Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

Stella nodded. Now the boy had decided to talk, it was best to let him unroll his story at his own pace.

“Now that’s the kind of thing you just hate when you’re a kid. Specially if your friends know about it, getting your ass kicked by your kid brother. So I made it a project to beat the crap out of him. And you know what? I never did. See here?”

Stella glanced over; Arthur Junior had pushed up his short sleeve to reveal his shoulder, but Stella couldn’t make much out in the dim light in the Jeep. “Hmm,” she said anyway.

“Fucking bite marks. I got him down, got his arm pulled behind him one day, had half a mind to break it I was so mad, and he bit me. Mom wanted to take me to the hospital, but Dad said I was just going to have to learn to fight back. Now that was plenty humiliating, let me tell you. And Roy Dean just standing there grinning at me the whole time.”

“Your folks didn’t punish him?”

“Well, sure they did, but the thing was, wasn’t much you could do to Roy Dean that would make any kind of difference. I think they took him off TV for a month, but he didn’t care—he just invented new kinds of trouble to stir up. When he got bored, Roy Dean used to sit out back on this split-rail fence Dad built behind the vegetable garden, and when a rabbit or something would come by he’d shoot it with his slingshot. He wasn’t much of a shot, but he just kep’ at it and kep’ at it, and now and then he’d get lucky and hit one. Thing’d drag itself off and Roy Dean would follow, and if he caught up, he’d stomp the thing dead with his boots. I’ll say one thing for my brother—he ain’t got a lot of quit in him.”

Stella thought of little Tucker and got a very bad feeling in her gut. On the off chance that Roy Dean had taken him, she prayed he was keeping his temper under control.

“Arthur Junior, I gotta tell you, you’re not painting a very pretty picture of your brother. But what would he want with a little boy that isn’t even his?”

“I have no idea,” he said, “and that’s the truth.”

“You could have told me that back at BJ’s,” Stella pointed out. “Not to sound ungrateful, but if you don’t know where Roy Dean is, there’s other holes I could be digging in. Why exactly did you want to go for this here drive?”

“Because I believe I know where Roy Dean has been spending his time lately, and it ain’t no kindygarden, see what I’m sayin’? It’s bad news, serious bad news—no place to be haulin’ kids into. If Chrissy’s kid is with Roy Dean, then somebody needs to do something.”

“Jeez, just what is this place anyway? Some kind of strip joint?”

“I believe I’ll just show you. Turn off on Methaney there.”

Stella glanced at Arthur Junior; his arms were folded across his chest and he had an angry set to his jaw. She did as she was told.

She hadn’t driven Methaney in years. A couple of decades ago, someone still farmed soybeans out here, but the soil didn’t give up much, and the fields lay mostly unworked and fallow, sowthistle and carpetweed taking over.

“Drive slow,” Arthur Junior said, his voice a near whisper, “and don’t stop.”

After a half mile or so, they drove by a hand-painted wood sign that hung by chains from a couple of posts driven into the ground next to a gravel turnoff. In big block letters, it read BENNING SALVAGE. Five yards into the turnoff, a tall set of steel gates was locked tight with a heavy padlock.

“Oh,” Stella said. “The junkyard. That’s what you wanted to show me?”

“Ain’t just a junkyard,” Arthur Junior said, his voice low. “Drive on by, and when you get down to the T down there, turn around and come back. But don’t stop, hear? Don’t be lingerin’.”

The boy was spooked, that was for sure. Wasn’t any way anyone could hear them out here, but Stella didn’t bother to point that out. Driving past the property, she spotted lights on in a little prefab house up on a berm shaded by a couple of twisty scrub oaks. A few pickups and sedans were parked out front. Further back on the property, sodium vapor lights on blocky steel poles illuminated other buildings and sheds. And beyond that, cars—acres of cars in various states of body condition and decomposition, skeletons of wrecks and rusting carcasses whose innards were being stripped a little at a time to patch up other cars. All along the edges of the property ran a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. Nasty to look at, especially since some of the barbs caught the moonlight just right and glinted shiny and menacing.

She figured there was a mean dog or two not far off. It wasn’t just junkyards that had them—in Stella’s experience every family compound out in the sticks had a few flea-bitten curs, bred to meanness with stick beatings and fights over scraps of garbage. When one got hit by a car or lost a fight or mangled a leg on a trap or fence and had to be put down, there was always some scrawny mutt bitch around ready to deliver a new generation of hardscrabble pups.

She turned back to Arthur Junior. “I knew a Benning or two. One of ’em was just a few years behind me in school.”

“That woulda been Earl. He’s probably about forty-five—he’s owned the place since his dad passed. But he has a partner. You know—an associate. Don’t know his full name but he goes by Funzi. Comes down from Kansas City with some of his guys and stays for a few days now and then; I think he has a place down on the lake.”

“ Funzi ? What is that, Italian or some such?”

Arthur drilled her with that gaze again, and this time Stella did turn and look at him. In the moonlight his face looked pale as milk, his eyes deep sockets. And the boy looked scared shitless. “Uh-huh. Italian, like Alphonse. Mrs. Hardesty, you know what Italian means up in Kansas City, don’t you?”

Stella made the turn, a gentle curve on the scruffy remains of a farm road, and started back. The junkyard was on the driver’s side of the Jeep now, and she watched carefully as it rolled by. No signs of life anywhere, but the light in the windows of Benning’s house showed sheer curtains pulled shut. A blue flicker from one window probably meant a TV. Big one, no doubt—seemed like the humbler the dwelling, the fancier the TV these days.

“What are you trying to say, Arthur Junior? Benning’s mixed up with some sort of Cosa Nostra shit? The Family comin’ down here to the Ozarks for a little R and R?”

“It ain’t funny.” Arthur Junior’s voice was suddenly sharp. “You don’t mess with those boys.”

“I didn’t say it was funny, but you got to admit—I mean, I’ve never seen any godfather types around town, you know? Haven’t been any horse heads turning up in folks’ beds or anything like that.”

She could feel Arthur Junior’s gaze fixed solid on her face. “If you get to tangling with these guys, you’d damn well better be as good as they say you are,” he said coldly. “You have no notion what they’re capable of. I told Roy Dean, I begged him not to get mixed up with these guys, but he just can’t say no to a quick buck, not ever.”

Stella didn’t say anything until the junkyard was in her rearview mirror, and then she put a little steel in her voice, just like she used to when Noelle was a teenager sassing her about one thing or another.

“Now listen here, Arthur Junior. Unless Roy Dean took Tucker, there’s no reason for me to do so much as give Benning and his pals a cross-eyed glance. I’m real sorry your brother ain’t got a lick of sense, but he’s not the one that hired me, so I’m not going to go rattling any cages just for kicks.”

“I didn’t say—”

“So if you know anything about Tucker you aren’t telling me, any reason I should worry about him and Roy Dean, then you need to come clean and tell me exactly what’s going on. Won’t do anybody any good for you to keep giving me these little pieces of the picture, hear? Otherwise, your brother’s a big boy—he’s on his own.”