Country Hardball Read Free Page B

shit’s head to clean out the darkness.”
    He aimed the knife at me, reached back into his belt for a pistol in the other hand. “You’re not the first piece of shit I’ve had to settle a score with.” He looked at me, then down to the bottom of the ravine. “You know how many bodies they’ve found down there?”
    I didn’t say anything, kept my eyes on his. Tried to fight the desire to send my head into his jaw.
    He said it again. “You know how many bodies they’ve found down there?” He leaned down into my face. “Not a goddamned one.”
    I stood up, heart beating, filling my ears with thumps and blood. I was good now. The pressure coming back, again. I’d given up drugs. Pressing against the inside of my skull. I didn’t even cuss anymore. Pushing and pulling. Filling me. I could feel the blood moving out from my chest into my arms, my thighs. “I didn’t kill your daughter.”
    My hands were still tied, which was fine. I didn’t need much freedom anymore.
    • • •
    I got back to the office in time for lunch. A birthday cake was there for Shirley. Her fortieth, so it was all black with balloons here and there in the office.
    When I walked in through the side door, everyone stopped and looked up at me. The mud on my pants, dark stains on my arms. The painting I was holding. A ravine filled with text/css" href

PURPLE HULLS
    “What are you making?” I asked my grandmother that afternoon. The heat outside was like a layer of the sun pressing down on us, and we’d picked purple hull peas until we’d filled all the baskets we had.
    We’d walked across the fields back to her house, climbed up the cement steps, and used our elbows and chins to open the thin-metal screen door. A sprig from a dying nandina bush had gotten caught in the door. I’d reached back, snapped the branch like a finger, then closed the door behind me.
    My grandmother had gotten old, bleach-stained sheets from the back room, the one my mother grew up in, the room she kept sealed like a tomb now, and spread the sheets on the floor. She’d picked up some cross-stitch from the seat as she sat down into her chair. “A little Christmas sampler for Ettie May,” she said. Then she pressed a button and the chair lowered her to a sitting position. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Maybe said a little prayer.
    We shelled purple hull peas for an hour, popping the peas out of their shells, staining my fingers purple. She didn’t talk about the car crash that had killed my parents so many years ago. How it had been my fault. How she missed them every day. She didn’t talk about how we’d gone fifteen years after the funeral without seeing each other. How this was the fifth weekend in a row we’d been together, making up for lost time since I was trying to put things right, trying to fix what that one night had sent to pieces.
    “So you still working for the county? Government work? Nice office job?”
    I said I wasn’t. “Kinda went downhill quick,” I said. She nodded like she knew. Like she was fine with whatever happened. I said I was planning to look for something down in Springhill, up in Magnolia.
    She didn’t talk about the letters on her kitchen table behind me. The ones that said she was in default. Past due. She didn’t talk about the reverse mortgage, the bad investments. The man at the bank.
    She tossed some purple shells my way. “You got to get to them before they go full purple or they’re too tough,” she said. “Don’t let them dry up on the vine. Snap ’em right off.”
    I said okay.
    “There’s a sweet spot,” she said. “Couple days when they’re just right. Keep at it. You’ll learn.”
    But I wouldn’t. That’s not the way things work out.
    She turned on the radio, and we listened to a replay of a show at the Louisiana Hayride. They were talking about a guitar player. A retrospective. Local boy made good. James Burton. I didn’t recognize the name.
    “That Burton boy,” my grandmother