Donnybrook: A Novel (22 page)

Authors: Frank Bill

Late evening air knuckled their skin. Crickets and katydids chirped in the wilderness that surrounded them like the approaching darkness. Two plastic grocery sacks lay at their feet with the necessities: pants, shirts, bra, panties, and a few diapers. The sound of tires crunching gravel grew in pitch.

Earlier, a phone’s ringing had echoed throughout a rundown trailer. Tammy answered, “Hello?”

Jarhead said, “Be down at Blister Fork in four hours. Pack light.”

Hearing the wear and tear in his tone, she asked, “You okay?”

Jarhead hesitated and said, “Been better.”

She said, “It’s been three damn days, did you … did you … win?”

He said, “They was no winner. Get packing.” And hung up.

Now the rusted-out Bronco squeaked to a stop. Rocky dust fogged in front of the headlights. The engine rumbled. The Bronco’s passenger-side door opened. Jarhead stepped out onto the road. His scooped-out muscled arms embraced Tammy and his boys, helped them into the back of the Bronco with the two sacks of their belongings. Zeek sat on Jarhead’s lap, Caleb sat to his right. Tammy to his left.

The darkness inside the Bronco couldn’t hide Tammy’s melancholy any more than the shadows could hide the jagged purples fusing with the violets of Jarhead’s lumped facade. Tammy held tight to Jarhead, nodded to the Bronco’s driver, and asked, “Who is he?”

From the driver’s seat, a set of worn eyes, one outlined in swelling from Angus’s fist, caught Tammy’s gaze in the rearview, and a voice said, “Name’s Purcell.”

Purcell shifted into drive, and Tammy said, “Mine’s Tammy. Nice to make your acquaintance.”

Purcell said, “Pleased to finally make yours, Tammy.”

From the radio, Johnny Cash spoke with the crackle of static behind his voice:
And I heard as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts sang come and see, and I saw and behold a white horse.

Tammy pushed her head into Jarhead’s chest and asked, “Where we going?”

Jarhead said, “To Dote’s gun shop.”

Tammy raised her head, looked at Jarhead, asked, “Dote’s gunshop?”

Jarhead looked Tammy in the face and said, “I gotta pay back what I stole. And Purcell here wants to do a little shopping.”

“For guns?”

Purcell looked in the rearview to Tammy and said, “We cashed out from the ’Brook by our hides. We got a sackful of cash, but we didn’t make no friends there. There’s some shit about to go down, and it’s startin’ right here in these counties. We need to make sure we’re protected.”

Confused, Tammy asked, “What kinda tongue is you talking?”

Jarhead gently grabbed her arm and silently nodded, his eyes expressing that he’d learned to trust this man, and so should she.

In the background Johnny Cash scratched at the strings of his acoustic guitar and began singing,
There’s a man going around taking names, and he decides who to free and who to blame. Everybody won’t be treated all the same, there’ll be a golden ladder reaching down when the man comes around.

Purcell rounded the curve, and a Shell gas station sat on the left. Jarhead eyed Purcell in the rearview and said, “Through the light, past Wendy’s, and stop in front of the building next to it.”

Purcell nodded.

Jarhead explained to Tammy, “Purcell sees things before they happen.”

Tammy turned to Jarhead and asked, “He a fortuneteller?”

“Fortuneteller, soothsayer. He’s seen change coming, violent change.”

Tammy protested. “What’s that got to do with us? Ain’t you done enough?”

From the driver’s seat Purcell said, “This is Jarhead’s calling. Boy fights like an angel. We need him, we all need him.”

Jarhead felt Tammy tremor with worry, pulled her close to his side with his left arm, his boys with his right, and said, “I believe what Purcell is saying.” He turned and pressed his lips to Tammy’s forehead and told her, “It’ll be okay, Tammy, it’ll be okay.”

Purcell stopped in front of the gun shop. Reached across the passenger’s seat to open the door.

Jarhead released Tammy, pushed the seat forward, sat Zeek next to Caleb, and stepped from the Bronco. Purcell opened the driver’s side and got out with a stack of crumpled bills. Looked across the Bronco’s hood at Jarhead as they walked toward the gun shop and said, “Johnny, anything happens to me, remember this name: Van Dorn. No idea what it means. And another thing—you need to tell her that
it
ain’t even started yet.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the early readers of the
Donnybrook
manuscript, Donald Ray Pollock, Anthony Neil Smith, Christa Faust, John Rector, Craig Clevenger, Victor Gischler, Kyle Minor, Jed Ayers, Scott Phillips, Keith Rawson, Roger Smith, Elaine Ash, David Cranmer, Israel Byrd, Denny Faith, and Ella Baker. You guys and gals kick ass.

