Shades of Eva Read Online Free PDF Page A

and
then started snapping it like a whip. The sound it made was enough
to make you wonder what sort of sting it might give to bare skin.
Scotty yelled at Meade not to start any trouble, but Meade only
laughed, snapped his belt again, and said, “Trouble came in when
pecker here came in!”
    I could see Spence and Pritchett looking to
me for direction. Spence was laughing nervously, and waiting.
Ogelthorpe was standing back and smiling. Scotty had picked up the
phone and was making what was quickly becoming a routine call to
police.
    I looked to Spence and shook my head, in
essence, telling him and the boys to step back, that Meade and I
had something to settle.
    I took a drunken step toward the Poker table
and reached for the nearest barstool. In one moment I was swinging
a highboy, the next I was flying through Scotty’s picture window
out onto yet another boarded walkway. Neah Bay slapped me square in
the back and my lungs reacted, giving back a premature breath to
her night air. It felt as though I had been impaled by the glass in
which I lay, as if a giant vacuum had at once and immediately
sucked every molecule of oxygen from my body. Neah Bay seemed to be
laughing at me, and I couldn’t respond to her. I couldn’t catch her
wind.
    I looked up into the rain, then down at my
stomach, gasping in vain for air, half-expecting a shard of glass
to be sticking out of my chest, but there was nothing there, only
blood. Then Meade stepped through the window’s frame and started
whipping me with his belt.
    Spence and Pritchett jumped him, but Meade
threw them off like two rag dolls and bore down on me. The flogging
made me think of my uncle Ully, Mom’s brother, who had adopted me
after Mom died, and his whippings. Then it made me think of Dad and
his belt and the still small voice of the Psalmist, whose proverb
of chapter forty-six and verse ten of the Psalms used to ring so
fervently in my ear that it still rings to this day: Be still
and know that I am God.
    I had the unmistakable sense that it wasn’t
Neah Bay laughing at me, but my ancestors; and perhaps, the still
small voice of God who was finding amusement, again, in yet another
of my many squabbles.
    Again and again Meade struck me, and that
belt did give a sting. Ogelthorpe had come through the door
carrying a wooden chair and slammed it over Meade’s back, but that
did little good. Meade shrugged it off like he’d shrug off a winter
coat. Lightning fell around us and thunder followed, creating a
sort of absurd symphony of leather and lightning cracks amidst the
bass rumble of the night sky. I took the whipping amidst a choir of
laughing, crying, admonishing spectators, some real, some imagined,
ancestors, Psalmists, unborn children and the spirits of trees
alike, all singing out in a chorus of sad darkness, and I was
unable to respond to any of them because I was unable to catch my
wind.
    This was my life to that point. It was all
that I ever knew.
    Then Meade pulled a switchblade from his
back pocket. I could see its tip sparkle in the rain amidst the
lightning. People began to scatter. Ogelthorpe and the boys looked
frozen, but Meade wasn’t. He had a smile on his face like he’d been
to this kind of party before, and I had no doubt that he had.
    He began to bring it down, and that’s when I
heard a click. That’s when another bolt of lightning lit up the
scene as if God had just turned a spotlight on all of us, and I was
finally able to sip a breath of air from Neah Bay.
    The click had come from a pistol whose
barrel end was a finger’s length away from Meade’s forehead now,
and Meade wasn’t moving.
    I could read BERETTA 9 MM in etched black
letters on the underside of the pistol’s barrel, and something also
on the tattooed forearm that cradled it. A single word scripted in
ink: Amethyst, with the face of a little girl silhouetted behind
the letters in holly. It was surreal, but there was an inherent
humor to the situation as my chest rose, and then