Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 23

The Yellow World, fiction by Wesley Browne

 

When my fingers came off, I didn’t so much feel pain as the sensation of something touching my hand, which then became much lighter. I didn’t know they were gone at first; I threw my arm behind my back before I raised it. When I did, I found my hand abbreviated and darkened.

The chipper rattled and roared as its maw chewed and swallowed oak and my departed digits. Those won’t go back on, I thought.

The deep red that enrobed the ragged remains of my callused hand had a yellow cast. So did the green chipper. So did the oaks, the poplar and the ash—the moss on the ground and the rocks peeking up from the dirt. The tint of my safety glasses made the hillside a yellow, sunny place, even at a moment so dark.

I don’t know how it smells when most people lose fingers, but when I did, it smelled like hot, cut wood—burning without smoke. It was a smell I always enjoyed. I enjoy it less now.

The din and my earplugs drowned out the sound of my brother hitting the ground. I imagine a thud or a thump, but who knows; it could have been a whack. You don’t find out who is most susceptible to shock until something transpires worthy of it.

I thought of the emergency shut-off, but it was moot. Letting the gasoline burn was as good as any other way. I also thought of trying to rouse the crumpled lump of caramel Carhartt that was Dustin, but he was of no use to me. We had worked the hillside together, but now I was on my own. And the pain was on its way. I knew this. And I had to stem the bleeding. I knew this too. It ran down my right arm and collected at the elbow of my flannel shirt sleeve, making it droop. I knew to keep the damaged hand high, keep my arm bent, but the blood surged up and out anyway, like the water in the fountain at the courthouse square in town.

I scanned the hillside for something I could use, then knelt beside my brother and took the red and black paisley bandana from his damp brow. When I stood, my head emptied, and I nearly went down. I straightened my faltering knees and remained upright. I knew, if I fainted, I most likely would go altogether. I can’t say whether I did it to try to raise him, or out of meanness, or both, but I kicked Dustin in the shoulder hard as I could, a kick that would leave evidence of the toe of my boot for weeks. His body shuddered, then was static.

I knew what I needed was a tourniquet, but I also knew I couldn’t tie it with one hand, especially my left. It was the first of the many times I’ve rued sticking the too-short push stick down the feed chute with my right arm.

Before my hand went into the cutting knives, I was singing John Prine in a voice I could scarcely hear, wishing for an extra season to figure out the other four. The chipper caught and ate the stick and shredded the end of my hand in a single instant. I can’t remember if I cried out, but my singing stopped.

The grisly yellow world was about to grow a shade worse. Since I couldn’t tourniquet the arm, I would have to squeeze the wound. The throb was beginning to set in, and behind it was a whole chaos of pain. The squeeze, I knew, would hasten the chaos’ arrival. There was nothing for it. I started toward the house before I did it, thinking the act of walking would distract me.

I drew a deep breath and tucked my chin before I grasped the pulsating wound. When I touched it, the devil unleashed his hell on the ragged place where once there were fingers. The poisonous pain ran all through my body and buckled me again. White light flashed inside the yellow lenses. My legs did their job. They held, then carried me off the yellow hill, down the end of the yellow holler, and out its mouth to the yellow path toward the old house.

I’ve never been so glad to see my mama in all my life as when I spotted her on the back porch. She had her straw hat on and held her green watering can. She was giving a drink to the middle one of the five hanging baskets bursting with hot pink impatiens. The porch, the hat, the baskets, the flowers spilling out, my mama—they were all a little on the yellow side.

She didn’t see me at first, consumed as she was by her flowers. I got within fifty yards before I called, “Mama! I made a mistake!”

She turned to me with the handle of the plastic can in one hand and her other under it. Her expression was placid, uncomprehending. I raised my mangled hand with the other pressed to it, my lonely right thumb poking up as if it were giving its approval. Her jaundiced face became a plate of noodles, all lines and squiggles. The can hit the concrete at her feet, and the water first jumped, then poured out. Her mouth moved and there were words, but with my plugs in I hadn’t any notion what they might be. I drew ever closer, but for some reason she made no move toward me. Her mouth moved again, and the sound was louder, but still I didn’t get it.

Once I was up on her I was shaking like a scared rabbit, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I said, “I need an ambulance, Mama. I need an ambulance bad.”

The first movement she made since dropping the can was to pluck the ear plug from my right ear. The air and the noises it carried rushed in. She put her terrified face inches from it and said, “Where’s Dustin?”

I drew my head back and gnashed my teeth. “Sleepin’. Now you gonna call me an ambulance or not?”  I stuck my ruined hand in the saturated little rag under her nose. “I can’t dial!”

She shook her head, like she was coming up out of a dream, took my upper arms and helped me to my backside on the concrete porch and leaned me against one of the gray six by six posts that supported the roof. While she did she said, “I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go,” all breathy and fast. I’ve got to give her credit I can’t give Dustin: at least she didn’t pass out.

I sat looking at the yellow rock face where Granpaw’s crew blasted the hillside to make a flat place for Mama and Daddy’s house. It was some years after that they got in the mood to make me. I looked at the yellowed saplings growing in the cracks and wondered—like I always did—what they were thinking sprouting there. There was no future in it.

Then I was tired of it. Tired of the yellow world. Tired of sitting in the expanding shadow of my leaking fluid. I was as happy not being in the world at all as to be in that awful yellow one where I had only half a right hand and a thousand rations of pain. I closed my eyes and the yellow world was gone. Wasn’t long before I was too.

* * *

I didn’t see the world again for another day, but when I did it wasn’t yellow anymore. It was mostly beige and boring, like a hospital should be. For that, I was glad.

Dustin felt awful, like it was his fault. I told him it wasn’t—and that was true—though it would have been nice if he’d stayed upright and helped.

