Thank you for your support over the years. You can find me on socials @rustybarnes23 or on linktree at the address below.
https://linktr.ee/rustybarnes23
Rusty
Thank you for your support over the years. You can find me on socials @rustybarnes23 or on linktree at the address below.
https://linktr.ee/rustybarnes23
Rusty
Hangin’ Out at the Git and Go
The moon tonight is
the lone, pink sodium street
light of one more no
name, gas station / grain
elevator town with no
bar, no diner, no
movie theater
(since 1980-something),
nothing to do on
a Friday or a
Saturday night but get in-
to trouble in some
other town the next
county over, or hang out
here, at the Git and
Go, and watch a few
cars passing through; sometimes some
outta town types pull
in to gas up and
walk around a while, stretching
and joking, asking
themselves, each other
and, finally, one of us
where the hell are we?
Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is The Great American Pyramid Scheme (co-authored with W.E. Leathem, Tim Tarkelly and Mack Thorn, OAC Books, 2022). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Redand a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Bill stood up and pocketed his handkerchief, looked up at the grey sky, and watched three turkey buzzards glide a low, loose circle directly overhead and, in the distance, high above the lemon grove to his right, he could just make out a small delicate-looking helicopter floating in and out of the clouds, like a dragonfly.
The body at his feet, in the shallow ditch, was a dump job. He knew that. He glanced around. “Like a giant laid the poor bastard down in the dirt.” He talked as if he were accompanied by an attentive but quiet companion. To his left, on the east side of the ditch, was the small dirt lot, no tire tread marks, County Road 27 just on the other side of it. West of the ditch, Grant Parson’s Meyer lemon grove, row upon row upon row, the size of a small town.
It had been Sugar Burkson, in fact, Parson’s reticent chief cultivator, who’d discovered the body just before sunup. He’d called Parson instead of the police and Parson called it in. Earlier in the morning, Bill had asked him, more in passing than to get information, “What you figure, Sugar?” His only comment was “Fuck if I know.”
Bill walked back to his truck in the burgeoning morning heat, looked at his watch: eight-thirty. He opened the toolbox in the bed of his truck and pulled a can of Busch Light out of the cooler hidden inside. He listened to the squirrels bark and squee in a nearby oak tree. The first few gulps were hard to get down and he almost heaved, but by the time he got to the bottom of the can, there it was: the slow spread of soft golden interior light, and he began to feel right again. He chucked the can, empty but for an ounce or so of swill, in the direction of the squirrels. “Reckon that’s Walter Pound’s charred corpse?” he said to his phantom partner.
“Ought not to litter, Sheriff,” said Deputy Lloyd Barnes as he approached Bill. “It’s a five hunnerd dollar fine in Highlands County.” He smiled at the sheriff, stopped in front of him. “Little goddamn early for an adult beverage, ain’t it?”
Bill’s drinking was no secret to anyone, but most people, out of respect, didn’t give him any shit about it. Together they walked back to the shallow dip in land between the lot and grove where the body lay. Bill wasn’t sure he wanted to tell his deputy what he thought.
Lloyd nudged a black leg with his boot and a crackling sound issued from it.
“Crispy fucker.”
“Quit kicking at it, boy.”
Barnes glanced around, pulled a can of Copenhagen from his shirt pocket, tapped it three times.
“Right off the bat, I got some ideas.”
Walter Pound was Lloyd’s cousin. They were, in fact, first cousins. Walter’s daddy, dead for some time now, had been Lloyd’s uncle. If this body was Walter Pound’s, Deputy Barnes would have some opinions on the matter, and Bill wasn’t quite ready for that.
“Do tell.”
“Even without knowing who this dead bastard is, I’d start with Evil Dead.” Lloyd squinted an eye at the sheriff as he put a pinch of dip into his mouth and tongued it into place. It began to lightly rain, just more than a mist.
Lloyd squatted down and took a closer look. “Who are you?” he whispered.
“Plausible,” said Bill. Evil Dead were something of a scapegoat for Lloyd. Still the biker gang had crossed his mind, as well. Of the three in the area, they were the most brutal, and they were responsible for many horrors committed in Durdin. Walter had been mixed up with them. But something told him this had not been done by Evil Dead. This, to his mind, was the result of hate, not business—maybe even deep, familial blood hate, the kind that many of the Pounds and Baggotts had for one another. Things had been quiet between the two families for a while, but relations always soured every few years, and when they did, shit would go down.
Lloyd looked up, the way the sheriff had earlier. The rain had intensified.
“Almost seems like the son of a bitch was dropped out of the fucking sky, don’t it? But there’s no impact impression anywhere.” Lloyd spat a brown stream of dip, then wiped his mouth. “What you want me to do? I’d love to go put the fear into some dipshit bikers.”
“Just hang tight for now.” He wanted to ask him if Enid, Walter’s wife, still lived in Sahwoklee, two counties over, but didn’t want to get Lloyd’s mind working. If he asked about Enid, Lloyd would no doubt make the leap to the possibility of the body being Walter’s, if he hadn’t already. “For now, let’s just get out of this rain.”
Thirty-five years ago, Walter Pound fell out of a cedar tree on the Durdin Elementary School playground and scraped his elbow. Mrs. Hillman, their kindergarten teacher, an ordinary townswoman, ignorant of backwoods feuds and ways, requested Enid Baggott walk Walter to the school clinic. Enid held his hand the whole way there, waited while the nurse fixed him up, and walked him back. At the age of five, they were barely aware of their own last names, much less any tension between their families, and from that day on, Walter thought often of Enid, despite what he would later realize about their families’ extreme dislike for one another. Some sixteen years later, at Lillian and Dill Talbert’s wedding, something drew them together, and they stayed tangled up.
As Sheriff Bill Register pulled off the small dirt lot of Parson’s lemon grove, he believed, but could not yet prove, he’d found evidence of the grim opening salvo in a new interfamilial skirmish.
Upon leaving Parson’s grove, Lloyd decided he’d not “hang tight,” as the sheriff had told him to do. Instead, he found himself turning onto Firebreak Road, a few miles south on twenty-seven, just outside Durdin city limits, and pulling into the chalky white lot of the Evil Dead Clubhouse. The building had been a VFW, but the bikers bought the building a few years back when the VFW moved to a new location closer to town. Two vehicles sat in the lot: a Harley with a confederate flag fuel tank and a black Ford F‑150. The truck was always in the lot. The block building was still white with red trim, but there was a narrow sign over the door that read
EVIL DEAD m.c. est. 1945.
If this is Hell, it’s really not that bad.” ‑Duchess of Durdin
Lloyd could smell fire, which reminded him of the charred body in the grove, and he felt a wave of nausea, but forced it down. As he approached the back of the building, he heard voices, and as he turned the corner he saw another motorcycle, an old Triumph, all black and chrome. Just beyond the bike, a smoker and two men standing next to it. Lloyd knew better than to sneak up on these men, so he yelled “Boys!” and waved as he came into view.
“Deputy dog,” growled the big one manning the smoker. Doug Crenshaw and Lloyd had grown up together, had even been friends in their early teens. Doug was not a Baggott, but he’d grown up swarmed with them. When Doug had joined up with the Evil Dead he’d tried to recruit Lloyd. But Lloyd was set on prowling through Southeast Asian jungles instead. The second man, a skinny tweaker named Spider, watched, as Lloyd approached.
“Getting an early start,” said Lloyd, pointing at the smoker.
“Takes about eight hours, if you do it right. Gives you a reason to start drinking early, too.” Doug raised his Budweiser and took a swig. He was a big boy, at least six feet, probably two-fifty, but not as big as Lloyd. The one watching was thin and short but wiry.
“Man, that smell…” Lloyd took a few steps closer. The intensity of the smell was about to put him over the edge but puking in front of these two was not an option.
Doug opened up the lid and dense, blue-grey smoke tumbled up from inside.
“Take a look.”
Lloyd stepped into the proximity of the two men and stood next to the smoker, next to the big man, and the spidery one moved in on Lloyd’s right.
“Goddamn,” said Lloyd.
Doug drank the rest of his beer and hurled the bottle into a metal drum close by. He closed the lid on the smoker and Lloyd stepped back, and so did the twitchy one named Spider.
“Was wanting to ask you,” said Lloyd.
“Here it comes,” said the big one. “I knowed you weren’t paying us a social visit.” He looked at his partner.
“It ain’t like that.”
“It damn sure is like that. It’s always like that. Any-damn-thing occurs and you or Bill comes peeping around the corner. What’s it this time? A purse-snatching?”
“Fine,” said Lloyd. “It is like that. No sense in playing make believe.” Lloyd fished out his cannister of Copenhagen, put in a dip, spit off the few grains of tobacco stuck to his bottom lip. Somehow this helped with the nauseating feeling from the smoldering pork butt. “Y’all villains, big man,” he continued. “Something bad happens, I come talk to the bad guys.”
The wiry one took a big step inward.
“You better settle the fuck down,” said Lloyd, with his right hand out in front of him. The man stopped
Doug smiled and nodded at the other.
“Lloyd Barnes, Vietnam badass!”
The thin one chuckled.
“You might be able to scare teenagers and little old ladies talking like that, but you ain’t shit here. We’ll knock you on the head and drop your ass in a phosphate mine, bury you in an orange grove, come back and eat some barbeque. Ain’t no thing to us.”
“Speaking of groves,” said Lloyd. “Found a burnt-to-a-husk bastard just north of here in a lemon grove. Just set down in the ditch like god laid him there. You wouldn’t by chance know anything about that, would you?”
“Sounds gruesome—but then, being a war vet, you seen all kind a shit, ain’t you? Dead babies and whatnot.”
Lloyd spit a deep brown gob at Doug’s foot.
“Look here,” said Lloyd. “You and your methhead pal hear anything you let me know. I’ll be back and I’ll be expecting a fucking anecdote or two.”
No one spoke. Lloyd touched the brim of his hat and turned his back on the two men and walked back to his truck.
Back at the station, Bill called Sahwoklee County Sheriff’s Office and talked to deputy Ben Lincoln, acting sheriff. Bill’s counterpart in Sahwoklee, Sheriff Frank Newsome, was six-months retired and had not yet been replaced, so the erstwhile deputy had taken over. Lincoln, all knew, would assume the role of sheriff officially once the county commissioners got used to the idea, but that was going to require a brief “mourning” period, as Frank had characterized it to his nephew Ben.
Bill asked Ben about Enid, Walter’s wife. Ben confirmed that Enid did, to his knowledge, still life in Sahwoklee County—presumably the small town of Cortez.
“As you know, she reported Walter missing three days ago. But I ain’t laid eyes on her drunk ass in a while. No telling where she might be.”
“As I know? I don’t know shit. You ain’t gone looking for Walter?”
“Not actively. Who gives a shit about Walter Pound—other than Enid? And I told your boy Lloyd to tell you about Walter when he called yesterday asking about Bradford’s cattle gone missing.”
Bill told Ben about the body in the lemon grove and his theory on who it might be.
“Lloyd did tell me about Enid’s report,” said Bill, lying to save face. “I must have forgot. Old age. Think I should talk to Enid though,” he added.
“Have you ever talked to Enid, sheriff? She ain’t exactly a sparkling conversationalist. And I’ll be honest, she’s smart as a snakebite, knows what to say and how to say it and has fun doing it. Likes toying with assholes like us.”
Bill told Ben that he had talked to Enid before, several times, and that he knew how to deal with her. When Bill hung up with Ben, he sat in his chair and tried figuring how to move ahead until he felt the heaviness of his fading beer buzz and drifted off.
When Bill woke he had a slight headache but he felt surprisingly rested. It was only ten o’clock. Let’s see, he thought. Take about forty-five minutes to get to Cortez. Drive around Sahwoklee for an hour or so, see what I see. Get back by about one or two. He stood up and patted at himself, looking for something to look for. Debbie Creel, his secretary clip-clopped into his office.
“Nice nap, Sheriff?”
He grunted.
“Medical Examiner called. Parson’s grove body being examined as we speak.”
“Thanks, Deb.”
She nodded and stood there watching him look around his office.
“You all right, Bill? I don’t like it when you’re all quiet like this.” Bill was always quiet, and she knew it.
“I’mma ride out to Sahwoklee.”
Debbie sighed. “This one’s got biker stink all over it, don’t you think?”
“It’s plausible.”
“I’d say a damn sight more than plausible. Who else could have done something like that? Could be Cuban mob—Tampa. Just dropping a body off ‘in the boonies’ or something.”
He smiled and nodded and touched Debbie on the shoulder on his way out.
“You see Lloyd, tell him to radio me, please, will ya, Deb?”
Debbie followed him out to his truck and knocked on his window. Bill rolled it down.
She whispered: “Could be a Pound-and-Baggott thing—that burned up body. That’s what you’re thinking, Bill. I bet it is, ain’t it?”
He winked at her.
“Any thoughts on whose body it is?”
He put the truck in reverse.
“Greedy old bastard,” said Debbie and she stepped away from the truck.
As Bill Register pulled onto the road, the fact that Enid had reported Walter missing pressed down on him. This is something, he thought. The distinct possibility of a Pound man found burnt up in a lemon grove. Could be a Baggott that done it, could be someone else. More than a few folks hated Walter enough to want him dead. Even, as Deb stumbled on, Cuban mob and affiliates. Even, as Lloyd had suggested, Evil Dead. It was even possible that Bradford’s missing cattle figured into things somehow. Anyone of consequence in the crime world on this whole damn peninsula has had, at some point, a reason to at least want the tar beat out of Walter Pound. Also, may not be that fire was what killed him. The burning could be post-mortem. Could be they burnt him up to cover up evidence. Highly possible. What, he thought, would Lloyd do if this all turns out to be true? What if that is Walter Pound’s body?
Back at the station, Lloyd was virtually accosted by Debbie Creel.
“You at Parson’s with Bill this morning?” she said as Lloyd sat down at his desk chair. She knew the answer.
“Yes, ma’am.” Unlike Bill, Lloyd would tell her all he knew, he usually did, but he also enjoyed stringer her along.
“What you reckon happened to that poor soul, Lloyd?”
“Well. Ms. Debbie, I figure he was burnt up.”
“No shit, Lloyd. I mean—who you think it is that done it?”
“Can’t say. Evil Dead, likely.”
“Interesting,” said Debbie.
“Why’s that?”
For the same reason as the sheriff, Debbie didn’t want to say too much to Lloyd about what she thought, about who she thought the body belonged to. If he’d brought up on his own the possibility, she’d have been more than happy to discuss possible scenarios with him—but she didn’t want to be the one to plant the idea in Lloyd’s head if it wasn’t already in there.
“No—it’s just that that makes sense. Any idea who it is—the body?”
“Come on out with it, Debbie. I know your minds working.”
She picked up a mug from earlier that morning with about an ounce of cold coffee in it and swirled it once then walked it over to the little stainless-steel sink in the corner and dumped it out and ran some water into it.
“Hell, what do I know, Lloyd. You the one been out there.”
He sighed, took off his wide-brimmed deputy’s hat and set it on his desk, looked down at his left hand.
“I do know for a fact that Enid reported my piece of shit cousin Walter missing a few days ago. Not ready just yet to mention this to Bill. Maybe he already knows. Maybe he doesn’t. But that’s family business.”
“I’ll be damn,” said Debbie. She could barely contain her delight at Lloyd’s mention of Walter and Enid. “This here—I think you’re right, Lloyd. This ain’t no bikers done this….How’d you know about Walter? Sheriff didn’t say nothing about that.”
“He tell you everything he knows, does he?”
She just looked down, then over at the wall.
“I called yesterday and talked to Ben, over in Sahwoklee, about a lead on them Brahmans gone missing and he told me—asked me to relay to Bill that Enid had reported Walter missing. I did not relay that message to Bill.”
Debbie nodded.
Lloyd continued: “Walter missing. Burnt-up Walter-sized bastard this morning. Don’t take too much intellect to sort out the possibilities, does it?”
“Well, Bill talked to Ben hisself just before he left earlier.” Debbie patted at the side of her head. “Whose cattle was that gone missing?”
“Them was Leon Bradford’s Brahmans.”
