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On the bottom step, its wide curvy shape is planted—and on the bottle neck, a brown sack hangs.
Squinting his eyes, Cletus leans in closer as if to get a better idea of what it is, that brown sack, but he doesn’t take a step. His mud boots are planted firm in the slushy ground.
He gets what he wants—
His eyes strain harder against the light until he sees it clearly, some sort of hood, fashioned from a potato sack or something, pulled over the bottle neck. Two holes are cut out of the hood at odd angles, like droopy, hollow eyes.
And just like the light…
Those eyes are looking right at him.
Finally, Cletus moves.
He leans back, his mind swerving to the dock again, to the boat.
Without his guns, he ain’t all that keen on sticking around here.
But he manages just two backsteps before it happens—
Quicker than he can gasp, Cletus chokes on a chunk of blood that comes rushing up his throat.
He blinks, once, twice, staring ahead at the trailer door with blank, stunned eyes. Mouth agape, blood spills freely from him. His raised arm, hand gripping the machete, twitches… and starts to drop.
Faintly, he makes out his bloody reflection in the gleam of the moonshine bottle… His reflection and a strange figure behind him. It’s a head next to his… a head so unnatural that it must be a hood, one spattered with blood. One just like the hood pulled over the bottleneck.
Cletus droops the machete from his limp grip and looks down at the blood pooling at his chest. The longest damn hunting knife he ever saw just sticks right out of him. The tip, the serrated underside, the smooth polished metal, all slicked crimson with his blood…
He chokes on a guttural sound.
The blade twists—and rips out from his back, taking his life with it.
Dead eyes stare down at a hole in a chest.
Dead knees hit the ground with a slush.
A dead Cletus crumples to the mud—
And it’s silent again in the pit. A place where secrets are buried… but don’t ever die.
8
If tossing and turning and silent tears wetting a pilled pillow is sleep, then Billie slept well that night. Not like she could expect anything better, though.
Sleepless nights are an old friend to her, for many reasons. Fights in the trailer park that rage on from dusk till dawn; her mom’s drug-fueled rampages out in the lounge area; Preston’s many breakups with her and same reversed; and of course, her secret.
Booze helped back in those days.
Those days. Sounds almost reminiscent.
Billie scoffs a scratchy sound, shaking her head as if to chastise herself. ‘Seven years ago’, she guesses as she sits up on the thin mattress in the narrow trailer bedroom and, with balled-up fists, rubs her swollen eyes.
Must say a lot about her that she’s lost more sleep over Preston ripping out her heart yearly than killing someone. Someone she knew. Hated, yeah, but still.
Well,it is what it is, as Tonya says.
And Billie reaches for her water bottle. It’s mostly empty, a pessimism that lives inside of her, but she swigs down the last of the moonshine—down to the final drop.
Henry Maxwell isn’t coming back. And Billie, in all raw morning honesty, doesn’t give a damn. She drinks, not because of Henry exactly, but because of Cletus. What he had her do. What she had to see, watch, listen to. If she lets herself, she can still hear the sludge of flesh and—worst of all—the crunch of bone as the machete hacked through.
