The Last Days of Summer (29 page)

Katie wipes sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. Above her, the ceiling fan struggles to move the stagnant air, shaking as it rotates. She's topping up the Heinz bottles with extra ketchup. Not Heinz, but
Penny reckons no one will taste the difference, and so far she's been right. ‘Penny sure does know how to save those dimes!' Tom had said to Katie one evening, when they were closing up, and Katie had laughed real hard when he'd said that to her. Tom had chuckled, too, though Katie's fairly certain Penny would not have found it as amusing, her staff laughing at her expense like that.

A bell chimes as the diner door swings open. Katie turns. ‘Josh!'

He grins. ‘Hey, baby.' But there's something off in his smile, in the way he says his name for her. He crosses the room to the counter in front of where Katie's filling up the ketchup bottles. The trucker, three stools down from him, glances up as Josh sits down, but when he sees Katie lean across the counter to peck Josh a quick hello, he mumbles something under his breath, and turns back to his food.

There's something off in Josh's kiss, too, but still Katie forces a smile.
Maybe I'm imagining things.
Out loud, she says, ‘I didn' know you were comin' in to see me tonight.' She smiles her cutest smile. The one she knows he likes.

‘I hadn't planned on it, baby. Something's …' he hesitates ‘… come up.'

She feels the smile fall from her face. ‘What is it?'

His eyes drop to the stain on her top. A smile briefly plays at the corners of his mouth as he nods towards it. ‘That's a new look.'

‘Oh, shut it.' She crumples up and throws a paper napkin at him. It bounces off his shoulder onto the counter before them.

He smiles at her, and for a split second it seems
everything's going to be OK. Then his smile falters and he leans forward across the counter. ‘We're fixin' to ride on up to your house,' he whispers. ‘I wanted to swing by here first, see that you was here.'

Her throat goes dry. Her chest feels cold. ‘Why?' she whispers. Her eyes search his.

He takes her hand and holds it on the counter before them. ‘I wanted to make sure you were safe.'

She feels her hand go clammy in his. ‘Why wouldn't I be safe, Josh? Why are you going to my house?' Confusion wrinkles her brow.

‘We have to do something, Katie.' His voice is hushed but urgent. ‘We can't just let him go round scaring folks.'

She pulls her hand from his and straightens. ‘No, Josh.' Her words pierce the stuffy room, too loud against the muted backdrop of the radio. The trucker looks over, then grunts and turns his attention back to his dinner. In the booth by the window, the father is still drinking his coffee while the mother holds the tot and rocks her gently back and forth. Behind Josh, parked out front, is his pickup, another older model of truck parked up beside it. Katie can see shadowy silhouettes moving in both vehicles. ‘Just how many of y'all,' she whispers hoarsely, ‘are fixin' on goin' on up to mine?'

He follows her gaze out of the window. ‘There's a good few.'

She can barely speak, her throat's so tight. ‘What are ya'll fixin' on doin'?'

He reaches out and runs the back of his fingers down the side of her cheek. ‘We have to put the fear in him is
all, baby,' he coos. ‘We can't have him going round the way he is.'

‘Did something happen?'

He hesitates.

‘Please,' she whispers, ‘what happened?'

‘He saw Rose,' Josh says quietly, ‘and Eddie ain't havin' that.'

The Elvis clock on the back wall chimes the hour, and Elvis's hips swivel and jiggle the time. Katie's whole body goes cold. Like all the sweat on her brow has seeped back into her head. ‘What about Mom? And Joanne?' Her heartbeat quickens to panic.

‘Don't worry 'bout them none, baby,' he murmurs. ‘Nobody got beef with them.'

‘Then why were you checkin' if I was here, if it's gonna be so safe?'

He hesitates. ‘Just in case,' he says eventually. ‘You know I don't like you near him.'

Her turn to pause. ‘Be careful.'

Outside, one of the pickups honks its horn, calling him. He grins. ‘I'm always careful, baby.' And he turns to go. He's halfway out of the door before she stops him.

‘Josh?'

He turns.

‘Don't hurt him, OK?'

