Free The Brat by Gil Brewer Page A

the way I hated her, but could still remember and feel the way it always was when I touched her, when we kissed. You think of all those things and none of it helps. I was plenty tired, and I was strained on her and what she’d done to me. Hellish urgency got inside me, building all the time. I was a little crazy with it. When a branch or bush touched me, I fought against it. I just kept getting hotter all the time now.
    For a time I couldn’t locate the road. Panic sifted down through the night and I forced myself to take time, considering everything as seriously as I could.
    I found the road, began jogging along. It was a narrow, deeply rutted stretch of sand and clay, with high growths of grass forming an island in the middle. It was best to run along the shoulder, or on the humped island, because there was no telling what animal hunkered in those deep, shadowed ruts.
    • • •
    Dawn had already stretched a hand of pink white across the eastern sky when I realized I was near Evis’s old home. The road shallowed. I had passed numerous cutoffs leading into fields or walled jungle.
    I passed an old shack leaning against the gray dark like a collapsed shroud.
    Spouts of mist and fog clung to the ground, the fields, the road, mushrooming in absolute stillness until I disrupted them by walking through them. Ground mists held in fantastic forms across the sinks and slopes.
    A rooster crowed, and dawn pulled light quickly across the sky. Birds called. The mosquitoes were gone. The world was silent, with only the bird cries rending it, like sharp, clean knives.
    Scuffling footsteps reached me. I looked up, saw a man rounding a bend in the road just at the edge of the clearing by the river shallows, where the Hellings lived.
    It was Luz Helling, Evis’s old man. He came along the dirt road, rubbing both eyes with the heels of his hands, chewing tobacco. He wore what looked like a clean khaki shirt, worn blue jeans, and he was barefooted. He had once been a big man, standing well over six feet and he must have been heavy-muscled years ago. It was all gone to gross flab now. His pale hair was sparse and his skull sun-blistered and freckled.
    Luz blinked his eyes, saw me, and stopped walking. I hadn’t wanted to meet anybody until I made sure DeGreef wasn’t around. Luz stood on the edge of the road, chewing slowly.
    “Morning, Luz.”
    He didn’t speak, waiting as I came up to him, never altering the rhythm of his chewing.
    In the cleared yard beyond which he stood, I saw the well-remembered cypress-sided house, and the river down there beyond the sloping bank. The pier. And standing in the yard, a battered old Pontiac sedan. Fogs shredded and slowly lifted around the sides of the house. Chickens pecked in the morning. A hound wallowed in the dust.
    “Where’d
you
come from?” Luz said.
    I knew. I looked like hell, and tried to keep the nervousness out of me. Luz had always been a difficult person to talk with. Now the feeling had increased tenfold. I didn’t know what to say to him.
    “Supposed to meet Evis.”
    “Evis?”
    “Yes. Isn’t she here?”
    Luz turned and looked back at the house, chewing, and then at me.
    “Evis ain’t here.”
    He turned abruptly and started shuffling back toward the house, gouts of dust spurting against the sides of his bare feet.
    “Luz!”
    He paused, looked back at me. I went up beside him. This seemed to trouble him and he increased his pace, as if he wanted to get to the house in a hurry.
    “You sure she isn’t here?”
    “Said she ain’t.”
    A quavering voice rose from the front of the house, lifting like brittle fingers.
    “Luz? Luz Helling—where in hell did you get to?”
    Luz stopped chewing and bared his teeth at the house.
    That had been Grandma Helling’s voice.
    The clearing had been enlarged since I’d last seen it, and several shacks of various sizes crowded against the intruding jungle. The yard was littered with rusting and broken farm implements; several