Elizabeth Massie - Wire Mesh Mothers

And she was screaming.

“I…,” began Kate.

The girl bared her teeth. The child stroked the head and wailed as if her soul was being raked over hell’s coals. The sound pierced the rafters and echoed along the dark corners of the barn.

“I don’t….”

And then there was a thunderous cracking noise, gunfire, and the voice of a man shouting outside, “Who the hell’s in there? Who’s in my barn?”

The girl leapt up in a single motion, dragging the child up with her. The cat’s head flew away. Kate spun about and stared in the direction of the shout.

“Chuck, go around the side! Watch the windows! Could be that gang of rail riders we heard about!”

“Hope so!” came a second voice. “Got a ‘ward out on them suckers!”

“Shoot first, questions later!”

“Yeah!”

The burning blocks had lit the nearby straw, and a small blaze was starting to spread its fingers across the floor.

“C’mon!” said the girl, hitching her head toward one of the open stalls. Kate grabbed one of Mistie’s arms and the girl took the other, and they carried her off the main floor and into the tiny room where there was a square, latched window. With her free hand Kate knocked the latch open, then shoved the trembling, still crying girl out and into the rainy night. Kate went next, wondering for the briefest moment if the girl might ham-string her as an added bonus, but then she was out, face down in the soaking weeds, and the girl was behind her.

Her breath in her ears, thundering in sync with the hammering of her heart.

Get up get up!

She was up, she had Mistie by the forearm, the girl had the other. They were bolting through the steamy rain, across the black waves of grasses and the confused and snorting cattle, toward a stretch of forest at the far side of the field.

Behind them, two shouts, on the heels of each other.

“Damn barn’s on fire! Get the hose, quick!”

“I see ‘em! Out there, out the window! In my sights!”

A strange moment of silence, stretching oddly out across the field behind them, reaching Kate’s neck, stroking it with cold nails.

Then a blast, an impact in Kate’s left calf, and she went down again into the sharp grasses. No pain for a moment, stretching like the silence, waiting for the precise moment to reveal its full self.

Mistie fell as Kate fell. The girl Tony skidded to a halt and turned about. “Get up, bitch!” she ordered. “Get up and run!”

Then the pain came. It erupted in the whole of Kate’s lower body, blowing apart like a grenade, fierce, powerful, hideously real. She threw back her head in disbelief and agony. Fire raged through her vessels to her brain.

“Get the fuck up!”

Hands grappling for Kate’s hand, tugging her to her feet where she tripped, went down, and was dragged back up again. Another blast from behind and a hoot of joy, “They’re outa here, by damn! They’re faster’n jackrabbits!”

“I can’t…,” Kate began.

“Hell you can’t, ‘cause I can’t carry you!”

Kate bore down with her teeth and her mind, and made her legs move. Out, forward, out, forward, out, forward. She didn’t have hold of Mistie anymore, but she could see the little girl stumbling along beside Tony. The child was no longer screaming.

It was a life’s time before they found the woods and the sagging wire fence that separated it from the cattle field. Tony pushed the top of the fence down with her foot and threw Mistie across. “Over!” she shouted to Kate. Kate crawled over the fence. Her palms came down in a rain-soaked thistle patch.

Back at the barn, another muffled shot, and distant, incoherent shouts. Kate twisted her head back on her neck to see a faint glowing through the window. It’s going to be a Yule fire , thought Kate. Poor cows. All that hay.

Tony caught Kate’s upper arm and dragged out of the thistles, across roots and rocks a short distance. Then Kate was propped against the slimy bark of some lumpy Louisiana scrub tree. Kate closed her eyes against the pain in her lower body. She heard a knife clicked open.

Damn, she’s going to kill me after all. I guess I don’t really blame her, not after the ax.

There was a sound of ripping denim.

The sound of rain water, or was it shower water, in her ear? Thundering, pounding, drilling to her soul.

And then, silence.

“Truth or dare?” asked Tony.

The teacher was coming back around, but kept fading in and out, her head thumping against the bark of the tree to which she was tied, her tongue making brief appearances over her teeth. Tony sat beside Baby Doll on top of a flattened nest of some fuzzy-leafed plants, her arms wrapped around her knees. Baby Doll was leaning on her, but she didn’t push her off. Tony thought that DeeWee would laugh his retarded ass off seeing Tony in just Ace bandage and pants, sitting in the wet woods with a teacher in just bra and pants, propping up a sick kid in a torn up pink nightgown. He’d talk about it for months. As stupid as he was, certain things stuck in his brain like a thorn.

“You hear me, teacher? I asked you a question.”

The teacher didn’t say anything, but she moaned and it was a wide-awake moan, not a dreaming moan.

Tony had done surgery, sort of. Flopped the teacher over, sliced the jeans leg up the back, and dug out the bullet. Good thing it’d been a rifle and not a shotgun. The wound was raw and bloody but not terribly huge. The teacher had groaned but didn’t wake up, and Tony had easily found the slug in the muscle. A few rounds with the tip of the knife and it had popped out into the humus beneath the trees. Tony had put it in her pocket for a souvenir. Then she ripped the jeans leg apart for a bandage and for bindings.

We look like those beat up guys on the American Colony Insurance ad, Tony thought. Only they’re carrying a flag, a drum, and a flute. And they’re standing up.

The teacher’s eyes opened, and this time there seemed to be some focus. “Mistie…?” she began.

“Here, with me. Got my knife so don’t try anything. Shoulda killed your ass when you were out. Truth or dare.”

The teacher sighed, and thumped the back of her head again on the tree trunk. “Not now.”

“You fucking tried to ax me to death,” said Tony.

Eyes closed, opened. The teacher looked up at the sky as if watching for more rain. She shivered, and tried to move her arms. Each hand was outstretched and bound to a low branch with leftover denim strips.

“Look like a fucked-up Jesus there, teacher,” said Tony. “Truth or dare?”

“I don’t…,” said the teacher. “Mistie. Is Mistie all right?”

Tony looked at Baby Doll. She was awake, but silent, curled up into her own knees, leaning on Tony’s shoulder. Her pale hair hung in a sheet around her face in a waterfall of yellow. Her body wasn’t as hot as it had been, but she still looked sick.

“I was shot,” said the teacher, seeming surprised by the sudden realization. She bolted upright against her restraints. “Oh my God, shot.”

“Not anymore,” said Tony. “I got it out. Call me Mark Green. I shoulda left it in, shoulda let you die, shoulda killed you like you tried to kill me.”

Tony and the teacher studied each other for a long minute, and then the teacher broke the stare and looked at the ground. She looked tired, beat.

They’d need some clothes, Tony knew, and soon. Louisiana rain wasn’t as cold as Virginia rain, but they sure as hell wouldn’t pass through to Texas unnoticed in their underwear.

The teacher tried to move her arms again. She said, “Why didn’t you, then?”

“Kill you?”