Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 17

Buried Treasure, by Benjamin Drevlow

How you’d even react, young buck, if you knew how I ogled, like some long lost uncle, that sliver of pale flesh running under the silver crucifix your girl said she’d never take off, how hard you’ve tried to anoint that sacred intersection of her chest you nuzzle in the morning shower, of course, only when you’re sporting good enough wood and not too hungover. Still, my eyes can’t help but connect the dots of all those freckles from too many lazy days like these under the August sun, the two of you laid out across dueling beach towels like a Cialis commercial, me plodding by with my surf socks and metal detector, this floppy hat and Hawaiian shirt, all that SPF 100 caked up and down my pasty ankles and knees, nose and cheeks, these big golden Wayfarers concealing our fleeting tryst, me and your girl’s tits.

Benjamin Drevlow was the winner of the 2006 Many Voices Project and the author of a collection of short stories, Bend With the Knees and Other Love Advice From My Father (New Rivers Press, 2008). His fiction has also appeared in Passages North, Split Lip, and is forth-coming at Fiction Southeast. He is the fiction editor at BULL: Men’s Fiction, teaches writing at Georgia Southern University, and lives both in Georgia and online at <www.thedrevlow-olsonshow.com>.

Burying the Johnboat, fiction by Sam Slaughter

Mary stood on her porch with a shovel resting on her shoulder. In her other hand, a tallboy of Miller High Life began to sweat in the summer heat. The sun was up and she’d overslept, the hangover punch to the head too much to deal with at seven a.m. when she should’ve gotten up to send Milton off to day camp. He got up, though, and went. Milton knew not to bother his mother some mornings. He’d eat two cold Pop Tarts and walk the mile to the bus stop where the YMCA bus would pick him up.

The night before, Mary had moved the trailer holding the johnboat into the yard. It sat there now on the crest of the hill behind their trailer. The dull green hull sucked in the sunlight like a hungry kid. She’d come up with the idea one of the many nights at the bar, sucking down two-for-one vodka tonics while what amounted to the town’s eligible bachelors took turns sliding their rough hands up her thighs. Milton was at home, asleep. He slept hard and long, always had, and she never worried. He had a peashooter to use if it came to that. But who’d want to break in, anyway? What were they going to steal from her? Her ex-husbands collection of Atlanta Braves trading cards? Go for it, just don’t touch the booze or her child.

Somewhere between her third and fourth of the night, she realized she should do something special for Milton. His birthday was coming up and she hadn’t planned anything yet. He hadn’t said a word, but he never did, so it’d be up to her to figure it out. Milton had loved the boat—he always loved going out on it with his father—so Mary decided she should do something with it. She’d build him his very own play place. Like at the McDonald’s out on the highway, but without the other snotty kids that made fun of his Goodwill clothes.

The boat had been her ex-husband’s pride and joy. When he left, though, he’d left in the night and with little more than his .22 and some clothes. He’d taken the bottle of Johnnie Green Label, too. Mary had known that when the time came she wasn’t going to be lucky enough to keep that. No one had wanted to buy the boat—a hole had rusted through near the bow—and so it sat next to the trailer for months. She’d sold the engine for parts. Milton climbed on it when he played and Mary always worried he’d catch a foot on something and cut himself wide open.

The dirt gave way easily and Mary found a rhythm almost as soon as she started. Push, pull, toss. Push, pull, toss, sip. Push, pull, toss. As she sipped, she watched clods roll down the hill.  Mary hadn’t thought about how deep to set the boat. She stared at the hull and imagined it moving, sliding out of the space in a rain, Milton on board and crushed when it hit the bottom of the hill. She couldn’t have that. Mary realized too that the deeper she dug, the less of the boat she’d have to see. She imagined that, with every inch she obscured by dirt, one more memory would be forever covered.

She wouldn’t have to think about the first time they’d had sex in that boat or the first time they’d gone noodling together or how he had proposed in the middle of a lake in that boat. She’d been so taken then, but now couldn’t help but see how stupid the proposal was. How could she say no? They were in the middle of the lake, there was no one else around, nowhere to go, nothing to distract from the situation should she have declined. Mary finished the beer in her hand, crushed the can, and tossed it into the boat. She’d get it later.

Mary worked steadily, pausing often enough to sip that the six-pack she’d bought was gone before too long. She’d swing by the gas station before she picked Milton up for some more. That’d be the first surprise for him, she’d be there to get him. He wouldn’t be expecting that, that was for damn sure. He never said anything about it, but Mary knew he had thoughts about her involvement in his life. She didn’t take him to things like his father had done. Even at eight, she knew he had those thoughts. Probably the same ones his father had had.

After a few hours—Mary had moved onto what was left of a bottle of Aristocrat vodka—she’d shaved a shallow grave out of the earth. All she needed to do was get the boat off the trailer and she’d be done. Then she could go grab a beer at the bar before Milton got to the bus. That beer was important. She didn’t want to lose her buzz, she’d worked to hard for it.

The boat was easier to move than she thought. It landed in the hole with a crack and a thump and Mary adjusted its position with a series of kicks. Good. It was in a good space. She stepped inside and jumped up and down, slamming her feet into the floor to help it settle. Each jump sent a vibration through her boots and up into her body. She found her vision slowing, her eyes not keeping up with the movement of her body. It felt good. Damn good. Mary jumped again, pushing down as she landed. She was going to pound it into the ground. She jumped again. It would not come up. Again. She would not have to see it from her porch. She jumped again and again and again as the sun began to fall behind the tree line.

Matt, poem by John Dorsey

played the piano

read bukowski to prostitutes

while sipping steel reserve

and chewing on pain pills

as if he was doing community outreach

at night he would talk about jazz,

art history and how he once

had sex with his sister

to make his hands stop shaking

as his demons sang in the alley

just below

his heart.

Joplin, poem by Michael Thompson

Once the war ended,

there wasn’t anything else to do

except play the horses

and hoist a few pints

at Tinhorn Flats

where the sticky surface

of no-pest strips

hanging behind the bar

are caked with flies

Waiting on long shot lives

to come in,

those who take themselves

far too seriously

rarely reap rewards

and tenacious is their resolve

to never stray far

from embedded roots

When factories pack up

for alternative lodging

just like a circus tent,

the sales of cigarettes

and grain alcohol increase

while matrimony collapses

under the strain of a bleak future

Crumbling down inside,

pinball wizards and gallery queens

litter the boardwalk

every Saturday night

until verbal fisticuffs

lead to race riots

If there was a casting call

for those who are afraid

to succeed at all costs,

the entire population of Joplin

might just show up

Michael N. Thompson is the result of a debauched threesome between Neal Cassady, Anne Sexton and Darby Crash. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Montucky Review, Word Riot, Toronto Quarterly, Lummox Press and The Hobo Camp Review. He is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being Verbal Alchemy (Blunt Trauma Press, 2012) and the forthcoming A Murder Of Crows (University Of Hell Press, 2014). Michael lives among the pastures and pines in Northern California. He doesn’t care much for meter and rhyme. His website is www.michaelnthompson.com

A Long Row to Hoe, by Meriwether O'Connor

 

Old Mr. Worthington showed up at half past ten when he shoulda oughta been there at ten sharp. Miss Candleman was ready for him with a cup of coffee, hers. She walked out, pleasant as pie. Hi, Mr. Worthington. Good to see you. He smiled despite himself as she had nice eyes when she looked at him up close like that. I was just getting some coffee, she leaned it toward him a quarter of an inch just enough for him to take inference that it was his and begin reaching toward her. It's really good on a morning like this. Really peps me right awake. She pulled it back quickly and took a nice, warm drink.

He struggled to stay balanced as his surprise and then shock and gradually shame made it hard for him to adjust back on kilter. Had she done that a purpose? He didn't fall on his face, quite, but there were a few moments of his elbows balancing as he both pulled back and then tried to avoid looking like he had just pulled back, which as far as balance went, was the real problem. If the pendelum swings both ways, you're fine. If you try to stop it half way, you're in for quite a reverberation in your old bones. Or so he found.

She playprettied up a nice smile for him. You're not tired, though, I'm sure you're wide awake. Probably be up since dawn, right? She smiled enouragingly for him to agree with her and he did even though it wasn't true. She had a way of doing that to him. Of pulling words or gestures from him that weren't his own. She had a lot of potions up her sleeve, that one.

He grimaced and began, I'm gonna cut the front first and then go round back and do the garden, waddya think about that? Too much today for me to cut both. I can do the back tomorrow if that's okay with you. That way the flower bed'll be ready for you this afternoon when you get back from the nursery.

