The Last Queen of the Gypsies - William Cobb

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then back up at her. His mouth was open and she saw blood welling up there, and it ran down his chin and his neck, dripping on her, burning her skin. Then his eyes rolled back in his head so that she saw only red-veined gray. He slumped, crumpled, fell heavily backward and lay flat on the floor with the knife protruding from his chest, his old thing flopped to the side, his wrinkled skin ashen and pasty like a plucked turkey. His body was as hairless as an infant’s.

      Minnie lay there, very still, afraid to move, watching the old man twitch and gasp for a minute and then grow still. She could see the life going out of him, his soul—if he had one—leaving him. He was the first dead person she’d ever seen. She did not even let herself ponder the fact that she had killed him, had robbed him of whatever desperate, hardscrabble living was left to him. Not much, she thought. Not much at all.

      She used the quilt to wipe the blood from her chest and belly, then got up from the bed, being careful not to touch him or step in the blood or her vomit. The old man had landed square in the middle of it, and his bright blood was seeping into it, making little rivulets in the gray-green, thicker ooze. She wrinkled her nose. The whole pile smelled to almighty hell, like the old man had already started to rot. She found her underpants on the bed, stepped into them and pulled them up over her scrawny, little-girl’s butt. She held the too large, loose-fitting dress over her head and let it drape down over her. It struck her mid-calf and turned a skinny child into a bony old woman. She stood looking down at Alexander Mossback Frill; he lay with his mouth open, his head tilted to the side, his eyes wide open and staring fixedly at something high over her head. Maybe he was looking at Jesus. Maybe Jesus had finally come for him.

      She looked around the room. There was half a pone of cornbread left in a cast-iron skillet, so she got it and shoved it into an empty flour sack she found on the floor. She had nothing to put the greens in, and, anyway, when she looked into the pot at the congealed grease on the surface of the pot liquor her stomach fluttered mightily and she had to look quickly away. There was a pie safe with nothing in it. A pan with four Irish potatoes and an orange, which she crammed in with the cornbread. She put the sack next to the door.

      She had to find the keys. She guessed they were in the bib of his overalls, and they were, three little brass keys on a string. The first one she tried opened the padlock on the door, and she pulled it open, hearing the old boards scrape on the floor. At the sound the hound under the stoop growled. She stepped back inside and found a stick of firewood about two feet long. She put it next to the sack. Then she found a can of kerosene and one of coal oil. She took the quilt off the bed and threw it over the old man. She doused the mattress—ticking about gone, clouds of cotton poking out here and there—and the quilt covering the old man. Then she shook both cans all around the inside of the cabin until they were empty, then flung them one by one against the wall, which set the old hound to barking. The smell of the kerosene and oil made her lightheaded and dizzy. She got the box of wooden matches off the table. She got the stick of firewood and her sack and went out onto the porch.

      The night was a great dome of stars overhead. She scratched a match and threw it through the door. Immediately the flames began to lick across the floor, spreading outwardly, toward the old man and the bed. She stepped down off the narrow porch. The hound came out, growling, showing her teeth, and she hit her in the ribs with the firewood as hard as she could; the hound let out a yelp, wheeled and limped off toward the woods, whining like a baby crying.

      Minnie stood across the road, watching the old cabin being consumed by the fire. The words “a cleansing fire” came to her from somewhere, maybe from the preacher back at the migrants’ camp, maybe from the collected wisdom of her memory, maybe from the accumulated experience of her own soul. The fire hissed and crackled and roared with a ferocious purpose, the flames devouring the old tinderbox cabin as though it were made of paper. She watched bright red and orange sparks shooting toward the sky, rising and mingling with the silver sparks of the stars already there.

      Minnie set out walking down the sandy shoulder of the road. It had turned cold, and she shivered in the thin dress. She would walk all night. She would keep walking for the rest of her life if she had to.

      2

       Piper, Florida

      June 1964

      In the small town of Piper, Florida, there lived a young man—or boy, though it would not be entirely accurate to call him a boy, since he was mature before his time, having endured the first fourteen years of his life in the same rundown house with a drunken father, who beat the boy regularly for the first ten years and then got his due from the boy for the last four—tall and muscular, handsome, appealing to women of all ages but choosing to spend that portion of his time he spent with the female sex with an eighty-three-year-old woman suffering from advanced senility.

      It was not that he was not attracted to girls his own age; he was. But once he was close enough to see behind the rouge and lipstick and beribboned hair he found them silly, unserious to a fault. They represented the type of people who populated the world, or at least as much of the world as he knew, with their babblings and petty arguments and insincere compliments, and he rejected them and rejected their world as well. He was more than content to walk alone.

      Piper was a town of two thousand people, in the western Panhandle, on one of the main routes to the Gulf beaches. It was the type of place that people only passed through going elsewhere, stopping maybe for gas or at the numerous fruit stands lining the highway north toward the Alabama border, oranges and grapefruit mostly, melons, none of which was any fresher really than they could buy in their grocery stores in Birmingham or Atlanta or Chattanooga, since Piper was two hundred miles from the fruit-growing region down in the central part of the state, the fruit stand owners relying on the motorists’ sudden awareness that soon they would leave Florida and their realization that they hadn’t bought enough fruit to take home with them. Piper had little in common with the beach towns with their gaudy pretensions to happiness and escape—the broken promises and the desperation. Piper didn’t even have a single motel, only an ancient tourist home sitting in stoic defiance of the obvious illogic of stopping when you’re a mere two hours from the beach. Nobody ever stopped there.

      It was a perfect early summer evening, not too hot, and the boy, whose name was Lester Ray Holsomback, walked along a dirt road—actually a street of the town—that ran along the river. He wore tight jeans and a white T-shirt, with a package of Camels rolled up in the sleeve. He was clearly visible in the bright moonlight, would have been even if he had not had on the T-shirt. He was just under six feet tall, with shoulders so wide they strained the T-shirt in the back. His hair was silky black, short, cut about half an inch all over, not so much cut as just there. He had a birthmark on the left side of his crown, white hairs in a misshapen V, as though some God or Fate had reached down and said thoughtfully, “Hmmmm, okay, him,” and put a check mark there. His eyes were a light blue, sometimes in certain lights almost gray, providing a contrast with the sun-darkened skin of his face. The only odd thing about him this night was that he wore on his face a Frank Sinatra mask, made of rubber, fastened with elastic bands in the back. He came around toward the end of the road, a turn-around at the river, behind the city dump, paused in the moon shadows, and stood looking at the car parked there.

      It was an old Chevrolet coupe, black with a red top. He knew whose it was: Billy Blankenship, a senior next year at the high school, whose father ran a business supply store downtown. Lester Ray stood in the shadows and lit a cigarette. He was not concerned about being seen. He knew he wouldn’t be, because the occupants of the car would be too busy. He could not see them, but he knew they were in there. He had watched them come down here before, had seen them pass by his house earlier on this night, Billy and his girl friend, named Lucy Hatter, nicknamed “Lucy Goosey.” A fat girl. Giggled all the time.

      Lester Ray had quit school in the sixth grade. He did not know this couple very well personally, since he spent most of his time hanging out with Mrs. McCrory and doing yard work for her, or working in the pool room—sweeping out the place, racking balls—and, with whatever money he could put together, drinking beer at Saddler’s Lounge, on the edge of town. He was not likely to see either one of them in one of those

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