The Brand Ch. 15

"Then forgive him," said Victria as she wiped the blood from her lip, "for what he did to all of you that day."

Screaming, Melody fell upon Victria, knocking her down and pummeling her, punching, scratching, pounding, frenzied and enraged. Victria took the blows until Melody began to tire. At that point, she tumbled and struggled with her until she got the advantage, and then sat on Melody's chest.

"You dumb bitch," Victria growled into Melody's face, "You are wearing someone else's brand. You have enslaved yourself to him, to her, to a tragedy! You've wasted my time, my investment, my love!"

Melody struggled to free herself. Victria kept her down, clutching her wrists tight. Beyond their labored breathing, past the silence around them, there was a distant cawing of a murder of crows.

"It's like you belong to someone else." Victria said despairingly, "It breaks my heart more than you know."

Incensed, horrified, Melody glared at Victria.

"It breaks your heart, "Melody snarled, meaning her words to bite "because it has tainted me for you, you controlling, narcissistic, putrid, fucking, cunt! Now let me go, because there is no one, no one, here to love anymore!"

Melody's eyes remained fixed on Victria's. Still, the crows cawed and, suddenly, it seemed to Melody that the earth was shaking beneath her. Victria raised her head slightly.

"Fuck you then, liar." Hissed Victria as she climbed off of Melody, and then got to her feet, "You deluded yourself and you lied to me. Stupid bitch; fuck you then."

As Melody grabbed up her skirt, she kept her eyes on Victria. She was searching the grass for her gun, and found it eventually, its barrel pointing out from beneath a low laying shrub. As Victria stuffed it into her pocket, she looked up to find that Melody had disappeared. Scanning the grounds, Victria saw that she was sprinting back up the hill, her skirt gathered up above her knees.

5

Martha May was in her kitchen, preparing a nice lunch for herself. She decided that the anxiety pills were working well, very well in fact. So well that food had started to taste good again. She'd even dared to hum a little tune to herself. She'd used to hum when she was a younger woman, when she enjoyed doing things, preparing things, like lunch for herself, for her and-

Martha instantly switched thoughts, like confidently moving through highway traffic, at least with the help of the lopa-something-or-other she had in her system, the new regular part of her daily in-take. At least the garden's in. Why those string beans are just thriving. Did I feed the chickens this morning? Yes, yes I did. Did I wash that man's clothes? Did that too. That man was Dean, and Dean had been designated as "That Man" since the day he moved all of her things into their daughter's old room.

The waitressing job was working out nicely. Heck, everything was fine. Everything was just fine. What more could she want? She was healthy. Her heart was working fine. Her mammograms continued to show that she was good to go. The hot flashes weren't, well, so hot, but the lopa-some-such settled those hormones some. Dean was out of her hair, for the most part. His money was still good to have coming in. And Melody- Well, she was probably fine. Dr. Patty said that Melody went off to work things out for herself. So many people, because of that terrible, terrible boy, just walked away from their lives, from their minds. It was heart breaking, just so damned heart breaking. They said even some of the police, EMTs and firemen got themselves the PTSD from that day. Dear God, those children. Dear God. Sure, Melody's fine. She's probably working in a school somewhere. Well, maybe not. A hospital? No. I know. I bet she cleans. That's fine. That's safe. That's, rewarding.

Martha heard the sudden swing and clack of the front screen door opening and then closing again. Oh Hell, she thought, did he get caught slacking again. Settle down Martha. You're fine. Everything's just fine. Whatever he did or whatever he does, we'll just talk about it with Dr. Patty, won't we? Martha heard the clop of shoes coming down the hall, and then felt the fact that Dean had joined her in the room. She turned, a big plate of pork chops, potatoes and peas held in her hands until it, and all its contents, dropped to the floor at her feet.

There was a young woman, standing on the other side of the kitchen table, dressed in an attractive, lavish, yellow and gold evening gown, though it was stained awful with grass and dirt and Lord knew what. Who wears yellow and gold in the evening? It's not evening Martha. It's a might after noon, and that's your daughter standing there.

"Melody?"

"Hello, Mom," Melody answered, absently wringing her hands, not looking directly at her mother, pacing in short steps to the left and right.

