Blunt Force Kindness (Baer Creighton Book 5) by Clayton Lindemuth

Author:Clayton Lindemuth [Lindemuth, Clayton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hardgrave Enterprises
Published: 2020-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Baer Creighton sat with his back to his brother’s duplex wall, his arms wrapped around his shins, face lowered to his knees. The tears had stopped but electricity still dazzled the hair on his arms. Pins pricked his mind from a hundred dancing angles. Demons flitted behind, where he couldn’t see. He stared at grass flickering pink between his feet. Clamped shut his eyes against swirling thought-fragments. They cohered, but with mismatched forms. Random thoughts gelled with strangers. They writhed without the sense to self-abort. The frayed power cord made it night. His curse arrived when he saw his mother sprawled on her bedroom floor, shotgun barrel in hand. The bruise on her temple came from the iceberg lettuce in the mixing bowl.

Without a shotgun shell, how the royal fuck do you make a salad?

Baer watched, afraid his disintegrating mind would float into nothingness yet still be hounded by untruth.

He felt his voice in his throat and was unsure if it was now with his back to the bricks or a few years before when he was dripped tears on his mother’s bruised face.

A door opened. The screen stretched a spring and rattled chains.

“Let’s go pee-pee,” Ruth said. “Okay? Let’s go pee-pee.”

Baer blinked open his eyes, lifted his face and wiped away the wetness. He lowered his hand to the hatchet at his hip.

Metal clinking, faint.

Yellow light flashed across the tiny back lawn.

Baer sat. Though his mother no longer occupied his sight she was with him somewhere in the yellow pink lawn. Baer tried to understand the salad. He hated salad. Ruth’s voice came in whispers and exasperated sighs. The screen door sounded again, this time as it closed.

He could leave without being discovered if he rallied his body.

A black form eased around the corner of the duplex and bumbled forward. A puppy on big paws, as prone to tumble as walk. It faced Baer and stood, then bounded toward him yipping. It halted.

“Baer?” Ruth’s voice came around the corner. “What you see, Baer?”

Ruth’s head came around the corner, then vanished. The door slammed. Stomps inside the duplex. Baby screaming. Door slamming again.

Ruth stood at the corner far enough back that the yellow porch light showed her shorts and t-shirt. She clutched a Louisville Slugger. The puppy wagged its back half and came to Baer and sniffed his pants where Günter Stroh’s dog Rommel must have left his scent.

She choked up on the bat and readied her swing. “Get away from my house or I’ll brain you!”

“Ruth.”

“Who are you?”

“You name your dog after me?”

“Baer?”

Everything he wanted to confront her with left him. He lowered his head.

“You can’t be here, Baer.”

“I guess I’ll get on then.”

Baer rolled to his side and clawed the wall to his feet. “You take care, Ruth.”

She stood there.

“I’m going that way, to the woods.”

“Little Baer hasn’t peed yet.”

“I’ll go around then.”

“Baer?”

He stopped.

“I didn’t name the dog. Larry did.”

“Okay.”

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