This is the conclusion of a story begun here. 

Reader advisory:  The following story contains occasional crude language.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

-- Confucius

The silver Greyhound finished its tortuous climb up the Blue Ridge Mountains and disgorged its passengers at the terminal on Tunnel Road.  It was almost midnight.  I shouldered my backpack and found my way to a moderately priced hotel downtown.  I rented a room, stripped my clothes off, took a warm and relaxing shower, and hit the rack.  My sleep came immediately and was dreamless and sound.

The early summer morning broke sunny and pleasantly cool, with a crisp breeze blowing the scent of pine from the mountains into the center of town.  I dressed, checked out, and walked to the F. W. Woolworth downtown where I ate a  breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee at the counter and bought a thick windbreaker.  I’d spent all my life in hot, muggy Florida, and the mountain air was chilly to me.

I walked to the Peoples Drugs and purchased a map of Hendersonville and a pair of sunglasses.  Then I started walking out of downtown Asheville, past the large high school, and onto Highway 74 South where I managed to hitch a ride in a Mack truck hauling lumber south to a sawmill in Georgia.  I kept my sunglasses on and my mouth shut during the ride to the outskirts of Hendersonville.  I didn’t want anybody remembering my face or voice later.

Hendersonville was a small town with the usual accoutrements:  post office, a town hall, a couple of parks, gas stations, a few greasy-spoon diners, and neighborhoods with modest, single-family homes on quarter-acre tracts.  A typical town of hard-working Americans who only wanted to be left alone and maybe catch a little break once in a while.  They didn’t have much, but, then again, they didn’t want much, either.  Sadly, like most of us, they busted their ass all their lives and had nothing to show for it.  Well, shit, it didn’t matter none—you can’t take it with you anyways.

Pardee’s address was a modest bungalow perched on the side of a hill.  His nearest neighbors were a good quarter-mile away around a bend in Davis Mountain Road.  Perfect, as far as I was concerned.  Out of earshot, hopefully.  Could’ve been packed in close like my old place in Pasco County, so close you could hear your neighbor urinating from your living room window.

Before heading up the walkway to Pardee’s door, I had transferred the S & W .38 Special from the bottom of my backpack to an inside snap pocket in my windbreaker.  I paused on his porch before knocking.  I had dreamed of this day for years.  By God, there were times when this vision was literally the only thing that sustained me during my time at Raiford.

How was this going to work?  I had to confess I didn’t have the first idea.  I was about to deal the hand, and I was pretty sure I knew how it would end.  I just didn’t know how Pardee would play it.  When all was said and done, though, I didn’t think it would matter.  I rapped my knuckles against the thick plywood door and waited.

After a minute, the door opened inward and a pleasant-looking woman stood in the opening.  She was short, looked to be about forty, with dishwater blonde hair, smiling blue eyes, and a generous pair of breasts barely concealed by a floral pattern blouse open to the middle of her chest.  She looked up at me with an inquisitive upturn of her full lips. 

“Can I help you?”  A sweet Southern voice with a hit of Appalachian twang.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am.  Is this the residence of Joe Bob Pardee?”

“Yes, it is.  I’m his daughter, Helen.  How do you know my father?”

I flashed a friendly smile and removed my sunglasses.  “Well, ma’am, your father and I were old acquaintances back in Florida.  I’m just passing through the area, but I was hoping to catch him and say hello while I’m here.  Is he at home?”

Her face darkened slightly as she studied mine more closely.  “I didn’t catch your name, sir.”

I moved closer to her, preventing her from slamming the door in front of me.  “Well, Miz Helen, you didn’t catch my name because I didn’t give it.  Now, I don’t mean to be forward, but I asked you a question a moment ago, and I didn’t get an answer.  I’m wanting to know whether your father is home.”

I gave her credit.  She didn’t shrink away from me; didn’t show any sign of distress at all.  A cool customer.

“Listen, mister, I think you’d better just move on down the road now.  We’re not looking for any trouble, but if you want some, I’ll have the Sheriff’s Department here so fast it’ll make your head spin.  Daddy’s got a lot of friends on the force.”  She turned away from the door and went into the front room, heading for the phone, I guessed.  Or maybe a shotgun?

I dealt the hand, and now it was time to make the first play.  I shouldered past the door, kicked it closed with the heel of my boot, and pulled the Smith out of my pocket.

“You need to stop right there, unless you want your next step to be your last.”  I thumbed the hammer back on the revolver to punctuate the threat.  “Now, for the last time, is your old man at home?”

She turned and stared at me, fire in her blazing blue eyes.  “Yes, he’s here,” she hissed.  “Where the hell else do you think he’d be?  Why don’t you just get out of here and leave him alone?”

“Leave him alone?  Leave him alone?  That son of a bitch never left me alone for seven long years in that hellhole.  No, he did leave me alone once.  In the showers, when I was getting gang-raped by six convict bastards.  He left me all alone with them.  After he got his own self off watching.  Bet he never told you about that, huh?  That’s the kind of vile prick’s blood you’ve got pumping in your veins.”

She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, another voice floated from a back room of the house.  It was more of a croak than the bark it had been, but it was unmistakably the voice of Joe Bob Pardee.

“Helen, please ask the gentleman to come on over here.”

I gestured with the .38 for Helen to lead me down the hall.  We reached the room and she sat down in a chair next to her father’s bed. 

The game had taken another twist.  I barely recognized the emaciated figure lying in front of me.  Pardee’s once-stout body had shriveled to half its former size.  His face, once tanned and weathered, had transformed into a pasty white death mask.  A clear plastic tube ran from a large ventilator next to the bed to Pardee’s nose.  His eyes, once the cold gray of steel, were now bloodshot, rheumy, and puffy.

“So, Gibbons, did they let you out, or are you on the lam?”  He spoke with an effort, and was punished for it by a prolonged coughing fit.  He hawked up a glob of phlegm and spat it into a cuspidor he kept on a side table.

“I got released, boss.”  I clipped the last word out with heavy irony as I pointed the Smith at his head.  “They got the guy who was good for my beef.  He’s probably sitting in my old cell right now.  How do you like that tune, you old scumbag?”

He gave a weak, rasping laugh, a hollow echo of his old evil, full-throated one from the bad old days at Raiford.  “You still peddling that innocent bullshit, Gibbons?  I don’t know how you got some poor fool to take a fall for you, but you ain’t kiddin’ me, boy.”

“Dad, don’t exert yourself like this.  You know what the doctor told you.”  Helen’s voice was solicitous and soothing.

Pardee reached over and patted his daughter’s hand.  “Don’t worry none about that.  Mr. Vern Gibbons here came to do something, and it’s time to let him get on with it.”  He looked over at me.  “What’cha waitin’ for, boy?  Lost your balls?  You killed a nigrah, but you can’t shoot a white man?  Is that it?”

I stared at the pathetic waste of a man three feet in front of me.  The shower incident flashed past my eyes.  The seven years of brutal sadism he wreaked on me boiled my blood and throbbed like a migraine in my temples.

My right index finger slowly pressed against the trigger of the Smith and Wesson.

My thumb lowered the hammer harmlessly against the round in the cylinder.

I wouldn’t give the prick his satisfaction, or his release from the prison his body had crafted.

“See you in hell, boss,” I told him as I walked out of the room, out of his house, and into the warm setting sun over the lush Blue Ridge mountains.

 © 2009, Kenneth M. Rhodes

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