Country Hardball Read Free

now. Make up for what I’d done.
    “No reason you should know me,” Mr. Greer was saying. Mid-conversation. Like he’d been talking for a while. But I was just coming back around. I rubbed my jaw where he’d hit me. Scratched through my beard. Something was flaking there. Blood. Dirt. I blinked. Rubbed my eyes with my hands, which were tied together. “She kept saying how it was so sad, such darkness.” He was running a sharpening wheel, sparks flying off the knife blade. I looked out through the windows but only saw sky. I was pretty sure we were in one of the outbuildings I’d come to complain about. Yeah. Another funny story. “You know anything about darkness, shithead?”
    Yeah. I had some ideas. Some ideas I tried to stay away from. “I didn’t kill your daughter.”
    “The hell you didn’t,” he said. “You kill everything, don’t you? People like you? You’re a curse. A blight. A bringer of darkness.”
    For what must have been the twentieth time in the past however long I’d been at his place, I had no idea what he was talking about. “I didn’t kill your daughter.”
    Looking through the windows, I could see the sun at the top of the sky. Guess I’d been out a little while, but not too long.
    He stopped sharpening the knife and turned around to face me. “Maybe you should stop talking about my daughter right about now.”
    I’d wanted this job. I’d wanted to work outside. Drive around, listening to Drive-By Truckers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Little Feat, all windows-down and fields full of sunshine. Sounds like a great day, back roads through Columbia County, grabbing a sandwich at the gas station, being your own boss in a sense. Staying away from trouble. Living a normal life.
    Yeah, I’d done things I wasn’t proud of. The accident with my parents. A few other things that ended up with people dying. Put a man down in self-defense. Finished a fight I hadn’t started. The neck is a fragile twig. But I’d served my time for some of that and that was behind me. Someone else’s life. Not who I’d wanted to be, who I’d become. I knew that if I lived clean from here on out, woke up every morning in the light, things would be fine. I was starting from scratch. Only this point on counts. A good job. Coworkers. Friends. The sunlight. The glare from the road. The summer brightness of things not yet destroyed.
    He had me up, blade at the back of my neck, pushing me out the door to the edge of a ravine behind his field. He hit me in the shoulder with the hilt of the knife, and I dropped to my knees.
    “My girl was impressionable,” he said. “Young. Innocent.” He sounded like he was going to cry, sniffling a little. But he didn’t. Just stood there looking out at the ravine. “What you did to your parents sent her over the edge. S a couple of drunk Mexicans.J2 said, he was young. Troubled. Artistic. Like her mother.” He pointed the knife at one of the other sheds. Another cinderblock box that brought me out here in the first place. I was sluggish from the head shots, but I focused where he pointed.
    “That one there,” he said. “With the lock on the door. Full of her paintings.” I wasn’t talking, so he kept on. “She did thirty-seven paintings of you and your mommy and daddy. The car crash. Locked herself in her room and painted. And screamed and cried. And painted. All ’cause of you and your goddamned fool life. Broke her soul.”
    “I didn’t kill your daughter.”
    “Damn sure did.” He walked to the edge of the ravine and looked down. “She couldn’t take it. The emptiness. The darkness. Whatever it is these kids feel. I just tried to get her through it after her mother died. Just hoping she’d be okay. Hope.” He spit. “Damn hope.”
    “I’m sorry about your daughter, but I didn’t kill her. I’ve done a lot of bad things, but I didn’t kill her.” Back here was dark, muddy, seeping through the knees of my pants.
    “I been watching you. Waiting for you.