Read an Excerpt

Fallen Angels

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By Patricia Hickman

Warner Books

Copyright © 2003 Patricia Hickman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0446691011

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Chapter One

A bit of trouble with attempted murder sent Jeb Nubey over the Texarkana border in the unfortunate direction of hunger. Everybody from the Texas side had gotten the wrong idea about the matter. If he had been a man of means, he would've been thought of as a stand-up guy instead of feller-on- the-run. That was all stand-up men were, he figured-the ones who could stand up with their pockets full of pay-offs and get fellers to see things in a new light. But now none of the itinerant boys-buddies he'd on many nights shared a bottle of the good stuff with-would talk to him. Once word spread of problems with the boss man, they just turned their sorry backs and walked away.

He'd never thought he would hear his name preceded by "no account," as in no-account scum, no-account filth-of-the-earth. Worthless. Shiftless. Twenty-two years after his momma had given him the good name of Jeb, he'd descended to the rank Leon Hampton had awarded him-Leon and his son, Hank, who could never keep a gal on his tight-fisted leash due to his alcohol-infused temper.

The gal, Myrna. The Betty Boop gal. Round hips. Red lips. "Last night, I nearly killed a man. Maybe I did kill him. Now no one will talk to me," said Jeb. "Hank got was coming to him," Jeb's brother Charlie said.

"But you got to hide, lay low until things simmer down in Texarkana. Until Hampton forgets your name." Hamptons owned everything in Texarkana, from the burlesque girls no one admitted worked for a nickel a dance down at the Biscuit and Bean, to the banking king who kept his doors open on Black Monday when the other Savings and Loans had closed.

"It's cowardly, Charlie. I ain't a running-away sort," Jeb said.

Charlie packed up two work shirts along with all the cash the two of them had earned picking cotton and handed it all to Jeb. "That's why Hank's laying near to death, because you don't run away. He came at you first. We all saw it. But you got them killer fists." Charlie gave the air between them a hefty punch and then handed him the bag he'd filled with the cash and such. "We don't have no clout in Texarkana. Without clout, you got no witnesses-not none that a-body would listen to." Jeb wondered if Charlie had finally lost every bit of good sense. "Hank would have killed you, too, Charlie, if he had caught you with her. Don't give me eyes. I know'd you slept with Myrna, like we all did."

Jeb had memorized Myrna. Myrna, the girl that pretended she loved him when she loved most of the starving gaggle of sharecroppers' sons in Texarkana. Sweet skin, like the girls that posed for the better calendars. Paled by the blue of night, her hair spread against the hay bale, flaxen corn silk like the breath of moon and stars. Touched by Jeb. Myrna had her own perfume and the kind of girl's fragrant hair that wrapped her white dewy shoulders with an aroma like petals. Mind fogging. But not worth a killing. "It was you, Brother, that did the doing." "I didn't, don't you see." Charlie's face gentled, faultless.

"We never. You know I got Selma waiting for me in Oklahoma."

"You expect me to believe you keepin' yourself for Selma? I believe that like I believe we's going to wake up a Rockefeller." "Myrna loved you, Jeb. Said you cast a spell over her. Told me that over a bowl of beans. Now if that don't mean somethin', nothing does."

Jeb knew the truth. "She never belonged to Hank. Gals like her don't belong to nobody." He shook out the insides of the bag and stuffed Charlie's money into a leather satchel his grandfather had once toted across the plains. He listened to the bearish sounds of the sleeping itinerant workers, hard sleepers fallen on their cots from a week of picking. Blood dried on boll-torn fingertips perfumed by corn liquor. "You think Hank will die, for real?" He could not breathe himself. "Either way his daddy's gone after the sheriff. You got to get out of here!" Charlie's face was wet with worry.

"If I leave, they'll believe I meant to do him in. I stay, they at least hear my side." "You got no clout." "Stop staying that, Charlie, like I got no name!" Hampton's hound dogs bayed. The moon had a faded paleness, as though a candle inside its glass was melting before sunup. "I never meant to kill him, Charlie. If he dies, I should be hanged."

"You listen to me, and you listen like I'm our momma! Give us some time, me and the boys, to talk to the sheriff. Otherwise they could string you up and gut ya before you can even whisper your own name. Hamptons, they got money. That sheriff listens to money. It calls his name. But if we all get to him, before the story gets turned around, blown into more than it was, I'll send for you."

"I don't know where to go, Charlie! Just where do cowards hide?"

"Find a big place with lots of people. Hot Springs. Little Rock. No, that's the first place they'll look. Best you don't tell me. But after you get settled, write." "How you expect me t'do that?"

