Where the River Ends by Charles Martin Read Free Book Online Page B

tried the only thing I had left. I reached into my front pocket, pulled out the pocketwatch I’d carried since my uncle gave it to me at my mother’s funeral and held it out. He eyed the dangling gold thing in front of him and then held it to his ear. “Keep it. It’s yours. All of it…just please don’t hurt the girl.”
    She was frantic, but he was nearly three times her size. I tried one last time. “Sir…please, you’re hurting the girl.” He stuffed the watch in his pocket, backhanded me and began tearing at her jeans.
    He had her pinned down now. The crack of his butt was showing, he had exposed himself and he was pulling her by her long hair, threatening to snap her neck like a twig. The coughing told me she was having a hard time breathing. I took four steps, jumped on his back, dug my heels in and rammed both index fingers one knuckle deep into his eye sockets. He reached for his face, uttered some guttural thing that told me what I’d done was painful and turned on me.
    The good news was that he let go of the girl, allowing her to stand up and run. The bad news was that with her gone, and him knowing this, he was now left with me. His facial expression changed sort of like the Hulk, he was foaming in both corners of his mouth and I’m pretty sure I shouted something I wouldn’t have repeated in the presence of my mother.
    You ever see those videos of college pranks where fraternity brothers—hoping to imbibe a sense of brotherhood—dump pledges in those large tumbling dryers at the coin laundry and then laugh while their butts turned orbits around the room? For the next sixty seconds, that’s about how I felt—absent the fabric softener. Having rubbed me into the concrete, blackened both my eyes, busted my lip, and broken my nose, he lifted me over his head and threw me out over the handrail like some WWF wrestler. I helicoptered through the air and landed in the marsh where a blue crab was munching on the head of a mullet.
    Wrestling man’s eyes narrowed as I floated hip-deep in a bed of wiregrass, muck and what smelled like sewage runoff. He grunted, shoved himself back in his pants, turned and walked off—evidently he couldn’t swim. For the next twenty minutes, I wallowed and concentrated on the next breath. With no sign of him, I scraped my way to the railing, pulled myself out and hobbled home. Twenty minutes later, I locked my door, sat in the shower and calculated the cost of a trip to the emergency room. Absent health insurance, the numbers were a bit high. My head pounding, I swallowed four aspirin and looked in the mirror. My nose had turned sideways across my face and now looked more like a lightning bolt. I grabbed it between my right thumb and forefinger, pulled downward quickly and woke the next morning, a butt-naked snow angel sprawled across the first floor of my studio.
    Looking out between the slits that had become my eyes and then around the bulbous thing that was once my nose, I stared through the glass—some four feet away—and into thirty sets of rather wide eyes, three rows deep, staring, but not at my artwork. Thanks to the three 60-watt bulbs I had dangling from an extension cord above the artwork, I was lit up pretty well.
    I climbed the stairs, fell into bed and woke somewhere in the afternoon to a blood-crusted face, a pounding migraine and a note taped to the door. It read: “If you’re interested in a discreet yet artistic black-and-white photo shoot, call the number below. I have my own darkroom and studio. Philip.”
    I threw the note in the trash, swallowed more aspirin and called one of my classmates to find out what I’d missed. James Pettigrew was a street-smart kid from the streets of Detroit who wrote poetry when he wasn’t sculpting clay. When he picked up the phone, he was scanning the news online and not real interested in talking with me. Smacking gum, he cut me off. “You hear about last night?”
    “No.”
    “Senator Coleman’s daughter got