Hell, Yeah Page 19

  Cathy opened both eyes wide.

  Hamburger took a step backwards. “Man, you better hurry. She’s wakin’ up too early,” he said.

  She kicked as hard as she could but was a second too late as she heard the click of the shackle snapping around her ankle. She connected with something because Beer grunted, squealed, and headed for the door in a bent over position. Quicker than a gnat can blink, she swung hard with her right hand and caught Hamburger in the nose. Blood sprayed all over her T-shirt and his shirt as she up came fighting like a wounded mountain lion. Both men took off out the front door with her right on their heels. Her legs were rubbery and running was tough, but if she caught them she swore she’d find the strength to kill them both. Hamburger fell to his knees out in the yard beside Beer who had rolled up in a fetal position and was moaning like a fire siren.

  “Damn you, I told you to give her plenty of that horse stuff and now look at us. She’s liable to break that chain. Does that shit make a horse strong and mean when it wakes up from it?” Beer panted between groans.

  Hamburger blubbered through a bloody nose, “Hell, I don’t know. I never stayed around long enough to see how they come out of the shit. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I will soon as I can walk, you idiot.”

  “That woman is a hellcat. Brad is the idiot. She’s going to kill him.” Hamburger wiped his nose on his coat sleeve but it didn’t stop bleeding.

  “Don’t talk to me,” Beer said in a high squeaky voice.

  Cathy made it to the front door when the chain ran out. Like a short bungee drop, the forward motion came to an abrupt halt and sent her backwards to land on the floor with a loud thump. “You sorry sumbitches. Get in here and let me go or I’ll chew this damned chain in two and beat you to death with it.”

  “I’m goin’ to kill you long afore you chew the chain in two,” Beer yelled through the blubber.

  Cathy looked around the room for something to fight with. All she saw was a bare mattress on top of metal springs on a rusty old iron bedstead. If she could get Duroc and Oscar back in the house she could smother them with the mattress or knock their heads against the bedstead until their brains looked like burned scrambled eggs. She was sure God wouldn’t even write down the sin of killing them in his little log book. He might even put a gold star beside her name.

  Two stained blankets were tossed on the floor on the back side of the bed. Maybe she could wrap them up in the blankets and beat them until they were cold with her bare fists. A toilet and sink were in the far corner with a tattered muslin curtain for privacy. She eyed the rectangular cover on the back of the toilet. She could heave it like a discus at the first one through the door and flatten his face like a real Duroc hog. A chain attached to a thick shackle on her right ankle was affixed to a pivotal eye bolt in the floor. If she could pull it up out of the floor it would be a good weapon to use for a garrote. She grabbed it and pulled with all the might she could muster but it didn’t budge.

  Duroc and Oscar were still out there in the yard and it didn’t look like they were too damned eager to come into the house or get out of the rain. The one curled up was still weeping and holding his crotch; the other one was trying to stop the blood dripping off his chin. She paced to get her legs back into working order. If it hadn’t been for the medicine they’d pumped into her, she’d have kicked Beer’s teeth in but she couldn’t get her foot that high. That’s why her foot landed so much lower. Once she got her muscles to stop trembling she’d show him a thing or two.

  “You ain’t goin’ to kill her. I am!” Hamburger’s voice gurgled though his hand as it caught blood still flowing from both sides of his nose. “I bet she broke my nose and I know my eyes is both black as hell.”

  “You big boys come on in and we’ll see who is dead when the blood lettin’ is over. Y’all ain’t nearly as mean when I’m awake, are you?” She rattled the chains.

  “Go give her another one of them shots.” Beer whimpered like a six-year-old girl.

  “Hell, no.”

  “Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” Cathy tormented them.

  “We was goin’ to leave you some food but we could change our minds. We ain’t comin’ back until late tonight if we do decide to let you have something to eat. And you better be nice to us or you can starve,” Hamburger said.

  “You get close to me, I’ll tear your arm off and eat it raw,” she shouted.

  “I told you we shoulda handcuffed her to the bed,” Beer said.