Leon Bradford, Debbie knew, was married to a Baggott woman. About fifteen years ago, he and Michaela Baggott, Enid’s cousin of some variety, got spliced up on the property Leon had bought a year prior for cattle grazing. It had been a big party, over a hundred people in attendance. A Baggott marrying someone wealthy like Bradford was a big deal. Debbie had been there. Kurt Bignall, the grocer, had asked her to go with him. Debbie did not like Kurt much, but she did like weddings, so she’d accepted Kurt’s invitation. She asked herself, would Walter Pound be dumb enough to steal Brahmans from Leon Bradford—and would Leon be bold enough to kill Walter for doing it? Lloyd must have read these thoughts on Debbie’s face.
“Debbie, Walter’d be crazy enough to steal Leon’s cattle, wouldn’t he?”
She told him yes, she thought he would.
Bill pulled into the dirt lot at Fuzzy’s, looked around, saw one other vehicle, a white Ford F‑150. There was a chained dog lying in the shade off to the left side of the door. He knew the dog but couldn’t call its name. The dog raised its head when Bill slammed the truck door, watched him walk all the way up to the entrance. There, again, was a light rain. But, as Bill stopped to look at the sky, he noticed a dark, almost purple shelf cloud to the northeast.
Bill went straight to the bar, whereat he noticed two others sitting, but couldn’t make them out until his eyes adjusted to the dark.
“Whiskey and a beer,” he said to Roof, the tall half-Indian bartender.
“Right up, Bill,” said Roof.
Bill lit a cigarette, glanced to his right, took a drag and said, “Jackpot.”
Roof set down Bill’s drinks and shifted his eyes over to the two lost souls sitting at the bar to Bill’s right, then glanced back at Bill. Next to Bill was a slumped over man in his late fifties or early sixties, a near empty mug in front of him, his fingers curled around it. Next to that man was a very small, prematurely shriveled woman in cutoff denim shorts, a striped tank top and flip flops. Enid Pound. Bill was taken by how quiet it was in the place.
Bill set his cigarette in the ashtray groove, did his shot of whiskey, and fished a dollar bill from his pants pocket, got up and walked over to the jukebox, which was lit up like Vegas, desperate for a few songs. But when he got closer to it, he realized the jukebox was busted up. Big chunks of the jukebox’s plastic dome were broken off and there were cracks in it. It was still blinking and flashing, but he paused before putting his money in. He also noticed that to the right of the busted up jukebox was a chair, one leg broke off, leaned up against a post.
“What happened to your jukebox, Roof.” He said, putting the dollar back into his pocket.
“There was a fight. Jukebox lost.” He chuckled and glanced at Enid, who was also chuckling, but hers was more of a wheeze.
“Does it still work?”
“I gather it don’t,” said Enid, turning on the bar stool and facing the sheriff. She propped her elbows up and leaned back against the bar.
“Enid Pound—that you?”
“You know damn well it is.”
“You’re just the woman I was hoping to run into today.”
“Sure are popular with sheriffs today,” said Roof.
“What’s that, Roof?” said Bill.
“Old Frank was just in here about an hour ago,” said Enid. “He’s retired, but don’t act like it. Finding it difficult to enjoy the autumn of his life.”
“I bet I know why,” said Bill.
“Don’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out,” said Enid.
“Reckon you and I can have a chat ourselves?”
“My policy on talking to the authorities in a drinking establishment is simple.”
“Let me guess: I buy, you talk.”
Enid smiled and walked over to Bill, still standing by the dilapidated jukebox, and they both sat down at a nearby table. As they sat, a gust of wind drove rain at the tin roof of the bar, making a loud racket.
“Ooh,” said Enid. “I love it when the weather is hostile, don’t you, Sheriff?”
The drive to Leon Bradford’s ranch from the station was about thirty minutes. Lloyd went over what he would say, what he would ask, what he would look for. Brahmans missing—Walter missing. Two facts with a lot of open air between them. He also knew that Bill would not have approve of this trip to Bradford’s. Bill did not approve of “hunches” and “gut feelings.” Bill was a hard-facts man, a cautious and thoughtful man. Lloyd respected Bill immensely, but Lloyd had his own ways and they had not yet failed him in a major way so he had no reason to second guess himself.
The double track up to Leon’s home on the back of the property was partially canopied and Lloyd found himself driving slowly to savor the dark, cool atmosphere, a scene, he thought, right out of a story about Robin Hood or King Arthur. It was one o’clock now and the sun was high and it was hot and humid, when not under the heavy shade of old-growth. But there was the hint of a storm in the north. He noticed fresh tire tread marks in the dirt and wondered if the Bradford’s were even home.
When Lloyd emerged from the cave of trees onto the lawn of Leon’s home he was somewhat surprised to find Leon and Michaela outside. Leon stood with his hands on his hips, looking down at something Lloyd could not quite make out, and Michaela was pulling a water hose around the right side of the two-story redbrick home. She eventually was out of his view. Leon didn’t so much as glance Lloyd’s way until he was out of the truck and walking towards the house.
The thing on the ground in front of Leon turned out to be a dead whitetail doe.
“Jesus,” said Lloyd, as he walked up to Leon.
“Damnedest thing.”
“Looks fresh.”
Leon grunted.
“How is it that you’re just coming across it then?”
Leon finally looked over at Lloyd.
“What you doing here, Deputy?”
“Wanted to talk to you about them Brahmans stole.”
Leon nodded, pointed behind him.
“Michaela and I just got back from town not ten minutes ago. Left here—shoot—around eight, and I don’t recall seeing it here then.” He scratched at the crown of his head.
“Looks like it just dropped dead, don’t it?” said Lloyd. He knelt down and gently put his hand to its neck.
“What I thought.”
Lloyd wondered if a doe could have a heart attack or a massive stroke.
Michaela came back around with her water hose.
“Deputy,” she said.
Lloyd and Leon stopped to watch her. Leon smiled at her.
“What you doing lugging that hose all over the yard for?”
“Just watering.”
“Leon, you too cheap to have some irrigation put in for your wife?”
“Says she likes the watering. Gives her something to do.” Leon turned back to the doe. “You help me pick her up and put her in a wheelbarrow?”
Bill watched Enid take a sip from her new mug of beer and watched her light a slightly bent cigarette she’d pulled from a crumpled soft pack of generic cigarettes.
“Walter’s candyass cousin still working for you?” said Enid, blowing a cloud of cheap smoke.
“Lloyd still does, yes. Wouldn’t necessarily call him a candyass, though. He ain’t the brightest star in the sky, but he’s a tough son of a bitch and a loyal officer of the law.” Bill wasn’t being funny. He meant what he said.
Enid grinned a toothless grin and coughed a quick laugh.
“Okay,” she said. “Guess you don’t know him like I do.”
“Being that he’s a Pound and you’re a Baggott, I wouldn’t think you knew him much at all.”
“I am married to his first cousin—and I’ve heard all the same stories as everyone else in this part of the world, except I’ve heard the real versions.”
“Real versions? You mean your and Walter’s versions?”
“The realest versions.”
She smeared out her cigarette and skated the mug of beer around in the condensation puddle on the table.
“Speaking of Walter,” said Bill.
Enid looked him in the eye, and Bill winked.
“You find out anything about his whereabouts?”
“Not precisely.”
“Let me get this right. You’re talking to the person who reported him missing to try and find out where he is? That don’t make a damn bit of sense, does it?”
“It does if you know what I know.”
Enid finished her beer and lit her flattened, bent last cigarette.
Bill held up two fingers and Roof turned around and grabbed two clean mugs.
“Go on, then.”
“First I want to ask you a few serious questions. No more of this playing around.”
“Who’s been playing? You ask, I answer.”
“It’s just that, if you really want to know where Walter is, you’ll want to answer me true. I don’t give a good goddamn about Walter. He could fuck right off, as far as I’m concerned. He could trip over and fall off the edge of the Earth, and I wouldn’t even spill my drink. And to be honest: whether he’s alive or dead or somewhere in between—that don’t really matter to me, neither. But it’s my job to figure things out. So let’s you and me figure this shit right here out.”
Enid put out her cigarette and crossed her arms and sat back in her chair.
Bill leaned in, put his elbows on the rickety table.
“Walter do something to severely piss off any of these bikers we got around these parts?”
“You got some paper and something to write with? We’ll make a list.”
Bill sighed and leaned back. “Anything lately or serious and longstanding—anything that might stand out in your mind?”
“He’s got some outstanding debt with them Evil Dead pussies. But they like having a little debt on you so they can get you to do shit for them to supposedly ‘cancel’ that debt, which never actually happens. They scumbags, but they ain’t stupid, least not the ones running the show.”
“You talk like you know about Walter and his dealings with folks.”
“Walter wouldn’t make a left turn without I told him ready on the right.”
“Got him trained, do you?”
“He’s just smart enough to know he’s stupid, is all.”
“So he consults with you on every little thing then?”
“Every little important thing.”
“Then you’ll know the answer to this question, I reckon: did Walter steal Leon Bradford’s Brahmans?”
Enid smiled.
“I’ll answer that question. I’ll answer it thoroughly. But first you answer a question for me.”
“Fine.”
“You think you know what happened to him, where he is?”
Bill figured he was in a good spot here, tactically, and decided that telling her the truth would make her angry, put her right in his hands, get her to talk wide open.
“This morning, in one of Parson’s lemon groves, offa twenty-seven, we found a body. A burnt up Walter-sized body.”
“But you don’t know it’s Walter.”
“Well, the body ain’t exactly…pristine. The body ain’t exactly recognizable.” Bill looked at his watch. “Matter fact, medical examiner probably just now finishing up with it. I’ll make a call, soon as we’re done here, and I’ll let you know on the spot what they tell me. But, right now, I want to know what you know.”
Enid lowered her head and Bill thought she must be crying. Her shoulders jerked a few times. She then held her head up and took a deep breath, looked back at Bill, eyes aglow, brow set.
“Walter did steal that crazy fucker’s cattle. Stole the shit out of ‘em. But seeing how Walter don’t own a fucking tea towel, he had to line up some help. And that help, I reckon, fucked him.”
“Go on.”
“Walter had the idea of using a couple side-by-sides, corralling as many as they could into a semi-trailer, and hightailing it. In and out. Wee hours. Only Walter, like I said, ain’t got shit. So he went to that Evil Dead dick Douglas. He and some other asshole got the side-by-sides and the semi and trailer and they pitched in on the job. Douglas had another ‘friend’ of his rebrand the cattle and take them to auction. Got top dollar, too. They sold them Brahmans and didn’t give Walter a red fucking cent. About two days after that I lost track of Walter.”
“So you do think Douglas and his bunch killed Walter.”
“You asked me if he stole them Brahmans. I told you he did and told you how they did it. I didn’t say word fucking one about who I think killed Walter. But since you brought it up, I’ll tell you what I think for free.” She paused and glanced to the left. “I need to take a trip to the little girls’ room.”
“You ain’t gonna run off, are ya?”
“What the hell for? But there better be a fresh one on the table when I get back.”
“Thought this one was gonna be for free.”
“Reconsidered. Nothing worth having is free.”
When she returned, Bill offered her one of his cigarettes. She took it, lit it, and took a long pull on the new beer in front of her before beginning.
Bill held up two fingers again and Roof hustled over two more mugs of beer.
“Thing is, you cain’t never be too sure with these waterheads we share blood with. Why Walter and I moved out here to Cortez. We still close, but far enough that we ain’t having to constantly worry.”
Bill and Enid sat and sipped for a while. Bill was perplexed. If Enid was telling the truth, he wasn’t sure how to proceed. He lit a cigarette and noticed Enid watching him. He reached his pack across the table and she took another one from the pack.
“Winston’s,” she said. “Fancy.”
He watched her take a match from a folded-up matchbook and slowly drag the match across the ignitor strip. She help up the match and looked at Bill, then lit her borrowed cigarette.
After exhaling a drag that seemed to consume half the cigarette, Enid spoke.
“What about Leon. You go and talk to Leon and Michaela about any of this?”
“What do you mean, what about Leon and Michaela?”
“Leon is a sad bastard—but you cain’t imagine the shit Michaela’s managed to do without any law finding out. She’s small but she’s cunning and she’s a nasty little bitch. Leon wouldn’t hurt a yellow fly but Michaela—being married to Leon is like a mask of respectability. She’s shady.”
“Sounds ridiculous,” said Bill.
She smiled as she smashed her cigarette butt into the ashtray.
“She likes it that you think so.”
The deer was not heavy but it was somewhat difficult to pick up and maneuver into the wheelbarrow.
“Got a roll-off around the house,” said Leon.
Lloyd followed Leon. They walked by the garage, door open, and Lloyd admired Leon’s old caddy, a fifty-nine.
“You’ll have to take me for a ride in that beauty one of these days.”
“How about today?”
Lloyd did not respond as they were at the roll-off and Leon had set the wheelbarrow down next to it.
“I guess,” said Leon, “just take your side and I’ll take mine and we’ll hoist her up and over.”
It was quick work and as they were walking back to the garage to put away the wheelbarrow, Lloyd remembered why he was there.
“Anyway,” said Lloyd. “I was meaning to ask you about them Brahmans you had stole last week.”
Leon nodded.
Michaela came around the corner, into the garage.
“Y’all done with the ‘barrow?”
Leon said yes and she picked up a bag of Black Kow and dropped it into the wheelbarrow with a grunt, then wheeled it off. She was a little younger than Leon, and she was strong for her size, too, which Lloyd guessed to be about five-foot-three.
“Have y’all made any progress on the case?” said Leon.
This question almost startled Lloyd and it took him a few seconds to answer.
“No sir, but I wanted to ask you some questions.”
“That’ll be fine,” said Leon.
“I know you and Michaela ain’t ones to get mixed up in all this Pound-Baggott garbage—as you know, I ain’t either—but I still wanted to ask you if you was aware of anything that might have passed by me. As far as I know, things have been fairly quiet lately.”
“Well, hell,” said Leon. “You’d know more than Michaela and me. We’re far removed from all that fighting and whatnot."
Lloyd nodded. He was beginning to become aware of a sound behind him, a thumping-whirring sound, that seemed to be coming from all directions.
“That’s what I figured, too,” said Lloyd. He turned and saw a helicopter coming closer. “I had to ask, though.” He had to talk louder, as the helicopter was quite close now. He looked at Leon and Leon grabbed his shoulder and pointed towards the front of the house. Leon’s hair was raised up now and he squinted.
They both jogged to the front yard.
“Leon—why’s a goddamn helicopter landing in your backyard?”
Leon smiled nervously, his demeanor somewhat changed.
“Michaela has always been fascinated. Always wanted to learn.”
“Learn what—to fly a fucking helicopter?”
“Yes, that’s right. She’s taking lessons.”
“From who?”
“That Sugar—Parson’s boy.”
“Where’d he learn to fly one?”
“Air Force, I reckon.”
An idea was beginning to form in Lloyd’s mind. It wasn’t all joined up yet, but there was enough. He thought about how the body at Parson’s lemon grove seemed to have been laid there by magic. And Sugar had allegedly found it.
Keep calm, he told himself.
“Well I think that’s great,” he said. “Good for her. Man, how’s she coming along? I bet it’s complicated. I know it’s hard to learn.”
“Oh, pretty good.” Leon’s hands were in his pockets now.
“How many lessons she have so far?”
“Not sure, a few.”
Bullshit, thought Lloyd. If she were taking lessons, they’d be expensive—he’d know exactly how many she’d taken. Course he might just be nervous. I need time, thought Lloyd.
“Anyway, I wanted to ask you—you got any idea who might have stole your brahmans? Just thought I’d ask. Wasn’t sure if anyone had asked yet.”
“How the hell should I know, Lloyd? Don’t you think I’d have told you something like that, if I had an idea?”
Lloyd could barely hear anything but the helicopter now. He gave Leon a smile and a thumbs up.
They both stood and watched the helicopter hover in the air, just above roof-level. Sure enough, it was Sugar piloting the thing.
Michaela bent over, scrambled up to the helicopter.
Leon waved, Lloyd did too.
Michaela and the man both waved back. After a few seconds, she walked around and got in the passenger side of the helicopter. The helicopter slowly turned and, as it turned, floated higher upward, then it moved out towards the pastureland behind the Bradford home.
The sound of the helicopter faded and Lloyd got an idea.
“So, Leon, I think I’ll take you up on that ride in the Caddy another day.”
