At four o’clock he saves what he’s written and shuts down. He finds he’s looking forward to picking up the thread tomorrow.
Maybe he’s a writer after all.
5
When he gets back to Midwood, Billy finds a note thumbtacked to his door. It’s an invitation to have ribs and slaw and cherry cobbler at the Raglands’ down the street. He goes because he doesn’t want to be seen as standoffish, but with no enthusiasm, expecting an after-dinner conversation over cans of suds having to do with commie college kids this and dirty immigrants that. He is stunned to discover that Paul and Denise Ragland voted for Hillary Clinton and can’t stand Trump, who they call ‘President Crybaby.’ Proving once more, Billy supposes as he walks home, that you can’t judge a man by his wifebeater.
He’s already been sucked in by a Netflix show called Ozark and is ready to start the third episode when his cell phone – his David Lockridge cell – dings with a text. George Russo, ever the concerned agent, wants to know how his first day went.
DLock: Pretty well. I did some writing.
GRusso: Good to hear. We’ll make you a bestseller yet. Can you drop by Thurs night? 7 PM, dinner. N wants to talk to you.
Nick is still in town, then, and probably in Vegas withdrawal.
DLock: Sure. But no H.
GRusso: Absolutely not.
That’s good. Billy thinks he could live long and die happy if he never saw Ken Hoff again. He turns off the TV and goes to bed. He slips easily into sleep, and at some point just before dawn’s prologue, he slips just as easily into a nightmare. Which he will write down tomorrow, as Benjy Compson. Changing the names to protect the guilty.
6
The man my ma lived with came home with a broke arm. I guess he must have went to the hospital first because it was in a cast. My sister was trying to bake cookies and she burnt them. I guess she forgot to keep track of the time. When that man came home he was plenty mad. He killed my sister and I don’t even remember his name. He started yelling as soon as he came in. I was on the floor of the trailer, putting together a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle that when it was done would be 2 kittens playing with a ball of yarn. I could smell the booze he was drinking even with the smoke from the cookies and found out later he got into a fight at Wally’s Tavern. He must have lost because he had a black eye too. My sister
Catherine was her name, although that’s not the one he’ll use – almost but not quite. Catherine Ann Summers, just nine on the day she died. Blonde. Small.
My sister Cassie was at the table we ate off, coloring in her book. She would have turned 10 in 2 or 3 months and she was looking forward to being in 2 figures instead of just 1.1 was 11 and suppose to be looking out for her.
The boyfriend was yelling and waving at the smoke which only just started before he came in, asking what did you do what did you do and Cathy
Billy deletes that fast, hoping nobody is looking right then.
Cassie said I was baking cookies I guess they burnt I am sorry. And he said you are a stupid little bitch I don’t believe how stupid you are.
He open the oven door and more smoke come out. If we had a smoke detector it would have gone off but we didn’t have one in our trailer. He picked up a dish towel and started flapping it at the smoke. I would have got up to open the outside door but it was open already. The boyfriend reached in to get that cookie sheet. He grab it with his good hand but the dish towel slipped and he burnt his hand and spilled those cookies that were in shapes I helped Cassie cut out and they went all over the floor. Cassie got down to pick them up and that’s when he started killing her. Or maybe it happened right away when he swatted her with that cast upside her head and she flew into the wall. Out like a light anyway but maybe still alive only then he started kicking her with these boots he always wore that my ma called motorhuckle boots.
Stop it your killing her I said but he didn’t stop until I said stop it you son of a bitch bully chickenshit fucker STOP HURTING MY SISTER. So then I went to tackle him and he push me down
Billy gets up and goes to the window of the office that is now – he supposes – his writing room. People are coming and going on the courthouse steps, but he doesn’t see them. He goes into the little kitchenette for a drink of water. He spills a bit of it because his hands are trembling. They don’t tremble when he’s going to take a shot, they are always stone-steady then, but they are now. Not a lot, but enough to spill some water. His mouth and throat are dry and he drinks down the whole glass.
It has all come back to him and it all makes him ashamed. He will leave what he has written about trying to tackle Bob Raines, because it puts a layer of heroic fiction over the truth, which is close to unbearable. He didn’t tackle Bob Raines while Bob Raines was kicking his sister and stepping on her and crushing her fragile chest on which no breasts would ever appear. Billy was supposed to take care of her. Take care of your sister was the last thing Ma always said when she left for her job at the laundry. But he didn’t take care of her. He ran. He ran for his life.
But it was in my mind even then, he thinks as he goes back to the table and the laptop. It must have been, because it wasn’t our room I ran for.
‘I ran for theirs,’ Billy says, and picks up where he left off.
So then I went to tackle him and he push me down and I got up and ran down the trailer to their room at the end and slam the door behind me. He started pounding on it right away, calling me every name in the book and said if you don’t open this door right now Benjy you are going to be one sorry-ass motherfucker. Only I knew it didn’t matter if I opened the door or not because he’d do me like he did Cassie. Because she was dead, even a kid of 11 could see that.
Ma’s boyfriend use to be in the army and he kept his footlocker at the end of the bed with a blanket over it. I pushed the blanket off and open the footlocker. He had a padlock for it but hardly ever used it, maybe never. If he had’ve I wouldn’t be writing this because I would be dead. And if that gun of his hadn’t been loaded I would be dead but I knew it was because he kept it loaded in case of what he called burg-gurg-gurglers.
Burg-gurg-gurglers, Billy thinks. Christ, how it all comes back.
He bust in the door like I was pretty sure he would
Not pretty sure, Billy thinks, I knew. Because it was nothing but fiberboard. Cathy and I used to hear them going at it just about every night. In the afternoon, if Ma came home early. But that was another fiction he would leave.
and when he come in I was sitting with my back against the foot of the bed with his gun pointing at him. It was an M9X19 that took 15 Parabellum rounds. I didn’t know that then of course but I knew it was heavy and I held it in both hands against my chest. He said give that to me you useless piece of shit don’t you know kids ain’t supposed to play with guns.
Then I shot him, dead center mass. He just stood there in the doorway like nothing happen but I knew it did because I saw the blood fly out of his back. The M9 recoiled against my chest
Billy remembers making an uh sound. And burping. And later on he had a bruise there above his sternum.
and he fell down. I went over to him and said to myself that I might have to shoot him again. If I had to I would. He was my mother’s boyfriend but he was wrong. He was a bad guy!
‘Except he was dead,’ Billy says. ‘Bob Raines was dead.’
He thinks briefly of deleting everything he’s written, it’s awful, but saves it instead. He doesn’t know what anyone else might think, but Billy thinks it’s good. And good that it’s awful, because awful is sometimes the truth. He guesses he really is a writer now, because that’s a writer’s thought. Émile Zola might have thought the same when he was writing Thérèse Raquin, or when Nana gets sick and all of her beauty rots away.