  “What in the hell does Brad want with a hellcat like that anyway?”

  “I don’t know, man. He might want to give her two weeks, or hell, even a month. It’s goin’ to take more’n a week to soften her up.”

  “Y’all tell Brad that hell is about to crawl up his ass and fry its way all the way through the top of his head.” She tugged at the chain but whatever they’d anchored it to under the house didn’t budge.

  “She knows. She heard us in her sleep just like I told you. Damn, he’s goin’ to be mad. I ain’t tellin’ him nothin’,” Hamburger said.

  “Me neither. I ain’t a scared of him but I am of that big old ox of a woman. He can take care of her all by hisself when he gets here next weekend,” Beer said in short raspy sentences.

  “Let’s go get some food and give it to her and then get the hell out of Dodge until deer huntin’ season. You want that hun’erd dollars he promised to give us next week?”

  “Hell no. Let’s take off for Las Vegas for a few months. I got a cousin out there who cleans up the bathrooms in a casino. He can get us a job,” Beer said.

  “You think I can’t find you in Las Vegas? I’ll hunt you both down if I have to go in every men’s room in the whole town, and when I find you…”

  “She means it, don’t she?” Hamburger whispered.

  “Let’s go get that food and start drivin’ west. I’m tired of this cold wet weather anyway,” Beer said.

  “We can go up to the grocery store and put it on my momma’s ticket but I ain’t takin’ it in there to her. Are you?” Hamburger asked.

  “Hell, no! I reckon we can use a fishin’ pole to open the door and push the food in through there. I ain’t about to go in that place.”

  “Y’all turn me loose and I’ll give you each a thousand dollars,” she yelled.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Hamburger said.

  “She’ll kill us. We won’t never see a bit of money,” Beer told him.

  “I won’t harm a hair on your heads. You just walk in here and undo this shackle and I’ll go to the bank and get each one of you a thousand dollars. Then you can leave and I’ll take care of Brad.”

  Cathy waited but neither of them said another word. They disappeared like two shadows into the foggy afternoon. She heard a thump and swearing as they got into the boat. She was so cold and angry that she couldn’t quit shaking. Even though the blankets looked like something a bag lady wouldn’t touch on a dumpster diving expedition, she wrapped one around her shoulders and sat down Indian style on the floor in front of the door. If they came back she fully well intended to jerk them into the shack and shake the keys to the shackle out of their pockets. The wind picked up and blew rain in through the holey screen wire and she scrambled back toward the bed. She couldn’t afford to get any wetter. If she caught pneumonia she’d die right there in that godforsaken place.

  She yanked and pulled on the bolt again with all her might but it wouldn’t give in. She looked around for a wire or a hairpin—anything to use to pick the lock on the ankle shackle. She snarled at the idea of even sitting on the stained mattress, but it was dry so she fell back on it and stared at the ceiling.

  Brad was insane. She’d found it out after they were engaged, but this even went beyond what she’d thought. How in the hell did he ever figure he could talk her into going back with him just because he’d rescued her? The man was certifiably goofy.

  They’d worked together, fallen in love with each other, moved in together, and were goin
g to get married. Then they had their first big argument. He threw the first punch and caught her on the lower jaw with his fist, jerked his belt off before she had time to catch her breath, and began to swing. She curled up in a ball on the floor for about sixty seconds then came up like a tornado out of a sunny Texas sky and fought back. After she’d kicked him in the crotch and boxed both ears until they rang like out-of-tune cowbells, he took off out the front door, his belt flapping in the wind behind him.

  She moved to Mingus and thought it was all over until she looked up one night and there he was in the Honky Tonk. Bless Billy Bob Walker’s heart—he’d told Brad that he and Cathy were married.

  She felt a movement on the bed and looked to her right. A rat the size of a housecat eyed her hungrily. She glared at him and bounced once but he didn’t move.

  “You got a choice. You can attack and die or you can slither off with your pride and skin intact,” she told him.