To Scott Montgomery, for spreading the word and having me at the Book People. For the music of Ray Wylie Hubbard and for being a damn good friend and letting me know that if one were to cut my words with a knife, they’d bleed.

To Rod Wiethop, for being an early fan and a damn good friend.

To all of my martial arts and boxing teachers, John King, Tony Wood, Matt Kitterman, Eric Haycraft, Frank Sexton, and John Winglock Ng. Without your passing me your knowledge, wisdom, and discipline, I’d have never made it this far as a writer.

Thanks to my agent, Stacia J. N. Decker, for getting this into shape and not letting me take the easy way out, and to my kick-ass editors Sean McDonald and Emily Bell, for sound advice throughout the editing process.

Thanks to everyone at FSG, my copy editors, proofreaders, Rodrigo and the art/design people, and the foreign-rights department. And my publicist, Brian Gittis.

Most of all, thanks to my family and friends for coming to my readings and spreading the good word. Your support means the world to me. And to my mother and father for raising me on Clint Eastwood movies.

ALSO BY FRANK BILL

Crimes in Southern Indiana

Praise for Frank Bill

“Frank Bill’s
Donnybrook
is Poe shooting heroin, Steinbeck freebasing cocaine, and Hemingway really drunk. It’s so great I felt I had been throat-punched, kicked in the cojones, and was going to spit blood.”

—Ray Wylie Hubbard

“Frank Bill is the kind of writer, and his characters the kind of fighters, who sneer at the rope-a-dope approach. In
Donnybrook
’s wild world of meth, bloody knuckles, flashing knives, and snapping teeth, you come out swinging—period.”

—Michael Koryta, author of
The Prophet

“Good Lord, where in the hell did this guy come from? Blasts off like a frigging rocket ship and hits as hard as an ax handle to the side of the head after you’ve snorted a nose full of battery acid and eaten a live rattlesnake for breakfast. One of the wildest damn rides you’re ever going to take inside a book.”

—Donald Ray Pollock, author of
The Devil All the Time

“Frank Bill’s
Donnybrook
is a backwoods, gut-punch masterpiece. Bill manages to imbue his characters with a full and deep range of human emotion in spite of the fact that their lives come in only two styles: hard and harder. Read and get schooled.”

—Reed Farrel Coleman, author of
Gun Church

“Frank Bill’s characters all seem to be hurtling at ninety miles an hour down dead-end streets, and his recounting of their passage is vivid and unforgettable. Like Barry Hannah on amphetamines, but the voice is undeniably Bill’s own.”

—William Gay, author of
Provinces of Night

“Now listen here: I’m a big old boy, and I don’t scare easy, but the world of Frank Bill’s imagination is one so damned terrifying that I felt the urge, maybe thirty pages in, to crawl underneath the nearest table and take to sucking my thumb in earnest. With a cast of characters as depraved and leather-hearted as these, with a landscape as bleak and blanched by despair as this, with a convergence of conflicts so hell-bent on combustion, it’s a wicked wonder that this wonderfully wicked book doesn’t consume itself in flames the minute you open the first page and let the oxygen in.”

—Bruce Machart, author of
The Wake of Forgiveness
and
Men in the Making

“Frank Bill’s prose rumbles and howls, as distinctly American as the exhaust note of a blown Chevy. Raw. Hard. True. There’s blood all over these pages. Where his first collection,
Crimes in Southern Indiana
, is a punch to the gut,
Donnybrook
is a shattering right-cross knockout.”

—Daniel Knauf, creator of the HBO series
Carnivàle

“[Frank Bill’s] stories form the ideal nexus between literary art and pulp fiction: beautifully crafted, compulsively readable, and addictive as crystal meth.”

—Pinckney Benedict, author of
Dogs of God

“
Crimes in Southern Indiana
brings to light a major American writer of fiction, the prose equivalent to a performance by Warren Oates or a song by Merle Haggard or a photograph by Walker Evans. Tempting though it is to compare him to other writers, the fact is that five years hence every good new fiction writer to come into view will be compared to Frank Bill.”

—Scott Phillips, author of
The Ice Harvest

“Take the bark of a .45, the growl of a rusted-out muffler, and the banshee howl of a meth-head on a three-day bender, and you approximate the voice of Frank Bill, a startlingly talented writer whose stories rise from the same dark lyrical well as those of Daniel Woodrell and Dorothy Allison.”

—Benjamin Percy, author of
The Wilding

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

First edition, 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bill, Frank, 1974–

Donnybrook / Frank Bill. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-374-53289-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Indiana—Fiction. 2. Boxing stories. I. Title.

PS3602.1436 D66 2013

813'.6—dc23