Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 27

The Unknown Show, guests Wolf Carstens and April Michelle Bratten

Last night on my interview show, I talked to Wolf Carstens of Epic Rites Press and Tree Killer Ink, about his writing and publishing of others.

Second on the show was April Michelle Bratten, who read a lot of great poems and we had great fun picking on AC/DC, talking about balls, and me complaining about my landlord not turning the heat on when it hits 45.

Listen here

Tollbooth: Chapters 16-18

*** continuing the serialization of the novel Tollbooth***

click here to start at the beginning

16

I drove around the random neighborhood in an ever broadening circle that neared the tollbooth. The rain was letting up, the sun threatening to peak through the comfort of the black clouds.

I turned on one street, surveying. Suddenly there was Gena, walking with a pink back pack. My sweet sweet tigress. I pulled beside her, as she turned, I saw it wasn’t her.

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

Fear was on her young face. It was happening more and more. I was beginning to see Gena in everyone and everything.

Up the road, there were vacant lots, the pine trees and sugar sand removed. New construction. A foundation had already been poured. Small wooden stakes with neon ties flapped in the wind. Some concrete blocks were stacked in neat piles.

I stepped out of the Subaru onto the lot. I wondered how these builders had been able to lay the blocks so perfectly. I didn’t know construction—I had no skill  whatsoever, I didn’t know how to do anything else besides hand out the change of a dollar.

I couldn’t even be a fisherman, which, I assumed wasn’t very hard. I couldn’t even stand there at the edge of the surf with a fishing rod and catch a fish, I had no skill . . . I had dreams of being a fisherman, out on the vast sea, just me and the waves . . . but I had no skill.

That wasn’t true, I had all kinds of skill. I looked up at the sky, trying to name some of those skills, any skill. Thinking even harder, so hard, so hard, what skills? But, then looking at the concrete blocks, I thought: why couldn’t I learn how to do something like that? Set blocks? I could definitely learn that.

There was a tarp on the side of the property, I went to it, lifted it. All kinds of wood was beneath. Nails too. And Insulation. A box full of duct tape, surely the most important tool on any job site. I reached down, picked up the tape, so many people thought that it was called DUCK TAPE, but so many of those people were born looking like flipper babies. At least I knew that much about the construction trade, that duct tape was called DUCT TAPE and not DUCK TAPE!

I scooped the box up, carried it to my car. It’s for securing ducts, dipshits!

This would be all I needed to build my new empire.

17

I called Ted from a pay phone outside Great Wok of China. He answered on the third ring.  “It’s Jimmy,” I said.

“Why do you still say that, we’ve been friends since Kindergarten.”

“My pre-school scores were better than yours. I didn’t eat paste,” I taunted.

“Still holding that over my head, I see. What’s up? You want to do something?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Like what?”

“I’m at the Great Wok of China”

“Why did they ever name it that?”

“As opposed to the Great Wall of China? Wanna get lunch? Just come over here, quick too, I need your help with something,” I said.

“With what?”

“You still have those do-it-yourself construction tapes?” I asked

“The home improvement ones you gave me?”

“Uh huh.”

“Did you ever watch them?” I asked.

“Once.”

“Perfect. Oh, and bring a level and a hammer with you.”

“To the Chinese restaurant?”

“Yeah.”

He sighed, “On my way.”

18

My Subaru had eight sheets of plywood on the roof, about 20 ten foot lengths of  4×4 lumber on top of that. There was also a door and a window, all secured in place by miraculous wrappings of super-industrial strength duct tape. In the rear seat of the car were large rolls of insulation—unseen under that, two packages of roof shingles. In the trunk was a roll of tar paper, ten penny nails, heavy duty screw, silicone, caulk.

I was at a table by the gum-ball machine when Ted pulled up. I waved to him through the window as he parked. He took a good look at my car, shook his head, coming into the hot salty unease of the Chinese restaurant. I sat smiling and sipping green tea from a small wax cup.

“Amigo are you out of your mind. That Subaru is grossly overloaded. You can’t just duck tape that much shit to the top.” Ted is like a dad to me. He won’t shut up with his wisdom and care for regulations. I need that, I suppose.

“It’s not duck taped it’s duct taped.”

“Well, I think I would know a little more about the gross weight capacity of a vehicle, since I work at the DMV. What are you going to do with all that stuff?”

