Read Online The Devil's Only Friend by Mitchell Bartoy - Free Book Online Page B

because I was lashed down so tight to the board.
    The masked men had stepped back to avoid the spatter, but now they moved back toward me. They didn’t seem to be in any particular rush to get someplace else.
    â€œWhy don’t you be friendly, Caudill?”
    â€œWhy don’t you like us?”
    â€œWe like you.”
    I was coughing and spitting and cranking my head around to see what I could see. Even though I knew it just meant that they’d dunk me again, I sucked in as much air as I could, trying to live a little longer. If you don’t have time to think about it and you have make a choice about living on for a little while or dying right away—you’ll pick to live a little longer.
    â€œWhyn’t you just talk to us a little?”
    â€œDon’t be standoffish.”
    â€œIt’s a waste of my breath to talk,” I said, gurgling slimy liquid through my voice box to make the sound. Isn’t that funny? I thought.
    â€œWe’ll be nice now.”
    â€œWe promise.”
    Something like electricity it must be. Your brain flashes even if there’s no light. You blink on, you blink off. You maybe can or maybe can’t remember what happens to you. Your brain keeps sending the juice down the spinal cord even after your sense is gone; it makes your legs flail and your muscles pull even though it’s tearing your skin off your flesh, pulling flesh from bone. Your brain wants to go on living even after it’s not worthwhile.
    What did I tell them? Maybe I told them everything I had learned from Lloyd, a bunch of nothing. Maybe I told them about Jane Hardiman, about my brother Tommy, about the nigger boy I had killed accidentally so many years ago. Maybe I wept for my father, for my eye, for my lost fingers. If I told them how I thumbtacked Lloyd’s papers up under my kitchen countertop, over my silver drawer, if I blabbed or cried or begged for my life, it was out of my hands. The only thing I can bear to remember out of it all is how sick with disgust I was that my own life could be so small as to end like that.

CHAPTER 7
    Sunday, April 9
    She was standing over me with a silvery trowel in her hand. I thought that she might have kicked me to wake me up or to see if I was dead. Green grass with twinkling frost or dew obscured part of what I saw. She stood so close to me that I could see partway up her skirt when I began to be able to move my eye. She wore heavy stockings. When I began to stir, she turned away toward a bed of budding flowers and neat shrubs.
    â€œSuch a life of misery for you, Mr. Caudill,” she said. “More and more pitiful with the passage of every day.”
    I thought I knew Estelle Hardiman’s practiced voice, despite the tinny ringing that was constant in my ears. Though it required some effort to position myself to get a better look at her, I managed to twist my head and shoulders. I was sprawled out on the thick grass of a big estate. The house stood at what seemed a great distance. It’s so green, so green, I thought. I had been dumped toward the back of the Hardiman property, near the service road. It was in that house that I first met Roger and Estelle Hardiman, first came to really feel the sting of what I could not ever have.
    She had dropped to her knees a short distance away and now puttered along the edge of the grass with her trowel. Her fanny was toward me. Though she was a thin woman, the flesh at the back of her legs sagged sadly down toward her knees. I watched her working for a few moments, unable to move. She stabbed her trowel into the dirt, twisted nimbly to her feet, and turned to gaze down at me. The warm light of the sun, low over the lake, lit up her face and her glittering eyes.
    â€œYou’ve made me a widow, Mr. Caudill. I don’t blame you, exactly, but you’ll pay nonetheless.”
    She left a decent pause for my response, but I could not speak. The breeze over the open grass chilled the