A Small Town Girl

By David Delmonté

A young woman arrives at a rural town in America. No one knows who she is or where shes from. The girl, Pity Grace Collins, is caught stealing, but evades the locals attempts to eject her from town by inveigling her way into the favors of the local men. With her character, shes either going to make it big or come crashing down to earth. Its anyones guess.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504945509

David Delmonté

David Delmonté is the author of COCONUTS KILL MORE PEOPLE THAN SHARKS, and EH?, He lives in Winchester, England.

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© 2015, 2016 DAVID DELMONTÉ. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/07/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4549-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4551-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4550-9 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

ONE

1978

Vince expected the car to carry on its way, as nearly they all did, in rising clouds of road dust. He was fitting a tire to a truck when they came, barrelling down Main Street.

But instead, the car stopped just by the ancient single gas pump and right by Vince’s right boot. Squinting against the low afternoon sun, Vince saw, in the front of the car, a young woman and a young man. The man’s thin face was caked with red and white dust from the road. The woman’s was half concealed by a green paisley-patterned silk shawl which she had wrapped around her head. Tufts of straight black hair poked out under the edges. As he stood and stared, holding the jack in his hand, Vince needed only to chew a stalk of alfalfa to resemble the country yokel he felt himself, at that moment, to be.

The young man in the car looked across at him. ‘Hey!’

Up close his hooded eyes gave him a weaselly appearance. He was a scrawny son of a gun, that was for sure, and wore an open-necked denim suit. Despite the lumpen Adam’s apple and cheeks sporting a three-day stubble, he looked a nervous young runt, maybe 22 or 23 years old.

The girl turned her head towards Vince but she was wearing sunglasses, like a movie star. But then he saw her big belly, pressing out through her cheap cotton patterned dress.

‘Say,’ the young driver began, ‘do you know any place we can stop tonight?’

Vince took it in: the flashes of mud up the fenders, the young pixie-like woman with the distended belly, the scrawny young man in the driver’s seat.

‘There’s a motel up the road.’

The young guy said, licking his lips, ‘Guess that’ll do.’

Then Vince saw the three days’ blonde stubble on the boy’s face, and the dirty fair hair growing over his denim collar. Hmm.

‘You folks married?’ asked Vince. ‘Only reason I’m asking is that old Mr Perkins who runs the Rising Sun, well, he won’t take you in if you’re not married, on account of his being a Christian and all.’

The girl whispered in her boy’s ear, but the boy flicked up his hand irritably.

‘Do you need gas?’ Vince asked.

‘There is no such thing as free gas, is there?’ the lad said, with self-pitying bitterness.

‘Clean your windshield?’ asked Vince, going ahead and taking a cloth and pail half filled with water and doing it anyway. He did this in no servile way; it was just because he hated to see a dirty automobile.

The girl bent her head close to the boy’s ear and, again, whispered.

‘Got a comfort room?’ he asked.

Before Vince could reply, the girl got out of the car, with some difficulty.

Unbending herself and standing upright, her legs looked incongruously thin against her upper pregnant bulk.

‘You can go into the main house,’ said Vince. ‘Yes, go inside, go right in.’

She opened the white picket-fence gate and walked up the path to the front door. It was unlocked and she opened the handle and walked in, leaving the two men outside. While she was there, Jesse, Vince’s older brother, ambled over, drawn by the sight of the car and the lure of ready money. Vince stepped back as his older brother muscled in and engaged the young man in trifling conversation.

‘Pretty nice motor,’ Jesse said.

The boy looked right ahead. He didn’t want to say anything, or get to know anyone, that was for sure.

Then the girl emerged.

‘Fill her up,’ she announced, frowning, and with her eyes averted.

Vince saw the boy’s eyebrows rise in surprise, but Vince did not pay it any mind. He had forgotten the boy had said, ‘There’s no such thing as free gas, is there?’, although he remembered it later. Vince worked the pump, while his brother took the $5, as the tank reached 15 gallons. Both men waved the young couple off.

They saw the car take off toward Spearfish and the open road. Evidently they had decided not to stop for the night in Brownsville after all, just another couple passing through, to who knows where? For all the world it was as if the girl and her boyfriend left Brownsville like so many before them, and who could blame them? Brownsville, with its single barbershop, haberdasher’s, a couple of shebeens, a milk bar, its L-shaped street and churches, an attorney’s office, and a handful of other commercial establishments.

But thievery is a selfish business, the perpetrators never thinking of the consequences to others. The girl was of that ilk, no different to the rest of the species. Whether there was something in her that made her greedy or desperate, who could say? Consequences being what they are, she would be found out, as sure as day follows night that would happen, and then she might not be able to control what would result.

