Sample story from Skull Fragments by Tim L. Williams
Read the opening pages from Tim L. Williams’ Edgar Award-nominated story "Where that Morning Sun Goes Down"
Four days after we murder Tiny Gardner, Donny Ray decides he wants pancakes. It’s closing in on three in the morning, still as black as a slag heap, so we head for the Huddle House out by the Western Kentucky Parkway and then Donny Ray pulls a thin, twisty joint from behind his ear before I can get out of the car.
“Hold on, Bubba,” he says. “Let’s fire this baby before we go in.”
Normally I’d jump right on that idea, but it’s early November, colder than it has any right to be, and the most the Pontiac’s heater can manage is the occasional wheeze of frigid air. We’ve been on a wild one. We walked out of Tiny Gardner’s trailer with a few bottles of Xanax, twice as many of Oxycontin, some not-bad Crystal Meth and four-hundred-and-thirty-six dollars in cash, and the first thing we did was stock up on beer. The second was score an ounce of head-busting weed from this old boy over in Dawson Springs. Now the last few days are fuzzy, blurred around the edges. I remember the bitter taste of pills on my tongue and the sharp tingle of cold beer and smudges of bare trees and dead fields glimpsed through the windshield, and that’s about it.
“Let’s smoke it after we eat,” I say. “My ribs are about poking through my belly.”
“Bubba?”
“Shit, Donny Ray. Stop calling me Bubba. I don’t want to sit out here in the cold.”
He fumbles around in his pocket for a lighter. “Nothing makes pancakes sweeter than a good old doobie buzz.”
There isn’t really any arguing with that, so while I wait for him to pass the number, I open a Keystone to rinse away the taste of old vomit. Of course instead of spitting it out the way I intend, I swallow, and of course that one swallow flips a switch in my brain, and I’m right back to feeling just enough fucked up to want more, more, more. I down the rest and reach for another. When Donny Ray passes the joint my way, I hit it hard and hold it long. Then I gulp my fresh beer while I listen to a little voice in my head telling me how we aren’t kids anymore and how I have to stop living this way, get myself straight and be somebody respectable. I won’t do it, but the fact that I know I should seems like proof I’m not the lost cause most people in Greenview think I am.
Donny Ray lets smoke roll out of his mouth towards the dome light. His long, greasy hair hangs over the seat. His jaws and throat are covered in reddish-blonde stubble that makes me think of the backlit portrait of Jesus that hung in my Grandma Nadine’s living room - or not exactly of the portrait itself but of a copy that a clumsy-handed five year old might have made of that Jesus picture. Sometimes Donny Ray seems every bit as much of a mystery as the face in the painting. I’ve known him since we were in first grade, but sometimes the workings of his mind surprise me. Take Tiny Gardner. I never expected Donny Ray to come up with an idea like that since Tiny was his second cousin and had always been a good guy, fronting us pills or weed when we were low on cash and buying whatever crap we managed to steal from people’s yards and unlocked garages without even dickering.
Now Donny Ray gives me a wall-eyed grin. “Blueberry fucking syrup,” he says. He reaches beneath the seat, pulls out the .22 revolver he bought from a soldier down in Clarksville, Tennessee. It’s badly scratched and has electrical tape wrapped on the grips, but it looks dangerous anyway. “They ain’t got no blueberry syrup, I’m going to raise nine and a half kinds of hell.”
“You ever think maybe you ain’t right in the head?”
“I’ll tell you the truth, Frankie,” he says. “Crazy or sane. One’s about as good as the other.”
***
The inside of the Huddle House smells like grilled onions and bacon and hamburger grease, and it makes my stomach rumble as soon as the door shuts behind us. The place is deserted except for an older guy in a sheepskin jacket slumped over his coffee cup, a fry cook leaning against the wall next to the grill and a red-headed waitress refilling ketchup bottles at the far end of the counter.
