Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 12

DWI, poem by CL Bledsoe

They pulled Dad over on the way home

from visiting us at Aunt Louise’s house

where we were staying while the divorce

went through. His truck died, so he shut

off his lights, cranked it, and flipped

them back on. A cop thought it was a signal

cause there had been robberies in the neighborhood.

When they brought him in, he informed

the whole building what he’d like for breakfast,

how his cell should be decorated. A preacher

came to talk with him. “Do you save people?”

Dad asked. “Yes sir,” the preacher said, serious.

“Do you save women?” Dad asked.

“Yes sir,” the preacher said, a touch of pride,

this time. “Do you save prostitutes?” Dad asked.

“Yes sir,” the preacher nodded. “Well can you save

me a couple for Saturday night?” Dad asked.

CL Bledsoe is the author of a dozen books, most recently the poetry collection Riceland and the novel Man of Clay. He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

A Trip to Town, fiction by Nick Heeb

(originally appeared in Revenge)

Stanley Thunder Hawk leaned back into the couch. He had just taken a snort of meth and the kick knocked him back against the torn upholstery. His heart raced and the world sped past, images blurred. He Sapa and Robideaux were talking quickly, agitation increasing with every word. He felt the vibrations of the music through the couch and he smiled.

Robideaux yelled and his fist connected with He Sapa’s jaw. He Sapa fell to the floor a crumpled mess. Someone yelled out He Sapa was dead, but then He Sapa’s eyes rippled beneath his eyelids and they knew he was alive. He lay there and the people in the house walked around him rather than make the effort to move him.

A man emerged through the smoke of the room. Thunder Hawk had never seen him before. Perhaps he was a ghost from a previous century. The man sat next to Thunder Hawk and turned to him. He spoke to Thunder Hawk as though an old acquaintance. He had marbled blue eyes, queer in contrast to his Native face. Then he spoke:

“I know you.”

“Huh,” Thunder Hawk said.

“I know your father, too.”

“Nobody knows him. You got the wrong guy.”

“Wrong, son. Everybody knows him.”

Thunder Hawk lifted his eyebrows at the man.

“He’s still alive,” the man said. “He’s been living in Harrisville, here and there for twenty years.”

The words pulsed and wriggled through Thunder Hawk’s brain like so many maggots. He tried to shake them off as he took a drink from the beer on the table.

“You’re crazy, old man. You’re fucking crazy.”

“He lives in the gray trailer house just off of 44. Across from Enoch’s place.”

Thunder Hawk sat silent. The old man’s eyes paced his face. “I have to go now,” the man said. “Go find him.”

*

Thunder Hawk awoke in his bed, unsure how he got there. Bleary-eyed, he blinked against the day. It was probably around noon. It was cold outside his blankets and he loathed to leave the warmth he had created.

He made his way to the living room rubbing his raw bald belly and sat on the couch. The pipe on the table still had some glass in it from the night before, congealed and yellow.  He took a rip, held it, and blew out a grey murky cloud.

Thunder Hawk slammed a fist on the table. He lifted his head and stared at the Ruger on the table: a semi-automatic rimfire with a walnut grip and a stainless steel muzzle.

He slid the barrel of the pistol into his jeans, above the seat of his pants, and walked out the door. The wind moaned painfully across the prairie and bent the heads of the crested wheatgrass. Clouds were moving in and the sun ascended toward the stand of cumulus like some martyr on a suicide mission.

*

The parked pickup slanted on the shoulder of the highway. Thunder Hawk smoked a cigarette and looked down the winding road to the town below. He took one last drink off a pint of whiskey and threw the bottle out the window and put the pickup into gear.

On the flat of highway he passed a sign on which was painted Jesus Saves in fat black swaths. Fingers of snow lifted from the ditch and stretched out across the blacktop, reaching for the opposite ditch. The sky now looked like cracking ice; as if some new world lay just beyond and would reveal itself in short order.

He passed a sign so riddled with buckshot the words Welcome to Harrisville were nearly impossible to read. Further on, there was a school building with a crumbling façade. An arrow directed him to the remains of the business district: buildings slouching inward with broken windows, graffiti in bright green lettering.

An old man bent at the back tapped the street with a twisted elm branch. Thunder Hawk pulled over next to the man and the man looked up, alarmed. Thunder Hawk rolled down the window.

“Napayshni,” he shouted. “What the hell you doing out here? You’re gonna freeze to death.”

“Is that you, Stanley?” The man looked in his direction with cataract-filled eyes. “I’m just out for a walk. The bugs were crawling again, I needed to get out of the house.”

“You ain’t got a house, Napayshni.”

“Well, that didn’t stop the bugs from crawling. I needed to get moving.”

Thunder Hawk looked down the street. “Need a ride somewhere or what?”

“Zee. I’m just gonna walk until they stop crawling.”

Thunder Hawk nodded and rolled the window up and drove down the street. He wondered if they ever did stop crawling, or if sometimes they just crawled less. He drove past a church converted of an old Quonset hut and across the street was another bar, this one a trailer house, the white paint peeling, curled up and shuddering in the breeze.

He turned left at the thin two-lane highway and took an approach down a sloped gravel road. The pickup came to a stop in front of an old trailer house with siding that flapped like a laughing mouth. An old truck with two flat tires slumped in the front yard.

Thunder Hawk walked across the yard. He readjusted the pistol, tucking it further into his pants. The front yard was fenced off with rusted woven wire. Within this fence a mangy mutt sidled up to him, nervously baring its teeth. The mutt stood on its backlegs, bracing itself against the fence. Thunder Hawk scratched its head and the mutt tried to lick him.

He knocked on the door. It was silent for some time before he felt heavy footsteps vibrating across the floor. Thunder Hawk’s heartbeat increased despite the alcohol warming his veins.

The door opened to a large man. His face was dark brown and leathered and his eyes were set deep in his head like a wildcat. Skunked hair fell to heavy sloped shoulders. He held a clear glass mug, large even in the man’s giant hand and it was brimming with ice and drink. Sour booze wafted off the glass. The man surveyed Thunder Hawk, then turned without speaking and walked to the couch and laid down. Thunder Hawk stood in the doorway, staring at the man. The man never took his eyes off the gray images flickering across the television screen.

“Shut the door, you’re letting all the cold in,” the man said.

Thunder Hawk reached behind him and closed the door. He sat on the couch opposite the man. They sat silently, watching the television. When it went to commercial the man spoke.

“Who’s you then,” he asked across his chest.

“They tell me I’m your son,” Thunder Hawk said.

“Ennit?” The man chuckled, then started to cough. He leaned over and spat a glob of phlegm on the floor.

“That’s what they say,” Thunder Hawk said.

“Which one’s you?”

“I’m Stanley.”

“What’d they give you for a last name?”

“Thunder Hawk.”

The man nodded. “Was you the one played ball real good?”

“Nah, that wasn’t me. I was the one they sent off to California for some time.”

“Ennit? California. Does California really have as many longhairs and queers as the tv makes it seem?”

“I don’t know. I knew a few people, and none of them was queer.”

The commercials ended and the man went silent again. Some game show was on of families lined up against one another. The man shouted his answers at the television and cursed the participants when they answered incorrectly. He coughed and took a drink, the ice clinking loudly in the glass. He let out a wet belch and rubbed his massive paunch. “So where you at now,” he asked.

Thunder Hawk relaxed into the couch. The elbow of it was broken and it wobbled when he rested an arm on it. “I’m living on Uncle Leland’s place,” he said.

The man snorted and said: “Leland’s place. That what they’re calling it now, yeah? That winkte boy still kicking around?”

Thunder Hawk sighed and shook his head. “Leland died last fall.”

The man craned his head toward Thunder Hawk. Thunder Hawk’s heart thumped painfully in his chest. The man’s eyes flared violently, but then a smile broke across his face like the first light of dawn. He slapped a hand on his thigh and laughed.

“Now there’s some welcome news. I hope his worthless ass went to Heaven so I don’t see him when I die. Him’s the reason I ended up living in this place— that land you’re on shoulda been mine. He got himself some white lawyer to put one over on me.”

Thunder Hawk settled back into the couch and rested both hands on his knees. There were three televisions in the living room, but only one appeared to be in working order. One had a cracked screen from what appeared to be a bullet. Cardboard boxes were piled with a tinker’s collection of objects falling from them. Behind them, two or three antler mounts were tangled up in a mess of felt and tines. A calico cat walked the spine of the couch and suspiciously regarded Thunder Hawk with green eyes. There was a quiet cough from a room down the hall.

The man reached up and ran the back of his hand along the cat’s jawline. The cat tilted its head to receive the touch, still watching Thunder Hawk. “So what do you want from me,” the man asked.

“I don’t want nothing. Just stopped by to see you.”

The man coughed mid-drink and some of the liquid spritzed his face. “There’s something I ain’t never heard. Have I met you before?”

“I don’t know. Your face don’t seem familiar.”

“Well I’d think you remember someone looks like me.” He scooched up a little on the couch. “You drink? I got some whiskey in the kitchen if you can find your way through that maze.”

“Got any beer?”

“Nah. Hell, there might be some laying around— if you want to hunt some, I won’t stop you.”

Thunder Hawk walked to the kitchen and kicked around some boxes. “I hope you ain’t got expensive tastes,” the man called after him.

The kitchen was a graveyard more than a maze. Wrappers and cardboard covered the floor like a second layer of linoleum. A litterbox that hadn’t been changed for what looked like months. Thunder Hawk thought it funny he hadn’t noticed the smell when he walked in. A sickly kitten with gunk streaking its cheeks mewed weakly from the countertop. The fur was rubbed off its hind legs entirely and it trembled where it stood.

He opened the refrigerator door. There were saltine crackers and a jug of milk on the top shelf, commodity cheese on the bottom alongside a cooked hamburger that was beginning to stink.

“I guess I’ll take some whiskey,” he called out to the man. “Where do you keep your glasses?”

“Just look around for something clean,” the man said. “There might be one in a cabinet. Don’t be drinking straight from the bottle, though. I don’t want to be getting sick off you.”

“I ain’t sick,” Thunder Hawk said.

The man snorted. “That don’t matter— some people’s germs just don’t mix.”

Thunder Hawk found a styrofoam cup with a rust-colored ring of coffee stained into the side. He filled it midway. “Got any ice?” he called out.

“Don’t be taking none of mine. The freezer don’t work so I gots to go to the store and get ice—and I’m about out. If you’re mooching my whiskey, don’t be mooching my ice too.”

Thunder Hawk took a small sip and looked at the man. The top of his head was visible, his stomach. Just gut-shoot him, let him think about it, thought Thunder Hawk. He doesn’t deserve a painless death. His stomach burned instantly from the whiskey. He took a larger drink and refilled his cup.

A small boy, maybe four or five, came into the living room with an armload of building blocks. He dropped them on the floor in a loud clatter. The man looked at the boy. “Don’t be making a mess,” he said to the boy.

Thunder Hawk’s pounding heart slowed a little, and there was a small wave of relief in his throat.  The boy busied himself with the blocks. Thunder Hawk walked back to the couch with the cup in his hand.

“This here’s Ezra. Did you see what happened to my roof?”

It took a moment for Thunder Hawk to realize the man was asking him a question. “Zee— guess I didn’t.”

