..... Clayton finds the Beauty Queen in the backseat of a new 87 Monte Carlo on a cold, cold January night, and his life boards a Greyhound for a destination unknown. It's Monday, just a week from his twenty-first birthday, and he's been rambling through the old Sugar Creek strip mine, cruising deserted haul roads since well before dark. He tops a small rise that opens to coal pit and finds the Monte Carlo parked at the edge of dark water. He high beams the car, races his old International pickup's engine and waits for the Monte Carlo's taillights to flare. Nothing. He reaches under the seat for the Smith and Wesson .357 that his granddaddy willed to him and lays on the horn. He waits. Five minutes later, still nothing, so he sets the emergency brake and steps out on frozen ground.
..... "Well, what have we here?" he says, peering through the Monte Carlo's window.
..... Of course there's no one to answer. Most of the mines in this part of south-central Kentucky have been abandoned for close to a decade, and there's nothing out here now but hundreds of acres of weeds, rusting machinery and overgrown trails that curl back upon each other like sleeping snakes.
..... Clayton pushes his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose, smiling the slow, loopy smile that had made his teachers nervous and his classmates swear he was retarded. He goes to the International, digs out a big Black and Decker flashlight that he's stolen from his old man's Peterbilt and hurries back to the Monte Carlo. He opens the rear door. No dome light, so the battery's shot. He spotlights the Beauty Queen and Lover Boy and stares as hard as he can, wanting to scorch the scene into his memory. The Beauty Queen is sprawled in the backseat, a thick, white sweater patterned with Christmas trees balled up and pitched into the front, a lacy, cream-colored bra unsnapped and hanging loose from her shoulders, her stonewashed Levis unzipped to grant access to searching fingers. Lover Boy is slumped forward, his head touching the front seat, his pants and BVDs down at his ankles. There's a fifth of vodka on the seat between them, a half case of Falls City Beer in the floorboard beneath the Beauty Queen's feet. Clayton reaches in for the vodka, unscrews the cap and takes a swallow.
..... Wiping his mouth on his wrist, he listens to a stray dog's howl from the far side of the pit. Clayton holds his breath, waits for the sound of a motor. Nothing. During the summer the strip mines are party central for high school kids looking to drink beer or score pot or fuck without worrying about prying parents, but patches of snow still linger on the hillsides and the place is the way he likes it-quiet and empty, a ghost world that is belongs only to him.
..... Satisfied that no one is coming, he sets the vodka bottle on the ground and swings the flashlight's glare into the front seat. A plastic baggie of grass on the dashboard, a half-smoked number in the ashtray, a prescription bottle open on the passenger seat. He opens the front door, drops the pot and the prescription bottle, Valium, into his parka's big front pocket and then turns his attention to the backseat again. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out. The Beauty Queen and Lover Boy came out here to fuck and get fucked up. It's been brutally cold for the better part of a week, so they would have been running the heater. They'd passed out or maybe she'd blown him and they were stoned and sleepy and it sneaked up on them. He doesn't know and it doesn't really matter. What does is that carbon monoxide got the best of them. Clayton checks his watch. It's early yet, just a little past eight, so he figures they must have come out here last night or maybe even the night before. He runs the flashlight over Lover Boy's face, doesn't recognize him and doesn't give a damn. It's the Beauty Queen that matters. Traci Greenwood, the daughter of the School Superintendent. She'd been a year behind him at Harp's Station High, a cheerleader, without a doubt the most popular girl in school. He licks his lips. A year and a half ago, right after her senior year, the town made it official and crowned her Miss Harp at the county fair. Clayton stood in the sweaty, sour-smelling crowd at the Ag Center and watched her ass twitch as she paraded across the makeshift stage in her powder blue swimsuit. Lately, he's been hearing that the Beauty Queen has fallen on hard times. She dropped out of Murray State after her first semester, came back to town to party, got kicked out of her parents' house after they caught her screwing a married man right on their living room sofa. He's heard she moved in with Carol Seegers, a thirty-year-old pill-head divorcee with a half dozen arrests for dealing and solicitation. Clayton didn't believe the rumors, but now he thinks maybe they're true since times don't get any harder than dead.