Leon nodded and smiled a little. Do I have enough, thought Lloyd? Bill would say that he didn’t, he knew that much. He thought about the medical examiner’s office—what had they found out by now? If it’s Walter’s body—and if he stole the cattle—and Leon knows….Would they have had Walter killed? Michaela’s a Baggott. Would have reason to hate Walter beyond the cattle thieving. Not poor old Leon, though. Surely not Leon.
As he walked back to his truck, it took everything he had not to turn around and cuff Leon and bring him in.
Lloyd made it about halfway down the long dirt drive from Leon’s house back to the road before he met up with Bill’s truck coming up the drive. He noticed someone in the passenger seat, someone small, the top of a head the only thing visible. He waved, and Bill pulled up alongside and Lloyd recognized Enid.
“We barking up the same tree, looks like,” said Lloyd.
Bill winked and glanced over at Enid.
“Medical examiner identified the Parson’s grove body as Walter Pound,” said Bill. “Dental records. My sympathies—to you both,” he added. “I know he was sorry but family is family.”
They all sat quiet for a moment. Enid spoke first.
“It’s Michaela what’s done it,” she said with authority, looked over at Lloyd.
“I think so, too,” said Lloyd. “Just watched her hop on a helicopter with Sugar and whirl away. Lessons they called it.”
Enid sat and listened whie the two men talked.
“I don’t reckon Leon knows the first thing about any of this, but Michaela and that Sugar Burkson bastard—I’d bet the farm they did this together.”
“For Michaela, motivation is there. The thievery and the family history.”
“Don’t forget the being crazy as a shithouse rat part,” said Enid.
Lloyd smiled at Enid’s comment.
“Enid, just thought of something,” said Lloyd, raindrops beginning to tap on their truck hoods.
“Hoyt Baggott was Michaela’s uncle, wasn’t he?”
She nodded. “And my first cousin,” she added.
“Well,” said Bill, squinting at the dark gray sky. “Starting up again.”
As the rain picked up, Lloyd waited impatiently for Bill to lay out their next moves. He told him to wait just off Bradford’s property for Michaela’s possible return by helicopter. Lay low and watch. Despite the rain angling in, Enid had not rolled up her window. Walters dead. Her man is dead. She seemed to be looking down at her hands, resting palms up in her lap, fingers curled inward, two dead spiders. Enid could have been someone, thought Lloyd, as Frank angled the truck into a three-point turn.
Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana and grew up in Florida. His writing has appeared in Adirondack Review, Broad River Review, BULL, Chiron Review, Contrast, The Cortland Review, Emrys Journal, Into the Void, Longleaf Review, New World Writing, The Pinch, Saw Palm, Tampa Review, and many other places. In 2018 he won Emrys Journal’s Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize and he is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations. Interviews with Lambert have appeared in print, on podcasts, and public radio. He is the author of the poetry collections Heat Seekers (2017) and The Shamble (2021), the chapbook In Eynsham (2020), and the fiction collection The Patron Saint of Birds (2020). His novel, Philisteens, was released in 2021. The collaborative fiction text, Mortality Birds, written with Timothy Dodd, appeared in 2022. He and his wife live in Florida.
which may give you a better sense of what I'm looking for here at FCAC.
War Whips it Out in Public
In the night a war steps in the room,
a toadying lickspittle war with bad teeth,
a savior complex and spindly reddish hair.
In the distance a mosque looms big as the sky.
The war decides to bomb the shit out
of it and the phrase collateral damage
comes out and vexes. The tone is off,
war is a fucking crook, everyone
knows it as soon as it steps in the room
all Visigoth and thunderhead,
the poor mosque doesn't know what
to do and shits itself in a panic shedding
dome and minarets and brick and glass
all over the grounds. But war doesn't
care it just smithereens the walls down
and calls it fghting for love & peace.
Orwell smirks in his grave and rolls over,
presents his ass for war to kiss but old
war groans out another bomb in Yemen
and children incinerate in the maelstrom.
What does war want anyway? More war!
What do we want? Nobody can agree!
War goes on just fucking us over,
like so many lice in the infested,
over and over and over again: Yemen
Iraq Afghanistan just off the top.
When war walks into the room and grabs
its crotch no one knows what to do,
we all sit and stare like idiots as it
makes us talk dumb and slicks its hair
back with a wet comb and sneers.
Shuck’s plan was fucking stupid. Everybody told him so, though “everyone” meant only his guilty conscience and the imaginary Jiminy Cricket voices of his semi-girlfriend Maggie and best friend Doc and his dog Biscuit, all in his head saying: “Jesus Christ, don’t do it!” The ballots felt like feathers—light, fragile, too ethereal for touching—and Shuck’s hands fumbled slick with sweat.
The tent was warm and quiet, the festival stages dark. The picking tent cast a pleasant ring and buzz, the night’s breeze carried ripples over the river. Shuck had two sacks: one filled with counterfeit ballots, and the other empty for the real ones. He was going to cheat the Jam the River bluegrass festival’s raffle, for a guitar.
(And don’t get this wrong; maybe the guitar wanted something. You can’t say it didn’t. Don’t go on thinking you’re better than this guitar.)
(What kind of guitar was it, you say? It was custom-built for Shuck's friend Doc's newly popular bluegrass festival and donated in conjunction with Gruhn Guitars, a world-class establishment in Nashville. And it was built by none other than Pete Kisanouvich of Kisanouvich Guitars, which, if you haven't heard about, you might not know enough about guitars to appreciate this story.)
(So far as words could do her justice, she had the world’s most endangered rosewood for the fretboard, stuff you had to jump into the Amazon bush for and probably come out shooting.)
(Set gentle in that precious board were mother-of-pearl inlays milky like the creamy stuff of godly loins. It’s gross how beautiful this guitar was. The inlays were shaped like hammers and sickles, some kind of hippie joke; doesn’t matter; the hardware was burnished gold, and the headstock wore a rose of sparkling, technicolor tin to catch stage lights and strobe them back on rows and rows of bleached blondes and screaming, red-faced dudes.)
Alone and shaking in the raffle tent, Shuck scooped tickets into his empty bag, his fingertips squeaking on the bottom glass. He dumped in the fakes. His eyes watered over. His name was on every single one. He'd done his best–that is, poorly–to change the handwriting every time, which only made it take longer.
He stirred them with his fingers, then ran crying out loud past the big stage and down the crafters' thoroughfare with the closed shops and food stalls, then west through the camping fields by the river that formed the southern boundary of Doc's family lands. It was quite a haul, particularly wailing and wiping away tears and stumbling sometimes in the dark.
###
Maggie slept in a lawn chair with her feet up in Shuck’s seat. Their dog, Biscuit, slept twisted underneath, his goober ass stuck out. Shuck gave him a prod and dumped Maggie’s feet from his chair—he wanted company. As expected, Maggie kept snoring, but Biscuit completed a grunting extraction and circled to sniff Shuck’s lap.
On his Walkie Talkie, he buzzed his buddy and festival runner Doc: "Tucking in for the night. Come burn one, if you can."
“Roger that. Wait for me.”
Maggie snored with her mouth open and her tonsils jiggling. She had the long, austere build of the mythic Valkyrie and when low, as now, he sometimes envisioned her in full bronze and plume regalia flying him around the stage of some genuine Italian opera, him tucked away like a football and her spearing past the fabric clouds and thwarting cardboard foam thunderbolts. Alas, he could not place this feeling as love so much as abiding respect, even admiration. But what did it mean about him?
In a flash of repentant ecstasy, Shuck reached and tugged her tank top and said, "I did it. I cheated and I am ashamed!"
Maggie’s eyes popped open, one after the other. “Shut up.” She snored and the eyes snapped back shut in the opposite sequence.
The dog licked his elbow; Biscuit didn’t give a shit about man’s laws. Maybe that meant he was partway forgiven.
(And what’s the worst thing you ever did? Think about it; you might be, already. Or, hey, don’t. Don’t ever think about it. Maybe that’s better.)
(It’s OK. They say the one true almighty skyward friend forgives you. That’s Jesus Horatio Christ.)
(I don’t have the power to forgive or not forgive; I’m just an omniscient narrator. Or am I limited? Sure feels that way, for all of us down here in the morass.)
Shuck felt better for about 30 seconds until Doc and Angeline showed up on the Mule, parked by the dying fire.
“Make sure that goes out before you go to bed,” Doc said. He always had to assert control like that, keep folks on notice. He winked, was always winking, too. He was a control-asserting, winking type of motherfucker. “We got a bunch of reports about some guy running around the campsites crying and playing with himself. Probably a sex-peeper. Can I get a hot dog?”
"Sex-peepers ought to be shot," Shuck said. Angeline furrowed her brow across the firelight. Maggie snored.
Doc gave Shuck a long look. "Okay? Probably just kick them out, is all." Doc rummaged around, looking through Shuck's camp for a hot dog. "We've gone five years without no summary executions."
Angeline kicked him lightly as he passed. “Stop talking like some dumb cowboy or I’m taking that hat.”
The hat. The goddamn hat. Only officials of the Jam the River festival wore official straw cowboy hats of that specific tint and diameter. Shuck had been promised one five years running, forgotten every time.
Maggie woke up talking to her dream: "Put that up, no higher, there, in Heaven." She smiled at everyone. "I was having the nicest dream." Biscuit perked, farted the interrogative case, and wandered off into the black.
Shuck said, “How’s The Blue Busters? I missed them.” He took a wiener from Doc and poked it with a coat hanger and stuck it in the fire.
Doc nodded. “Good.”
Doc liked anything musical with twang. But Shuck hardly came out for the bands, missed as many as he caught. He mostly liked to play in the picking tent, and they had a lot of good pickers and fiddlers, but Shuck was right there amongst the best.
Angeline sighed heavily and stretched out in a chair. “We haven’t sat down all day.” She wiggled her toes over the fire. “Shit. That’s nice.”
“Turn it, Shuck,” Doc said. “You know how I like my wiener.”
Maggie laughed too loud, then, embarrassed, announced she’d get the hotdog fixings. She rummaged in the dark through the armada of coolers Shuck had appropriated from the Lowe’s store he assistant-managed. She came back with her cigarettes and no buns. They all laughed, and she went back sheepish. Angeline caught Shuck’s eye, mouthed, “I like her.”
Shuck squirmed at the compliment, knowing only a few cures for it: he lit the joint, passed it delicately to Angeline. She threw her head back and took a long drag, shook her hair out of its bun.
Maggie yanked the joint from Angeline and dragged it hard, shooting sparks. Then she coughed and stomped, cough-stomping all around the campsite blowing billows like a dragon.
Not to be outdone, Shuck took the joint and blasted on it, held it up in a big, speculative, cock-eyed appraisal, held up a finger like wait, there’s more, and hit it again, really bore down. Then he coughed so hard he threw up some in the grass and hoped they couldn’t see him in the dark.
(They did see it, but let it pass, in the name of friendship.)
“Y’all got ketchup?” Doc asked.
Shuck scowled and wiped his mouth. That’s right, ketchup. Fuck you and your Paul Newman face and perfect, sweetheart girlfriend—ketchup. “We got mustard.”
But Maggie found Doc ketchup.
Doc asked, “You played much yet? I heard some guys going at it in the picking tent just a while before.”
“Not yet,” Shuck said, face burning in the dark.
Now Doc was being so quiet it was like he had Shuck figured out. Finally, he said, “You talked to Dad?”
“I haven’t.”
“About time y’all make up.” He meant the party last Christmas, which concluded with Shuck shouting at Doc’s locked door, giving up, shivering on the long, drunk walk to his truck, where he slept without heat—he’d lost his keys—and hoped the pre-dawn chill would take him.
Shuck said, “It was you that threw me out, not him.”
“What choice did I have?” Doc had a way of chuckling at you conspiratorially like at the bottom of it all, you agreed with him. And part of you did, the part you wanted to punch in the face until your hands and face turned goo. “You wouldn’t shut up about the guitar, how we owed you something. You know how you get.”
"He has a condition called King Baby," Maggie said like she was helping. "It's what the therapist told us."
"Aw," said Angeline. "Poor King Baby." She reached to pat his head despite the good ten-foot distance, the fire in between. "There, there, king baby."
Shuck imagined crawling into the fire. “I didn’t mean no insult, but your Dad knows I helped you think this whole thing up, and now I’m no part of it at all.”
“Well, Dad wants it in the family. Plus, you called him a ‘tyrannical masturbator’ in his Santa suit in front of his wife in his own driveway on Christmas. So, get over it.” Doc rose like mist, not propping or boosting himself but simply sliding upright like a marionette. “The past is done, pard. Let’s go for a ride. I got one more thing to do before I call it.”
Shuck stared out into the dark. His eyes watered, just as they had when he’d run the half mile back to camp, like he’d wept in his car at Christmas, chattering cold. “All right,” he said, eying around the campfire. “Hold on, Doc. Now we’ve heard about my darkest moment. What about y’all? What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
"Dated you," fired off Maggie. She tried Angeline for a high-five, but Angeline politely demurred, so Doc swung in and clapped her hand roundly.
“No, really,” Shuck said. “What about you?” He stared right at Angeline.
“Huh.” She tapped her chin, considering.
Doc sighed, raised his hand. “I cheated in every class I ever took from grade school through two years of community college. Every single class.”
Angeline kicked him again. “I bet I know how you pulled that off. Was it some poor, love-struck girl you cheated off?”
Doc shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes I paid in weed I stole from Dad. I have essentially no education.” He gave his trademark deadpan look around the fire. “Did I use that word right, ‘essentially?’ I heard someone say it before. You ready, Shuck?”
Maggie cleared her throat. “I called in a bomb threat to my high school. I wanted to go to Starwood to see Incubus and it was supposed to be a school night.” Everyone nodded in appreciation.
“Not bad,” Doc said. “You lose points for Incubus, but I love the creativity.”
“Starwood was what they called the Ascend Amphitheater back when us old-timers were in short pants,” Maggie said to Angeline.
“I helped my ex-boyfriend commit insurance fraud with his boat for like fifteen grand.”
Angeline frowned. “Don’t tell anybody. Please.”
Only Shuck didn’t laugh. “Y’all wanna hear mine?”
Doc cleared his throat. “Nope. I doubt our hearts could take it.” Before Shuck could object, Doc added, “Come on–step it up, pard. It’s not you that spent the day working.” Rare irritation crept into his voice. “You don’t understand, this gig is hard work. And I came by your camp to ask for help, what, three times? Four? Found you drunk off your ass.”
Shuck rose shakily. “Where we headed?”
“Check the bonfires, put them out.”
Doc climbed into the Mule and Shuck slid in by him. "Here." Doc reached behind the seat and found another straw ranger hat. He gave Shuck a pointed look. "Dad wanted you to have this. He ordered it for you special, 'cause your head's so fuckin' big."
Stunned, Shuck took the hat, and they went bumping in the dark over grassy hills steep as dunes.
Hats never fit Shuck’s watermelon of a head, but he scrunched and crammed the ranger hat over his crown and sat back, one hand fixed to the brim lest it flew off into the sea of snores. And he beamed, despite himself.
They twisted through the campsites, the river a dark gurgle on the left and the last lights from the festival burning up ahead. They bumped down the gravel thoroughfare by the shop booths where Doc stopped and gathered the trash from the big barrel cans. Shuck felt so honored by the official headgear that he stumbled out and pretended to help. Heading past the shops and mainstage toward the bonfires, they rode past the raffle booth and Shuck winced.
Doc must have noticed, because he said, “Your ass still sore about that guitar?”
“It’s a nice guitar, is all.”
“Well, save your money. He’s got more for sale.”
“I could win it,” Shuck said.
“Nope.” Doc gestured at the ranger hat. “Contest is just for paying customers. No staff. Sucks to get what you want, sometimes, huh?”
Three bonfires were spaced evenly along the field at the eastern edge of the property, where Doc and his father pastured horses most of the year. The first fire was smoldering but the second still flickered, and they found there an old customer howling at the moon, stripped to patched, old-timey britches. Shuck took him by the waist of those britches, and with the hat on like a badge and the cheek-tingling, wide-open feeling of being out on the farm, the vigor of the damp clean air, he would have tossed the drunk into the fire out of over-exuberance, but Doc cooly intervened, talked the old camper down from howling and sent him sheepish back to camp. Doc's voice and his easy manner mesmerized folks that way.