She frowned. Oh, I was hoping you could do both lawns at once. It's better that way. Makes more sense. She peered at him unsurely. You know, John'll be over tomorrow to deliver the paper. Maybe I can just ask him. I don't want to put you out.

His mouth formed a round O of astonishment and then fear prickled along his shoulders and hairline. As much as he hated her, he hated an empty icebox more.

I…oh. Uh. Well, I guess I could. But then what'll you do with your plants when you get back? I thought I was coming specially today so to get the bed ready for when you get back? He looked puzzled.

Oh, well, that. I'm not doing that anymore. That's old hat. I'll be here playing dominos with the girls. We'll be having lemonade. She grinned in the way that was an offer from a regular person but not from her. From her it meant watching him all day boil in her yard and then embarassingly asking for the bathroom one single time in front of all her clubwomen. And then going back outside with a plastic cup of water to fish in his truck for a little spot of drink, some orange juice and some jerky. He kept some stashed in the glovebox for in case.

He suddenly felt as if he had actually been up since the crack of dawn with the birds. So you don't want me to prepare your beds? He couldn't shake the puzzlement and kept at it like a dog with fleas. Sure to scratch a hole in the thought if he just kept scratching it enough.

I just said it. Don't you remember? You're here to do the lawns only. He took back a step at the "only". Okay, then. How about if I come back in the morning and get them all done by ten? Before the heat of the day starts. It's already pretty warm. He dug in his pocket for his keys.

No, the girls will be here. I need the lawns done. Pronto. A thought crept into his head that what she needed was him doing the lawns while her clubwomen were here. She needed him struggling in the heat like a fat, white grub…bait for her fish. His heatstroke was their conversation fodder over lady snacks like pinafortes.

I…are you sure? I was hoping I could come back and get it done early. I can come earlier if you want, get it all done by nine. I just didn't wanna wake the neighbors too early. I'm not worried about the neighbors. I'm worried about our agreement. She was getting angry and little spit drops formed at the side of her mouth and her eyes went from lavender to black then back again.

Okay. Well…so you feel you got your money's worth, how about I go on and do the front lawn now and come back and do the back in the morning, first thing? Or, I could come and do it tonight about seven. That might work. He looked up expectantly at the woman, like a pup who really has just not learned his lesson about peeing on the carpet but didn't yet know.

She brushed her hands together wiping dust out of thin air if there was such a thing. That's fine. That's fine. Okay, then let's not worry about it. I'll just ask John when he comes tomorrow with the paper. I'm sure he can get it done in a heartbeat.

He paused, unsure what to say next. I… He thought about the new teeth he was ready to put on layaway at the dentist and the way he missed cracking peanuts with beer in the evenings. He paused longer this time. Searching for peanut eating words that would make this job he'd had for three years of Wednesdays not die from one ten minute conversation in the summer heat.

Hold your horses, now! I can get 'em both done. Now, just gimme a minute. I need to go back and get all the tools I'll need. I didn't bring the edger as I didn't think I was gonna need it.

That's fine. Then, take your time. She grinned and waved her hands at her lawn. Take your time. She said it three times. Oh, and look for chiggers in that right hand corner. I think I saw a circle forming. There's some medicine in the garage.

He felt his own chiggers rising under his skin biting him quickredhot as she trotted back inside tap-tap-tap then stopped to speak again. Oh, and don't forget the girls are coming. So, don't park in front. Park on the side, if you can. Back by the pipes. I think you can squeeze in there if you try. I know Bob always could.

He hated to, but he had to call out to her. Can you go on and pay me half up front? I won't be able to get back and forth on the gas I have now. I'll be stuck long about Redmond street the way things are looking.

Sure, she smiled brightly and brought him the cash, the first time she was sweet all day and meant it. See you when you get back.

He went and got the edger and struggled it into the pick up and got the gas and avoided the coffee pot inside by the register. Especially because he was now only working for a partial day's pay as work trucks were gas guzzlers by definition. A body has to make a certain level of income to have a job where you could afford to buy a fuel efficient car.

By the time he got back, the sun was leeching the living daylights out of him every step he took. His eyes drained sweat and his lips were white. He pulled the edger out while he still had the power to do so. He

brought his gallon plastic jug to her hose and filled it. He drank half and then poured the rest over himself. He filled it again. This time, he had no room left for water and not in a good way. He sloshed inside like a fish tank on a freeway. Bile came to meet his tongue in the back fo his mouth. Oh, gosh.

He pulled himself together and began to work one blade at a time. By the time he got the front done, the ladies had arrived. They smiled and waved, those that knew him. The others walked stiffly past him unsure whether to say hello or not. He tried not to look up to make it easier on everyone.

He went to the shade for a moment and sucked the salt off some peanuts he had in his extra coat in the car from last week. It worked. He felt like himself again. He felt around for some more and sucked and sucked and sucked until his heart and his brain and something else that had no name was on track again.

He began walking to the back lawn as she came out in a huff. I thought you'd be back here working by now. Oh, I was just getting some water. The heat. I needed some water. Why was he lying about such a simple thing? But somehow, she made the very truth a lie and vice versa. Some devil in her jumped into him and did the hooligan shuffle. He just couldn't help it.

You know, maybe I shouldn't have offered to pay you up front if you don't feel you can finish today. She sighed a very tired sigh. Come back tomorrow if you need to finish up.

But, wait! You didn't pay me up front. You paid me half. For the gas.

Oh, is that what you remember? She smiled her sad smile. She kept one just for old men like him, simple-simple-simple old men. My grandfather got like that, too. Especially in the sun. Here, she took his arm, let me get you in the shade and you can sit down. We're having sandwiches. She grinned and gave him half a hug and waved at the ladies through the window as they watched her walk him out of the sun and into her nicest chair by the tree. The one she saved up for and that had the nice non-mildew cushions and flowers from many countries.

Sit here, I'll be back with some lemonade. And maybe a sandwich. We're having pinafortes. Sounds like you'd like one.

He was silent. His tongue was dry and sore and the sun had baked his will until it was crispy little strips of nothing. They fell to the ground next to him snapping in the dust of the day. He was empty and waited for food, waited for water, waited for his blood sugar to rise, for his body to apportion its ratio of salt and water and potassium appropriately. He waited mostly for her bright voice to comfort him again on such a long, hot day. An angel in the desert if there was one.

She took one look at him and she knew. Knew from the three faded spots on his pants and the vacant look in his eyes and the hair growing in gray on his dark arms. She knew from the way he looked without food and the way he sat there unable to fetch it for himself when he was most in need of it.

Oh, and don't worry about the lunch break, Mr. Worthington. I won't dock you. If you can get here tomorrow before seven, you can help John finish up the back. Then we'll be even. She tralala'd her way inside, fresh and ready for her second cup of coffee of the day.

The women looked up from their dominos as she walked in. What's going on out there? He feeling sick? Oh, just the heat of the day, she said. You know how men are. Always want to finish what they started. I

told him…well let's give him a few of our sandwiches and pinafortes as well. That ought to help bring him round.

And it did. it did.

He became our Mr. Worthington again, himself but also not. Gradually he put aside his plan of layaway teeth and began watching The Price Is Right in the mornings, not caring too much about the time of day. He found his houseshoes more comforting than his work boots and stopped washing the windows on his truck. By three months time, he had grown into his old age, just fine.

When his nephew came to visit as he did in the fall, he said, You haven't driven this thing in ages. The battery's dead. Oh, yeah. I guess it is. You can have it. I don't need it anymore.

And, he wouldn't. No longer willing to venture out into the heat of the day with the hyenas waiting by the watering hole, he stayed safe at home with the antelopes and the marmelots in the nice tall grass of his carpeted home and his ice tea with a little too much liquor and some poundcake he'd found on sale at the dollar store.

He began to carve armies of little wooden men from matchsticks and set them up to work in the cactus garden he had on his coffee table. See here, he said, Get this done by Saturday or else and the matchstick men sighed and wished they could obey. They even wished for little pick axes so they could work harder or at least some shovels so they could get some rows started alongside the cactus for whatever else Mr. Worthington might want to plant. He saw it in their faces. He did. He did.

Out of pity, then, he put them in with the devil's ivy to work since it was a little moister in there. It was a cooler environment to be sure. They did appreciate the change of temperature and the moderating coolness. Their skin was not as clammy as before and they felt a breeze in their little matchstick men beards from the fan he put nearby. Once he set it too high on the back of their necks and they all thought with one great thought that a tornado must have been up.

Then, gradually he got tired of their yapping and no good complaining about dawn to dusk and their little matchstick men stories about wooden nickels and tall fearful tales about termites and woodboring bumble bees and he simply put the lid on the terrarium. Their voices were quieter then and they began to grow pale without the fan.