“Have a seat, we’ll discuss it like gentlemen.”

“Did you steal all of that?” Ted asked, quietly.

“No, it was a gift.”

“From who?”

“From God.”

“Out of your mind,” Ted took a seat across from me. He said, “I really think that you should seriously consider talking to someone.”

“I’m talking to you.”

“Not that kind of talking. I mean, like a professional. A shrink. I think you might need some medicine. Ya know, Jim. You just seem plain off to me. Off.”

I ignored him. “I don’t know . . . I had a dream last night that I shot somebody for driving through the tollbooth without paying . . .”

He was looking up at the lunch specials, squinting, “Yeah, get a psychiatrist.”

I always ignored him when he said that I needed psychiatric help. “I have a plan, a necessary plan.”

“Concerning . . . ?”

“We’re going to build an escape from our boring stupid lives.”

“I don’t have a boring stupid life.”

“I disagree.”

A Chinese woman came out of the kitchen, sweating and carrying a large tray. Two lunch specials for us.

“I got you the boneless spare ribs, Dr. Jung,” I informed.

“I love boneless spare ribs,” Ted said with delight.

“You probably have never tried anything else off of a Chinese food menu in your life.”

“That’s not true. I just know what I like.”

“Well I have the same problem, as you can see.”

“The middle of the road is fine with me,” Ted said.

“I don’t like being married.” I said, “and I know that you don’t either. If I wasn’t a coward, I’d leave.”

“I’m happy.”

“You’re fatter than you used to be. I’m balder, we can’t be that happy.”

I put some of my ribs into my mouth, began to slowly crush them in my werewolf fangs. I slurped my tea.

“I have a plan,” I said, manic.

“I have a plan too,” he explained, “I’m trying to get promoted at the DMV, to get my own office, a pretty secretary who wears nice perfume and colorful skirts.”

“Hold it right there!”

I held up the Chinese food place mat, showing the drawings explaining Chinese Horoscopes, “You know what this says? I’m a boar and I should avoid rabbits.”

“Sarah is a Rabbit?”

“According to this,” I said point blankly, shaking the place mat in front of his face.

“OK,” he said, leaning forward, “just a short stay in a nice facility? The Mayweather, out by the cranberry bog. Please, think about it. They’ll listen to you, they’ll talk to you about your problems . . . it’ll help.”

“Do you have a pen?”

“No, no pen,” he said, patting himself anyway. “No pen.”

There was a tea cup full of crayons next to a coloring book with Chinese cartoons of dragons. In a frenzy, I scooped up the red and blue and green crayons and I began to draw my detailed plans on the back of the place mat.

“What are you doing now?”

“You’ll see.”

First I drew the far walls, and then the near walls, then the door, adding the windows. I carefully scrawled detailed dimensions, like any good architect would.

Munching on his egg roll, Ted asked, “And why are you off in the middle of the week anyway?”

“I might be quitting my job,” I said as I slowly drew the roof. “If all of this works out, I might quit my job.”

“Might! You can’t quit your job, you have a kid on the way. This is exactly what I mean!”

“Enough idle chit chat, check this out.”

I slid the drawing to him across the table.

“There you go, there are the blueprints.”

“For what?” he asked.

“Our hideout.”

Last of the signed paperbacks

I’m happy to say that the book release parties went really great for my novel Tollbooth.

I have some paperbacks left, that I am going to mail out, signed to peeps. I slip a few copies of the Idiom zine in the envelope too.

Jimmy Saare collects tolls on the New Jersey Parkway. He’s had a mental snap, as a result, is becoming uncontrollably fixated with the 19 year old Gena who works the copy machine at Officetown. Despite his wife Sarah’s impending pregnancy, Jimmy pursues his desire for Gena, unexpectedly becoming more entangled with the strange manipulations of an anarchistic teenager, Kid with Clownhead, who wants to start his own destructive cult when he grows up.

