Authors: Carolyn Brown
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 going 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 drooped 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.
“You touch that phone and I’ll poke your eyes out with this,” she threatened.
He reached a paw out and touched it.
“I mean it. You’re supposed to be outside eating crackers, not my cell phone. Damn it all, why didn’t I remember it was in my pocket?”
He pulled it an inch further out of her reach and licked the edges.
“I hope it electrocutes you.” She finally got the wire hooked into the speaker hole.
The rat reared up on his hind legs and bared his teeth.
“Why do you want it? You can’t call for help. Let me have it and I swear I’ll give you every cracker in that basket.” She grabbed it and hurried back to the bed. Rat lumbered down the hole in the floor and went out to fight for soggy crackers.
She had part of one bar which meant if there was service in that area she might make one call. She sat there for a long time trying to decide who to call. Daisy or Travis?
Travis was closer and could get there faster.
“But Daisy and Jarod have access to an airplane. They could be here in an hour and I don’t have any idea how far I am from Mingus.” She remembered Jarod’s parents owned a small plane.
She noticed that she had several messages and listened to Daisy explaining that she and Jarod had been to church that morning when Cathy called. Evidently they were playing phone tag but for Cathy to call late that night if they didn’t connect sometime during the day. There was a message from Travis saying that he had to work late and they’d have to put off dinner and a movie.
Tears welled up in her eyes as their voices played in her ear. She held the phone to her heart as if it was a real person. When she looked at it again she noticed the blinking little battery notice at the top right-hand corner. She had enough power for one call if she was lucky.
She dialed Travis’s number and waited while it rang five times. Then his voice said that he wasn’t available, to leave a message. She groaned and was about to push the button to hang up when she heard the first little beep telling her that her phone would be powerless in a few seconds.
“Travis, I’m in Jefferson, Texas. Cross the bridge, down the bayou or river or whatever water is there, about a mile, in an old fisherman’s shack. Don’t call the police. Just come get me. I’ve been kidnapped and I’m chained to the floor and…”
Her time was up. She hoped he listened to his voice mail that evening. If not, no one would even realize she was gone until Monday night when she didn’t open the Honky Tonk.
“Well, Cathy O’Dell, you don’t have anything else to do other than fight with rats until then, so get busy on the lock,” she said.
* * *
Travis awoke late on Sunday morning. He rolled out of bed, ate a bowl of cereal, and got dressed. He was supposed to check things out at the rig site and then be done for the day, but Rocky either got food poisoning from his honky tonk woman’s cooking or else a flu bug from kissing her and couldn’t work with his head in the toilet every twenty minutes. So Travis filled in for him and worked until six on Monday morning.
It was mid morning when he got home and reached in his pocket to call Cathy to tell her that he was going to sleep at the trailer since she would already be up and around. But his cell phone wasn’t there. He patted his shirt pocket and it wasn’t there either.
“Must’ve dropped it in the truck. I’ll get it later,” he mumbled and went to bed.
He awoke at one o’clock and listened carefully. The place sounded and felt empty. He checked the clock again. Cathy should have been there at noon. He hoped she hadn’t contacted the same flu bug that had put Rocky on the ground. He went to the hall and peered out toward the Honky Tonk. The skies were gray and the day dreary. There should be lights on in her apartment and there were none.