"Don't put your name on it, like, Here I am, come and get me, police." Both of them stared at the floor, locked in place and out of ideas. Disgraceful shame. Good schemers, but between the two of them, kind of low on dependable means. "I tell you what-just draw a big X on the letter. Have the postman stamp it with the town name. Lay low. I'll find you when it's safe."

The whole desertion mess started in the Rialto Theater in Camden, Arkansas. The warm lap of summer brought out the townsfolk to the dance like they'd been spring-dosed with yarbs. Angel figured the Ouachita's old ballroom dance hall across the street had lured in the wrong kind of man to draw her Aunt Lana's wandering eye. Lana, who wasn't really her aunt anyway, only a conniving woman, of a mind to do her daddy's errands only so she could keep food in her belly. Aunt, my hind foot, her mother might have said-if she herself had stuck around.

Saturday night at the movies in Camden fed hungry imaginations a front row view of the American Dream. Pin-up girls lolled poolside on the big screen, California smiles as bright as morning light trickling across the Ouachita River. In the Arkansas movie theater, Angel closed her eyes to imagine the California sun warming her unshapely legs, tickling her calves until they turned heads, brown and never-ending like tall, elegant Sequoias. Forever legs, she imagined. Then she opened her eyes, palely thirteen again and deserted in the Rialto with her little brother, Willie, and her youngest sister, Ida May. Two kids, a big girl with her younger brother, sat in front of them not in the least bit interested in Barbara Stanwyck or that glamour gal's rendering of a charlatan evangelist. With the movie screen for a halo, the girl turned around in the thread-bare chair and stared at Angel and her siblings, curious and bored. The girl, her hair pigtailed to distraction, pressed another jelly bean between her lips that puckered when she spoke as though she had practiced the Shirley Temple pucker too long at her mirror. She glanced up the aisle and then back at Angel.

"Where'd your momma go to?" "None of your business," said Angel. She leaned right and slightly cocked her head.

"She ain't our momma. She's Aunt Lana," said Willie. Angel gave him a sort of tap in the arm with her elbow. "Don't say 'ain't.'" She hated being marked an Arkie even though every farmer, bank clerk, and soda jerk in sight fit the type-the kind of people who drift into the middle of the nation, lose their wind, and stay. To Angel, saying "Ain't" was like saying "I give up and can't get no smarter." But worse was hearing Willie mix Momma with Aunt Lana.

Angel talked about everybody and everything. But not Momma. It was the kind of thing she kept to herself as though some day the secret would bring the two of them closer. Her momma, Thorne, had disappeared into a Ford with two women who traveled to Little Rock to try and find work. Angel had stared after her, held on to her eyes, a pair of exotic browns like the kind that belong to bronzy island girls. Eyes that set off her luxurious hair tendriling out of the window. With her momma had left the only opulence that lingered in Snow Hill. The only hope that Angel would some day be as elegant as Thorne, drove off to Little Rock with a promise to send money.

Lemuel, her father, had too often of late paid more attention to a neighbor divorcee named Lana than his own kin. With Thorne run off to Little Rock, he finally packed the kids all off aimed in the general direction of the town of Angel's oldest sister, Claudia-a place called Nazareth. But of all the foolish ideas Daddy had ever dreamed up, sending them off with Lana took the cake.

"Where is Aunt Lana?" Willie shared his popcorn with Ida May, trying to keep her in her own seat and out of his. "She's not our aunt. How many times I have to say it?" said Angel. She knew that Daddy thought that if he had the little ones call her "Aunt" her every-other-day appearances at the front door would give her full authority over the youngens. But Angel knew better.

Daddy had underestimated his girl. "I think she run off with that huckster nosing around the hotel and left us here. If Daddy knew, he'd bean her." Willie picked Ida May off his shoulder and deposited her on the other side of the chair arm. "What's a huckster?" Ida May tried to curl up against her brother again.

"A peddler who ain't a bonafide person of worth." Angel disappeared into the screen again, into the sin of Barbara Stanwyck, The Miracle Woman. The motion picture had finally made it into Arkansas. When Willie tried to speak again, Angel shushed him, a slow hissing that seeped out of her as she followed Miss Stanwyck across the screen.

Angel made them stay until the last credit rolled up and away. The house lights brightened slow and easy, turning the wallpaper red as lipstick. "Let's try and find Lana," said Willie.

