Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,42
you need to be filled up again. Time, then, to eat.
She goes to the counter, orders up. The Sawickis have that coal cracker accent going on, replete with all the dialect that makes Atlanta—with her muddy Southern twang—want to bite glass. Y’wanna kilbo griller? Kilbo for kielbasa. Dincha want mustard wit dat? Come back tamarra!
And they say Southerners sound dumb. If there’s one thing Atlanta has learned is, hicks are hicks. Being red-in-the-neck is a global pandemic and everybody sounds stupid to everybody else.
It’s Madge Sawicki behind the counter, big pink lips and cakey make-up and hair teased into a rat’s nest, all in service to staving off the rigors of mid-life. She’s nice enough, and wants to chat, but Atlanta’s just not in a chatty mood. Instead she just orders—yes, mustard with that, no, not spicy—and goes and sits on the once-green now paint-flakey bench around the corner.
By the time she’s half-done eating the kielbasa—the skin with a sharp snap, the meat spicy and strange, the mustard doubly so—she takes a look at the folder sitting by her side and suddenly the bottom drops out of her stomach and the food goes rancid in her gut. She gives it a couple minute, but—still sour. Atlanta wads up the remains of her meal and pitches it in the metal trashcan next to the counter.
Madge waves. “Y’wanna wooter ice wit dat?” You want a water ice with that? That’s another thing regional to the area. Water ice. It’s what they called shaved ice. Water ice? What other kind of ice would there be?
She tells Madge no, then turns and sees someone across the street.
No, no, no.
Mitchell Erickson. Student council president. Pitcher on the baseball team. Blonde hair and green eyes and a too-white smile you could see from the International Space Station.
Oh, and secret Neo-Nazi fascist gay-hating racist dickhole.
Said dickhole sees Atlanta.
No! No.
And then starts to cross the street toward her.
She’d seen him around school a few times since Chris died, but always stayed out of his orbit. The last time she had any actual interaction with him was when she threatened to shoot his father with a pistol her own mother had given her. After Mitchell had beaten her up, thrown her in a truck. After she’d gone slinging threats at him and his secret Neo-Nazi fascist gay-hating racist dickhole crew, including rage-punk John Elvis Baumgartner and that cunty scary Hitler Whore Skank named Melanie.
Never mind the fact he might’ve been involved in Chris’ murder.
Her blood boils. Her middle churns.
“Atlanta!” he calls over to her. Waving and smiling like they’re fucking yachting buddies.
She wants to run screaming, wants to dart around the corner or dive in a passing car or climb up into the food counter window like a cat fleeing a house fire. But her boots stay rooted to the sidewalk.
“Been a while,” she manages to say as he suddenly stands before her. Smelling like soap and smugness.
“It has,” he says. Tongue probing the inside of his cheek. “Sorry to hear about your friend.”
“I’m sure you sent flowers to the funeral and I just missed them.”
“I’m sure.”
“What do you want, Erickson?”
He leans in close, lowers his voice. The smile falls away like an ill-hung painting tumbling off a wall. “Just wanted to say, sorry to hear about your house.”
“My house?” Her chest tightens. “What about my house?”
“Little mouse squeaked in my ear, told me that your mother’s having a hard time paying the mortgage. Foreclosure, huh? Man. Symptom of the down economy, I guess.” Sympathy so fake a breeze would knock the cardboard cutout down, blow it across the street where it’d get hit by a bus.
She says through clamped teeth, “How do you know that?”
“Oh! Didn’t I mention that my dad’s got friends at First National? Golfing buddies. He keeps all his investments there, too—a sizable package.”
“I’ll rip off his sizable package and cram it down his throat.” She feels dizzy. Like the world in front of her sits in sharp-sharp focus but has gone blurry and greasy at the edges. Consequences again come crashing down upon her. The chain of action and reaction laid bare. Chris Coyne’s father hires some local kids connected to the gun club to mess with his son, scare the boy straight. Chris comes to Atlanta. Atlanta pushes back against the bullies, bullies like Mitchell Erickson, son of Orly Erickson, most powerful man in town. Chris is dead. And now Orly has called in favors at the bank to make sure her mother