At the dregs of the last fire, they shared a cigarette as coals smoldered. “Anyway,” Doc said, “the drawing is first thing tomorrow. I thought we’d get more tickets. If you weren’t a ranger, now, you just might have had a shot.”
Back at the camp, Shuck took out the Aria, a miserable, dingy thing finished like a rotten cellar door and made in red China. He didn't check his voice despite the quiet camping, shunked and sang his own new ditty.
(Ever heard of Chris Stapleton? Well, this is his story. Not really. But he recorded at the Jam the River for their PBS special program a year or two before he blew up. The whole festival served as a set up for the show, the grand vision of The Old Man, Doc’s Daddy, who looked like Kevin Costner and interviewed in a weird, laconic way. He liked to reference pre-interview conversations, so the viewer always felt a little left out. Great cinematography, though.)
All Shuck had wanted was his chance, and he got it. Early days, a night-time shoot on the newly outfitted main stage, a warm-up before the festivities began the next morning. Lights up, searingly bright, Shuck had to keep his hands just so to keep the Aria's pickup from buzzing. They'd tried just a mic but couldn't mix it well. Everyone was learning. Everything was quiet: must be time to go. Pick the long ride into "Aunt Hoot's Root Cellar for a Toot-e-nany."
“Wait, Shuck.” Can’t distinguish the voices, the Old Man, Doc, Doc’s brother Virge, the sound guy. Hands won’t stop fucking shaking. Don’t you blow this thing, don’t blow this thing.
By the time they got things right, he could only play chords and a little turnaround, some kind of lilting variation on "Old Susannah," first thing he'd learned in lessons twenty years ago.
"Thanks, Shuck." That was that. They put it in the second show, with some reel of a horse in a field and some strange baby running out of a chicken coop. His name in with a heap of names credited as "Add'l Music" ass-end of the credits.
Someone, Maggie, would call his name, ‘Hey Shuck, you’re on!’ and not mean any meanness at all, and he had to go to the living room and pretend to be delighted with her as his dreams ran out the punctured sack of his life in semi-sync with a baby falling in mud in grainy black-and-white. He flubbed the same note, every godforsaken time.
There could have been more chances, maybe. He never asked. He gave up. It happens. I’ve given up on this tale a time or two. Maybe this time, it ends up different.
To say Shuck didn't sleep well, what with his preoccupation with the possibly felonious fraud he'd committed and its deeper implications concerning his character, wouldn't quite get near it. He lay face down on a thin sleeping bag outside the tent grinding his big teeth on rocks. Biscuit wheezed and whined next to him, fluttering her paws in protest like she dreamt of Shuck being her owner.
And of what did Shuck dream? Nothing. That was over for him.
###
Shuck sat up wild-eyed at twittering dawn. He started his day by drinking an MD 20 20 Maggie'd brought—it was orange flavored specifically for breakfast. He crept into the tent and drank and watched Maggie snore, wondering why he couldn't love her.
There was no clear answer. She was a strong, kind, lovely woman.
So why hot tears welling? He could say it: She pitied him. (She didn’t.)
He didn’t want it. (A God damned lie; it’s all he wanted.)
She deserved better. (Ain’t that the truth?.)
He hereby released her with a benedictory gesture of the bottle, which spilled a little by her foot. Afraid she’d wake and find him leering like some kind of sex-peeper, he stumbled out of the tent and rolled down a little hill into another camp.
He saw a fistfight break out between another set of campers, didn't bother to rise as he rubbernecked. A fiery redhead with droopy, mossy eyes and yellow lip-and-chin whiskers staggered around his camp, crashing through the furniture. He back-flopped onto a little picnic table and buckled it.
A woman with some allegiance to decorum or the table yelled, “Get up!” over and over.
A thick guy with short dark hair came scrabbling from a tent bewildered, surveyed the scene, and went to help his fallen comrade. But the redhead came up swinging, smacked his friend in the nose. The girl yelled, "Don't hit him, Frankie! Don't!"
Frankie could have been either one, but the kid with the bloody nose reared back and
knocked the cold piss out of the redheaded table-buster.
“No, Frankie!” the girl yelled.
Too drunk to go down or die, Red reeled and pitched, locked Frankie up in a headlock.
Now Frankie was murder-angry, but at last, the woman got them apart. Shuck mumbled, "There's a fine, strong woman." Red slumped against a tree, everybody paced. Frankie bided. The girl drifted too far away, surveying the furniture damage, and Frankie charged, bashed Red's head against the leaning sugar maple. The clang rang out across the campsites.
Red went down floppy, started yelling: "You hit my head into a tree, Frankie. I'm going to give you a red-ass beat down when I'm sober. I'll find you when I'm sober, Frankie. I'll beat the tar shit out of you. The tar shit! Tar! Shit!"
Mind cleared of turmoil for that bright instant, Shuck chuckled, Huh huh, into the dewy grass. Red kept hollering “tar shit” until the words were dispersed into Shuck's mental soup.
The woman had wandered over to where Shuck lay. “You all right, there, mister?”
Shuck nodded face down in the grass.
“Let’s get you up.”
###
With the girl in the shade of the main stage, Shuck figured now was nearly time for the raffle, felt the ice water of incoming panic in his arms and gut like he’d read about in war stories. He told himself to confess, here, now, and end this thing. Doc would get pissed, surely send him home. They’d fix the raffle box.
Instead, Shuck sipped Gatorade by the fan in front of which the woman had parked him.
She told him, "Stay put and you'll feel better," had a husky voice, looked in her late twenties but cured by hard-living, hair in cornrows and tied with tie-dyed ribbons. A thin dress and no shoes. Freckles and brown eyes. Shuck wanted her to stick around for what was coming, why, he didn't know. He said, "I'm Shuck. What's your name?"
“Syd, short for Sydney.”
“Yep.” He came up with nothing else, and she took a long look around and tapped her foot.
He was sobering up, noticed for the first time the mass of purple thunderheads perched to spill into the valley. Salvation, perhaps, if they’d roll on over and spoil the morning itinerary.
“What’s the matter, Shuck?” Syd prodded his foot with her own. “You look like you just caught your dog wolfing down your baby.”
“Jesus. What a terrible thing to say.”
(And, were Syd present back at the impromptu campfire confessional, she’d have taken the grand prize for scintillating regrets; behind her ear were the initials TK tattooed in thin blue ink and the story thereby alluded defies the scope and sensibilities of this paltry tale.)
(Suffice to say, injustice abounds. But all shall be forgiven, and those who traverse the rolling world without the weight of sin are babes alone who must tarry not with freighted souls lest they pass the precipice themselves and lose their grace. Such may have been the fate of TK, departed too soon, but, strictly speaking of the spirit, not soon enough, perhaps, ergo, alas.)
(But what do I know? I’ve never done anything; I’m only signification, the ghost of these several thousand words.)
Syd tried to laugh it off. “Just concerned, is all.” She punched Shuck’s shoulder, quite hard.
“Ouch. I’ve done something very stupid.” He didn’t know he’d admit it before he did, and the rush of relief was so great he nearly stood up.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“I cheated Doc and I’m gonna go to jail. It’s the worst day of my life, I feel sick. I’m already drunk.”
“Yeah. I smelled your breakfast on your breath. Who’s Doc?”
“The guy who runs this thing.”
“Field of Dreams Kevin Costner or Yellowstone Kevin Costner?”
“Field of Dreams.”
“He looks like a dick.”
“He isn’t. I mean, kind of. Not really.”
“How did you cheat?”
“The raffle. For the Kisanouvich. The guitar.”
“No biggie. I think all the guys in my camp must have put their names in two or three times.”
“No. I took out all the tickets and filled the box up with my own.”
She dropped her smirk. “Oh, man. You’re fucked. The Costners are gonna beat your ass.”
Shuck shuddered. One little baby teardrop slipped down his trembling cheek.
“They’re gonna take you and throw you in that pit in Wyoming. The murder pit. You watch that show?”
Shuck did watch that show. He cried a little more.
"I like to shoplift," Syd offered by way of consolation, which it wasn't. People stole all the time from his Lowes store and heretofore he'd stood in judgment, always pressed charges. No more.
That’s it–he’d change his life. He’d let people steal from the Lowe’s. Maybe Old Man Lowe had hurt them somehow in the semi-recent past. He just couldn’t know a thing like that.
A cold breeze came down from the ridge. Shuck stood up and paced a few yards, Biscuit eagerly attending him every step of the way. He came back and crossed his arms across himself, said, “That’s a stunning admission, and I feel honored and all that. But I think I better get out of this place before I’m exposed.”
Doc came over looking serious, caught Shuck by the shoulder, and said, "Hey, man, come help me set up for the drawing. We're going to get going and hope the rain waits."
Syd stepped in and said, “He was going to help me hitch a camper. That OK?”
Doc looked up at the clouds and tipped his hat back. "Well."
“It’ll just take a second.”
But they’d waited too long: helpers unveiled the raffle box already transported onto the stage. The Old Man stepped up to a squealing mic and wished the gathering crowd good morning.
Syd elbowed Shuck, “Let’s go, man. Don’t just stand there.”
But Shuck was mesmerized by the Kisanouvich, which Angeline now carried across the stage. Whispers of admiration burbled through the crowd. Despite thunderheads rolling down from the ridge, the last bits of sun danced on the tin rose. Angeline gave a wide smile and curtsey, put the guitar on a stand.
Syd pulled on his belt, but Shuck dug his feet in. The old man reached in, withdrew and read the card. Shook his head. Said into the microphone: “Shuck Johnson.”
Angeline shot Shuck a smile and picked up the guitar again. Held it out. Everybody clapped.
The Old Man said, “Get up here, Shuck.”
He thought he’d have to crawl but made it upright up the short plank stairs to the stage, took the guitar in his hands; it thrummed electric with perfect, ultra-light craftsmanship.
Doc’s father nodded to the mic for Shuck to make some kind of speech. Instead, he ran, down behind the stage and around, the crowd parting. He glanced back and saw Doc with his hands in his back pockets and his hat still cocked up, tall and stern like Gary Cooper on the stage, squinting down at his fleeing friend in confusion or embarrassment.
Maggie stood at the edge of the crowd with her arms out like Shuck would, in his elation, want to embrace, but he mistook her for festival security, juked hard, and sent her flat on her face in his dust, Biscuit stopping for a conciliatory nuzzle before charging on.
Shuck wanted to leave the guitar but could see no safe place to discard it as he ran. Then, he saw Doc's Mule ATV idling in the horse pasture.
###
They—Shuck, Syd, and a whining Biscuit—were tearing through the woods by the river in the Mule before Shuck realized he’d just added grand theft auto of a farm all-terrain vehicle to the rap sheet. Syd held the guitar to her chest, too scared, perhaps, to look up but anyway fixated on the tin-plated headstock. She moved her lips as she read the serial numbers.
He found a trail and bounced through the river dangerously, glad the morning chill still kept the campers off; otherwise, he'd have squashed man, woman, dog, and child, had any swum where there where the river intersected the winding road up out of the valley, where Shuck headed now.
They made it to the top of the ridge and Shuck clicked off the motor. Got down and listened for a while, waiting to hear someone driving up. He heard a shout or two below but far away, seemingly disinterested, or rather interested in something else entirely.
“Well,” Syd said from the passenger seat, “you might as well play me a song, Shuck.
Shuck said, “I think you better slip off somewhere. I appreciate you coming along but this is going somewhere ugly. You’ve had a bad enough morning.” The calm creeping into his voice bothered Shuck more than the woman’s ease with the conspiracy; she only shrugged and plinked on the guitar herself.
“Nah,” she said. “I’ll just say you kidnapped me.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Yeah. Guess not. Here, play something.”
At first, he couldn’t play. His fingers trembled and the last dregs of the Mad Dog churned in his sloshy head. He couldn’t remember how anything went, even after his fingers found their proper places. But then the Kisanouvich spoke to him, in a voice sonorous and clear. It said: “We was meant for one another, pal. I’ll never let somebody hurt you ever again.”
He played “Aunt Hoot” flawlessly for Syd, who did not hide her stunned weeping
admiration. As he finished, Doc’s Jeep bounced in beside the Mule. Doc and Angeline stepped out.
Doc said, “Uncool, man.” He said it again: “Unnncool.” Angeline’s big eyes sparkled. Syd lit a cigarette and shuffled in the deep, dead leaves. Doc patted Shuck’s shoulder. “How drunk are you, you son of a bitch? That was the goofiest shit I’ve ever seen.” He ran a mocking, wobbly-armed circle around the clearing, reversing course at invisible adversaries, and Angeline doubled over laughing. Doc stopped and beamed at Shuck like this was all for laughs. “So, you got wasted and entered your name like fifty times. Please tell me you remember doing that.”
Shuck set the guitar down in the Mule. “I won it,” he said, that creepy calm still in his voice. He couldn’t look Doc in the eyes.
“Dad covered for you.”
“He was really smooth,” Angeline added.
Doc shrugged. "So, I guess, no harm done. We just played it off like it was a gag. It took a long time to get all your goofy ballots out, though. Set us back half an hour. Why'd you write them differently? I have to know."
“No reason.”
“I think your girlfriend is pissed. Shit, what’s her name?”
“Maggie,” Angeline said, still laughing. She hopped up on the hood of the Jeep. “I liked her.”
Doc spun. “Watch the finish.”
“You calling me fat?”
Shuck felt like he was in a dream watching something fall on his head that wouldn’t quite land. It kept getting closer, an anvil maybe, or a big black boulder, but it couldn’t close the distance. He said, “Well.”
"Well?" Doc smiled at him, their lives already resettling back to normal.
Angeline caught Shuck’s eye, a smile of recognition dawning on her freckled face. “Wait, is this why you were asking us to confess our sins last night? Shuck, is this the worst thing you’ve ever done, stealing from your best friend in the world?”
Her eyes hardened and she held his gaze for a full three seconds, then blew a raspberry fart in her elbow and laughed. “One time, I was driving these guys around and by like, the second liquor store, I figured out they were robbing them, because, duh, the masks.” She stared wistfully out over the treetops. “But yeah, we must have hit like four that night, a drug store, too, and then we got fucked. Up.” She clapped her hands for emphasis. She sighed. “Been sober six years, though,” she added, near a whisper.
“I got caught for all that cheating and I cried and said Marjorie Simpson copied off of me and she got kicked out of school and didn’t get to go to the prom after her mother worked all those night shifts at the Dollar Store and days nursing the geriatric psych ward just to buy her dress. I could have still taken her to the prom as my date, but I didn’t want to. Ha-oooh—" Doc gave a tremendous bleat as he pounded his chest like Tarzan. "Damn, it feels good to get that out there."
Syd grinned, scrolling through her cell phone. “If we’re letting it all out there, y’all ever heard of yodel-fucking? ‘Cause I’m kind of famous. Wait, dang, I don’t have any reception.”
Shuck cleared his throat. “It was mean of you to embarrass me at Christmas when I asked to buy the guitar at a friendly rate. You hurt my feelings and you told me once I could even ask you anything.”
Doc squinted at him, appraising quietly, not liking what he was seeing.
Shuck tried not to cry. “You said we were brothers.”
Angeline said, “Aw.” Syd went and sat a ways away, her back to everyone, still playing on her phone and grumbling. Doc looked out over the cloudy morning.
Shuck said, "I just wanted it 'cause it's got our Jam the River logo right across it. You remember I came up with that design."
“I do.”
“Well.”
Doc hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. “Well.”
Shuck looked up into the treetops and said, "You can have it back."
Doc said, “We thank you. Your girlfriend—Maggie—left with all your shit.”
“I figured that. Don’t believe she’s my girl no more.”
Shuck threw a glance at Syd, who had swiveled back to watch the reunification. “But maybe that’s for the best.”
Syd shook her head, gave the slow thumbs-down of a Roman emperor. “Total lesbian. One hundred percent.”
“Everyone is, when it comes to Shuck,” Doc said, distracted by the coming weather. “Sorry. I just can’t help it.”