The trucker looks up from his meal again. The father up from his coffee. The mother looks to the father, and the tot, oblivious, sticks a crayon in her mouth and gurgles rather loudly. Josh nods to Katie and shuts the door behind him. The headlights on both pickups switch on, momentarily flooding the diner with light. She watches
as Josh climbs into his and as both trucks pull out. Her hands are shaking when she picks up the Heinz and she has to set the bottle down so she doesn't spill its refill. A small bit of tomato ketchup slips down her fingers to the outside of her right hand just under her pinkie. She stares at the drop of ketchup transfixed, her mind miles up the road, back home already.
The colour of fresh blood.

There is no moon, but the sky still glows blue-black, alit with stars. Jasper lies in his boyhood room, his feet hanging off the end of his bed. His hands are behind his head, and he gazes up at the white of the ceiling sky above him. Carefully, one by one, he relocks the doors inside his mind that hold back his memories. There are places he does not let his mind wander. Things better forgotten. There are parts of him so filled with hate, so coloured by hatred, that he has grown to loathe them. To loathe what lies inside himself.

He hadn't thought he'd see her. Not like that. Not so soon. He doesn't want to think about her. The way she was. Before. Or the way she looked today, her face newly flushed with surprise. And fear, he reckons, yes, that was fear in her eyes. He doesn't want to think about how that might make him feel.

They didn't speak the whole drive home and dinner had been no different, Joanne pestering them with questions that fell on deaf ears till eventually even she'd fallen silent, moving the peas around her plate, piling them in tiny stacks held together with mashed potato. He had been glad when his own plate was clean. Was glad that Katie was at the diner and her judgemental eyes were off him. He did
not go out on the front porch with Lizzie after dinner. Did not watch the sunset. Went straight up to bed instead. The girls' bedroom door had clicked shut long ago, and Lizzie's footsteps followed down the hall shortly after. The house is silent.

It takes him a moment to notice the headlights that reflect off the road to dance across his white, starless ceiling sky. Circling like searchlights.
Odd
, he thinks,
cars drivin' out this way at this late hour.
Then he hears the engines purr and spit and rev. Horns honk and tyres squeak. Engines are fed more juice and revved more loudly. He hears the shouts of men; the crickets go all quiet. Though the room is warm, Jasper feels a chill pass over him, and the tiny hairs at the back of his neck stand on end with warning.

He sits up slowly, swinging his feet to one side, placing them lightly on the floor. The wooden boards feel smooth and cool beneath his bare feet. He sits, body tensed, ears straining. He does not go to the window to look out. He can guess what lies below. Since church, a part of him has known this must be coming. A part of him has been waiting. Slowly he rises from the bed and pulls on his jeans and the old Coca-Cola T-shirt he wore straight out of prison. He does not look in the mirror. Does not pause to put shoes on. He opens the door slowly so it won't squeak, though why he's being so quiet he cannot say – the racket outside is more than enough to wake the whole house.

He steps out into the hall, the floorboards creaking under his weight. The voices outside call louder now, jeering, taunting. He can almost make out their words, but cannot recognize the tones or tell how many men are
out there. A click behind him makes him turn sharply. Joanne peeks from her bedroom door, dirty blonde hair tangled around her, shorts and top barely covering the woman she's becoming.
Don't ever change
, he thinks.
Don't ever age.

She rubs the sleep from her eyes. ‘What's going on?' She yawns, too tired still to know that she should be afraid.

‘Get back in your room,' he growls.

Her big eyes widen and blink. Awake. She steps back inside the darkness of her room, closing the door. He waits to hear the latch click shut, then turns and goes downstairs.

He can hear the voices now, louder, growing in confidence.

‘Coward!'

‘Bastard!'

‘Cunt!'

Louder with every step he takes.

‘You come down here, you son of a bitch!'

The stairs squeak as he passes over them. He pauses a moment to let the old house settle around him. Something about the cool wood of the steps against the soles of his feet calms him just a little. Downstairs is flooded with light. They've parked up around the house in a semi-circle, high beams still on, filling the house with light. He walks forward, blind, knowing this house, trusting where his feet must lead him. It's like he's a teenager again, sneaking out in the dark, except this time the world is all light. Too light. He does not belong in such a world of light. And yet he walks forward, hand up to try to
shield his eyes. He fumbles a moment with the screen, then again trying to find the door knob. He opens the door. He knows that, if they were so inclined, they could shoot him, right there, spotlight nearly upon him, framed by the open door, illuminated by their high beams. A nearly perfect target, he reckons, yet he still walks forward. He stops in the centre of the porch, hand still up to shield him, eyes still blinking, fighting to adjust.