The moisure was not good for their lungs but the devil's ivy prospered in the mist and twirled its way around their feet, paralyzing them unintentionally with its great growth spurts.

And then, little by little, the little matchstick men's feet rotted off from the wet dirt and they tottered over, one more each day until at last, he and Bob Barker were the only ones still standing upright. And, then there were no more contestants, of any sort, human or wooden, in sight. And, the price, the price. The price for old Mr. Worthington, was finally right.

 

Under the De Soto, fiction by Barrett Hathcock

We had a roofing job in Eureka Springs. Stupid name for a town. It’s up in the top corner of Arkansas, almost in Missouri, stuck in this Ozark gulley, every street a downward spiral. There are no grids in Eureka. It’s all very disorienting. Following the Steel Cloud into town, I got lost right away.

I was back working for Billy. He’d moved up in the roofing world and was doing hotels, re-tarring and re-gravelling, and we kept doing these little trips out from Dallas. I’d go with him and we’d hire a bunch of hands wherever we ended up. We’d do a week in Galveston, two days back home, a week over in Bossier City, four days back home. He just kept coming up with the jobs, each building’s super letting us know about a buddy he had.

Back in Dallas, Billy had his old lady and a kid in school, though it didn’t seem to slow him down in the social department. I had Elise, who was always asking how long I’d be gone, but it was only ever a few days. When roofing jobs dried up in the winter, I’d sub around the local middle schools. Elise didn’t like it, the unpredictability, but it wasn’t like we ever went hungry.

We were there to re-tar this old hotel downtown. I’d gotten lost but before long I saw the Steel Cloud parked in front of what I assumed was the hotel. It was the only building tall enough to disappear into the fog. I asked a bell-hop and he said they were on the roof giving it the once over.

Up top was in bad shape, beyond patching. Apparently, it’d started leaking all over a wedding party in the ballroom in September and that was just it. Billy was laying it on Ralph, the day manager, even though the contract was already sewn up. Billy marched off square footage, called me over and said, “This here is my lieutenant Mr. Thomas,” and generally made tar sound complex. I played obedient second-in-command, which was basically why he kept hiring me.

The good thing about the job was that they gave us rooms in the hotel—no more sleeping in the van. It was October and slow. Billy and I each had our own suite, which meant I had a little living room with a table and a couch and my own coffee maker and mini-fridge. Ralph said we could just charge whatever to our rooms, but Billy gave me the eye. He said he was off to find some hands and that we’d start tomorrow straight up like normal and that I should go enjoy myself. But not too.

It was about six when we all got settled in. Billy left me standing there in front of the old hotel, driving off in the Steel Cloud to god knows where. Ralph was shrugging into his rain jacket, heading home, and saw the Porsche pull away.

“Must be nice,” he said.

“Don’t you know it,” I said back.

All that was left was for me to do was find somewhere to eat. The weird mountain road slanted down under my feet. It was like I was back in geometry class, but trapped inside some shape. The town was like a game of Tetris with the staggers. The roads split at strange angles, and spade-like sides of buildings suddenly came at you. There was a restaurant up on the second floor, and I could hear laughter and someone playing the guitar and singing that Daniel song by what’s his name. The queer with the glasses. Don’t have it.

I went walking uphill on the main drag, and the sidewalks were full of people, mostly old couples—ladies pulling their husbands through the streets, all of them in white sneakers. I’d walk up to a restaurant, look in the window, but inside I’d see nothing but shoulders, so I kept walking.

I decided I needed more cigarettes, so I hiked on down to the truck. On the way I passed by this pizza place with an awning and an Arkansas flag and a little rainbow flag. No one in there. Across the street was an Indian food place, but I’d only had Indian once before. I’d enjoyed it, but I didn’t know what anything was called. Elise had ordered everything for me. Lord knows when she’d become such an expert. Kept walking down hill, feeling the gravity pull at my shins. A little mountain creek ran behind the shops to my right. I have to admit it was charming in a way. There were ice creams shops and fudge shops every block or so. Lots of clumsily hand-done signs and flyers everywhere. Come see the Eureka Sings production of The Little Foxes! This Thursday! That type of thing. I passed a guitar shop, stopped and looked in the window. The brown backsides of acoustic guitars hung floating from the wall. The sign said closed but inside an old man with too much beard sat with a guitar, pointing to the guitar of another man, telling him where to put his fingers. They started strumming together and I walked on, not wanting to interrupt with my staring.

Got to the van, pulled out my cigarettes from the glove box. Van was mostly empty now that all the gear was on the roof. Just a sleeping bag and a lantern and a milk crate of parts. It looked like a box of metal corners. I began to walk back uphill the way I came, puffing along, moving slower now. The day was heavily cloudy and all the buildings in the town looked like cookie dough—beige and unfinished. But the colors of the shops stood out. There was another quilt shop with a little rainbow flag. It was like the town would not be battened down by weather or geography or nothing. I blamed this on the tourists, who apparently was this town’s thing. The student was chopping regularly away at his guitar when I came back by, though I couldn’t tell what song he was playing.

Elton John, that’s the guy.

I was coming back up the hill where I would turn to get back to the hotel, and there was the pizza place and the Indian place. I went for the pizza.

Inside was lots of green vinyl and televisions. I sat down and started looking over the menu, and went through it almost three times when I saw the lady up at the counter. She was looking at me, regarding me like an animal.

“You ordering or just here for the TV?”

“Ordering,” I said.

“Well come on up.”

I ordered a medium with pepperoni, black olives, and artichoke hearts.

“Mmm,” she said. “Yummy. You must be from some place else.”

“You could say that.”

“That’ll be eight dollars. You want to drink? Which state?

“Huh? Yeah, large Sprite.”

“Which one?”

“Oh, originally? Out west somewhere. One of the boxy ones.”

She smiled. She was a tall gal, not that pretty, with a plain evenly wrinkled face and large teeth, the kind you’d keep inside your smile. She had long graying blonde hair that she held in a low pony tail. She wore a T-shirt that said Eureka! It sure beats the shit out of Hot Springs.

“Be about ten minutes. You eating here?”

“Yeah,” I said, taking my change. I pulled a paper from the stack near the register. I saw another lady spreading out my cheese, like she was sprinkling dust. She took the pizza board and walked over to a big metal box, and pulled down one of the horizontal drawers and slid the pizza in place. She was shorter, wide hipped with iron grey hair, cut high and tight like she was a fresh recruit, but it was hiply gelled into little frozen waves. She pulled a cigarette from behind her ear and nodded at the lady who had taken my order and then disappeared in the back.

I sat down with my paper but couldn’t concentrate from watching the weather on TV. They were saying some big storm was on its way in, moving over from Oklahoma going to hit Arkansas around eight. I had to remind myself what state I was in. Right as the weatherman was saying that the station had us covered, a wind swept downhill outside the open door and the lights in the restaurant hiccupped. I checked my watch: 7:40. I went back up to the register. The tall one was standing there with her paper tented out in front of her. She folded down a corner at my approach.

“Is there any way I can get that to go,” I asked.

“Get it any way you want it,” she said.

“Great, thanks.” She walked over to the oven, pulled on the thin door and peered in. “Three minutes,” she said.

“Cool.”

“What brings you to Eureka?”

“Roofing. I’m working up at the hotel.”

“Which one? The Crescent or the Basin Park.”

“I don’t know. The tall one.”

“Oh, the Basin Park. The one just up the hill.”

“That’s it.”

“Used to work there.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah, everybody’s worked there. They come to town and work with at the Basin Park, or at the Crescent, or at the hospital. Ain’t nowhere else to work in town.”

“Yeah.”

“Up until they quit and open up their own shop.”

“Yeah? I noticed there were lots of shops around.”

“The tourists love it. Ain’t nobody in this own actually from this town.”

“Where you from?”

“From way they hell down in Hilo.”

“What brought you here?”

“Who can remember? Peace of mind? Been here almost twelve years.”

There was something about this woman. There was an openness to her that comforted me. It wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t maternal. Occasionally, I find this rapport with older women, women I don’t find attractive necessarily and yet who I can talk with. And I enjoy talking with them because our talk feels free, cleansed of the hormones that clog almost all my other conversations, not excluding those with Elise.

“This your little store?”

“Yep. You got it. We been in business just over a year now.”

Right then the other woman walked by the open doorway carrying a large plastic jug of something. She didn’t stop.

“Started cleaning rooms up at the hotel. Then worked the front desk, night manager, saved up enough and we bought this building. Took a while to figure out what we wanted to do with it.”

