Free Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories by Ron Rash Page B

dress,” Lucy said.
    “But you will, and soon, and like I said it’ll be a spiffy one.”
    “If I do,” Lucy said, “I’ll use this piece of shit for nothing but scrub rags.”
    She let go of the cloth. The branch had scratched her neck and she touched it with her finger, confirmed that it wasn’t bleeding. Had the locket been around her neck, the chain might have snapped, but it was in her pocket. Or so he assumed. If she’d forgotten it in the haste of packing, now didn’t seem the time to bring it up.
    As they continued their descent, Sinkler thought again about what would happen once they were safely free. He was starting to see a roughness about Lucy that her youth and country ways had masked. Perhaps he could take her with him beyond their first stop. He’d worked with a whore in Knoxville once, let her go in and distract a clerk while he took whatever they could fence. The whore hadn’t been as young and innocent-seeming as Lucy. Even Lucy’s plainness would be an advantage—harder to describe her to the law. Maybe tonight in the hotel room she’d show him more reason to let her tag along awhile.
    The trail curved and then went uphill. Surely for the last time, he figured, and told himself he’d be damn glad to be back in a place where a man didn’t have to be half goat to get somewhere. Sinkler searched through the branches and leaves for a brick smokestack, the glint of a train rail. They were both breathing harder now, and even Lucy looked tuckered.
    Up ahead, another seep crossed the path and Sinkler paused.
    “I’m going to sip me some more water.”
    “Ain’t no need,” Lucy said. “We’re almost there.”
    He heard it then, the rasping plunge of metal into dirt. The rhododendron was too thick to see through. Whatever it was, it meant they were indeed near civilization.
    “I guess we are,” he said, but Lucy had already gone ahead.
    As Sinkler hitched the sagging pants up yet again, he decided that the first thing he’d do after buying the tickets was find a clothing store or gooseberry a clothesline. He didn’t want to look like a damn hobo. Even in town, they might have to walk a ways for water, so Sinkler kneeled. Someone whistled near the ridge and the rasping stopped. As he pressed his palm into the sand, he saw that a handprint was already there beside it, his handprint. Sinkler studied it awhile, then slowly rocked back until his buttocks touched his shoe heels. He stared at the two star-shaped indentations, water slowly filling the new one.
    No one would hear the shot, he knew. And, in a few weeks, when autumn came and the trees started to shed, the upturned earth would be completely obscured. Leaves rustled as someone approached. The footsteps paused, and Sinkler heard the soft click of a rifle’s safety being released. The leaves rustled again but he was too worn out to run. They would want the clothes as well as the money, he told himself, and there was no reason to prolong any of it. His trembling fingers clasped the shirt’s top button, pushed it through the slit in the chambray.

BACK of BEYOND
    W hen Parson drove to his pawnshop that morning, the sky was the color of lead. Flurries settled on the pickup’s windshield, lingered a moment before expiring. A heavy snow tonight, the weatherman warned, and it looked to be certain, everything getting quiet and still, waiting. Even more snow in the higher mountains, enough to make many roads impassable. It would be a profitable day, because Parson knew they’d come to his pawnshop to barter before emptying every cold-remedy shelf in town. They would hit Wal-Mart first because it was cheapest, then the Rexall, and finally the town’s three convenience stores, coming from every way-back cove and hollow in the county.
    Parson pulled his jeep into the parking lot of the cinder-block building with PARSON’S BUY AND SELL hung over the door. One of the addicts had brought an electric portable sign last week, had it in his truck