Shine - Lauren Myracle [70]
I tried to step backward, but I couldn’t, because I was up against his produce stand.
“Bad things happen. Evil happens,” Ridings said. “Evil’s out there. I seen it riding right by me, like the riders of the apocalypse.”
I inched sideways. My bike was a foot away. I just had to get to it. Once I had the handlebars clenched in my hands, I felt a heck of a lot better.
“I’m real sorry about your cow, Ridings,” I told him.
He went still. Slowly, the feverish light left his eyes, and his body lost its rigidity, so that he was no longer up in my face. He scratched his arm and said, “Damn chiggers.”
“So . . . yeah,” I said. “Guess I’m going now.” I hesitated, thinking about evil. “Hey. You know Patrick, right?”
“Sure I do,” Ridings said. “He used to come talk with me.”
“He did? About what?”
“Just whatever. Tomatoes. The weather. Stuff like that.”
“Oh. Well, he got hurt, like bad hurt. Did you know that?”
“I sure did.” His eyes were mournful. “Satan.”
The highway Ridings set up his stand on led to the Come ’n’ Go. It didn’t get much traffic, but it did get some.
“Did you notice anything . . . odd?” I asked. “Not this past Saturday, but a week ago Saturday? The night Patrick got beat up?”
Ridings looked at me like I was speaking gibberish. Maybe I was, or maybe he couldn’t think back that far, what with his brain eaten up from Wally’s home cooking.
I thought about Wally’s cooking, and then I thought about peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, and my brain put them together in that way brains sometimes do: pairing ideas that shouldn’t be paired, yet nonetheless were.
Don’t you take no peanut butter and mayonnaise sammiches, even if someone gives ’em to you free.
We get all sorts of crazy orders. Peanut butter and mayonnaise, turkey with fried pickles, tongue with spicy mustard.
Shut up, Dupree. She doesn’t care.
Ridings’s brow cleared. “Oh. You want to know did I see something. Something suspicious.”
“Yeah, did you?”
“Naw. I packed up my stand, then went home and watched the stars some. Saw Beef pass by in his girlfriend’s truck a few times, driving folks around. I guess I watched the stars some more and called it a night.” He made a sound that for him might have been a laugh. “’Course the sun was coming up all red and teary by then. You ever notice how swollen the sun is so early in the morning? Like it got no sleep, either?”
Beef driving everyone home. That was all he’d seen.
Ridings yawned, his eyes closing. He opened them again and looked at me, his eyes glazed. “Hey. You ever meet my little girl? You want to see her picture?”
It was time for me to go, because just as sure as God made plump, juicy peaches, Ridings had left already. And just as sure as God made peaches, I knew he wasn’t coming back.
I SCREAMED WHEN I SAW IT: A SEVERED TONGUE on my pillow. It was jagged at the end, like it had been sawed off with a knife. There were bumps on the surface, like on a human tongue, but it was too big to be human. It was a cow’s tongue, flaccid and damp and on my pillow.
I screamed, and Aunt Tildy came running, Christian right behind her.
“What? What is it?” Christian demanded.
I tried to speak, and he grabbed my shoulders, because maybe I wasn’t making words come out so well, or maybe I’d gone pale. I was shaking so hard that he had to hold me up.
“Good Lord in heaven,” Aunt Tildy said when she saw. She peered closer, then drew back as if she’d been stung. “Why do you have a cow tongue on your pillow? Is that a note under there? Cat, what have you done?”
What have I done? I thought. What have I done!?
Christian eased me to the floor, my back against the end of my bed for support. He looked into my eyes and said, “You’re okay. You hear?” He stood and strode to my bed. “Aunt Tildy, move.”
I heard rather than saw what happened next. Footsteps as he strode to the front of my bed. The rustle of the paper as he grabbed the note. Then a whole stream of cussing before he came back into view. His face was stormy as he crumpled the piece of paper. “Who did this, Cat?”
“What does it say?