“Mothercunt thiefing son of a bitch!” Antonio bellowed. “What you chatting she up for? Eh?” He staggered forward, tried to leap the banister. He slipped and caught himself, his bare feet sliding in the broken glass. So drunk he didn’t even self notice his sliced, bleeding feet. “You want I tear up that pretty face for you? You ain’t business with my daughter!”
Melonhead pulled himself up tall, his face cold. “Your daughter old enough to do what she please, man.”
Antonio’s face clotted with fury. “You facety…!” Antonio made to rush down the porch stairs.
“No, Daddy!” Tan-Tan put her hands out to stop him. He clouted her over her ear, the one where her implant had been. Pain exploded behind her eyes, but she managed to stay upright. She held on to her father’s waist, kept him on the stairs from sheer force of desperation. “Melonhead! Go home!”
“I not leaving you!”
“She not going anywhere with you, you pissant wretch!”
“Go, Melonhead, or it just go be worse!”
“You sure?”
“Yes! I go come talk to you later.”
Melonhead took an unsure step away, waiting to see what would happen. Antonio quieted, stood weaving on the stairs and mumbling incoherent curses at Melonhead.
“Tan-Tan,” Melonhead called, “I go give it a hour for you and he to talk. Then I coming back with Daddy and the sheriff and we taking you from here.”
Oh, please Nanny, yes. “Go, I say!”
He walked away backwards, slowly, keeping a stern eye on Antonio. Antonio found some energy and threw the bottle top at him. Melonhead ducked clear, turned and jogged down the lane.
“Come Daddy, make I clean up your feet.”
Antonio grabbed her arm, so tight she felt the skin bruise same time. “Rutting whore!” He backhanded her across the face. She felt her teeth meet in her tongue.
“No, Daddy!”
“Every time I turn my back, you making time with some man! Like you turn big woman now? Eh? You smelling yourself?”
“No, Daddy! Please, Daddy! It ain’t go happen again!”
But Antonio dragged her into the living room. All Tan-Tan pulled she couldn’t break his grip.
“Blasted slut with a slut for a mother. You ain’t too big for me to tan your behind for you!” With one hand, Antonio unbuckled his heavy leather belt and pulled it out from his pants. He doubled it up in his hand and cracked it against her shins. The pain was like a knife cut.
“Daddy!” she shrieked.
He beat her across her calves, her thighs. She could feel the welts rising. She screamed, but Melonhead was too far away to hear.
As he whipped her Antonio was dragging her by the arm through the house, into her bedroom. He threw her on the bed.
“Is man you want? Is man? I go show you what man could do for you!”
No. No. She couldn’t face this again, after years free from it. He kicked her legs apart, yanked up her skirt, tore her underwear off. He pushed into her. She bawled out for the tearing pain between her legs. He grunted, “I is man too, you know! Is this you want! Is this?”
Something was scraping at her waist. Her hand found it. The scabbard. With the knife inside. A roaring started up in her ears. It couldn’t have been she. It must have been the Robber Queen who pulled out the knife. Antonio raised up to shove into the person on the bed again. It must have been the Robber Queen, the outlaw woman, who quick like a snake got the knife braced at her breastbone just as Antonio slammed his heavy body right onto the blade.
“Uhh!” Antonio jerked like a fish on a hook. He collapsed onto her. His weight drove the knife handle backwards against her breastbone, gouging upwards until it was under her chin. Antonio’s head fell on Tan-Tan’s own. She screamed. His body convulsed, then relaxed. Thick blood gushed out of his mouth. She heard his bowels loose in death. Then she smelt it.
Her body went cold. She started to tremble uncontrollably. She lay there so under Antonio’s corpse, waiting for Melonhead to come and end the nightmare.
And is there so Chichibud found her. He sniffed the air before he entered the room. “Dead,” he said.
Tan-Tan felt the hysteria bubbling up. “Off me. Get. He. Off. Me.”
Chichibud hopped up onto the bed and dragged Antonio’s body to one side. Tan-Tan couldn’t stop trembling. She couldn’t even self manage to pull her skirt back down over her legs. Is Chichibud who did it for her. A low moaning was coming from her mouth. “Sh, sh, doux-doux. I could read the signs for myself. I know he attack you.”
She found the words. “He did beating me.” She swallowed. Her chest burned where the knife handle had gouged a track, pushed by Daddy’s body. “Beating me bad, with he leather belt. Then he… I never mean to use the knife, Chichibud. I did only want he to stop hurting me. Oh God, Daddy dead?”
“Dead, yes. We have to leave, fast.”
“No, Melonhead coming back with One-Eye.”
“Then we must move now. One-Eye rules don’t have no mercy. Murder will swing you from the hanging tree.”
“Me?” She couldn’t believe it.
“You, yes. Pack.” He sent her over to her dresser drawers while he wrapped up Antonio’s body in the bedclothes. She did nothing, couldn’t seem to think, just watched him. He wiped her new hunting knife clean against the bedsheets and handed it back to her.
“No, no, Chichibud! Don’t make me touch it! Throw it away!”
“Don’t fret, Tan-Tan, don’t fret.” He sheathed the knife at his own waist.
He tore off a strip of the bedsheet, wiped the blood off Tan-Tan’s face. He indicated the gouge in her breastbone from the knife handle. “I go bandage it later.” He opened her dresser drawers himself, yanked clothes out of them at random.
She had killed Daddy.
Somehow she struggled into the clean blouse that Chichibud gave her. Her hands were shaking so badly she could only do up three of the buttons. Chichibud held out another garment. Her new skirt, the birthday skirt that Chichibud’s wife had made for her. She pulled it on under the skirt she’d been wearing, tore the top skirt off her body and let it fall. Her eyes kept straying back to the bloodstained lump on the bed, wrapped in her sheet. The smell of death was thick in the air. She just kill she own daddy.
Chichibud bundled her out of the house, talking soothingly to her the whole time. “Nothing wrong, is just you and me, going for a walk like we always do. Good thing Benta come with me today. We could ride she.” They went out front to the guava tree. Benta, his big, stout packbird, was crouching on the ground, large as a cow and as solid, but with green and brown feathers. She was plucking leaves off the water vine that was entwined around the wormy guava tree and sucking them down. She had a leather panier strapped to her back between her stubby wings-them and her neck, and a high leather seat buckled round her body.
When Benta spied Chichibud she got to her feet, bating her useless wings and cawing.
“Hush up, the child in trouble! Can’t make everybody know we business.”
“Wroow,” Benta said. She butted her head gently against Tan-Tan’s shoulder in her customary greeting. She nuzzled against Tan-Tan’s neck and combed the girl’s untidy plaits through her beak. On another day it would have made Tan-Tan smile; Benta bird was forever trying to groom her hair. Today she stood beside Benta and shook. Daddy dead. Somebody kill he. Somebody bad.
“Down, Benta girl,” said Chichibud. The bird crouched low. “Tan-Tan, get in the panier.”
She could do that. She could follow an order. Benta bent her neck and Tan-Tan climbed into the panier, knees pulled up in front of her nose. Her body hurt. She waited for whatever it would please Chichibud to do next. He climbed into the seat behind her. He threaded a leather strap between one handle of the panier and the other, tied it. “Hold on to this when the ride get rough,” he told her. “And keep your head low.”