“You could have opened a fudge shop.”

“Too much fudge in this town already,” she said smiling.

She went back to the oven and pulled open the door, and pulled out the disc of my pizza. She slid it into a box with an aggressive, expert casualness.

“You want peppers and shit?” she said.

“No thanks.”

“All right. You come back tomorrow after the storm, have a beer.”

Two slices down I walked into the hotel, and I was immediately flagged down by the kid at the front desk. Hadn’t been there a day yet and already they knew me by sight. He said he had a message for me. So chewing on my third slice, I unfolded the pink piece of paper on top of the pizza box as I rode the elevator up to my room. My plan was to buy two cokes from the machine and mix it with the bottle of Evan Williams I had in my bag, ride this storm out in style. The message was from Elise. The little “please call” box was checked and in the open, free response area it said, “You forgot your cell phone again.”

***

The storm front hit as soon as I got up to my room. Started watching some movie on the television but the screen kept turning jagged whenever the wind picked up. I think it was one the National Lampoon Vacation ones. I never understood why they were called that.

Finally, at about ten, after the storm had raged and settled and raged and settled, and I’d finished the pizza and one of the Cokes, I decided to call Elise back.

“Some people might be about to go to bed, you know,” she said.

“Since when do you go to bed this early?”

“Since when do you care what time I go to bed?”

“Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been working.”

“At ten at night? It’s raining over there. I know this. You didn’t go to Mars, you know.”

“The red planet.”

“So what you were out partying with Billy until all hours?”

“Just dinner.”

“What did you have?”

“What?”

“What did you have?”

“A steak.”

“Mmm. Manly.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Don’t say it with such exhaustion.”

“I’m not exhausted.”

“You sound exhausted,” she said.

“You sound exhausted.”

“Well I have a perfectly good reason to be.”

“I do, too.”

“Look, are we going to talk like this all night?”

Just then the line stuttered and went to dial tone. Even though I knew what was going on I kept calling her name Elise? Elise? Elise? over and over, though I also kept telling myself to just shut up and call her back.

“You didn’t have to hang up on me,” she said.

“I didn’t hang up. Something with my …”

“Calm down. It was just a joke.”

“I don’t want to fight,” I said.

“We’re not fighting. We’re just shaking it out.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know, like when athletes finish doing something, they shake their arms out? Shake shake shake.”

“I’ve never done that,” I said.

“Like when we watched the Olympics. The runners?”

“Okay, I remember.”

“See? No big deal.”

“Well what do we have to shake out?” I said.

“I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the one that up and ran to Arkansas.”

“I didn’t run. I just took a job with Billy.”

“You ran.”

“I take jobs with Billy all the time.”

“Yes, but usually there’s like a note or we talk or you know, you tell me before you split.”

“I told you …”

“Yeah, you like shouted it as the car was speeding away.”

“I did not.”

“Did too.”

“Okay, look, how are things?”

“Things are great. Things are pregnant.”

“What?”

“Things thinks they are pregnant. Things are growing big and round and like Saturn.”

“What? Wait, what did you just say to me?”

The power stream shuddered and dimmed, the caterpillar of snow descended diagonally across the screen of my television, the entire room hiccupped and my phone went dead again.

“Goddamn fucking hick town,” I said when she picked up.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. “I’m pregnant, Tommy.”

“How can you be pregnant?”

“Really, they didn’t teach you this.”

“No, I mean, you know what I mean.”

“Look it happens. It can happen. It has happened.”

“But I thought you were on the pill.”

“I am. Well, I was.”

“You got off the pill? When? Weren’t you going to tell me?”

“I got off yesterday when I found out I was pregnant.”

“Why?”

“Because if you stay on the pill when you’re pregnant, you fuck them up. You give them like horns and shit.”

“Really?”

“Oh, Jesus, Thomas, yes, really.”

“But before …”

“Before I was on the pill. Remember, every day. That little damn hockey disc.”

“Then I mean, I understand, but how then did—”

“I don’t know,” she said, sighing into the phone, sounding genuinely confused by it all. “Maybe it was the antibiotics a couple of weeks ago.”

“The anti what?” I said.

“The antibiotics I got for the sinus infection.”

“They can do this?”

“Yeah, they can.”

“But did we even?”

“There’s no one else.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Let’s just say I could feel where you were going.”

“Alright sorry, jeez.”

“I’m not feeling so well.”

“I can tell.”

“Sympathy, Thomas, what I need at this moment is a mountain of sympathy.”

“Okay, sorry. What did the doctor say?”

I waited for her to speak, and I kept waiting and nothing, and then I suddenly realized that the phone was dead again.

“I haven’t been to the doctor yet,” she said when I got her back on the phone.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I haven’t been yet. I did the stick.”

“You peed on the stick?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, I mean, I’m not trying to discredit you or anything, but we don’t really know what we’re talking about yet. You got to go to the doctor. You just did the little pee stick.”

“I peed on three of them.”

“Well, that fine. I’m not …”

“Yes, you are. Yes, you are. You are saying …”

“I’m not saying anything. I just think we need to confirm.”

“Confirm what?”

“Confirm the pregnancy. How many weeks along? Do you know that?”

“I think three.”

“Okay, that’s fine, but we need to confirm everything. Why three?”

“That’s just sort of my hunch.”

“Well how late are you?”

“Well technically I’m not late yet.”

“What do you mean ‘technically’?”

“I mean that I’m supposed to start tomorrow.”

“You mean you’re not even late.”

“Yes, technically as of now I am not officially late. But the stick says.”

Well why did you even take the stick if that—”

“I had a hunch okay? I had a hunch in my fucking pregnant belly okay? Women just know.”

“Just know.”

“Women just—”

“I know. I heard you. Okay.”

“I had a feeling about the antibiotics,” she said.

“Why did you say anything before we—”

“I forgot, okay?”

“Jesus, don’t get hysterical.”

“Do not use that word. Whatever you do, do not use that word around me ever again. Do I make myself clear?”

“Roger.”

“Do I?”

“Roger.”

“Now, I don’t like talking about all this over the phone any more than you do, but what would you have me do?”

“Well you could wait until I got home.”

“And when is that going to be?”

My mind went numb. I was looking out the window at the rain falling in the street light and the leaves of the trees shuddering intermittently into the light, like the branches were trying to shake off the rain. For a moment, I couldn’t get back to the room where I was. I had no idea how long it would take to do the roof upstairs.

“It’s raining here,” I said.

“I already knew that part, Thomas.”

***

The next day it was still raining, but one of those deceptive sprinkles, where you think it’s really nothing but as soon as you get out in it, you seem to be covered in needles of water. The town was back alive, its tourist blood flowing. Old ladies hauled their husbands up and down the sidewalks, the little rainbow flags beckoned, and the cute bubbling stream from the day before now had real violence too it. All around us gravity was having its way. The sidewalks were moated with rainwater, too fast and deep to walk through.

After coffee and a muffin from one of the cute spots down the street, I got up to the roof. The new hands were there, standing stoically in the rain and smoking, but there was not a thing to do, and Billy was pissed. He paced around on his cell phone despite the rain. I worried that he might get electrocuted but I wasn’t the type of person to say anything. Finally, after like an hour of this, he told me to go downstairs and tell the manager the day was a bust.

I rode down the elevator next to a couple of guests, dripping the whole time and trying not to look dangerous. Something about construction or repair just makes people nervous.

Ralph was easy. He seemed to like me for a reason I couldn’t fathom.

“Yeah, I figured,” he said, sitting in his chair and playing on the computer, its blue glow lighting up his big glasses. “We gotta just hang on until this thing passes. Probably tomorrow sometime. Look, there was something I wanted to discuss with you. I mean I could talk about it with Billy but it’s about this weekend.”

I had the feeling that Ralph disliked Billy. Billy was one of those people who unnerved some people. Well, most people really. There was nothing visibly wrong with him, but he had a slick confidence that creeped people out. He could stand there and compliment your car, go on and on about it, and fill you with the notion that he was about to steal it with your wife inside.

“Do y’all want cash or is a check okay?”

I answered without really thinking about it.

“Cash, definitely. We need it to pay the hands. If we don’t pay them daily, they’ll skip out on us. Then we’re back on square one, picking up Mexicans every morning. Got to keep them faithful.”

“I figured as much. Okay, so y’all have today’s and then I was thinking. I was thinking of paying the rest tomorrow before I split for the weekend.”

“Don’t come back in on the weekends?”

“Not if I don’t need to. I’m sure you understand. And I sure as hell ain’t going to let Kenny have all that cash. You met Kenny?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well, you will this weekend. Saturday manager. Couldn’t wipe his ass without pulling a muscle.”

