Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain

Author:Jolene McIlwain [McIlwain, Jolene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2023-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Less Said

1

It was a simple pulley. Not weathered, maybe fixed-eye, with some plastic twine threaded through the sheave. It hung there from a bar, which had been bent in the middle by weight and poor planning. The bar was secured to two trees about five feet apart, wispy-looking quaking aspens with trunks about as big around as an average female’s thighs. Smooth like them, too.

Other than that, and the hundreds of empty bullet casings scattered about and piled up in mounds, it looked like any other run-down, ordinary camp. If they were true hunters, they would have recycled their casings instead of wasting them. These guys wouldn’t take to sizing and primers. They wouldn’t deburr, bell, chamfer. They wouldn’t know what a carbide die was. True hunters would have had a proper gambrel hoist for the deer they hung. They were weekenders. That’s if what they hung on that pulley was a whitetail. That’s if that’s what they crept into the woods to hunt.

2

Two of the dancers from Taylor’s Body Shop—one of the only thriving establishments in town—went missing for a whole weekend. Taylor yammered about losing customers. “Get those girls back here. I want them dancing around them poles tonight,” he yelled to the other girls and collapsed his scraggy frame into his swivel chair next to the register, licked his thumb, and counted out the stacks of ones and fives again, all of those bills creased deep with sweat and booze. But no one went looking, and the girls returned, a little banged up—scrapes on their knees, bruises circling their ankles—but back to their same routines.

Taylor never asked for the details about where they’d been or coerced them into telling him specifics of who it was that stole them away. He said rumors only made business better for the girls. And him. They’d agreed. “Don’t go telling the pigs!” they said, raising their penciled brows to their reflections in the smeared mirrors. Mouths agape, they lined dark the watery edges of their eyes.

Many of the regulars noticed the one girl covered up a little more, was a little tenser when she gave laps.

3

Whitey told everyone Meggie was the best bartender he ever had; she’d tended bar for him the past five years since graduating high school. He called her scrappy. Said she could hold her own.

Meggie heard a group of slick city hunters bragging about some camp they’d landed through a sweet deal. Came in to celebrate. She didn’t know where the camp was located. Whitey hadn’t heard anything about it. (He missed quite a bit Meggie picked up on.)

“You guys always drink girl’s drinks,” she chided one evening, as she served these same city hunters their Sloe Screws and Fuzzy Navels. One of the huskier ones ordered tequila just to call her at her game.

“You do the shots with me, though,” he said.

“Need some training wheels for that stuff?” She offered him a slice of lemon and slid the salt dip close to his hand. He snatched the shot and gulped it, winced and waved the lemon away.

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