The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant Read Free Book Online Page B

it to them. Either way he would push him off into the ditch and break his legs and if the man died then it was his own fault.
    He squatted down and grasped the man’s lapels and was about to shift him off the running board of his car and drag him to the ditch when the man’s eyes shot open and his cold hands gripped Forrest’s wrists. His face curled into a snarl, blood still surging between his lips as Forrest twisted his hands to free himself.
    Damn, son! Forrest said. You want more?
    Suddenly he felt another man close at his back and hands around his collar. The man behind him leaned on his back and the weight kept Forrest from standing. The man holding his hands grinned, sticking out his stump tongue like a mottled piece of bloody sausage, his eyes wide, his swollen goiter flopping against his chin and collar. The man behind him hooked a forearm under Forrest’s chin and pulled his face up to the sky. Low clouds rolled dusky gray and charcoal.
    Forrest felt the razor being drawn across his neck, a cold sensation like the line made by a piece of ice on skin, a cool tracing of metal, and for a moment he marveled at how smooth and painless it was, watching the specks of stars through torn clouds, knees in the cold snow, feeling the dampness of his boots, the man behind holding him tight, the man in front holding the wrists of his outstretched arms and leaning his face in close, grinning. Their combined breath billowed around them. A weight drained out of him and a sudden weakness took its place. Then he felt the blood pouring down his chest and down his throat, swallowing the stuff in salty gulps—that was what got him: Down my throat? My God, he is cutting through, he will cut my head clean off! The man behind him was sawing roughly at his neck and Forrest lurched and bucked, pulled an arm free and stuck it into the face of the man behind him. He felt a cheekbone and an eye socket and pried his thumb into the soft part and the man cried out and was off him and Forrest got his feet under him and staggered a few steps back toward the restaurant, then fell heavily in the snow on his hands and knees. He marveled at the quantity of blood that poured from him like a watery bib onto the snow, making a steamy slush between his hands. He crawled across the lot to the wall of the restaurant. There was the splintering sound of a door kicked open and shouting from inside the restaurant and he knew they had gone inside.
    Forrest leaned against the wall, searching for the edges of the cut with his numb fingers, the ground a world of white in front of him. He gripped the edges of his cut throat and thought to himself that this would be one of the times where one ought to consider the balance of his life; but all that came to mind was that these men had wanted a beating and he had given it to them and so what was all this about?
    A part of me is missing, he thought. There was only one whole being in the universe and it was the one who rose in the morning, who stepped over the mountains and reaching down with massive, blunt fingers plucked men’s souls like weeds in the furrow. When Forrest looked up the roof of the sky was gone, just a ragged hole, the stars gone out and light coming down in slow glistening streams. The hole in the sky rotated and he felt his weight shift and it seemed like the earth and all the people in it were in a box that was being tipped over, to be dumped out into the black. Not yet, he thought. More shouting and breaking glass from inside. A woman screaming, a strange, high, desperate scream that burrowed into Forrest’s heart and twisted something in him, hard, but he couldn’t focus on why it was happening or who it was. Forrest looked at his legs splayed out before him, trousers sticky with blood, and knew that they wouldn’t respond.
    Later it was quiet and Forrest watched the ragged wisps of snow, like falling clouds settling in a white layer on his legs and the lot and the trees beyond the road. He