They brought a doctor to my room who wanted to cut off my toe and make me a new index finger, said it would “increase the function” of my hand. I got the feeling he was excited to try it out. I just let him talk. I knew right away I didn’t want a toe cobbled on my hand. It was hard enough to see the way people reacted to it. I sure didn’t want to make it look like some kind of patchwork science project.

I left the hospital with my little hand sewed up and an orange bottle of white pills, pills a man could make a nice profit on if he was the sort. I took a few, but the rest went down the commode.

There are times when my buddies gig me, the way buddies can, about my masturbation practices and how I can only count to six. I always laugh along. Dustin never does. He never even smiles. He just sits like there’s a tack on his chair until the jokes pass.

I soon found out, some girls can’t deal with the fact I’m maimed. Others can get used to it. My daddy says it’s an advantage. “Sorts the good from the bad real quick. The bad ones aren’t worth foolin’ with.” That may be so, but I might have liked to spend a little time fooling with some of the bad ones anyway.

Sometimes I get down. My daddy always tells me the same thing, “It does no good to dwell on the past.” My mama’s the worst for that, and he can’t abide it.

I try hard, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t miss my fingers. There are times when I stare at the meandering scar where they once lived, at the places where the knit skin sits up like a rouged mole trail. Thinking about the loss knots my stomach, but those knots get incrementally smaller each day.

The morning I made Dustin go back up the holler with me, he did so under protest. I prodded him. “You afraid you’re gonna have another fainting spell?”

I stood at the foothill’s crease while Dustin fired up the chipper. It roared awake, then trembled in hunger. “Hush,” I said, working my earplugs in with my left hand. “You already bit me once. You won’t get me again.”

The foliage on the brush and limbs we cleared had died and turned crispy brown while I convalesced. The leaves on the trees had begun their change, but weren’t too far along just yet.

Dustin put his clear safety glasses on and looked it over. “So, how you wanna work this?” he said, over the chipper’s fury.

I contemplated a moment before I reached in my front pocket for my yellow-lensed safety glasses. I took a step nearer the eager chipper. I looked down the chute at the cutting knives. Their motion was so fast that they were nothing more than a silver blur. With my left hand, I tossed the glasses inside. The rattle was brief, and they were gone.

I shrugged. “I better haul and let you load. I don’t got any glasses.”

Dustin nodded. He moved to the chipper’s mouth while I made my way to one of the brush piles. We set about finishing our work.

 Wesley Browne owns a small pizza shop, practices law, and lives with his wife and two sons in Richmond, Kentucky. His prose has appeared in Appalachian Journal and Chaffin Journal. The Yellow World was previously published in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Ron Rash Volume IV. He is a member of the Hell of Our Own Writers Group and has twice attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky

Whorehopper, fiction by Liz Frazier

“I ain’t never seen the beat, her living up there like that. Her and Woody both.

They ain’t got no toilet paper. No wash rags. The bedspreads have got dog shit on them. I’m telling you, it’s a wonder they don’t end up with some kind of disease living like that.”

You know Sue. Said she’s had every disease in the book except for AIDS and the Clap.

“I called the Welfare on them, her laying up there like that—stinking to high heavens. She ain’t had a bath—hell, she ain’t been out of that bed in over two years. Her hair’s so filthy you could wring out enough grease to fry a dozen eggs in it. Her fingernails are so long that when she goes to clean that colostomy bag, they said poop gets up and underneath of them, and she just lets it go. But, she lays right there, and Woodrow waits on her, hand and foot.”

She called me Roto-Rooter until I was nearly twelve.

She preferred one to the other, and sneaked me Little Debbies and candy bars when I wasn’t supposed to have them.

“I went up there to try and see if she’d let me clean her up, but that house smelled so bad that I couldn’t stay, and I had to get up and leave. I said, “Sue, let me cut your hair. I’ve brought you a whole bag of stuff here…” And, before I could finish what I had to say, she said, “Thay ain’t no damn way under the sun that I’m cutting my hair. I promised Mommy before she died that I wouldn’t cut it, and by God, I ain’t doing it. I keep my hair short on the top so’s I can run a wet wash rag over it when it needs it, by God, and that’s enough.”

Ain’t never not too hot to trot.

Ain’t never not too hot to trot.

“So, I just left her alone. Lord, those dogs was up on the table, they was up on the sink, eating out of the garbage cans, barking and carrying on. She was cleaning that colostomy bag while I was there, and she had to smack them dogs away from it just so she could clean it. She don’t wash her face. Never did. Still don’t. Just rubs more make-up on over top of it.”

She was a cage dancer at cock fights,

But under this light, ain’t nobody beautiful.

She bought herself a masturbating monkey when she turned 55.

Said somebody pawned it to her for some Lortabs.

“They’re putting her in a nursing home, I reckon. But she’s talked herself into it. All these years of pretending. She’s pretended to be sick for so long, and she’s laid up there in that bed for so long, saying she can’t walk, she can’t walk, that now, she really can’t walk. I don’t feel sorry for her none, neither. When I called that woman at the Welfare office, they wanted to know how I came to know about all of this, and I said, “Do I have to tell you?” And they said it would help them investigate, so I told them that she’s my late husband’s sister. She’s the only one of them left, and I just hate to see her laying up there like that.”

The bottom dollar dropped out of a hat.

“That Welfare woman asked me what else did I know about the situation. They’ll make her cut off that Jheri-curl when she gets in there. I told them that she was renting a place for a little while, spending all of her money on dope and cigarettes for her and Woody, and when it came around to the time to pay the rent, she’d go and check herself into the nut ward over at the hospital for a few days at a time until time for her check to come in. She can’t manage money. Can’t live on dope and cigarettes and nothing else. I told them, I said, “She ain’t been right since her ex-husband divorced her. Said he was just tired of her. She was all the time complaining about one thing or the other, acting like she was sick all the time. Her mommy was laying over there dying of cancer, and she’d lay back there in that little bedroom acting like she was sick. When Goldy was dying, Woody done the same thing, too. Told that nurse to leave a little bit of that morphine in the needle so he could have it when she was done. I swear on to goodness.”

