Country Roads

The barn looked as if it hadn’t been used in years. The floorboards were dry and dusty, with loose strands of old hay strewn all about the place. There were some tools on a rack affixed to one wall, but they were all rusty with age and neglect. Despite all this, the structure itself looked well-maintained, sturdy. This is why he had chosen to hunker down here for a spell, while he found his bearings. He’d figured he could rest up and be gone before anyone noticed his presence. He’d been wrong.

The old woman had the shotgun fixed at his chest and she had no intention nor inclination to lower it. The gun looked comically large in her tiny arms – it made her look a bit like a Looney Tunes character. However, she gripped it with familiarity and ease. She was tougher than she looked.

He sat on a single bale of hay in the center of the barn, his hands up in submission. There was a loft with more hay above him, where he had planned to put his head down for the night. It was old hay, but the barn had kept it dry enough to avoid any mold or mildew. Still, it wasn’t going to be fed to any animals anytime soon.

“Can I put my hands down please, ma’am?” he said, his politeness and pleasant Southern drawl running contrary to the bright orange prison uniform he was still wearing.

“You shut your mouth,” the old woman replied. “The authorities will be here soon enough. You keep your hands where I can see them until then.”

It was the first words they’d exchanged in minutes.

He sighed and kept his hands up. The old woman narrowed her eyes at him. Her finger did not leave the trigger.

His arms were tired. Hell, his everything was tired. Tired of running. Tired of hiding. Maybe it was better that he was caught. At least now, he could rest.

Still, it would have been nice if he could have seen home just one more time. The rolling green hills, the autumn foliage, the blue-green waters of the Elk. It’s funny what you come to miss in prison.

The old woman watched on suspiciously as the man began to sing softly, in a low, tenor, voice.

“Country roads, take me home. To the place I belong.”

The old woman’s trigger finger twitched once, then softened. The man’s eyes widened in surprise as she began to sing along with him.

“West Virginia, mountain mama. Take me home, country roads.”

A moment passed between them.

“Mountaineers fan, are ya?” the old woman asked.

The man nodded. “Born and bred, ma’am. Yourself?”

“Nah. Never cared for the game. My husband though.”

The man smiled. “Sounds like a man of good taste.”

The old woman scoffed. “He was a bum.”

Was. The man’s smile faded. “My condolences. I would have liked to talk football with the man.”

At this, the old woman cackled. “Yeah, you two would’ve gotten on like a house on fire. Two no-account law-breakers.”

“He did time?”

“He died in prison.” The old woman eyed the man’s uniform. “You oughta get used to that idea.”

“What did he do?”

“Assault on a police officer. Crippled the poor man. Claimed it was self-defense.”

The man raised his eyebrows. “You don’t believe it was?”

“My husband didn’t have an honest bone in his body. He was in and out of trouble all the time. Drinking. Gambling. Almost cost us the farm more than once. But he always found a way to weasel out of whatever trouble he was in. Always had an excuse.” The old woman smiled a bitter smile. “The funny thing is, I always believed his lies. Even until the end. It took a verdict passed down by a jury of his peers for me to see him for what he really was. A liar.”

They both grew silent. Somewhere in the distance, a rooster crowed.

The man in the prison uniform eventually broke the silence. “You know,” he said quietly. “The system doesn’t always get it right.”

The old woman sneered. “Yeah, right. You gonna tell me you’re innocent too?”

The man shook his head slowly. “No ma’am, not innocent. I’ve done a lot of wrong in my life. More than I would be proud to admit. But I didn’t do what they claim I did.”

The old woman observed the man. He had a look of resignation on his face. The look of a man that was done pleading his case only for it to fall on deaf ears. It was a look she had seen before.

Carefully, she moved her trigger finger just long enough for her to check her watch. By her reckoning, the authorities would arrive in just a few minutes. She sighed and shifted her weight, still keeping the shotgun aimed at the man's chest. “Go on then. Let’s hear it.”

“Ma’am?”

“Let’s hear your side. And put your hands down, for God’s sake.”

The man did as he was told. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, nodding appreciatively. Then, he took a breath and began his story.

※

“I used to work for a man, went by the name ‘Bubba’. Real sonofabitch, as mean as they come. I used to collect money for him – that is to say that if people didn’t pay up what they owed him, it was my job to incentivize them.

One day, Bubba and I are making the rounds. We go to collect money from this guy that owes him. Only the guy ain’t home. Only his wife.