Ezra looked up from his building blocks at the man, then he turned to look at Thunder Hawk. He was a handsome boy, with deep dark eyes resting on high cheekbones. His obsidian hair was cut into a rattail at the back. His lips pulled back to a mouthful of rotting teeth.

The man laughed. “I come home half-cocked this past winter in a storm. The wind was blowing something fierce, and I couldn’t hardly see my hand in front of my face from all the snow. When I got home, I stumbled to my bedroom and fell asleep. I don’t know how long I was sleeping for but I woke to a good-sized noise. I got up and walked out into the living room and sure as shit, the whole roof had ripped off—nothing but night sky and falling snow. Well, there was no way I was fixing it then, so I just went back to my bedroom—the roof was still attached in there. I slept it off and in the morning I got someone to come fix it for me. It was awful damn cold in here for some time. The snow sure caused a lot of damage.”

Thunder Hawk nodded. “How long you’ve had the place?”

“This house? Gee, I don’t know. Five years is all.”

Thunder Hawk nodded. The trailer house seemed much older than that. Ezra quit playing with his blocks and placed his hands on Thunder Hawk’s knees.

Ezra looked into Thunder Hawk’s eyes and started hissing at him. “You are crazy. You are crazy. You. Are. Crazy.” Thunder Hawk pushed the boy’s face away from him. The boy hopped up onto the couch and put his arms around Thunder Hawk’s neck, playfully trying to tip him over.

“Is he your boy or what?”

“I don’t know whose him is,” the man said. “I had some people over and we got to drinking and snorting; before I knowed it, she’d turned into a two-day affair. When the place cleared out, Ezra was still here. That was only a couple of days ago— someone is bound to come back for him.”

The boy now was behind Thunder Hawk and pulling back on him, squeezing his chest as much as he could. Thunder Hawk furrowed his brows thoughtfully. “You been feeding him?”

“Here and there. That boy don’t need much food. Him’s like a fart in a frying pan. He sure does like that commod cheese, though.”

“What’s this?” Ezra asked. Thunder Hawk felt Ezra’s hand against the pistol. Thunder Hawk lurched back to pin Ezra against the couch. Ezra cried out and rolled away, off the couch and onto the floor. He looked up at Thunder Hawk with a scowl. “What was that?” Ezra asked.

“None of your damn business,” Thunder Hawk said. He looked at the old man. He was gazing at Thunder Hawk curiously.

“What do you got there?”

“I ain’t got nothing. Just my wallet.”

The old man seemed to accept this. He sat up and leaned against the headrest of the couch. The snoozing cat spooked at the sudden jolt and leapt to the floor. It walked down the hall, tail waving gently in the air. The man pulled a crumpled plastic pack from his shirt pocket and gripped a loose cigarette with his lips. He lit it, took a drag and pointed the burning tip at Thunder Hawk. “So what is it you want from me? I know you got a reason for being here. Need a place to stay?”

“Nah. Nothing like that. Just getting out of the weather is all.”

The man pulled back the lace curtain and looked out the window. “Shit, this ain’t weather a-tall. It’s probably still above zero. You got spoiled with all that sunshine in California—you forgot what real weather is like.”

“Maybe.”

The man continued: “Because I ain’t got no money. So, if that’s what you’re after, you’re shit out of luck.”

“I don’t need money,” Thunder Hawk said. He looked down at Ezra lining up the blocks into a wall. “And I better be headed out.”

“You can stop by some time again,” the man said through a plume of smoke, as if Thunder Hawk had passed some extensive test.

“We’ll see.”

“You don’t want to take Ezra, do you?”

“I ain’t got a place where he could stay. He’s better off here.”

“Alright then. If you hear someone says they’re missing a child, let them know where they can find him.”

“I’ll keep my ears open.”

Thunder Hawk walked out into the remnants of the day. The wind cut through his shirt and his skin contracted. The mutt whined to him and Thunder Hawk leaned over the fence and spat in its face.

The cab was silent save for Thunder Hawk’s hurried breaths. He leaned forward and pulled the Ruger out. He ejected the clip and slid the action back to release the shell. He laid it all on the seat beside him. With one last look at the house, he reversed out of the yard onto the highway.

He rounded the bend in the road and saw Napayshni face down in the ditch, stiff and motionless. A small pack of rawboned dogs were making their way across the pasture toward the man.

The western horizon reflected in the rearview mirror; what little sun there was had begun to set and a flare of bright pink lighted the edge of the world. He grinded to fourth gear and picked up speed. He wanted to get home before the roads turned to ice.

Nick Heeb was born in South Dakota. He currently resides in the Southwest.

Donkey Lady Bridge, fiction by Misti Rainwater-Lites

There weren’t any prayers or tears left. Stormi was brought up Baptist and that shit was hard to shake. She was too intense and weird and had too many goddamn questions to be a Pinterest mom but her heart was too spacious to abandon her only son so she stayed in the redneck city in the redneck state and clenched her fists and gritted her teeth through burning hoops of fire. Bullshit traffic. Strip mall dystopia. Glorified trash culture. Beer and boobs. Lowest common denominator mentality. Ubiquitous shortcuts to thinking. “And I was, like, literally so mad I was, like, shouting? I mean…really? Are you…like…serious?” Another Eagles song on the radio. Another zombie on another Android walking into Stormi as she strode across the parking lot to enter the Christian America approved warehouse where she could buy a barrel of puffy cheese balls for two bucks and buy a magazine that would tell her the real reason why Blake Shelton couldn’t get enough of Gwen Stefani’s pussy. Star Wars Pop-Tarts. Her son needed those.

“We’re gonna do this, damn it. Mommy hates driving, especially at night, but we are gonna find Donkey Lady Bridge. I promise, baby.” The boy was content in the backseat with his Slim Jim and Pringles. He was eight-years-old and still sucked his thumb. Stormi would be riding the bus sometimes late at night because she was tired of driving and a memory from three or four years ago would hit her in the gut like a sledgehammer and the tears would flow. There were plenty of prayers and tears left. The ex-husband had put a lock on the guest bedroom door in that house that rent house they left in the glorified cow pasture south of Dallas when the call center in Corsicana got shut down and they moved to San Antonio. He put the lock on the door so that while he was at work she would take care of the boy. Change his diaper. Feed him. Interact with him. Blow bubbles. Read books. Rather than get on Facebook and send more pictures of her tits and ass to another writer slash editor.

Donkey Lady Bridge was somewhere over the Medina River somewhere south of San Antonio. There were different stories. In the story Stormi liked best the woman was on fire and she jumped into the river and died two deaths simultaneously. She burned. She drowned. She haunted generations of drunk Texans with her rage and sorrow.

“This was a bad idea,” the boy said when they finally found the place. It was too dark to see anything. Cars whizzed by.

“No. It was a great idea,” Stormi said. She got out and stretched but didn’t make the boy get out. He would remember someday. He would remember a lot of shit but maybe this memory would compensate for a lot of others. He had a mommy who loved him so much she bought him snacks and took him on a road trip to shoot a documentary for the YouTube channel she had created for him. His mommy was passionate and brave and she drove while he ate snacks and sucked his thumb.

“What if the Donkey Lady follows us back to San Antonio?” the boy asked.

“She won’t. She’s happy where she is.”

Misti Rainwater-Lites is the author of Bullshit Rodeo and the CEO of Chupacabra Disco. She enjoys collaborating with her son and giving the middle finger to haters and joykillers.

Nude with Boots, story by Tom Leins

“Same again – no ice.”

The barman glares at me. I don’t blame him. No one likes being told how to do their job.

***

Slattery’s Meat Market is situated in an ugly, unremarkable part of town. It used to be a factory social club, back in another lifetime, but now it hosts live pussy shows and the occasional cockfight. When I arrived, Slattery was scrubbing blood-streaked vomit off the front steps. Despite the brutally cold Autumn afternoon, his evening shirt was transparent with sweat.

There are no coasters, so the barman places the drink on an old Thighs & Fries napkin. Apparently Slattery retrieved them from a skip after the chicken joint was shut down earlier in the year.

There is a videotape playing on a small black and white TV behind the bar. All I can really see is a juddering blur of skin and bone, but I half-recognise one of the girls, so I assume that the video was made locally. It is always nice to see local entrepreneurs looking out for one another.

***

I turn back towards the stage and survey the smouldering wreckage of my past. Ani and I were never married, but we came close. Too many hot, blurred afternoons. Too much vodka and Mountain Dew. Back then she had a part-time job in a Texaco garage, I didn’t have a job of any description. They were good days.

I move further down the bar, away from the toilet block and the stink of hot piss coursing through the rusty pipes. The stage consists of five paint-splattered planks balanced across a load of beer crates. This end of the room smells of stale cigarette smoke and fresh pussy sweat.

Ani is nude, but a moment passes before I realise that she is pregnant. It takes me by surprise. She told me that her insides had been chewed up after a botched appendectomy, so it takes me by surprise. I remember the ragged scar well. I used to trace it with my forefinger after sex.

***

Her dark hair has been shaved to stubble and her scalp is the colour of a burned carpet. A cigarette dangles lazily from her lips as she gets her grind on. Flecks of ash fall across her breasts every time she makes a sudden movement. She is completely shaved down below, but I can see small tufts of hair under her armpits. Her boots are scuffed and silver. They look too big for her, like they used to belong to someone else.

I came here today to tell her that her father has died in prison, but I’m not sure I have the heart. I was told that he bled out in the chow line at Channings Wood after getting a shank between the ribs. The knifeman had melted a prison-issue razor blade into a plastic spork. Obvious, but effective. What Ani doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Maybe.

***

The song ends abruptly, and when Ani climbs down from the stage a couple of guys drift across the sticky floor towards her. They remind me of rabid dogs in search of spoiled meat. At first I think they are carnies–some of Eugene’s boys, maybe, but they look too clean.

“What does a man have to do to get a fuck around here?”

The first man is middle-aged and hard-looking. His eyes are sunk deep in their sockets, and his ears and nose look too big for his withered face. I slide off my barstool towards them. Slattery usually employs a bouncer – a big fat guy with a lump hammer – but he doesn’t start his shift until six o’clock. Up close, I recognise the tough guy. His name is Robert John Hershey. He used to be a cop, until they kicked him off the force.

I stomp the back of his legs and he crumples like an old cigarette packet.

Ani’s wet lips part as she sees me. She doesn’t smile. Neither do I.

Hershey peels himself off the dirty floor, with a nasty-looking smile plastered across his rotten face. I see a glint of metal under the queasy bar lights as he lashes out at me with a set of brass knuckles.

I allow the car aerial to drop from my sleeve and whip him across the eyes in one fluid motion. He howls like a stomped dog – blood leaking out from behind his bony fingers. He stumbles around the bar shrieking, bouncing off tables and chairs.

The other man watches wordlessly, enjoying the show. He is called Charles Boggs. He’s a cop, too. He reaches into his checked sports jacket and comes out with a battered little gun. It looks like a throw-down piece. He smiles unpleasantly, and his skin looks see-through. His badly shaven jawline clicks as he shuts his mouth.

He aims the piece at my face, hand trembling slightly.

He steps closer, and I picture the bullet entering my eye-socket and splattering my skull-meat across the bar.

I picture the barman reluctantly mopping up the viscera with a stack of Thighs & Fries napkins.

I picture shovelfuls of winter mud raining down on my cheap, plywood coffin.

