Driving for hours through day-round rainy dark and down hilly backroads, she pondered the meaning of losing.
There was no use beating around the bush. She had lost - lost everything, one way or the other. Of course, she was always too smart to be on the losing team, but here she was anyway, careening along switchbacks, mountain and forest shadow mirroring and melting into the asphalt so it was like driving through long tunnels. It was raining, faint rumble of thunder in the distance, getting fainter, sounded like it too was fleeing the scene. But the rain was getting harder, filling the car with the sound of it drumming against the metal frame. She had picked the winning team, but being on the team wasn't the same thing as winning; there was the boss and then there was the rest of them, tributaries feeding his great river, and how could she have ever thought it'd be otherwise? If she never got what she'd came for...
She'd learned about losing early.
According to the stories she was raised on she'd been born into what was once a real family, real being the word of consequence: money to burn in the bank, names on signposts at the corners of paved streets, a great house that put all others to shame by the reach of its shadow. And like all such families who remained in that part of the country, the reality was lost when they weren't looking, blinded by their own shine - it was blown away in a whirl of dust, the paint flaked off the signs, the apples shriveled and dropped in the unharvested orchard, and the name wore out like a dollar that'd changed hands by the hundreds.
The final stroke: her daddy had died. Automobile accident, so goddamn common, even in a time and town where rubber was rare on the road, and maybe he'd been drinking when he'd gone hurtling through that bridge rail and into the river - that was one subject where there was enough respect left in town for their name that nobody talked about it.
They were still rich in memory, in memories of what they were meant to be. Didn't matter that the town was mowed flat and pilfered empty as a drained lakebed. They still had the town mines and dreamed in coal, by definition transmutable into diamonds if you swore by that kind of magic and they did, oh, they did. Transmutation and revival - they would call the promise of the old days back to life if they had to sacrifice their last eyeteeth to do it. Not that the situation was that desperate yet - they still had all their teeth, a few good inches of shoe leather; desperation was the wolf at their door but it hadn't gotten in yet. They had much farther still to fall, and maybe that made it worse in the end.
The oldest son was football captain, until he was the former football captain, but that still meant something so long as he stayed in town, that captaincy something for his strong shoulders to bear while he was marking summertime until he could leave again, until he could kick up dust behind him and run back into the wide-open arms of Yale or Duke or whatever law school would take him in, hand him a degree weighted down with names of the kind that wouldn't wear with fickle fortune. The second son, too. He was bound to get a degree in business. Bound to be something else to suit the times once things started going right again, right after the firstborn had done it. No offers for him, but he was bright enough, a midday sun's brightness, no matter if his face was such that no girl ever danced with him or no fellow ever bought him a beer. He'd make something of himself. Their momma rattling around trying to half-keep up that big house and father-who-art-in-heaven both had so much to be proud of, even still. One of those sons was gonna be governor, sure as sand, or at least congressman, the face of the county if not of the whole state.
It would take money, though, to get these grand plans off the ground, and what last they'd had had gone in the ground with their father's grand funeral services.
So it came down to the girls. The girls and their would-be savior, a man who was in the meat-packing business, among other shadowy Chicagoan things. He'd done business with their father, he'd been a friend to their father, and when their father had gone off overseas he'd been a friend to their momma. Real good friend, wanted to make good on that friendship, take the whole family under his wing.
Really, it came down to the oldest girl on account of her body, the fine figure she cut. Marriageable. beddable, sellable - and past time, too. Kathy, she was called by at the time.
He came back from Chicago and blew into town like he was never not there, six months too late for their father's funeral. One minute it was a threadbare town with dust underfoot that turned everyone the pale shade of a sepia photograph (or was that another trick of memory?), next it was his town in prospect if not yet in deed, every acre was potential property, ready to be turned over.
Leon, was his name. Lion it meant in French, as he liked to mention when introducing himself to the townsfolk, like such dumb hicks could never figure that for themselves.
He brought friends with him, younger men mostly. Business associates, he called them, and they wore tailored suits fit for any banker but didn't bother to disguise their bruised knuckles and bloodshot eyes, the occasional clink of their knuckle-brass in secret pockets.
They all had their eyes on Kathy when the boss-man wasn't looking too close - sometimes even when he was. One in particular looked hard and hungry, the way her momma (the goddamn hypocrite) had warned her about.
One in particular. She saw him the first time at sundown, warm purplish summer dusk, eating a browning apple on the steps of the Apostolic Tabernacle, like Adam. Where's his Eve? was the first thing she ever wondered about him. She was on her way to the movies, they had a proper movie house by that time - the town's last decent construction project. She was taking her sister to see Dorothy get twister-borne away to Oz for the first time, and the girl asked her all these dumb questions about how it was the colors bloomed into life on the celluloid and why they drained away again when that dumb bitch Dorothy decided she wanted to be back in Kansas again after all.