So we bust into the place in order to collect what’s owed. I keep the wife quiet, while Bubba ransacks the sock drawers, the kitchen cabinets, the toilet casing – anywhere where degenerates tend to hide cash. But Bubba doesn’t find anything. He’s furious.

Then Bubba sees the wife. She’s terrified but keeping quiet. But she starts screaming when Bubba pulls his knife and starts towards her. He tells me to shut her up. I cover her mouth but push him back. I ask him what the hell he’s doing. He says that he didn’t come all the way out here for nothing. He says that he’s gonna get what he’s owed, one way or another.

Now I did a lot of bad stuff for this man, but there are some things that I cannot abide. So I pull my own knife. We struggle and Bubba manages to get me on my back. Bubba pushes his knife down on me, but I stop it with my hand. I feel the blade pierce my palm and I think, this is the end. Then out of nowhere, the wife clocks Bubba over the head with a lamp from behind.

But Bubba is enraged, and no lamp is gonna stop him. He just grunts and shoves the wife away. She falls back and hits her head on a table. But her distraction gives me a chance to lash out with my own knife.

Somehow, Bubba manages to catch my knife with his palm, stopping it inches from his chest. Now, I don’t know if my knife was dull, or I wasn’t strong enough, or maybe I hit bone or something. But it didn’t get through Bubba’s hand.

Bubba looks down at me and his eyes are crazy, like I’ve never seen before. With his free hand, he takes the handle of his knife – the one that’s sticking out of my hand – and pushes down slowly. His knife goes straight through my good hand and out the other side. I feel the blade go into my chest. And that’s when I blacked out.

I woke up in a hospital, hand-cuffed to a bed. The first thing I asked about when I came to was the woman. They told me she’d been killed. They told me that I was responsible.”

※

“Ma’am, I’m not proud of what I did.” The man looked the old woman in the eye as he spoke. “By all accounts, I done wrong by that woman and for that, I’m prepared to take my licks like a man. Whatever happens next, I want you to know that I surely appreciate you for hearing me out.”

The old woman nodded slowly. The man’s story resonated with her. He was definitely on the wrong side of the law, but she couldn’t help but feel that perhaps the law was wrong on this occasion.

In the distance, the wail of patrol car sirens could be heard approaching. By the sounds of it, the whole station had come to answer the call.

The man, upon hearing the sirens, lowered his head in resignation. Then, he looked at the old woman.

“Ma’am, I don’t suppose you could see your way towards letting me have one last cigarette before I go back in? You don’t wanna know where the cigarettes we get on the inside have been.”

The old woman hesitated for a moment. Then, cradling the shotgun in one arm, she fished out her cigarette packet from the front pocket of her apron. Her lighter was inside the packet.

She tossed the cigarette packet at the man’s feet. Slowly, he bent down to pick it up. He placed a cigarette between his lips and lit it, using one hand to shield the flame from the wind.

He took a deep breath and held the smoke in his chest, his eyes closed in an expression of ecstasy. The he exhaled through his teeth, blowing smoke up into the air around him.

The old woman couldn’t help but feel a surge of pity for the man as he enjoyed the simple act of smoking a cigarette. He didn’t seem like a bad man – just unlucky. He did what he had thought to be the right thing and if she had been in his shoes, she probably would have done the same.

Her grip on the shotgun loosened, the barrel dipping ever so slightly. The man took another long drag from his cigarette.

The old woman paused. Something was off.

“His knife goes straight through my good hand and out the other side.”

The man had a long scar on his right palm. The old woman had noticed it when the man had had his hands raised. That was not the problem.

The old woman looked at the man’s right hand as he reached up and took the cigarette from his lips. The back of the man’s hand bore no scar. Only his palm.

“I don’t know if my knife was dull, or I wasn’t strong enough, or maybe I hit bone or something. But it didn’t get through Bubba’s hand.”

The man noticed the realization dawn on the old woman’s face and looked down at his hand. He chuckled. “Ah, shit.”

As the old woman went to raise her shotgun, he flicked the lit cigarette at her face.

“Ah!” she yelled, recoiling in surprise and pain. Then he was upon her, grabbing the barrel of the shotgun and forcing it away from him. As the pair struggled, the lit cigarette fell to the floor of the barn, rolling into a small cluster of dry hay.

※

The police were a mile out but they were able to hear the gunshot over their sirens. By the time they arrived at the farm, the barn was a raging inferno.

Only one body was recovered from the smoldering wreckage. The escaped prisoner, Benjamin ‘Bubba’ Kint, remains at large.