My heart thuds like a breezeblock being thrown down a tenement stairwell. I’m about to close my eyes when Boggs grunts and drops to his knees. Slattery stands over his body, breathing like a horse. A tyre iron dangles limply from his hand, like an afterthought. The blood pooling under Boggs’ dented skull looks positively black.

“Fuck. . . thank you.”

He shrugs awkwardly. Slattery is a tall, rangy man, but his face has been ruined by too much nicotine and gin. He grunts.

“I don’t have many friends, so I take care of the few I’ve got.”

Then he starts to drag Boggs through pool of skull-blood by his jacket collar. He leaves a fat, dark smear on the floor.

***

Ani doesn’t reappear from behind the smoke-coloured curtain next to the stage, and I don’t have the energy to look for her.

The barman passes me a tall glass of something luminous.

“Cocktail. On the house. Slattery calls it a ‘Clubfoot’.”

I take a sip.

“I hope it tastes better coming up than it does going down…”

He doesn’t laugh, but neither do I. It wasn’t a fucking joke.

***

Afternoon congeals into evening, and the Meat Market becomes hot with bodies. Crowds make me nervous, so I button up my jacket and leave. Slattery has resumed scrubbing at the bloodstain. The sky is the same colour as his cold, grey eyes.

A sickly yellow smile forms between his lips.

“Someday, we are all going to pay for this.”

I nod, leaving him to the blood-streaked vomit, and walk into the hard winter light.

Tom Leins is a disgraced ex-film critic from Paignton, UK. His short stories have been published by the likes of Akashic Books, Shotgun Honey, Near to the Knuckle, Revolution John, and Spelk. He is currently working on his first novel, “Thirsty and Miserable.” Get your pound of flesh at https://thingstodoindevonwhenyouredead.wordpress.com/

Salute, fiction by William Trent Pancoast

I sit by a window on this twenty-degree-below-zero morning and think what it was like for my dad and all the other kids in the Ardennes trying to dig foxholes in the frozen rocky ground, with other kids trying to kill them through the trees, these eventual men I only knew as stubbled old guys at the American Legion Hall, and how when my dad died in 1979 I had such a bellyful of Vietnam and war I told what was left of his friends that they couldn’t come fire their rifles at the grave site, and I think of the concentration camp prisoners forced to go out on work detail in the hard stillness of winter in their ragged coats and flimsy shoes, my dad there to liberate them, and I curse men from time immemorial who have perpetrated such cruelties to other humans, and I load my own rifle this Arctic-aired morning, step into the yard and say to the whitened woods before me, “Commence firing,” and begin shooting into the trees, steady not fast, the salute that I denied my father, my tears freezing to my cheeks.

William Trent Pancoast’s novels include WILDCAT (2010) and CRASHING (1983 and 2016). His recent fiction has appeared in drafthorse, Revolver, Steel Toe Review, Monkeybicycle, Night Train, Fried chicken and Coffee, As It Ought To Be, and Working Class Heroes. Pancoast retired from the auto industry in 2007 after thirty years as a die maker and union newspaper editor. Born in 1949, the author lives in Ontario, Ohio. He has a BA in English from the Ohio State University.

Y’all Qaeda, poem by Marcus Bales

They don’t believe in women’s rights

         Or science data;

Breakfast prayers provide their heights

Of thought, but only for the whites,

They see themselves as southern knights

Who’ve got the Feds dead in their sights,

         The brave Y’all Qaeda.

Our zealots are as bad as theirs–

         A long parade of

Idiots who think affairs

Have gone to hell and no one cares

Except for them who think repairs

Require violence and prayers

         By brave Y’all Qaeda.

They carry guns so they won’t fear

         What they’re afraid of:

A decent life of peace that’s clear

Of weapons since the new frontier

Is multicultural, peer-to-peer,

And not some fucking buccaneer

         From brave Y’all Qaeda.

They each remain a willing slave

         To their crusade of

Being free to misbehave

With ignorance and hate. But they’ve

Misunderstood what they should save:

Unarmed civilians are more brave

         Than brave Y’all Qaeda.

The courage of civilian life

         Is a cascade of

Moments of controlling strife

With which each situation’s rife

Without a gun or bomb or knife

So you can love your kids and wife–

         Not brave Y’all Qaeda.

They’re living in the Yellow Zone

         And in the shade of

Terrors we’ve already shown

Are livable — all people own

The same desires, and most have thrown

Their lot to see their children grown–

         Not in Y’all Qaeda.

The time has come, you bloody fools:

Show what you’re made of.

Build, instead of blow up, schools,

And teach and live by golden rules

Instead of hoarding gold and jewels.

Put down your weapons, pick up tools,

         O brave Y’all Qaeda.

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and his work has not appeared in Poetry or The New Yorker.

Muddy Mississippi, fiction by Katie Moore

My Mama always said if it hadn’t been for that first sight of the Mississippi, twisting like a snake below the levy, she never would have laid down in the back of Billy Taylor’s pickup. The way she told it, the river did all the courting for that mean Taylor boy.

Ma never thought the spell the water cast over her was quite fair—setting her life on a path with as many twists and turns as any river could ever have. Maybe she was making her excuses when she told me her river tales. Myself, I don’t think rivers are in the business of being fair. They just are what they are.

Mama was a puzzle. Sometimes she screamed in a voice made harsh with years of cigarette smoke, “Goddamn! I wish I’d never seen that river, girl!”

Other times, mostly when I was very small, she would pull me into her lap while she rocked by the kitchen window in the evening and stroke my frizzy hair ‘til it behaved in her slender hands. She’d whisper in my ear, “The Mississippi River gave me my girl, the only critter in the world worth lovin’.”

Then she’d send me off to bed with a pat on the bottom and I’d fall asleep listening to the crackle and squeak of her rocker through the wall. She wore ruts in the floor board with that old rocker.

Mama loved the river so much she named me after it. Mississippi Ann Taylor, born nine days into August, the same year the river ate my Granny’s house. I was 23 inches long, which is mighty long for a baby, and nine pounds even, which seems mighty big too. I can’t imagine pushing out nine pounds of baby between my legs. On the day Ma brought me into the world she told visitors, before she let anyone lay hands on my newness, that my name was Mississippi—not Missy, Cici, Pipi, or any other such nonsense. She warned everyone from the pastor to her sisters, “Better not let me catch you callin’ my girl out of her name.”

People must have seen in her eyes the punishment for breaking this rule, because I don’t remember it ever being tested before of after the seventh grade when J.P.Corbin made his mistake.

Mama had braided my hair real pretty for the first day back to school after a summer of wild and nappy curls like big yanks of yarn bursting from my head and swinging down my back. She spent two hours combing and cutting all the knots free and braided it tight in pigtails just before I laid my head down for the nervous last-night-of-summer sleep. I thought I might be a bit too big for braids, but I didn’t mind none. It was nice to have all that hair out of my way. I hardly dared to sleep for fear I’d toss an’ turn too much with the jitters and knock the braids loose.

In the morning I woke to sleek and tame braids like new rope. I toss’d ‘em back and forth over my shoulders and preened like a fussy hen in the bathroom mirror ‘til Pa called me a ninny and told me he’d take a scissors to ‘em if I didn’t quit.

He couldn’t spoil my smile that morning. I walked to school proud as a rooster. My dress was as plain and careworn as it was when school let out the last year, and my shoes were picked out of the church box, but my braids were shiny in the early sun and the breeze tickled ‘round my ears. I felt just as pretty as a magazine girl. I was just sure folks would stop and stare over my fine hair when I walked up on the school, but nobody said nothin’. They went about their business, and I went about mine. I wasn’t used to much attention, but I sure did want someone to notice me just once.

No one did, for good or meanness, ‘til recess. Of all the people I liked and those I didn’t much care for, J.P. Corbin was the one to pay my braids some mind. He was the biggest, meanest little snake in boy skin I had ever met, up to that point. He walked right up on me playing squares and wrapped his fingers around one of my braids. I remember his hands looked like rising bread dough, all dimpled and pasty. He yanked so hard my head bent right down to the side and I screamed out a cat’s angry yowl. I swung my fists and tried to get my teeth in him, but he was quick for all his size.

“Sissy braids! Sissy braids! Sissy Mississippi,” he sang like a nursery rhyme. Once he stopped his singing he took to calling me Sissy for good, even though everyone already knew better.

All that day he called me Sissy when he had cause to speak to me, and whispered it even when he didn’t. And he laughed, did he ever laugh, like a snake would laugh, like a squirrel screaming at you from the trees, like a mean dog barking. I told him he’d better stop or my crazy Ma was gonna get him.

He called me Sissy the next day, and the next. He got other people calling me Sissy, singing it at me in the hallway.

That was just the first time I learnt how way-down-deep bad boys are, all of ‘em. They’s just a waste of time. I always thought so, but J.P. Corbin confirmed it. I wasn’t never picked on before, so I didn’t know quite what I should be thinking. But I didn’t like it. My name was Mississippi, it always had been. They only had to say it. I had to learn to spell it before everyone else, and write it. I had to be named after a river, not them. I got madder and madder the more I thought on it.

I finally screwed up the courage to tell Mama.

Fire lit up her eyes and the heat must have burned her cheeks ‘cause I never saw her that color before or since. I knew she wasn’t just a little mad because she didn’t even yell. She didn’t even talk. She just walked on out the door.

When she stomped off in her house-dress I wished I’d never told her. It was the one that used to be white with blue flowers but looked more like gray with darker gray flowers just then. She went the way to town, down the gravel road. I just knew she was going to talk to Mr. Corbin. He would see her dress and her crazy eyes. Everyone already thought Mama was crazy, but I didn’t like her proving it. I wanted to sink right down into the moldy green cow pond down the road.

She didn’t tell me what happened, she didn’t even speak to me when she came in, red cheeked from the walk and looking tired. She just got supper ready and combed out my ratty hair after we ate. Didn’t braid it though, never again.

I didn’t have too many friends after that time, but people didn’t often call me anything but my name anymore either, when they spoke to me at all. J.P. never even looked my way cross-eyed. Rumor was Ma’d threatened to set his Pa’s house on fire and curse his crop. I don’t think she would have done it, but likely she could have done it. I heard his Pa’d whupped him ’til he couldn’t set down proper and took away all his chore money for three months. I didn’t feel bad for him. He knew better than to call me anything but Mississippi.

We lived in that same town, Devlin, when I was born, and all through while I was growing up. I still live in Devlin, surrounded by people who know the sound of my laughter in church on a Sunday morning. My Mama don’t live anywhere no more though. She’s dead. An’ my Pa’s as good as dead if you ask me and mine. I pretended not to see him, when he used to stand at the foot of the gravel drive and stare up at the house, vacant eyed like a slaughtered calf. He’s just one of my ghosts.

I got lots of ghosts for a person my age. Some of ‘em passed down from Mama, an’ some I earned all on my own, like pennies for chores. Some even come from Pa, I’m sure.

Devlin ain’t anywhere near Mama’s river, but she talked about it so vivid, I always thought I could see it in my head. I pictured it just like a film of the ocean I saw once in school, with waves rushing up on the shore. I went to see it after Mama died, instead of going to the service. It only seemed right to say goodbye to her there, where we first met, the night my Pa put me in her belly. The town buzzed for weeks behind cupped hands whenever I walked by. They said I always was an odd one, and taking off for the river when I should be at the funeral was just another example of how I wasn’t quite right. I was Mama’s girl. It ran in the blood.