But then the clouds broke. The sun shone down on the guitar and Angeline looking pretty and in love lit up holding it, the scouting ray glittering on tin pedals. Hell, she looked like the veritable “Angel of the Morning Light,” which was the name of a song Shuck had written and sung for his special girls, including Maggie, missed badly now and gone forever with his tent and coolers, which were the property of Lowe's, but he wouldn't report the theft. Instead, he'd write Maggie songs and sing them to her windows until she took him back. Staring at his friends, he didn't know what in the world could be better, how he could ever truly be part of something like that.
Doc reclined against the Jeep under that lonely, only ray. Angeline waved the Kisanouvich around, laughing as it cast a dance of sparkles across Doc’s bare, goose-pimpled chest.
Everyone had what they wanted, but him. He said to himself, “It ought to be mine. I earned it.”
(And if it wasn't true, and if Shuck, not given to introspection, or, for that matter, appreciation of the kindness shown to him by abiding friendship, didn't feel the least bit sorry, so what? If we can't write it off as "poor Shuck" or say "Ah, fuck him and the giant head he rode in on" or sew the world's litter of Shucks up a pillowcase and toss them in the river, where does that leave us?)
(Maybe we just give him the damn thing, because he wants it. Like that poor jilted girl wanted to go to the promenade with handsome young Doc. Like Biscuit wants, just once, to eat everyone’s dinner while they cower in fear at his dominance. Like people like Doc and Angeline, seeming possessors of everything, must want something, too. Maybe just line them up–everyone–and give them what they want.)
(And is it possible–might this all have occurred there on that ridge to Doc, watching his sulking friend, chewing his lip, mulling over the next move? Maybe so. My narratorial intuition suggests it's just what Doc was going to say.)
Then Angeline asked, “So how are we going to decide who really gets the guitar?”
Shuck had it back before she could stop him. "Just let me see it for a second," he said and ran. And before Shuck tripped, before he bounced down the ridge and crushed the Kisanouvich to smithereens beneath him, he turned back his head and told them, "You said I only had to ask."
Lucas Flatt's work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Typehouse Literary Journal, Sundog Lit, and Ellipsis…literature and art. He won the 2016 Larry Brown Short Story award at Pithead Chapel, and teaches creative writing at Volunteer State Community College.
Budweiser Blues
by Cecile Dixon
Larry
When my olé lady, Kourtney run off with Dwayne, I took to drinking beer. A lot of beer. I still got up every morning and went to work. My brother Jimmy’s sheet rock business didn’t suffer because of my drinking. But, as soon as five o’clock rolled around I’d climb in my truck and head to The Liquor Barn for my nightly case of Bud and two packs of Marlboro reds, in the box.
I didn’t pay the nosey ass cashier no mind when he stated, “You sure buy a lot of beer.”
“That’s a fact,” I answered and walked to the door.
“See you tomorrow evening Larry,” he called to my back.
At home I’d open a can of something that Kourtney had left in the kitchen. She’d either been planning on leaving and thought I’d starve or she was prepping for Armageddon, cause the pantry was stuffed with canned goods. There must have been two cases of pork and beans alone. Not the good kind, but the store brand.
I leaned against the sink and ate pork and beans, straight from the can. That little bit of flab, that weren’t like no pork I’d ever seen, went into the trash.
After I’d finished my supper, I iced down my Bud’s in the cooler on the front porch, started a George Jones cd and kicked back in the recliner that I’d moved out there. I’d figured that after Kourtney left I could decorate any way I wanted. My style was comfortable. By the time the cd got to “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, I was on my fifth beer. Good timing. I stood and pissed off the porch and sang with George. A dog down the road howled along.
“What’s the matter, your bitch leave too?” I yelled into the darkness. The dog quit howling and the disc ended. Time for Hank Junior. I popped the top on can six, but before I could start “Rowdy Friends”, I heard the distinct sound of a Cummings Diesel. To be exact Dwayne’s Dodge. The hair on my neck prickled and I downed the beer with one swallow and was opening another when that black Dodge rolled up in front of the house.
The moon was pert-near full that night. I didn’t have any trouble making out Dwayne setting behind the wheel. He didn’t say nothing, just looked hard at me. So I give him my hardest look back. After a long minute he grinned, flipped me the bird and floored that Dodge. Black smoke rolled out of its twin stacks.
“You mother fucker,” I yelled at his taillights. I could feel hot mad burning my jaws. Son of a bitch might get away with taking my woman, cause after all she willingly walked out the door, but he wasn’t gonna rub my nose in it. I threw my cooler in the truck and lit out after him.
Now it’s a fact that a Cummins diesel is a strong engine and it’ll pull a brick house out of a shit hole, but it ain’t known for speed. I floored the pedal on my old gas guzzling-Ford and it fishtailed onto the pavement, before laying a little rubber then it smooth assed flew up the hollar. It weren’t long before I came upon Dwayne’s taillights.
I downshifted and slammed right into his bumper. The quarter inch plate steel my winch was bolted to held fast and I heard a crunch from his tailgate. Olé Dwayne must not have been expecting me to pull up on him like that cause he swerved straight into the ditch, and before I could get stopped that steel bumper of mine caught his rear quarter panel. It opened up the side of that truck bed like opening a can of peanuts. The sound of splitting metal drowned out the noise of both motors. My cooler flopped around and before I could grab, it slid to the floor. The lid held fast.
I jerked the wheel hard to the left and my bumper tore loose from Dwayne’s Dodge, taking a big hunk of his door with it. I stopped the truck and climbed out to survey the damage. The only damage to my Ford, far as I could tell was my steel bumper was jacked around a little and my winch might have gotten pinned up. Now that Dodge was a mess. Most of the bed was gone or wadded up. The tailgate was laying in the middle of road about twenty-foot back. Dwayne was trying to shoulder his door open without any luck. He finally give up and climbed out the passenger side. I was feeling bad about his truck until he opened his mouth.
“Fuck you to hell and back Larry,” he spit the words into the night. “Look what you did to my truck. I just got it painted.”
It came back to me. This was the sawed off fucker that Kourtney left me for. He started this whole mess tonight. All my mad come roaring back. We stepped toward each other at the same time. Somewhere about the middle of the road I swung with my right. Me being taller and longer my fist connected with his nose. I felt, more than heard, his nose give way. When you’re hot mad there’s nothing more satisfying than the crunch of cartilage.
Blood poured from his nostrils. He swung at me and before I could duck, his fist caught my jaw. My right ear rang. Pain shot into my temple. “My mama hits harder, you fuckin pussy,” I yelled.
Now I’ve heard athletes talk about getting in the zone. It’s true for a fact. When your body gets loaded with adrenalin you don’t feel pain. All you can think about is getting to the finish line. Or, in my case, whipping Dwayne’s ass. I wanted to give him the pain of my empty bed. The pain of talking to myself. The pain of pork and beans.
I stepped in and landed three short jabs into his nose. His eyes began to swell. Dwayne landed a gut punch at the base of my breastbone. Air whooshed out my mouth. I doubled over to try to catch my breath. He broad armed me across the back of my head. I stepped back out of his reach. Sweet night air filled my burning lungs.
I handed a hard blow to his swollen right eye. The lid split. He raised his chin up. My next punch caught his teeth. I felt my knuckles tear open. He went for my gut again. I danced and his fist landed on my right side. I jabbed his right eye again. Blood washed over his face. He caught my lips with a hook. My mouth filled with blood. I summoned every ounce of muscle in my body. I swung a roundhouse. It hit his left temple. He went to his knees hard, like a sack of led. I kicked him in his left ribcage. Bone crunched. He folded up on the pavement. I was gearing for another kick when he raised his hand. He was done for. Whooped.
I staggered back against my truck and let my mind adjust to the fact that it was over. I leaned there, trying to slow my breathing and all the pain I hadn’t felt rushed in as the adrenalin faded. There wasn’t a spot on my body that wasn’t throbbing, burning, busted or plain raw.
Dwayne groaned and rolled onto his back. I could see his chest heaving. I spit a mouthful of blood and teeth out. My Ford was still running so I opened the door and cut the engine. The red Coleman cooler was wedged on its side in the floorboard. I wiggled it free and opened the lid, grabbing two beers.
I tapped Dwayne’s boot with my toe, “here.” I handed him a beer and he pulled himself to sitting before opening it.
I sat down on the Ford’s tailgate and resisted the urge to groan with the movement. The first mouthful of my beer stung like rubbing alcohol and I used it to rinse with before spitting it out. The second drink went smoother. I watched Dwayne fumble to get his beer open. When he finally did he drank a long pull.
I finished my beer and threw the can in the ditch before getting out my tow chain. “Come on Dwayne, let’s get you out. I gotta work in the morning.”
Kourtney
“Kourtney, when are you and Larry gonna give me a grandbaby?”
Every fucking Sunday before dinner was over, my mother in law would ask me this same damn question. Today, before I could give her a vague answer my husband, Larry, spoke up.
“Mama we’re trying like heck,” Larry said with fake seriousness and put his arm around my waist, “We try every chance we get. As a matter of fact we…”
Bea, my mother in law laughed and swatted Larry with a dishtowel, “You are bad, down right vulgar.”
The moment passed. I dreaded these Sundays and tried to get out of coming every single time. Sometimes the feigned headache worked. Today it hadn’t. So here I sat, surrounded by Larry’s family, his parents, and his three sisters their husbands and so many screaming kids I couldn’t count them. All dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meetin clothes and covered with the smell of fried chicken grease.
Bea hadn’t liked me since the day Larry and me run off to Tennessee and got married. She said we should have waited and had a church wedding with a preacher. She suspected I was pregnant, and then she was disappointed when I wasn’t. We got married because of a baby all right. But it weren’t mine. It was my mama, pregnant at thirty-eight with number six. Each one of us with a different daddy. I wasn’t hanging around as the live in baby sitter anymore. I convinced Larry to elope.
This Sunday we were the first to leave the in-laws house. We usually were if I had my way.
In the car on the way home, Larry said, “You sure are quiet. You pissed about something?”
“No,” I mumbled and lit a cigarette.
“You can’t let Mama get to you. She sure don’t mean no harm.” Larry reached over and squeezed my thigh. “She don’t know how bad we want a baby.”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now Larry. I’m tired, I just want to go home.” I lowered the window a crack to let the smoke out.
“Maybe its time we went to see one of them fertility doctors.” He swallowed deep and stared straight at the road. “After all we been married four years and…” He let his voice trail off without saying it. Without saying four years married and we didn’t have a baby.
“I ain’t ready to be poked and prodded,” I reached down to turn the radio on and Larry grabbed my hand.
“Kourtney, we…” I jerked my hand away and cut him off.
“I said not now.” I turned the radio on. Even though it was a commercial for a lawnmower, I cranked the volume up, loud enough to drown Larry out.
That night he gave up trying to talk to me and drank beer until he passed out in his recliner. I slept alone and pulled the covers over my head the next morning when he came in to get ready for work. He stood beside the bed for a minute. I pretended I was asleep. I didn’t want pick up where we left off the night before. He must have been too hung over to fuss because he left without saying anything.
After I heard his truck pull out of the drive, I got up and showered and got ready for work. It was my early day. I’d have to open and get my register drawer filled before turning on the lights and unlocking the Piggly Wiggly door. I didn’t mind early days. It meant I’d get to leave early and have two full hours of me time. Time I didn’t have to account for.
I fixed my coffee and added an extra splash of sweet Italian creamer. The living room reeked of beer and I started to pick up the empty cans that were strewn around Larry’s recliner. But I stopped myself. They weren’t my mess. I reached to the top shelf of the bookcase and pulled down my grandma’s old Bible. The zippered case was worn and cracked, so I was extra careful each morning when I took it down. I ran my fingers across the gold lettering, Ada Jenkins.
Sighing I tugged the zipper open and felt inside the back cover for the pale green compact. The pharmacist label read No-Ova, with Kourtney Hoskins underneath. I pushed a small pink pill from its bubble and popped it in my mouth. Then I tucked the compact back in the Bible and placed it carefully on the top shelf before swallowing the pill with a sip of coffee.
Kids, was all I ever heard from Larry and his mama. Like having a bunch of brats was the sole reason to live. I wanted to have fun, to dance and laugh and party. I wanted to fuck for fuck’s sake. I wanted to do all the things my mama and her brats cheated me out of.
On the way to work I punched numbers into my cell. I had them memorized because I couldn’t keep it stored in my phone. Dwayne answered on the third ring.
“Hey, guess what? It’s my early day,” I held the phone to my shoulder so I could downshift at the light.
“Ummm, I bet I might be able to sneak away,” Dwayne’s voice lowered to a growl.
“Where do you want to meet at?” I pulled into the Piggly Wiggly lot. Delma Peters was already waiting at the door. She glared at me as I ignored her and continued my conversation.
“We could meet at the creek over on county line…” Dwayne whined, “I’m kinda strapped for cash right now. Car sales are down, so my commission wasn’t much.”
“I don’t really fancy the idea of getting buck assed necked in broad daylight.” Dwayne wouldn’t ever take a prize for his smarts. “I got the cash, I’ll meet you out on the lake, at the Lodge. I’ll try to get a room around back.”
Dwayne chuckled, “That’s my girl. I love you Babe.”
“I’d better get my forty five dollars worth.”
“Oh trust me you will.”
I ended the call. “I guess I’d better get this store open so Delma can get her some Ex-Lax. Olé bitch is lookin kinda constipated.” I said to myself as I plastered my best customer service smile across my face.
Dwayne
Dwayne stared at the darkness in the direction of the ceiling. He didn’t want to move and wake up Kourtney. He could feel her there, sleeping on his arm, like she didn’t have a care in the world. Sleeping in his bed, in his bedroom, in his apartment. In her mind she believed she had a right to be there.
Soon as Dwayne got home from work, there she’d be, waiting. Waiting, like she had every evening for the last two months. At first it was nice, Kourtney waiting with his dinner ready. Waiting to drink some beer. Waiting to fire up a joint. Waiting, ready to fuck. But now, it had gotten to the point where her constant waiting turned him off. She was just too willing. Last night he’d just wanted to watch The Big Bang Theory. But then she’d rubbed his crotch and his soldier had betrayed him.
So now here he laid, a prisoner in his own bed. Back when he first met her down at the Two Step, he was flattered when she bought him a beer. She was good looking and for an old married chick she had a body that made him stand to attention.
They’d been slow dancing to Josh Turner growl out Your Man. Kourtney whispered in his ear, “Show me your truck.”
In the parking lot, unlike most girls he hadn’t had to coax her into anything. She didn’t object when he rubbed his hands over her ass as he picked her up and set her in his truck. She’d pulled her jeans off and tugged his down before he had time to even feel guilty cause she was married. She didn’t even bother to take her ring off.
It had got to be a regular thing. She’d call him when she could sneak out. It was fun and he was free to live like he had, see who he wanted. All with the side benefit of a steady piece.
But, then two months ago, at three in the morning, she’d knocked on his door. “I did it,” she said like she’d won a prize. “I left Larry.”
She threw her arms around him. He pushed her back. “What the fuck did you do that for?”
She looked like she was going to cry, “So we could be together,” she touched his face. “Like we talked about.”
Dwayne tried to remember back. Lots of times she’d talk about leaving olé Larry, about what an asshole Larry was. Dwayne would grunt agreement and try to grab one of her big olé titties. He didn’t care if she left Larry. That didn’t confront him none. But he didn’t want a wife, Larry’s, somebody else, or his own. Now he guessed was too late to tell her.
Every Saturday night she still wanted to go to the Two Step and dance. She could dance with whichever good olé boy caught her eye. But, if he so much as tipped his hat at a girl, they’d be hell to pay. She wouldn’t even wait until they left the bar. She’d cuss him right there in front of God and everybody. Then she’d tie in on the girl, threaten to scratch her eyes out. Dwayne knew he was fast becoming the laughing stock of the county. Pussy whipped was what they said.
Here he was lying with a whole woman snoring on his arm, when he’d only wanted a little part of her. He carefully slid his arm from under her head. She mumbled something and smacked her lips a couple times. He flexed his fingers to get the circulation back. If only she’d stayed with Larry. Now olé Larry had wanted her. He’d heard down at the garage that Larry was still moaning the Kourtney left me blues. Dwayne slid his leg off the edge of the bed. Maybe if he could convince Larry that Kourtney saw her mistake, olé Larry might take her back.