She thought she felt eyes watching her in the dark theater. She never did see him. She liked it, that somebody would go the trouble of sneaking around to see her. Not that it meant anything.
She would have gone through with it, marrying Leon. He would've taken her away from her chores on the farm and the small-town trap and onto Chicago, where she imagined life in some kind of gilded cage with untarnished silverware and sheets that were always clean and movie houses with chandeliers and lush velvet seats. She told herself she could learn to like the cage, learn to like it like she liked anything that shined.
She might not get a better offer. Every year beyond twenty was a mile deeper into old maid territory, and that was more lonesome and perilous than any route out east. And then, there'd always been something wrong with her, something that marked her as not like the other girls. Maybe it was the way her daddy had raised her, the dangerous crime flicks he'd let her see, the time he'd taught her how to shoot bottles off a fence, nicknaming her his little firecracker. Maybe it was the way she darned the hems of her polka dots and florals too short, maybe it was the nickels she wasted on drugstore lipsticks, the way her long curls tangled in the dust by the railroad tracks which she would traverse acres of dusty rocky fields so she could walk along - or maybe it was a deeper meanness, a profound lack, like a fairy-tale curse on her heart. Whatever it was, it smoldered like sparks in the underbrush, unseen. It didn't matter. She could fool most men most of the time.
It would all have worked out.
If only he would have stopped fucking her mother.
o
Some scorcher midday in August, through the glass pane in the kitchen door, there was an image that Kathy knew could not be right.
She broke it into pieces for herself, like long division.
One leg, no, two, four. Four legs. Tangled, sinfully tangled.
A thrust or a guttural movement.
One mouth open, keening. Dark lipstick, was it the color of plums? Would it taste of overly ripe fruit or bloody bruised skin or of a woman's sins, inherent, like the preacher was always hollering about?
A short, lumpy back. Sweat in the hollows, the dimples. Heavy as a barrel, as a stone.
The table was a mess. Yeasty dough left uncovered that'd failed to rise. A cup of grainy coffee with a milk skin on top.
Kathy closed her eyes. Her hot heart beating like the wings of a swallow in a snare, only it wasn't fear, wasn't panic, oh no, it was nearer to a thrill, something like she imagined flying must be like.
She knew straightaway what she had to do.
o
Kathy was leaning against the LaSalle convertible that belonged to Leon's right hand, the one who she'd seen at the Tabernacle. Mr. Chambers, his names was. By this time in their acquaintanceship, he and Kathy flirted sometimes. She thought they understood each other. Chambers understood she loved the movies and wanted to be a girl in a picture, any picture, but preferably one of those shadowy crime pictures where the dame looked like she was half-made of razors - and so he talked to her like she was, lots of arch and canny gals-and-dames-like-yous. Kathy thought she understood that he was a notorious smooth-talking, chain-smoking cold-assed motherfucker. Love 'em and leave 'em were the words he lived by and so being virginal and marked off for another must be a big part of her appeal.
"Hey, Katie-girl," he drawled, leaning in to capture a kiss from her pale chapped lips. She dodged it and it landed on the flushed skin of her neck.
"I need twenty bucks, Mr. C." she said, her lips curling into a grin that she ducked her head to half-hide, fingertips fluttering in to rest on his belt buckle. "Please?" Her trill was a perfect impression of that floozy Leon thought he had his eye on. Wouldn't quite fool Chambers but she didn't intend it to.
Her hand drifted lower.
His pupils dilated, his Adam's apple bobbing like a cork.
"Oo-oh, you are pleased to see me." Her hand dancing over the new shape and heft of him, inexpert but that was the point of the act. A note of desperation. "I could help you out there, if you want."
His lip twitched. Hard shine in his eyes. Maybe a little dangerous but so was she now, by god, so the hell was she.
His tough, callused fingers stuffed some crumpled notes into her hand. Kathy smiled, sliver of demur teeth, and slid them under the sailor-suit collar of her summer dress.
"Thanks ever so, darlin'." She turned on her heel, walked away in a whirl of white polka dots. She heard him click open his lighter, light a cigarette behind her. She didn't look back.
This wasn't the first time she thought she'd played him for a fool. It wouldn't be the last she'd be so mistaken.
Chambers's twenty gave her enough to buy a shotgun. Got herself a new lipstick too, painted her mouth like Snow White's.
(She'd collected another two-hundred from Johnny, Burt, Harold and Tony in the same way.)
She went into the gun shop and talked about her oldest brother, y'know, the football captain? wantin' something real special for his b'day to the shop assistant. It was the oldest son who had her daddy's rifle and of course the shop assistant knew that, had heard him bragging about his eye for targets enough times. When he said something about it, about sons treasuring their father's heirlooms above any other valuable, Kathy slammed his face against the counter and got her first taste of what it was to make human blood pour out.
