Saint Homicide (Single Shot) (5 page)

Chapter 5

I drove out of Little Rock, with Tisha directing me where to turn off the interstate, guiding me down a series of crooked dirt roads leading ever deeper into the dark marshes south of the city. Our final path was an uneven mud track overhung with creaking branches, and when we finally emerged from this black tunnel we were in a small clearing.

“You can stop here,” she said.

Gray clouds drew across the sky like a veil. I couldn’t see much in the darkness, but Tisha moved with perfect ease as she got out of the car and led me to an opening in the woods. Drifting back a step or two, I followed her lead. She slipped into the trees, and I stumbled in after her.

Ahead of me in the dark she said, “So, you’re probably wondering about the teeth, huh?”

“What?”

“Ice,” she said. “That’s what killed my teeth. You know about that?”

“You’re talking about a drug?”

She brushed a branch out of her way, and I noticed the ground sloping downward. “Ice, like crystal meth,” she explained. “I was smoking it, like, all day long. Smoking it at school, with my boyfriend, in my bedroom, in the Taco Bell parking lot, one time in the bathroom at Waffle House. I was…god, I was on the pipe dusk till dawn.”

“And it…”

“Fucked up my teeth. I mean, it messed up everything else too. I’d get these bad heart rushes, you know. It’d just send my heart racing. Scary. And I would be up for days smoking and then I’d just shut down, for, like, a day and a half. I slept for thirty hours straight one time. Went to the bathroom on myself. I mean, thirty hours. Bad news.”

“And then the teeth?”

“Yeah. Watch your step here.”

Though the moon was only a vague blur in the clouds, I could tell we were on a path now. The path sloped sharply downward and I had to fight to keep my balance on the slippery mix of leaves and pine needles. Clutching tree limbs with my hands, I felt along the ground with the tips of my shoes. The trees were black, and everything else was gray.

I asked, “Where did everyone else park to come to this thing?”

“I didn’t think they’d let us in if we just drove up,” she said. “I mean, maybe they’d let me in. It depends on who’s working the gate. But not you. They wouldn’t let you in.”

“Why not me?”

“Cause of what you look like.”

“What do I look like?”

“I don’t know,” she grunted, her pale hands silvery in the moonlight as she reached for branches and saplings. “Like a teacher who’s mad at the class?”

“Are we headed toward the edge of a cliff?”

“Just be careful. Watch out for roots.”

As she said it my toes found the first exposed root, the first cable of a root system spider-webbing down the slope. In a way it helped—each thick coil formed a rung on the ladder we were climbing down—but I could not see where we were going. The moon’s fragile light seemed to weaken the further down the path we traveled.

“Almost there,” she said.

I didn’t take steps now, merely pushed my feet from root to root.

“Fuck,” she grunted. “Take it slow.”

Finally the ground leveled off a bit. Tisha’s breathing eased. She said, “Anyway, my teeth. They all turned yellow, and then they all turned gray. It was quick, too. Like they all just up and died. Turned mushy.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. They were soft as boiled peanuts. The dentist said they had to all come out.”

The roots stopped and I was working with dirt and pine needles again. The tree tops parted and the moon came into focus through the clouds. Only now, a strange stink drifted through the dark.

Tisha moved easily down the last of the slope and when the ground leveled off she turned and said, “They ripped out the whole top row of my teeth and they were supposed to rip the bottom ones out, too, but I started bleeding too bad. I’ll go back in a week or so and get the bottom ones out. Then I get my false teeth. Can you fucking believe that? Not even twenty and I’m going to have false teeth.”

“Are you still smoking ice?”

“Not really. I mean, every now and then, but mostly I stopped.” She shrugged. “Want to see something?”

As the girl moved closer to me, her round face blue in the moonlight, my heart raced. I thought of Tisha’s heart, racing so hard because of the drugs she’d smoked. I thought of Jennifer’s heart monitor in the hospital, how it measured the blood coursing through her broken body. One breakable organ in each of us, one coil of tissue whose proper function demarcated life from death.

“Do you want to see something?” Tisha said again.

“Sure.”

She leaned within a few inches of my face and opened her mouth and toggled her bottom teeth back and forth with the tip of her finger like she was flipping a light switch.