AVAILABLE NOW

I am also signing copies

and snail mailing direct to you for

$12.00

follow the paypal link below.

also available on Kindle for $4.99

Here’s what peeps are saying:

“A tantalizing joyride of contemporary American dysfunction …”

- Zygote in My Coffee

————————
“Bud Smith’s Tollbooth is like the car accident of a book that everyone slows down for, to watch along their way to wherever–the type of car accident that creates a 30 mile stretch of idling vehicles.” Aaron Dietz, author of Super

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“At the intersection of the mundane and the surreal you’ll find Bud Smith. Poetic, profane and bizarre, Smith’s characters and the world he creates simultaneously attracts and repulses; just when you think you’ve got the characters pegged they do something wonderful like shitting in a box or disgusting like falling in love. Outrageous and frighteningly real, Bud Smith’s writing is always beautifully written and wildly entertaining.” – Martha Grover, Author of One More for the People.

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“There are two types of people: tollbooth operators and people who think there are people who aren’t tollbooth operators. Bud Smith’s Tollbooth is about you, whether you like it or not. You most likely do not work in a tollbooth but chances are you do know what it’s like to work a mind-numbing job. Chances are you also know what it’s like to make life-changing mistakes. And I hope to goodness and back that you also know what it’s like to take a risk that will possibly change everything for the better. Tollbooth has all of these things, but you probably know that already because you’re in it.” Aaron Dietz, author of Super

————————
“Tollbooth: better than Madame Bovary, not as good as masturbation.” – Martha Grover, Author of One More for the People.

————————
“Absolutely mad in the best way” James Duncan, Hobo Camp Review

Book Review, The Tide King by Jen Michalski

Stanley Polinsky carries a Tom Swift novel in his pack as he marches trough war-torn WII Europe with his companion, Calvin Johnson who constantly ribs him about it. Carrying a book, while simultaneously engaged in combat with the Nazi seems absurd.

When Stanley explains that the book was read to him as a child, and it’s about a magical item called The alamantium lamp, an invention that can raise the dead and heal any wound, the Tom Swift novel within this novel reveals itself, and serves as an anchor for this wonderfully written, story about immortality granted by ingestion of a magical lightning struck herb.

After a landmine explodes in the early pages of the book, mortally wounding a soldier, the herb is ingested, and a chain of events is set off, each event more perfectly outlandish than the last.

Absurd. Magic. Adventure. Time spanning. Epic. Me likey.

Jen Michalski has constructed a wonderful world here, that is equal parts magical adventure and beautifully written examination of love, loss and what it means to have a life that can or can’t end.

I enjoyed Michalski’s back to back novella collection Could You Be With Her Now, and am very impressed by her range as a writer, from the 1st person POV of “I Can Make it to California by Dinnertime” where she writes as a mentally challenged boy, to the accompanying novella in the collection “May-September” where the narrator is a twenty something girl engaged in a relationship with a woman pushing seventy. Tide King is written in third person and recalls the best elements of fairy tale, literary fiction, and even, Tom Swift.

Read it.

Available here

What I Hope to Find at the Yard Sale

Reblogged from Facts About Neuroplasticity:

It’s almost the end of summer so the large houses

are making room for pumpkins and Christmas

and they put their least favorite things on the lawn

for us, over the tracks, to drive by and look at.

There are always cook books – many from 1950, I hope

to see one from before the war (Civil of course)

but I’m never that lucky.

Read more… 202 more words

One of my favorite poets, follow her site.

Book Release and Reading this weekend....

Reblogged from PHP and The Idiom Magazine's Blog:

So this weekend two events going on....

Saturday night we are having Bud Smith's second book release party because the first one was so good!  You can see pictures of the first one in one of our previous posts...

This book release party is at 8:16 Studios and again we'll have bands and beer and poets and smokes and Bud Smith's novel Tollbooth for a nice lil discounted price...

Read more… 63 more words

Doing a book party tonight for Tollbooth. I'll be mailing out the last of the signed copies next week too. Hit me up if you would like one, or click on the tollbooth logo in the sidebar. Thank you!

A crushed pepsi can floats down

Your side of the world is flooded

Mine is on fire

Helicopters circle

Dropping emptied soda cans,

Candybar wrappers

crusts from sub par sandwiches.

Even God has a day job.

When I talk to people trying to live to 185

I get to thinking about dying

and coming back as a fish

The ocean issupposed to rise 25 feet sometime, whenever

It was a frozen custard stand engulfed in flames

Took the boardwalk

Lucky Leo’s

Carousel Arcade

Use the fine reeds as a make shift snorkel.

Tell the fire marshall I said hello

I’m building a raft from a neon sign

and will be there soon.

made of bells.