Obviously, he gave her the gun for free.
o
Kathy tied Leon to the kitchen chair like some girl in a Leonard Cohen song, one of those songs that was like a key fitting in her memory lock-box, would later do. It was a Sunday morning and she'd played sick to get out of going to church and she'd asked for Leon to come see her, give her a get-well kiss. The moment he set foot over the threshold she'd bashed the rifle butt into the side of his skull.
Why, was all he asked, while she puttered around the kitchen like she was trying to make up her mind what to have for after-church tea or something, why was all he bleated over and over and over over and over again until she'd gone goddamned crazy because he still didn't have a fucking clue, and he had blood all over half his face, his cheeks and jowls quivering like liver so fresh it'd just been carved out of the cow's carcass.
"Because you're a lowlife scumbag who fucked my momma while Daddy was in France. That's fucking why." Her voice didn't waver, didn't give an inch. She could've tacked on other reasons but felt she should stick to the most righteous one.
She was remembering her father teaching her how to hold his rifle, shooting bottles on a fence, telling her, "You gotta promise you're gonna take what you want, cause 'ain't nobody gonna hand it to you. You're gonna have to give 'em hell Katie-girl. "
"That's it?" he sputtered.
Kathy wanted to crack his skull like an eggshell and paint the walls with his brains. She wanted to hack his head off with a steak knife and leave it on the kitchen table for her mother and brothers to find, a goodbye note. This sack of meat was what you thought you could sell me to.
"Please -" Acrid stench stinging in her nostrils - oh hell's bells he'd fucking pissed himself from fear, of her, and Kathy was laughing and whatever it was wrong that'd smoldered in her innards and her heart and her brains was finally going off like firecrackers, her laugh spilling like broken whiskey bottles.
"Leon, baby, do me a favor?" Kathy said. "Shut the goddamned hell up."
She emptied the barrel into his body and she didn't look away once. His blood matched her lipstick, his eyes glazed with unshed tears. He looked more human to her dead than he'd ever looked so alive. But she couldn't let that get to her now, could she? She pressed a kiss against his cheek - nobody else in this town wore paint that color - and left her old life behind.
Which was to say that Chambers caught up with her down by the railroad tracks, sundown again, when he came roaring across the barren wheat field in his uncannily shiny LaSalle. She wasn't afraid. He whistled like a wolf, a true wolf, so different from any boy in town.
He told her -
"Was biding my time till the tastiest moment to do him myself and I sure am glad I waited. Got to watch the whole show through the window, and darlin,' you were better than any picture"
"What kind of man are you?" she asked him, marveling. It was sundown again and his warm wolf grin was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
"Honey," he said, "there ain't no other kind like me."
When he opened his vein for her it was like he opened a map to every road in America. Gave her the key, unlocked the secret that America's roads were more than just grit and gravel, steaming asphalt and blowing dust. They were a web knitting the vast sprawl together, a symbol of hope and prosperity and home. There were no American stories that did not begin or end with roads. On the road, she would be her own story now.
She drove away in the LaSalle.
o
From that moment by the rails he'd always told her that she wasn't made, she was created by her own two hands.
Wasn't that true about all monsters, though?
o
The storm broke and the sky was silvery bright as moonshine, and just as sharp as moonshine of the other kind; it was not a sky you could drift up away in. It wouldn't snow today, the clouds were now too thin for that, at least at this latitude, but there was hoarfrost on her Mustang that morning, and on the scrubby bushes someone had planted next to the parking lot in a sad attempt at making it look like something other than a smear of gravel and shattered bottles over which the motel sign drunkenly blinked.
She had moved out of the farmhouse because she suddenly couldn't stomach the memories anymore. Even though those memories were lies; even though she had never lived there, never lost anything there except another scrap of her tattered pride. But it was close enough. The next worst thing.
She was on her way out of town, no question about that; it was past time to get the fuck out of Dodge - but she still had remnants of the blood Winchester'd spilled and the bodies she'd burned smudged under her skin and there was no way she was leaving sober. So she'd had to head back into town, this godforsaken isolated valley town, too far to any other. Check into the motel, meaning to shower, get a bite to eat. Instead she laid on the bed looking for familiar faces in the ceiling's watermarks and did neither of those things.
It was morning and all the bars were closed and while there were always panhandlers on the streets obscenely easy for the picking the stench of them churned her stomach and so she had to stop for coffee, just to keep herself occupied.
