Blink

Billieu was nothing more than an old grocery with two gas pumps next to the highway leading to Manning. The store had been closed down for ten years, but then reopened under a new owner, Mister Chesterton, who had a college-educated niece named Kelly Ann whom he somehow then talked into working the register for seven dollars an hour.

Now, her brother Brett had once joked with Kelly Ann, telling her, “if you’re ever driving down 42, don’t blink or you’ll miss Billieu.” But in all seriousness the girl felt she couldn’t blink barely enough, seeing the hooded kid back there by the beer cooler. With both hands pressed to the countertop, Kelly Ann couldn’t help leaving her mouth hanging open, either.

Here it was the middle of August, and here was this kid in a jacket with the hood pulled over his head, for heaven’s sake!

He paced one way then the other, opening one of the glass doors then closing it, leaving a layer of fog on the inside. His head then pivoted around to eye the brown-haired girl behind the counter.

“Can I help you?” Kelly Ann hollered.

“Uh, no ma’am,” he replied, shaking his hooded head. Done with whatever he was trying to do, the kid swung around and skipped past the counter. She heard him say, “don’t mind me none!” before he’d shoved the door open and was off running somewhere.

Kelly Ann strummed the counter top and ran her tongue inside her still open mouth. “Huh! Somebody must’ve put him up to it. Where do they get off thinking they can send a kid in to buy beer for them? I mean, why don’t you just come in and buy it yourself? And as hot as it is? I swear!”

She hit the button for the cash drawer, straightened some bills, then closed the drawer. With hands upon the counter once more, she stared out the door. Two eighteen-wheelers went flying past, dust sent swirling off the shoulder and into the parking area.

“Uncle Chess!” Kelly Ann hollered.

“Yeah!” came a man’s loud voice from the storeroom.

“I’ve got to use the restroom.”

“Again? Girl, what do you keep drinking them Mountain Dews for?”

“I’ve really gotta go, okay?”

“Well, go then. I’ll listen for anyone that comes in.”

She wanted to be certain. So, instead of going straight back, she went by way of the coolers first. There in the aisle lay a wad of bills held together by a clip engraved with the initials “CMC”. Having scooped it up, she thumbed through what amounted to a huge stack of hundreds. Kelly Ann sucked in a big gulp of air and held it.

In the restroom, she’d left the wad on the edge of the sink and was staring at it from the toilet. She was still staring at it while washing and drying her hands. With the clip removed and dropped in the sink, Kelly Ann began straightening out, counting and stacking each bill, careful not to let any fall to the floor.

“… eight, nine, ten.” She paused, feeling her hand trembling. “Eleven! Twelve! Thirt…!”

Kelly Ann covered her mouth, hoping no one had heard her. A few bills were still in the other hand. She let out a laugh before gathering them all up. The girl then tried squeezing the whole stack into her tight jeans pocket but soon gave up on that one. Pulling a paper towel from the dispenser, she wrapped them up with it instead. As for the clip, she thought to leave it in the trash can, but then turned and dropped it into the toilet. After sending the thing on its way with a flush, she cracked the door and peered out.

No one appeared to have come in the store yet, and no one was parked outside either. Behind the counter now, Kelly Ann stuffed the thick brown bundle into her purse, caught her breath and stood with hands folded and a smile stuck to her lips. She was in the perfect pose for anyone who might walk in. But then, perhaps too perfect. They’d ask. So, she lost the smile, brushed some hair away and blew out another deep breath.

She was about to turn and pick up where she’d left off stocking cigarettes, when Kelly Ann noticed a car pull up to one of the pumps. It was deep purple with sparkling chrome trim. A boom-ba-boomp-booomm shook the store windows for a few seconds then quit. Kelly Ann moved her purse under the counter.

The door opened and two men came in. They strolled down the middle aisle, picking up and putting back various items along the way.

Kelly Ann pulled a carton from the tote on the floor, opened it and filled an empty slot with packs of Marlboro. She could now see their heads sticking up from the back aisle, mumbling and chuckling to each other, shoes shuffling toward where the kid had been shuffling his earlier. She dug out the last two packs and threw the empty carton away. With the packs pressed between her palms, Kelly Ann looked again. The heads of the men just hovered there, neither one speaking. She looked at the packs between her palms, then the price printed on the slot’s tag.

“Nine sixty-one,” she whispered. “How can he afford these, smoking a pack a day like he does?” She was, of course, thinking of her brother who worked for the state police. His partner was always trying to ask her out, too. They would be stopping in close to noon to pick up snacks for lunch. Her watch read 11:36.

“Excuse me, Miss,” came a deep smooth voice from the other side of the counter.

The girl went to turn, and the cigarette packs slipped from her hands. “Oh, sorry!” she said, bending to retrieve them. “Can I help you?”

Both men laughed.

Kelly Ann waited, rubbing the two packs together.

