A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,45

you tell ’em that you done run into the truck door, you hear? You got that, Charlie?

Chill knew that none of the teachers believed the story about the truck door, but he also knew that nobody was going to challenge him on it, either. Who wanted the aggravation? His daddy was a violent man, big, prideful, easily riled, like a saucepan kept on a low boil, always hoping somebody will come along and crank up the flame and give him an excuse to blow. Nobody messed with him. Lanny Sowards didn’t have a real job; he mainly just picked up metal scrap on the road and sold it to the recycling place in Piketon. And he got drunk. That was his job. That was what he devoted himself to.

There was never enough money in the house for shoes or food or other regular things. One day when Chill was six years old, he had argued with the man from the gas company who’d come to turn off the gas. Chill ran out into the side yard and called the man a goddamned fucking sonofabitch and kicked at the man’s left shin, hard, over and over again. The man was so startled to hear that kind of language coming out of a little kid – startled, and amused, too, because it really did sound funny, that kind of garbage-mouth on a kid, a kid so small that the kicks didn’t even hurt – that he stopped what he was doing and just stood there. Then he left. But he came back the next day, when Chill was gone, and turned off the gas anyway.

His daddy ended up not mattering for very much longer, though, because when Chill was ten years old, Lanny Sowards wrapped his truck around a tree on one of those crazy Saturday nights when he was driving blind drunk, and there wasn’t a piece of him left that was big enough to bury. That was how Chill’s brother Steve had put it, saying the words gleefully, almost in awe: They couldn’t find a whole piece of him nowheres. He was spread out all over the place. Looked like a bag of laundry somebody’d dumped along the road. Dang. It was a while before Chill could believe that Lanny Sowards was really dead. It didn’t seem possible. He was afraid that if he believed it too readily, if he let his guard down, his daddy would show up again, take him by surprise, bushwhack him, having heard everything Chill had said about him in the meantime, and he’d make him pay. It took months for Chill to accept it. His daddy was too big for something as small and weak and dumb as death to get the better of him. When he thought about his daddy, Chill still had to resist the strong urge to duck. He could still sense that big boot flying at him, sharp edge leading the way, and hear his daddy’s bull roar, a sound as big as the world itself.

So Chill still hated Sunday afternoons. Always would.

There was a knock at the door.

Startled but not surprised – he was expecting it, but didn’t know just when it would come – Chill mashed out his cigarette on the jar lid that he kept on the nightstand. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up, buttoned his jeans. With his right hand he smoothed back the hair on one side of his head. The hair felt greasy and clotted beneath his palm.

The knock came again.

15

Bell looked at her daughter. The living room suddenly felt colder, even though the afternoon sunlight was cruising in through the large picture window, filling the house with a casual radiance, turning the rundown chair and the worn carpet and the chipped mantel into brighter, brasher versions of themselves.

‘So you want to go live in D.C.?’

Carla shrugged.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I do.’

‘What about school? And your friends?’

‘There are schools over there.’ Carla said it quietly, seriously, not in the smart-ass way that Bell had anticipated. ‘I’ll make new friends.’

Bell let some time go by. Sam didn’t speak either. He sat back on the couch, the ankle of one leg balanced on the knee of the other leg, and he fingered the pressed hem of his slacks.

If Carla truly didn’t want to be in Acker’s Gap, then Bell wouldn’t keep her here. She had made a promise to her daughter. She didn’t want West Virginia to seem like a