The Second Doublewide on the Right, part 70

I’m Fixin’ To present part 70 of The Second Doublewide on the Right:

Jimmy Ray Hurd’s little sister lived in a little one bedroom apartment up off I-20. Presently she was lying half naked in her bed and had shiny diamond rings on all of her fingers, even on some of her toes. The stones twinkled like stars when she wiggled them. She had bracelets on her wrists and around her ankles, necklaces around her neck and sparkling ear rings dangling from her lobes.

Jimmy Ray had come by earlier and dumped this duffle bag full of broken glass and a humongous amount of the most beautiful jewelry in the middle of her bed. He had left her a big pair of gloves to pick the glass out with, and now she was literally bathing herself in all the glittering and glowing precious stones and metals.

She was used to her brother giving her things. When she was little he used to bring her candy and cookies, toys and trinkets, and was always giving her a few dollars. He was five years older than her and it had taken her until when she was in the seventh grade, and he was a senior, before she realized he was a thief. But they had been poor when she was a little girl and she hadn’t had a daddy, so she had always loved Jimmy Ray because he was the closest she ever had to one.

There had been a period of time when she didn’t see much of him. It was during her last two years of high school, which was mostly spent in a fog of dope smoking. She hadn’t even bothered to go back during the last three months of her senior year. What she did was move in with Alvin Kelly, a minor dope dealer who was several years older than her. It was all right for a while. Then Alvin has started treating her real mean when he was stoned, which was mostly every day.

It began by just mean and painful little pinches, or painful hair pulling, but then it escalated to hitting her—not in the face, but punching her with his fists in the back or on a shoulder. She got so she always had big ugly bruises and couldn’t wear a tank top or they would show.

But Alvin kept plenty of weed in the apartment and she smoked so much she stayed lethargic and blamed his meanness on her self. Then he escalated his abuse by verbally abusing her, calling her vile names like “little low-rent red-neck.”

One weekend they had run out of dope and after Alvin had exhausted all his resources he had started drinking whiskey on Saturday afternoon. He passed out in the late afternoon, but was back on his feet by dark, raising cane because she hadn’t fixed anything to eat.

After Jimmy Ray’s little sister told him what he could eat, he had hit her in the face and knocked her out cold. When she woke up she was lying on the kitchen floor with her head throbbing with pain. She got up and stumbled into the bathroom and looked into the mirror and was shocked to see that her right eye was almost closed and blood was seeping from it. She returned to the kitchen and got some ice out of the freezer, wrapped the cubes in a cloth, sat down at the table and held the coldness of it to her throbbing eye while she phoned Jimmy Ray.

Her brother had been sitting at the kitchen table with her, with one hand in his pocket, when Alvin finally came back home. His eyes were red and mean when he walked in. Defiantly, he pulled out a chair and sat down at the table with them like nothing had happened, looked directly at Jimmy Ray and demanded, “What the heck are you doing here?”

Jimmy Ray’e little sister answered for him when she said, “He’s here because I asked him to come.”

“You shut the heck up,” Alvin snarled at her. Then he turned towards Jimmy Ray, put his finger in his face and spit out hatefully, “And you can get your skinny red-neck self out of my place or I’ll—-”

That was when the blade of her brother’s big switchblade knife snapped out with the suddenness of a serpent’s strike and almost cut Alvin’s finger off.

She remembered her brother practicing with that switchblade knife when she was little. He had always enjoyed showing her how fast he could pull it and snap out the blade. He must have kept in practice because Alvin had just almost lost a finger.

Alvin, miraculously, changed from a bully to a blubbering craven coward, as he stared at his finger, sliced to the bone, with blood spurting from it and beginning to pool up on the surface of the table.

Jimmy Ray’s little sister figured that her brother wasn’t through with Alvin after he rounded the table and kicked the chair out from underneath him.

And she wasn’t fixin’ to care much if he wasn’t through with him.

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