Martha was motionless. Her heart raced, but she suspected the lopa-dopa-whatever would slow it down. The thing was, it wasn't slowing down, but it didn't hurt in her chest either. It felt, good. Melody finally pulled a chair out, the chair she'd sat in since she was a little girl, pushed her big old skirt under the table and sat upon the chair. Martha smiled.

"Uh honey." Said Martha, suddenly weeping, but weeping with a joy she hadn't felt in a very, very long time, "you know that dress is ruined, don't ya'? I won't be able to clean it like it deserves."

Melody had been staring at her hands on the table. Slowly, she turned her gaze up to study her mother's face. Watching the woman's tears, the hard age around her eyes and the lovely smile on her lips, Melody began to cry too.

5

Thirty miles back toward the east and more than an hour later, Victria registered in a hotel in Greely. It was a sprawling college town, its campus grounds traversed primarily of middle class white kids, a major slaughter house just another two miles east, all of it surrounded by retail, fast food and low laying tenements full of primarily Mexican folks. The air, even two miles away from the slaughter house, was rank and fêted with the stink of shit and death. It was a perfect place for Victria to stay the night and get drunk.

There was no one to stop her now, no fucking Melody or her damn dog either. They would be there anyway, all night with her, popping up in her working memory, that was for sure, and they would be there for a long while after that. But, for that evening, Victria would drown them with whatever it took. She would start slow, with beer, nice cold beer. She would take out the sketch pads, the pencils and the pens she'd bought back in Savannah and she'd draw. Then she'd start drinking shots of cognac between sips of beer. What would she draw? Victria had no clue.

At a nearby Hannaford's, she bought a carton of cigarettes, two bags of comfort chips and two candy bars, if in the event the appetite took her. Then she'd found a package store, bought herself a twelve pack and a half pint of Remmi Martin. She wanted the Remmi to get cold and the beer to stay cold, so Victria bought a Styrofoam cooler too. Back in the room, she stowed her purchases, grabbed the ice bucket, and then headed for the hotel's ice machine.

Back in her room, Victria went about filling the Styrofoam chest with ice, but it wasn't enough. Stupid, she thought. I should have bought ice at the fucking Hannaford's. She looked around the room. Didn't I have a bag, a big, sturdy bag? Victria suddenly found herself listening intently, triggered by the silence. There was something different. Victria narrowed her eyes and slowly reached for the revolver that was still in the inside pocket of her leather jacket. Her eyes shifted toward the slightly parted bathroom door. She withdrew the gun, fit both hands around its grip and pointed its barrel toward the ceiling. You can't shoot ghosts Victria. Nope. But, since this isn't the most pleasant of places and since I've already been victimized, I just want to be ready. Victria advanced toward the bathroom door. On three, she decided she would kick it open. In the raging quiet of her mind, she counted: one, two, and three. On three, a heavy foot connected with the right side of her head. Victria flew back, never letting the gun leave her hand. Eyes shut tight in pain, in defiance, she spun off the bed and tried to steady her footing. She backed up, staggering, until she felt wall behind her. Time was passing quickly. She wanted to shoot, but she wanted to open her eyes to see her target. She wanted the ringing in her right ear to stop.

"Put it down."

"Who, the fuck, are you?"

"Put your fucking gun down."

Victria shook her head and opened her eyes. Black spots and bright swirls of light danced across her vision. Somewhere beyond the blackness and the brilliance, there stood a person, someone who had his own gun because she heard him flip off his safety, at least that's what she thought she heard. He has a gun. That's an excuse to shoot.

"I said put it down."

Buy your own time. At least he is anyway. I need to see him.

"Stop being a stubborn fucking bitch and just drop the gun Victria."

Then the voice was clear, and with it came the face to match it.

"Seriously hippy?" Victria said, "Now you want to' be a big packing momma?"

"Oh I've been playing with fire long before I met you bitch." Answered Glory, "Drop the gun now."

"No. You'll have to shoot me first."

Glory remained solid in her stance, pointing a full size 1911 at Victria's head. What could she say: put down the gun again? What could she do? She had a heart. Victria knew it. She would shoot alright, but not until she took a bullet first.

"I lost Melody. I don't need to do shit for anybody."

"Put the gun down Victria. You don't want to die today."

"Maybe I do."

"I'm telling you that you don't."