“I’d like to ask you,” said the one, “if you’d seen my, uh, cousin come in here earlier. He was this short dude wearing a jacket, you see.”

Both had their eyes on her. Kelly Ann felt like they were trying to read her, scanning her body and smiling the whole time. She tried not thinking of the purse under the counter, suppressing the image of the bills wrapped in the paper towel even. One of the men must’ve noticed her glance to one side and stretched his neck to look back toward the storeroom. He wore a gold necklace bearing the initials “CMC”.

Placing a hand on the counter and leaning in, the man said, “Look here, Miss uh …”

Kelly Ann hadn’t gotten her name tag printed up yet, so she wore a label her uncle had written her name on.

“… Kelly dear. Baby. See, my cousin, he might’ve dropped something of ours back over there. You wouldn’t happen to have picked it up by chance, did you?”

Kelly Ann shrugged and shook her head, massaging the packs with her fingers.

“Now, don’t lie to me, girl. ‘Cause I know a pretty thing like you wouldn’t take nothing that wasn’t hers. Am I right?”

“How could I?” she said. “I mean, I’ve been up here the whole time. Haven’t been back that way yet. Sorry.”

“But you thought about it.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying. Look, there was a kid in here earlier, but he ran out. Whether he dropped something or not, I have no clue. What would I go looking for anyway?”

The man lowered his head and patted the counter.

Her uncle Chess stepped out of the storeroom, his eyes fixed on the clipboard in his hands. “Kelly darlin’, you can go ahead and …” He stopped and looked up at the two men.

“It’s okay, pops!” said the one who’d leaned on the counter. He straightened up and continued, “y’all didn’t have what we were looking for. You have a nice day now, you hear?”

Chess nodded to them.

The two men slipped out the door.

Chess said, “suits me. Listen, Kelly darlin’, you can go ahead and take your lunch break now. I’ll watch the register till you get back.”

Kelly Ann placed the two packs, wrote down her time, and picked up her purse. She stood near the door and pretended to be digging around in it for her keys, while eyeing the car outside.

After the two men got in, a boy’s head popped up from the back seat. One of the men reached back and pushed him down.

Kelly Ann couldn’t be sure, but it looked like his mouth was covered with a piece of duct tape.

The car pulled off, and the store windows ceased being shook by the boom-ba-boomp-booomm.

She let go of the revolver’s handle and unclipped her car keys.

Sitting in her SUV with the AC running, she lit a cigarette and squinted toward the highway. Her watch now read 11:54. She should’ve seen his cruiser by now. Kelly Ann had her cell phone out and was ready to call, when someone pulled up next to her and honked.

She grabbed her purse, got out and ran around to the driver’s side of the police cruiser.

“You’ll never guess what just happened,” Kelly Ann said, when her brother had gotten the window down.

He looked over at his partner then back at her. “Yeah? So, what happened?”

She opened her purse and said, “this kid came in and he …” Looking down in it, she saw how the paper towel had come loose, leaving the bills exposed. For an instant, it occurred to her that the paper towel would get lost among the purse’s other contents, becoming nothing more than a thing left down in there and not found for a month. But the money showing from it was … well, more money than she’d ever seen in her life. The bills were fanned out, too, reminding her of the amount she’d counted out there on the edge of the sink.

“… he … he was … Oh, dear god!” The girl covered her mouth and looked at the highway.

“What?” her brother said. “He tried to steal something?”

“No, he just …”

“Did you know him?”

“No,” Kelly Ann said. “I mean, I’d never seen him before. He was in and out so fast, he never even spoke a word … or did he?”

Her brother’s partner leaned forward. “Did he say something to you?”

The image of the kid in the back seat of the deep purple car came back to her. He had been still wearing the hood, showing only the face — rather, just the eyes which had appeared not wide with fear but narrowed and blinking as if he’d just gotten up from a nap. It seemed as though he’d resigned himself to his fate, that there was no longer any use in fighting it.

Don’t mind me none! she remembered him saying.

“Well, hon’,” her brother said, “if it looked like he’d done nothing, you shouldn’t worry about it. He might’ve been after something and got scared. Sooner or later, he’s going to try it again and find out it’s easier than it looks. That’s when it gets harder to resist. Then, it never stops, until either he’s caught or someone puts him down. Either way, it’s out of your hands. Now, just you don’t go letting yourself try something like that, you hear me? It’d break Mama’s heart, if she were still with us.”

“What are you saying?” Kelly Ann responded. “Why I’d never … anyway, you two go on in. Uncle Chess can deal with you now. I’m going home to eat.”

Her brother’s partner leaned forward again, this time with a grin. “You sure you won’t join us?”

“No,” she answered, “not right now I don’t.”

Her brother punched the other’s shoulder.

