Country Hardball Read Free Page A

Thought I was gonna have to come after you. Then I hear you’re working for the county now that you’re a free man. Made a call. And here you are. Come to deliver paperwork. Just like the social services people when they took Lily away. They take your daughter and give you forms. Then they come back and tell you she ate a bottle of pills. And then there’s all that other paperwork to bury her.” He walked up to me, put the point of the knife to my neck. “You killed her. Sent her over the edge.”
    I tried to hold my head still as I talked. “Not my fault.”
    I could carry the blame for a lot of stuff. But not this. All I wanted was a new start. Fresh on the job. A blank slate.
    He put the heel of his boot into my chest, my breath falling in sputters on the ground. “You took my daughter from me, you piece of shit. After all those years. The past is the past. But you never get out of it. You can let it go all you want, boy, but it ain’t up to you. It don’t let go of you.”
    I thought he was talking about me. What I’d done. My parents. The time I’d spent in juvie. The week I was free before I’d been pushed around enough and went out looking for a fight and found it. The year and a half I went inside for the stabbing. Trouble inside. More trouble outside. Six months at Haven House, then on my own.
    I was facedown on the ground, trying to push myself up. “Trouble’s a dog, son. A goddamned fucking dog. It gets your scent and hunts you down.” I thought he was talking about me.
    He wasn’t.
    “Yeah, I did some shit I ain’t proud of. Some ‘fucked-up, repugnant shit.’ That’s from a movie, son.” I was still struggling to get up, and he kicked my arms out from under me. I fell back into the dirt, hit the side of my head on a rock, something hidden just below the dark ground. “I thought I was clear. That I’d left it behind. Then Claudia, that’s my wife, she gets sick and leaves. Then Lily gets depressed because of your stupid shit. Says there ain’t no point anymore.” He looked at the buildings that held her paintings. “She got artistic. Woman at her school said that was good. An outlet.” He spit. “Outlet, my ass.”
    He?” Caskey askedan H walked over to me. He was close enough that I could snap his neck, but I was past that. I was good now. I could get through this without violence. Let him talk. Let him free himself. Let him come through the pain, the broken glass in the belly like I had. Just let him talk.
    “You understand what I’m saying to you?” He leaned into my ear. “Can you hear me?”
    He turned his back on me, but I didn’t have the strength to get up. My eye was covered in dirt and blood. My head was liquid, moving around, looking for balance.
    Five years ago I could have taken out his knee in a couple of seconds, sent an elbow into his Adam’s apple. Five years ago that is what I did. What sent me back inside. I didn’t want to go back inside. And I didn’t want that, that darkness he was talking about, back inside of me. If you’ve never felt it, then you don’t know what I’m talking about. The darkness that fills in from the edges. You think you can hold it back, but it seeps through like mud through door cracks.
    He turned around to look at me. Take the knife, then I could settle him down. Talk to him. I didn’t want to have to break him. I didn’t want that life back.
    “Claudia gone. Lily gone. All payback, son. For the shit I’d done when I was a young man.” He shook his head. “It comes after you. Takes a while, but it finds you.” He kneeled down near my face. “Like I found you. And that’s what I’m gonna do. You see, some people get bit by a dog and they get scared of dogs. They run and hide. Wet their pants when a dog barks.” He spit. “And some people, well, son, some people get mad at the fucking dog. Some people get real fuckin’ pissed at the dog. And some people find that dog and carve a fuckin’ hole in that piece of