The Brat Read Online Free Page A

a gallon glass jug of white liquid.
    I thought about Berk Kaylor. Now, Sullivan. Now is the time to get out of here. Now is the time to run, or you’re damned….
    “What’s that?”
    “You’ll see, Lee.” She placed the jug in the trunk.
    She slid onto the seat. I climbed behind the wheel. She looked at me, at the windshield of the car. Never once did she turn toward them, out there. She didn’t even say good-by.
    The family watched. Rona waved, started toward us, then hesitated and waved again, her dark hair blowing faintly in a noon breeze. She leaned back against a palm, her hands flat against the tree, watching, not smiling now. Suddenly she turned and ran for the cabin door.
    “Drive, Lee! Drive away.”
    Luz Helling spat against the rough and sun-hot bark of a slash pine and looked at the frothing trickle of amber juice. We drove off.
    Evis’s face was pale, her hands clasped together in her lap. She watched the road straight ahead. When I spoke, she didn’t answer. When she finally spoke, it was as if nothing were the matter, as if everything were quite ordinary. But I saw the savage signs of escape.
    I knew what I was doing and wanted exactly that.
    A tall flannel-shirted man stepped from behind a copse of cedar and watched us pass. Berk Kaylor. She saw him, but made no sign. Once she shot me a bold glance, as if to say, “Remember—don’t mention him!” Then she said aloud, “I know how that makes you feel. For the last time, then—it was never anything, Lee. He’s a cousin, that’s all. It’s not out of the ordinary down here. I couldn’t stop him doing what you saw. It’s never been anything more than that.”
    If she lied, it didn’t matter, anyway—not now. Evis was all that mattered to me, then or ever. I loved her, had to have her, and that was all.
    Just before we reached the highway, we passed a small clearing on a low mound of yellowed grass beside the country road and Evis asked me to stop the car.
    Kaylor, I thought, is back there. Forget him. There has always been somebody else. You know that. For every woman like her, there is a Kaylor. It has to be.
    “Help me with the boxes, Lee.”
    We carried the loaded cartons of books and magazines to the barefaced mound. She dumped them there. After I helped her this far, she wouldn’t let me touch them.
    Business Etiquette. Shorthand in Twenty Lessons. Business Management. Stenography
. There were perhaps a a dozen different correspondence courses: two on how to train yourself to speak correct English. She did not own a typewriter, but she had several keyboard charts on which she had practiced, so that when the time came she would be ready. There were poetry, a few novels, some of the classics, and many magazines depicting the living conditions of the very rich. All these, and many more, she dumped helter-skelter on the mound.
    Her eyes were brilliant with excitement a kind of madness, and I stood by trying to figure it. There was only the known excuse, the conventional reason. My mind was blankly accepting.
    “Now, Lee.”
    Her voice was soft with urgency.
    She ran lithely back to the car, swung up the gallon jug, rushed to the pile of books and magazines, of dreams and hopes and schemes, and with lips parted, sun-bright hair swinging across her face, poured the contents of the jug over everything.
    The liquid splashed like hot silver.
    She knelt, trembling, and touched a match to the pyre.
    For a little over an hour I watched the flames seethe and finally gutter. I watched her run around the fire, thrusting it to life again and again with a long forked hickory stick. She roved around with a kind of harshly repressed glee. The way she looked scared me plenty.
    Coated with a film of soot, eyes red-rimmed, her shoes smoldering, she returned to the car where I waited.
    “Now that’s out of your system?” I said.
    She did not syeak.
    I looked at her. “Why me?” I asked her.
“Why me, Evis?”
    “Because you’re just right. Because