The first sight of Mama’s muddy Mississippi was a bit disappointing, to be truthful.

When I was growing up Pa always said all Mama’s talk about the river was horse-shit, and that Beth Pidden was happy to jump in his truck and drive away, anywhere he wanted to take her. There wasn’t no other way for her to see the world, ‘cept to go where someone would take her. Mama was never quite happy just being my Mama and Pa’s wife here in Devlin. She was the type shoulda seen the world.

If Pa’d been drinking, and she started spinning river tales, he’d laugh in her face and tell her she wasn’t nothin’ but a dumb bitch. Sometimes I laughed with him, ‘specially when she said she wished the river hadn’t brought her such a trouble in the body of a girl. She said that at least three times in a week when I got to be old enough for the boys to start looking twice after me on Sundays. But I believed her river stories, even if I said I didn’t when I was feeling stubborn. I believed everything my Mama ever said.

It was easy, trusting Mama’s river tales, ‘specially when I’d see stories in the town paper about the river flooding and ruining all manner of homes and fields. Like I said, the year I was born, the river swallowed up my Granny’s house. Swallowed it up, with Granny sleeping sound in her bed. No one knows if she woke up, or tried to swim away or get out of the house. Pa said the house, whitewashed and a bit drafty but not at all rickety, was there before the flood and after the flood it was gone. All the river left was an old tree stump he used to chop logs on and a porch post still sticking up from the ground like a sawed off flagpole. My Granny Taylor was never seen again by anyone in Devlin, probably not by anyone at all.

‘Fore she died she came to see me in the hospital where I was born, over in Hoggarth. I was her first girl gran’child and she thought girls was a bit smarter than boys, or so said my Pa anyway. I don’t remember meeting her, but Pa wasn’t real fond of her, and I wasn’t real fond of Pa. So ‘course I thought she must have been the most wonderful person, next to Mama.

Pa disliked her so much he didn’t even talk about her unless he was special-occasion-drunk. On those nights he was fond of cursing her name with every dirty word in the book, and some I’m sure he made up ‘cause I ain’t ever heard ‘em before or since. I never could make sense from him when he was in his cups, so I quit listening to him and asked Mama instead.

My Mama only ever met Pa’s Mama once, aside from the birth visit, on account of Pa’s extreme dislike of her. But Mama thought she was a real good woman, especially ‘cause she was living right next to the river where Mama wished she coulda lived. Pa wouldn’t hear of that, he didn’t want to live anywhere near his memories, he said.

I asked Mama why Pa hated his own Ma so much. It seemed silly back when I was eleven and it sure still seems silly now. Mama said when Pa was about eight his Mama was carrying his little sister, the youngest and the only girl out of eight boys. Granny couldn’t a’known she was having a girl, but she did. She knew it. And she was fairly crazy with excitement. Seems she sent Pa’s Daddy clear up to Hoggarth for some calico and lace. She had it in her head to make calico curtains and calico gowns and a calico hat with lace and a bow. She never did get her calico. Pa’s Daddy went up on a Saturday and they didn’t hear the news ’til Tuesday. Ma told it that Pa’s Daddy bought that calico and lace and then went right into the Whisper Dixie and got himself special-occasion-drunk. I guess Pa comes by his mean mouth honestly ‘cause his Daddy started shooting it off with some of the Poighton brothers about half witted Sally Poighton who worked at the post office and slept with men for chocolates and nickels. That’s what he heard, and that’s what he said. I don’t rightly know how true it was.

True or not, those Poighton boys whupped him till he looked like a rotten plum, but even beaten he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. I guess he couldn’t leave well enough alone. I don’t know what he said, but someone heard Felis Poighton tell him he’d get him. Felis was the oldest brother, and the dumbest. He looked a bit like a catfish and smelled ‘bout as bad. I remember him from church when I was real young. Pa’s Daddy didn’t ever come home. When Bixby Jaytre heard about the fight and came checking up that Tuesday, Pa’s Mama knew the Poighton Boys had finished him off. No one ever found a body, or any trace.

Pa blamed his Mama, on account of the calico and lace. I don’t know if Granny blamed herself, but she dressed my aunt Junie in the same old clothes she had dressed her boys in.

‘Course Pa never forgave her. He’s the kind as holds on to the bad and never notices the good.

He left when I was 13, not long after J.P. Corbin’s mistake, but by then I was ‘bout done with him anyway. It nearly killed Mama though. I don’t know why, but she loved him. Even after calling her stupid and a bitch and all manner of meanness for nearly 14 years she still loved him. Even after spending all his money at Trick’s and Ruth’s, shelling it out for shots of tequila and pints of beer or stuffing it in some girl’s underpants, even after telling her once or twice a week that he paid the rent, she better put it out, and making her cry real quiet, even after leaving her with no money and no job and damn near no food and me to take care of, even after all that she loved him.

Loved him so much she stayed in bed near three weeks when he went. I had to do the cleaning, and what little cooking was possible. I had to take care of all the chickens and the pig. Thinking on it now, I shoulda caught one of them scrawny chickens. We coulda had some real food to lift our spirits. Shame I didn’t think of it then.

Pa said he was leaving ‘cause Mama wasn’t fulfilling her wifely duties. And Mama said Pa wasn’t fulfilling his husband duties so why should she. And they carried on for a whole day, both of ‘em trying to win. And then Mama called him a worthless good for nothing drunk. That might not have been so bad but she added, ‘…just like your dead, rottin’-in-the-ground father.’

You coulda heard crickets chirping clear over in Hoggarth. Pa just stared at her, his mouth all lazy and hanging open, his pale blue eyes open real wide. He just stared and stared for a good minute. ‘Don’t ever call my Daddy names, you fucking bitch,’ he whispered real low, like wind. I saw his fists clenching up before Mama did. It sounded like a tree cracking down in a storm when he hit her. Her head snapped clear round and she fell on her hip. I think it was the first time. I know it was the last time, ‘cause he left right after and we didn’t see hide nor hair of him till ‘bout a year later.

I didn’t say a word the whole time. I don’t think I blinked once, just watched it all in slow motion with my hands clenched so tight my fingers turned white as milk. I opened my mouth, all right, but no sound came out.

He walked right out with just the clothes on his back and the wallet in his pocket. He didn’t take nothin’. We thought he was coming back, for his things if not for us. But he didn’t, and Mama just lay in bed. She got skinny as a wild cat and looked a little wild in the eyes too.

After three weeks she got out of bed and started making supper, like nothing was diff’rent. She didn’t talk about Pa, not once, and we didn’t see him for a long time. It was better without him and his lying, drinking ways in my opinion. But I don’t think Mama agreed. I heard her crying here and there, in the bathroom, out in the garden, in the kitchen chopping greens. It was as if her life just followed him on out the door. She got old just ‘bout overnight. Her eyes never lost the wild.

We didn’t know where he’d gone. But ‘bout a year after he left he was back again asking Mama for money. His hair was mud colored instead of shiny blonde and it smelled funny, like meat and bad milk and sick animal, and something minty, but not nice like mint growing round the porch. I could see the bones in his face clear through his skin, his hands were that way too. He seemed ‘bout as alive as a skeleton. ‘Course we didn’t have no money to spare, Mama had to take in sewing and mending, and chil’ren to watch, and all manner of odd jobs just to keep the mortgage paid and food, almost always, on the table.

He went off again real quiet when Mama told him she didn’t have none to spare. He didn’t yell or cuss or nothing, didn’t seem normal to me. Just seeing him made Mama sad all over again though, so I didn’t say nothin’ to her bout how strange it was that he just went off without no fuss. ‘Course we found out why ‘bout two days later when Mama was fixin’ to pay the mortgage. It was gone, every bit of the money. She still kep’ it in the blue and brown pear shaped cookie jar on the counter, just like when Pa was living with us. We couldn’t afford no cookies anyways. I s’pose Pa still had his key, and we hadn’t even thought of changing the locks. I knew it was Pa, for sure, he got in and took all our money without us even knowing But Mama wanted to believe it was some stranger, called the police and raised a fuss. She didn’t tell ‘em ‘bout Pa asking for some money. They would have thought he took it too, but I don’t think Mama would have listened to them either.

We had to sell half the furniture in the house and the tractor to make it back and pay the mortgage ‘fore the bank stepped in and put us out. I had to sleep on a pile of blankets after that, since my bed got sold to Fran Daws for her littlest girl Betsy. Now I never did like my Pa much, ‘specially since he up and left, but I started hating him for sure after that. It weren’t the last time he stole from us, neither. The second time we had to get a charity loan from God’s Heart Baptist Church. We paid it back every month with bout half our food money. I was hungrier and skinnier than usual that year.

The third and last time he did it, Mama fell over dead and didn’t have to worry ‘bout the mortgage no more. I was near to twenty summers and madder’n a snake in a burlap sack. Mama hadn’t been feeling like herself for awhile, but I never thought she’d die. To be truthful, I thought she’d outlast Pa and me and the whole town.

See, I didn’t have a mind to marry, not ever, and Mama said if I couldn’t find me a man, I’d hafta get me a job. So I did. It was after my first day as a checker at Bunts Grocery that I found her. I could see her arm laying on the kitchen floor, her hand curled up like she was trying to hold on to life as it left her. I knew she was dead when I saw that arm but I walked in and stood on the brown painted floor to look at the rest of her anyway. Her dress was blue and worn in the back, just getting threadbare. It had floated up as she fell and lay twisted ‘round the tops of her legs, showing a triangle of dingy white underpants and two skinny, veined legs. Her hair had never gone grey, it was brown like mine but the sun was catching it through the window and it looked red like fire. I couldn’t help but think that Mama was dead but her hair sure looked alive.

I don’t remember seeing the cookie jar smashed on the floor ‘till after she was taken away by Mrs. Utney and her two fat sons. I was all alone. I didn’t know what to say when I saw it, just stood dumb and staring. I knew Pa’d killed Mama. With all his thieving and lying and leaving, he just wore her right down. There ain’t no words to tell about something like that. I knew my Pa to be the worse thing living. That ain’t easy. And my Mama, only soul who ever cared a whit ‘bout me, was dead. That ain’t easy either. And I was all alone, and that was the hardest part of all.

I tried to tell the police, but they just thought I was, “havin’ an episode,” a spell of craziness brought on by Mama’s death. The whole town knew we was crazy, me and Mama. I never did know why exactly, I just knew we was. I grew up knowing it. They were real nice ‘bout it at the station, but they didn’t do nothing.

The church helped out. They took up a collection for the funeral and one for the mortgage, since I was bereaved and all. They sure can make you feel like giving money at that church, talk you right out of every cent if they want to. I almost felt like I should give it all back to someone who needed it more, but I figured it’d be hard to find someone needier’n me.

The old ladies who smelled like powder and always sat up at the front brought over so much food I wouldn’t have needed to cook nothin’ for weeks, if I’d been hungry. They helped me arrange the funeral too. We had Mama cremated, since that was all we could afford, but there was a nice little service at the church, I’m told. Like I said, I didn’t go. I took off, with what was left of Mama, for the river.

I started off walking, but got a ride real quick from a man who’d been in town to visit his grandgirl, just born. He took me all the way to the water, since he lived close by.

I’d thought it’d be like the water in a picture of an island I saw on a postcard once, all sky blue and shining in the sun. I thought from the way Mama talked it was like a little piece of heaven set right down ‘tween Missouri and Illinois. I couldn’t help but think maybe the river died when Mama died, ‘cause it sure didn’t look like the river she talked ’bout in her stories.