Angel rolled up Willie's popcorn bag, tucked it under her arm, and herded the others out into the lobby. Once she thought she heard Lana's high, squeaky cackle-the same one she heard at night out on their front porch when Daddy sent them off to bed. But Lana was nowhere to be found. Across the street from the Rialto a steady stream of couples clambered up the steps and across the mezzanine of the Ouachita Hotel to the grand ballroom, where a live band played. Most of Camden had turned out for the dance. The threesome headed out into the street and searched the crowd for what seemed like an hour. Finally, Angel turned to face the younger ones. The Rialto's neon marquis buzzed overhead. "Let's face it, Willie. Lana's gone. She ditched us." Ida May huffed, "Did not!"

"Willie, you stay down here next to this couple. Make like they're our folks until I get back. For safety. Stop looking at me like that. I'll check out the dance." Angel sidled up the steps to the landing. It led across the alley to the ballroom. She could see couples swaying across the hardwood floors, but no Lana. She met Willie and Ida May downstairs again and led them to Usrey's Drugstore on the corner of Washington and Adams, where she helped Ida May onto a stool. She made Willie stay with her while she crept past the faces reflecting back at her from the long ornate mirror behind the soda bar.

Moments later, Willie found her in the back and ran at her red faced. "That soda jerk told us if we ain't ordering, we have to leave!" "Lana's not here either. Let's go," said Angel. "Go where, Angel?" Instead of acting scared, Willie got mad. "Back to Snow Hill? To Claudia's? Where?" "Hush! Don't be a rat, Willie! You got to give me time to think."

Ida May waited like a ghost in the doorway, jostled aside by paying customers. Her face was oval with brown eyes like her mother's. When upset, the oval got all long-like, hardening her eyes like penny candies. Her momma had always said, "Little Girl, you'll turn to salt and blow away makin' faces like 'at." Ida May stood in the doorway, her mouth an O. Angel hated the way the Depression toughened girl babies and made them old before their time.

Angel examined the town in front of her. First off, Camden was more electrified than Snow Hill. The Camdenites gathered in clusters in front of the movie theater, some in front of Usrey's Drugstore, and a lot of the people dressed for Saturday-night-showing-off. They clambered in and out of the ballroom, little ants spilling out of a thrown-away Coke bottle. The young women all wore hats that snugged to their heads like colored helmets. The whole place had a pace contrary to Snow Hill. By this time of night Snow Hill had rolled up inside of itself, an old man glad for the day to be over and done with. "If we don't find Lana, where will we go tonight? Where will we sleep or eat? Lana didn't check us into the motel like she said she was fixing to do," said Willie.

"We'll find a room. I'm no louse when it comes to figuring things out, Willie. I can take care of things as good or better than Lana. I am thirteen, after all." Angel took Ida May's hand and led her down past the hotel and across the street to the Rialto. She tapped the counter to attract the ticket seller's attention. "Excuse me, Mister. I got something to ask," she said. The ticket seller lifted his eyes and revealed a long, thin face with a chin that protruded like a potato. "Yes, what you childern want?"

"I'm supposed to meet my aunt. She's getting us a room. Know where she might get us a room?" Willie mumbled behind her. The ticket seller pointed at the Ouachita Hotel. "Only one place."

With one graceful, popcorn-oiled hand, Ida May pointed toward the hotel. "I see her, Angel! Look, there she is yonder." Ida May bristled past her older sister, who had failed her as a stand-in leader.

Angel chased her across the street, through the gaggle of humans from the hills and lake that encircled Camden proper. Willie ran past her, charged up the hotel stairs, and barreled past the mezzanine.

"Angel, it's not Lana!" he called from the opening to the ballroom. The music blared above his nasal yell. Angel reached the doorway and looked in at the mass of swaying bodies. A woman, blonde, bore Lana's posture-hips forward, shoulders slumped. The woman gingerly held up a cigarette for a man to light. She drew on it. The tobacco end warmed and kindled red like coals coming to life. The blonde leaned toward him and whispered into his ear. Then she turned and walked away from him as though she had excused herself to the powder room.

"It's not Lana, Ida May," said Willie. Ida May had by now twisted Angel's skirt around her pointer finger. "I'm skeered, Angel." "I'll get us a room. We'll get some shut-eye and then figger out what to do tomorrow." Angel led them across the mezzanine and down into the hotel lobby. "I didn't like her anyway," Willie said. "Matter of fact she made me sick, come to think of it. She told lies about Momma."

Angel paused, remembering how Lana had said, "It's a hard thing to hear. Your momma had to be taken off to stay with her sister who could keer for her better.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Fallen Angels by Patricia Hickman Copyright © 2003 by Patricia Hickman
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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