We divide ourselves to chemicals.

“They’ll have to fumigate that place when they go up there and see what kind of condition they’ve been living in. I told her, though. I told her about them dogs—eighteen dogs in one little ole rinky dink two bedroom trailer—and I said, “I believe that nursing home would be the best thing for Sue. She’d have people to wait on her, hand and foot, and she wouldn’t have to worry about dogs eating the shit out of her colostomy bag, and she’d have to get off of all that dope she’s been on here lately. I said, "I really believe it would do her some good.”

“They wanted to know if she had any other family she could live with. I said, “I’ve got Me and Sarah to take care of right now. My husband’s just died not two months ago, and I just couldn’t do it.” Woodrow hain’t got much sense. Sue lays right there and uses them vibrators right in front of him, and he acts like it ain’t a thing in the world. Linda, that’s her daughter that’s older than Woody, I asked her if she’d take her.  But she said she ain’t home long enough. She’s off getting coked up all the time. That’s what her problem is. She don’t even take care of little Bo-Bo, and he’s got some girl knocked up now, they said. And, Sue hain’t got no boyfriends she can live with. Ain’t had but one that was worth anything. He divorced her about ten years ago. The one she had before last was… I believe it was “Hamburger,” you know, Donnie Robinson. And, the one before that was “Fa-Fa” Foster. He got put in the pen for raping somebody. That last one, boy. I’ll tell you what. They called him “Batman.” He put on capes—I’m telling you the truth now—he’d put on capes and act like Batman and chase the ceiling fan with Sue’s old douche bags trying to stop it. I ain’t lying.  He wasn’t right, now, I’m telling you.” If you think about it, she ain’t right, neither. You’d think she’d be glad to get out of that shit-hole after all she’s been through. She just lays right there and laughs like it ain’t a thing in the world. Lord, have mercy!”

She was always one of those ballerina types who liked to whistle at boys.

A brown on brown sandpaper dream

Rust

In the pit of the stomach

“Lord says, you get what you give. She had that sex store down town there. You seen what happened. They caught Linda for smoking dope in the bathroom. Police walked right in. She was walking in high heels on some old codger’s back right there in the store. Said she was trying to get him to buy something or other. Anyhow, she used to sit there on that barstool in the store all dyked up in them mini-skirts, the back of her hair teased, flirting with them young fellers. The Lord puts you in your place. Ain’t gonna get to heaven selling them dildos and all that.”

“But, Woody dresses her. She tells him what she wants to wear, and he goes and gets it for her. Cleans her false teeth and everything. He used to wear Goldy’s bloomers out to the mailbox over in Bill King Hollow, so I reckon he knows what he’s doing.”

Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.

She stares and stares and stares.

And waits.

A whorehopper, as if for a date.

“I don’t like to see nobody go into a nursing home, but you know Woody ain’t going to get rid of them dogs. Shit. He’d put her on the street any-a-day before he’d do that. That’s what he moved up there on Hurricane for, just so he could keep them dogs.  Remember?  They was that lawsuit because six or seven of them attacked that little girl. It was all over the newspapers and the T.V. a while back.  He was afraid they was gonna take them. Well, now he’s got all them dogs up there living in that little old trailer with him and Sue. I ain’t never seen the beat. The Lord’s gonna get them, you just wait.”

Methamphetamine flows through her like bad birthing water—heavy, brown, sedate.

Ain’t never not too hot to trot.

Ain’t never not too hot to trot.

 

Liz Frazier is the Appalachian Dostoyevsky.

Girls of Michigan, by Gary V.Powell

It was an era of incivility; a mean time when lines were drawn and people picked sides. A few lived large while most teetered on the precipice. In those days, I ran with a rough crowd, rowdy guys who played pick-up rugby on weekends, drank until they puked, and got into fights. We attended community college part-time and worked at corporate dives like Wal-Mart, Applebees, and Best Buy. Some of the guys lived at home with parents lacking the fortitude to kick their sorry asses onto the street. Butch and I rented the upper floor of a dilapidated house on South Main. Most nights, after work or classes, we cruised the drag from the old railroad station to the turn-around. Sundays, Butch and I drove north out of Indiana, into the darkness on the edge of town, crossing the line into Michigan where the girls were easier, the beer cheaper, and the back roads lonelier.

We were shooting nine-ball at Zimmy’s the first time I saw Lila. The game paid on the three, five, seven, and nine, and we were into two family men for more than they could afford. Between racks, the younger of our two opponents, a skinny, nervous dude with greasy black hair, retreated to the bathroom to snort the balance of his paycheck up his nose. The older guy—I guessed him for early forties—smoked cigarettes and checked out a gaggle of hard-edged women congregating around the fireplace.

Everyone turned to look, even the old farts and floozies tilting against the bar, when the three girls flounced into the place. None of them was knock-out pretty, but they were young, curvy, and mostly unblemished. They wore five-inch heels, tight jeans, and sweaters that bunched around their breasts. Lila’s long blonde hair, blue eyes, and tough-girl stance caused her to stand out from her two homelier friends.

The bartender, an overweight ex-cop who went by the name of Hammer, checked their IDs and served up beers. When she leaned in for a sip, Lila’s thong crept above her waistband, revealing a garish tattoo that ranged from one shapely hip to the other. There was something vulnerable and tainted about her, underscored by that tattoo. I wanted to lick it, like a dog licking a wound.

