John Sandford - Mad River

They knew each other from the countryside. Tom had been born on a farm five miles east of Bigham, and met Becky and Jimmy in high school. They’d run into each other again in the Twin Cities, where Jimmy and Becky had gone looking for work. Six weeks after their reunion in the Twin Cities, here they were, cutting cross-country in the dark, and Tom, in his own dim way, was thinking over the possibilities.

A cold cloudy April night in the Minnesota countryside is darker than the inside of a coal sack. They sped along through the night, right on the edge of outrunning their headlights, missing a coon running down the road, the animal glancing back at them with amber eyes.

They got to Shinder in the middle of the night, pulled into the yard. The old man’s truck was sitting there, and Jimmy pulled around it and said, “Tom, get out and open the garage doors. Let’s get this thing out of sight.”

Tom got out in the headlights and pulled open the garage doors; a snowblower was blocking the entrance, and he jacked it around until Jimmy could squeeze by. They were pulling the doors shut behind the Charger when the old man hollered down from an upstairs window, “Who the hell is that?”

Jimmy called back, “It’s me.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“Need to come in for a while. We could use some breakfast.”

“Get the hell out of here, you little fart. I don’t have anything for the likes of you. Now, scat.”

“Scat, my ass,” Jimmy shouted. He turned to the other two and said, “C’mon. Door’s never locked.”

“Get the fuck away from my house.”

Jimmy went through the back door, Becky behind him, Tom holding back. In the kitchen, Jimmy flipped on the light, went to the refrigerator, pulled it open, took out a plastic bottle of milk, and said to Becky, “There should be some oatmeal there in the bottom cupboard, next to the sink.”

She pulled open the cupboard door, and there was a cylindrical box of Quaker Oats on the shelf. She took it out and was holding it in her hands when the old man came storming down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“You fuckers get out of here,” he said. He waved his hand at Jimmy, a dismissive gesture. “You got no rights here no more. Give me that oatmeal.”

“Stay away from her,” Jimmy said.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“No, you shut the fuck up. I’m tired, and we got some trouble over in Bigham, and I’m not putting up with any shit anymore. We’re gonna have breakfast and figure out-”

“I’m gonna throw your ass out,” the old man said. He took two steps toward Jimmy, and Jimmy pulled out the gun and pointed it at his forehead. The old man stopped, and sneered at him and said, “You got a gun? You think that makes you a man?”

“Don’t know about that, but I know that there’re some dead folks who don’t worry about that no more,” Jimmy said.

“Dead folks, you ain’t got the guts.” Then a wrinkle appeared in the old man’s forehead and he asked, “What the fuck you done?”

“Killed a white girl and this black dude over in Bigham,” Jimmy said. “I hate your old ass and I got half a mind to kill you, too.”

“Gimme that fuckin’ gun,” the old man said. He made the mistake of taking a step toward his son, and Jimmy shot him in the forehead.

Though the old man must’ve been dead instantly, his body apparently didn’t know that, and he took four quick backward steps on his heels, then fell in the doorway to the living room. Becky looked at Jimmy and said, “Crazy old fuck.”

Tom came in, looked at the body, and said, “Jeez, you killed your pa.”

“And it felt pretty fuckin’ good,” Jimmy said. “Help me drag his ass into the living room. I want to eat some oatmeal, and I don’t want to look at him while I’m doing it.” To Becky he said, “Go on. Cook us up some oatmeal.”

The body downstairs did cause some unease, and Tom eventually got a blanket and went out and slept in the Charger. Jimmy and Becky went and slept in Jimmy’s old bed, which smelled of mold, but neither was about to sleep in the old man’s. Becky insisted on sex, whining until Jimmy gave in. They took a shower together, but Jimmy knew it wasn’t going to work-it just didn’t work for him-and they went in the bedroom and Becky went down on him, and it still didn’t work.

Then he went down on her, after threatening to kill her if she told anyone, and she definitely believed that he would kill her, after what she’d seen that night, and with the body in the front room, but when she screamed down five or six or eight orgasms, she couldn’t have cared less about the body.

Maybe nothing else worked, but Jimmy was good with his hands and mouth.

They got a restless couple hours of sleep, and wound up back in the kitchen, eating more oatmeal. Jimmy said, “We need to get rolling, if we’re going to Hollywood. We get out there, we’ll be okay.”

“What about your pa?” Tom asked. He glanced nervously at the kitchen doorway, where he could see a leg below the knee, a shoe, and a dirty white sock.

“Fuck him. Who’s gonna know? Everybody in town hates his ass, nobody ever comes here,” Jimmy said. “We’ll take the Charger over to Marshall tonight and ditch it.”

“No gas in the Charger,” Tom said. “I tried to heat her up last night, when I was sleeping out there, and it ran for three minutes and died. No gas.”

“You dumb shit,” Jimmy said.

“Good thing I did it,” Tom said. “If we’d tried to go anywhere, we would of got about a mile, and then we would’ve been walking, where everybody could see us. Don’t got enough money between the three of us to buy a gallon of gas.”

Jimmy said, “Well, we got a few bucks. When I shot that bitch last night, I saw a wad on the dresser and grabbed it.”

Becky said, “Really? How much?”

“Quite a bit,” Jimmy said. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a fold of cash. Becky reached out and said, “Let me see,” but he pulled it back and stuck it in his pocket.

“None of your business,” he said. “But we need more. We need a clean car that will get us where we’re going, and we don’t have enough to get one.”

Tom said, “We could just get bus tickets-”

“Fuck a bunch of buses,” Jimmy said. “Let me check the old man.”

They walked through the kitchen to the body, couldn’t look directly at him, but felt his pockets and came up empty. Jimmy said, “Must be upstairs.” He went up to the old man’s bedroom, came back down a minute later, and said, “Eighteen dollars and thirty cents. We got more off the black dude.”

Becky said, “We might get a couple of bucks off my folks.”

Jimmy said, “Good idea. We’ll take the old man’s truck.”

Becky’s folks didn’t have any money, but they had the same attitude that James Sharp Senior had, and they didn’t like Jimmy at all. Old man Welsh was hungover, and not about to put up with any shit.

“Do I look like I’m made of money? When I was your age, I’d been working for five years.”

“That’s ’cause you could get a job way back then,” Becky said. “You can’t get one now, and I mean, you can’t get one now. How long you been eatin’ off Mom?”

“You little fuckin’ brat, I raised you and fed you and now you come around with your peckerwood friends with your hands out-”

“You just call me a peckerhead?” Jimmy asked, his voice quiet.

“Peckerwood,” the old man said. “I said peckerwood. But you want me to call you a peckerhead? Okay, you’re a peckerhead.”

Becky’s mother snorted at that: funny stuff. She stopped smiling when Jimmy took out the.38.

“Now, we don’t need that,” Becky’s father said.

“You think I’m a peckerhead now?” Jimmy asked. He pointed the gun at Welsh’s chest. “Come on, say it.”