“My Lord,” I said.

“Mm hmm,” she said. “The roots are still attached but I could jerk these front ones out with my fingers if I wanted to.”

“Please don’t.”

She laughed and started off through the trees. I followed her to a creek. As we came to it, the hard smell I’d noticed earlier surrounded me. It was like being in a dumpster.

“What is that?” I asked.

“There’s a rendering plant upstream. It stinks like shit, don’t it? They call this Pig Gut River. Sometimes you can see chunks of rotten meat and fat floating down here. Fucking gross.”

“That can’t be legal.”

She shrugged and waved me over to a gnarled metal sign someone had stretched across the creek. It was twisted almost into a curl but looked sturdy enough. Tisha bounded across it in two steps and was on the other side. I followed her with one big step, noticing as I crossed that the sign was an advertisement for beauty cream.

I followed her through the trees, where
a large house emerged from the woods. Sloping down from the house, rows of cars and pickup trucks filled a large clearing. It looked like a good-sized revival meeting.

The house stood three or four stories tall, with a large wraparound porch replete with rocking chairs and French doors leading inside. But the house appeared empty.

All the life on the property centered in and around a huge barn behind the house. An amber light shone from its smoky portals as thumping music and cackling voices carried across the packed field. A few silhouettes passed in and out of the light—just distant, indistinct shadows, but the possibility that one them might be Lynn drew me forward in a run.

Chapter 6

The dusty barn bulged with people, and their heat kept the cold air outside. Most of the crowd were young men in blue jeans and ball caps, but there were also many young women in tight jeans and low neck t-shirts. It was not what I had expected. At the edge of the crowd an elderly man in a flannel shirt sat on a bench peeling an orange with a large pocket knife. Next to him sat a middle-aged man, a younger version of the old man. Next to them sat a little boy around six years old. The old man divided the orange and shared it with the other two.

Tisha caught up to me and walked toward the cheering spectators gathered around the ring. Without so much as a look back at me, she disappeared into the swarm of bodies. People milled about and filled the lofts on either side of the barn. Along one side of the barn a makeshift bar served beer and whiskey from large kegs; along the other side, a pile of speakers blared indiscernible rock music. For a moment I tried to locate Tisha, but she was simply gone, absorbed into the thick cloud of cigarette smoke that hung over everything like a wispy ceiling. I never saw her again.

None of the cheering crowd around the ring turned to see me and none of the people at the bar gave me a second glance. I wound through the crowd to get a look at the ring and see if Lynn might be there.

A fat man stood in the center of the ring. He was tall, with an enormous belly stretching against a blue t-shirt. A thick cable of gray hair hung down his back and a salt and pepper beard fanned across his chest.

“Y’all ready for the final round?” the fat man called out.

As a roar rose over the pounding guitars, and laughter soared up from the crowd, I searched for Lynn among the shifting mix of faces. But I didn’t find her. I saw only slight variations of drunkenness, anger and stupidity grinding against each other in the boiling ring around the pit.

Another man scrolled back the barbed wire gate and the first dog was led into the ring. A  muscular Rottweiler with alert eyes, he was surprisingly calm until his opponent was led into the ring by a man with red eyes. The red-eyed man’s dog was a Rottweiler as well and was missing half of his right ear. The animals lunged for each other, snapping and barking, and the red-eyed man had to brace himself to keep his dog from pulling him to the ground. The fat man introduced the fighters and their trainers, but I couldn’t hear him over the crowd and the music and the fury of the dogs. The animals were insane, their barking like thunderclaps, and were held by taut chains at either side of the ring as the fat man stepped out. He held a red handkerchief above his head and screamed, “Y’all ready for the hounds of hell?”

The crowd screamed, “Yes!” and the fat man dropped the handkerchief.

The dogs, instantly loosed from their chains, hurled into one another. Both reared up on their hind legs and tore at each other. The crowd was in a frenzy. Fistfuls of money beat around me as bodies pounded against bodies. A young man with a sleeveless flannel shirt and arms covered in tattoos elbowed me in the ribs. A woman near the front of the ring screamed at the dogs to kill each other, her face an angry scarlet as her breasts swelled from the top of her low-cut shirt. I had never been in the midst of such an inundation of skin and bone; it slammed against me on all sides.