"First Time: An Anthology About Lost Virginity"

Reblogged from Out Where the Buses Don't Run:

Would you like to read an anthology of short stories, essays, and poems all circling around a memorable-yet-cringe-inducing subject: losing your virginity? Of course you would! Then "First Time: An Anthology About Lost Virginity," is the anthology you want to read.

I'm pleased to announce that my short story "Late Bloomer" is one of the four dozen stories, essays, and poems featured in the new anthology, "

Read more… 161 more words

Excellent post about The First Time anthology from my friend Gus Sanchez, who has a great story in it.

Ever Heard of the Underworld?

I wanna get lost

on the streets I grew up on

laying down in wet grass,

drinking watermelon flavored poison

beneath bonfire billboards

I wanna survive

because of a weird kiss

from a weirder girl

I want to tunnel

beneath the strip malls

into the caverns

where the teenagers go

when the cops are stumbling

zombified

through the Friday night terror

we’ll sit down on stone thrones

in a recently de-spiderwebbed chamber

listening to records

we stole from your mother

while she was smoking on the porch

with the milkman

I wanna breath the gold dust in til I spin

I wanna live for another ten years

I wanna have a rouge ocean wash away the loose gemstones resting in the lowest ash of dream

so I’m free to say, “fuck it”

as we take our shirts off forever.

Tollbooth: Chapters 14-15

*** continuing the serialization of the novel Tollbooth***

click here to start at the beginning

14

 

It was getting too dangerous for my porn collection: there was too much of it inside too small of a space. Sarah was a chick Sherlock Holmes. Her psychic abilities frightened me. It wouldn’t be too long before she stumbled upon my stash and I wound up sleeping in Rommel’s dog house beside his stinky ass. I had to act quick getting all of my Gena porn out of the little downstairs bathroom before it was too late.

I swung around the block, happy with my decision to play hooky from the booth. I deserved the day off. The driveway was empty, I pulled the Subaru in quick, almost clipping the seashell mailbox, skidding up right in front of my unusable garage.

The kid who mowed our lawn was walking down the street. As I stepped out of the car, he started asking, “Hey, Jim, grass looks crazy high . . . ”

“Set it on fire,” I said.

“What?”

“The lawn. The house. The world.”

I walked to my porch, he said, brightly, “Will do!”

As I opened up the front door, Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table with all of the lights in the house off, just staring at me. She knew. I threw my car keys in the wooden cat organizer she’d glued together by the coffee pot.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t need any help.”

“Can you help me then? Where the hell is your car?”

“Took it in for brakes and oil and . . . I told you this. What do you need?” she drummed her fingers on the table. They sounded out my slow death march. She’d bitten the nails down to the cuticle. “Why are you home?” She looked at the clock directly above my head.

Once her hands had been well manicured. Bright colored nails, french tips. They were the hands of a thug now. She’d break my jaw most likely.

“I dunno,” I said. “Every time I come home, you’re just sitting there in that chair, and it’s not because you’re pregnant, it’s because you’re miserable.”

“Miserable, who me?” she said faking shock.

I flipped the light on in the kitchen, “This place is drab! We need some sunshine!”

“It’s raining out.”

“More the reason!”

“Really, why are you home? Did you get fired?” she asked with some slight fear. I waited, let that fear brew in her, then grinned, shook my head; no you silly former cheerleader.

“I figured that maybe I could take my wife to breakfast, treat her to some eggs,” I said. “If I can’t talk her into an abortion, maybe at least some eggs and bacon.”

“Treat me? Sure. I could go for breakfast.”

So, I took her to breakfast. I made sure that it was an extra extra delicious breakfast, not even diner breakfast, but restaurant breakfast. We smiled at each other, feeling a slight tinge of the old love we had in our salad days, in our heydays. It was a place that overlooked the river, the waiter came to our table on light feet, obviously taken away by our deep, apparent love.

We ordered the deluxe mega lumberjack specials, with fresh squeezed orange juice. There is nothing that Sarah loves in the world as much as an orange. “Let’s move to Florida,” she often said. Fresh coffee! I demanded silverware that the sun could gleam off of even though there was no sun on that day.

She brought a fork of egg to her lips, bit. I raised a coffee mug in near tribute. So what? So what that my life was over and the hunger in her was a direct reflection of that? Look at this new hunger, eating for two. That little belly was stretching, and after the baby came, it would still be that big. After that, surely she’d be eating whole plates all by herself, but so what? So what.

