The Honk and Holler Opening Soon by Billie Letts Read Free Book Online

there, they would’ve come inside.”
    “I don’t know about that.” Caney pulled back, out of Molly O’s reach, opened the cash register and began pulling out bills. “I’d say we ran thirty or thirty-five dollars over most Thursdays.”
    “Well, it’s neither here nor there now, is it?”
    “How’s that?”
    “She left here headed for the interstate. Chances are she’s already cozied up next to the fool who picked her up.” Molly O took the bills from Caney’s hand and stuffed them inside a bank bag. “By this time tomorrow night, she’ll be God knows where, carrying that pitiful dog around until she finds someone else who’ll give her a handout.”
    “I didn’t give her a damned thing.”
    “And in case you didn’t notice, she didn’t say ‘good night.’ She said ‘good-bye.’ ”
    “That doesn’t mean—”
    “Trust me, Caney. We’ve seen the last of Miss Vena Takes Horse.”
    “I don’t know,” Caney said, once again staring out into the night. “I think she’ll be back.”

Chapter Seven
    T HE SCHOOL BUS sat at the far edge of a ravine less than a quarter mile behind the Honk. Vena had spotted it earlier in the day while she was out back, getting a box for the dog. She’d wanted to get a closer look, see what condition the bus was in, but when she saw Molly O watching her from the kitchen, she decided to wait until the cafe closed, hoping the night would shield her from view.
    She followed the road until it curved away from the Honk before she cut back and crossed an open field. As she crawled through a barbed-wire fence to reach the ravine, she heard a horse snuffle from somewhere nearby.
    From what she could tell, the bus hadn’t been moved for years.
    Scrub brush had grown up to the fenders, and trumpet vines snaked over the hood and grille. A couple of windows near the front were cracked, but she didn’t see any broken ones, so she supposed the inside might be dry. Still, she didn’t expect much.
    She hadn’t been inside a school bus since she was eleven, when she whipped Braz Iker, a fight that left her facing an angry princi-pal who suspended her bus privileges for a week, a suspension she considered to be a reprieve rather than a punishment. After that, she and Helen never rode the bus again, preferring instead to hitch rides when they could catch them and to walk when they couldn’t.
    But the fight on the bus wasn’t the only time Vena and Braz had tangled.
    Their first confrontation took place when Vena was in the third grade, the day he called Helen a blanket ass, laughed at her braids and made her cry, an experience which prompted Vena to stab him with a pencil. The skirmish that ensued left Vena with a swollen lip and sprained ankle.
    Then, having discovered his power over the Takes Horse sisters, Braz never passed up a chance to get to them.
    When he taunted Helen for wearing shoes bought for a quarter at his cousin’s yard sale, Vena wrestled him to the floor of the bus where he punched her in the stomach and made her throw up.
    When he ripped open Helen’s lunch sack and produced what he claimed was a buffalo sandwich, Vena shoved him down the steps of the cafeteria, for which she paid with a black eye. And when he fooled Helen into believing she’d been invited to a Halloween party given by one of the town girls, Vena hit him in the neck with a rock, a lucky throw for which Braz retaliated by repeatedly slamming her head against the jungle gym.
    Though she always came away from such confrontations bruised and bloody, she knew Helen suffered more . . . Helen, who chopped off her braid and flung her yard sale shoes into an abandoned well; Helen, who went hungry at lunch rather than bring a bologna sandwich from home; and Helen, who cried herself to sleep because she was the only girl in her class not invited to a Halloween party.
    But Vena was tough in a way that Helen would never be, tough enough to take on a boy two years older and thirty pounds heavier than