Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,97
strips. All the horses look like the animals at the zoo on a hot day—tired, wasted, like they just want to lay down, roll over, and die. Sunlight comes through the trees, a bleach white light—not warm and comforting but empty and hot. The eye of Hell watching.
Petry doesn’t say a word.
Neither does she.
Whitey doesn’t pant. He just stares forward, like his eyes are lasers burning holes in the back of Petry’s seat.
The dog knows. Has a sense of the man’s maleficence.
Atlanta feels trapped. Separating her from the front seat is a wire cage. Like she’s one of the dogs before the fight. Locked away in her crate until it’s time for something bad to happen.
Comes a point when to head back to town, toward the station, Petry should stay straight on this road—Boxelder Road—but turns off instead onto Old Orchard Road. Not toward the town of Maker’s Bell in the valley but rather, onto a road that loops back up toward Grainger Hill. Toward the trailer parks and dead barns and shitty little ranch houses where grungy motorheads sell bad weed or crystal meth.
That’s not good.
She pulls out her phone. No bars.
Whitey growls, real low.
Finally, she says in a croaking voice: “Where are we going?”
But Petry, he doesn’t answer. He just drives forward, eyes up front.
Ahead, a dirt lot. He pulls into it, the tires conjuring up a plume of dust. Doesn’t turn the car off, but leaves it running, instead. Through the windshield Atlanta can see a burned-out house—a charred briquette that was once someone’s home and is now just a skeleton of black bones.
Petry turns around. Faces her through the wire.
“If you touch me,” she seethes with false bravado. But she can’t finish the words. She’s too scared.
He says nothing in response. Instead he pulls out a phone—no, not a phone, but some kind of MP3 player. He’s already got it cued up to play what he needs. He thumbs a button.
Sound fills the car. A conversation.
First voice: “Something’s wrong with my son.”
Second: “We’ve noticed that. Wondered if you’d come to us.”
Two men. Atlanta recognizes both of them.
“I worry that who he is… is who he is,” says the first man. Bill Coyne. Chris’ father. “That it’s something he can’t change, you know?”
“He can change.” This one, Orly Erickson. “It’s a choice he’s made. Whether out of teenage rebellion or something else, I don’t know. I’m no psychologist. But I know that God did not make us this way. And I know that the Devil gives us choices and tempts us so that we choose poorly.”
Bill: “I want something done.”
Orly: “Are you asking me to do something about this?”
Bill: “I… I don’t know.”
Orly: “You are. Aren’t you.” A statement, not a question.
Bill: “Yeah. Yeah. I guess I am.”
Orly clears his throat, says, “I think we can get the boys on it. They got that program for troubled kids, kids who are law-breakers. Scared Straight, they call it. This is like that except far more literal. They’ll scare him straight, all right. Beat the faggoty feelings right out of him. Throw the Devil out the window and leave room for the goodness of God. We can do that, right, Petry?”
A few moments of silence. Petry doesn’t speak on the recording—trademark silence. Probably just nodding.
Orly, again: “It’ll cost you a little something. Not much. Since it’s for the cause and all.”
Bill: “I can do that. I can pay. I’m happy to pay.”
“Then thy will be done.” Orly laughs. Then the sound of a drawer opening. Glass against glass. Maybe a bottle pouring—glug glug glug—sharing a drink. “Hail victory.”
Bill: “Hail victory.”
Another clink of glass. A toast.
Then the recording stops.
Petry again says nothing. He just removes the MP3 player from the cage.
“I know all that already,” she says. She can barely keep from yelling. “You’re not telling me anything new.”
“Oh, but I am,” Petry says. “I played that for him. So he could hear. I took him from his home. I drove him up to Gallows Hill, to the pear tree as it bloomed, and I gave him rope—already tied like it needed to be tied—and I played that recording so that Chris knew what his father had done.”
The air, robbed from her lungs. A gut-punch. A horse-kick. She plays through it in her head. What that must’ve been like for Chris. To learn your own father had orchestrated the worst and most humiliating moment of your life. Thinking you were broken. Thinking you could be fixed through pain and humiliation.