The Devil on Chardonnay Read Free Page A

cross smashed Bobby’s cheekbone and he went down on his butt, dazed.
    “Pickin’ on Bobby!”  someone shouted.
    The next two came at once.  He slipped a right under another windmill punch and dropped the smaller one, but the other landed a solid punch that spun Boyd’s head around and staggered him back.  He grabbed the guy by the shirt and pulled him close, enduring some body punches and savoring the free-flowing high.  Pushing forward to the center of the room, he trapped the man’s hands between their bodies and pounded his face with a half-dozen fast jabs from close range, turning it into a pulpy mess.  He dropped him and stood alone.  Crank still had the pool cue as he strode across the space between them, tobacco-stained teeth bared in a gleeful, childlike grin.
    *******
    The pressure on his chest was not painful, just there.  Then there was the beep-beep of a Road Runner cartoon, punctuated by whistles and insane laughter, followed by a wet kiss, sloppy, all over his face, and warm.  It smelled like bacon.
    The headache came when he opened his eyes.  Sitting on his chest were two children.  The 3-year-old, nude, flicked the channel changer between two cartoons while his 2-year-old brother, in a wet diaper, ate a piece of bacon and wrestled for control of the changer.  The dog, a hound mix, licked Boyd’s face while Boyd lay on a black Naugahyde couch beneath the front picture window of a 14-foot-wide mobile home.  Seeing his pants on the floor by the television, Boyd raised up to see blood on his boxer shorts, his only remaining garment.
    “Oh.  You’re alive,” a female voice came from behind him.  He turned to see a woman in a faded cotton nightgown frying bacon in the kitchen.  She was in her mid-to-late 20s, and her breasts jiggled freely as she scraped the frying pan to remove the bacon.  Her long hair, shoulder length the night before, was tied in a simple knot behind her head.  He remembered her as the waitress at the bar at the hotel in Sumter.  He’d pulled those pink panties down sometime in a vague, misty past.
    “When did I … uh,” he said, thickly.  His mouth tasted worse than the dog’s.
    “Oh, you showed up about 12.  You came in here with a busted lip and a powerful need.”  She laughed and shook her head, breaking an egg into the bacon grease.
    She looked fresh and happy.  Obviously not affected by whatever had made Boyd so ill, she moved quickly and efficiently around the kitchen.
    “Did we, uh …”
    “We sure did, baby,” she said with a smile, turning to face him.  “You were great, till you got into that moonshine jar Billy Ray left over there.  You better stick to fightin’ and lovin’ and leave the drinkin’ to Billy Ray.”
    “Who’s Billy Ray?”
    “My husband. Ex-husband, really.  The divorce is final sometime next month.  He lives with his mother.  You like your eggs runny?”
    An officer and a gentleman, he thought, as he surveyed the scene he had created.  An open door across the living room showed a king-size bed with rumpled sheets.  His jaw was simply sore, but his right hand was swollen and purple behind the little finger.  The nude boy walked down the hall to the bedrooms in the back.  The other one dug into a plate of grits and sugar with a side of bacon his mother had just placed on the floor in front of him.  The dog looked alert for an opening on the bacon.
    “This is Billy Ray’s weekend with the kids.  I need to take them over to his mother’s before 9.  Then we can get back to business.”
    “Why 9?” he asked, just to say something.  He didn’t feel like what she was planning.
    “That’s when he usually comes to get 'em.  Last thing I need is to have you and Billy Ray trying to see who can throw who out that picture window first.”
    She laughed again and looked at him, shaking her head in disbelief.  “Don’t know why I always get the ones with demons.”
    A South Carolina Saturday morning, he