It was smaller than I thought and the banks were nothin’ but scrub grass and rocks. Dirty too, the kind of thing city people would call trashy and turn up their noses at. Not just dirt colored, but dirty feeling, like the air ‘round it stuck to my skin and wouldn’t rub off. The water was brown and running slow like a river of rain with shiny oil resting on top. Look’t like it was headed for some big storm drain. And the smell, shoooo! Smell’t like outhouse, like wet dog and boilin’ potatoes. Smell’t like old ladies and bugs. I didn’t like it one bit.

Now I don’t know, maybe Mama talked ‘bout it so much she talked all the life right out of it. She had a habit of that. She could make you feel like the queen of the whole world when you was down or she could make a spring seem gray when it was green and pretty just a minute before. She didn’t have much but she had a way with words. Pa called it her devil tongue, said all women had an evil tongue in their dirty mouths.

Or maybe she wasn’t quite right. Maybe she was just dumb like Pa said. And I musta been dumb for believing her.

The mosquitoes were eating me alive. I hadn’t thought about it before now, but the river was perfect for little pests and critters. Somebody was dumping their garbage close to where I was standing. It smelled like old food and dirty diapers. I remember thinking that it wasn’t nice, even to a river this worn out. Certainly didn’t help the place none.

I went back home, quick as my feet would carry me. It took longer to get back since I walked most the way. I wasn’t lookin’ forward to goin’ back to Mama’s house, all alone. Maybe I walked a bit slower than I could’a. My feet was powerful sore by the time I got there, but I got there.

It was cold, and dark, and sad without Mama, so all’s I did was sleep, half of a day, and all of a night, and half of the next day. And then I walked down to Bunts’ Grocery and told ‘em I was ready to work. They didn’t think it was right, so soon after Mama died. They didn’t say as much to me, but I caught ‘em whispering a time or two. I had my reasons though, same reasons I went to Mr. Bunts and asked him how I could sell Mama’s house, and would he help me find a place to stay on my own.

The Bunts’ didn’t like it, me living by myself here in town. I guess if I lived way out at Mama’s, they could forget I was really there alone. They said it weren’t proper and even tried to marry me off to one or t’other of their fat sons, Huck and Frank, Jr. No other girl would have ‘em, but I guess they thought I just might. They sure were wrong. I wouldn’t marry any old man, and I said as much. I don’t want nothin’ from no man, ‘cause I don’t want to give nothin’ back. Besides, Huck had funny breathing, like gurgling way down in his belly every in breath, and wheezing every out. And Frank always seemed to have his fingers in every little wet place his body had. I couldn’t abide by either the breathing or the fingering.

In the end they ended up agreeing to help, seeing as how I worked for ‘em so cheap and stayed late most days.

I guess Pa got wind of it, ‘cause he started standing outside the old house most nights, just looking up at it, like he was thinking. I didn’t pay him no mind, he was as dead as Mama in my mind. Anyway he shoulda been. One night he tried to talk to me as I was coming back from work late, walking and bone tired and bad spirited to begin with. But I just walked on as he talked about us sticking together and me being all he had in the world. He took to yelling and grabbing at my arm and acting desperate, but I just kept walking and I guess he didn’t feel he could get too close to the house now Mama wasn’t in it ‘cause he didn’t follow.

I couldn’t wait for the house to sell, to be rid of ghosts, and memories and Pa. Sometimes I thought I saw Mama, in the kitchen cooking up supper or sitting in her rocker on the front porch. It was a bit startling, thinking Mama might not be in heaven at all, but still here- a ghost. I didn’t think about it much if I could help it, just like I didn’t think about Pa. I fancied myself an orphan.

What I did think about was working, and once the house sold for next to nothin’ to an old man and his three legged ratty dog, I thought about moving. I didn’t much care where, so long as it was far as I could get from Mama’s house. Far as I could get turned out to be ‘bout half an hour walking from the Grocery in a little old place up a whole bunch of stairs, right above the dry cleaning shop. It was falling apart bad, steps loose and the roof leaking in the rain. Mighty drafty when it was cold out, and like to boil a person alive when it was hot. I didn’t have much furniture, just a second hand mattress with the faded flowered sheets that used to be Mama’s, a table and a chair, and a small chest for my clothes. I didn’t have much of nothin’, to be truthful. I had to save pennies and live hungry sometimes, just like always.

But it was mine, and it was the first thing that ever was mine, just mine. That made it like living in a castle in some story, made it just as homey as could be. I felt real fine, being all on my own in my own place, for awhile.

I think Pa took to standing outside there too, but I can’t be sure it was him, or anyone really. Sometimes I thought I saw someone, in the dark places outside at night. Sometimes I thought I heard something, like a footstep or a cough. I might have just dreamed it all up, but maybe someone was there. I guess I’ll never know for sure now. Whoever it was coulda just been there that one night, or he coulda been watchin’. Don’t much matter, what’s done is done.

I was walking home from work after staying ‘til right near ‘leven. I’d been helping Huck with the inventory since he can’t read so good, or count so good, and I just lost all track of the day. I didn’t have much to go home to, to be truthful, so I guess it didn’t much matter to me.

Outside it was black as the bottom of a still barrel and the wind was howling and shushing. I remember wishing I had more’n just a worn red cardigan to pull ‘round me while I was walking, and cussing my thin soled shoes. They were black, which was all that mattered for working at the Grocery and they were cheap which was all that mattered to me ‘til that night. I wished I’d gave up another few dollars for warmer toes, I sure did. I was mighty pitiful. I’m sure I looked like an old lady, skin loose on the bones ‘cause there ain’t no meat b’tween, shivering in practical shoes and a cardigan, my hair knotted tight behind my neck, my eyes slitted almost shut ‘gainst the biting wind.

Guess it makes sense I didn’t hear nothing, with all my thinking and all the wind. I don’t much think it woulda made a difference if I had heard. Nothing I could do once he grabbed onto my arm and twisted it up behind my back, ’til my fingers coulda almost scratched at the bottom of my neck. And then he had the other arm, moving it unnatural, using it to push me this or that way ‘til I was ‘tween a red pickup with heat still coming off the tires and a brick building with busted out windows, used to be a liquor store. The ground under my knees was cold and hard, the kind as should be covered with snow. That night it was fairly powdered with someone’s broken bottle, beer or pop, I don’t know which. The glass cut my knees and later my back.

I didn’t see him. He was behind me at first and then my dress and sweater were right up over my head. I never got a look at even an inch of him. But boy did he smell. He smelled like Pa did, that time he came begging, like meat and bad milk and sick animal, and something minty, but not nice like mint growing round the porch. And he breathed like Huck, gurgling way down in his belly every in breath, and wheezing every out. He was laughing as he kicked me down ‘til I was trying to crawl right into the earth. He laughed like J.P. Corbin, way back in grade school, like a snake would laugh, like a squirrel screaming at you from the trees, like a mean dog barking. He beat me down ’til I was loser’s low, but just like Pa’s Daddy, he couldn’t leave well enough alone. And when I felt something pushin’ up inside of me, and my eyes rolled back up in my head, and I went to something like sleep, I remember thinkin’ of Frank and his fingers.

I don’t know when I woke up, and I didn’t know where I was. I was blue, from beating and cold both. I didn’t know your insides could hurt. I sat up looking, and staring for a good long time ‘fore I realized I was at the bottom of my own outside staircase. I didn’t remember crawling, or walking. I don’t know how I got there, but I crawled up the steps and in the door all the same.

I slept just inside the doorway for a day or two. I lost track of hours and days. Sometimes one seemed like t’other. And when I woke up, I knew you was with me, that he put you in my belly. And I knew you’d wanna know some ‘bout me. I ain’t been well enough to do much talkin’ before now tho’, took a long time for my face to heal proper. At least, I think it was a long time. I ain’t been strong enough for going out doors either, but it feels good walking now. I didn’t want no one stopping to pick us up. I wanted to tell you why and besides, I know where we’re going better’n anyone. We’re almost there now, and I’m almost done speaking my piece.

It ain’t ‘cause I don’t love you as you are, I do. It ain’t…

Well, it don’t matter what it ain’t. What it is…

See, I just can’t, I mean, I don’t know how to…

I just don’t want you. It ain’t personal. Yes, I can love you but not want you. I don’t know how. No, it don’t make sense. I don’t even know who your Pa is. This is better, I’m savin’ you a hard time. Being third in a line of crazies wouldn’t be no good for you. Mamas know best. You woulda learnt that real quick with me, like I did with mine. They know best and you gotta believe ever’thing they ever say, ‘cause they’re your Mama, and that’s the only reason that matters.

At least I’m coming with you, my Mama left me all alone. She didn’t take me.

Here we are. I can smell it.

It don’t look like much of anythin’ in the dark, just a trickling sound, like the whole world’s pissing and that’s what the river’s made of. I know it’s down there, oily and brown like water off a dog.

I still ain’t crazy ’bout this here river, but one thing Mama was right about was the mud. I feel it ‘tween my toes all cold and almost soft. The Muddy Mississippi. It’s colder than I thought and gentle just up to my ankles. Sharp things at the bottom cutting my feet. I didn’t want to bleed. At my knees I can feel it pushing me with its hands, it has hundreds…

You’ll feel it soon, too. You’ll feel it at my belly. I wonder how long it’ll take to sweep us off to oceans where no one knows our laugh in church…

Remember, don’t hold your breath or it won’t work. Swallow as much as you can, baby.

Beau John the Younger, fiction by Jim Chandler

Of all the members of the Journal family, none was more eccentric that Beau John, the younger brother of Senator Hogan Journal.

“Beau John lives too much in the past.” That was a sentiment frequently expressed by many of the citizens of Westbridge. “Beau John don’t know the Civil War is over and he damn sure don’t know we lost it!“

And that was true to some degree. Beau John Journal believed, in some deep place inside even he could not define, that “The South” would rise again, that the “just war” had simply been put on hold for a spell when Lee handed over his sword at that Virginia courthouse.

Beau John owned the Wayfarer Inn and it was as close to a Confederate museum as the likes of New Hope County would ever see. Sitting down a shady little lane on a bluff overlooking a bend in the river, the huge building looked on the outside like one of those antebellum homes straight from the late movie, stately and impressive. It stood an imposing sight there on the river, a two-story structure of cypress weathered a Confederate shade of gray. Outside, above the massive double iron doors one might expect to find on a European castle, rested the Journal coat of arms, comprised of muted shades of red and blue. High above it all fluttered a huge Confederate battle flag once carried by General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Stars and Bars bold as Southern pride.

But that was just the start of Beau John’s display of old Southern symbolism. Out in the vast yard near the river bluff sat a well-preserved cannon, its deadly snout peering out over the river below. It did not require a great deal of imagination to envision it taking apart any Blue Belly skiff that might come wandering up or down the muddy river. And visitors could imagine, without undue effort, a rank of Southern lads lining the rim of the bluff, training their long rifles on blue-clad interlopers attempting to manage the escarpment and impose Federalism upon the free South.

Inside, the Inn was even more impressive. It was composed of numerous smaller dining areas set in alcoves designed for privacy, Beau John had filled every inch of vacant space with Civil War memorabilia–all of it Confederate of course. Brass-bound glass display cases lined the foyer and every available space around the walls of the huge building. They were filled with old swords, pistols, uniforms and samples of shot of all sizes. Flags of all types, from the Stars and Bars of Jefferson Davis’ empire to regimental flags from a score of Southern militias, covered the walls.

