Fraidy Hole: A Sheriff Lester P. Morrison Novel (16 page)

All bikers weren’t alike of course. There were those rare occasions when the bar filled with rough looking men, bearded and tattooed, all riding noisy Harley-Davidson’s that
made enough racket to
shake a filling loose.
Their leather jackets had names on their backs like Outlaws or Mongols.
Those boys made Earl nervous. But so far, no one had been shot, or knifed, or beaten, and bikers being bikers, did drink a lot of beer, filling Earl’s register with more profit than he usually made in a week.

The bar business was a living, albeit a meager one, and with Marilyn’s medical bills piling up, the future of the Pirate’s Den was shaky at best.
At 62 years of age, full Social Security was a ways off and Earl had no other income.
A second job, even if he could find one at his age, was out of the question considering the hours he put in at the bar just to keep the doors open.

“Earl
! You
gonna bring me my coffee or what?” Marilyn’s request came in loud and clear with all the subtleness of a bulldozer.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”

Earl filled her favorite cup; a big green thing with Frankoma Pottery embossed on the side, and carried it to the bedroom.
His wife did not look happy
,
but then that was not at all unusual.
Marylyn, all 375 lbs. of her, lay sprawled across the entire width of the queen-sized bed, her head propped up with a half dozen pillows and her tree trunk legs splayed open in an obscene V. Her thin brown hair hung long and loose as if vainly trying to cover her massive breasts, but failing miserably.
She was wearing one of her two nightgowns, the light weight one she used for summer and the flannel one for when the temperature dropped below 50 at night.
The flannel one would come out of the bottom drawer any day now as September was almost over.
The flannel nightgown and a terrycloth robe were in only their second season of use, having been ordered directly from The Shopping Channel. Marilyn didn’t get out much anymore and besides, there were no stores in Boise City that carried her size.
In fact, since the last 50 lbs. had slipped up on her, the nightgowns and robe was pretty much her entire wardrobe if you didn’t count the fluffy pink slippers.

The bed was Marilyn’s favorite place in the whole house with her oversized easy chair in the living room coming in at a close second.
An electric motorized scooter sat beside the bed to transport her between the two.
Marilyn kept roughly the same hours as Earl, staying up late and watching old movies on the high definition TV until he got home from the bar. She used Earl’s
getting up
sounds as her alarm clock in the morning. If she worked it right, she could get him to bring her
hot
coffee and toast
slathered
with grape jelly while still in bed and then, as soon as she heard the front door slam, doze for few delightful hours before wheeling her way to the TV and an afternoon of watching the soaps and the Price is Right, one of her favorites.
Marilyn and Earl had not shared a bed in years and both preferred it that way.
Sex in any form was not an option.

Some of the boys at the bar found it hard to understand
,
but Earl still had feelings for his wife. There were a few good years, especially the ones when Earl had a well-paying job as a truck driver before the company went bankrupt.
He
’d
saved
a little money,
certainly not a fortune
, but it was enough to buy the Pirate’s Den and start his own business, something he’d always wanted to do. At first, Marilyn would drop by in the evenings and chat with him and the customers. She liked having someone to talk to living out in the country like they did. But she didn’t like the taste of alcohol, never did, and as time passed, her evenings at the bar ceased altogether. Instead, Marilyn stayed home and ate…and ate.
It hadn’t really bothered Earl that much when his bride began to put on the pounds, Earl liked his women with a little meat on their bones, but when the flab around her middle started stacking up like firewood, and pleasingly plump turned to grossly obese, Earl found himself avoiding his wife as much as possible.
Marilyn made no attempt to curb her calories.
Any cooking done in the house, when she had the energy, was mostly pies and cakes with a double batch of brownies for the weekend.
Suggestions of a diet were met with “You could lose a few pounds yourself, ya know,” which Earl had to admit, was true.

Over the years, her mood and temperament had changed from fun loving and quick with a laugh, to one of grouchiness and constant criticism for not providing her with the finer things in life.
But Earl continued to cling to the memories of their happier days and had promised himself that he would care for Marilyn as best he could for as long as she needed it, despite her moods and tonnage.
That didn’t necessarily mean that he wouldn’t stray a little in the sex department if the opportunity presented itself.
He might be getting on in years but he did get the urge now and then.
The sight of those shapely female figures swinging their
little
butts around in front of the jukebox
or
bending over the pool table had caught his eye on se
veral occasions
.
Thinking back, he
could still
visualize
that one little filly that got so drunk last Thursday night, the young one in the short denim skirt.

*****

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty
.
Melissa opened her eyes. The light at the rim of the cellar door was brighter now, barely perceptible but definitely brighter. The sun would be up soon. She’d lost track of how many times she had closed her eyes during the night and counted out the seconds that added up to minutes before first light, but it helped to pass the time. At one point, she had made a silent vow to never again complain about mornings whether it was for early school buses or her chores on the farm or her mother urging her to get ready for church on Sunday.
Never before had a morning
taken so long to
arrive
or looked so good.
Never in her eighteen years on earth had she spent a more miserable night, shivering, thirsty, and her empty stomach now among the top three priorities of the new day, coming in right behind escape and a big drink of water. Sleep had come in snippets at best, her aches and pains denying any comfort, the intermittent rustle of leaves snapping her awake, and the ever present sense of dread that her rapist could return at any moment and finish her off. God, the thought of dying in th
is
hole, cellar, or wherever she was, was unthinkable.
And what kind of hole was she in anyway? She’d thought about it a lot during the night. If it was old fashioned root cellar, wouldn’t there be more shelves?
Melissa couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old when Grandma Millie had taken her down the steps
of her own root cellar
and proudly pointed out all the food that was stored there. There were three tiers of shelves if she remembered right, all lined with things like carrots and squash and crockery filled with sauerkraut. Bins were piled high with potatoes while onions hung in bunches from hooks nailed into the corner posts. Mason jars packed with something red—beets she supposed—took up one entire shelf. Seemed like there was
some
squash and turnips too.

