A Swollen Red Sun Read Online Free Page A

up high in his chest. Jets of smoke shot from his nose as he spoke and held his breath at the same time. “C’mon, take it.”
    Jackson reached for it, and Jerry Dean pulled it away.
    “Fuck you, then.”
    Jackson knew better than to arouse the demon inside Jerry Dean. He’d split Jackson’s lip into a bloody mess last week with a hard fist. Jackson knew Jerry Dean was quick to anger when he was drinking or tweaking. Knew some things were best let go.
    Jackson finished his beer and threw the can out the window. He slipped his mask down over his face and watched the cherry glow to his left. They rode back to town with sparse conversation.
    Olen poured a cup of strong coffee and watched long dandelions bend and sway in the fields below the window. The east was yellow, and it welcomed the day with promise. Particles of dust and dog pelt swam in the hot air he passed through as he stepped onto the porch.
    His hummingbirds fought and ate and hummed. He watched them have conversations without words. Just tweets and pecks and squawks that told stories he would never know.
    The air tasted like corn smelled, and the ground was a blanket of leaves. A pair of Canadian geese flew above the house, and Olen smiled. Wished he had back all the things he’d lost through the years. Some memories were miles away, but others never left. Memories of her, in the garden: pulling and picking and raking and hoeing.
    Her beautiful hair, when it was blonde and wavy, with full curls that bounced off her shoulders like velvet springs. She went shorter as the years passed, then grayer. Then it was gone, and she was not the same Arlene he had loved for fifty-nine years, four months, and eighteen days.
    She was a small, frail skeleton with loose skin, and part of her died in his arms every day. But Olen held her hand until the end. She was tormented with intolerable pain. Yet all he could do was watch and cry and wish that God would take him instead of her.
    She died on a Tuesday morning.
    He woke up in the recliner the hospital had placed beside her bed. There was a doctor and a nurse in the room. The machine was loud, and the sound it made was flat and continuous. He knew that she was gone. She had waited until he fell asleep before she left him.
    He did not cry; he just looked out the window until the room was empty. And then it was the two of them. Him alive and her dead. He should have held her hand when she disappeared into that heavenly void, but he’d been sleeping.
    He never had a chance to say good-bye.
    Olen lost a war with emotion and stared through the glass. There was hard rain and wind and a sky filled with light, but he never saw a rainbow.
    Deputy Dale Everett Banks woke before the sun and walked out the back door to piss. The wind was cool. It came from the east in a constant push and brought with it the first weak specks of light.
    He’d stayed up until 2:00 a.m. Couldn’t sleep. Woke up twice to take leaks—not that he couldn’t have waited; he just wanted to come outside and stand there. Think .
    He felt bad about the money. Drug money though it was. He’d stolen it, and that knowledge played hell on his conscious. One way or another, he had to give the money back. But he couldn’t give it back. Or wouldn’t give it back. He had tough decisions to make before things went wrong. Country people, dirt-poor from birth, did not lose that kind of money, even to the law, without trying to get back what was taken.
    When Jerry Dean came, and eventually he would, Banks had to be ready.
    After the obligatory pot of coffee, he packed his first dip of the morning and went to the back porch to watch the golden orange sun crest slowly. Bacon frying and hard snaps of fat and grease popping in cast iron called him from the kitchen.
    They’d bought an old cabin of rough battered logs and fixed it up over five long years of weekend remodelings and countless vacations spent cutting cedar. They hammered and hung drywall and ran electrical and