And then there were several portraits of Colonel Beau John Journal, his great-great grandfather and namesake. Near the foyer was the largest, a huge oil on canvas depicting the bold young Colonel sitting tall in the saddle, his hat tilted at a rakish angle and his black eye patch shining with menace. Another, somewhat smaller, depicted the colonel leading a charge from the back of his snow-white steed, his sword thrust forward as he rode hard to meet the Blue Bellies, his face set in a mask of pure Southern righteousness and courage.

In truth, Colonel Beau John Journal had survived the war by “playing possum” when shot from the saddle of his horse during the battle of Shiloh. A piece of Yankee grapeshot had ripped the colonel’s left eye cleanly from its socket on August seventh of 1862, the second day of the big battle. Colonel Journal’s troops had taken part in General A. S. Johnson’s surprise rout of Buell, before General Grant had saved the Yankee’s day with twenty thousand fresh troops and turned the tide of the battle.

Colonel Journal had lain upon the ground near Bloody Pond, conscious all the while of the screams and cries of the terribly wounded around him, until the battle petered out late in the day. He managed to slip away with the fall of night and, his once proud troop decimated by the slaughter and threw in his lot with a band of guerrillas under the command of General Marcus Spode. Spode was among the very few commanders of such undisciplined units who maintained much of his sense of humanity. He did not permit his troops to wantonly plunder and murder. His attempts to control his rag-tag unit, composed in many instances of men who delighted in the shedding of blood merely for the sake of seeing it flow, resulted in his own murder. A pistol shot to the brain as he slept one evening, just weeks before Lee surrendered 27,000 troops and his sword at Appomattox courthouse, killed Spode.

After the war, Colonel Journal returned to Westbridge. As the scion of a family of great wealth and position, the young former colonel—a dashingly handsome man with his tall and sturdy build and his one good eye gleaming fiercely black—set out to live the good life of an aristocratic Southern rake. By the time Colonel Journal had constructed the Wayfarer Inn in 1869, his feats as a drinker, womanizer and gambler had become legendary not only in New Hope County, but throughout the entire region.

Having poured through the diaries left by his ancestor, the contemporary Beau John knew that his ancestor had carried an evil streak that was not evident to the outside world. Following the war, when the countryside seemed overrun by Yankee “Carpetbaggers,” Colonel Journal had kept his anti-Northern sentiments alive by destroying Yankees every chance he got. A natural poker player who appeared to have luck beyond anything normal, the Colonel was also a master at manipulation of the cards; a man of honor, he would never cheat a Southerner, not if it meant the loss of everything he owned. But Yankees, he believed, were beyond recognition as honorable people. They deserved whatever they received, and he gave them what they deserved without mercy or conscience.

Beau John had discovered an even darker secret concerning his namesake, one so horrible that he had read the passage numerous times before the awful truth finally sunk in. His great-great grandfather had, in the year 1873, married a Southern belle named Sarah Smythe. Her family owned thousands of acres of Mississippi Delta farmland and was wealthy beyond belief; far more so than the Journals, who were among the largest landowners in western Tennessee. Sarah Smythe had borne the Colonel two sons, Jefferson Journal and Robert E. Journal, the latter Beau John’s own great grandfather.

Sarah had disappeared one day in June of 1881 and was never seen again. According to family legend, all of the men folk of the area had searched for her for weeks. It was believed that she had been spirited away, raped and murdered by a mean Negro who had killed several white people in the area, a murderous renegade named Ned Fry. Fry was captured four months after Sarah disappeared and went to his death on the gallows proclaiming himself innocent of her abduction; and many believed the grizzled Negro was telling the truth, as he bragged continually about the whites he had killed.

And so the secret of Sarah Smythe Journal’s disappearance had remained an enigma for all those years–until Beau John found the diaries hidden behind a secret panel in the wall on the second floor of the Inn.

Reading it for the first time, he found it difficult to believe the man whose name he bore wrote it. It was written by a man deep in the throes of mental anguish, torn completely apart by guilt. It was penned in the year 1895. That was the year Colonel Beau John Journal, then fifty-five years of age, placed a Colt .45 caliber pistol to his right temple and committed suicide.

Upon reading the diary, Beau John learned that his great-great grandmother had suffered from a terrible affliction. An insatiable sexual appetite had plagued Sarah Smythe Journal. Her husband, who did not take kindly to betrayal, had caught her in the act with a black field hand.

After discovering this piece of information in the last of his namesake’s journals, Beau John recalled some of the other comments he had read earlier that had made little sense at the time. At one point, the original Beau John had said that his young bride “seems locked in the embrace of some Devil over which she apparently has no control.” And later he spoke of her “boisterous nature that makes fulfillment seem near to impossible.”

After reading the last volume, Beau John the Younger had learned what that meant. His great-great grandmother had suffered from what they called nymphomania nowadays.

If his great-great grandfather had ever suspected that his wife had stepped outside the bonds of marriage, it was never mentioned. Reading the scrawled handwriting describing the terrible moment of truth, Beau John could in some way sympathize with what his grandfather had felt.

The first Beau John had not been looking for problems that day. Indeed, he had been in the barn for a considerable length of time, assisting one of his mares in foaling. He was headed back to the house to eat a bite of lunch when he heard the sounds coming from the smoke house.

At first he thought it was one of the field hands, one of those former slaves who were now in his employ. They sometimes slipped off from their chores to have a go at one of the house girls. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened, but a good chastising would make sure that, at least with that couple, it wouldn’t happen again. Of course, Beau John still believed as many of his white contemporaries did: that blacks were basically farm animals and one had to expect such behavior from them. Abe Lincoln might have said they were all humans just like the rest of us, but that don’t make it so. You can turn a man loose, but you can’t make him a regular human being just by saying he’s one, Beau John figured.

He was just before yanking the door open when he stopped dead still. He had heard the woman’s voice, and it had turned the blood cold in his veins. It was his wife’s voice he heard coming from within that awful shed.

You don’t ever get enough, do you? he heard the voice say in a mocking tone. He heard a male voice grunt something in return. And you’re big, too… I wish my husband had one like that and knew what to do with it…Ohhhh, that feels soooo good!…Yes, there, when you pull almost out, and then shove it in hard…hard!…Oh, I’m getting tingly again!

The Beau John of old could barely remember what occurred next, according to his secret diary. Somehow, there was a double-bit ax in his hand. He vaguely recalled seeing Big Sweat, the field hand, turn as he kicked the door open. The big man’s overalls were down around his brogans. Sarah was sitting on a shelf, her heels spread wide on the rough planks, her bottom naked; later, Beau John would recall that her vagina was gaped open and very red, reminding him of a rooster’s comb.

The first blow of the ax caught Big Sweat in the front of his right shoulder, cutting a horrible rent and knocking him off his feet. Oh please massa! Sweat cried out, trying to shield his face with his arm. Beau John swung again, finding home this time, the blow making a wet plop and causing gray matter to fly all over the inside of the smokehouse. Big Sweat rolled over onto his face, his body quivering and jerking like a chicken with its neck wrung.

Sarah had uttered not one sound during all this. As Beau John turned to face her, she still said nothing, nor did she offer to move. Her face, as he later recalled, was a virtual mask of blankness, as though she had consigned herself to whatever fate waited.

Without so much as a second thought, Beau John killed her with one true blow, burying the ax to its handle in the top of her head. Unlike Big Sweat, she never twitched following the mortal blow, but simply lay over onto the shelf on her side. Her eyes, still open and vacant, seemed to lock onto her husband’s; it was that which tormented Beau John for the rest of his days, the thought of her lifeless eyes burning into his.

Beau John locked the bodies in the shed until well after dark. Then, he swore Old Bob to secrecy. Old Bob had been his slave when he was a child, and he would trust the gnarled old man with his life. That night, he and Old Bob wrapped the bodies in canvas and placed them in the wagon. They hauled their frightening cargo out into the edge of Big Bog, a swampy, low marsh filled with cottonmouths and quicksand. Once there, they weighed the bodies down and slipped then into one of the holes of near liquid sand. After a few moments, the bags slid out of sight with only a small liquid gulp to note their passing. Once back at the farm, they cleaned up all traces of blood and gore in the smokehouse. No one will miss Big Sweat, Beau John had told Old Bob. He’s only been here two weeks and he was just passing through when I took him on. If anybody asks, he packed up and left.

The following morning, Beau John reported his wife missing. He had slept very little the night before, a problem that would haunt him for the remainder of his days. Whenever he closed his eyes, he could see her eyes staring at him. He knew that–even down where she was in the bog– her eyes were still open and staring.

Beau John the original had lived 14 years after that awful night. If his papers could be believed, he never again touched a woman. My life ended the day I done that awful deed, he had written near the end. I often think of what might have happened if I had not chanced past the smokehouse that day, if I’d lived on in blissful ignorance of what Sarah was up to. I might have gone to my grave a cuckold, but at least I would have known a few pleasant days in between. With what happened, my life has been hell on earth. The only thing I have to look forward to now is the real Hell, where I know I am surely bound. I go there gladly.

The contemporary Beau John could not imagine the guilt his great-great grandfather had felt. He himself had felt tremendous guilt himself when his beloved Wanda died, and he had no part in that; many a time he had prayed that the cancer would somehow leave her wracked body and come to rest in him, that God would let him take on her burden.

But of course that hadn’t happened. Wanda had suffered and suffered, begging him finally to kill her as the cancer gnawed away inside her. He had wept and prayed, begging first for her to be made whole and well again, and finally pleading with God just to take her out of her misery. Those prayers didn’t seem to work for a long, long time, and when it was finished, Beau John was finished with God. On the night of the day she had been laid to rest, he had stood over her grave in a pour down rain and cursed God at the top of his lungs. He had cursed and ranted and raved for hours, so terrible did he feel his loss.

By daylight, he was totally exhausted and suffering from exposure near to the point of death himself. He was taken to a hospital with double pneumonia and wandered in and out of delirium for several days. Finally, almost miraculous, he pulled through.

It was the good Lord that brought you through, his Aunt Nettie had said. The Lord was at your side during it all.

I don’t want to hear any more about the Lord, Beau John had scowled. The Lord didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. Even if he existed, I wouldn’t ask him for his goddamn help!

It’s the sickness, his aunt told some of the medical staff. He’s still half out of his mind and don’t know what he’s saying.

That was fourteen years ago, and two things still hadn’t changed for Beau John: he still missed Wanda and he still denied the Lord. He’d had made a living will in recent times, to make damn certain there wouldn’t be any “Holy Rollin'” over him when he was gone. Beau John didn’t believe he’d ever see Wanda or any of his other loved ones when he was gone, because he didn’t believe in the hereafter.

We’re nothing more than a dead dog when we’re put in the ground, he once told Hogan. Just dead meat that rots.

I hope you’re wrong, his older brother had replied, his tone not convincing. If that’s true, then all this shit is a big waste of time.

So, you finally figured that out, eh?

Beau John was only 38 when his wife died and he could have had his pick of women; he was handsome and wealthy. But he vowed never again to form any kind of real relationship that could result in the kind of pain he had known.