She was not the girl who I had met in high school. She was a cheerleader then. I remembered ever so clearly the way that she used to cheer for my life.

When we finished the meal, the waiter brought us our check. I was so happy, realizing that I didn’t really need this other young fantasy of mine, Gena. I didn’t need to turn away from my wife. It might have been the coffee, all of the caffeine, and the fat of the meal, God knows, but as I sat there watching her, I thought: baby, snookems, sweet thang, I’m a real fuck up and I love you.

And shit and shit and shit! So what if you are a fucking stupid siren who sang a fake song to get me to crash my ship onto your rock? There have never been two people so perfectly screwed up for each other. We’re just going through a dull patch. I’ll get out of the tollbooth. We’ll train the kid as a getaway driver. We’ll start knocking over jewelry stores wearing werewolf masks, armed with AK-47s. It’ll be perfect.

The bill came.

I placed the credit card down. The waiter took it lovingly, dancing like an elf all the way to the rear of the restaurant, whistling some elf song.

I signed the check and left him a handsome tip.

I looked at my wife. I was about to reach for her hand, to tell her something sincere, that I’d been a real asshole and that I did still love her, that I was sorry for the distance that had come between us. But love is a two way street.

“Hey can I ask you something?” she said.

“Yeah, what is it?”

“Well, thanks for the breakfast and all. It was good. All respect due for that delicious breakfast.”

“But . . . “

She held up her finger, saying in sign language, one minute, hang on jackass. She revealed a picture, a very nice picture, of a black model with a large pink dildo in her ass and the face of an angelic white beauty—copy slut Gena.

“I found this in your pants pocket. I was doing your laundry. What the fuck is this?”

“That?”

“Is this what you want?” she hissed.

“That? Oh no!”

“In her ass!” she said, too loud.

“Quiet.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“I’m sorry,” I defended, “but it’s all a mistake anyway.”

“And that face looks familiar . . .”

“I think it’s that Russian model, Frenza Larnalotzvia, but I can’t be sure.”

“Oh no, Dr. Frankenstein, you can be sure. You made this thing. What was her name?”

“I found that.” I was hoping she hadn’t found anymore of the mock ups. “I found it at work, in the break room. That José . . . ughh, I hate that guy. I guess I grabbed it without thinking. It was stupid, immature.”

“The guy who draws dicks on your certificate?”

“That’s him,” I said, “So stupid.”

“Well, it’s stupid . . . yeah it’s stupid.”

I got up. She was still sitting. “Come on, I don’t want to do this right here in the restaurant. If we go to the car, you can at least scream at me. It will make you feel better.”

She was silent all the way to the car, silent when I turned the ignition, silent when I put it in gear, silent past the river, silent around the bend up by where the highway meets the bridge, silent past those old abandoned parking lots.

But then, as my luck was destined to fail, she became no longer silent.

“It would have made me feel a whole lot better if you just appreciated what I was going through for you,” Sarah ranted, rightfully.

“I do appreciate it. Aside from the whole part where I wish it never happened, yeah I do appreciate it.”

“You have something wrong with your brain. You are not supposed to tell your VERY PREGNANT wife that you wished she wasn’t carrying YOUR KID! AND YOU DO IT ALL THE FUCKING TIME!!”

“I’m crazy, I’m sorry. But I’m trying to be honest.”

“Honest? You’re unreal. You lie and tell me that you aren’t into porn, that this isn’t yours, and I am supposed to be stupid and just say, No, it’s totally OK for my husband to whack off to somebody else when he won’t touch me.”

“Calm down. It must be that José character at work. He seems like a real sleaze.”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever is right,” I said.

“I think we need a little more honesty in our relationship.”

“I think we need a little more trust in our relationship.”

“I agree.”

“I agree.”

I pulled the car into the driveway, shut it off, got out, began walking to the front door. She was still sitting in the car. I began to unlock the front door, opened it. I turned to her, I expected to see her crying. Instead, there was a look of surprise on her face.

“Jimmy! Jimmy!” Sarah said.

“What?”

“I think my water just broke!”

My life flashed before my eyes.

“Seriously?”

The car door opened. “No, I was just screwing with you, you moron,” she said it with warmth, the way two people could do only if they cared deep down. “I’m seven months. You’ve got a ways.”