We sit in one of the rear booths, and I lick my fingers and do my best to smooth down my wild-ass hair. It’s a week unwashed and bad tangled, so I don’t accomplish much other than to make myself feel self-conscious. There’s dirt on my face and my clothes reek of body odor and beer sweat and the gasoline that we’ve been syphoning from cars all over the county. Donny Ray is just as bad, with his eyes bulging and his flannel shirt caked with mud and dead leaves. We look to be the kind that make decent people vote for law and order and consider buying a gun.
When the waitress eases over to our table, coffee pot in hand, Donny Ray has his head tilted back, pouring sugar down his throat the way my grandma used to do with B.C. Headache Powder. I don’t know why everything is reminding me of my grandma lately. She’s a long time dead, buried under a piece of dirt that I haven’t visited since her funeral. Now I keep wondering what she’d think of what we did to old Tiny Gardner. I don’t figure she’d like it much. True, I didn’t shoot him or cut his throat with a deer-skinning knife when the stubborn son of a bitch refused to die, but I knew what was going to happen before we ever knocked on his door, and I kicked his hand away when he grabbed my ankle and begged for help, saying, “Don’t do this to me boys, why you all want to do me this way?”
“Coffee?”
Coming back to the here and now is like jerking awake after a fall in a dream, and I have to stifle the urge to cry out. I’ve been so deep inside my head that I haven’t noticed anything about the waitress except for her red hair, but now I look up at a woman about our age, trim and built nice and with a face that would be magazine-cover-beautiful if not for the purplish scar that zigzags from just below her left cheek all the way down to her collarbone.
“You want coffee or not?” she asks. “You all can’t be in here unless you order something. Ice water don’t count.”
It takes me a few seconds longer than it should to recognize her. Leanne Edwards. The girl of my dreams back in my high school days, which are barely five years gone but seem like a couple of eternities away.
“I do,” I say, my voice as dry as ash. “Want coffee, I mean. We both do.”
“Uh huh,” she says.
Her daddy was a glorified maintenance man at a community college, so she wasn’t one of the rich girls who belonged to the country club and wore jeans so expensive they looked cheap and got a new Mustang on her sixteenth birthday. But she was the most popular girl in the whole school anyway - captain of the cheerleading squad, prom queen in both her junior and senior years, the star of the drama club’s annual play four seasons running. She dated Ross Franklin who everyone said was the best football player to ever come out of Harps County and whose daddy owned half a dozen mobile home dealerships scattered around west Kentucky. Ross accepted a scholarship to UK, and Leanne was supposed to go with him, and I figured that would be the last anyone saw of them until they showed up at the ten-year reunion as glamorous and exotic as Hollywood movie stars.
Then the spring before graduation they were coming back from a Dixie Chicks concert when Ross took a curve on old 431 at close to a hundred and ten miles an hour. He’d put away a few beers at the show, another six-pack on the ride home. His Navigator went off the road, clipped a beech tree, flipped and then rolled down a sandstone bank to an abandoned railroad track ten or fifteen feet below. Everyone said they were lucky to have survived, but that was before we heard about the aftermath. Leanne was shredded like a cabbage - they said from the neck down she looked like a corpse that had been stitched up after an autopsy - and Ross’s brain was as hopelessly busted as a dropped egg.
They got married on the long-term-care ward at Greenview Community Hospital, and then Ross’s daddy bought them a half-acre of land on Buck Gish Road and gave them a new doublewide. But word was that Don Franklin’s business was faring about as well as everyone else’s. When he stopped pumping money into their checking account, Leanne hired on for the nightshift at the Huddle House. I’d seen Ross from time to time, shuffling along like an old man or drooling over the candy bars at the checkout lane at Wal-Mart or standing on the post office steps with his face turned to the sun while piss ran down his leg. It shook me up pretty bad. You expected shit like that to happen to guys like Donny Ray and me, but you’d think for people like Ross and Leanne things would have worked out different.
“You got blueberry syrup?” Donny Ray asks.
[Continued]
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