A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

“Is Bob coming back tonight?” Jane asked.

Now she’s even invading my mind, Cissy thought. She whacked resentfully at the potato, peeling off more meat than skin. “Tomorrow.”

Her shoulders tensed.

“Then can I sleep over here tonight?”

“No.” Cissy surprised herself with the shortness of her reply. She could practically feel Janie radiating hurt, and so she tried to make up for it by softening her tone. “I’m sorry, Janie, but I’ve got too much book work to do, and it’s hard to concentrate with people in the house. I’ve even told the girls they can take their sleeping bags to the barn tonight to give me some peace.” The girls were her daughters, Tessie, thirteen, and Mandy, eleven. “They want to spend the night out there ’cause we’ve got that new little blind calf we’re nursing. His mother won’t have anything to do with him, poor little thing. Tessie has named him Flopper, because he tries to stand up but he just flops back down. So the girls are bottle-feeding him, and they want to sleep near…”

“Oh.” It was heavy with reproach.

Cissy stepped away from the sink to turn her oven on to 350°. Her own internal temperature was rising too. God forbid she should talk about her life! God forbid they should ever talk about anything but Janie and all the damned things she was scared of! She could write a book about it: How Jane Baum Made a Big Mistake by Leaving Kansas City and How Everything About the Country Just Scared Her to Death.

“Aren’t you afraid of anything, Cissy?”

The implied admiration came with a bit of a whine to it— any thing — like a curve on a fastball.

“Yes.” Cissy drew out the word reluctantly.

“You are? What?”

Cissy turned around at the sink and laughed self-consciously.

“It’s so silly…I’m even afraid to mention it.”

“Tell me! I’ll feel better if I know you’re afraid of things, too.”

There! Cissy thought. Even my fears come down to how they affect you!

“All right.” She sighed. “Well, I’m afraid of something happening to Bobby, a wreck on the highway or something, or to one of the girls, or my folks, things like that. I mean, like leukemia or a heart attack or something I can’t control. I’m always afraid there won’t be enough money and we might have to sell this place. We’re so happy here. I guess I’m afraid that might change.” She paused, dismayed by the sudden realization that she had not been as happy since Jane Baum moved in down the road. For a moment, she stared accusingly at her neighbor. “I guess that’s what I’m afraid of.” Then Cissy added deliberately, “But I don’t think about it all the time.”

“I think about mine all the time,” Jane whispered.

“I know.”

“I hate it here!”

“You could move back.”

Janie stared reproachfully. “You know I can’t afford that!”

Cissy closed her eyes momentarily. The idea of having to listen to this for who knew how many years…

“I love coming over here,” Janie said wistfully, as if reading Cissy’s mind again. “It always makes me feel so much better. This is the only place I feel safe anymore. I just hate going home to the big old house all by myself.”

I will not invite you to supper, Cissy thought.

Janie sighed.

Cissy gazed out the big square window behind Janie. It was October, her favorite month, when the grass turned as red as the curly hair on a Hereford’s back and the sky turned a steel gray like the highway that ran between their houses. It was as if the whole world blended into itself — the grass into the cattle, the roads into the sky, and she into all of it. There was an electricity in the air, as if something more important than winter were about to happen, as if all the world were one and about to burst apart into something brand-new. Cissy loved the prairie, and it hurt her feelings a little that Janie didn’t. How could anyone live in the middle of so much beauty, she puzzled, and be frightened of it?

“We’ll never get a better chance.” Tess ticked off the rationale for the adventure by holding up the fingers of her right hand, one at a time, an inch from her sister’s scared face. “Dad’s gone. We’re in the barn. Mom’ll be asleep. It’s a new moon.” She ran out of fingers on that hand and lifted her left thumb. “And the dogs know us.”

“They’ll find out!” Mandy wailed.

“Who’ll find out?”

“Mom and Daddy will!”

“They won’t! Who’s gonna tell ’em? The gas-station owner? You think we left a trail of toilet paper he’s going to follow from his station to here? And he’s gonna call the sheriff and say lock up those Johnson girls, boys, they stole my toilet paper!”

“Yes!”

Together they turned to gaze — one of them with pride and cunning, the other with pride and trepidation — at the small hill of hay that was piled, for no apparent reason, in the shadows of a far corner of the barn. Underneath that pile lay their collection of six rolls of toilet paper — a new one filched from their own linen closet, and five partly used ones (stolen one trip at a time and hidden in their school jackets) from the ladies’ bathroom at the gas station in town. Tess’s plan was for the two of them to “t.p.” their neighbor’s house that night, after dark. Tess had lovely visions of how it would look — all ghostly and spooky, with streamers of white hanging down from the tree limbs and waving eerily in the breeze.

“They do it all the time in Kansas City, jerk,” Tess proclaimed.

“And I’ll bet they don’t make any big deal crybaby deal out of it.”

She wanted to be the first one in her class to do it, and she wasn’t about to let her little sister chicken out on her. This plan would, Tess was sure, make her famous in at least a four-county area. No grown-up would ever figure out who had done it, but all the kids would know, even if she had to tell them.

“Mom’ll kill us!”

“Nobody’ll know!”

“It’s gonna rain!”

“It’s not gonna rain.”

“We shouldn’t leave Flopper!”

Now they looked, together, at the baby bull calf in one of the stalls.

It stared blindly in the direction of their voices, tried to rise, but was too frail to do it.

“Don’t be a dope. We leave him all the time.”

Mandy sighed.

Tess, who recognized the sound of surrender when she heard it, smiled magnanimously at her sister.

“You can throw the first roll,” she offered.

In a truck stop in Emporia, Mel Brown slopped up his supper gravy with the last third of a cloverleaf roll. He had a table by a window.

As he ate, he stared with pleasure at his bike outside. If he moved his head just so, the rays from the setting sun flashed off the handle bars. He thought about how the leather seat and grips would feel soft and warm and supple, the way a woman in leather felt, when he got back on. At the thought he got a warm feeling in his crotch, too, and he smiled.

God, he loved living like this.

When he was hungry, he ate. When he was tired, he slept. When he was horny, he found a woman. When he was thirsty, he stopped at a bar.

Right now Mel felt like not paying the entire $5.46 for this lousy chicken-fried steak dinner and coffee. He pulled four dollar bills out of his wallet and a couple of quarters out of his right front pocket and set it all out on the table, with the money sticking out from under the check.

Mel got up and walked past the waitress.