“Oh shit.” I grabbed her arm, and we walked in as a giant hand would loop the curve of a tea cup handle.

“Sorry I got fat, but your fat cock did it to me,” my bride said.

“I apologize for my fat cock.”

“Am I too ugly now?”

“No.”

“Well, will you lay down with me?”

“Now?” Lay down was code.

“Yeah. I need it,” she said. “Bad.”

“Holy shit, so do I.”

We went upstairs, kissing madly on the stairs, knocking the photos off the wall of us at the prom; us on vacation at Niagara falls; us floating on orange pool rafts in Miami the previous summer.

We collapsed on the bed, I knocked the air out of her and she shrieked with laughter, “watch my belly, you klutz!”

“Shhhh,” I slipped my tongue in her mouth and she ran her nails down my back. We rolled on our sides, eagerly tearing our clothes off. It’d been too long. Far too long.

“Touch me here,” she said. Her breath smelled like fresh mint. She rolled on top of me and we did it slow—with extremely synched rhythm, as only two people who’ve known each other for as long as we had could. Cries of wonder and happiness and grunts of release left our lungs and we couldn’t do anything to stop them. A drop of sweat fell from her brow, landing in my eye. I didn’t care.

My eyes rolled back in my head, her breasts swung over me. I was floating through the astral plane bathed in immortal vibrating pink light.

After—our breath hot and frantic, we rolled to the side, I clutched her from behind.

“That was like the old days.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“I loved the old days.”

“Me too.”

 

15

 Larry wanted to see me in his office, which was fine by me. Usually a trip to Larry’s office meant some Girl Scout cookies that his daughter was selling, news on some adjustments to the booths, some state money that was coming in—something like that.

When I opened the door, Larry was sitting at his desk, reading a magazine: swimsuit girls kissing deep in tropical water.  I sat down, put my feet up on the edge of his desk. He didn’t care.

“How you living, kid?”

“Not as good as you.”

“Debatable,” he said, cracking his bubblegum. “Look, I need to talk to you about something very important.” His eyes narrowed, taking on a newfound sinister look. “We’ve known each other for . . . what, how long have we worked together?”

“Eleven years.”

“This whole time you’ve been in that same booth and things’ve gone very smoothly.”

“But now . . . “

He nodded, “But now, somebody has been blowing through your toll lane, late at night on José’s watch.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve been notified by the State that the only way to correct the problem is to terminate the individual.”

“José?”

“No, the motorist,” he said, drumming his fingers on the desk. With his free hand, like a magic trick, he pulled a silver gleaming gun out of the top drawer. He slid it to me across his desk. “You ever shoot a gun?”

“I fired a gun once,” I confessed, “But it was a turkey hunting gun. I shot up a mannequin.”

“You could kill a thousand turkeys with this. You’re the best we’ve got.”

I wanted to stand up and back out of the office, but something made me reach for the gun. It seemed to hum with power in my hand—I recalled all the dreams of cowboys and Indians as a small boy in the field behind my house, where Ted and I would shoot the neighborhood kids in the blueberry bushes with sticks. We didn’t have rifles and high grain to do the thing right, so we improvised.

It felt good to hold the true glow of death in my hands. The grip was wonderful and so was the smell of the gun oil. I knew I could shoot a terrorist from one hundred and ninety yards, the hostage wrapped up in his arms. I would get that terrorist right in the center of his skull. Laser dot aiming device? I didn’t need that shit! I was American.

“It’ll be a lime green Honda Civic. The tailpipe will make it sound like a lawnmower. After your shift is over, come in the break room and take a dinner break. I’ll watch the booth personally, José won’t be coming in tonight. He has the evening off. When you’re done eating, come and relieve me in the booth, understood?”

“Perfectly,” I said, sliding the gun in my pocket.

“The car comes every night between ten after ten and twenty after ten. It’s been on a clockwork schedule every night of the workweek for the last seven months.

I nodded. So this was to be the new way.

 

I waited in the booth. It was the same routine at night, but much slower. I looked up at the wall, I hadn’t bothered to hang a new certificate up there. It didn’t matter anymore. The clock of life ticked down like torture. The gun sat on the little ledge. Every motorist who came to the window could have seen it if they really wanted to, if they stretched, but none of them were real people, they were all just ghosts of the highway—disassociated, in a trance between the streams of opposing headlights that danced over the median. The moon hung sweat-less and cold over the pines, still with humid air.

