Hell With the Lid Blown Off Read Free Page A

blouse the color of ripe plums, and her eyes were a perfect match. It came to me that she was talking, and I figured I’d better listen in case she required an intelligent answer.
    â€œHow are you, Trent? I haven’t seen you in ages.”
    I sat down next to her on the piano bench. “I’m just fine. Shoot, I just can’t figure out why I haven’t seen you around much lately. Where have you been keeping yourself?”
    â€œI can’t figure it out, either. Must be that you haven’t been paying attention, because I see you out and about all the time, strutting up and down the street with your six-gun on your hip, rattling the doors on the shops at sunset to make sure they’re all locked.” Her fingers danced over the keys and she glanced at me with those purple eyes. “Every afternoon, you sit for a spell in a chair in front of the jailhouse after dinner and try to look all official, until some little nipper comes along and you run off after him in a game of tag. Makes it hard to take you seriously as the steel-eyed lawman, you know.”
    She was ragging on me, I knew, but all I could think was that she had noticed me. Something jiggled in the back of my brain. “I thought you were off in Muskogee studying music! When did you get back?”
    She wasn’t about to let me off the hook. “Why, Trent, I haven’t even gone yet. I just went over to Muskogee last week to enroll at the Music Conservatory. I’ll be starting in the fall. For the past few weeks I’ve been staying at Miz Beckie’s off and on and helping with her piano students during the summer.”
    Miz Rebecca MacKenzie lived in a big, gloomy house just north of town, right on the road to Tulsa. Everyone called her Miz Beckie. She had taught piano to every church accompanist in the county, except for the Church of Christ folks, of course, who didn’t hold with such things. She had even taught Ted Banner, who played the piano every Friday and Saturday night at the Elliot and Ober motion picture theatre, and as rumor had it, at the Rusty Horseshoe Roadhouse on the other nights of the week.
    Miz MacKenzie was a good-looking woman with a neat figure and big blue eyes, always dressed to the nines in the latest fashion, even on days that she had no notion of leaving the house. She wore her silvery-gold hair pinned high on her head, like a crown. But even if she looked like a queen, she wasn’t haughty. No, not a bit of it. Her life’s mission was to donate money for public projects, or to help the poor.
    Miz MacKenzie sang like an angel, and taught singing as well as piano. Not to me, of course. We couldn’t afford music lessons, so I never learned anything. Even so, she gave all of us who grew up around there a gift that can’t be valued.
    â€œI’m surprised you remember me at all, much less remember that I’ll be studying music.” Ruth sounded a mite put out when she answered me. “All those times you’ve had supper out at the farm with us—who do you think it was sitting at the end of the table, passing you the mashed potatoes? Just one of the mob of Tucker kids, I guess.”
    I didn’t say it, but something had sure happened to her over those few months and it didn’t have to do with learning how to teach kids to play the piano. “Well, smack me with a two-by-four, Ruth. I deserve that tongue-lashing, because I must have been blind not to notice you. I promise to pay real close attention to you from this day on.”
    She glanced at me again, and her teasing expression faded. She stopped playing and shrugged. “Never mind. Things happen when they’re supposed to, I expect.”
    At least I was smart enough to note the change in her tone. I stood up, my hat in my hand. “I’d better get to work. Sure was nice to see you. Next time I get invited out to your folks’, maybe we can have a long talk and catch