“That’s fine. I’ll double check with Billy.”

“Yeah. Okay. I guess that’ll be fine,” he said. “Tell him I’ll have the money tomorrow afternoon. Y’all be tarring by then?”

“Yeah, if this stupid weather cooperates.”

***

“What did he say?” Billy asked when I got back upstairs.

“He says cool. Get to it when we get to it.”

“Yeah? Want his money back?”

“Huh, no. Nothing about that.”

“Cool. He say anything else?”

“Nah, he was busy. Cool with all of it.”

Billy smiled for the first time that day, almost invisible under all that rain and his ball cap. “Cool deal,” he said.

After grabbing a cigarette from the communal pack we’d kept in the shed, he called the Mexicans still standing still in the rain over toward the edge of the roof.

“Hola, viejos. Aqui venido. We’re completo hoy. Siesta all day, comprende? Manana morning, bright and early. Bring a friend, mas o manos? Amiga de la roofer? Comprende?”

The Mexicans nodded in unison, and Billy slid one of them a fold of money. He looked at it for a second, made some mute gesture toward his friend, and they trudged away.

“I got enough for one more day of that,” he said.

“It’ll let up. I watched the weather this morning.”

“Since when did you become mister weatherman?”

“Since you brought me out to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, sir.”

He laughed and lit his cigarette, and said, “Well that settles it.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m heading to Little Rock.”

“Yeah?”

“Got some business there.”

“Yeah, more tars jobs?”

“Tar pit more like it.”

“Huh?”

“Figure it out.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll be back Sunday.”

“Sunday, what I’ll do until?”

“You know what to do.”

“Well—”

“Do you know what to do? You know how to do this? That’s why I brought you, right?”

“Yeah, I know what to do. I know how to roof.”

“Good. That Ralph off this weekend, right?”

“Yeah, some weekender is coming in. Kenny.”

“Right, good. You just keep your nose straight. Don’t drink too much. Hire another hand if you need to but no more than four. Five would be just greedy. Here.”

He reached back in his coat and pulled out the rest of his cash, tightened up in one his daughter’s hair bands, handed it over to me.

“You make that work, however possible. I don’t want any calls from you begging.”

“Hey, we’re set. Weather’ll clear out this afternoon. You come back Sunday we’ll be packing up and loading out Monday by lunch with cash in hand.”

“Good. I comprende that.”

“You lining up some work down in Little Rock?” I don’t know why I was pressing him that morning.

“Let’s just say I’ve got a solo gig there for the time being,” he said. And with that he blew out smoke that got caught between us in the rain. And he looked at me from under the brow of his cap with a plain male frankness. I hate to say that, but there was something male about it. It was some kind of straight-on preverbal male communion, out there in the smoke and rain. It was a look that said, shut up with your goddamn questions.

So I shut up.

***

The rest of the day was like my own personal vacation in Eureka. I went for an early lunch at the pizza place. The tall blonde was there again, and she sat down and ate across from me. Said was better to eat early before the nurses came. Her name was Serena. Said every Friday was Nurse Day and all the ones from the hospital would twaddle on down. Her partner came by later, her name was Tracy, and it finally dawned on me that they were together. I’m cool with that. I never worried about what other people did to each other, but I didn’t see it at first. Anyway, they told me that if I had the day I really should drive around and look at the scenery. They said stay away from all the old lady shops unless I needed a quilt for my lady back home. But I said no thanks. We’re all full up on quilts. I asked them about the guitar shop, and they said yeah that was Tex and he was legit, been there longer than anyone.

“Is he a native?”

“Heck no. He’s from Vermont.”

They said after that come back for dinner. It was lasagna night.

“Y’all do lasagna?”

“We’re not just a pizza joint,” Tracy said.

“What if I want to see some of the other nightlife in your fine town?”

Well that’s fine, they said, but don’t go drinking on an empty stomach.

And so I trouped on down to the van. I passed by the guitar shop but it was closed with a little clock that said he’d be back at 2:20. I bought a carton of cigarettes to share with the hands (one of Billy’s secrets). It was still raining a little but I managed to find my way out of the gully and got on the Pig Trail, which turned out to be really Highway 23. I rode for a little while with the horizon jumping up and down.

Finally, I just pulled the car over at this little lookout point and I got out and lit a cigarette and stood for a while. It was more than beautiful, the way the trees all ran up and down the hills in their fall colors. I was above everything, looking down on the hilltops and down there it looked like some great crumbled rusty machine, all quilted together. The rain had stopped and there was a pleasant chill to the air, a coldness brought in on the storm’s heels. I could tell it would clear up the next day and that we’d have three days of hard work ahead of us without Billy to make people nervous. I finished my cigarette and started another. There was nowhere to sit down so I just kept standing but didn’t seem to mind. The wind was free and light like it was finally done with summer, and it pushed me gently to the edge, and the crumple quilted surface of the treetops bowling out below me made me feel like I could fall into them. I thought about lasagna night and having a beer with Serena and Tracy. It was so wonderful in that moment feeling that I had nowhere to be, no one I was supposed to call. The next cigarette was already gone, so quick, and it seemed wasteful to start another right away. I couldn’t chain smoke like I was 20 anymore. I stood out there just breathing for another five minutes before I got self-conscious.

I drove back into town and found my hotel parking lot and began to trudge back up the hill. The guitar guy was back in the store, standing at the register reading a Thomas Harris book, and I came in and said, can you give me a lesson?

A cowbell clunked to announce my entrance.

“You buy a guitar, I’ll give you a lesson,” he said.

“I don’t want a guitar.”

“Well then.”

“You know Tracy and Serena up at the pizza place? They’re old friends of mine. I’m new to town and they said you were the man to see.”

“That a fact?”

“You bet,” I said.

“Well,” he said, sliding a guitar pick inside his paperback to mark his place, “let’s go pick you out something.”

And we spent the next hour huddled together, each on stools as he tried to teach me an E chord and then a G chord. We started on D but then his next lesson came. My fingertips were stinging raw, like they’d each been individually scorched. But I didn’t want to leave. There was something about strumming out that E that felt so good despite the pain, like a big twanging exhale.

“You come back tomorrow I’ll teach you ‘Margaritaville’,” Tex said.

“I need to buy a guitar?”

“We’ll work on that.”

Back at the pizza place that night, I had lasagna, and I told Tracy and Serena about my day. They were right proud, and I was proud telling them. It was strange being so proud in front of them. Tracy would get up and tend to the ovens while I was talking. A bowling league had come through and set up in the restaurant, all wearing identical pink shirts, snap buttons with short sleeves. They must have won because they were loud and kept toting pitchers out to the tables, two at the time. I was eating up near the register, almost like the help.

“Tourists,” Serena said. “From Little Rock.”

“My boss is in Little Rock,” I said.

“Everyone is in Little Rock. It’s where everyone wants to be.”

“Not me.”

“Well you’re the first. Where do you want to be, then?”

I didn’t know but I was on my second plate of lasagna and third beer, and my belly had this radiating, warm fullness to it, and I just wanted to bring everyone together, the bowlers, Serena and Tracy, and make a giant guitar out of them and strum them over and over.

Then I went back to the hotel and stayed up watching Law and Order reruns until Elise called at ten-thirty.

“I’m not pregnant.”

“What?”

“I’m not pregnant.”

“What do you mean you’re not pregnant?”

“Just what I said. It’s a no go. I’m without child.”

“But yesterday.”

“I know, I know. I went to the doctor.”

“Already?”

“Yes, already. What, now you’re mad I went to the doctor too fast? Yesterday you were all go to the doctor.”

“It’s just I didn’t think …”

“What?”

“I thought maybe you’d wait until I got back home.”

“Well sorry to disappoint you.”

“I’m not disappointed, it’s just—”

“You’re not disappoint I’m without child.”

“No, I’m disappointed it’s just—”

“This—”

“This—it’s happened so fast.”

“Tell me about it. So when are you coming home?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have a ballpark?”

“Ballpark four days.”

“Four day ballpark.”

“Can you live with that?”

“I guess. What’s your next job?”

“Don’t have one yet. Billy’s scouting work in Little Rock.”

“Great. What’s with all this Arkansas work?”

“I don’t know. He’s got a thing for Arkansas.”

“Thing. Fling’s more like it. You alone in there?”

“Just me and the mini-fridge and Law and Order.”

“Good boy.”

“Thanks.”

“Come home soon.”

“I will.”

“Soon soon.”

“I will.”

“I want to have a baby now.”

“I understand that.”