The next few seconds passed in a flash. Victria turned her gun on herself. Glory leaned right, angled her body and fired, sending Victria's revolver flying out of her hand. With animal rage, Victria lunged forward and slammed her head into Glory's stomach. They wrestled each other along the floor, kicking and punching. Glory wouldn't give up her gun, not until she'd neutralized it. As pummeling blows slammed into her jaw, Glory ejected the gun's magazine and racked the gun's slide, jettisoning the live bullet from its chamber. Throwing each piece across the room in opposite directions, Glory blocked Victria's fist, twisted her wrist, causing her to scream in pain. There was a sudden, insistent, knocking at the door, though Victria, somewhat deafened by the gun blast, felt it far more than she'd heard it.

"I'm a bounty hunter!" Glory shouted at the door, "Back the fuck off!"

Glory spun Victria onto her belly and smashed her face into the hard floor. Victria heard the knocking persist and the staccato click of hand cuffs. Then she felt Glory take her wrists and shackle them behind her back. By then, the knocking on the door had become steady pounding.

"Come on." Said Glory as her breathing settled, "Let's take this party somewhere else."

6

"My face fucking hurts."

"Yeah? It's killing me too. You look terrible. Did Melody do that?"

"Yes."

"Good for her."

Victria slowly turned to face Glory and regarded her crossly. The woman raised an eye brow and immediately winced from the pain the slight movement triggered in the cut she'd received in her right cheek bone from Victria's fist. At peace, but only because Glory had kept Victria in shackles, they were seated together at a small round table in an adequate room in a hotel located a few towns south east of Greely and its stale, fêted air. Despite Victria's protestations, the manager at the Greely hotel bought Glory's story, that she was a bounty hunter and Victria was her query: the embezzling ex-wife, ex-business partner of a Florida restauranteur.

Victria did what she was allowed to in order to make the best of her captivity, which was to take deep gulps of beer through the straw her kidnapper had put in the bottle for her. She drank deeply, aching to feel its temporary oblivion. She squirmed slightly in the steel cuffs around her wrists and the new set around her ankles. The reason Glory gave for keeping Victria confined was that she'd become a threat to herself, which increased the risk that she would be a threat to her captor. Beyond that, it still wasn't clear as to why the tall, attractive woman made the effort of following Victria and Melody more than halfway across the country.

"So where did you pick up our trail? Victria asked.

Glory shrugged.

"Savannah." She answered.

"Really? How'd you manage that?"

"I took it upon myself to install a GPS tracker app on your tablet and checked your progress on tailme.com."

"What? When? How?"

"I watched you type your log in and installed it, but only after I made it so that I could do it remotely with the secure remote support software I downloaded first."

Victria stared in astonishment.

"You just slept a lot at Grandmother's and you left your tablet on a lot and, well, I didn't trust you."

Victria looked away.

"And, since you were in Georgia a while, I had enough time to zero in and follow you out of town that last morning you were there."

Feeling violated as she processed the unsettling revelation, Victria drew another deep drink of beer.

"What was the deal at the sheep farm?" Glory asked.

"Oh, just a moment of inspiration. And, may I ask, why did you make the effort to pick up our trail?"

"I wanted to make sure Melody was okay. You left Grandmother's somehow, suddenly, obviously at one hundred percent. But, Melody was still in her stupor."

"And you believed I was really going to kill her."

Glory reached into the Styrofoam cooler by her side, pulled out a bottle, and then cracked it open. Shrugging again, she said:

"Love and rage, wrath and mercy. I had my suspicion. What was all that shit about in New Orleans?"

"What shit?"

"You climbing into a building that should have been demolished, looking for something and then climbing back down."

"I was looking for an old friend."

Glory suspiciously eyed Victria, and then asked:

"What about that little cabin you stayed the night in?"

"Well you know how Grandmother got in the middle of all that crazy shit that went down at her place, you know with the coyotes and the full moon and the miraculous healing of my legs."

Glory took a drink of her beer, and then set the bottle on the table.

"I seem to recall certain facts of the reported event's aftermath:" she answered, "most of Grandmother's dogs, dead; wild coyotes, dead; you, naked, gathering eggs."

"Yeah. Right. Well I tried to make a miracle of my own."

"Hmm. And?"

Victria studied the woman's face for a moment, the curly mane of brown hair that framed it, its beautiful features and symmetry and the damage she'd done to her cheeks, chin and lips.