Those people must have felt like that moon as they sped along, the glass of their vehicle making an entirely new universe as they crossed through the space between blinks of millenniums in their God carriages. Their vehicles set themselves apart from the atmosphere of the sphere where they were said to live and rumored to have lives. Their stereos blocked out useless Earthly noise. Their seat belts cuddled them into immortality.

In an eggshell, in a bubble, in a sarcophagus on wheels, driving into a vortex, shifting through a new dimension, ripping a hole in the fabric of the galaxy without even blinking. That’d be nice.

The guy in the tollbooth breaks that fantasy, stops them like sheep, says, “You are not the moon, you’re not the reflection of the moon on the ocean, you’re not even a little wave in the water, you’re just an asshole citizen. Heed all regulations. Slow down. Face this toll or face death.”

Then, from afar, I heard the distant sound of a lawnmower.

There was me, the sheriff, and there was him, the outlaw Indian who’d been scalping all of the ladies of misplaced wagon trains. The vehicle soared towards me, I leaned out of the booth ever so slightly, aiming the gun into the oncoming headlights. I squeezed the trigger, the silver pistol recoiled. I laughed wildly, squeezed again, this time a wilder shot. A headlight burst.

I kept shooting as the green Civic came within the last fifty feet of the tollbooth. When the car passed I spun, squeezing off the final ten rounds at its tail lights. The tires flattened, the back window exploded. Swerving, the driver screamed as chocolate syrup blood sprayed from a hole in his neck. On his radio somebody was singing a very poppy hit song. He was dying to the rhythm of that song.

I watched unbelieving as the car went off the side of the parkway, into the darkness of the pines. I tossed the gun in the shadow of the booth, I counted to fifty in my head, then a hundred and fifty, my heart racing. What then?

Out the window I saw a dim light where the single headlight was reflecting off a pine tree. No one had seen anything. Still, I waited for police sirens. Headlights appeared on the highway. I gasped.

It was a young guy, with an older woman, both looked annoyed, “Dude, how much is the toll?”

“Thirty-five cents.”

He handed me a ten dollar bill, “I’m giving you a ten.”

“I see that.”

“Well don’t try to be all smart and just give me change of a dollar.”

I wondered if there were any rounds left in the gun. But, nervous, I gave him back the correct change.

“Dude,” he said, “can I have a receipt?”

I handed him the receipt.

Up the highway, I saw a road department truck parked beside the car crashed in the woods. Two men were setting up flashing lights and road flares. I sat perfectly still, gulping. A few other men come out of the woods, carrying a large trash bag. It appeared to be industrial strength.

Another series of motorists zoomed through the exact change lane. The road crew loaded the bag into the back of one of the trucks, which left in slow official maneuvers up the highway. A quarter mile up was the service road entrance where the salt and the sand and the plow equipment and the road crew headquarters were located.

A few minutes later a tow truck came, hauling the vehicle out of the woods.

The flashers and road cones remained for perhaps twenty minutes and then those workers slowly packed it all away. In the center of this strange night, they were just trying to kill time until the time clock said that they were again free men. I saw a kid in a reflective vest yawning and stretching. It was somewhere close to three am.

At my next designated break I went into Larry’s office, he was still reading the sexy chick magazine.

“Good work,” he said.

“Thanks.”

He smiled, “That asshole really had that coming.”

I put the silver gun on his desk.

He smiled again, “You aren’t done, there’s one more person to take care of, who’s been dodging the toll.”

“Who?”

“Sarah,” he said flatly.

He tossed me a fresh ammo clip from his filing cabinet. I caught it; there was no sense in denying Larry.

“Go home, get some sleep, kill your wife.”

I nodded, walked down the hall to the vending machine, got a PayDay, munched on it as I drove my car out of the parking lot and to where Sarah waited. As I pulled into my driveway finishing the candy bar, I sighed, thinking that I would be sad when my wife was just a memory.

I stepped into the dark house. Sarah snored upstairs, she usually didn’t snore. Since she’d become pregnant she’d started. I imagined that the baby was a snorer, that it was all its evil gremlin doing.

Gun in hand, I crept up the stairs, straightening some of the framed photos as I passed. Bedside, I aimed the gun in the darkness, preparing to fire at Sarah, but couldn’t.