Читать книгу Red - Erica Spindler, Erica Spindler - Страница 7

Bend, Mississippi

1984

No place in the world smelled quite like the Mississippi Delta in July. Overripe, like fruit left too long in the sun. Pungent, like a drunk’s breath at the edge of a whiskey binge. Like sweat.

And it smelled of dirt. Sometimes so dry it coated the mouth and throat, but most times so wet it permeated everything, even the skin. Becky Lynn Lee lifted her hair off the back of her neck, sticky with a combination of perspiration and dust from the unpaved road. Most folks around Bend didn’t think much about the smell of things, but she did. She fantasized about a place scented of exotic flowers and rare perfumes, a beautiful world populated by people wearing fine, silky fabrics and welcoming smiles.

She knew that place existed; she’d seen it in the magazines she poured over whenever she could, the ones the women at Opal’s snickered at her interest in, the ones her father raged at her about.

None of that mattered. She had promised herself that someday, somehow, she would live in that world.

Becky Lynn picked her way across the railroad tracks used not only to ship rice, cotton and soybeans out of Bend, but to divide the good side of town from the bad, the respectable folk from the poor white trash.

She was poor white trash. The label had hurt, way back the first time she’d heard herself referred to by those words; it still hurt, when she thought about it. And she thought about it a lot. That’s the kind of town Bend was.

Becky Lynn lifted her face to the flat blue sky, squinting against the harsh light, wishing for cloud cover to temper the heat. Poor white trash. Becky Lynn had been three the first time she’d realized she was different, that she and her family were less than; she still remembered the moment vividly. It had been a day like this one, hot and blue. She’d been standing in line at the market with her mother and her brother, Randy. Becky Lynn remembered clinging to her brother’s hand and looking down at her feet, bare and dirty from their walk into town, then lifting her gaze to find the other mothers’ eyes upon them, their stares filled with a combination of pity and loathing. In that moment, she’d realized that there were others in the world and that they judged. She had felt strange, self-conscious. For the first time in her young life, she’d felt vulnerable. She had wanted to hide behind her mother’s legs, had wanted her mother to tell the other women to stop looking at them that way.

Becky Lynn supposed that had been back before her daddy had turned really mean, back when she still thought her mother to be an angel with magical, protective powers.

But maybe she had already realized that her mother wasn’t an angel, that her mother didn’t have the ability—or the strength—to make everything all right, because she hadn’t said anything. And the women had kept staring, and Becky Lynn had kept on feeling as if she had done something wrong, something ugly and bad.

Most times now, the respectable folks, even the customers she shampooed down at Opal’s Cut ‘n Curl, looked right through her. Oh, while she shampooed them they talked to her, but mostly because they liked to hear the sound of themselves and because they knew she was paid to listen and agree with them—something their husbands almost never did. But when they came face-to-face with her on the street, they looked right through her. She wasn’t sure if they pretended they didn’t see her because she was one of Randall Lee’s brood or if they truly didn’t recognize her ‘cause they’d never really looked at her in the first place.

But whichever, she’d decided being invisible suited her just fine. In fact, she preferred it that way. She felt less different when she was invisible. She felt…safer.

Becky Lynn took a deep breath as she cleared the railroad tracks. The air always seemed a bit sweeter this side of the tracks, the breeze a degree or two cooler. She stepped up her pace, hoping to get to the shop early enough to spend a few minutes looking over the Bazaar that had come the day before.

Up ahead, Becky Lynn caught sight of a fire-engine red pickup truck barreling past the square, coming in her direction, a cloud of dust in its wake. Tommy Fischer and his jock gang, she thought, her heart beginning to rap against the wall of her chest. Probably on their way to pick up her brother. She darted a glance to either side of the road, to the fields thick with cotton, knowing there was no place to hide but searching for one, anyway. Sighing, she folded her arms across her middle, jerked her chin up and kept on walking.

The group of boys began to howl the moment they saw her. “Hey, Becky Lynn,” one of the teenagers called, “how about a date?” In response, the other three boys began to hoot in amusement. “Yeah, looking good, Becky Lynn. My dad’s Labrador retriever’s been lonely lately.”

That brought a fresh burst of amusement from the boys, and she tightened her fingers into fists, but kept walking, never glancing their way. Even if it killed her, she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing how much their comments hurt.

Tommy slowed the truck more, swerving to the road’s dusty shoulder. “Hey, baby…check it out.” From the corner of her eyes she saw the two boys in the back of the pickup unzip their flies and pull out their penises. “If you weren’t so ugly,” taunted Ricky, the meanest of the group, “I’d even let you touch it. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, baby?”

The urge to run, as fast and far as she could, screamed through her. She fought the urge back, compressing her lips to keep from making a sound of revulsion and fear.

Ricky leaned over the side of the truck and made a lewd grab for her, forcing her to step off the shoulder and into the muddy field. Tommy gunned the engine and tore off, spitting up gravel and dirt, the boys’ laughter ringing in her ears.

Becky Lynn ran then, the gravel road biting the bottoms of her feet through her tattered sneakers, the bile of panic nearly choking her. She ran until she reached the safety of Bend’s town square.

Drawing in deep, shuddering breaths, Becky Lynn leaned against the outside wall of the Five and Dime, the corner building on the railroad side of the square. She pressed the flat of her hand to her pitching stomach and squeezed her eyes shut. Sweat beaded her upper lip and underarms; it trickled between her shoulder blades. The image of the boys, holding their penises and taunting her, filled her head, and her stomach rolled again. They’d never done anything like that before. She was used to their taunts, their obscene suggestions, but not…this.

Today they’d scared her.

Becky Lynn hugged herself hard. She was safe, she told herself. It was getting toward the end of summer, the boys were bored and got off on seeing her squirm. In a month they would start football practice and wouldn’t have the time or energy to seek her out.

Then she would have to face their jeers at school.

She fought against the tears that flooded her eyes, fought against the despair that filled every other part of her. She had nobody. Not one person in Bend she could turn to for help or support. Alone. She was alone.

Even as fatigue and hopelessness clutched at her, Becky Lynn curled her fingers into fists. She wouldn’t give up like her mother had. She wouldn’t. And someday, she promised herself, she would show Tommy and Ricky and everybody else in this two-bit town. She didn’t know how, but someday they would wish they’d been nice to her.