But with the exception of the single plank on the back wall, there was none of that in Melissa’s cellar. And Granny’s cellar had a mound of dirt on top, not a hard metal door like this one. So, not a root cellar then. It could only be a storm cellar, a shelter from tornadoes, common in Oklahoma. Shelter? Melissa thought of the irony
. It’s sure not a shelter for me, more like a grave.
She shook her head of the thought. Alright then, it’s a
fraidy
hole. So why are there no people around? Nobody would spend the money to make a
fraidy
hole and not build it close to the house.
It wouldn’t make sense. So why didn’t she hear anyone; no voices, no tractors firing up for a day in the fields, no trucks going out to check the cattle, not even a barking dog? Either the people who lived here were gone
for the day
or…
no one
lived here, and maybe not for a long time either. The only sounds so far had been the traffic from a road somewhere, and not much of that.
The other sounds, the ones in the leaves on the floor, had become so numerous that Melissa had finally figured out what they must be, what was making that erratic rustling, scurrying noise all during the night; not an evil imp, not a vampire with blood-stained fangs, no animals to bite her toes off while she slept. Mice, it had to be field mice, a perfectly logical explanation.
Not that having a mouse run across her bare foot wouldn’t scare the bejesus out of her, but just knowing what was back there, back in the darkest part of the
fraidy hole
, and she was pretty sure of it by now, was a gargantuan relief.
Mice were common around a farm and Melissa was a farm girl.
Seeing a mouse in a grain bin was like seeing a cow in the pasture, they were ubiquitous, especially on the Parker place as Albert would not allow a cat on the property, mouser or not.

“Sneaky little bastards
,
they’re always under your feet,” was her dad
dy
’s feeling about cats.
Melissa had a cat once.
It had appeared from nowhere—as cats tend to do—and was concentration camp thin. Melissa fed it milk and table scraps—no way would Albert spend money on cat foot—until the cat looked reasonably healthy, its coat of light orange fur as shiny as new copper.
Not
a day went by that Albert didn’t cuss the cat, even kicking at it a few times, and when it failed to appear for its regular feeding one morning, Melissa knew, but couldn’t prove, that her
dad
had done away with her pet.
When she accused him of the dastardly deed, Albert denied it, but he wouldn’t look her in the eye either.

The more Melissa thought about her cat, the angrier she became. It began in her belly, moved up,
and
stuck in her throat. All at once, she let it go, throwing her
head
back and
screaming
at the concrete ceiling
.
“My dad-dy,” she
spat
, drawing it out as if she could yank the word from her mouth, toss it to the floor, and stomp it, “is one sorry SON OF A BITCH!
It felt good to say it and she felt better for doing so, but
it would do no good to cry about it now;
she had to get back to the problems at hand.

“Yep, that’s what I got, mice, no doubt about it,” she said aloud
, her voice now calm and even
.
At this stage of her captivity,
Melissa
,
having grown accustomed to the echo in her tiny chamber
of horrors,
was speaking all her thoughts
aloud.
Sometimes she answered her own questions, lunacy to some, but in her case, it was the closest thing to having someone to share her misery.
As if on cue, a movement caught her eye, and there it was, scampering along the base of the wall,
barely noticeable,
as it dashed toward the stairs where Melissa sat.

“Ah ha!
I see you, you little bugger.”
The rodent stopped, head up, nose and whiskers twitching, homing on the sound, sensing the air for danger.

“You want out little fella? C’mon, over here to the
steps
.
Look, there’s a crack at the top, just your size. Go for it.”
The mouse would have none it, no matter the sincerity of the invitation, and did a u-turn back to the shadows. Melissa allowed herself another smile, one of the few since her imprisonment.

“All right, now I have some real company down here, even if you are only a mouse.”
A scene from an old movie
came to mind
,
The Bird Man of Alcatraz
starring
Burt Lancaster.
A man in a stark cell, almost like her little prison but with better light, had befriended a fallen bird. Birds became his passion and made his time in prison more tolerable.
Melissa wasn’t sure if she could make friends with a mouse though. She took one last look through the crack and descended the stairs.

“Okay
,
mouse, I doubt that I’ll be here long enough for us to become
best friends
, but you should have a name anyway.
But not Mickey, that’s way too corny and besides, you look like a girl to me.
How about Lulu?
What do you think?
Say again?
I didn’t hear that
,
but I know you can hear me.
Tell you what, if Lulu is fine with you, sit tight and don’t make a sound.
All right then, Lulu it is.
Now I don’t want to be rude, us having just met and all, but I can’t sit around and talk to you all day, I’ve got work to do.”