Dwayne shifted his weight to the edge of the bed. Kourtney flung her arm out and slapped him across the chest. Dwayne froze until she rolled over and her breathing got even and deep. He’d go talk to Larry tonight. Right now.
Slowly he crept out of bed and to the living room, slid into yesterday’s jeans and carried his boots to the stoop to put them on. Once dressed, he put his truck in neutral and let it roll down the hill before starting it. He felt good. He was gonna be a free man again. Dwayne laughed out loud.
As he drove he practiced what he’d say to Larry. First off he have to say he was sorry. He wouldn’t have to lie. He was truly sorry. Then he’d have to tell Larry how sorry Kourtney was and how much she regretted leaving. This was where lying would come in handy. He’d have make Larry believe that Kourtney was just pining away.
He’d pull up and knock on the door, real respectful. When Larry opened the door he’d stick out his hand and say, ‘Man I want to apologize for any hurt I’ve caused you and I’m here to try to make it right.’ Yeah, that was a good start. They’d shake hands and he’d wing it from there.
Dwayne swung a right off the highway and onto Larry’s road. He sung along with the radio, “And this bird you cannot change.” He down shifted and let his diesel stacks cackle. “Lord knows, I can't change.”
He saw Larry’s house just ahead. He lowered the radio volume and slowed down. Just as he was getting ready to turn in the drive, he saw Larry. The Dodge’s headlights lit him up, standing on the edge of the porch with a Bud in his hand. Behind him was a recliner, a box fan, a table with a boom box and a Coleman cooler. A party on the porch.
Dwayne pulled his eyes back to Larry. Larry looked surprised, but he didn’t look heartbroken. His jaw was tight, but he didn’t look like a man who wanted his wife to come home. He looked like a man who was free to party all night long. All night on his front porch if he wanted to. One thing he sure as hell didn’t look like. He sure didn’t look like he wanted Kourtney back.
All the hope Dwayne had felt just before came rushing out, like air from balloon. Larry wouldn’t gonna take Kourtney back. He was stuck with her. Here Larry stood with Dwayne’s freedom, while Dwayne was sentenced to life with Kourtney. “Fly high, free bird, yeah,” played softly.
Slowly Dwayne raised his middle finger.
Cecile Dixon is a retired ED nurse who, after a thirty-year sojourn to Ohio, has returned to her beloved Kentucky hills to write and raise goats and geese. Cecile holds and MFA from Bluegrass Writers Studio. Her work has been published in Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Fried Chicken and Coffee, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Still the Journal, Women of Appalachia, Of A Certain Age, KY Herstory and other anthologies.
Epiphany.
That’s exactly what it was like. An epiphany.
It was 2:46 in the morning. I know this because I’d started playing a little game with myself trying to guess the time at night as I woke up off and on, whether it was the nurses checking on me or just waking up from the bed being so uncomfortable. After a week in, I needed something to pass the time. I’d awaken, look at the room, the level of dark or light outside the window, listen for the traffic, to conversations down the hall, then try to tell the time before looking at the clock to my left on the wall. I was getting pretty good.
When I woke up to the revelation that I’d sue Reverend Alamo, I guessed it was nearer morning that it actually was. I thought I could see the slightest hint of morning twilight growing from the mountains in the east. It must have been the moon or something. It wasn’t even three. I had hours to go before it was time to stir. Before things woke up along that hospital wing. No one was awake who I could have called and explained my realization, talked out my ideas. I’d have to wait for daylight.
I don’t recall most of the accident. I was already out cold before my car hit the tree head-on. I didn’t feel my face impacting the steering wheel, nose first. Or my legs getting pinned and broken. My hand burning. Who’d have wanted to be conscious while all that was happening? Lucky me.
I’ve attended the Reverend Jackie Alamo’s services at least ten times. He stops through Labor County once or twice a year. He uses the local university basketball arena, that place where they hold the monster truck rallies and Shriner Circus. It packs in 15,000. He can almost fill it. Like it’s a Tim McGraw concert.
I used to take dates from church to go see Alamo. They loved it. I’d get tickets for as close to the front as I could afford, up near the action, which got pretty expensive. Alamo had a way about his preaching. It’s like he could lull the whole place into a spiritual trance, get you feeling like anything was possible. Wasn’t that the goal, I suppose? To believe in miracles. Real miracles. After all, to believe in Jesus is to believe in miracles, not just way back then, but up to today as well. He’d say, “If you want a miracle, be the miracle!” Alamo preached and healed in a way that made it feel okay to believe, as if he wasn’t the usual snake oil slinger.
We’d be so worked up after watching all that screaming and healing we’d end up skinny dipping out on the river. I’m surprised we didn’t evaporate it up we were so hot. Any preacher who’d assist me like that in getting lucky was alright in my book.
So, yes, I was a believer, I guess, whatever that means. That can be something different for whoever you ask. Mamaw swears he healed her scoliosis. My third cousin Ronald claims Alamo cured his chronic hemorrhoids, right there in the middle of a service. Said he could hardly sit on those hard arena chairs one moment, the next moment the pain was gone and Ronald was tossing his blow-up donut into the aisle and doing a little happy dance. Ronald said it’d been worth every penny he’d given over the years during the offertory.
Everywhere Alamo goes people claim they’re getting healed by this man. Some when he lays hands on them, some just sitting in their wheelchair across the arena floor. He gives the invitation after an hour of singing and another hour of holler preaching and they line up by the hundreds. He claps the palm of his hand right to their foreheads as fast as his deacons can walk, limp, or roll the afflicted across the stage. Once he begins there are twitching bodies all over. He’ll aim is hand out into the first few rows and zap a few and the aisles fill with half-conscious mumblers. The band and choir grow louder the crazier it gets. Some are even healed from great distances. That’s how I ended up here in this hospital bed. Here with nothing to do but watch a clock in the middle of the night.
Reverend Alamo runs a public access show on Channel 6 on Tuesday evenings. Prayin’ at the End Times, it’s called. It simulcasts on the radio as well. He’s got singers on the show, guest preachers, he interviews people. There’s usually a small crowd in the studio made up of guests and family. Enough to say plenty of Amens and Bless their hearts through the hour.
He says since it’s impossible for him to pray for everyone individually, and since God responds better to specifics when it comes to prayer, he takes the week’s prayer requests and puts them all in a round fishbowl and pulls the “Lucky 7” at the end of each show.
“Lord, Ms. Greene wants her son to quit the pills!”
“Jesus, Lord, help the Mayes Family get through Papaw John’s colonoscopy alright.”
“Help Mr. Jenkins with his ‘special problem’ with the ladies, Lord!”
Stuff like that.
He has a special guest every show. Someone who needs relief from some ailment by some “good old-fashioned healing.”
He was talking directly to me that evening. I knew it just as plain as day.
I’m not a regular listener to Reverend Alamo’s show, but we don’t have that many radio stations around here, so I just happened to land on his show and stay during my fifteen-minute drive home from work.
The topic of migraines caught my attention. He was interviewing a little kid named Frankie who suffered awful migraines. So bad he had to be homeschooled. He’d have them every day, his mother said. He’d have to take a nap in a dark room for an hour or two once they hit. It was debilitating, especially for a little kid in third grade. He shouldn’t have to be dealing with that. It was worrying his poor mother Joann to death over the boy.
My problems with migraines waited until my mid-thirties. Fine one day, literal blinding migraines the next. I was at a music store in town, talking guitars. A tiny blind spot popped up to the right of my sight, but I thought nothing of it. Until it started growing. Then lightning streaks began pulsing down along the blind spot. The blind spot got even bigger. I had to sit down. I was half blind. My head started hurting. I thought I was having a stroke. It set off a panic attack.
It was a “migraine with aura,” the doctor said. At first, they’d come and go. A few times a week then nothing for a month, then days in a row. No sense to it whatsoever. But they’d gotten worse, minimum, one or two, a week. They’d make me late for work or I’d have to go home early. Call in a sick day. Ruin plans. A constant anxiety.
Alamo was talking up a big game on the radio with Frankie, the migraine boy.
“This affliction, brothers and sisters…this neurological ailment…back in the olden days, when Jesus walked with us in the flesh…I’m sure a migraine episode would have been interpreted as some form of demonic attack…and perhaps the Lord himself would have thought it was some kind of devilish possession – and I ain’t saying the Lord would have been wrong, but who are we to say we know all the workings of the brain? Who’s to say the Great Liar doesn’t have a hand in causing such a chronic pain and discomfort in a boy’s life, causing his poor mother to worry like she does?”
He was actually opening the door to Satan having some hand in migraines.
“We’re gonna do what we can to help you, son, okay?” he said softly to the boy. “Let’s pray for Frankie,” he began, but before he started, he added, “and y’all keep in mind that next month – June – is countywide Migraine Awareness Month as declared recently by our County Judge Executive and county board. Remember to wear your sparkly silver ribbons, y’all.”
I was paying attention, but half-heartedly up to that point. Sure, the little kid had migraines. Him and me and a million others. But then he homed in on me, or at least it felt like it.
“But Frankie here ain’t alone in his suffering, brothers and sisters in Christ! Somebody out there’s got the same problem as little Frankie here! The same bad headaches, these awful migraines,” he said, sounding like he was only a breath away from having a fit of tongues. “I feel they’re on the road tonight – listening right now to the show. Lord, you know who they are. Where they’re at out in the big world tonight.”
I laughed. This would really hit home with the few that have migraines who just happen to be listening in on this station at this very moment. For all I knew that might have been only me at that moment. The more he talked, the more it felt just like that. Alamo calling out to me across the radio waves on a Wednesday evening. I’d just had one earlier that morning, out of nowhere. I was almost late to work over it.
“You know who you are. You and Jesus. Frankie and me are gonna pray for a healing. For him. For you. Whoever you are!”
Alamo got louder and more excited. I was paying very close attention by now.
“Lord, you are the Great Physician!”
But why just poor little Frankie? Why just me listening right now?
“You know what’s causing these headaches, these terrible migraines!”
What’s up with all this picking and choosing, why not cure it all in one swoop of the miraculous healing hand?
“Reach down your healing hands and take this burden…”
I might have started out intrigued by Alamo, but I have to say, I was getting angry by then. Alamo was like this – convincing one minute, ridiculous the next.
I felt like my ailment, my burden, was just a prop for his show, for that moment of attention he craved. I’ve been on the fence about the guy. I’d get something useful from one of his sermons, have a good date from the experience, doubt most of his healing theatrics but walk away thoroughly entertained. Even inspired. It was something to do.
But now? Now the whole obviously staged routine was just pissing me off. Alamo was just using Frankie and his mother. Hell, he was using me and didn’t even know me, some blank face out there with a convenient headache problem.
“Screw you, Alamo,” I remember saying, reaching for the radio dial to find another station.
People say, the next thing I knew, this and that, etc., and it can be an exaggeration. It’s true, though, I reached for the radio knob, there was a spark like a shock, and the next thing I knew I was coming to in the hospital. I’d gone off the road straight into a tree. My hand was scorched, which confused everyone since there was no fire in the car. I’d bashed my face into the steering wheel (the airbag had been deployed before and not replaced when I bought it). The dash had dropped and pinned my legs at the knees, causing fractures.
The doctors and nurses inquired about my hand.
At first, I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing at all, but after a day things focused back. I explained what I’d been listening to and the explosive spark when I’d reached for the radio. They figured I was confused and checked me again for a concussion. No, I insisted, I remembered clearly now. It was coming back to me. I reached to turned the station and the radio exploded and everything went black. Next thing I was in the hospital.
Electrical malfunction, obviously, the doctor figured dismissively. The nurses nodded. Why argue? I hardly knew myself. But with my injuries I had days to lay around thinking on it. Better details came to me what had happened. Alamo’s show. The kid and his mother. Migraines. The more I remembered, the angrier I got.
After my “epiphany,” I called up an old friend of mine. Ramsey Middleton and I went to school together. He attended law school and came back home and set up a solo practice downtown. I called him up from the hospital. He came to visit, and we talked. He didn’t doubt me. Didn’t doubt my story. He didn’t need to, he said. His job, he said, as an attorney, was to listen and tell me whether he thought I had a case. I did, he said. A good one.
But, I wondered, how could a preacher, miles away, who didn’t know me, didn’t know where I was at the time of incident in question, be held responsible for my accident?
“Answer me this,” Ramsey asked, “Did he cause your accident?”
“Yes,” I said. I truly believed he had.
“What caused you to have the accident?” Ramsey asked. I felt like I was in a deposition.
“Getting shocked and knocked the fuck out by the radio in my car,” I said.
“Right. And what caused that? A malfunction?”
“Not as such,” I said.
At this point I had to make a decision, didn’t I? Had the good reverend sent his healing vibes out over the mystic airwaves and zapped me? Or, had I touched the dial of my radio at just the precise moment it malfunctioned with a long-overdue short and knocked myself out from the electrocution?
I’d been in the hospital for a week and a half. I’d thought hard on it. Had I experienced a migraine in that long. Not that I remembered. How long had it been that I’d gone a week or more without a bad headache? Had something the doctors given me helped? Was it the simple relaxation? Change of environment? Diet?
Or was I healed?
“Commit to something,” Ramsay encouraged. “It’ll dictate where we go with this. If you’re serious.”
Oh, I was serious. This guy was going to pay for this.
“I’m serious.”
By the next day: no migraine. I was ready to commit to the idea of being both miraculously healed and the victim. Healed through a miracle man. The victim of that same man of God’s ability to reach out willy-nilly and zap people without their permission, healed or not.
I called Ramsey up and told him where I’d settled on my commitment. Definitely healed. Definitely a victim.
Our plan? Invite Alamo to come see me, a fan and frequenter of his services, explaining my recent and serious injuries. Maybe he’d visit. We’d spring our accusations on him.
He’d deny any involvement, of course. Ramsey saw it like this: Alamo would claim he’s not responsible for injuries, which means he’d have claim one of at least two things — one, that I wasn’t “touched” by the Spirit through him through the radio, basically that it didn’t happen, though it could have, since he’s talented like that, but I was lying, or two, that because he’s a fraud, the whole thing’s impossible to begin with. One makes me look like ambulance-chasing fool. Two makes him a crook. Which do you think he’ll claim?
We’d find out.
Half a week later the Reverend Jackie Alamo said he was coming to visit. Ramsey and I were ready.
“Lord, son, bless your poor heart,” he started as I rattled off my injuries. “Two fractured legs just above the knees. A busted nose.” My eyes were just then starting to clear up from the awful bruising. “My hand’s still healing from the burns,” I said, shaking my head.
“Was there a fire, son?” he asked.
“More of a big spark that burnt me, when I touched the radio…” I began.
He nodded, taking it all in.
“…at just about the time you were praying with that kid with the migraines, and his mother, on your show…remember?”
Alamo blinked once, looked around, at Ramsey and back to me.
“You were listening to the show, were you?”
“Yes, sir, I was. And I’m one of those people I guess you were reaching out to with that migraine prayer you were doing.”
“Well, I hope you’ve had some relief, maybe, from them…since?” he asked, a little sheepish suddenly.
I nodded, “Yes, sir…I think maybe…I’ve been cure. It’s been almost two weeks. No headaches.”
His eyes widened and he gave a little gasp.
“Glory to God!” he sort of yelled, but not loud enough to disturb out in the hall. “That’s wonderful news, young man!” He was excited. “When you’re better we should have you on the show. People will love hearing about your story…”
I continued, “The shock came from touching the radio, preacher…that you were sending the healing through.”
He smiled, proudly. “I have no doubt, young man! This wouldn’t be first time we’ve had healings from a distance through faith, yes, sir!”
Ramsay interrupted about that time. He’d shoved his hand into his coat pocket and produced a manila envelope. He handed it to Alamo, who looked up at Ramsey and at the envelope as he took it with is hand.
Ramsey smiled his “gotcha” smile and said, “Mr. Alamo – you’ve been served.”
Alamo’s eyes got even bigger. “What the hell’s this, buddy?”
My, how his attitude suddenly changed.
I continued, “Right as I got shocked and burnt with whatever you were serving up over the airwaves, I blacked out, you see, and didn’t stop until I’d wrapped my Toyota Corolla around a big sycamore. All this is from that car wreck, you see?” I nodded at my injuries.
Alama looked up from scanning the letter.