Unlike his forefather, he did not totally forsake women–there were the girls in the cat houses over in Catlow County, and every once in a while he would date one of the younger girls who worked at the Wayfarer. It hadn’t taken him long to learn that such was unwise, as the girls invariably then tried to use their connection with him to their advantage by pushing their work off on someone else. One even went so far as to claim that Beau had sired the child growing in her belly. He had laughed and told her that such was impossible, as he had had a vasectomy.

Of course, that was a lie, but the girl didn’t know it. And she more than likely knew who the real father was anyway, he reasoned. In any case, she quit about a month later and he was glad to see her go.

At 52, Beau John didn’t have a hell of a lot more he wanted to do. He’d been in the Navy as a young man, locked in time there between the end of the Korean conflict and the beginning of Vietnam, and he’d seen his share of the world. His ship, the U.S.S. Walker, a “tin-can” destroyer escort, had made all the ports in the “West Pac” cruise, from Yokosuka to Subic Bay to Buckner Bay to Hong Kong, had even dropped anchor in Australia and New Zealand. As with most of the men, Beau John had his share of whores; he and a buddy, a Mexican by the name of Fernandez, had during one wild day in Yokosuka attempted to see how many women they could be with in that span of time. They had stopped after eleven–although what they did with the last five or six might not have

counted.

Beau had returned to Westbridge after his stint in the service and had gone to work for his father. Unlike his brother, Beau John had no interest in college; by that time, Hogan was becoming fairly well known as a criminal trial lawyer, but politics was still in the future. So Beau John had gone to work first helping his dad run the big farm, and then, after his father died, he took over the Wayfarer. He had reacquainted himself with Wanda, whom he had known in high school, and they were soon married. He soon saved enough money to buy out Hogan’s share of the Inn–it turned little profit in those days and Hogan had no time for any venture that didn’t produce the revenue.

Beau John and Wanda had tried to have children, but never succeeded; finally, they learned that Wanda was infertile. They were in the process of adoption when the cancer was discovered, so that was the end of that.

He had no idea what would become of the Inn after he was gone. He had no heir to leave it to, but had thought of willing it to his nephew, Cody. At other times, he thought he might just burn the place down before he died. If he had time, that is. Beau John had made up his mind to one thing: he’d never lie around and suffer like his wife had.

If the Big C came calling on him, he had the solution in his bedside drawer.

[Dry County] fiction by Ernest Gordon Taulbee

The carnival had come to Howard County more than one or so times everyone said. He himself had been there ten to twelve times, he thinks. Pretty much as long as he had been with the carnival, so not long after he got released from juvenile and was supposed to go back to school. He had a week between getting out of stupid fucking kid jail and the start of school, when the carnival came to town.  [Now?] He knew other guys agreed to go to the army to get out of the detention center, but he wasn’t interested in that. He didn’t want to march in straight lines with all that “yes sir, no sir” shit all day long.

[He needs to slow down.]

He wanted adventure, but he wanted to get high too. Also, he knew he would end up in jail again at some point, and being in regular jail where they let you sleep it off a little bit seemed like a better option than having some MP yelling at you about how big a fuck up you were at five in the morning, when you were still half-lit. It didn’t seem like something he would be down for, [Please.] so he would probably just end up in the pokey for longer, when he put his hands around that MP’s throat.

[I can tell he has his finger on the trigger. I felt him cock the hammer.]

He wanted to be called Robin Marx, because he said that was the name all carnies use. He started as a 24-hour man, posting the signs up and down the curvy roads in Howard County, as part of the advance work crew. [Why now?] He got lost more than once when he was a First of May, and it took him forever to get back to the carnival. He was afraid they would leave without him, since he was so new he wasn’t even sure anyone would notice if he was gone. They would come looking for the signs though. By the time he became an A&S man, [Please not now.] he knew those roads as good as anybody else. Don’t say like the back of your hand though [Why?], that ain’t no kind of ballyhoo any self-respecting talker would use.

[My head hurts.] Back to what he was saying, Howard County had always one of the best stops during the travelling season, and only a crazy man would burn the lot there. [I’ve always hidden my hangovers well.] It was high grass, but it was more than worth it. He suspected not much came there, so the Clems always came out like crazy, [This one is intense.] and it seemed to him those folks spent damn near every dime they had made all year in one night at the carnival. The girls were easy too, but he ain’t no Chester. They never had one blank; not a single time they were there.

All the carnival people knew it was where the two of them fell in love.

[There is something about him. Something reptilian in his eyes.]

He was The Man, and everybody – from caller to 50-miler – knew it. You did what he told you to do. You could give a little lip to the Concession Manager, [I can’t explain it, but I can feel his heat.] but you better not say a cross word to The Man or you would be the center piece of a torture show getting all the color drained from your veins. They called her Aunt Sally, but she wasn’t one. She had started as a key girl, since every mark that saw her wanted her to be waiting when they opened the door, but now she run the girl-shows. Some folks say she start as a lot lizard when she wasn’t much more than a girl, but anyone in the carnival would kill you dead if you said that out loud. [It’s filling the room.] One carny said they first got together in a notch joint, but nobody ever saw that fucker again. [His heat is making me sweat.]

Word was they had got together in Gibtown over the winter. He heard one carny say it wasn’t going to be a carny marriage, but that it was going to be a real marriage. He didn’t believe it himself, until they said they was going to have a ceremony and everything in front of the freaks and callers and benders and everybody. [That look in his eyes. If he’s not blind, he is illiterate.] He knew it had to be true when they said they was going to say their vows in Howard County after everyone had put in their nelson and the girl-shows was over.

That’s where the trouble started. [I should have been able to overpower him. He’s thin and frail looking. He’s obviously dying, so I didn’t expect him to be so strong.]

They weren’t planning some little thing that wouldn’t add up to some flukem and something from the cook house to chew on and they sure weren’t going to throw some candy floss at the troupers and tell them it’s cake. [Even the steal in his hand is burning the back of my neck.] The lot man was going to run the show and oversee the vows, so nobody was talking about a little thing. Someone said they even put an announcement in Amusement Business but said no one but the troupe was invited.

[The first one was the girl with the birthmark — like she did it herself.]

[But I didn’t have the stomach for that anymore.] Here’s the thing: carnies ain’t a romantic bunch.

[I couldn’t kill them after her.] They like to fuck as much as anybody else, but it ain’t much more than that.

[I sold them to the highest bidder after the first one.] There are those who get carny married, and that is just to say these two are going to just do each other for a while, but it ain’t nothing serious.

[There were plenty of bidders, and the prices soared higher and higher.] I could end at any time and nobody would think much about it.

[I was done. I am retired, as long as I find my way out of this.] No point for a carny divorce.

[Now paradise awaits, if only I can get out of this.] It’s just over.

[I know my name: Estill Salyer. I want it to be forgotten.] They could both be carny married to someone else the next day, and you wouldn’t see a drop of jealousy out of either of them, like it never happened.

[There were ten of them. Ten big pay days.]

Carnies just don’t work that way.

That wasn’t all of it either. Word had it The Man had a shoebox full of ABA’s in his trailer. They said he would spread them out all over his bunk at night, and he and Aunt Sally would fuck on them to make sure they were blessed. [He saw the money in my case. It’s enough for me until I die.] The story passing around was he was going to cash them in and the two of them was going to retire to Gibtown with enough C-notes to last them until the day they died. [I want the wife, and I want the kids. I want it all. It’s waiting in South America in some distant place.]

The lot man or the concession manager had supposedly bought the carnival off The Man, and one of them would be the new Man. Nobody knew for sure, but most were pulling for the concession manager. He was easier to get along with, but everybody figured it would be the lot man, since he hadn’t ever taken lip from anybody.

[They say paradise is in South America. A place where they know the cure. A place where you can be safe and clean. I am going there. I’ve met a man who can give me passage. He’ll be expecting me soon.]

As it goes, the new sheriff in Howard County got 86’ed from the show back in the day, and hadn’t set foot back on the lot since. He was just a kid then, and he’s full grown now. For some reason, he just never got over it. They said he gave the advance man ten tons of screaming hell when he went to the county clerk’s office. What they said was that the sheriff told the advance man that he’d be coming in to check the annex and if he saw one sign of a blow-off he’d take every fucking carny there to jail.

[There has to be a way out of this.]

Here’s another thing: when that sheriff came in he wasn’t the only thing the rubes in Howard County voted on. They also turned the county dry. Nobody had ever heard of that. Usually dry counties go wet. It sounded like one fucking hell of a mess for a county to go from wet to dry, but that is what went down in Howard. Everybody was figuring the Clems would be coming for a drink of something, but the advance man said to tell them you don’t drink nothing but virgin flukem. He also said the sheriff told him he’d arrest any carney with even a drop of liquor on his breath or person.

Word had it The Man, the lot man, and the concession manager was all on the same page: this was going to be the last trip to Howard County, [I have to figure it out.] at least until that sheriff was out of office, so make it count boys – take them marks for all they got. They said to GTFM and don’t let these cake eaters leave with a penny in their pockets.

You would have thought that night was magic. There ain’t no way around that. He said you would have thought every carny there was a heat merchant. Every caller, inside man, outside man, and jointee made sure to jo every game they were running. He said they made them all look like lugens. There wasn’t a mark that left the carnival that night who didn’t have a beef, and, you could definitely say, that the lot had been burned. [He has to be burning up. I feel like I am standing next to the sun.] The Man knew he would never be allowed back in Howard County. There wasn’t a KB all night, no matter how much they hollered. The whole damn night, the carnies promised girl-shows and nudist colonies and key shows, but not a one of the Elmers got laid. He didn’t drop the awning because everybody had put in their nelson, he dropped the awning, because all the mooches were spilling out too much heat. The carnies had their money, now it was time to have some real fun. [My head won’t stop killing me. It may kill me before he burns me alive.]

As soon as the last emby was gone, they had the 50-milers set everything up. There were bottles of booze in buckets of ice stashed all over and good floss that looked like it came from an actual grocery store. They set guns out everywhere too. Some of them guns were older than anybody knew. [I have my own gun, but he caught me outside.] Some looked like they had just come out of come carny’s poke.

“Carnies may not pay a dime in taxes, but they are American’s just like the marks. God damn it,” he said.

He said he had never been to any kind of wedding before. His parents weren’t even married, and he didn’t know what to expect. He thought it was the prettiest thing he ever saw. [I’ve seen so many beautiful things.] The Man and Aunt Sally said they loved each other and promised to stay together for all times. Some of the people in attendance said what the lot man told them to say to each other came from the bible. Others said he was just making it up as he went along, but that lot man had polished more cracks than anyone else in the carnival – so much that a lot of the carnies said he was the only professor who came about that title honest. [If only I had someone. One person who cared about me.]

He said he had been carny married more than a few times, but watching The Man and Aunt Sally get hitched almost made him want to do it himself. He said he was pretty sure that wouldn’t happen.

As soon as the lot man said “man and wife” The Man dropped his drawers and Aunt Sally started going down on him right in front of everybody. Some trouper grabbed one of them pistols, and shot it in the air. Somebody else yelled out, “Al-A-Ga-Zam” and the fucking party was started with the only friends Robin Marx had ever had. [I have Foster, but he is so far away. He probably thinks I am dead already.]

