Crimes in Southern Indiana Read Free Page A

ground. She bucked her pelvis up. Wanted him off of her. The other hand groped the rounded shapes beneath her soiled wifebeater. Her eyes clasped. Held tears. The man’s tobacco-stained lips and bourbon breath dragged against her neck.
    â€œLike that…don’t you?”
    The man’s name was Melvin. He’dthe scent of coagulated chicken swelled in three days of hundred-degree heat. He’d paid four hundred crumpled bills to the Hill Clan for three hours with Knee High Audry.
    Knee High lay between the rows of corn that shadowed her goat-milk complexion. Unwashed shoulder-length hair the hue of burned tires fanned out in matted clumps. Melvin grunted. Knee High’s thoughts darted to how her ride withAble to run an errand had been detoured to seeing men about money in another county. Where a man named Darnel laughed, told Able, “Ain’t you a taste of treason. Sell out your two boys, this girl’s daddy and uncle, to Sheriff Sig. Now you’s swindlin’ your granddaughter to us. Shit, you’ve pretty much snitched out half the county for Sig.”
    Able nodded, said, “Need money, cancer meds ain’t cheapfor the wife.”
    Darnel passed a sack to Able and told him, “Nor is your taste for the booze.”
    Knee High watched Able thumb through the brown sack of bills. Trying to decipher Darnel’s words, not realizing what was transpiring, her brain ignited with confusion and anger. Her daddy and Uncle Dodo had run off. The only speech she could muster wasn’t to Able, it was to Darnel, and she shouted, “Where’smy daddy and my uncle?”
    Darnel chuckled, his sight boring into her like two hollow points, and he said, “Dead and buried.”
    She looked to Able to correct this. He stood silently holding the sack of money, digging his hand into it, and she demanded, “What’d you do, Granddad, what’d you do?”
    It was Darnel who responded. “He did the same to them that he’s done to you.” Knee High reached for Able,wanting to shake answers from his hide. He stepped back, still counting the money as she questioned him. “What’s he saying, Granddad?” And before she could wrap her mind around what was transpiring, Darnel’s talcum grip restrained her. She twisted away from him and he backhanded her and said, “He sold you to me and my brother to satisfy the men of our county.”
    She tongued blood from her lip ashe drew her to a room where wallpaper was smeared by tea stains and soured skin. The last thing she saw before the door slammed and bolted shut was Able turning his back, walking out the same way they’d entered.
    She beat on the pine door, trying to fathom these things Able had done, trying to understand what Darnel meant, saying Able had sold out her daddy and uncle to Sheriff Sig. And why Ablehad traded her for a sack of money to pay for her grandmother’s cancer medications. The man named Darnel told her it was “to satisfy men.” She understood she’d been sold for sex. But her grandmother Jo would never have agreed to such a thing.
    Her arms and fists swelled and hardened as she sat barefoot on the floor, crying, a broken-down mattress quilted by a sheet once white lying gray and stickybehind her. She held her knees and rocked back and forth for what seemed like hours, realizing her daddy and uncle were dead because of Able. Then came the roar of a vehicle’s engine outside. The slamming of a door. Men speaking, saying, “Four hundred. She’s in yonder. Take your time. We got people to tend.” Feet trampled out of the house, an engine fired up and became distant. The sound of metalunlatched on the bedroom door’s opposite side. A towering stranger entered. Kneeled down in his cutoff red flannel, smiled with teeth caked by tobacco, and ran a finger tainted by motor oil down her cheek, told her, “Call me Melvin.”
    He grasped her firm