The Deep Read Free

dexterity. Her body was warm and soft as bread dough, perfumed with the excretions that leaked from her skin. Her breath feathered the hairs inside his ear canal. She began to whisper. Luke could never quite make out what she said. Her voice hit a subaudible pitch that crawled directly into his brain.
    Luke awoke, his breath coming in leaden rasps. The dream drained from his brainpan, thick as syrup. He checked his watch; he’d slept less than two hours. Goddamn. His mother. All these years later she was still there, haunting the corridors of his mind like a hungry ghost. He closed his eyes and she bloomed in his mind’s eye again: Bethany Ronnicks—she had forsaken her husband’s family name, preferring her maiden one. Battle-ax Beth.
    She was a huge presence in every way: her room-filling personality, her booming laugh, and in time, her vast physical bulk. She’d always been a large woman: broad shoulders, wide hips, over six feet tall. A lady skyscraper , as Luke had heard her spoken of around town. She held an imposing beauty, or she had before her “bad years,” and the two hundred pounds they had packed onto her frame. She walked with a regal bearing, her chest thrust out as if in the expectation that a visiting dignitary would affix a medal to it.
    She worked at the Second Chance Ranch, a “home” for mentally troubled male youths— No Chance Ranch , as she referred to it in her poisonous moods. She had been hired as the duty nurse but soon transferred to orderly, the first female in the state hired for that position. She preferred the hands-on aspect. Better than doling out pills and sanitizing bedpans.
    “It stinks,” Luke overheard her say once in conversation with Edie Emmons, one of her few friends. “The piss of those mad boys. There’s a chemical they produce—a compound specific to crazies. Trans-3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid.”
    “Oh my,” said Edie, sycophantically. “Sounds terrible.”
    “It is terrible. The stink of insanity, Edie, sharp as malt vinegar. It’s bad enough when they sweat it out. But their piss ? The worst.”
    At first the other orderlies—all male, predominantly black—grumbled. They had a bar bouncer’s mentality: yes, Beth had a no-bullshit disposition and could handle the nut jobs well enough with words. But what happened when words failed? Beth was a big woman, but still a woman—did she have the brawn to subdue a foaming-mad boy who cared little for his own body or that of others?
    But Beth was a hellion. She was the first to jump on any dog pile, grabbing a boy’s wrist or neck and cranking with all her might. The orderlies came around to having her in their ranks. They nicknamed her Battle-ax Beth.
    Many years later, working as a veterinarian, Luke had run into one of his mother’s old charges. Kurt Honey—whom Luke knew slimly, having gone to the same middle school—had spent time at the ranch for the aggravated assault of his eleventh-grade math teacher, whom he’d stabbed with a compass. Honey was a hired hand at a dairy farm where Luke had been summoned to tend to a sick Guernsey.
    “She’s your ma, ain’t she?” Honey had asked.
    Luke looked up from the cow’s inflamed udder. “Who?”
    “Battle-ax Beth.”
    Luke had no idea Honey knew she was his mother, but he assumedHoney would speak ill of her. Luke wouldn’t stop him. The days when he would’ve defended her were long gone.
    “She was a viper.” Honey gave a spooked laugh. “Smart, you know? But in ways that don’t really profit a person, except in special situations.”
    Luke went back to the udder, hoping that would be the end of it.
    “She scared the bejesus outta this one guy, Brewster Galt. Ole Brew was none too smart—that’s half the reason he ended up at the ranch. This one time, he caught hell for stealing an apple from the cafeteria. Small things were big things at the ranch. Even a missing apple couldn’t go unpunished. Now Brew had this condition, okay? His one eye was