“I don’t think you do, but that’s okay. I don’t need you to understand.”

“You just need me to like donate.”

“Yes. But there are other reasons I need you too.”

“Well that’s comforting,” I said.

***

            The next day we were back at work, and I was playing foreman. The hands brought somebody’s brother and the three of them made quick work of the scraping, and by ten they were heating tar and getting everything ready. The smell was already thick in my nose. I was in the readjustment period where the smell comes back at you and takes over every thought. After a day or so it just becomes background, but there is always the first day of having to stomach it once again. I was pre-embarrassed about lunch, what Serena and Tracy would think with me coming down the hill smelling like turd.

And that got me to thinking. Why was I embarrassed about what they thought of me? I hardly knew these people. But as the morning wore on, and I stood there and smoked, I couldn’t shake it, this sudden caring about how I smelled and knowing that I smelled worse the longer I stood up there. Suddenly everything seemed too tight, from the cigarettes to the tar to the coveralls I was wearing.

I decided to go downstairs and check on the money. I hollered at the hands, who kept on pouring, and rode the elevator down to the lobby. The whole way I could feel people leaning away from me, the smell pushing them, disgusting. I was disgusted myself for the first time I could remember.

“Here you go,” Ralph said.

“Thanks for this.”

“Hey, sure. Makes it easier on me. Now I don’t have to worry about Kenny screwing things up. He’ll be around this afternoon. I’m probably about to cut out myself. Y’all got everything you need?”

“Oh yeah. No worries. We’re pouring steady now.”

“Billy being cool?”

“Cool as a cucumber.”

“Good. I didn’t see him out this morning, wondered if he maybe had too much to drink.”

“Nah. He was up there. Maybe had coffee in his room. We’ve got suites,” I said, stupidly.

“Probably right. So listen, y’all be careful.”

“Sure thing. Them hands are tight.”

“Those people up there speeka da English?”

“They do all right.”

I stood there too long. The conversation was over and I knew it, could feel it, but for some reason I stayed still, like I wanted him to bless me or something. Maybe it was the lying about Billy, though I don’t know why that would have caught me up. Billy was just Billy. Who cared if he wasn’t around. Though if he was around, let’s be honest, I wouldn’t have done what I did. Maybe I was feeling some pre-guilt. I swear I hadn’t even thought of it yet but maybe my body could feel it, could smell the crime coming off of me like that tar.

Because what happened was I rode the elevator back up to the roof, the fat envelope of cash in my inside pocket, and I got out to the shed and lit another cigarette. The Mexicans were still at it. It was coming up on lunch break, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go back to the pizza place smelling like tar. And I couldn’t stand there for the rest of the day pretending to be the boss. And what was most frightening was that I realized that I couldn’t talk to Elise again. The thought of having to talk to her on the phone again that night and the night after and deal with her spastic charm—I couldn’t do it. And to go back home and hash out all of that crap with the pregnancy, to figure out if she was pregnant or not, or if she was faking and why, and did she really want to have a child and when did this come up, when did she realize this. I knew what she would say anyway.

“I don’t know. It struck me right as I was telling you that I wasn’t pregnant. I realized that I actually did want to be pregnant.”

Which was fine for her, but it wasn’t fine with me. I could see that. The tar was spreading and settling, cooling steadily, and the roof on this old hotel would be like new in two days, ready for another twenty years of rainfall. And that’s how I started to think of my own life at that moment, that after so many years of one thing, a man had to make changes, a man had to revisit the surface of his life and check for leaks.

And so I knew what to do. I took out the cash Billy had given me and stuffed it in the communal cigarette carton. That still left Ralph’s envelope completely untouched. Screw Billy. He would do the same to me, I thought. I waved over to the Mexicans, indicated I was going to take a piss. They’d find their money. That was never a problem.

And then I rode down the elevator, swung by my room and got out of my jump suit and back into my regular Wranglers. Threw my shit into my bag and took the stairs down. No sight of Ralph. I walked quickly down the street, the fat envelope of money in my coat pocket, heavy and grimy. I passed the pizza place, just now opening up for lunch. I wanted to stop in and tell them goodbye, tell them everything, but I knew better. It was better to disappear suddenly from their view. Besides, I couldn’t settle there. I needed to find my own somewhere new.

I kept walking down the hill, spotting the van in the distance. Billy could get another for cheap. It wasn’t like I was stealing his little Porsche. I stopped for a moment, wondering if I was really about to do this, all the complications it would bring. Would Billy come after me for nine grand and an old Volkswagen van with 200 plus miles on it? I was standing in front of the guitar store. Inside Tex was leaning into the counter, almost done now with that Thomas Harris novel. The cowbell on the door clunked as I entered.

“Back for more, eh,” he said, not looking up.

“Back for that guitar,” I said.

***

            I sped down the Pig Trail, the wave of the horizon whooshing by, and I made my way through the Ozark National Forest as fast as I could. I just knew that I was about to see some patrolmen peek over the hill behind me and flip his lights. But instead it was just me and all that gravity, all those irregular lines. As soon as I got up any speed, I was braking hard to keep it on the blacktop. All the van’s ingredients shifted with every turn, the sleeping bag rolling like a tumbleweed, the milk crate of metal corners sliding back and forth. To keep my guitar from getting hurt, I sat it upright in the passenger’s seat and strapped the seatbelt across its big belly. I made it to the interstate and got through Little Rock without too much thinking, even though Billy was there somewhere in its hills, humping someone, the Steel Cloud parked out front. Really more than anything he would probably be proud of me. He’d write it off, insurance would pick it up. I was ashamed of what Ralph would think, but this seemed like worrying about Serena not liking my tar smell. Since when do I care what these people think? These strangers? What about what I think of myself?

After Little Rock, I fell into silence and simply drove, making sure not to speed. I was going to be fine. I stayed this way until I hit Memphis. It was the bridge that did it. As I came up its incline, the illuminated M-of its lights shook; I’d somehow caught up to that front that had come through Eureka. The wind descended and shook the van as I slowly made my way up the bridge. I could see the outline of downtown in the distance but only as a dense rectangular shadow in the gray half-light. It was somewhere around dinnertime. My plan was to get all the way to Chattanooga before settling in.

I got up under that glow of the De Soto Bridge, under its arc of light bulbs, and all that light made me feel a bit more safe—a bit more like I wasn’t about to get flung off into the river for what I’d done. And it was just then, under that light that I saw the sign across the river, the red electronic sign stuck on some building downtown: The Birthplace of Rock and Roll. And that’s what broke me down, made me see what I was really doing to Elise.

It had all happened by now: the Mexicans would have discovered their money, rifling for the cigarettes after lunch. By now Kenny the idiot weekender would have figured out that I’d flaked, when all the noise from the roof had stopped hours too early. By now he would have called Ralph and Ralph would have called Billy, and Billy—emerging from God knows what scenario—would have called my cell phone, which was sitting on the kitchen counter back in Dallas, right where I’d left it on purpose. I was tired of talking to Elise even before I’d left for the job. I wasn’t planning on leaving her. I had never thought about it before, but then there you go.

By now she knew. Only six hours ago everything was normal, but by now she had to know. She would have picked up my cell phone, and Billy and her would have had the strangest conversation. Full of confusion and explanation. It probably took them a half an hour to figure out what I’d done.

And what exactly had I done? Only what every man has a right to do, at least two or three times in his life, and that’s start over. Find a new spot on the map and make himself up from scratch. I didn’t know that then. In fact, running across that bridge and seeing that sign, it felt like a true Sign—like God had come down to let me know that Elise really was pregnant.

***

There was some meandering before I got all the way to the coast. Some false starts. I stayed around east Tennessee and the Carolinas for six months, just bouncing around, working day labor. I turned myself back into a hand, taking daily bits of cash and cigarettes, making friends with the Mexicans where I could find them, speaking their language, helping them find the work that was out there. I’d stay a week in the same place but no longer. I was laying low until I felt the fog had cleared.

No one came for me. That’s how I knew she wasn’t really pregnant. If that was the case, she would have really found me. If it were true, she would have gone hysterical.

Now, all this time later, I’m not proud I did it, but I understand why. You’ve got to protect yourself. That’s what I learned in Eureka. You’ve got to clear out a new space for yourself, not box yourself in, patch your leaks, find your true home. That’s what Serena and Tracy had done, probably what Tex had done too. Everybody’s got that right. You’ve got it, too, if you want it.