Kelly Ann pulled out of Billieu and headed down highway 42. The glare off the pavement irritated her eyes, and she felt relieved once she’d turned onto Hennessy Road which had shade trees for part of the way. Given no rainfall for weeks, dust from the road’s gravel rose and trailed far back of the car. Half a mile later, Hennessy curved and entered Sunnybrook trailer park. Kelly Ann’s was the one at the far end, next to an aluminum-paneled gate leading to an old cow pasture where people had been hauling and leaving trash in one corner. She could see some smoke still rising from one end of the sprawling mass, where someone had dumped a bunch of dirty diapers and set fire to them.

With most of Sunnybrook’s tenants either gone to work or hidden away from the summer heat, the park was quiet.

Kelly Ann got out and stared at the grayish column of smoke. She looked back down the graveled road to see if anyone was coming. Entering the open gate, she walked over to where bits and pieces of diapers formed a chalky tattered chain stretched along the edge of the grass. The smell was horrendous, making her already lose her appetite. Amid the blackened remains, some small flames were still visible, which made her glad considering the reason she’d walked back that way. After emptying her purse of everything but the revolver and her wallet, she stepped back and watched the ashes of the consumed bills being mingled with the other charred debris.

“There goes my ticket to hell, I guess,” Kelly Ann said. “Wonder where that kid’ll end up. So sad. And those two, if they decide to come back … Damn them! I’ve got to get out of this place.”

Kelly Ann heard a crackling and a rumbling out of a stand of pines. Between their trunks and over beyond Billieu, she spied nothing but black sky. Streaks of lightning shot out of it. Her scalp tingled. She coughed. Pressed to her chest, her hand felt the label written with her name. She ripped this off, crumpled it and stepped forward to toss her uncle’s handiwork into the smoldering mass on the ground. Wiping sweat and soot from her eyes, she wanted to return to the cool comfort of the trailer before the rain hit.

As she turned, Kelly Ann looked over at a gap in the nearby wooded area, where stood a yellow and black sign marking the right-a-way for the Norco gas pipeline. But the sign wasn’t what had made her look.

A small boy in shorts was squatted next to the tree line. Realizing the woman had seen him, he ran back down the clearing.

Caught between the pressure from the impending front, the stench from the whirling smoke, the oppressive heat off the trailer roofs and the swaying of tree tops overhead, Kelly Ann felt her head reeling and body being sucked into that wooded gap. What made her start running that way instead of back to the safety of her trailer, words wouldn’t cover.

The boy stopped, looked back at her then took off again.

“Hey!” she shouted to him.

“I didn’t do nuttin’! I didn’t do nuttin’!”

“Wait! I want to talk to you!”

He slowed and stood, waiting. She kept coming, so he turned but then stumbled and fell.

Kelly Ann stumbled, too, dropping her purse. Shouldering it again, she stood up, panting, sweating. In between heaving breaths, she said, “why’d you run?”

“Why’d you come after me?” he replied. “I never took nuttin’.”

“Huh?”

The boy stood up and brushed himself off. “I wasn’t going to take anything anyways. I had money. What’d you come after me for?”

Kelly Ann squinted at him. “You … you were wearing that hood. You looked so …”

“I gave it to that other fella, so you couldn’t tell on me. Now, they can’t come after me, thinking they got me. I would’ve given it back, ‘cept they ain’t the forgivin’ kind. Which is why I wanted to spend it before they did come. That way, they wouldn’t know I had it, see?”

Kelly Ann looked past him down the clearing that went on and on through the woods. “Where do you live?”

“Me and my daddy, we got us a camp in the woods, back there.” He was waving behind himself. “Real secluded. You stay in that trailer up there, don’t you? I seen what you did back there. You better quit that store and go somewhere, ‘fore they come looking for you. They ain’t nice, ‘specially with girls like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“See, they deal in dope. But they also deal with these rich dudes, selling off girls like you, or younger. That’s why you need to get away from here. You’re too pretty for that. Rather, you’re pretty enough, they’d get their money back and then some.”

Kelly Ann let her purse hang from her hand. “Listen, my brother he works for the state police. You should tell him what you just told me. He’ll see to it they’re put behind bars.”

“Don’t work that way. Listen, I gotta go. My daddy, he’s sick and all. I was going to use some of that money to help him. Guess I better go back then. You go on back, too. Pack your things and get outta there.”

He waved to her and stumbled a bit before passing through the tall grass, brushing the tops with his hands.

Emerging later from the clearing, Kelly Ann stood in the pasture and stared up at the turbulent clouds towering over the trailer park. The air temperature had dropped and the smoke all but dissipated.

“He said I was pretty. Stupid kid! And that guy with Brett needs to get a life. I’m tired of being called pretty.”

She felt the first drops and caught sight of the torrent sweeping toward her.

“No sense in running now, is there? Just hold on, Kelly Ann! You don’t want to miss this one.”