“Fresh meat,” the older guy said with a wink, and even in a joint like Zimmy’s it sounded crude, the kind of comment that sucked the soul out of every person there.

“Your shot, man,” Butch told him in a monotone. Tall and rangy with a scraggly beard and long hair peeking out from under his Cubs’ baseball cap, Butch had no patience for banter while playing pool. He drank Wild Turkey, changed his own oil, and fought without fear.

“You like that?” the younger guy asked.

He’d caught me looking and read my mind. I felt like he’d stolen something precious from me. “I can take it or leave it.”

He thrust his hand into his jeans’ pocket, leaving his wedding ring behind. “Yeah, me too.”

I wanted to wipe that leer off of his face as much as I wanted to shut his partner up.

“Will you fucking shoot?” Butch said.

The older guy gave a “whatever” shrug, lined up his shot, and missed, leaving Butch with a duck on the two. After tapping it into the side pocket, he dropped the three, four, and five. Then, snookered by his own hand, he tucked the cue ball against the rail at the far end of the table from the seven, the six having fallen on the break. The younger guy couldn’t even see the seven much less make it. After he missed, I ran out the table, putting us up three hundred dollars for the night.

The family men paid, then asked to play again. I explained that since they were broke and we didn’t shoot for pleasure our brief encounter had run its course. The older guy protested, saying they could be trusted for it. Butch reset his baseball cap on his head and said he wouldn’t trust him to shovel shit with Chinamen. The two glared at each other until I tossed a ten on the table as a peace offering. The younger guy swept it up, took his partner by the elbow, and steered him to the bar. Butch and I found a spot on the opposite side of the fireplace from the hard women, ordered drinks, and waited for the next suckers to show. The family men sidled up next to Lila and her girls, buying them a round with my ten.

I guessed her to be eighteen to twenty. She probably lived at home and waitressed at a restaurant on the lake. Or maybe she was a college girl, slumming with friends who hadn’t been lucky enough to escape these parts. Maybe she had a boyfriend who treated her like an angel, or was a backwoods farm girl who’d never even been felt up in the back seat of a car. When the door opened and a cold north wind blew in, Lila’s nipples strained against the fabric of her sweater. The younger guy’s hand slid down her back and over her buttocks. She squirmed away, but he was back at her a few minutes later. I caught her eye and nodded. She returned my nod before looking away.

While the older guy chatted up Lila’s friends, Butch saluted them from across the bar.  He stuck cigarettes up his nose and into his ears. The girls giggled, watching his act over the older guy’s shoulder. Butch balanced a spoon on the end of his nose. The girls giggled again, and the older guy turned to see what was so funny. Butch scratched between his eyes with an index finger, surreptitiously flipping the guy off, and causing the girls to giggle even more.

The younger guy tried to work a knee between Lila’s legs. He whispered into her ear and rubbed his chest against hers. He brushed her hair aside and stuck his tongue in her ear. She wriggled away only to have him do it again. After a while, I’d seen all I could take. I finished my beer, crossed the room, and pushed my way between them.

“What the fuck?” he said.

“C’mon, man, she doesn’t want your hands all over her.”

He took a step back, grinned, and said I should mind my own damn business.

“Why don’t we ask her?”

Lila stared at the floor. “I guess I rather not be pawed,” she said, her voice barely audible against the backdrop of music, chatter, and laughter.

Humiliated for a second time that night, the younger guy’s face burned. He was pissed and high, a volatile combination, and it wasn’t hard to see what was coming next. Not believing in fair fights, if I could avoid them, I surprised him with a short, quick jab to the heart. He doubled over, and I hit him again, this time across the back of his neck. He dropped to his knees, clutching at my thighs. I tore loose and kicked him in his bony ribs. When the older guy started for me, Butch laid a pool cue upside his ear, opening a long, deep slash along his cheek. He sagged like an old barn.

I grabbed Lila by the hand and headed for the door about the time Hammer cleared the bar. Butch held the fat man off with his cue stick and ushered the other two girls out behind Lila and me. We made a run for it across the parking lot. Butch dropped his Mustang into gear, popped the clutch, and roared into the night, snow drifts as high as the car’s roof on both sides of the road. Lila’s friends snuggled together in the passenger’s seat up front, squealing. Lila sat next to me on the bench in the back.

“Are you totally crazy?” she asked.

I sank into the naugahyde. “We’re not crazy. We’re bad asses.”

She looked me over. Michigan moonlight streamed in through the rear window, revealing a sickle-shaped scar at the corner of her mouth. “You’re not such a bad ass,” she said.

***

I might not have been the bad ass I thought I was, but she was no waitress, college student, or farmer’s daughter. She lived in a run-down mobile home on a cul de sac at the end of a gravel lane with her father and two older brothers, Larry and Dwight. They were rarely around, working days as tree trimmers, yard men, and house painters, and fishing and hunting on weekends. They grew marijuana, dried it in a shed behind the trailer, and used a machine to roll tight, little bogies, which they sold to other locals lacking the industriousness to raise and roll their own. Lila washed their clothes, cooked their meals, and picked up after them, the wife and mother having long since fled the scene. I couldn’t blame her. I’d seen the old man, gnarly as an aged tree, teeth missing up front, and a broken nose. He came to the door instead of Lila once, hitching his overhauls over bare shoulders as he strode across the darkened room and asking what he could do me for. I told him I was lost and needed directions.

Early on, she confessed to being a high school drop-out, closer in age to sixteen than eighteen. So far as I could tell, there was no facile intelligence lurking behind those pale blue eyes, no clever conversation waiting to bubble forth from that soft, willing mouth. She preferred soap operas to sitcoms, and the only books she read were trashy romance novels with busty babes on the cover. In a t-shirt and jeans, hair pulled back, and lacking make-up, she was plainer than she’d appeared that night at Zimmy’s. She lived on ice cream, candy, and root beer, making her soft around the middle and prone to tooth decay. It wasn’t hard to imagine what middle-age held for her.

