Hard Twisted Read Online Free

Palmer’s elbow.
    Lottie ate the pancakes, and the chicken, and they nudged the pie plate back and forth between them. They ate mostly in silence, watching the cars pass on the street, and when she would glance at him and their eyes would meet, she would giggle and cover her mouth with a hand.
    When they’d finished eating, Palmer peeled back the check and studied it and told her to go outside and wait in the truck.
    She sat with the window rolled watching the fountain in the town square until Palmer appeared from the alley side of the building, hurrying to the truck and climbing in after his valise. He fumbled with the key and jabbed at the starter, grinding the gears and lurching them into traffic as cars swerved and horns sounded. They turned right at the first corner and left at the next, with Palmer all the while watching behind them in the mirror.
    In late afternoon they quit the highway for the county road. They passed through miles of wooded fields and blackland farms before swinging onto a gravel track by a cemetery, where a small dog shot through the iron gates and heeled them for almost a mile.
    The track then narrowed and darkened as shade trees crowded their passage. They rounded another curve and Palmer braked the truck and tilted his hat, leaning out the window to hawk and spit through their settling dust cloud.
    There she is.
    Lottie sat up to look. Through a gap in the tree line she made out a long field sloping away to a swaybacked barn. Beyond the barn was a peeling clapboard house flanked by shade trees, one living and one dead, and beyond the trees was a pasture, this with an empty stockpond in which two rawboned horses posed with their heads low and their tails swaying and switching.
    Another tree line marked the far boundary of the pasture. She saw no cattle or goats and no pony horses, and she could imagine no swimming hole on the land or in the jagged cut that ran beyond it.
    Okay then. Here we go.
    He climbed down to free the rusted loopwire that held thesagging gate upright. The horses lifted their heads as he returned to the truck and slammed the door and drove it forward and alighted again to close the gate behind them.
    They parked in the shade of the barn. Swallows flew at the sound of their slamming car doors. Somewhere in the distance, chickens gabbled and clucked. Palmer turned to the house, cupping his mouth with his hands.
    Hello! Anybody home?
    All was silence.
    The barn before them listed precariously. One stall housed a rusted jalopy blinded by missing headlamps; the other, an ancient two-furrow horseplow. Littering the ground and lining the open-stud walls were sacks and barrels, tin cans and fruit jars, and rusting tools of every description. Against the back wall, spotlighted by a gap in the high tin roof, stood a tumbledown tower of hay.
    I got to pee bad.
    Privy’s around back. I’ll go on inside.
    The outhouse was rank, and so she squatted in the bare dirt behind it. The sun was high and the air warm and still, and the stillness of it hummed in her ears. She listened for the distant sound of voices raised in greeting, but she heard nothing.
    The porch sagged where the paint had worn, and her bootheels rang hollow on the steps. She opened the screen door and paused, and there spied Palmer’s back framed in an open doorway where he knelt before a woodstove. He pivoted at the sound of the doorspring.
    Come on in. Looks like we missed ’em.
    The house was cool despite the sun. A small front parlor was sparsely furnished with a cracked leather sofa and a matchingwing chair, its brass rivets missing. Lace hung limply over milky windows. Beyond this room was the kitchen, and beyond the kitchen a narrow hallway that ran darkly toward the back.
    Where all’d they go?
    They’s a note, he said without turning.
    It lay on the kitchen table beside the valise; grease pencil scrawl on a flattened paper sack.
    Clint—Could not wait no longer. Rode out with girls