Mad River

I know that there’re some dead folks who don’t worry about that no more,” Jimmy said.
    “Dead folks, you ain’t got the guts.” Then a wrinkle appeared in the old man’s forehead and he asked, “What the fuck you done?”
    “Killed a white girl and this black dude over in Bigham,” Jimmy said. “I hate your old ass and I got half a mind to kill you, too.”
    “Gimme that fuckin’ gun,” the old man said. He made the mistake of taking a step toward his son, and Jimmy shot him in the forehead.
    Though the old man must’ve been dead instantly, his body apparently didn’t know that, and he took four quick backward steps on his heels, then fell in the doorway to the living room. Becky looked at Jimmy and said, “Crazy old fuck.”
    Tom came in, looked at the body, and said, “Jeez, you killed your pa.”
    “And it felt pretty fuckin’ good,” Jimmy said. “Help me drag his ass into the living room. I want to eat some oatmeal, and I don’t want to look at him while I’m doing it.” To Becky he said, “Go on. Cook us up some oatmeal.”
    •   •   •
    THE BODY DOWNSTAIRS did cause some unease, and Tom eventually got a blanket and went out and slept in the Charger. Jimmy and Becky went and slept in Jimmy’s old bed, which smelled of mold, but neither was about to sleep in the old man’s. Becky insisted on sex, whining until Jimmy gave in. They took a shower together, but Jimmy knew it wasn’t going to work—it just didn’t work for him—and they went in the bedroom and Becky went down on him, and it still didn’t work.
    Then he went down on her, after threatening to kill her if she told anyone, and she definitely believed that he would kill her, after what she’d seen that night, and with the body in the front room, but when she screamed down five or six or eight orgasms, she couldn’t have cared less about the body.
    Maybe nothing else worked, but Jimmy was good with his hands and mouth.
    •   •   •
    THEY GOT A RESTLESS couple hours of sleep, and wound up back in the kitchen, eating more oatmeal. Jimmy said, “We need to get rolling, if we’re going to Hollywood. We get out there, we’ll be okay.”
    “What about your pa?” Tom asked. He glanced nervously at the kitchen doorway, where he could see a leg below the knee, a shoe, and a dirty white sock.
    “Fuck him. Who’s gonna know? Everybody in town hates his ass, nobody ever comes here,” Jimmy said. “We’ll take the Charger over to Marshall tonight and ditch it.”
    “No gas in the Charger,” Tom said. “I tried to heat her up last night, when I was sleeping out there, and it ran for three minutes and died. No gas.”
    “You dumb shit,” Jimmy said.
    “Good thing I did it,” Tom said. “If we’d tried to go anywhere, we would of got about a mile, and then we would’ve been walking, where everybody could see us. Don’t got enough money between the three of us to buy a gallon of gas.”
    Jimmy said, “Well, we got a few bucks. When I shot that bitch last night, I saw a wad on the dresser and grabbed it.”
    Becky said, “Really? How much?”
    “Quite a bit,” Jimmy said. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a fold of cash. Becky reached out and said, “Let me see,” but he pulled it back and stuck it in his pocket.
    “None of your business,” he said. “But we need more. We need a clean car that will get us where we’re going, and we don’t have enough to get one.”
    Tom said, “We could just get bus tickets—”
    “Fuck a bunch of buses,” Jimmy said. “Let me check the old man.”
    They walked through the kitchen to the body, couldn’t look directly at him, but felt his pockets and came up empty. Jimmy said, “Must be upstairs.” He went up to the old man’s bedroom, came back down a minute later, and said, “Eighteen dollars and thirty cents. We got more off the black dude.”
    Becky said, “We might get a couple of bucks off my folks.”
    Jimmy said, “Good idea. We’ll take the old man’s truck.”
    •   •   •
    BECKY’S FOLKS didn’t have any money, but they had the same attitude that James Sharp Senior had, and they didn’t like Jimmy at all. Old man Welsh was hungover, and not about to put up with any shit.
    “Do I look like I’m made of money? When I was your age, I’d been working for five years.”
    “That’s ’cause you could get a job way back then,” Becky said. “You can’t get one now, and I mean,
you
can’t get one now. How long