Vera Violet by Melissa Anne Peterson

Author:Melissa Anne Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640092334
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2019-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

15

THE BIG CAT

If Colin had known about the big cat, he might not have taken the dirt bike. But as soon as he got out of jail he looked up a rich kid in Olympia who owed him a lot of money. The kid was a politician’s son who wanted to be a redneck. Colin waited with him for two hours at a grocery store. He stared at the kid’s stiff Carhartt pants. His new Georgia boots. The boy’s money never came through. His politician dad was using tough love. The kid started talking in a high-pitched voice. He was coming down and scared—feeling suddenly vulnerable.

Colin said he wouldn’t cut him up so bad if he had something to hold on to. He told him about how nicely the kid would fit into the trunk of his Impala. Colin took the bike and told him he was lucky. He took back roads most of the way to David. He rode down 101 under the speed limit. It was his birthday. He had never in his life owned an Impala.

Colin was tired of the tweakers in the tweaker pads—the track marks, stolen guns, and boredom. He went to the house on Cota Street to look for me. It was empty and stared at him. He couldn’t remember where my apartment was. A troublesome thought reminded him there was something he was supposed to tell me. He scrubbed at the wall in the kitchen. There was a bloodstain there. He picked at the sores on his face. Some kids knocked on the door, and he let them in. He didn’t really remember their names. They had meth and offered him some. As the smoke left his lungs he grew even more confused. He didn’t say a word to the tweakers huddled around the crack pipe in the living room. He grabbed his heavy jacket and walked out the back door. He looked longingly at the porch. He jumped on the dirt bike and bought a case of beer at the corner market.

Colin rode all the way up in the hills above the plywood mill. He followed logging roads until he found one that ended abruptly. He was in a turnaround that only loggers knew the use of. He drank his beer and tried to cut kindling for a fire with his pocketknife. He was shaking. He sliced through his skin. Splinters stuck into his flesh. The wound bled angrily. He wrapped his finger in his handkerchief. The blood soaked through the cotton. He watched the thickets of salal and Scotch broom change shape in the dark. His good-looking face was haggard—saggy bags of dark flesh hung underneath his eyes. Stringy, greasy hair clung to his face. He wouldn’t sleep that night or the next. It would take a lonely eternity for the drugs to leave his system.

A mountain lion smelled the fresh blood of his wound. He heard her screeching as he stared at the sun sinking behind a freshly shorn hill. The big feline was young and starving.

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