There are four pickups surrounding the house in a rough semi-circle. One, he recognizes as the truck Katie climbed into beside her boyfriend just a few nights before. Another, he sees, is the same deep blue truck he'd spotted when he was first home and walking the back roads. Eddie Saunders' truck. He does not recognize the other two vehicles, a rusted-out old Chevy it's hard to guess the colour of, and an old green Ford that's best days clearly are behind it. He cannot tell how many men there are: the high beams off the trucks are too bright to see much else beyond them, but he'd guess, from the shadows he can decipher, maybe fifteen. Maybe more. Eddie's truck is parked up right in front of the house, dead centre in Mama's garden. Three of Mama's rose bushes lie uprooted, tyre tracks pressing them into the dry earth. Jasper does not take the time to assess what other damage may have been done, but inside he feels a sadness settle, unlike those in his life that he has known before. He feels a new affinity with the garden, looking at it destroyed, the beds he only just weeded with his own bare hands.

That garden was his mother's pride and joy.

The jibes and jeers fall silent as Jasper emerges from
the house, the silence he steps into almost more frightening, more deadly, than the shouted angry sounds that lured him out. Some of the men are holding shotguns. Others rifles. Some just baseball bats. Eddie Saunders stands front and centre, his Winchester semi-automatic casually slung over one shoulder. ‘Well, well, well,' he says. ‘Look what scum we've found here.'

Jasper slowly reaches above and pulls the cord on the porch light, hoping to illuminate the faces in the darkness before him. Light spills onto the lawn, brightening the deep shadows of the closest men's faces. One hand still shades his eyes from the intensity of their high beams. ‘You mind turnin' those lights down, boys?' His voice is even. ‘There's a woman 'n' child sleepin' inside.'

Eddie's laugh cuts through the darkness. Others follow suit and chuckle, but it's his laugh that sticks in Jasper's ears, repeating, burning. ‘Since when do you give a fuck,' Eddie snarls, ‘about anybody but you?'

Jasper scans the men before him, looking for familiar faces, but most stand in front of the glow of the high beams, their faces blacked out and lost in shadow. ‘This here's my property,' he says firmly. ‘Y'all weren't invited. I suggest you find your own ways home.'

Eddie laughs again, but it is far from a happy sound, and Jasper cannot make out his expression. The high beams off the trucks turn all the men into silhouettes, shadows of themselves. ‘Speaking of invitations,' Eddie laughs, ‘I don' myself remember us all invitin' you on back.'

‘This is my home. I don't want trouble. I ain't back for that.'

‘What are you back for? A bit of free pussy? Back to finish off what you started, you sick fuck?'

Jasper closes his eyes and lets the words absorb into him. Become him.
You sick fuck. Yes
, he thinks,
I am.
He smiles. ‘What's wrong, Eddie? You didn' miss me all these years?'

Eddie looks down to his feet, slowly shaking his head. He clicks his tongue. ‘Jasper, Jasper, Jasper,' he says. ‘What are we gonna do with you, huh? See, I was of half a mind to shoot you when you just came out there, but that's too messy, ain't it? That's not really my style. No, I got a life to live 'n' you ain't worth givin' it up for.' Eddie spits a big wad of tobacco onto the ground beside him. It lands on an evening primrose, tightly closed for the night, stepped on and trodden down into its bed. ‘The problem is,' Eddie continues, ‘I just can't let her see you. I thought at first, maybe, when I heard you was gettin' out you'd be wise enough not to come on back here. Thought you'd be smart enough to know when you're not welcome. But, shit,' he spits another large wad of tobacco, ‘you ain't even smart enough for that. I thought then maybe the paper had it wrong a bit, maybe you'd come out of Huntsville all reformed 'n' shit, so I gave you the chance. Didn't I give him the chance, boys?'

Around him the other men murmur and mumble their agreement. ‘Damn right, you did,' a voice shouts. A young man's voice. Familiar to Jasper but hard to place.