..... He flashes the light on the Beauty Queen's face, thinking how peaceful she looks even with the bluish tinge around her lips. This is the way he always imagined Sleeping Beauty looked when she was discovered by Prince Charming. He leans into the car and kisses her dry, cold lips, but there's no resurrection. He wonders what would happen if there were. Would she scream or call him a weirdo or would she be so grateful that she let him touch her breasts, maybe even put his hands in her pants? Thinking about it gets him hard, and he shivers like a horse waiting for the saddle.
..... "There's no harm in it," he whispers.
..... And surely there isn't. No one's here to see, and the Beauty Queen's past caring, so he hunkers beside the car, pulls down the straps on her bra and cups her heavy, chilled breast in his hand. Moaning a little, he leans forward and takes her nipple in his mouth and suckles. His heart hammers in his chest, and he feels feverish and dizzy. He thinks of the way he'll stroke himself when he's home in bed, what he'll have to remember and that makes him even harder. As smitten as he's been with Beauty Queen, he's never jerked off to her before, the same way he's never jacked to the posters of Samantha Fox and Christie Brinkley even though they grin down at him from his bedroom wall. Even in his fantasies, Clayton is humble. Middle-aged waitresses with varicose veins and saggy breasts, the pimpled fat girl at the drive thru window at Druthers and his cross-eyed cousin Lorraine are the best looking women he can imagine being with a fat, four-eyed weirdo like him. The Beauty Queen? To him she's every bit as majestic and unattainable as Hollywood celebrities or the girls on the pages of Playboy magazine. But now she's here within easy reach.
..... He slips his hand inside her panties and yanks it out when the dog howls again. This is crazy, he tells himself. He needs to leave it alone. No one's likely to come out here tonight, but if they do and they see him, he might get in trouble. The thing to do is get back in his truck, head on home, eat some dinner, forget about it. When someone finds them out here, Sheriff Simmons won't look twice. He'll just shake his head, call for an ambulance to take them to the morgue and have something to talk about at his next Stay Straight and Stay Alive lecture at Harp's High. But if someone sees Clayton fooling around with the body…there's no telling what they might think.
..... Still, he doesn't want to leave the Beauty Queen behind. How can he give her up? If he lives a thousand lifetimes he'll never have such a beautiful and pliable female in his grasp again.
..... He stands up, shivering in a gust of wind. His hands are aching, half numb. He glances back at his pickup, an idea taking hazy form and then suddenly becoming clear and possible as he seizes upon the image of the old smokehouse near the back of his parents' fourteen acres. He reaches into the car for one of the frozen cans of beer, heaves it towards the dark water, giggles when he hears the splash. It hasn't been above thirty for nearly a month, and in the last week, it's gotten as cold as seven below. If the water's not frozen this close to the bank, the pit must get real deep real quick. Why not, he thinks. What harm would there be in it? Who would ever know?

***

..... Two and a half hours later, Clayton sits at his parents' kitchen table, crumbling crackers into a bowl of tomato soup and reliving the last couple of hours in his mind. He's had the Beauty Queen twice since he unloaded her in the smokehouse, and he's cold and spent. He slurps his soup and thinks about her, nude and covered with an old blanket, lying on a stack of milk crates, waiting. The idea of rats troubles him. It would be wrong to let them get at her. The Beauty Queen deserves better.
..... "You didn't come in to say hello," his momma says on her way to the fridge for yet another light beer.
..... Clayton winces at the sound of her and wills her to get her beer and head right back to the living room. "I thought interrupting Carson's monologue was forbidden at all costs," he says.
..... She opens the can, sips and sits down with him at the kitchen table. "Your daddy called tonight," she says. "He's in Fort Myers, Florida. Says its warm enough down there to ride with the truck window open."
..... "Huh," Clayton says "He coming home soon?" he says, thinking please god no.
..... "A couple of days," she says. "He's picking up another load in Panama City and running it over to Shreveport then he's heading this way."
..... It's too soon, but Clayton figures a couple of days without his old man's constant nagging and his greasy farts stinking up the living room is better than no days at all. Get a job, go to work, get a job. The old man has been as persistent and repetitive as parrot since Clayton quit high school.
..... "You should have come in and said hello," his momma says, her beer-addled mind chasing itself in circles. "I get nervous with your daddy gone. I might have shot you as a burglar."
..... Clayton shrugs and then grins at her over his bowl. "What kind of burglar breaks in and makes a can of soup?"
..... "A hungry one."
