“For what?”
“Just felt like saying it.” I slid my free hand into the tangle of his hair. “Thing is, I really did want to go walking with you, Dudley. That time in the woods.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he said.
“So it is.”
“We could go and lie on our rock.”
I drew out a strand of his hair. “It’s our rock now?”
“Ain’t nobody else claimed it. Possession’s, like, nine-tenths of the law.”
“Who told you that?”
“I read it.”
We went quiet again. The space between his breaths got longer and the breaths deeper, and it suddenly washed over me. He was sleeping! Can’t explain why it was so amazing, so fearful, a body falling asleep in my arms.
I dozed off, too, but never for long. Sometime toward morning, Dudley’s breathing changed into a high, choked hiss. Brakes, I remember thinking. Castor oil. I believe I actually tapped him on his chest like he was an engine that needed to be sounded. Then he jerked up in bed.
“Smoke,” he whispered. “Smoke.”