Читать книгу Trouble in Abundance - Arlette Lees - Страница 8

CHAPTER 4

Madison leans her bike against the barn and goes inside. Sunlight slices between the boards as she climbs the ladder to the loft and leans back against a bale of hay.

Wednesday was the first time Sterling had spoken to her since mid-summer.

“Can I tell Mom I’m staying with you for a few days?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Until when?”

“I’ll be back on Sunday and tell you everything.” Sterling touched her arm and smiled her warm blue-eyed smile. It was almost like they were best friends again.

That of course, was before she caught Sterling at Eddie’s and lost her temper.

Madison digs in her bag and tosses the school book aside. She removes the flared glass stopper from the perfume bottle and breathes in the warm, spicy scent. She shouldn’t have let her jealousy get the best of her. It would have been smarter if she’d waited until Sunday to hear what Sterling had to say.

She returns the fancy bottle to the bag and removes the diary. It’s cloth-covered in a bright geometric design, one of those blank-page books you get in fancy bookstores. She flips randomly through the pages, reminded of the happy days of June and early July. Sterling describes her as clever and fun to be with, memorializing their carefree days of riding horses and skinny dipping in the Blue Hole back in the woods. They spent three days at The Dells with Sterling’s parents that summer, carried a 6-pack down to the river and got buzzed beneath the stars. Then around mid-July the Seabrights bought Sterling a car and everything changed. She was always out, didn’t accept or return calls and never returned to the Blue Hole.

Madison turns to the second week of their senior year.

Today when Social Studies let out I only had a few minutes before math class. I wanted to be alone, but Madison was right behind me, stuck to my sweater like a burr. She dropped her book and I made my escape when she bent to pick it up. I caught Cody coming out of Biology.

Madison could never understand Sterling breaking up with the nicest boy in school. Cody was tall, blonde and movie star handsome. Every girl wanted to win him and every guy wanted to be him.

We stood at his locker. I’d dumped him without explanation so he’s not overjoyed to see me. I barely open my mouth when I’m jostled from behind. I turn around and it’s HER! I wonder how long she’s been standing there. “Do you mind?” I snapped. She looks hurt, fails to understand I’m no longer the girl I was at the Blue Hole. “I’ll see you at lunchtime,” I tell her. I see a tear and a flash of controlled anger in her face. I walk away from them both. At lunchtime I sit with my team mates. I don’t want to deal with Madison’s feelings. I have enough trouble dealing with my own.

“Madison Diane Buckley! Where are you hiding?” Mom steps into the barn, a scarf tied in a bow on her forehead like Rosie The Riveter.

“I’m up here studying, Mom.”

“You can do that later. I’ve made you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then I want you to rake out the goat shed.”

She has to keep her grades up. A full scholarship is her only ticket out of Abundance. She never wants to see another goat or eat another peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

* * * *

Gladys’s Bar sits in the mosquito zone on the west bank of the Little Papoose River. It’s built of split logs with a green beer sign flickering in the window. The walls are hung with mounted deer trophies, antique guns and Fox Indian artifacts. When you walk in, the first thing you see through the smoke is the No Smoking sign mounted above the cash register. Gladys keeps a Derringer in the cash drawer, a baseball bat behind the bar and is proficient in the use of both.

Gladys’s is a popular establishment, frequented by men in jeans and work boots, the girls in tighter jeans, discrete tattoos of roses and butterflies inked on their ankles and shoulders. Most of the customers are regulars, the same faces week after week, year after year, until they go off to that big brewery in the sky.

The sounds are the sounds of my childhood: leather dice cups slapping against the bar, the ding of a 1940’s pinball machine, the click of balls on the pool table and the cha-chunk as packs of cigarettes tumble from the machine into the tray. A Worlitzer bubbles red and blue beside a rear window over-looking the river.

I enter on a blast of cold air, a big bag of kibble in my arms and Fargo trotting at my heels. Gladys gives me a nod as she slides a beer to a man down the bar. My mother is fiftyish, but looks about sixty-five. She has dyed red hair and a complexion pickled and smoked from a lifetime of alcohol and cigarette use. That doesn’t mean that a certain kind of man (like the four she married and divorced) doesn’t find her husky voice and pre-cancerous cough irresistibly sexy.

Fargo draws an instant crowd. A man with a big handlebar mustache takes out a hunting knife and cuts the burrs from his coat. A girl in a blue topped-off tank sets a saucer of beer in front of him and watches him lap it up…the dog, not the lumberjack.

I walk to the bar and plunk the dog food at my feet. On the back wall is a photo of me and my late fiancé, Australian-born Dingo McGlory. We’re astride his death machine in our happy days before the fast bike met the slow tractor.

“I could use a saucer of beer myself,” I say, climbing on a stool.

“Where did the Shetland pony come from?” says Gladys.

She pours me a cold one and I tell her about Fargo and the dead girl. I pass my phone through the room. A trucker says he saw the dog sitting on the shoulder of the highway a few days back. A woman in a cowboy hat says the blonde looks like a masseuse who moved to Hollywood a couple years ago.

After two more beers I climb the stairs to my room above the bar. Like me, Fargo has had one too many, trips on a step and hits his chin on the landing. I tug his collar to keep him from falling asleep on the stairs. I shift the dog food bag to my left arm, inset the key in my door and find it unlocked.

The folks at Gladys’s are too often the ones I pick up on petty thievery and bad checks, so I religiously keep my door locked. I push it open, snap on the light and set the bag inside with a thump. Someone has been in my room, some two actually, given the odor of cheap cologne and sweaty funk. My bed-spread is mangled, a black cigarette burn near the pillows. An ashtray beside the bed contains eight butts, three smeared with bright red lipstick.

The curtains smell like stale cigarette smoke. I raise the window with an angry clack, letting the night wind sweep the room. When I turn around Fargo is sleeping at the foot of the bed. Vibrating with indignation, I grab the ashtray, trot back downstairs and slam it on the bar.

“What?” says Gladys, with a startled look on her face.

“Who did you let inside my room?”

“Just Jackie and Howie, hon. They got into a brouhaha. I couldn’t have them upsetting all the customers.”

“Then you kick their butts out the door, not upstairs to my room. I pay my rent and it’s not like this is the first time you’ve invaded my privacy.”

“I’m so so-o-orry. I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“You didn’t what? They were up there long enough to smoke eight cigarettes and burn a hole in my bedspread. If you’re so magnanimous, let them camp in your room?”

“You know I can’t do that, hon. The bank bag is in there.”

“Oh great, why don’t you shout it through a megaphone? I should….”

“What?” she laughs. “Call a cop?”

“Give me your key,” I say, my hand trembling with anger.

“That’s the only one I have. What if there’s a fire and I have to get into your room?”

“You let the building burn down and collect the insurance. Now give.” She reaches in her pocket and drops the key in my palm. “Thank you. You can have it back in a few days when I move out.”