Read Online BAD TRIP SOUTH by Billie Sue Mosiman - Free Book Online

what she’d do if Crow bothered my Mama. She might get jealous and kill them!
    Then I looked at Mama staring out the window and knew she had no idea what was ahead of her if we didn’t get away from Crow and Heddy. She didn’t know she was going to have to do...stuff...with someone she didn’t know, someone who scared her.
    I tried to think what to do. Crow kept his gun and my Daddy’s gun in his purse. If I could ever get my hand in there without him seeing me...
    But he kept it too close. He hugged it like you hug a baby doll. It was a fat purse and it had to have all kinds of stuff in it besides the guns and the tinfoil squares of drugs and the Wrigley’s gum. I’d never get it away from him. He might be skinny, but he was real strong. When he picked me up from the bathroom floor it was like he had picked up a bag of apples. He had all these muscles in his arms from being in prison and working out, he said.
    “ Where we going now?” Crow asked of Heddy once he got his fill of staring at Mama.
    “ I’m going to head south soon,” she said. “Soon as we make that quick stop at my mom’s.”
    “ I wish we didn’t have to make that stop. I’ve been dreaming of Mexico. I really did check out some books teaching Spanish like you said, Heddy, but I didn’t get far with them. About all I picked up from the Chicanos in Leavenworth was frijoles and puta .” He laughed. “Yeah, we be going down into sunshine country.”
    “ You’re heading for Mexico. Why can’t you let us go?” Daddy asked. It was the first thing he’d said all morning.
    “ Because I like you,” she said, giving him one of her lopsided grins. “Didn’t I prove that last night?”
    “ People we know are going to report we haven’t called in. They’ll tell the police we were at the Long Horn Caverns. They’ll put it together and know you’re in our car.”
    “ Bullshit. You hear that bullshit, Crow? Is that the biggest bullshit you ever heard or what?”
    “ Yeah, I hear the motherfucker. What if he’s right?”
    “ He’s making it all up. They didn’t call anyone when they were at the caverns. That was a tourist stop thing, spur of the moment. No one knows they went there.”
    “ That right, Cop? You’re trying to fool us? I could hurt you for that.”
    Then something crazy happened. Daddy grabbed the wheel and hauled it hard to his side of the car. Crow was slammed against the car door and me and Mama fell over on him. Heddy was screaming like some kind of cat, real high scary sounds. The car ran off the road and jumped a ditch. We hit a barbed wire fence, knocking it flat. We went bumping and careening before Heddy stomped the brakes and we slid around in the middle of a cow pasture.
    Daddy was out of the car and running hard as he could back toward the highway. It was a two-lane road and there weren’t many cars. One went by now and then, but not right when he was running toward it.
    Crow fumbled open the back door and fell out onto his shoulder yelping. He scrambled up and pulled out his gun. He aimed it and shot at Daddy.
    I was trying to get out of the car too, but Mama held me fast by the back of my shirt. I saw Daddy drop. There was the shot and then he dropped to the ground. I thought he’d been killed.
    “ Daddy!”
    Heddy was out of the car by then, taking the keys. Crow and Heddy ran toward Daddy, both of them waving guns and I thought I was going to faint. Everything started getting black around the edges, like the world was squeezing in toward the center where Daddy lay.
    I saw him sit up. I saw his grim face with dirt on it. I saw Crow reach him first and shout something. Then Heddy got there and she leaped right onto Daddy, knocking him to the ground again. She was yelling and clawing at his face while he tried to keep her off him.
    The eerie thing was what happened next. Crow started laughing. It was this wild laugh that made the black and white spotted cattle move across the field away from us like we were