..... Clayton smiles a genuine smile despite himself. He hates it when she catches him off guard with her goofy humor or with displays of almost-true affection. It makes the rest of the time when she is distant, judging, disappointed even worse. He doesn't blame her for feeling that way. She's thirty-nine, an attractive woman just edging towards a plumpness that would fall away if she'd give up her nightly six pack. She has strawberry blonde hair and a playful smile that can be flirtatious when she's dressed in one of her "business suits" and showing a reluctant client around a three bedroom ranch or a four bedroom split-level at Cherry Wood Estates. She was never a cheerleader or a Beauty Queen, but he's seen her high school yearbooks. She was a pretty girl who got better looking with time. The same isn't exactly true of his dad. Too much time sitting behind the wheel and too many truck stop meals have thickened him and worn away his muscles, but he still looks alright with a fresh shave and a haircut. How such "normal" looking parents ended up with a close-to-three-hundred-pound, myopic, greasy-haired and acne-scarred kid is probably the great mystery of their lives, the one question they've been asking themselves since he was five years old.
..... "So what have you been up to tonight?' she asks, her tone light but the question not casual.
..... The lie comes easily. It should. He's been telling the same one for the last four years.
..... "I was down at the pool hall."
..... "Beasley's?"
..... He tries to keep the impatience out of his voice. "It's the only one in town, Mom."
..... She runs her thumbnail along the rim of her can. "I'm not sure I like you hanging around there. Mabel Clemmons says they sell drugs out of that place."
..... "She doesn't know everything."
..... "She knows more than you think."
..... "A lot of people know more than you think."
..... Her head ticks to the side and her jaw sets. "What's that supposed to mean?"
..... For a second he holds her eyes. He wants to say to her, you know exactly what it means. Things have been tense between her and the old man recently with fights roaring up from nowhere and without warning the way thunderstorms churn up in the summer when the air is too hot and too heavy to do anything else. But those fights-- over a joke that his mother deemed inappropriate or the money needed to pay an unexpected bill-- never give rest to anything, just the way those quick summer storms never seem to break the heat and humidity. Lately, his mother has become restless, complaining about the time she spends alone, suddenly dissatisfied with the old farmhouse they'd bought when Clayton was four. Now she wants a place closer to town without the overgrown fields, the crumbling barn used to store junk his daddy hasn't gotten around to hauling away, the ivy-covered old smokehouse with its low roof just visible over the weeds and pawpaw bushes. Clayton suspects that the real tension around here has come from how often his mother mentions Ray Massey, her boss at Massey Real Estate. A couple of weeks ago, Clayton spotted the two of them, his momma and Ray Massey, leaving the Royal Palm Restaurant. When he mentioned it she said it was a "working" lunch. He didn't comment, but he was pretty sure you didn't come out of a working lunch and linger by the side of the building for a quick kiss. Now he holds her eyes, wanting to let her know that below her makeup and quick smile, she isn't so pretty after all. But then, as usual, he loses his nerve.
..... "It doesn't mean nothing, Mom," he says. "I was just saying…"
..... He falls silent, thinking about the Beauty Queen, how she's out there right now, waiting, thinking how she's his and no one can take her away from him. She'll never cheat, never slip off for a quick kiss with another man. Most of all she won't look at him the way his mom's looking at him right now-her expression distrustful and full of angry questions: Why are you always smirking? How did you get so ugly? Why don't you do something-- lose weight, cut back on the chocolate and sodas to clear your skin,, wash your greasy hair? Are you ever going to get a real job, a girlfriend, a life? Will you always be the cross I have to bear? And the thought of the Beauty Queen makes it all better, nearly tolerable for the first time in as long as he can remember. He has something, someone, and the rest of it is just petty shit that doesn't matter. Suddenly, he's on the verge of laughing out loud.
..... "What's got you grinning like the Cheshire cat?" his momma asks.
..... He shrugs, takes his bowl to the kitchen sink and runs water in it. When he turns from the sink, she's still watching him.
..... "I met someone tonight," he says.
..... "A girl?"
..... His resentment flares at the surprise in her voice. "Yeah," he says. "Believe it or not, she seems to like me. Or at least she hasn't told me any different."
..... "Well," his momma says. "Good, good for you."
..... "It's early yet, but who knows? Maybe I'll end up with happy ever after, after all."
..... Then he does something that he hasn't done since he was nine years old. He bends and kisses her forehead on his way to bed.

***