Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

“Shut up, Pearl.” Arson whispered the words, eyeing her in the rearview. Boy, did she give him a look. The floozy bitch made Arson’s blood boil. She was just the kind of trash his brother would bed. Just the kind —

Pearl opened her mouth. Red bee-stung lips on that fat little face of hers. Arson couldn’t hardly believe it. Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, he’d told the little floozy.

She started to mouth off again. “Shut up,” Arson said, but it was like she didn’t even hear him. So he told Hank to shut her up, but it was plain that Hank wasn’t the kind of man who knew how to do that or Pearl wouldn’t be talking in the first place.

Well, fair warning was warning enough.

Arson climbed out of the car and reached through the open window and took hold of Pearl’s peroxide blonde hair and gave it a pull that made her scream. Then he dragged her out the door and kicked her in the ass and she gave out with a startled cry as she went face first into the dirt and then Arson yanked her to her feet and slapped her up but good.

And, boy howdy, did the cure come over her but quick, like Arson Pike was one of those tent show miracle men. It was something to see. First Pearl was gabbing like she actually knew what she was talking about and then she was screaming like some she-goat taking a rutting and when it was all over her nose was bloody and her eyes were red with little girl tears.

Sitting in the backseat, Hank didn’t say a word.

He knew better.

He didn’t want some of the same.

Arson made to slap Pearl again, and she cowered like a whupped dog. “And you think you’re tough.” Arson laughed. “Well, you ain’t tough. Sister, I’m here to tell you that you ain’t half the woman my Claire is. She came through bullets and fire and car wrecks, and she didn’t crawfish half as bad as you do from a little old slap.”

Pearl couldn’t look Arson in the eye, but she nodded, and she did it damn quick.

“That’s better,” Arson said. “Now you get your ass out in that corn and find my Claire. You apologize for the way you been treating her, and you tell her that you ain’t nothin’ but a dimestore floozy who can’t keep her trap shut.”

Again, Pearl nodded. And then she glanced around her, at all that corn, and she puddled up like she was all set to cry again.

Pearl was scared to say anything, but Arson knew that she would. Teary-eyed, she waved her painted fingernails at the cornstalks and asked, “How am I gonna find her in all this?’

It was a damn fool question. Arson didn’t have time for it.

Again, he kicked Pearl in the ass.

She got to moving.

Arson climbed into the car and slammed the door. His fingers went tap-tap-tap on the steering wheel. He stared at his brother in the rearview, and Hank looked away.

“Goddamn city girl,” Arson said.

The vultures circled low in the concrete sky. Claire studied the sharp talons that tore dead flesh, the black eyes that gleamed with hunger.

She knew that vultures only ate the dead.

A fresh gout of blood filled her lifeline and spilled over her fingers. She was bleeding, but she wasn’t dead yet.

Not yet.

The wound wasn’t anything, really. She’d had a lot worse. Bullets had ripped through her shoulder and legs, flames had seared her flesh when the law set fire to one of their hideouts, and her hip had been busted and skinned clean to the bone when their getaway car went off the road.

Oh, how she’d bled. Claire had her share of scars and then some. But she never complained, and she always healed up. Always. Arson said he’d never known a woman like her. He’d never wanted another woman the way he wanted Claire, who could stomach as much pain as a man. She made him proud, the way she didn’t complain, the way she always came back for more.

Claire wore her scars. She didn’t try to hide them. Her scars were like mortar between the bricks in a dam, holding back a river.

Her skin was the bricks, her scars the mortar.

The river was her blood.

She needed scars to live. But this time, she couldn’t seem to scar. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t heal the cut in her hand. She didn’t even know how she got the cut. One morning she woke up and her hand was weeping blood on the pillowcase. First she bandaged it, but it didn’t scab over. No matter what she did it just kept on bleeding, just like the hand of one of those religious nuts you sometimes read about in the papers.

So she’d stitched the wound, stitched right along a lifeline that was deep but short, and blood had seeped between her needlework. She’d stitched it tighter, and still the blood had come. She’d squeezed her hand into a tight fist, her fingers straining to hold back the red river within, and the stitches had only burst, and the blood had surged, filling tributaries in the lines of her palm.

Claire didn’t want to show it, but she was scared. She tried to scar over the fear the same way she tried to scar over the wound, because she didn’t want Arson to sense it. If he caught scent of her fright, he might stop loving her. And if she kept on bleeding, if she bled right out —

Then she’d be cold. Dead. Arson wouldn’t hold her in his arms anymore. He wouldn’t kiss her and tell her how brave she was.

He would leave her. He’d said as much. When she died, he would put her in a hole in the ground. He would cover her over with dirt and leave her forever.

Claire knew one thing — a body could only spill so much blood, and then there wasn’t any more to spill.

The vultures circled lower, their clawed talons brushing dry corn tassels.

Circling… circling… circling…

Circling Claire. Shaking, she held tight to her gun. Something was wrong with the birds. Had to be. Vultures only ate dead things. Any fool knew that —

And Claire was alive.

The birds came after her.

Her heart was pounding.

A wave of ripping beaks, tearing talons.

She was bleeding.

Wings beating a black rhythm in a granite tombstone sky.

But she was alive.

They came after her and didn’t stop.

There were lots of things Tate Winters should have been thinking about as he sped toward Fiddler. The road, the outlaw gang prowling his territory, the local bank that was ripe for the plucking. Lots of things.

But all he could think about was the little flapper who sat behind him with her arms around him tight and her thighs pressed against his.

Her name was Imogene, and there was something about her that just plain lit Tate up. He’d heard it was like that with men and women sometimes, but it had never been that way for him. Until now. Because there was something about Imogene that made him feel like a wild colt, all hot-blooded and —

“Hey!” Imogene yelled in his ear and he damn near dumped the bike. “Pull over!”

Tate braked hard and parked the Harley under an old oak at the side of the road. “Don’t ever yell like that,” he said as he got off. “I nearly lost it.”

She apologized. Tate barely heard her. Damn, but she was pretty. Maybe he should just go ahead and get it over with. There was a James Cagney picture playing at the theater in Visalia. Tate thought that James Cagney was top-drawer. He could ask her out to a picture show, and then —

“Didn’t you see it?” Imogene asked.

For a moment, Tate thought she was talking about the picture show, but then he realized he’d missed something. “See what?”

“Back there.” She pointed down the road a piece. “I saw J. W.’s Ford parked on that side road between those cornfields.”