 

 

Tipping the Jug*, poem by GC Smith

Rednecks and blackmen

old buddies and friends

will stand now together

with a clay jug of corn

they'll drink to their health

and comfort each other with lies

and comfort each other with lies

They'll talk of their dogs

and the ducks that they've shot

of hunting through Lowcountry winter

with their bragging of deeds

in the depths of dark piney woods

they'll not mention who shot the cow

they'll not mention who shot the cow

They'll avoid the commotion

of the farmer's vile notion

to simply be paid what he's due

They'll vow to hide from him

and never mention that cow

as they drink deep of the old mountain dew

as they drink deep of the old mountain dew

*apologies to Robbie Burns

GC Smith is a southerner. He writes novels, short stories, flash fiction, poetry. Sometimes, but not in novels, he plays with dialect, either Cajun or Gullah-Geechee ways of speaking. Smith's work can be found in: Gator Springs Gazette, F F Magazine, Iguanaland, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Naked Humorists, The GLUT, Flask Fiction Magazine, N.O.L.A. Spleen, NFG Magazine, Cellar Door, The Beat, Dispatches Magazine, Beaufort Gazette, Coyote's Den, Southern Hum, Lamoille Lamentations , Quiction, The Landing, The Haunted Poet, Flavor a Deux, The Binnacle, Stymie Magazine, Bannock Street Books. He has four novels, WHITE LIGHTNING –Murder In the world of stock car racing and THE CARBON STEEL CARESS, A Lowcountry P.I. novel, IN GOOD FAITH, A Johnny Donal P.I. novel, and Mudbug Tales: A Novel In Flashes, wit' recipes. His poetry book is A Southern Boy's Meanderings.

The Hills are Alive, essay by Anna Lea Jancewicz

Yeah, everybody has a dead grandmother story. They’re not sexy and nobody’s buying. But this story is mine, and it’s not so much about the woman as it is about the place. I’m from a little coal town, McAdoo, in Northeastern Pennsylvania. A place where people still use clotheslines, and it has nothing to do with being green. A place where weddings and family reunions mean at least a fist fight, and maybe one of Aunt Vera’s boys pissing in somebody’s car to teach them a lesson. A place where it’s hard to say whose sin will draw the nastiest whispers, the cousin who’s suspected of covert abortions, or the cousin who had the gall to earn a PhD. A place where aunts will still recommend spiking a baby’s bottle with Karo syrup, and stare slack jawed when you reveal that all of your children made it through infancy without ever touching lips to a rubber nipple. A place where a cousin can snarl about all the illegal Puerto Ricans and not understand why you burst into laughter and shake your head. A place where uncles capture snakes from inside houses in paper grocery sacks, where a black bear might just amble out of the strippins, where great-grandfathers sit with Phillies baseball games on their transistor radios eating tomato and oleo sandwiches before they die of black lung and are buried in their Knights of Columbus uniforms, swords by their sides. A place where Grannies yell at kids in words that are not English, and the onion domes of Byzantine churches rise once-resplendent in once-golden paint above streets crammed with clapboard houses and American flags.

Because this is Appalachia, but this isn’t the Appalachia you think of, with bluegrass and cornbread and kids named Billy Bob. This is where kids are named Stanley, and you can’t pronounce their last names, what with the sz’s and cz’s and w’s that sound like v’s. And the Stanleys all say youse guys. This is the Appalachia where grandmothers don’t flinch to say cocksucker in front of you when you’re little enough to only picture an awkward situation for a chicken, but Protestant is whispered, a dirty word. This is the Appalachia where you vacation Down The Shore, and peppers are mangos and you sit on your dupa and shut your trap for two-tree minutes now, henna?

The colossal maw of an abandoned strip mine yawned behind my grandparents’ house, the house that my Poppop built himself, just down the big back lawn and across the alley from the looming house that he was born in, the house that my Granny and Grandpap lived in until they died, where Granny’s parents had been laid out for their home-funerals, back when such a thing was what was done. My second cousins lived in one half of that house, and the youngest was just my age. The summer they finally paved that alley, she and I got in a fight, each of us on either side of the cooling asphalt, and one of us hit the other in the forehead with a well-pitched rock. I can never remember which one of us threw the rock and which one of us bled. We were that close. When she got knocked up at fifteen, I thought Well hell, I can’t judge. There but for the grace of God and my parents’ trusty pick-up truck go I.

Because my mom and dad got out, had packed up everything we owned and moved us, pick-up truckload by pick-up truckload, to Virginia in 1979. I was four. The world had been all of a couple miles squared, and every person I’d ever seen had known my name, known my family. I’d thought black people were only on TV. But you’ve heard the Billy Joel song, so you know that part of the story. The coal was gone, the factories were closing. “It’s getting very hard to stay…”

But back I came, each summer wowed by the horizon appliquéd with ghosty blue silhouettes of mountain tops, back to this place that seemed on one hand bursting with magic and wildness, and on the other just plain backward. Down at the bottom of Logan Street, behind Poppop’s house, there was the Shit Crick, into which all the borough’s raw sewage was emptied. There were no big box stores, no fast food restaurants. We’d get on the highway in Poppop’s big green Oldsmobile, cruise-control it to the Frackville Mall for that. I’d perch on the armrest beside my grandfather as he sang Sinatra, keeping my eyes peeled to catch sight of the golden arches high atop the hill as the mall came into view. Or we’d wind down the mountain to Walt’s Drive-In for soft serve ice cream cones, watch golfers on the driving range behind, bring back a CMP sundae for Nanny. Her favorite, chocolate/marsh mellow/peanuts. What McAdoo had was the firehouse, with booze at night. An Italian place, for pitza, the kind that drips orange grease to bleed through stacked paper plates and needs to be folded in half to fit in your mouth. An inexpertly hand-painted sign nailed up crookedly outside somebody’s door, advertising ETHNIC FOOD, and that means pierohi, halupki, halushki. There was a roller rink, but that was closed down every summer, or maybe just closed down for good.

My cousin and I roamed, played all the make-believe games. We watched Hatchy Milatchy on black and white TV, and put on dance shows for Aunt Peggy when she came home from working at the Kmart in Hazelton, and dressed up in Granny Palmer’s old handmade floor-length slips and her other accessories, antique handbags and scarves, that my Nanny still had saved in a trunk. We picked Queen Anne’s Lace and put the flowers in glasses of water and food coloring, watched the blooms turn colors. We argued over which celebrities we’d marry, we argued over which of her teenage sisters’ boyfriends was the cutest, and when we got a little older we’d skulk in alleys and sneak cigarettes and sing Guns N’ Roses.

These were my summers, until Nanny got sick.

***

It’s a few days after my fourteenth birthday, and I’m standing in the December rain, straddling one of my cousins’ old ten speed bikes, watching some strangers dump backhoe shovelfuls of cold wet dirt on top of my grandmother’s coffin. Nanny is down in that hole, not wearing the colorful polyester pantsuit she asked to be buried in. She’s wearing the mint green gown that she wore for one of the twins’ weddings. They said what she wanted was tacky. I went back to the house with everybody else after the funeral, but they were all eating and talking, and I didn’t feel like doing either. I came back, by myself, to watch this.

There are several acres of cemetery out here on the edge of town, butting up to the railroad tracks, before you cross over to the long road through the woods where wild huckleberries grow in summer, where cold, cold water bubbles up from mountain springs, the road that leads out past the cigar factory, over to Tresckow, where both my aunts live. Chain link and crumbling stone walls separate sundry graveyards that belong to different churches, fences that keep the dead Poles from the dead Italians, the dead Irish from the dead Slovaks, the dead Rusyns from the dead Hungarians. I look out and see a wide expanse of granite headstones jutting from the variegated drab greens, browns, yellows of grass that’s been frostbitten. Looking back toward town, I see the sloping streets crowded with clapboard houses, and the squalid onion spire of St. Mary’s against the low gray clouds.

***

She hadn’t been my favorite. My Poppop was dedicated to spoiling me, sneaking me sugary cereals in tiny boxes and buying me cheap toys at the IGA. She was dedicated to tough love, making me spend the whole summer writing out my multiplication tables, and telling me that wearing those tight jeans like my cousin did would give me crotch-rot. But then she got sick. Really sick. She had at least two kinds of cancer at the start, one of which required bed rest, the other of which was best managed with an active lifestyle. We would walk two miles every morning, in a big loop, very slowly, very carefully, and then she would spend the afternoon in her reclining chair. I spent a lot of time with her. We talked a lot, like we never had before.