Later that afternoon, when Jesse was eager to complete the purchase of a friend’s car, a Ford Thunderbolt, that he found he was unable to do so because someone had stolen from below the mattress in his bedroom his $500 stash. The girl was the only person whom Vince had allowed in the house unaccompanied, it being Granny Shandler’s day off and Vince and Jesse’s mother having been out buying groceries in the town.

Even though the fugitives had a two hours’ head start, Vince suggested he go after them. He swore that he was prepared to go as far as Spearfish if that was what it took to get his brother’s money returned, and Jesse could rest assured that he would not stop there, even if it took a week to track them down. Jesse let Vince go because his anger was boiling inside and he was not sure he would drive straight or what he might do when he caught them. Chucking a carbine in the back of the pickup, Vince set off with a squeal of tires. Not an hour out he caught up with the fugitives’ car. Judging by the way it was parked with the hood up the car had broken down. Pulling up in the pickup and then stopping and getting out, he expected to find the boy behind the raised hood, but he didn’t. Instead he heard a yelled-out ‘Hey’ behind his back. He turned to find the runt emerging from behind a rock, pointing a pistol at his head.

The boy was gleeful. ‘Pretty neat, huh? I saw you coming! I ducked down here. And that’s pretty cool! Cos now I got wheels.’

His voice was hoarse and proud, unlike the hesitant figure of an hour before. Vince was steady in front of the boy’s obvious instability. Was he high or something? How did he expect to get away with it?

‘What’s wrong with this one?’ Vince asked, calmly.

‘Fan belt. I can’t fix it. But now you’re here I can take yours. Where are the keys?’

‘Come on, don’t be a fool.’

The boy jumped from one foot to the other, and waved the gun. ‘Don’t you be calling me that! Now, I’m asking you one last time!’

Well, figured Vince, this wasn’t a time to argue. ‘They’re in the cab.’

The boy shot a glance at the girl, who started to get out of the car.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked.

‘With you, of course.’

‘No, honey, this is where you and I part company.’

‘What are you saying, Davey?’ she said, advancing a step or two.

‘Don’t mention my name!’ the boy yelled. ‘Get back in the car.’

‘I’ve done everything you wanted. I’ve followed you through thick and thin, more fool me!’

‘Don’t come a foot nearer, hear me?’ His voice was shrill.

‘You’re worthless, worse than useless!’ she said. ‘You’ve ruined my life, Davey Powell!’

Furious, he crabbed his way to the cab of Vince’s pickup, and climbed up inside.

As the girl ran towards him he wound down the window and fired a shot that whizzed past her head and embedded itself in the door of the car, just inches from where Vince was standing. Vince rushed at the pickup just as the boy got the engine fired up. Then the boy floored the accelerator; the back tyres churned the road so much they burnt rubber, and the truck skewed across the road. He nearly lost control, dropping the gun as he wrestled with the steering wheel. It went off, and the boy yelled and the truck came to a skidding full stop.

‘He’s shot himself,’ said Vince, striding over to where the truck, for a moment, stood idling. The boy was yelling and crying as he clasped his thigh. Blood was oozing from within his trousers and was gathering in a small pool in the well of the cab.

Vince opened the door, pulled the boy clear, laid him on the grass verge and tied a tourniquet around his thigh with the leather belt from his jeans. Having done that he reached his hand into the boy’s jacket, found the bulge where Davey had stuffed his brother’s dollars, and took them out. The girl just stood there and watched, expressionless. The blood flow ceased, but the boy’s face was very pale. Vince got a cloth from the glovebox of the truck and cleaned the blood as best he could from the boy’s hands. Putting the cloth back, Vince saw that the bullet had gone right through the boy’s thigh, through the floor of the cab by the chassis, and looked to have severed the brake pipe serving the wheels. Jesse would be mad as a rattlesnake.

Vince attended to the other vehicle, leaving the miscreant to rest on the grass.

Vince carefully opened the radiator cap. A puff of steam greeted him, but Vince figured the boy had run the car almost dry.

‘Have you got any luggage?’ he asked the girl.

‘A small case in the trunk,’ she said.

She leaned against the door.

‘Are you OK?’

She shook her head.

‘Get in the car and rest, you’re all done in.’

She nodded and got in and lay down on the back seat.