We didn’t date in the regular sense of the word, but as winter turned to spring and spring to summer I spent more and more time at Lila’s. I’d blow off classes or call in sick at work. I’d show up in the middle of the morning or early afternoon, when her old man and brothers were out.

We both knew what I was looking for.

She wasn’t double-jointed or kinky, wasn’t a moaner or screamer; but she was capable, even skilled in the ordinary maneuvers of sex. She never asked to be taken out, didn’t expect to have money lavished on her, and wasn’t interested in the least in how I spent my time away from her. Not once did she ask, “Randy, where do you see this going?”

Part of me knew I was taking advantage. Another part of me was like a crack addict who denies his addiction each time he torches a rock. Besides, she was as grateful for the attention as a puppy having its belly scratched. For three months, I kept Lila secret from Butch and my other so-called friends, much as another man might have secreted an online affair from his wife.

Then, one evening in August, I came home from class to find Lila sitting on our front porch stoop. She wore a cheap cotton dress, the five-inch heels I’d seen her in that first night at Zimmy’s, and too much make-up. Across her shoulder was a bling-encrusted purse, and sitting next to her was a leather suitcase that looked like it had been stowed in someone’s attic since 1950.

***

“She cannot stay,” Butch said.

Lila remained on the stoop while we talked it through. I argued for one night, seeing it as a reasonable accommodation to an awkward situation.

Butch remained adamant. “No way in hell,” were his exact words.

I asked what she’d told him.

“You know what she told me.” His voice was laced with disgust, maybe even contempt, arising, no doubt, from the self-knowledge that while he’d never have fallen into this particular mess, he could just as easily have found trouble in another realm. We both knew he preferred fighting to fucking.

“It just sort of happened,” I said in my defense.

There was no moving him. “Make it unhappen. She’s jailbait, and I’m not going to jail over this.”

I fetched two beers from our aging Frigidaire and went out to the stoop. Cars cruised by with shirtless guys hanging out the windows. The drivers played their music too loudly and called out to pedestrians in the crosswalk. The neighborhood had been taken over by Hispanics, and the air smelled like burning oil and tacos. There was a Wash N’ Dry on the corner next to a redneck bar. Blood stained the sidewalk out front.

“How’d you find me?” I asked.

“Copied your address off your driver’s license when you were in the bathroom. I walked out to the county road and caught a ride from a farmer.”

Maybe she had more on the ball than I’d thought. “So, why did you run away?”

She set her jaw. “I don’t like how they treat me. I do and do and do and nothing’s ever enough. They didn’t appreciate Momma, and now they don’t appreciate me.”

This had been building over the summer, a crescendo of complaints I’d chosen to ignore.

“You need to work this out with your dad.”

“No. I need a place to stay until I find a job.”

“Well, you can’t stay here. You’re underage.”

“You weren’t worried about that when you were humping me.”

I stared at the cement between my knees. I watched a cockroach crawl in front of us before stomping out its life. “I can’t, Lila. Butch won’t allow it, and this is his place as much as mine.”

She took a tone she’d never used before. “And I can’t go back. I’ll never have a life if I don’t get out of there. I want to earn my GED, maybe become a beautician.”

I conceded that the world could never have enough beauticians.

“And, you know what? I want to travel. I’d like to go to France or Italy or even Belgium.”

“Belgium?”

“Well, why not? You think I never heard of Belgium?”

Her tone made me squirm. In all the hours we’d spent together, there had been no reason to acknowledge that Lila might have dreams beyond that mobile home on the cul de sac. But now her future lay before us like a holiday dinner, fragrant with hope and expectation.

“There’s nothing wrong with Belgium,” was all I could think of to say.

“I mean, what do you want to do, Randy? Stay here, shoot pool with your buddies, and slip around with teen-aged girls for the rest of your life?”

I turned to look into a face I no longer recognized; no more the face of some empty-headed slut picked up in a bar, but the earnest face of a girl trying to become a woman. “Don’t worry about me, I have a plan.”

She finished her beer. “I thought there was more to you than this.”

I slapped my thighs and stood, unable to remain sitting. I offered her fifty dollars, the remainder of my winnings from the week before.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” she asked. “That won’t last a week, if I have to rent a room and buy my own food.”

“Take it. It’s all I have.”

“Well, it’s not enough.”

“So, what do you want me to do?”

She placed her elbows on her knees and cupped her chin in her hand. “My daddy keeps cash in a coffee can. It’s what he makes selling dope. I didn’t take it before, because I knew he’d come after me if I did. But, now, I got no choice. You have to drive me out there, so I can steal that money.”

“Tonight?”

“Damn straight tonight. We need to get this done, so I can get on with my life.”

“What about your dad and your brothers?”

"They’ll be out froggin’ until daylight.”

“Maybe they will and maybe they won’t.”

She shrugged. “What difference does it make? If they’re around, you can beat ‘em up. You’re a bad ass aren’t you?”

There were plenty of things I could have said or done, but at the time my options seemed few. I gathered up our beer bottles and headed inside. “Give me a minute,” I told Lila.

I laid it out to Butch and asked to borrow his car, his Mustang being more reliable and faster than my used Volkswagen. I told him I’d be back as soon as I could, in and out, clean with the money, in no time at all.

“They’re out all night?” he asked from under the brim of his baseball cap.

“That’s what she says.”

He considered it—the situation rife with conflict and possibility. “Maybe, I better come along. You know, watch your back.”

I wasn’t about to refuse his company.