"And, it backfired." She said.

Glory had never been bad to look at, even then with her face bruised and her lips swollen. But meeting her gaze hurt because all Victria saw in it was Melody. When she closed her eyes she saw Melody. Now Melody was gone, and maybe that was good. Or maybe it wasn't. Victria, unable to avoid the reflection, tried to recount the facts for Glory, the reality and the magic, and it only made it harder for her to get her head around her certainty that she had indeed been used by Melody, either consciously or subconsciously. Exactly where inside her mind had Melody gone, Victria pondered. Had she been reliving the trauma of that awful morning in her head, over and over and over again, and for three whole months? What kind of Melody, she wondered, would come out of such a place? Had all that happened been what she needed to survive that brutal memory?

"Let me get this straight." Said Glory, breaking the silence that hung there after Victria had recounted the events of the last three days, "So you put Melody in the magic bathtub, after you found the doll some Voodoo priestess made of you, but the priestess wasn't anywhere to be found."

"Right. Excepted I wouldn't say the tub was magic. It was more, enchanted, like a spell was cast on it."

"Okay. So then it got really cold, and you turned and saw the ghost of your dead father. How did he die again?"

"Oh some interactive art installation where people could do whatever they wanted to him, and some guy off the street just took it too far."

"Right. And Melody came out of her trance, maybe with the help of your dad's ghost or having been possessed by the priestess you called?"

"Francisca."

"Yes, Francisca, who you believe made you a black witch by giving you a bath in that same, enchanted, old fashioned bathtub."

"Right."

"But the enchanted bathtub didn't work on Melody because, why?"

"Well, it did work, to a degree. It's just that the spell needed a boost."

"A boost."

"Yes Glory, a boost. I had to bring her back to the cemetery where Leanne and Randy and all the other people he killed are buried."

"Well why not back to the actual scene of the crime, the school?"

"Because when I drove her by it, I saw they'd demolished it. So the cemetery was the next best thing."

"Sure. That makes sense. And then?"

"And that's when she snapped out of it, when she saw my gun."

Victria finished her beer. Glory pulled another from the ice, opened it, switched Victria's straw into the new bottle, and set it before her.

"But it all backfired." She said as she put Victria's empty bottle back in the cooler.

"I guess. answered Victria, looking away, "I'm sure. She's gone."

"Yes, but she's free. She's aware, mentally stable, relatively speaking, I'd guess, and free."

Victria drank down a third of her second beer and said:

"I guess."

As a new silence filled the space between them, they drank in turn. Eventually, Glory prepared to clean her fire arm. Laying out a fresh white cotton T-shirt, she placed her weapon and her cleaning tools upon it. She also took out Victria's .357 and assessed its damage. Her .45 round had snapped the barrel clean off and its cylinder had snapped across the middle. It could have been worse, she thought, thankful that the concussion wound on the side of Victria's face was limited to some bruising and a few small fragments of steel.

"So you are, really, a bounty hunter," Victria asked as she watched Glory dismantle her gun in a matter of two seconds, "and you run Pam's restaurant for extra cash, or something?"

Discerningly aloof, Glory considered her captive for a moment, and answered:

"Something like that."

Brow furrowed, Victria studied her mysterious captor as she degreased, wiped and freshly oiled the parts of her .45.

"Tell me something." Glory asked after a time, "Were you really going to shoot yourself?"

Victria glanced at her and answered:

"Yes. No. I don't know. I guess I was hoping you would actually shoot me."

"Really?"

"No. No. I know you wouldn't have done it."

"How'd you know?"

Victria met her gaze, smiled and winced.

"Because you're a fucking pussy." She answered.

Glory gave her the finger as she took another sip of her beer.

"Dude, what if I have to piss?" asked Victria.

"Then you'll piss right there." Glory answered.

"And what if I have to shit?"

"Then you'll shit right there."

"Glory, come on. You know the scene. I can't switch like that. It'll kill me."

"No it won't. You'll be fine."

"Why are you scening me woman? I haven't consented to this."

"I told you. You are a threat to yourself and that makes you a threat to me. So, you will be bound until I know you can keep yourself safe."

"Can I have a cigarette at least?"

"Nope. But you can have as much beer as you want and I can feed you."

"Yeah, but I have to piss and shit myself."

"Right."

"What the fuck Glory, that's not fair."