Page 2 of Liquids

I look at the trailer and then back at him. “Is there a problem?”

“Yeah, girl, there’s a problem.”

He rams the shift stick into reverse and fishtails backward over the grass and onto the dirt track again. I grab for the strap above my head so I don’t end up in the engine, but my hand slaps off the roof. When I look up, there’s a tear where it used to be.

“Fucking hold on,” he says, flooring the accelerator, and if I thought we were lurching before, it’s nothing to this, racing down the road at twice the speed we came up it. I clutch at his huge bicep: It’s the most stable thing in here. I think he’s grinding his teeth.

He swings to the left down another track that’s possibly a creek, water spraying mud up and out onto the windshield. About half a mile down, low buildings loom out of the dark on our right, and he wrenches the wheel, swinging into the area in front of them, headlights sweeping over the stone walls in a wide arc. The grass is long and untamed, the windows filthy, the front door of the main house so battered it’s no longer possible to tell what color it once was. Cars litter the yard.

“Fucking jackasses,” he says, as he leans into the back and pulls out a rifle and a long leather pole that could be … holy shit, it’s a whip! Jesus Christ. What the fuck?

He jumps down from the cab, cocks the gun, and slides two cartridges into it before locking it back into place. Then he points it at the door and fires, and my mouth drops open as the lock explodes.

“Come out, you fucking cowards! Had to wait until I went out, did you?”

Silence. The windows are all dark.

He lifts the rifle again and shoots out a window in an explosion of glass.

“You want me to come in there and fire at you?” he shouts. “I know you’re home, you assholes. No bar in town’d have you drinking at it.”

I was hoping for a warm bed and some interesting sex, not an episode of CSI.

Still nothing moves inside the house.

“You want me to shoot the shit out of your cars?”

He cocks the gun, takes another cartridge out of his pocket, and loads it up.

“Last warning!” he adds, then he points the rifle at the front tire of the nearest truck and fires.

I jump as the door slams open. “What are you fucking doing, you jerk? I can’t afford new tires.”

The guy in the doorway is vaguely familiar. Belligerent. A beer belly hanging over his pants with a check shirt stretched over it, buttons straining.

Jodi Carpenter.

School jock, chief asshole of all the school assholes. He raped a girl in ninth grade. She was fourteen. He was never charged for it because her family didn’t want their daughter to “go through all that.” He sways on the front step. Looks like things have gone downhill for Jodi since he left school, but then that’s true of all of us.

“I can’t afford a new fucking trailer. You should have thought of that before you did it over.”

An oily grin creeps over Jodi’s face, and my skin crawls. Back at high school, he used that smile when he leaned into girls in the hallways or at parties when no one was looking. Trapping them with his hips against the wall. I kneed him in the balls once. One of his buddies beat me up for that little show of defiance, picked his time when I was off guard and no one was watching, the asswipe. When I got home afterward, my dad took one look at me and grunted, “What did you do?” I loved my dad, and he was my biggest champion, but he was a jerk a lot of the time, especially when he’d been drinking.

Rig puts the gun down on the grass. And before Jodi can do anything, even lurch back inside, the whip cracks out and I don’t see where it hits him, but he stumbles, clutching his leg.

“What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck is that? I never did nothing to your trailer. Fuck, man.”

The whip snakes out again and wraps around his calf, and his arms flail as he keels over backward.

“Get off me, you piece of shit!” he shouts.

“You want me to attach you to the back of my car and drag you along? I’ll bet that’d be fun to watch. We could video it and post it on social media. You got a big following, Jodi, for your prostitutes and your drugs?”

That’s what Jodi does now? Forget CSI, this is Miami Vice.

A mountain of a man appears in the doorway behind Jodi, a pistol in his hand, but somehow it whips into the air, flying toward Rig and landing several feet away. He picks it up and shoots out another tire on the car.

“Any more of you assholes want to come out here?” he shouts. “Bring me another gun, why don’tcha?”