The deal we cut with Lila was that she’d never show her face again.

Butch slipped his trusted leather billy club through a belt loop on his jeans and I tucked a tire iron under the driver’s seat.

Just in case.

***

We parked on the shoulder of the county road and walked the distance from Butch’s Mustang to the mobile home. Illuminated by a bright half moon, the woods on both sides of the gravel pulsed with the steamy growth of vegetation, the scream of cicadas, and the occasional rustle of a raccoon. No one spoke; there was nothing to say. We were bad characters on a mission to steal from even worse characters. I carried the tire iron. Butch’s billy slapped against his thigh. When we closed in on Lila’s mobile home we kept to the shadows. A pick-up truck and an aging Jeep sat out front, but no lights shined from within the trailer. We squatted in the underbrush and watched and listened.

“They must be in Larry’s car,” Lila whispered. “They go to the marsh on the other side of Zimmy’s.”

“You’re sure no one’s home?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure.”

She drew a breath and fished inside her purse for a set of keys. “I’ll be right back.”

We watched her teeter across the yard in her heels, hips rolling beneath the cotton dress. She took one final look around before inserting the key, turning the lock, and disappearing inside. Long seconds passed, then we heard a scream and a crash. A moment later, Lila burst from the door, clutching a coffee can. She kicked off her heels and made a dash for the woods, breasts heaving, purse flapping, just out of reach of her old man who, dressed only in boxers and a wife-beater, followed hot on her tail.

Butch and I strode out of our hiding place. We didn’t get far before the brothers emerged from behind a woodpile. Like the old man, they were thick and squat with arms like baseball bats. They rushed in low, looking to wrestle us to the ground and do their damage there. I side-stepped Larry and kicked him on the rump as he drove past. The extra momentum sent him sprawling face-first into the grill work of the pick-up truck. As I advanced to take advantage of the moment, I saw Butch on my periphery. He had Dwight in a headlock and was hammering away.

I didn’t expect Larry to recover as quickly as he did. He was on his feet again by the time I arrived, blood streaming from his forehead and a stupid grin on his ruined mouth. I feinted with my left and punched with my right. I caught him on the ear, but felt a sick burn across my chest. I stepped away, blood seeping from the slash and through my shirt. Larry circled low, a straight-edged razor sizzling between us. I cursed myself for leaving the tire iron in our hiding place. I fought back panic and nausea and waited for him to lunge. When he did, I popped him again, but paid the price with another burn, this one to my left cheek. I slapped at it, and took a solid right cross between my eyes. I fell backward, vaguely aware that Larry was moving away.

I inhaled dirt and decomposing garbage, dog shit from another era. Across the yard, I saw Dwight break free of Butch’s headlock and bury a frog gig in his forearm. Butch bellowed and reached for his billy. Larry arrived and slashed with his razor, Dazed from Dwight’s wound, Butch swatted only air.

I felt heavy. Time slowed and it was difficult to focus. I regained my hands and knees and began to crawl. Behind me, I heard the sound of flesh on flesh; the brothers had Butch pinned against the pick-up, pummeling at will.

I felt around by instinct until I located the tire iron. I managed to stand, knees wobbly, vision blurred. I took a breath, roared, and ran, swinging the tire iron like a war axe. The brothers turned. I brought my weapon down across the bridge of Larry’s nose. He fell in place. Before I could strike Dwight, Butch and his billy connected with a head-snapping shot to the chin. Caught in the heat of the moment, Butch probably would have him finished him off had a shotgun blast not rocked the night.

Lila had managed to escape, leaving the old man free. He stood in front of the trailer, a smoking double barrel resting on his shoulder. Butch and I darted for the thicket. We crashed and thrashed about until another blast scared us to the ground.

We lay in darkness, behind a fallen tree, not twenty yards away from the old man and the brothers. We watched the old man make his way to Dwight, who’d managed to regain his feet. Blood drained, thick and black as motor oil, from the cut on his chin. The old man stripped off his wife-beater and wound it tight around Dwight’s head and chin. Together the two of them went to check on Larry. He still lay motionless where he’d fallen, and it occurred to me that I might have killed him. They wiped his face with Dwight’s shirt and sat him up.

Larry held his head in his hands and mumbled a few words, dazed and likely concussed, but alive. I would not spend the rest of my life, clinching my cheeks in a Michigan prison. While Dwight comforted his brother, the old man stalked over the thicket’s edge where Butch and I had disappeared.

“I know you sonsabitches are out there,” he said. “I can see you. C’mon out and I won’t shoot.”

We didn’t flinch.

The old man walked back to where the brothers clung to one another. The three conferred before the old man returned. “All right, you chickenshits. Have it your way.”

The old man and brothers conferred again. Dwight went inside the trailer and returned with two large pipe wrenches. He handed one to Larry and the three of them set off up the road.

“My car,” Butch whispered. “Not my goddamned car.”

***

We took a moment to check our wounds. My razor cuts oozed blood, but the muscle beneath the skin remained intact. Butch was worse. He removed the frog gig with a groan; his forearm showed four puncture wounds down to the bone. We tied his arm off with my belt and eased our way through the thorns and brambles. Lila was nowhere in sight, and I couldn’t risk calling out to her. Halfway to where we’d parked the Mustang we heard the sound of glass breaking and metal clanking on metal. By the time we’d crept to where we could see, the windshield and the lights were out. Ugly dents showed on the hood and fenders.

Butch seethed beside me, but there was nothing to be done, not with the old man holding that shotgun. After a while, the brothers gave out. Larry dropped his pipe wrench, bent double, and threw up. When he finished, he was too weak to stand. The old man paced the tree line not far from where we hunkered, our hearts thundering, our breath rasping.

