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Jane was under the pool table, and she had no intention of coming out.
Even though Conty the bartender had flipped on the lights and had, in his sandpapery voice, informed the local degenerates that their speakeasy had spoken easy enough for one night. Even though the last trucker had trudged out the door. Even though Mitch was probably halfway to Mississipi, Jane wasn't going to move.
It was achy-damp in her hiding spot, and though the tungsten filaments illuminated every etched name on the walls, the space around her might as well have been a black hole. She'd made an effort to control her wandering fingers, which had a habit of reaching out and exploring textures without her even realizing it. She couldn't help herself when she saw a stone polished by the sand and the rocks in the creek behind her father's property-- she'd stoop over and seize the treasure, fondle it between her hands, stroke it across her cheek, her lips, her tongue, even-- she couldn't get enough of the feel of things.
Here under the table, she knew should control her impulse, but her curiosity got the better of her, and she found herself rubbing her finger back and forth on the sticky edge between the tile and the linoleum. She’d discovered a sticky pool of dried beer, its skunk lending a sour zest to the sickly bouquet of p_ss and prophylactic. It reminded her of the time her mother got a vase full of cully-roses from a boyfriend Jane had never met. He didn’t call back after that, and her mother kept the flowers in the vase until they could see the stems mush and the water turn brown through the patterned glass. They gave off an odor of rotting spunk and tomatoes left too long on the vine.
She hadn’t had much luck controlling her fingers earlier, either. She’d been leaning on the wall watching the high-school dropouts in their billiard-disguised pissing contest when she’d seen the old friend of her father’s knocking back whiskey with Conty and Shep. There he was, craggy and charming as she’d remembered from when he used to come and help her father clear the field every spring. She knew she hadn’t seen him since she was seven or eight. The fields hadn’t been cleared in those ten years, either. She smiled at him. Called his name.
“How you know me, girl?” he’d asked.
“If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.”
This made his eyes crinkle up and brighten, and he leaned forward. She could smell his whiskey-sweet breath. “Aren’t you a trickster, then?”
“Yep, that’s me.”
They’d talked about the music—a bunch of old country dirges. They’d talked about the drought and the way he saw the trouble city to city from his truck. She found comfort in the old friend, even if he didn’t remember her. But after awhile her fingers couldn’t resist the texture of the turquoise stone in his belt buckle. He didn’t know she didn’t mean anything by it.
“And you’re a honeysuckle, too. Fresh as one,” he’d said, as he was tearing her flesh before she managed to break away, before she’d become just another rotting flower under the table at Nora’s Midway Truck Stop.
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