Free Hard Twisted by C. Joseph Greaves Page B

I’m always the one gets left?
    Don’t worry your pretty head. We’ll be back quicker’n you can say Jack Robinson.
    Back from where? Why can’t I come?
    You keep it up and you’ll find out why, her father said as he shrugged into his mackinaw.
    She followed them to the door, where her father worked and reworked the latch.
    Now listen to me. Don’t open this door for nobody till we get back, understand?
    That’s right, Palmer said. There’s been reports of some desperate characters newly arrived in the neighborhood.
    Yes, sir, she told her father.
    All right then. Her father held the door for Palmer, who winked as he crossed over the threshold. When the door had closed behind them, she heard a key in the lock.
    Lottie woke at dawn. She rose and stretched and padded to the bathroom, the warmth of her footprints evanescing on the cold wooden floorboards. She peed and washed her face and straightened her ribbon in the mirror. On her way back to her bedroll, she paused again at the window.
    The Akard house was still as yet, its windows clad in the golden glow of sunrise. Songbirds clustered in the elm tree, jostling and flitting, and a rooster cawed somewhere close at hand. She smiled at the sound.
    She dressed quickly and hurried down the stairs, expecting voices and the sounds and smells of breakfast, but found herself alone in the empty kitchen.
    She listened for movement elsewhere in the house.
    She filled the coffeepot and fed crumpled newsprint and pine tinder into the stovebox. She tried to light the match as Palmerdid, but the match tip chipped beneath her nail and she yelped as it flared, sucking at her thumb.
    She remounted the stairs, and she crept to her father’s bedroom, rapping lightly at the door.
    Daddy?
    The cut-glass knob was cold to her touch. The door creaked as it opened, revealing her father’s bedding rolled and bundled in a corner. Beside the bedroll was his Bible, and beside the Bible were his folded clothes and his few scattered toiletries.
    She listened. The radiator ticked.
    Returning downstairs, she paused outside Palmer’s door, which she opened without knocking. Inside she found his empty bed-roll splayed upon the floor.
    Only then, as she passed the hallway bathroom for the second time, did she notice the leather valise where it rested on the toilet seat. She stopped, holding her breath and listening.
    Inside the satchel were Palmer’s shaving things, his brush and razor and a soap bar in a lidded tin. There was a screwdriver and a pliers, a small scissors and a nail file, a toothbrush and a hair comb, two decks of playing cards, a tin of Dr. Wernet’s dental powder, a box of Colt Firearms Company .45 ammunition, and an oval tin of Dixie Peach pomade. She removed these items each in turn and examined them and placed them in a neat row along the sink.
    There was no pistol.
    Beneath the things that she’d removed, flat and contoured to the satchel bottom, were papers. State of Texas Department of Highways Motor Vehicle Registration. Certificate of Live Birth, frayed and yellowed. United States Army Notice of Induction toMilitary Service. Enlistment Record and Report of Separation (Dishonorable Discharge). Her lips moved with the words as she paged through each of the documents.
    She was careful to replace the papers as she’d found them, followed by the tools and the toiletries, then the shaving kit. Lastly she reached for the ammunition, spying as she did her face in the medicine cabinet.
    What the hell?
    She shrieked at Palmer’s reflection, the box exploding where it landed, man and girl jigging in tandem at the clattering of cartridges.
    I’m sorry! I’m sorry!
    She fell to her knees, sweeping and gathering the hard brass cylinders in handfuls from around his boots, until his boots stepped back and pivoted and strode on down the hallway.
    She sat for a long time on the cold, hard tile, until the sound of frying eggs