So she was in this diner, a diner like any other; the linoleum was dirty, smudged by slushy footprints, and the vinyl seats were patched with duct tape, but the silverware glinted, reflecting yellow light, and she blinked and that was where she found him. It was a pity, because the diner was a refuge from that seeping morning chill and the waitress hadn't given her any weird looks such as might tempt her into snapping the woman's neck, even though she hadn't showered for the past thirty-six hours and she was pretty sure she looked like it, her cloying perfume only accenting her body odor. She almost pretended she hadn't seen him, to buy herself some time, but then he looked up from under that stupid goddamn spaghetti-western hat and made eye contact and her clever plan was shot to hell. He got up from his booth in the corner, sauntered over to her like a gunslinger, grubby and unshaven, rough in dirty jeans. Posturing even when there was barely a soul around to appreciate it. All for show, not that, she had to admit, she was in a position to judge.
He slid onto the bench across from her, propped his elbow on the window ledge.
"Of all the gin joints," he said. "Just the woman I was lookin' to see. Got a message to relay. Telephone games, you know how it is. I guess at your age, never having got a handle on texting, must not feel as goddamn ridiculous to you as it does to me."
She had her sunglasses on to hide the hungry shadows around her eyes but was sure he could feel her glare from behind them, sure half the diner could.
"Guess what: you're gettin' a second chance," he said. "Teacher's pet."
She blinked at that last: it seemed a non-sequitur.
"Chance at what?" she said. Her nails were digging into the crack between the table's metal rim and Formica top.
"Doin' what you were supposed to do in the first place, what else? You know some other definition of second chance I don't?"
She'd been harboring fantasies that the boss would let her go, make a clean break, and it was only now that she saw clear how stupid she'd been. This wasn't a second chance, no such thing, this mindscrew just wasn't over yet.
"He still want the Winchester alive?"
"You really need to keep your eye on the big picture, sweetheart," he said. "Get with the program."
"I've never been in your fucking program," she said. Drank her coffee and it tasted like iron. "And I've got my own picture to be getting on with."
"Sure you do," he said. "But honey, nobody likes a girl who'll never play ball."
"I'll do it," she said. Refrained from the rhetorical question: do I have a choice? "Gather up the posse," she said, meaning for posse to mock his hat, but he was oblivious to such digs as usual. Or maybe he enjoyed them, maybe that was the point. "Draw up a proper plan this time with no input from you, if you don't mind." Her tone implying that she hoped he did mind, hoped he minded a lot.
He shrugged. "Blame what you let slip through your fingers on me, why don't you. The boss-man obviously don't. And whadya need a plan for, anyway? This ain't military science we're talkin' about, this is retrieving a loose nuke."
"You think science wouldn't come into that? I could almost envy you your simple mind, Carson."
He smiled that cold-snake smile. Truth was, she did envy him: she didn't believe he cared for anyone or ever had and so he knew nothing of missing or loneliness or revenge, nothing about any of it. He saw the face she put on in the morning: that she was a creature of grief and brutality and (naturally) lipstick red as blood. He didn't see what was behind it, for all that he smiled at her like she was so transparent.
"What you need," he said, "is to double stock on canon fodder."
"What I need," she said," is for you to get outta my face."
He let her down again by obliging before the matter could come to a conflagration.
She pulled out her case and her lighter, ignited a Marlboro. That got the waitress to put on a purse-lipped grimace, jerk her head to the no-smoking sign. She blew out hard, smoke hanging a screen in front of her face, waiting for the waitress to start something. Get over here, say something prissy or sugary-scolding, like Momma used to - Oh, sorry dear, didn't you see the rules...?
After, she went back to the motel and re-touched her makeup. She spiked her lashes like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, a favorite, one she saw with her man after she left home - two symmetrical flicks of eyeliner, blush cutting down the cheekbones, mascara the color of the darkness just beyond the streetlamp's range and, of course, that famous lick of ruby adorning her lips. No peacoat, no dress, no kitten-toes - she dressed like the woman she'd been when she'd had her own fucking posse, the highway queen who'd hacked off her hair with a switchblade and wore leather jackets and jeans that clung to her legs and black boots anchoring her feet to the road.
It was an art that escaped some people. She'd have to run by the station to let the Chief know she was taking point on this one - rub it in her face - and the Chief would lend her men without letting her forget they were on loan, a dispensation. The Chief would also say something rude about her hair, the long dark streaks of her roots growing out.
The Chief had after all said to her, concerning the mini skirts she'd dressed the girl in, that she didn't see why a lady had to get all two-penny tarted up in this day and age to get the job done. As if the way of men with women changed with the times.
She was dressed for memorable and for murder, ideally. Of course, it might not go down that way. Might be nobody would be playing ball and nobody would be taking their toys home in one piece. She might just kill him, winning team and obligation and gameplan be damned.
She had her doubts. Maybe the boss had written her off as a liability and meant for Winchester to kill her. Indirect and cruel - that sounded like him.
She had the sudden idea that she was playing Russian roulette with her own impulses, and she didn't know which chamber was loaded - she wasn't the man behind the curtain. The thing was, putting the gun down just wasn't an option. What did that leave her with?
There came a time when you had to cut your losses or go crazy trying to add them up.