  Rat licked his paw and washed his face glancing over every few seconds to see if he’d scared her into a screaming hunk of fresh blood. When she glared back and growled, he turned tail and took his time about jumping off the bed and disappearing through a hole in the floor.

  That’s when the tears welled up and spilled down her cheek bones. She hated roaches, rats, and mice. If Oscar and Duroc brought food she’d have to stay awake to protect it or Rat would come back with an army of his friends. She’d also have to be very careful not to cut herself because if Rat smelled blood he wouldn’t be so easily scared away.

  “What in the hell am I going to do?” she whispered.

  Without a clock she didn’t know if it was two hours or six days past eternity when she heard them whispering outside the cabin. The front door, which was nothing but a flimsy framework with screen wire tacked to it, opened enough for a cardboard box to slide inside.

  “That’s all you get. Make it last or you’ll go hungry,” Hamburger shouted.

  “You sure you don’t want a thousand dollars each? It’s a hell of a lot more money than Brad was going to give you,” she hollered.

  “Naw, we talked about it. Brad is our kin. Shirttail cousin by marriage. We’d piss off our momma if we was to go agin him. You make that last and don’t die.”

  “If I die they’ll hunt you down like snakes and charge you with murder. I’m going to prick my finger and write your names on the wall. Oscar and Duroc, isn’t it?”

  “God Almighty, she was awake. I told you that one shot wasn’t enough. She’ll tell the sheriff and he’ll send me down forever and I won’t never get to go deer huntin’ again.”

  “Well, I expect we’d best get on the way to Las Vegas, hadn’t we? They’ve surely got deer huntin’ somewhere out there. If they ain’t we can hunt whatever they’ve got. I always wanted to hunt one of them big rabbits like I seen on them postcards.”

  “Good-bye,” Hamburger yelled.

  “I’m a voodoo queen and I’m putting a curse on both of you. You’re about to have so much bad luck you’ll come back to Mingus, Texas, and beg me to kill you both with a fish filletin’ knife. My curses are horrible and they never fail. I’ve already killed a rat and hung it on the porch to rot. When it gets ripe then the curse starts to take effect. Everywhere you go rats are going hunt you down because of the second part of my curse. Want to know what that is?”

  “What?” Hamburger asked then clamped his hand over his mouth so hard that his nose started oozing blood again.

  “Boils are going to break out all over your balls and start oozing blood and pus. That’s when you’ll be afraid to go to sleep for fear the rats will sneak up on you and chew their way under your britches and have a party on your balls.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Beer said.

  “I picked that rat up by the tail and slung him against the bedpost. I don’t reckon the animal rights people will get too worked up over one dead rat. Anyway, he’s dead and the words have been said over him. I tied two little balls of cotton out of the mattress around his neck to represent your balls. Want to see him? Come on up on the porch and take a look. You’ll see I’m not lyin’. You’ll start to itch in about two days. All you got to do is unchain me and I’ll take the curse off.”

  “Damn it all, I knowed we shouldn’t have listened to Brad. Now ain’t neither one of us goin’ to find a job in Vegas,” Beer said.

  “Then let’s go down to New Orleans and find us another voodoo woman to take the curse off us. It’s a hell of a lot closer anyway.”

  “We need to call up Brad. Tell him that we left her food but we ain’t stickin’ around,” Hamburger said.

  “You call him. I ain’t tellin’ him shit.”

  Hamburger pressed the right numbers and leaned against a willow tree. “Brad, you know who this is so I ain’t sayin’ no names. We got her in the shack but she’s a wild one and you got your job cut out for you. No, man, she don’t know nothin’.” He looked over at Beer and winked.

  “Sure, man, you can count on us. We’ll have her up there in two days. You want us to put her where?” Another wink.

  “On Tuesday? You got it. You’ll pay us then? Just leave the money on the back of the toilet. Reckon we’d best get on out of the area for a few days after that. Okay, then, good-bye. I only got five more minutes on this phone. Have to buy a new one. I’ll call you on Tuesday when we get there.”