Vince went to the back of the car and opened the trunk. Inside was a small leather case, the type he reckoned the girl had not bought, but anyway he opened the lid. Inside was an assortment of ladies’ clothes, jumbled together. There was a showgirl’s costume, a pack of cards, half a dozen briefs, a denim jacket, and, he noted approvingly, a small Bible. He picked it up and opened the cover. Inside, in a hollowed-out space, was a small derringer pistol. He found some bikini tops and, with manicure scissors he found there, he clipped off the elasticated bra straps. Tying these together, Vince attached them to the V8 motor’s alternator using an adjustable spanner he luckily found in the top of his jacket. He was just tightening the nut on the alternator when he heard the truck’s engine fire up. He removed his head from under the hood in time to see the boy, having got himself back in the driving seat, driving off once more.

‘Hey!’ Vince yelled. ‘She’s got no brakes.’

But he was gone, towards the mountains.

‘Does he want to die or what?’

‘Only the good die young,’ said the girl pithily.

‘Is he always so self-destructive?’

‘It was he who got me into drugs.’

Yeah, right, thought Vince.

‘He won’t get far,’ said Vince. ‘Everyone from here to Tumberel knows that pickup. But I don’t think he’ll last that long.’

‘Will he crash?’

‘For sure.’

She looked crestfallen. ‘But he won’t die. He never does. He’s like a cat with nine lives.’

Walking back to the car he asked her, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Pity. Pity Grace Collins.’

‘Vince,’ he replied.

They were on the road back towards Brownsville when Pity started sweating and breathing in short gasps. They would not get to the town in time.

The only place Vince could think to take her close by was the old log cabin, owned by a reclusive goatherd they called the Bandit because of his long grey beard. It had a few serviceable bunks, Vince remembered, and was often used as a base for shooting expeditions on the prairie during the summer and for trapping or hunting animals during the winter too. But it had not been in much use recently, owing to the Bandit’s eccentricities, which had culminated in his writing a long letter to the town’s Mayor asking that he be given one week’s notice in writing if anyone wanted to use the hut, as it was ‘my property and no one else’s’. Everyone put this down to his having gone out of his mind with loneliness up there in the mountains, and when his mother died a year back it became worse. The Bandit was only seen in town every few months when he stocked up on stores, coming into Brownsville in a pony and trap, wizened and with a longer beard than ever.

Vince checked out the hut before allowing Pity out of the car, but finding it deserted, he escorted her inside.

And so it was there, amid the spiders, the dripping roof, the smell of turps and meth, and the coils of fencing that Vince’s father had erected around the property, that Pity started to give birth.

She looked at him through beseeching large black eyes, like pebbles set in a white scared young face, and gasped.

‘Please do something!’

He set up a fire with faggots, he boiled water, he shook out blankets and made her as comfortable as he could. And then when it happened he just did what he had to do, thinking of the cows he had helped, and the cats and dogs he had witnessed. Pity was very brave, hardly crying out, she just whimpered through closed teeth, although a few expletives passed her lips at the climactic moments. The baby emerged: a girl. He held her with his left hand and cut the cord with his knife in his right hand. The baby breathed promptly and cried as she took her first gasps. As soon as he had cleaned the muck off her with some paper towels, he handed the baby to Pity. He then gathered up the placenta and put it in a paper bag and threw it out of the cabin into the gorse bushes for the wild coyotes to find and devour.

The baby and the girl were together and rested together, the baby rooting and feeding right away. Vince said he would go and get help.

‘Please don’t be long,’ Pity said, and she gave him a sweet white-toothed smile, which lingered on her face for a few seconds and which etched itself into Vince’s soul.

He grinned sheepishly back at her. ‘You keep safe now.’

He washed his hands carefully in the water, and advised she wash herself too.

Then, firing up the car, he hightailed it out of there, thinking that the recent experience was nothing like what he had witnessed to date.

‘That was a heck of a thing,’ he told himself, ‘a real heck of a thing.’

Once in town he sought out the sheriff and told him what had happened to the truck. The sheriff agreed to drive out right away and take Jesse, whose truck it was, with him. Vince handed over the money he had taken from the boy to give back to his brother. The sheriff took it and tucked the notes into the inside pocket of his tunic. Then Vince searched for Granny Shandler and found her in the house. Vince told her there was no time to lose and explained what had happened.

‘Mary, sweet mother of God,’ Granny exclaimed, but made herself ready to go by donning her bonnet and shawl. She had come from down south and had served the family for years. They got into the car, but then Vince remembered the temporary fan belt would need replacing. There was nothing else for it. He would have to fit that before they could return to Pity.

Vince went into the garage and Jesse came out from under the car he was working on.

‘What happened to my pickup?’ he demanded.

Selecting a fan belt from a rack of spares, Vince told him.

‘Holy Moses!’

The sheriff pulled up in the patrol car.

