Trip Wire by Charlotte Carter Read Free Book Online Page A

cushion, eyes flickering.
    “Something happen to your mom, Jordan?” Cliff asked. “How long has she been sick?”
    He was standing in a corner of the room, back to the wall. All he did was shake his head.
    “Where’s Crash?” Cliff said.
    “I don’t know. He went out.”
    “She looks awful, Cliff,” I said. “What are you going to do?”
    “. . . sweet girl . . . ,” Bev mumbled. “Only ones who ever help us out, you and that Indian man of yours. He’s fine.”
    Cliff and I looked at each other. “Indian. You think she’s talking about Dan?”
    “She must be delirious,” he said. “She thinks you’re Mia.”
    I lifted Bev’s head again, which was heavy with sleep. It was then that I realized the smell coming off the blanket was not run-of-the-mill BO. I pulled the blanket away and saw the blood soaking into the couch seat.
    “Call an ambulance, Cliff. She’s bleeding out.”
     
    The ambulance driver told us Bev had had a miscarriage. Malnourishment and what looked like pneumonia—to say nothing of the heroin usage—didn’t exactly make for the healthiest pregnancy. By the time they were loading the stretcher into the emergency vehicle, Jordan was hysterical. When the county social services people turned up and informed Cliff they were going to keep Jordan until his father returned, Cliff went into his own set of hysterics.
    Ain’t grown-up life grand? Blood and death. Just the kind of thing I bargained for when I left Ivy and Woody to strike out on my own.
    I got Cliff calmed down enough to go back home. But I didn’t go upstairs with him. I’d had enough of my comrades for one day. And I’d had enough of bearing up and taking charge. I swear, if we’d found any heroin in that apartment, I might have taken it myself.
    I ran along the avenue, zigzagging around the deadly patches of ice. Coat collar open. No hat or gloves. The cold was deep inside me now. Rattling around in there with my grief and confusion. No, I wasn’t going to turn to heroin. But I did need a drink.
    5
    Strung with lights on a lonely corner of Willow Street, the Tap Root was our neighborhood bar. It was an old German beer garden that brought together a hodgepodge of white pensioner drunks, folkies and blues men from other North Side bars, college kids, journalists, the aged Wobblies from the IWW hall on Lincoln Avenue, even a few tourists who had read about the landmark watering hole in their guidebooks and were maybe hoping to meet Studs Terkel.
    They served the best franks and sauerkraut at the Tap Root. Wilt and I had lunched there many a time, and as we ate, he always extracted the same promise from me—“For Christ’s sake don’t tell Mia. I can’t take another one of her raps about preservatives.”
    Not much of a mix of people that day. Everybody looked old. Old and lonely. I took a stool at the bar and ordered the bitter brown ale. The Louis Armstrong concert from the juke flowed into a Jo Stafford extravaganza. I wasn’t unhappy to hear that old-fashioned music; there was an odd comfort in it.
    Not a soul interfered with me as I downed one tankard after another. I was getting drunk and that was just fine. It was almost enough to obliterate all the memories. Please, God, no more memories just now. Not the good ones, like holding on tight to Wilt as we roared up Lincoln Avenue on a borrowed motorcycle. And surely not the newer ones, like the sight of him in that chair, or the sucking noises my boots made as I waded through Mia’s blood.
    “Cass.”
    I turned at the sound of my name, already knowing who had spoken it.
    Ivy. I wanted to speak her name in return, but I was tongue-tied.
    But then she took hold of my hand and looked at me, the familiar kindness in her eyes.
    It slipped out then. “I’m sorry.”
    “Never mind that now.”
    “What are you doing here?”
    “I’m here for you, Cass. Your friends told me I was pretty sure to find you here. Woody’s got himself under control now, baby. We all