BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 72

1981

JUAN

The pistol at Juan's temple is cold, he hears the trigger cock. Two other men hold his four girls with their hands behind their necks. They have ceased struggling. Ceased talking. Their eyes are wide, awaiting for the next event in a sequence they already wish to forget.

"I didn't steal any money," Juan insists. "You have the wrong guy."

The thief was Alejandra, he knows. The same girl he first met at The Chariot Lounge, the local biker bar, one early afternoon three years ago. Her face had been beaten, the barmaid had been cleaning her up. "Tell me what happened," he had asked her after she had settled down, the blood washed away and her bruises starting to appear. it took two drinks to garner her trust. She was a "rancher"—she serviced the pipe movers at Rising River and a liaison had gone bad.

They exchange short glances. Juan knows she is the thief but doesn't give her up. He didn't know beforehand or wouldn't have brought her out here. The things she had said earlier he now understood. She had put him in danger. Knowingly, if unthinkingly.

He doesn't know how long he is on his knees with a gun at his head. It seems forever but couldn't be. All he can hear is his heart beating into his temples, into his ears, but suddenly he sees the two men with the girls relax, move away from them. He feels the gun's cold barrel leave, sees it go into his antagonist's waistband. Then, behind him, Bishop Mecham's voice, "Everything okay here?"

His attacker says, "All okay." He is smiling, innocently. But Mecham stays with his pickup, doesn't leave. Juan stands up. "Mr. Mecham," he says upon turning. The Bishop recognizes him and waves him over to talk.

The girls stand and hurriedly climb into the camper. Juan talks with Mecham briefly, then quickly gets in his truck. Mecham speaks with Juan's assailant as if nothing was happening, laying out tomorrow's tasks. He doesn't leave until Juan is on his way.

The girls in back, Juan in front, he drives as fast as he dares, into town, to the Chariot, where he stops, drops the girls off, gives them the money they had already earned for their work and tells them, "No more for me."

© 2025 Ralph Thurston