The crowd cursed and spat and screamed as the Rottweilers tore at each other. The red-eyed man’s dog sunk his teeth into his opponent’s shoulder and blood ran down his chest. He finally let go when the other dog managed to get his teeth into what was left of his right ear. He tore it loose and the red-eyed man’s dog yelped and tried to retreat to the side of the ring, but the other dog, seeping blood from his shoulder, bullied him against the barbed wire and snapped at his face. The red-eyed man cursed and kicked the post, but the other dog had its teeth around the neck of his dog. The crowd screamed with delight as his dog was dragged to the ground, blood gushing from his gaping windpipe. The other dog, panting and shivering, wet with blood, limped to the other side of the ring as his fallen opponent twitched and died in the red-soaked dirt.

Everything slowed and eased with released energy. Money changed hands like leaves blown with a breeze. I pushed myself away from the ring. I scanned the pink faces passing me as I walked to the door of the barn and took a deep breath of the cold night air. Gradually, I moved away from the barn and toward the woods. At the edge of the woods I ducked behind a tree and urinated in the bushes. Music and the yelling of the crowd were a constant behind me, but I heard footsteps in the gravel.

In the darkness, a man and woman were walking to one of the trucks parked at the edge of the trees. “Is this it?” the woman asked in front of a large red Ford. Her voice was young.

“Yeah,” the man said. He wore a white cowboy hat.

The girl was short, with a mound of brown hair held in a clip on top of her head. She wore blue jeans, a tight white T-shirt, and no coat.

“How much?” the man asked. I couldn’t see them very well, but the man sounded distinctly older than the girl.

“How’s about a hundred?” the girl said.

“Expensive,” the man said begrudgingly.

“You just made a thousand on the dogs.”

“That’s true,” the man said. “You worth a tenth of my earnings?”

The girl was quiet, as if she were thinking about it.

“I’m just teasing you,” the man said, his voice attempting warmth but failing somewhere at impatience. He unlocked the truck door. When he opened the door, the cab light came on.

Staying in the shadows, the girl said, “Turn that off.”

The man reached inside the truck, turned on the ignition, and turned off the light. He sat down on the bench seat of his truck in the darkness.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” the girl asked. “Watching those dogs kill each other like that?”

The man took off his hat and wedged it between his dashboard and windshield. “No. And I’ll tell you why. Dogs ain’t people, they ain’t got minds like people and they ain’t got souls like people.”

“Dogs got souls,” the girl said. “Don’t you know that?”

The man sighed. “I tell you what I do know. I got,” he fumbled in his shirt pocket for a moment “a hundred dollars here. And I didn’t come out here to talk about dogs or their souls. Now you want to make some easy money or what? Cause I could be in there right now making some money my ownself.”

The girl took the money and held it up the moonlight. “I guess so.”

“Good,” the man said.

The girl climbed into the truck as he eased up and unzipped his jeans. Their forms merged in the shadows. The crowd at the barn let out a roar and the music moved beneath it.

I trembled. I tried to remain as still as possible as I strained to hear their grunts above the noise from the truck.

Finally, the man let out a violent grunt and laughed. They adjusted their clothing in the dark. The man killed the ignition.

As she opened the door, the girl asked, “Was it worth a hundred?”

“That last part was,” the man laughed and the girl slapped his arm as if correcting a naughty child.

“Bad boy.”

“Naw, I’m just teasing you,” he said, his voice newly endowed with a bizarre fatherly affection. “You done just fine. It was a real nice time.”

“Good.”

“So,” the man said, “you ready to head back in?”

“Actually, I need to hit the bushes for a bathroom break. You go on in. I’ll see you when I see you.”

“No problem. I’ll see you around.”

“Okay.”

The man put on his hat, locked his truck and headed back toward the barn. The girl watched him go and ducked into the woods not very far from me. She relieved herself in the leaves, laughed a little and zipped up her pants.

When she stepped out of the woods, I followed her.

She walked past the cars and trucks toward the barn. I tried to keep enough distance not to give away the fact that I was coming from the same place she was.

When she was almost to the barn, I called, “Hey, Lynn.”