Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson Read Free Book Online

the connection run through me like electric current. I felt the bone of his skull give, and that giving reverberated up into my hands and spread through my whole body. It was all but silent, but I felt the crunch of it, felt him splintering and the shards of bone entering the thick meat of his brain. He slumped sideways from the force of the blow and was completely still.

    And somehow nothing had changed, except the singing had stopped. There was no blood. His skin was unbroken. The bottle was unbroken. Nothing seemed broken at all. I stood there until I got the giggles. I stood there giggling and giggling, unable to stop. It struck me that this was inappropriate, and then I realized the word “inappropriate” was a hilarious word to think while standing over an utterly dead body. It sounded like something Clarice would say, pursing her lips with disapproval over my laughter coming right after I smashed a boy’s head in, and I dissolved into more helpless giggles.
    At last I unscrewed the cap and took three long, searing gulps.
    The pain of them burning down into my throat shut me up, and there was Jim Beverly, and he was dead, and I had killed him. I looked stupidly at the bottle. Although I had been staring at it, fascinated, before I ever picked it up, somehow I had not registered the fact that this was real Mexican tequila. A dead worm floated disconsolately near the bottom.
    I was so surprised that I opened my mouth and the tequila I had swallowed came shooting back up. It fell in a wash down the front of my dress, the fumes of it burning my eyes. Then it struck me that I had calmly puked on myself, and that was the funniest thing yet. I laughed so hard I had to either sit down or wet myself.
    When I wound down, I sat there for a minute, hitching and gulping. I must have been laughing so hard it was like crying. I looked over next to me, where Jim Beverly was lying slumped in a pile. He was absolutely and completely still. I didn’t know what to do with him. Even though he was a short skinny guy, maybe five-nine, with an overdeveloped chest and stringy, muscular limbs, he was a lot bigger than me. I was barely five feet tall in shoes, weighed maybe ninety-five pounds. And I was shaking like I had the ague. As I stared at the body in front of me, I was surprised to find that my situation didn’t seem terrible or even real.

    It didn’t seem like anything had actually happened. But even so, I knew better than to sit around giggling and puking on my boobs, keeping company with a dead boy until a nice policeman came to cart me away.
    I scooted up behind him on my butt and began shoving at the weighty mass of him with my feet. I shoved at him and pushed, and slowly he slid forward and toppled over the edge of the cliff.
    He landed with a meaty, slapping bounce, rustling the kudzu, a noise so clearly theatrical and fake that I had to pinch myself, hard, to stop myself from giggling again. Then he was rolling down the steep slope.
    It seemed that as he rolled, the heaps were rolling, too, rolling in waves like the ocean. It was as if they were alive, grabbing at bits of him, reaching up like they had hands, pulling him in and under, down to Roach Country.
    I took the tequila with me and drank it as I made the long hike home. Worm and all. 

CHAPTER  3
    I GOT TO my office on campus at around six A.M.on Thursday. I knew Rose Mae Lolley would be back, and I didn’t want to be home when she turned up. I would have to lie to her, and I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t even sure I remembered how.
    I passed the morning grading papers and fretting. My office was a windowless cube I shared with two other Ph.D. candidates, but this early in the day I had it all to myself. I called Burr twice at home, but he didn’t pick up. At nine I tried his direct line at work but landed in voice mail.
    I had been born and mostly raised in the South, so I ought to have been able to find a way to reach him. Southern girls are trained from birth up