“I know you’re in there. I’ll get you yet,” the old man hollered. “You hear me Lila, you little whore, I’ll have you and them boys before this is over.”

Dwight called out to his father. Larry had toppled over. The old man came and squatted next to him. He placed a hand on Larry’s shoulder before sending Dwight down the road. I heard him say, “stitches, emergency room.” By the time Dwight returned in the Jeep, Larry was on his feet again. Dwight helped him into the back seat while the old man made a final appeal for Lila to come forward. After it became clear she wasn’t showing, they drove off, leaving us to the moonlight, the cicadas, and the raccoons.

No one moved for ten minutes.

Then Lila called my name. We walked out to the car, glass and gravel crunching beneath our feet. “Someone’s going to pay for this,” Butch said. “Someone’s dying over this.”

Lila stepped out of the woods on the other side of the road. Her dress was torn, her five-inch heels lost, her face scratched from the thicket. She let out a cackle and waved her wad of stolen cash high.

“Damn,” she said. “Maybe you are a bad ass.”

“Keep your voice down,” I told her.

Butch opened a car door and brushed glass off the seat. He slid inside, started the engine, and then stepped out for a full inspection. “Dumb shits didn’t slash the tires,” he said. “That’s the first thing I would’ve done.”

Lila took my hand and stepped in close. She crushed her breasts against my chest, her breath hot in my ear. “Let’s go somewhere and fuck.”

I pulled away. “I don’t think so.”

“C’mon, I got this money now. We can party it up. My friends live just down the road. They’ll take care of Butch.”

“Get in the car,” he said. “We’re dropping you at the first hotel.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Don’t be that way. Let’s have some fun.”

“You better drive,” Butch said. “My arm’s getting stiff.”

“Get in and shut up,” I told Lila, “or I’m leaving you here.”

Butch and I settled into the front seat, Lila in the back. With the lights out, all I had was the moon. I found first gear and crept forward. There was just enough light to make it back to Indiana.

A lawyer by background, Gary V. Powell currently spends most of his time writing and wrangling an 11-year old son. His stories have appeared at Pithead Chapel, Prime Number, Fiction Southeast, Carvezine, and other online and print publications. In addition, several of his stories have placed or been selected as finalists in national contests. Most recently, his story  "Super Nova" received an Honorable Mention in the Press 53 2012 Awards. His first novel, "Lucky Bastard," is currently available through Main Street Rag Press.

 

Next Big Thing Self-Interview

In case some of you don't know me well, I'm going to break my own rule and post something personal,  a short bio and a self-interview which came to my attention from Charles Dodd White and the 'Next Big Thing'. I'm too shy to tag anyone back, though.

Rusty Barnes grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in over a hundred fifty journals and anthologies. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a literary journal which has been featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio. Sunnyoutside Press published a collection of his flash fiction, Breaking it Down, in November 2007, and a collection of traditional short fiction, Mostly Redneck, in 2011. In late 2013, Sunnyoutside will publish his novel, The Reckoning.

What is your working title of your book?

Right now it’s called ‘The Reckoning,’ but it had three or four really bad titles before that: Triplet, Three of a Kind, Youth and Young Manhood (thanks Kings of Leon!) Richard Novel (I was really struggling for a title when I first conceived this book).

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I remember from my childhood several near-crimes and crimes involving people I knew well and I never found a way to come to terms with the person I thought they were and the person they turned out to be. If you sit on a bus with someone and have watergun fights you don’t expect 20 years later to read about their involvement in killing state troopers or running multiple meth labs. This book tries to deal with those realizations in completely different circumstances from the real life events.

What genre does your book fall under?

It’s a mix of literary fiction and crime fiction, I guess. I intended to write a literary thriller, and tried to tread both genres in doing so. So I succeeded, I guess. More word on that when the book has actual readers, sometime in mid-2013.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Wow. I don’t know. John Hawkes would play a great Lyle Thompson. Hawkes was great in Deadwood and then even better in Winter’s Bone as Uncle Teardrop. You just knew that guy could whup some ass. Maybe Guy Pearce for Richard’s dad. For Misty, you need a washed-out blonde that can play trashy—pick your poison. Lindsey Lohan? All the rest of the cast are kids, and I don’t know any kid actors, sorry to say.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Richard and his good friends Katie and Dex find an unconscious woman nude in the creek; they try to help her and get into a mess of trouble.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The Reckoning will be published in mid-2013 by sunnyoutside press.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The first draft was written in three months during my wife’s last pregnancy. With a young child and two others, not to mention the paralysis I felt having completed a novel, which is something I thought I’d never do, it took a lot of time: two years off and on to get various things right and to rewrite some stuff so as to avoid lawsuits.  I wrote a lot of poems in that downtime, though, so it wasn't a total wash. Then I tried unsuccessfully to get an agent. I’ll never do that again, if I can help it.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Maybe Matthew Jones’s A Single Shot?

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My childhood. I never found a naked chick in the woods, but I could have.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Sex, violence, a youngish boy dealing with it all pretty badly.

Big City Surprise, poem by Misty Skaggs

I saw a red-tailed hawk,

with his red tail flashing

sunlight

lift up off the side

of the highway,

that storms a concrete path

parallel to Louisville,

along the river bank.

He shouldn’t have been there.

A big, bronze bird

like the one who lives

along the weedy, gravel trail

to the home cemetery.

He shouldn’t have been there,

beautifully out of place,

hunched up in shadow,

picking at fat, rat roadkill,

under an overpass.

 

Misty Skaggs, 30, is a hillbilly blogger, an independent scholar, a barefoot poet and a lifelong resident of Eastern Kentucky. Her poetry and prose have appeared in literary journals such as Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, New Madrid, and Limestone. Currently, Skaggs is hocking her self-published collection of gritty, narrative style poems which offers a dark and intimate look at prescription drug abuse in Appalachia.