All the carnies – from the newest 50-miler to the most elder trouper – was screaming loud enough to blow their pipes. If there was music playing, no one heard it. The girls from the girl shows and the key girls all started dancing and getting naked. It wasn’t long before they were giving it out for free. Even the key girls and they never gave it out, but they all had two or three carnies going at them at once. It made him so hot he couldn’t stand it, so he grabbed him a gun and a bottle of liquor and went look for a place to bury his hard-on. That didn’t take long to find. He had never had a better time in his life.

That’s right when it went to shit, before he could even come. That motherfucker sheriff had been as good as his word. He and all his deputies came in a shooting guns and cracking skulls, before the first carny could say “B.C.”. That’s how he knew it was all over, when one of them deputies took a nightstick to the key girl he was fucking. Neither he nor any other carny was going to take it. They all had guns, and that was their people the law was fucking with.

[He’s so far away.]

He wasn’t sure if he was the first one to get a shot off, but he’s pretty damn sure his found his mark, the same way his bally always found its mark. The cocksucker went down hard grabbing at his chest and screaming something awful. He walked on over there and put another bullet in the asshole’s face, not even bothering to put his own dick away. The key girl was just lying there on the ground naked, her eyes were wide open but she wasn’t breathing. [I remember the last one struggling to keep her breathing calm.]

All the other carnies were shooting and fighting, and the police were fighting back. More of them kept coming too, except the new ones were wearing different colored uniforms. He lost count of how many of them there were, but he knew some of them were state boys and everybody knew the state boys don’t fuck around. He ain’t smart by any measure, but he can count like a son of bitch. Every goddamn carny in the country can count. They may not be able to say his alphabet all the way through, but he’ll be fucked if he can’t count.

They just kept coming.

[There may be a way out.]

He looked up at the flatbed trailer where The Man and Aunt Sally had just got married. There were a few key girls hiding in the possum belly. There were two of the cops holding onto The Man, wrestling with him. The sheriff was behind Aunt Sally. He’s pretty sure that sheriff was fucking her. [She was staring up at me; her tears holding back her breakdown. I wish I could go back to her.] Not only can he count, but he can shoot too. He’s got an aim like a motherfucker – it only took him three shots to put those deputies down.

He took the pistol and threw it to The Man. The sheriff was too busy giving it to Aunt Sally to notice as The Man walked up to him and buried one right between his eyes. It was something to see. The sheriff fell down on top of Aunt Sally and The Man threw him off quicker than shit. Then, The Man grabbed onto Aunt Sally, and just started holding her. [That is how I feel now. I deserve this. I am the runner cut in half by the ribbon as I cross the finish line.]

He looked around and he saw one of them rifles like they give you if he had joined up so as he could get out of juvenile. He grabbed onto that son of a bitch and started thinning the crowd, but seemed like – no matter how many of them he put down – more of them kept coming.

He saw the lot man come his way. He was dragging the concession manager. One was dead the other looked like he was dying.

“Go on now, get,” the lot man said to him. “Ain’t nobody got any friends left here.”

He looked back at The Man, because he wasn’t doing anything without his permission. The Man was still holding Aunt Sally, but she had taken a bullet. He wasn’t sure if it was The Man who gave it to her, but it didn’t matter. The Man looked him in the eye and said, “Save yourself.”

That was all he needed to hear, he said “Al-A-Ga-Zam” one last time and he was off. Like he said, Howard County was tall grass, so it didn’t take long before he was in the woods. His ears felt all muffled over, but he could hear the shooting and carrying on, so he kept running. [This is less than I deserve. I should have to suffer more than this, but I think I know the way out.] It was dark and hard to see, but that is when he felt something funny come over his eyes, and he had to stop running because it felt like he was breathing up something sweeter than the candy floss.

The next thing he knew he woke up in the forest. He could tell by the dew it was early morning, and there was a rooster in the distance. He was hungry enough to eat that rooster. He thought about trying to find his way back to the carnival, but he suspected they wasn’t much left there, so he headed towards the rooster. [I need to figure him out. There has to be a way. He is the evil I have delivered being returned.]

The forest opened up to the clearing. He could see an old farmer spreading feed for some chickens and a mess of doodles. He still had a rifle in his hand and another pistol in his belt, and he wasn’t in any mood for conversation. He took one shot from the tree line. He took his second shot when an old woman came out the front door with her hands waving in the air, like she was in some weird posing show. He walked down the hill and to the house.

[I’m afraid his story is almost over. I’m confident my story ends, when he’s done with his own, but I’m still writing.]

Somebody behind the door was trying to keep it closed, but he was stronger. It was a girl plenty old enough. He finished the job he started with the key girl and he felt much better. [I can feel him getting closer. His breath hitting me like hot welding slag. That sweetness in his breath, and another smell like cooking meat coming from inside him.] Once that was over, he made her give him the money in the house and the keys to the trucks. He put her down, too.

[I chose this. This is my fate. It is all I have done and all I will do.] Then he started driving. He knew the main roads well and the back roads better, so he just kept driving. Those farm folks must of not like banks. Who can blame them? So he just kept going, stopping for gas and some cook when he needed it. He traveled south and west, the opposite route the carnival had been taking, and he said it felt like many days from the past when he had been hauling a pig iron. [But I think I know a way.]

[He said to call him Robin Marx. I am calling him “sir.” I have to keep him talking. As long as his story is going, I have more time to figure this out.]

Then he saw the motel and he pulled into the parking lot. He’d never stayed in a motel before, and he wanted to give it a go. He needed to stop too, he thought, something about his insides was hurting. They just felt hot: hotter than the key girl had made him. Something just wasn’t right and he knew it.

[I’ve heard it called the ghost of Ginny Dare; it must be haunting him. I spoke of it with the last one. She was running from many things. I think she was running from Ginny, too.]

He hadn’t taken a bullet or a blade. Maybe the food was poisoned and he was the only one who lived long enough to know they had all been lied to [I started so honest, but so many things led me here and nothing will lead me back to the place where I began.]. Maybe that booze was rotgut and that was what was going wrong with his eyes. Maybe that key girl or the farm girl had some primal case of clap, and it was working him over. He didn’t know. Despite the heat [I need something cold. His heat is burning me up.], he felt strong – stronger than he had ever felt. Strong enough to take on a whole kayfabe.

[I would have done good things. I would have done so much good when I made it to South America. I have been an instrument of something dark, but I wasn’t escaping to live. I was escaping because I wanted to be good. I wanted to be more like Foster, because I know he is good.]

The motel took cash and he had enough left to pay them for two days. He went inside the room, once he figured out why he got a card instead of a key. He took a shower and rinsed out his clothes in the tub. He left them hanging from the shower rod, and he laid down naked on top of the bed. He slept for a long while. It was daylight when he went to sleep and daylight when he woke up, and he was pretty sure a whole day had passed, since his clothes were as dry as Howard County. [I wanted to get there and send for Foster. I wanted the only family I have left to be safe.] The room was just too fucking hot to live, so he went outside. He was out of money, and he didn’t know where he was going. In truth he didn’t know where he was, and that was a dangerous thing. [Direction comes with danger, too.] He had to figure his way out of this thing.

[Maybe I could have found those women or at least what was left of them. I could have brought them south and found them help. I could have made sure they were healed.]

Then he saw this mark. There he was: pleased with himself like he had education. He wasn’t sure if he left his pistol in the truck, but he knew he would find out. [Killing doesn’t bother him. There is no way he will let me live.] He went back into the room and took the pen and paper from the night stand, and went back to the truck. Sure enough, the pistol was there. [I was there too, as I am here now.]

He walked up to that mark who was struck on himself and told him not to make a goddamn sound. He told him to get his suitcase in get in that fucking room. [I just have to find a way out. Then I’ll be good.] Once they got inside, he told him to open the case. That son of a bitch was full of money, and he knew, if he could just find a way too cool himself down, he would be okay. He’d take that money from this stupid fucking Clem who thinks he is better than everyone else, and he’s get his ass back to Gibtown. One of them old snake oil guys was bound to have an elixir that would calm this heat. [It has to happen.]

There was another stack of paper and pen in the mark’s room too. There was a little desk in the room as well. He told the mark to sit his ass down. [The barrel is digging into the place where my skull and spine meet. He’s finished talking, but I am still writing.] He took his pistol up to the back of that motherfucker’s head and told him to start writing.

[He’s getting closer.]

He told that dumb mark he was an Elmer like all marks were Elmers and he didn’t give a fuck if he lived or died.

[He knows I am just stalling.]

He told him he better write down every fucking word just like he said it.

[It’s time.]

And he told him he better have a prayer ready for when it is all over.

[Now.]

 

Bedwetters, fiction by Misty Skaggs

The screeching and squawking next door stopped and through the evening silence, Charlene heard frogs peeping in the creek. And she heard her favorite rocking chair squeaking a little louder. She felt herself move and bob a little faster in her perch on the porch as she thought about how that neighbor woman rubbed her the wrong way.With her eyes squinted, she watched Mrs. Gilliam bounce and hum through the yard, teetering across the flagstone walkway between their houses on a pair of heels on a Wednesday after supper. That woman had ruined Charlene’s perfectly quiet moment with an uninvited bundt cake made out of a box and her vapid gossip. Mrs. Gilliam, Genie Jo she insisted, stomped around on the old woman’s last nerve with those cheap heels. Charlene may have been born and raised in a holler, but she knew good shoes when she saw ‘em. Back when she was young, she had a shocking sense of fashion. For a spinster. She turned heads without showing skin or feeling foolish. There wasn’t a man in three counties who could keep up with her.

Genie Jo’s voice was a nervous chirp and her hair was too blonde. Her house was too clean, her kids were too polite. Those rugrats always yes ma’amed and no ma’amed at Charlene, but she didn’t buy it for a minute. She knew damn well those smiling, polite kids were the same little hoodlums who put a dead muskrat in her mail box. Charlene had been a teacher in the same town, in the same school, most of her life. Seventy some odd years. Long enough to know kids, to see them grow up into adults. Those kids were going to grow up to be degenerates, she could see it comin’. Charlene noticed things, quietly and aptly. From behind her bulky, metal desk in the fifth grade classroom, she observed the passing of generations. And she figured she was probably the only educator in the whole United States who’d drawn a correlation between boys who wet the bed and grown menwho cheat on their wives. Nine out of ten times, those pee babies grew up to be two-timers. Charlene took mental note of every time that neighbor woman teetered toward her house with a box of wine to talk to the old maid in a pitiful whine about feeling lonely.

That neighbor woman, Genie Jo, she had married a bedwetter. A whiney, pudgy, red-headed Gilliam boy who grew into a whining, red-headed man. Charlene remembered him from the fifth grade back in 1995. And she could hear him through the fence when she was out back working in her tomato garden.

“Honeeeeyyyy hoooneyyyyyy…” he’d wail for his wife, like a sickly siren.

Grousing for her to fetch him this or that. And she did it, Mrs. Gilliam. She actually did it. In those jakey heels and a skimpy, two-piece bathing suit. She packed and pranced back and forth from the house to that above-ground pool where he floated around like a sunburnt, shaved orangutan. She delivered bottles of beer or sunscreen and cooed to him sweetly. His whole body was covered in wet, matted, gingery hair. All except for the top of his head. Charlene wouldn’t be surprised if that woman picked his nits before bedtime.

And changed the piss-soaked sheets every morning. Genie Jo smiled her fake smile with her fake teeth and waved as she toddled up the porch steps, clinging to the railing for dear life. Charlene just shook her head and rocked a little harder.