“And you’re suing me? Why would you do such a thing?”
Ramsey chimed in. “Now let’s not play dumb, Mr. Alamo.” I noticed how Ramsey was refusing to call him reverend or preacher. “It is our contention that your special and miraculous powers are what caused these injuries. What caused him to wreck. My client’s lucky to be alive.”
“You can’t blame this one me!” he whispered, pointing at all of my injuries.
“You heal people, don’t you? In person and from a distance?”
“God does, son, not me,” he countered.
“That’s not how you sounded just now. A little while ago you sounded very much willing to accept that you’d been party to a miracle. Even responsible. Wanted him to come on your program to show him off,” Ramsey reminded Alamo.
“I can’t help what God causes!” Alamo hissed.
“You’d blame this on God,” I asked, holding up my charred appendage.
“Yes! I mean, no!”
Alamo was getting really frustrated. He tried calming down.
“But if you are cured,” he tried again, “why question it? Sometimes God trades us one thing for another. Maybe this unfortunate accident had to happen, along with your healing?”
Ramsey jumped in. “You’re going to make that argument in front of a jury of your peers, sir?”
“Are you shaking me down, young man?” he asked Ramsey. “It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried costing me some money over a healing supposedly gone wrong.”
“Oh, is that right?” Ramsey said. “Good to know. Look, preacher man,” Ramsey tried again, “You either did or didn’t heal him? He says he’s healed. Is he healed?”
“I won’t call anyone a liar who says their healed by the grace of God, no sir.”
“Is it possible you helped heal him by means of his listening to your program?”
“That’s possible, yes.”
“Is it possible your healing caused him to wreck when it happened?”
Alamo gave that some thought, probably realizing he’d talked too much already, mumbled something about calling his lawyer.
Ramsey said, “The way I see it, either my client is lying about being healed, lying about his incident, or you didn’t or can’t heal in the way we’ve described. That’s a lot of choices for a jury to dig through, if you ask me.”
Alamo didn’t like so many choices. He got up in a huff and pulled on his coat and walked for the room door and turned.
“I’ll see y’all in court, damn you!” he yelled, this time loud enough for the whole wing to hear him.
A few months later and we were in the thick of it. We’d learned just how tough Alamo’s private attorney, Jessica Hicks, could be. She’d first tried to get the whole thing dismissed on the grounds of frivolity, at one point calling us “simple idiots” for claiming such a thing as “damages by way of negligent spiritual healing.” Still, no migraines. A miracle.
During further discovery, Hicks said about me, “It doesn’t matter if he was healed or not. That’s beside the point. Only the plaintiff was in the vehicle at the time before and during the accident. All we have to do is show doubt as to whether he’s being truthful. We don’t know if he, in fact, suffered from migraines. We don’t know if he, in fact, was listening to the Reverend Alamo’s show that evening. We don’t know if he, in fact, was burnt by the radio. There are no witnesses. We just have to paint the plaintiff as a liar and a kook.”
Still, no migraine.
Ramsey told me he wasn’t feeling 100% on our chances. He said Hicks was used to fighting for Alama, that was obvious. “I’d rather not go to trial if we can help it, buddy,” he told me.
But I’d collected up my prescriptions from the doctor. I had copies of my doctor’s exams. Was I a migraine sufferer in the past? Indeed, I was. We could prove that. And I hadn’t taken my medicine in a while, so I had more than I should have. Every little bit of evidence would count, even if it there were objections.
No migraine.
My insurance wasn’t covering $23,560 worth of my treatment (so far) and we were claiming another $100,000 worth of pain and suffering. I was determined to press it, even though I’d gotten past the point of free advice from Ramsey and his bill, though discounted, was accumulating.
By now I’d gone two-and-a-half months without a single migraine. I was all in, convinced I’d been cured by a miracle. I wasn’t exaggerating. I thanked Reverend Alamo during a settlement meeting. He seemed stunned, at first, as if I was acting the part, but I think he saw through all the strangeness going on around us, past the lawsuit, past the attempts at proving this or that, and finally believed in his own miracle.
The more I agreed that, yes, this was a miracle, and that, yes, he’d helped heal me, the more he wanted people to know the fact. The more he wanted me on his show. Maybe it was due to so many of his prior healings being bogus. Hicks could tell Alamo wasn’t dependable when it came to sticking to his plead of “not guilty” of negligence. He might say it out loud, but his demeanor would be pride in the courtroom. Hicks sensed this.
Maybe Alamo just needed a win. For himself. And God.
I agreed to be a guest on Prayin’ at the End Times. To say how I’d been healed, once a poor sufferer of the Devil’s headaches. How I didn’t miss work anymore because of those awful migraines. I’d prayed with Reverend Alamo along with his other guest, an old man suffering from lifelong GERD, or acid reflux. His poor wife Sheila was with him. We prayed for his healing, and told anyone out there suffering with GERD and listening on the radio and plead with them to reach out and touch the radio dial for a great blessing. Amen.
I got a check in the mail a week later for $123,560.
Larry D. Thacker’s poetry and fiction is in over 200 publications including Spillway, Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry South, The Southern Poetry Anthology, The American Journal of Poetry, and Illuminations Literary Magazine. His books include four full poetry collections, two chapbooks, as well as the folk history, Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia. His two collections of short fiction include Working it Off in Labor County and Labor Days, Labor Nights. His MFA in poetry and fiction is earned from Wet Virginia Wesleyan College. Visit his website at: www.larrydthacker.com
A hundred times the Colonel had walked into Rip’s barber shop and nobody had ever stared at him until now. The Colonel felt the tattooed kid’s eyes tracking him as he walked to the chair wearing his Army uniform.the
Rip sat the Colonel in the chair and fastened the cape over the medals and pressed blue cloth.
“Haven’t seen you in uniform in a while,” Rip said. He ruffled the Colonel’s hair with his fingers, taking scissors and a comb from the counter under the mirror.
“Reserves. Guys trying to remember their best days,” the Colonel said.
Rip pulled the comb up the left side and worked the scissors around the Colonel’s ear.
“Your best day, you weren’t even in uniform,” Rip said, nudging the Colonel’s head to the right.
“These days,” the Colonel said, “Reserves is like a social club. Old roosters drinking coffee and forgetting the pain.”
The punk kid said something into his cell phone, talking about some military freak just walking in. The Colonel didn’t like that tone, sneering as he said it while he looked the Colonel in the eye.
The Colonel rose and faced the tattooed kid. The ink was dark and fresh on the winged serpents and snakes coiling from his arms to his neck.
“Keep your mouth shut when I’m in the shop,” the Colonel said. The kid had no reaction. “Respect the uniform.” The Colonel thought the kid had the dead eyes of a boy who didn’t care much about anything.
“The Army fought for your freedom and men died in faraway jungle swamps and drowned and sank in the middle of the Pacific.”
The kid didn’t blink, staring at the Colonel. Drugs, the Colonel figured. Some kind of indifference that separated youth from the tortuous process of growing up, and he fought the urge to slap the kid but finally got back in the chair.
Rip put the cape back on, trimmed the sides and layered a little on the top even though there wasn’t much hair up there. Rip put the scissors away and switched on the electric clippers.
“Trim up that neck, and a little menthol after shave.” Rip buzzed the Colonel’s neck and finished up with the comb and some tonic.
The Colonel rose and slipped a twenty into Rip’s hands and waited for the kid to go sit in the chair. The kid lingered but the Colonel stood there. The punk kid climbed into the chair. The Colonel stood to the side of the kid.
“You want to talk about wars?” the punk said. “What kind? Gang wars?” One side of his mouth curled into an ugly sneer. The Colonel thought about hitting him in the face, knuckles on chin.
“Don’t ever compare a gang to the United States Army,” the Colonel said.
The kid rose and moved toward the Colonel, standing right in front of him.
“Get near me again, I fucking blast you,” the kid said. “Come up when you’re not looking. Pop your cracker ass.”
The Colonel didn’t respond well to threats, never had, and he said, “Come on, you scum,” and grabbed a pair of scissors from the blue jar of alcohol and pressed the sharp point against the punk’s tattooed neck until Rip yelled and grabbed his arm and made him drop the scissors.
For days afterward the confrontation kept the Colonel up at night replaying how the argument went beyond anything he’d imagined it would be.
Two weeks later the Colonel sat in the barber chair under the cape asking Rip for a new hair style, Rip clanking scissors in the sterilizing bath.
Rip thumbed through a men’s magazine, found a photo and showed it to the Colonel.
“The fuck is that?” the Colonel said, stabbing a fat finger at the picture.
“Somethin’ new.”
“Dude’s twenty years old.”
“Ain’t a lotta choices with hair like you got.”
“One time I’m trying for a different look and you flash some punk with a fade and a tat.”
“Come on,” Rip said. “Let’s go with the usual. Little talc and tonic, you as good as a sailor in Hong Kong.”
Scanning the magazine photos, contour fades and too much pomade wasn’t what the Colonel had in mind. He needed a nod and a word from Rip that everything was cool, his hair wasn’t thinning out too much. Not too bad Colonel, it ain’t that thin, seen less hair on thirty year olds. If he said something like that, it would be good, the Colonel thought.
The Colonel watched Rip in the mirror looking him over, Rip saying, “Relax, just ease on down, nice trim and some menthol, go down to Freddy’s and have a cold beer around five and I’ll meet you for a drink.”
“You remind me of a barber I had in the Philippines,” the Colonel said,
“thought slapping menthol on a dude solved everything.”
Rip didn’t say anything, just smoothed the Colonels hair with his hand like he was petting a cat.
The Colonel said, “Ah, man. Didn’t mean to sound like I don’t respect you and your place. Come in, get a good cut, you listen to all my war stories and bullshit.”
The Colonel looked at himself in the mirror. Age comes quietly.
“You guys use pomade back in those days?” the Colonel said.
“Anything greasy, we used it.”
“Shit, back then it was 57 Chevys and girls, taking it all downtown. Dean Martin on the box singing Sway I’d be dancing and getting lucky. It’s different now.”
I’m different now. You don’t want to notice the little things that are happening to you. It was hard for him to think that way, and he didn’t want to say it out loud. He knew Rip knew it too. But Rip’s job was to make men feel good without lying to them, without exposing too much about what he knew, gently letting on where the thin patches were and if you had a big mole on the back of the neck or something ugly growing where it shouldn’t be.
The door swung open and street sounds flooded in, horns and engines and the punk kid came in and walked past the chair, earphones plugged in and he hummed and stared at the Colonel in the mirror.
Rip clicked on the trimmer and the low buzz whined around the Colonels’ ear. The Colonel felt the tickle of the clippers shearing off his little hairs, and the stare of the punk in the mirror.
“Get you looking real good there, Colonel,” Rip said. He put the mirror in the Colonel’s hand. In the mirror the Colonel saw the punk measuring him. He told Rip to swing the chair around. Rip took a bottle of tonic off the counter and opened it, spread it through his hair with his fingers, but he didn’t swing the chair around. The kid, reflected in the big mirror on the wall, was scratching his side, standing, watching the Colonel. Rip rubbed some more tonic through the Colonel’s gray hair and the back of his neck.
The punk shifted his weight and the Colonel caught a flash of something, a knife maybe, along his belt line. The Colonel put his thumb through a lock of hair and smelled the tart citrus of the hair product.
“Nice head of hair.” Rip drew the comb through the Colonel’s hair. “Some of this juice make it grow a little faster.”
The Colonel felt Rip’s hand touch the top of his fingers of his left hand.
“You want,” Rip said, “I’ll call Vicky. Have her come over and do a manicure. These fingers look a little rough.”
“Maybe some other time.”
The punk turned and walked out.
The Colonel paid Rip twenty and went outside. He didn’t see the kid anywhere, like he disappeared down the drain into the sewer and out to sea. Seeing the kid set off the mechanism the Colonel still hadn’t gotten rid of, triggering his defenses, setting him on high alert.
The air was thick with fumes from cars and buses passing on the street. A church bell chimed as the Colonel settled into his Chrysler and started the ignition, checked around the car and in the mirrors.
The Chrysler’s tank was almost full but the Colonel wanted to park under the gas station overhang in the shade next to the pumps so he could watch the intersection. Two buses and a motorcycle with a rider wearing a red helmet and leather jacket roared past him. It was something he did, inspecting the moving traffic as if he had a duty to do so.
Inside the trunk, the Colonel found the small canvas pouch, unsnapped the fasteners and found a squeeze bottle of peroxide and some bandages. He got the key from the attendant and unlocked the restroom out back. The cold water hurt the cuticles of his fingers, bloodied and curled from the Colonel pulling the skin from the nails, his nervous habit. The peroxide burned. He stood with his back to the mirror and attached small bandages to the tips of two fingers on his left hand. His ring finger, where he used to wear the wedding ring, was badly chewed and he poured more peroxide on that one until the bleeding stopped. He’d put the ring away five years ago, six years after the divorce.
A couple of years ago he’d go to the barber shop and talk to Rip and other men even when he didn’t get his hair cut. His stories seemed from another era, and he sensed when other men tuned him out, reading their newspapers or changing the subject. The Colonel wanted some place to go and talk with other men, nothing fancy or anything, just a place to go and be with people. Driving around occupied his days now but it gave him too much time to think and be alone. The kid had gotten under his skin and made him uneasy, the way he felt when clothes didn’t fit right or he’d forgotten to do something.
Freddy’s place was dark. Two fellows sat at the bar. Two years ago, Freddy slumped behind the bar and stopped breathing just as the Colonel was finishing a beer, about to order another. The Colonel thumped on Freddy’s chest for five minutes like he knew CPR or something but he got him ticking again. When he came back to work Freddy said he didn’t want to talk about it so they shared long silent glances at each other. The Colonel had seen blank stares like that in the war, when boys saw things they shouldn’t have to see and looked for answers that never came.
The Colonel took a seat and Freddy gave a nod and poured a beer and set it down. After a few moments Freddy was back with a towel to wipe down the wooden bar. He asked the Colonel how things were.
“Like they always are, Freddy.” They talked, saying nothing, back and forth, the weather, the heat, the slump of all the establishments along the street. If Freddy couldn’t stand talking about his health, how he was feeling and getting along, the Colonel couldn’t see bringing up the punk kid and the threat he was feeling. You didn’t go places with some men when they signal off limits to certain things in the past. The conversation faded after they concluded that the neighborhood joints were losing to the national brands and baseball season was just too long.
Freddy nodded and turned away to service some customers. Bartenders did that, the Colonel knew, indulging in small talk until it seemed appropriate to move on down the bar. There were always things to do behind the bar, and the Colonel was relieved when Freddy moved away. The Colonel took a seat in a back booth, finished his beer and went out the door to the alley where a man stood hunched over with his hand down inside of a shopping cart.
It was almost five o’clock. Rip might be coming by soon.
Too much thinking, that was the Colonel’s problem. He knew it but he couldn’t stop watching for signs of the kid walking past the thrift shop, the taco joints, the used musical instrument store and the other cheap storefront businesses. Like a compass needle swinging north, his thoughts veered back to the kid.
He’d turn and look down the brick alley; the kid’s image filled his brain. Look out toward the street with the popping and the siren fading now in the distance; there was the kid in his mind committing a crime, a burglary, robbing a convenience store and the cops chasing his ass into an alley with a slice of blue sky overhead where an old man sat with his cart and a used up old war veteran stood immobilized thinking too much about what things should have been like and never having the courage or desperate self-realization to tell someone that he was alone and he’d be alone and he wanted to be alone but he knew it was pulling him into a dark, dark place where he’d fade away and nobody would know and nobody would care.
When Betty left him, he tried to come to terms with his demons and she listened for an hour but it was too late, she said, too late and she’d grown weary of his self-imposed solitude that gnawed the guts of their marriage.
Haircuts now and once in a while a beer and a word or two with someone paid to wait on him or cut his hair and, hell, the stare-down with a punk while he was gripping a pair of scissors was the strongest human interaction he’d had all year and he hated it, but he needed it.
The sky was going grey. The Colonel waited on the corner watching lights go green-yellow-red and the crosswalks filling with people filing through glass doors onto sidewalks laughing and chatting softly in low dull noise, blind to the Colonel’s vigil.