‘Did you get my money?’ Jesse asked.

Vince jerked his chin in the sheriff’s direction. His brother’s face darkened as if the whole episode had been Vince’s fault. Angrily he strode to the sheriff’s car and got in, keeping his face averted. The car drove off.

Vince fitted the new fan belt and then called at the general stores to fetch milk and eggs and a few groceries, and when he and Granny Shandler returned they found the girl where Vince had left her, on the bottom bunk, on the mattress covered by a brown blanket, humming quietly to herself as if in prayer.

Granny bustled around, getting the girl comfortable. She complimented Vince on having provided water and towels even if the latter were not in their first flush of youth.

She frowned as she poured water from a green steel flask that revealed some rust on the spout.

Noticing the fire had gone out, she demanded that Vince light up the wood burner, it being colder in the mountains than on the plain.

None of her current accoutrements were what Pity Grace Collins was used to, having been brought up a good girl in a churchgoing family in Knox County, Tennessee, but even though she was only twenty-one, Pity had done enough living for a woman double her age.

Vince lurched out of the shack once more to collect wood, and worked as fast as a rabbit, picking up branches and bits of wood. He was back in all of ten minutes.

Pale and weak as she was, Pity saw the silhouette of Vince in the doorway, a busy cloud of mosquitoes above his head. She took in his checked shirt rolled up to the armpits, his face streaked with sweat which made the sun detail small sand trails on his cheek where it caught the light blonde stubble.

‘Come in if you’re coming,’ said Granny Shandler.

Vince wrestled with the door of the iron burner and shoved in the handful of wood and old newspapers he’d found on a dusty shelf for kindling. But before the water was even warm, the infant’s insistent cries added to the insects’ nonchalant buzzing and Granny Shandler’s reassuring cooing.

Now Vince’s old but fairly clean towels did their work once more, and Pity smiled wanly at Vince as he poured water into an old saucepan which Granny used to clean up.

Once that was done, Granny asked him to remove the top of the big urn of milk they had brought up from town.

Pity smiled weakly again at him from the bed and Vince shuffled his feet in their big black boots.

‘Quit squirming like a Tahitian dancer while I spoon out this milk!’ reprimanded Granny.

Pity Grace Collins could not help but notice the bluebottle embroiled in the creamy cap that had formed on top of the milk inside the urn, and her stomach tumbled a few times. But she drank what she was given nonetheless. She was in no position to refuse what was offered her. Vince let his lips level into a kind of grin when he saw her drinking.

‘Be careful where you step,’ warned Granny. ‘I don’t want you with your clumsy ways upsetting nothing, do you hear?’

Vince nodded a few times like a donkey in a car, thought Pity, and the image almost made her laugh before she checked herself. The baby was placed in the drawer of the old mahogany dresser because there was no crib available, but it was not pushed all the way in.

Vince looked over at the infant, which slept. She looked just like a baby, hugely uninteresting to anyone except those committed to its welfare. Yet the newborn touched Vince, as he was the one who had delivered her into the world. He was her father, in a way, he felt. He lingered, staring at her.

‘Go, go,’ said Granny.

Pity raised a thin white arm in thanks and Vince strode out, somewhat circuitously avoiding a couple of sacks of mouldy flour and a bale of hay left from last autumn.

He climbed into the Oldsmobile, and even as he fired the V8 engine he was thinking how to rev it quietly so it might not wake the baby.

Along the gravel road back down to the highway Vince spied the unmistakably bewhiskered face of the Bandit, who was heading the other way at the head of a flock of goats. He was carrying a rifle.

He squinted at Vince as he wound down the window.

‘How’s it going?’ Vince asked.

The Bandit screwed his eyes up and sought to recall who the speaker was.

‘Oh, it’s you, Vince,’ he said mildly.

‘There’s a girl in your hut having a baby,’ Vince said. He thought he might as well come out with it.

‘That so? A female, you say?’

‘Waters broke right on the highway. Had to come up here.’

‘You left her there alone?’

‘Granny Shandler’s there too.’

The Bandit considered this information for a few moments, tugging at his beard. ‘Is she planning on staying there long?’

Oh yeah, her whole life, Vince felt like saying. But there was a risk the Bandit might take this literally. So he said: ‘No, just a day or so, if that is OK by you. Then she’ll be on her way.’

‘Well, I never heard of that happening before!’

Vince, who wanted to be off, was afraid the Bandit’s floodgates would open, and he’d stand and chew the cud all day. ‘Look, is there anything I can get you in town?’

The Bandit pondered, and to Vince his thought processes took an age.

‘Some ammunition would be fine,