  Beer slapped him on the shoulder. “Why did you do that? He’s goin’ to be mad as hell when we don’t show up with her and I’ll be damned if I try to get close enough to dose her up again.”

  Duroc hit him back. “It give us enough time to get to New Orleans without him wonderin’ where we are. He wants us to bring her up to Arkansas on Tuesday and put her up in the mountains in an old huntin’ trailer, but we’ll be long gone. I told you, I ain’t dumb.”

  Beer chuckled. “Well, let’s get the hell out of here then.”

  * * *

  Cathy kept the blanket around her shoulders as she walked barefoot across the dirty cold floor to the door. Six inches less chain and she wouldn’t have been able to reach the cardboard box. It was filled with small cans of Vienna sausage, peaches, and beans in flip top cans and six boxes of cheap saltine crackers.

  She opened a can of sausage and ate them with her fingers. When she finished she kicked the door open and slung the can as far as she could out into the yard. Rat could lick it clean out there if he was interested.

  Her feet were freezing so she went back to the bed and huddled down in her blanket like an old Indian woman. Where were her boots? She distinctly remembered putting on her boots with her pajamas to go to the bank that morning.

  “Those sorry bastards left me barefoot in the middle of winter. Damn them to hell for all eternity. Why would they do such a mean thing? That’s why the one I kicked can still walk at all. It’s because all he got was my bare foot and not my boot.”

  Her legs went to sleep and she stretched them out using the second blanket to cover her feet. Suddenly she had an idea. She opened another can of sausage, hurriedly ate the tiny morsels and sent the can flying out the door to join the other one. Then she used the sharpened edge of the can lid to cut a hole in the middle of best of the two blankets.

  She slipped her head through the hole and made a poncho that hung almost to the floor. She carefully cut two squares and two long skinny strips from the other nasty blanket. She tied the squares around her feet with strips. She tossed the rest of the blanket on the bed. Should she cut a hole in the middle for a second poncho or keep it to use as a cover at night?

  She looked closely at the sharp metal but couldn’t figure out a way to use it to jimmy the shackle lock. However it might come in useful later, like to cut Brad’s liver out when he came to rescue her, so she laid it on the floor right beside the bed. He might come before the week was out and she’d be ready for him.

  She paced from one end of the chain to the other several times before she finally sat back down on the bed. After a while her eyelids droope
d and she dozed, only to awaken with a start to loud squeaking noises. Her eyes darted around the bed expecting to see a whole army of rats trying to talk each other into attacking her. The noise was coming from the door where they’d dragged the sausage cans back up on the porch and were fighting over the cold jelled liquid.

  One stuck his ugly head through a hole in the screen and locked in on her box of food. She grabbed it and carried it back to the center of the mattress. She picked up her sharp lid and posed, ready to defend her rations. They could attack in numbers or one at a time. All she had to do was nick one of them and the rest would go crazy after the warm blood.

  It was while she was hovering over her basket of food that she thought about the bed springs. They were made up of wires and held together with smaller wires. She leaned over and looked under the mattress. She could see any number of slim wires small enough to pick a lock. She slid off the bed, set her food box on the toilet, and yelled at the rats.

  “Don’t you dare sneak in here while I’m working at this. I swear I’ll kill you with my bare hands if you so much as look at my food.”

  They ignored her but she didn’t trust them so she carried a box of crackers to the door, kicked it open, and slung rats and crackers both ass over teakettle out into the yard. They were scrambling over the crackers like flies on a fresh cow patty when she went back to the bed, threw the mattress on the floor, and set about the job of working a wire out of the springs.

  It was dark before she finally succeeded in untangling one small enough to use. And that’s when something began to vibrate against her leg. She thought a rat had snuck into her pocket and jumped up, jerked it out, and slung it across the room before she realized it was her cell phone.

  “Well shit!” she said.

  It was against the far wall and her chain wouldn’t reach that far so she stretched out on her stomach and reached as far as she could but it wasn’t enough. She stood up and went back to the bed where she bent the end of her picking wire and tried again. Rat darted across the floor and sniffed the phone while she reached.