“She came in before first light, hon. She wasn’t that quiet. I heard her. Don’t go crazy, now.”
With only my skivvies on I busted out the door and ran to Rod’s. It’s like I could feel the truth when I stood by her nook. Her stuff had gone away.
The pistol had gone away too.
I split back to Bev’s, and thoughts and feelings and horrors banged and clanged and banged in my head.
All my angers revved.
Fears, I guess, did a bit of goading.
“She can’t do me like this!” I know I dressed myself at some point about here. “She can’t just dump me! She can’t just wad me up and drop me in the trash. No! I came all the way in, you know? I came all the way in, there, here, and she can’t abuse me this way!”
“Sammy, she’s got her reasons, I’ll give her that.”
I knew there was a short crowbar under my front seat. Something fine had fallen from her eyes.
“There’s Rod,” Bev said. “I’d say you should leave him be. Looks like he’s been drinkin’.”
I only looked at her. I only looked at her and she looked away.
I pushed out and went after Rod.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. He’d managed a haircut in jail. He looked more fit, too, but he smelled of ten dollars’ worth of cheap liquor. “Been celebratin’ my good-time early release. What’re you wantin’?”
“You seen Jamalee?”
“No. Not for a while.”
“How long a while?”
“They turned me loose before breakfast. I wanted to drive over to the Inca Club for a nice stiff breakfast, so I dropped the girl down by Towhead’s Gas Station. Where the bus stops.”
She had said those words that made me have notions, happy hopeful notions; now those notions got to haunting me and running me ragged and furious.
“And, hey, bud, I’ll be layin’ around here for a few weeks and that means adios to you, my special buddy. Get in and get your shit and get out and have you a good life, hear?”
I hardly did. I hardly did hear. I turned and headed toward Bev’s, and Bev stood in the door watching me.
“And, hey, where’d you stash my pistol? Come back here and answer me, peckerwood.”
At the door I said, “Give me a smoke.”
“I’m out, hon.”
“How could you? Huh?”
A long kiss-off sigh flowed from her.
“My baby Jam grew up of a sudden overnight.”
Biscuit shuffled to me and sniffed and I believe I had tears ganging up. I touched the mutt, then fled in the Pinto.
I was fixin’ to hurt her. Hurt her tiny body.
At Lake’s Grocery I flashed that I needed some smokes and turned in. The parking spaces were filled so I kept back and left room for drivers to back out.
I wish she wouldn’t have pulled what she did.
A station wagon started up and started to back out, then stopped. The woman hopped out and ran back into the store.
Jamalee was just a lot too holy to herself.
The bunch that would have me, I don’t like them to change their minds.
I thought maybe I might catch her bus.
Everybody was buying beer and baloney, picnic stuff. Then finally the wagon backed up, but right at me, so I backed some more. The wagon slowly turned its wheels and pulled away and a fuckin’ Toyota that hadn’t been there before wheeled in and took my parking space.
Each extra minute that bus went a mile more.
I leaned on the horn and got flipped off by two rough dudes in the Toyota. Beards, caps, dirty shirts, all that funky hard-guy crap.
The crowbar dealt itself into my hand and I sprang from the Pinto yelling. My yells contained threats.
Both dudes got out. The driver grinned a grin you ain’t meant to like. He lifted his T-shirt so I could see he had a pistol inside his belt.
“You think I care? You punk-ass canteen turnout motherfucker.”
I wish that road had bent another way.
Seems like there’s always some sonofabitch with a pistol. Testing your character, testing your dedication to stayin’ alive.
“You think that popgun’ll save you?”
“Hey! Hey!”
Tim Lake came quick down the steps.
I wish I hadn’t took to smoking.
She probably could about smell Memphis, as that bus spread fumes through the rice and cotton part of Arkansas, the flat region, clattering toward the river.
Tim Lake laughed.
I said, “You cacklin’ cheap bastard, put in some parking!”
I could claim that his laugh triggered me. His mouth jerked open in one of his big long laughs and spit spun a web from top lip to bottom and my arm shot out hard and straight and fast and his forehead met the crowbar flush.
You could look at him when he landed and not need to ask the main question.
The dude with the pistol said, “Oh, man, don’t try to leave. Man, you done mashed Tim.”
A thing I heard a convict say once came to mind and floored me. “A head is just a pumpkin with ears when it smashes.”
The ground caught me. I lay back and looked up, and I felt she thought of me then and would remember my name for good, forever. People congregated and gasped. People muttered about me. Some kids edged close to peek down at Tim’s mushy head and they paled quick.
The sirens coming to get me let loose with those constant howls, howling my way like official hounds from the next world over.
I worry that the beach is really no place for a girl alone who can’t swim a lick.
Hang the blame where blame belongs.
Now you’ve heard it.
About the author
Daniel Woodrell lives in the Missouri Ozarks near the Arkansas line. His five most recent novels were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Tomato Red won the PEN West Award for the Novel. Two novels have been adapted as major motion pictures: Woe to Live On (released in 1999 by Ang Lee as Ride with the Devil, starring Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich) and Winter’s Bone (2010; won the grand jury prize for U.S. dramas and the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at Sundance). His short story “Uncle” (in Busted Flush Press’s A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir) was nominated for the Edgar Award. He is at work on his next novel.
Tomato Red
Originally published in 1998 by Henry Holt.
This edition, Busted Flush Press, 2010
This edition copyright © Daniel Woodrell, 2010
Foreword copyright © Megan Abbott, 2010
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
eISBN : 978-1-935-41568-8
First Busted Flush Press paperback printing, July 2010
P.O. Box 540594
Houston, TX 77254-0594 www.bustedflushpress.com
Daniel Woodrell, Tomato Red
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