She told me stories. Her toes curled up girlishly, and she rubbed her feet together as she told them. Stories about drinking fresh hot milk from the goats her parents had kept in their yard over on Jackson Street. Stories about her father Wasyl coming to America from Russia, how the coal company owned him, how he never really learned English. Stories about dating my grandfather, illustrated by black and white photos held into the albums with those little paste-on corner frames; pictures of Poppop with slicked-back hair, in white tee shirts and blue jeans, looking like Marlon Brando, her by his side in bobby socks, the captions calling her Katie when I’d never heard anybody call her anything but Kathleen or maybe a few times Kathy. Stories about my mother when she was little, about how she finally got so tired of washing and brushing and ironing my mother’s hair that she one day surprised her by lopping it off with a sly pair of scissors after her bath; about how she got so sick of my mother sneaking out of the house with her bell-bottom jeans rolled up beneath her school skirt, those hippie jeans embroidered with a big pair of hands grabbing the ass cheeks, that she stole them and burned them in the furnace. Stories about nursing school, working at the hospital, traveling on her cruises. The story of when I was born, two months early, tiny but strong, and she was there in her crisp white uniform to assist Dr. Lee with the delivery.

But most of all, she liked to tell me about her favorite movie.

I’d never seen it, The Sound of Music. We never watched it together. It was the mid 1980’s of course, and my grandmother didn’t own a VCR. The idea of popping a tape in and watching a movie whenever you wanted to was still an absurd exoticism. But this was even better. She recalled the plot for me a thousand times over. She described the characters, recited dialogue, sang the songs. I felt like I knew the whole movie by heart. It made her so happy, even when she was exhausted and struggling, even when she was so bent that she couldn’t lie in the bed anymore and had to spend all her time in that brown reclining chair. She died in that chair.

We’d come up to visit for Christmas. My birthday is the day after. I heard her the night before, up all night with my mother by her side, begging my mother to help her kill herself. Asking for her sewing scissors, as if she’d be able to do the job with them. She told my mother that she could see her parents, standing in the hallway outside her bedroom door, waiting for her. Then in the morning, on the day I turned fourteen, she took one last gurgling, labored breath. She was 54 years old.

***

The rain has soaked through my clothes and I am freezing. The grave is filled and I’m alone here, the workmen are gone and it’s getting dark. I pedal back up to the Slovak church, and I slip inside. The doors have never been locked, day or night, any time I’ve tried them. That would never happen in the city where I live. But I’ve come here a lot, this is familiar. I kneel in front of the painted plaster Blessed Mother in the dim and quiet. Her eyes are like anthracite slag. I light one of the votive candles, add one more flickering flame to the field of squat red glass cylinders. I reach deep down into the pocket of my jeans, and I pull out my rosary beads.

***

I’m sure I’ve been gone a long time, but nobody seems to have noticed. Most of my relatives have gotten pretty drunk, even the ones for which it takes a hell of a lot. As I walk in, I hear an aunt say She held out for Christmas, she held out so she wouldn’t ruin Christmas for everybody. My Poppop turns his head slowly, slurs, one thick finger pointed at my chest, She died on your birthday, so you can never forget her.

I change into warm, dry clothes. I ghost past them, between them, eat a little frosting from my cake; it’s still in the fridge, pristine, with the plastic ballerina on top. I go into my grandmother’s bedroom; nobody wants to be in there. I shut the door and curl up in the dark, in her chair. My hair is still damp. I’m remembering when I was scared to sleep in the dark, in this room, and she told me The dark is nothing to be afraid of. God made the dark so that every body and every thing can rest.

I’m sobbing now, choking and heaving.

And when I’m done, I breathe deeply. I rub the brown velour upholstery on the arms of her chair. I notice the remote control for the television on her bedside table, just where she must have left it last. It’s barely visible in the dark, but it somehow catches my eye. I sigh, and I pick it up. My finger touches the power button, and there it is. In Technicolor. Julie Andrews, twirling around and around and around:

“The hills are alive with the sound of music,

With songs they have sung for a thousand years…”

***

My grandmother left me her wedding ring when she died, she left it to me. My mother took it, said I couldn’t be trusted with it yet. My mother wore it on her own finger, for years. As my birthday approached, in 2004, she asked me if I wanted anything special for turning thirty. Yeah I said I want Nanny’s ring. She gave it up reluctantly, but now I wear it. It reminds me of where I’m from.

When people asked, I used to say Oh, from around Allentown. Or maybe Do you know where Scranton is? Wilkes-Barre? But those answers are not quite true. So, you ask me now, ask me where I’m from. I’ll look at my finger, and I’ll tell you:

Yeah, everybody has a dead grandmother story. They’re not sexy and nobody’s buying. But this story is mine, and it’s not so much about the woman as it is about the place. I’m from a little coal town, McAdoo…

Anna Lea Jancewicz lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she homeschools her children and haunts the public libraries. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming at Bartleby Snopes, The Citron Review, theNewerYork, Rivet Journal, and elsewhere. Yes, you CAN say Jancewicz: Yahnt-SEV-ich. More at: http://annajancewicz.wordpress.com/

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Where to Buy Your Weed, fiction by Misty Skaggs

Her trailer was a ripe patch of excess, bloomed conspicuously at the base of a cliff on the edge of a bone dry, Baptist county in East Kentucky. The half-acre around it was littered with faded Mountain Dew cans glinting in the sunshine and decorated haphazardly with a half dozen busted toilets turned planters. Mary had filled them to the brim with rich bottom soil and planted sturdy annuals that burst forth in bright colors come springtime. And you could hear her racket from a ridge over. Never music, just the strained voices of lonely people seeking solace over air waves. Her regular customers learned to lean in when she hollered them across the thresh hold and into her home. They learned to brace themselves against the blast of cackling talk radio hosts crackling out into the hillbilly breeze via AM radio, the regulars planted their feet against decibel after decibel blaring through the stacks of second hand speakers that towered and teetered close to the drooping, water-stained ceiling. If you were a brand new customer just looking for a quality buzz, it could be downright overwhelming.

Mary herself was too much–too big, too loud, too self-assured, too self-righteous. She’d answer the door in a muu-muu splattered with crusty, sausage gravy and tacky floral print. She’d tell you how Jesus don’t mind pot, but you better stay away from that ol’ Detroit dope. She conducted most all her business out of the kitchen. There was always an abundance of food bubbling over on the stove and her rumbling old refrigerator was always stocked with strange, leftover smells and cold beer. The mismatched canisters lining the counter tops were stuffed full of product. On the rare occasion she wasn’t cooking when you’d show up to score, she’d take your money all flopped out and sweating across the queen size bed crowded into the built-on, back room of the mobile home. And she’d produce a thirty bag or a sixy bag or even a whole ounce or two out from under the folds of her dress. Or maybe out from under the folds of her pale, fleshy body. Nobody ever dared to question the hygienic aspect once they realized that sticky, hairy, bud smelled even stronger and danker than the dealer.

No one knew where she kept her crop, but she gave the living room over to the house plants. The ivy grew up over the arms of the couch and she warned guests to avoid the moldy Lazy Boy. Not for the sake of their pretty, clean clothes or pretty, clean lungs. Because once, the rotting plaid armchair had belonged to her Granny, and now it belonged to the rosary vine. Her favorite. Her Granny’s favorite. Mary kept the room cool and dark so that the thick, durable foliage of it shone under the light of a single lamp that faked sunshine. And the blossoms were back lit, flickering red and wavering like candles at the base of a shrine to homegrown botany. Everybody on this side of the state knew she was thanking the good Lord for her green, green thumb.

Misty Marie Rae Skaggs, 32, hardly ever leaves the holler anymore.

Uncles Charlie Loves You, poem by Misty Skaggs

I remember tired, washed-out women

warning us young’uns

with his name -

“Uncle Charlie’s gonna come,

gonna come all the way

out here

and get you."

I remember we believed it.

I remember the good ol’ boys

rounding up a posse

fueled by boredom

and Pabst Blue Ribbon

every damn time

he went up for parole.

He might get out,

he might come home.

No-Name Maddox,

backwoods bastard,

progeny of a prostitute

with no paved streets to walk.

He could’ve been one of them,

with a Mamaw out on Mauk Ridge.

Might’ve been another nobody

puffed up on Kentucky windage,

bedding high school girls

in the bed of a beat-up

pick-up truck

saying,

“I don’t know

what somebody is.”

Or maybe

Uncle Charlie

could’ve been a country preacher,

a powerful, primitive, baptist

running the church house like a family.

A short feller filled

plumb up to the brim

with rural route righteousness,

briar-hopping the pulpit

instead of hitching to Haight-Ashbury.

The Holy Spirit in his wild eyes

instead of homicide.

I know

I hear Kentucky

in his voice.

Hiding in the space

at the end of the words

where consonants drop off

and disappear.

Misty Marie Rae Skaggs, 32, hardly ever leaves the holler anymore.