A woman with two canvas tote bags holding a cell phone got off the bus and stepped around the kiosk and faced the Colonel, looking down at the phone and back at the Colonel.
“Is this the place to get the good churros?” she said, pointing at the cell phone screen. Her red head scarf was tied off in the back. Her hands were thick and dark.
The Colonel didn’t know anything about churros, what they were or where to get something like that, some Mexican dish he’d never heard of.
“Is that Mexican food?” he said.
“Hablas Espanol?” the woman said.
“No.”
“Yes, it’s at the bakery. La panaderia.”
“La panaderia.” The Colonel repeated the word, trying to say it the way the woman had said it.
“Tu ves? Tu hablas Espanol.” She laughed. “My daughter is home now and she ask for los churros. Only los churros, Mama.”
“The only bakery I know is around the corner.” He pointed to the right where the bus turned down the boulevard.
“Would you mind, por favor,” the woman said, “walking with me. No se este barrio.”
They walked together toward the bakery.
The woman asked the Colonel about the neighborhood. “Is it safe at night?”
“Most of the time.”
“Every place has problems,” she said.
“Keep an eye out for your surroundings. Do you have a good flashlight?”
The woman didn’t know the word.
“A light. Something to use in the dark.”
“Oh, la luz. No, I don’t have one.”
“They have them at hardware stores,” the Colonel said. “Get a good one. Twenty or thirty dollars but worth the money.”
“It is important to feel safe.”
Yes, the Colonel thought, it is important to be safe. Giving the woman some helpful advice felt good to him.
People didn’t ask him things like that anymore. He’d be in the uniform and people would say, ‘Thank you for your service’ sometimes, but no one ever asked him in a store, for instance, what you need to have in an emergency, or how to protect a home from burglars. A whole day in uniform, walking around, eating in a café, drinking at Freddy’s and not once would a stranger engage in conversation about a first aid kit.
The woman walked next to him with long strides, pointing at pink and white blossoms in the wooden planter in front of a dress shop, tugging on his arm as they stopped to look in the store window display filled with beauty products, crème rinse bottles and plastic combs and she sighed as a woman inside primped in front of the large mirror. The woman was staring now at the beautiful woman inside spraying her sleek black hair and the stylist behind her smoothing the shoulders of her blue shirt.
Inside the panaderia cases were filled with pastries, cakes and cookies. Women and men swarmed around eating and drinking coffee, laughing and chatting in Spanish. It smelled the way it did when his wife, Betty, used to bake oatmeal raisin cookies and apple pies. Cinnamon, fresh coffee and warm frosting.
The women took the Colonel’s arm and pointed to the churros, dusted with powdered sugar and said she would like to buy him something for helping her find the bakery.
“That’s not necessary,” the Colonel said, thanking the woman. “My pleasure.”
She ordered churros and sugar cookies. The counter man wrapped the baked goods in waxed paper. They went outside to the cool air. It was dark. The woman opened the bag and took out a length of churro wrapped in paper and handed it to the Colonel, who took it and thanked her.
“I can walk you back to the bus stop,” he said, “and then I have to go.”
They started down the block, walking slowly, stepping aside as men and women passed them on the sidewalk in the early evening. It had been a long time since he’d walked with a woman, maybe years, but he couldn’t remember exactly how long. He’d called Betty a few years after they’d divorced to ask her if she’d meet for coffee, take a walk around town, just to see how each other was doing, nothing intimate or leading. She’d agreed, and they set a time and place. When the time came the Colonel dressed in a new white shirt and blue sport coat and waited at the museum where they were supposed to meet. He waited two hours before he got in his car and went home.
The tattooed kid and the threat was in the back of the Colonel’s mind now, still there, but not so pronounced.
The Colonel stopped and said, “There’s a Surplus Store around the corner a couple of blocks. We can get you a good flashlight.”
“I don’t have much money.”
“Come on, I’ll buy you one.”
She agreed, saying over and over she didn’t want to take charity. She used another word, something in Spanish. The Colonel looked at her as she was talking. She was smiling and nodding the whole time.
The Colonel found her a small penlight that would be perfect for a purse. Not too big. Small enough to conceal in her hand but enough light to stop a man from seeing anything when the light was shined into the eyes. He purchased the light for thirty-five dollars and unboxed the light and inserted batteries. They went outside. The Colonel clicked the light and showed the woman it had three levels of brightness. He had her click on the light a few times. People were coming down the sidewalk, so he handed it to her and told her to use it whenever she needed to.
The woman slowed down as they approached the bus stop, rearranging the bag under her arm. The Colonel wanted to ask if she needed a ride, and he almost said it but he didn’t and the bus came and the woman thanked him. He watched her go up the steps into the bus and wave at him as the bus began to move. He knew there wasn’t a way that he could have made the short encounter with the woman mean anything more than what it was, but he wished it had lasted a little longer. He had handled himself with dignity, he told himself, and he felt a little foolish thinking that he wanted to make something more, when the woman only wanted some protection when she didn’t know the neighborhood.
The amber street lamps threw a soft glow on the sidewalk casting shadows behind trash cans outside the stores and reflections of golden light sparkled in windows and the eyes of people and off of their shiny shoes. The Colonel walked in the direction of the parking lot where his Chrysler was under a tree in the third row. It was a few blocks away.
The churro she’d given him felt warm in the bag. He peeled back the wax paper and took a bite of the soft doughy bread. He could have been a criminal on the street, but the woman had trusted him and had chosen him from the people standing at the bus stop.
He drove home and entered his apartment, closed and locked the door and waited in the dark for a moment before turning on the light. Listening for any unusual sounds, he found everything quiet and amused himself when he realized the only sound he heard was his breathing. He turned on the light, went to his small record collection and pulled out Dean Martin’s Greatest Hits and set the vinyl disc on the turntable.
Two days went by. The Colonel drove his Chrysler around, watching, waiting. On the third day he made coffee and cleaned up and dressed and went out to the car port to the Chrysler, not knowing where he would go. There was no place in particular he had to be, or anyone he had to meet with. The metal covering on the car port was heating up with morning sunlight and a dog barked on the other side of the fence of an old two-story manor house where kids played in the back yard sometimes, but not now, not on this weekday.
The dog growled and barked again, near the fence, and the Colonel heard him rustling around, digging possibly, digging for his bone or trying to make a tunnel under the fence and get out of the backyard and face the neighborhood and see the sights and be a dog who once in a while escaped his confines and made his way out for a walk among the wonderful creatures of the world.
The Colonel heard a scrape of shoe behind him just before he took his keys out of his pocket. He turned around. Two punks behind him, and he heard a third in front of him now. They’d converged as he’d listened to the dog tilling the soil at the fence. He could only see the two at one time, or look at the one who’d appeared from the other angle. He was surrounded on two sides, and on the other side were the Chrysler and the fence. It wasn’t the same punk kid from the barber shop. None of them were familiar to him. Both kids were coming straight at him and the Colonel turned just enough to see the third kid stepping toward him.
They closed in and stood a few feet from the Colonel at the back of the Chrysler. The dog was barking very loud. The Colonel didn’t say anything, looking at the two who stood together to his right. On his left, he could feel the cold stare of the third boy in his sleeveless white t‑shirt and shaved head. The Colonel had his right hand in his pocket and activated his phone to call 911.
“Don’t turn around now,” the Colonel said. “See that camera up there?” He pointed over his shoulder at the upper eaves of the apartment building. “And you hear that dog?”
White T‑shirt sniffed but the Colonel focused on the boys on his right. They both looked up at the eave.
The fat one on his right wore a red hoodie and pulled the hood over his head and tightened the string. The other stood still. White T‑shirt stepped in front of the Colonel as if he thought he could hide from the camera. The cameras were just for effect. They weren’t functional. The Colonel had the phone in his hand now, out from his pocket.
A female dispatcher responded. “911…what is your emergency?”
“What the fuck is that?” White T‑shirt said, whipping a small switchblade out and up in front of the Colonel’s nose.
The Colonel responded. “Three men assaulting a citizen at 866 Alvarado Drive.”
“Are you in danger?” The dispatcher kept calm.
The Colonel held the phone out in front of him and the fat one in the hoodie said, “Drop the phone. Now.”
“Sending a patrol car,” the dispatcher said. The Colonel dropped the phone on the pavement at the foot of Hoodie.
“Two minutes to kill me. Is that enough time?” The Colonel stared at Hoodies eyes, black and shaded under the hood.
“Edward fucking ScissorHands. You like that old barber shop, get that scissor cut, yeah?”
These were the goons, the Colonel knew now, homies assigned to the kill squad by the punk in the barber shop. He only had a few moments now to twist things a little to see if the boys were ready to do the job. Make them examine their qualifications and get them to think about what was going to happen. Other thoughts came to mind too, the same ones he thought about at home at night, the familiar cycle of solitude, being alone, and new ones that just appeared as if from nowhere. Would there be a news article? What page would it be on? Where they were going to bury him?
“Let’s talk about death,” the Colonel said.
“Talk about yours.” Hoodie pulled out a knife and flipped open the blade, four inches of serrated steel.
The Colonel said, “You know what a judge tells you when he sends you up?”
Hoodie said, “Been there, old man.”
The Colonel looked at White T‑Shirt. “You’re gonna have a lot of friends in the joint. Real close personal friends.”
“Just do it,” White T‑shirt said to Hoodie.
Slowly the Colonel moved his right hand, showing his hands to the thugs. “Take my wallet, the cash, you’re gonna do it anyway. Take the bills.” He continued, moving his hand to his wallet.
He pulled his wallet out and handed it to the kid next to Hoodie. “Take the cash. Go to the Panaderia on Second Street. Buy all the churros and give ‘em to kids. Think you can do that?” Sirens howled a few blocks away and the dog barked and slammed against the fence. “Kill me now, buy some treats.”
Hoodie was sweating and his eyes shined and White T‑Shirt twitched and the third kid walked in tight little circles pounding a fist in his palm.
Hoodie showed the gun, a shiny large caliber pistol.
“And one more thing,” the Colonel said, looking down the barrel of the .45 semi-auto.
Hoodie sneered, “You had your last meal.”
“I’m not hungry,” the Colonel said.
“They’re coming,” Red Hoodie said.
The Colonel said, “My last song.”
“Shoot him, Ese,” White T‑shirt said. His words had force, the dog barked and slammed the fence.
Sirens getting closer, the Colonel turned slowly toward the camera mounted on the eave and began to sing.
“When marimba rhythms start to play, dance with me, make me sway.” Voice cracking, trembling, he kept singing with his eyes to the camera, the camera that wasn’t recording anything but the Colonel hoped its blind eye would see and hear his spirit.
White T‑shirt was screaming in Spanish and Hoodie cocked his pistol and put it to the Colonel’s ear as sirens whooped and rose in pitch, near now.
“Hold me close, sway me more…”
The Colonel felt the steel barrel in his ear.
“When we dance you have a way with me…Stay with me, sway…”
The blast was very loud and it silenced the dog and the Colonel slumped to the pavement with a thick crunch of skull on asphalt. Hoodie slipped the gun in his sweatshirt pouch and shouted something and they ran down the parking lot and found a locked gate at the end.
Patrol cars rounded the corner down the alley alongside the covered parking area and screeched to a stop, sirens raging up and down and car doors opened, both patrol cars, and the officers rushed out guns up and heard the single bark of the dog. Two officers ran toward the bangers who had jumped the fence, calling in for backup.
All units, shut Alvarado between 2nd and 3rd, all units.
The first officer to get to the Colonel touched his neck and shook his head. The other one radioed for the coroner and a crime scene unit. The first officer, a lean man in his early thirties, reached into the Colonel’s pockets for identification, but found nothing except a folded piece of paper.
He unfolded the paper and glanced at it and handed it to the lead officer in charge.
The lead officer read out loud.
To Rip, many thanks, safe travels. Freddy, I should’ve said more. The woman at the bus stop, I’ll see you someday. Sway with me. And Betty, Betty, Oh, Betty…I could have done better. For all the rest of you, I’m nobody. Nobody then, nobody now. God bless the soldiers.”
Blood leaked out of the hole in his head and the Colonel’s mouth was open as if his teeth were gnawing the ground. The pavement was getting hot and the blood dried and smelled of iron filings like an auto shop garage.
The tall officer spoke first. “Sway with me. What’s that?”
The lead officer said, “It’s an old Dean Martin song.”
“The shit you know.”
“My mom’s a fan.”
“For sure I’ll put that in the report. John Doe Dean Martin fan killed in a parking lot.
The two pursuit officers jogged back from the locked gate at the end of the parking lot, breathing heavily and wet with perspiration. They removed their hats when the approached the body and said they lost pursuit at the gate and neither got a look at the assailants.
They all stood in the hot sun and the dog let out a howl and scraped along the back side of the wooden fence.
“Know a Rip, or Freddie?” the lean officer in charge asked.
The officer looked at his watch. “I’ll check around.”
The lead officer scanned the note again. “Betty. Sounds like some old business.”
The pursuit officers squinted in the sun. The tall officer turned and walked to the patrol car, opened the door and sat down in the driver’s seat, leaving the door open. He keyed the radio and spoke. The blue and red lights on top of the cruiser stopped flashing and he sat looking out the front window before he closed the door.
Kurt Taylor has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside, and spends his time searching for Mojave Desert vistas to photograph and enjoy. His writing has appeared in NOHO>LA, his blog Indian Hill, and he wrote and appeared on numerous television shows in Southern California including Inside Dodgers Baseball, and Interactive LA.
Kurt lives in Southern California.
Do you remember that time I swore I’d heard that Dick Clark had died and you said you hadn’t. I said, “It was on NBC, and why would NBC tell me Dick Clark was dead when Dick Clark wasn’t dead?” And you said “NBC didn’t say Dick Clark was dead, because he isn’t dead.” In the days before the internet was in our pockets there was no way to check, except to wait for New Years Eve when, by god, there he was in Times Square, narrating the dropping of the ball.
You said “you must have been high,” but you know I don’t get high, and you know how crazy I get when you don’t want to fuck, but say you still love me and prefer my penis to almost every other penis you’ve experienced. I am compelled to ask each and every time, “When was the last time you experienced a penis that wasn’t mine?” You always name-drop people you could never have had sex with, especially since we live in Cleveland, then you suggest we drive to WalMart for Advil and pie. I always shout YES, even though I know we have plenty of Advil and more than half a pie.
I gained closure once Dick Clark finally died, years after I had spread word of his passing to most of our address book. You threw me a little Dick Clark Really Is Dead This Time party, where you and I were the only invitees. We had champagne and chocolate cake, and spent an hour trying to figure out what NBC had really said that made me hear, “Dick Clark is dead.” Then we fucked in every room of the house while you told me mine really was the best penis you ever experienced. I knew you were lying, but as long as the answer to, “When was the last time you experienced a penis that wasn’t mine?” is always the same, I really don’t care.
F John Sharp lives and works in Kent, Ohio. He is the fiction editor for Right Hand Pointing and his selected works can be found at FJohnSharp.com.
Something you don’t see every day
Miller was
telling me
that his
mother had
used rope
pulleys and
a cement block
to build
the perfect
suicide she
had tied
a plastic
bag over
her head
then pushed
the cement
block off
the bed
and its
weight pulled
the ropes
tied around
her wrists
through the
pulleys down
and to the
ends of her
bed where
she died
crucifix style
unable to
pull the bag
off even if
she wanted to
It was
an impressive
piece of
engineering
for a woman
who never
finished high
school, Miller
said
It’s too bad
she couldn’t
use that
forethought
and ingenuity
to figure out
a reason
to stay alive
he said this
just before
looking up
at the giant
moon still
in the 6 am
sky he pointed
and said
now there
is something
you don’t
see every day.
Before Afghanistan
I had
a wife
and 4 kids
and a job
and friends
and I guess
I still have
those things
but now
I also have
the war
and the war
says I
am your wife
I am
Your children
I am
Your job
and I
am your
only friend
but don’t worry
I will not
let you
be that vet
who puts
his head
in the noose
but you
will be the
one I send
to cut him down
over and over
again in your dreams.
Matthew Borczon is a poet and a recently retired Navy Sailor from Erie Pa. He has written 17 books of poetry, his latest, PTSD: a Liiving Will, is available from Rust Belt Press. When not writing Matt is an LPN and a father of four children.
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