Last Will and Testament, by Murray Dunlap

You don’t know this, but I did everything in my power to convince my father to change his cockamamie will.  I’m a lawyer for christ’s sake.

It’s hardly a reasonable document.  Most of us will end up with nothing.  Nothing!  After all those weekends in a drafty cabin in godforsaken Barlo, supposedly hunting.  Of all the cover stories, hunting!  Eleanor made it all sound fairly legitimate, but Bennett only hunted when he worked himself into an angry drunk.  And at that point it wasn’t hunting.  It was killing.  Daddy would drink all day and then something insignificant, a dropped glass or broken ashtray, would send him into a rage.  He’d grab his rifle and ride the four-wheeler down the swamp road with a high beam spotlight.  He’d see a pair of eyes and fire that damn cannon of a rifle.  What was it? A seven millimeter Mauser.  A cannon is what it was.  I have tinnitus just from standing next to him.  Sometimes he actually killed a buck, but most times not.  Fawns, doe, wild boar, coyote; Bennett didn’t care.  The game warden was on the dole so he didn’t care either.  They’d call up some poor black guy from the squatter’s camp and have him drag the kill –whatever it happened to be– back to the cabin, skin it out, and butcher the meat.  They’d pay him off, send him on his way, and then celebrate the successful hunt with a bottle of whiskey.

“Hunting, my ass,” I said.

“I did the best I could with what I had,” Eleanor said. “There wasn’t much.”

I was trying to tell the others about the will, but the mind wanders.

“Get on with it, Wallace.” Ren pumped his fist. “For God’s sake!”

Shane took off his shirt and wrapped it around his head like a sheik’s headdress.  He sat with crossed legs on the pinestraw and placed his hands, palm up, on his knees.  He closed his eyes and took deep, even breaths.  He’s always been some kind of an alternative freak.

“This is church property Shane,” Celia said to her son. “Put your shirt back on.”

“You were a stripper,” Shane said. “Beside, a little mediation might be just the thing for this place.  Walrus here could use it.  Ren too.  Look at his face.”

“This heat is oppressive,” Eleanor said. “I’m going back to New Orleans.  Even Katrina didn’t stir up this much shit.”

“But I put up with it,” I continued.  “I greased the wheels.  I played the role of son.  I bought an olive green goose feather jacket and acted like I gave a damn.  I thought it would all pay off.  I thought Bennett would recognize my loyalty and leave me a fair share of his wealth.  His wealth.  What a joke!  He inherited every penny and spent more than he made.  Which is pretty damn greedy when you think about how much money he had to begin with.  How can you start with twelve and a half million dollars and end up with seven?  How can anyone spend so much, make so little, and then leave everything to chance?”

Ren’s face was as red as a party balloon.  He pumped his fist, leveled his eyes, and growled, “Spit it out, Walrus.”

I gave Ren my look that says don’t you dare call me that but I knew I’d better move on.  Even I was antsy to get this out.

“A game of craps!”  I said.  “That’s his idea of a will.  All seven million dollars will go to the wife or son who throws the best dice.  I think Georgia gets a boat, but other than that, it’s all or nothing.  Winner take all.”

“What about me,” Celia said, her eyes suddenly clear and focused.

“What are craps?” Joy asked.

“You roll like the rest of us,” Wallace said to Celia.

“And what boat? What does Georgia have to do with this?” Celia asked.

“Craps!” Shane shouted. “Excellent.”

“I could kill him,” Ren said, his jaw grinding.

“Too late,” Shane said.

Baxter jogged in place, eyes darting from brother to brother.

“One game?” Ren asked. “One roll of the dice for seven million?  There are two wives, five children, and seven million dollars.  Why not an even split?”

“Is this bathroom humor?”  Joy asked. “I’ve never gone in for bathroom humor.”

“Didn’t even consult me on the legal ease of the document,” I explained. “Went to some other lawyer up in Birmingham.  Some Mr. Bridges so and so.  And it’s bullet proof.  I can’t find any way out of it.  We meet tomorrow at the courthouse at noon.”

“We’ll sue the will,” Celia said. “Can you sue a will?  Did you say five children?”

“It’s perfect,” Shane said. “It’s the treasury of desire.”

“I think you’re behind this, Walrus,” Ren said. “I bet this is your doing.  I’m bringing my own dice.”

I gave him my look again, but what more can you do at your father’s funeral?

“Good idea,” Shane said.  “If we all bring loaded dice, we’ll all win.”

“Shut it, Buddha boy,” Ren shouted.  “This is serious.”

“Georgia is his daughter?” Celia asked.  She opened her purse and took out a medicine bottle, tapping out two tablets and swallowing them without water.

“This is all too much,” Eleanor said.  “Call me when you come to town, Wallace.”

“Mr. Bridges will have the table and dice at the courthouse.  Bennett made the arrangements.  We could contest it, but we’d all have to agree.  And if we did, it could take forever.  Plus, the judges in this town might not budge.  They think shenanigans like this are hysterical.  Alabama.  What in God’s name am I doing here?  I should be over in New Orleans playing the real game.  I should use my considerable intellect for something other than these small town, southern shenanigan.”

My brothers shouted and paced.  Celia whined.  Joy mumbled.

Then Baxter suddenly stopped running in place.  He carefully slipped off his shoes and unbuckled his belt.  Then he unzipped.

We all stopped what we were doing.

Baxter removed his pants.  Underneath, he wore nylon running shorts.  He put his running shoes back on, took off his button down shirt, and removed his undershirt.  He stood before us bare-chested, zero-percent body fat, shaved head, and eyes full of tears.

“Honey,” Celia said. “Are you okay?”

Baxter wiped his eyes and very calmly began to run.

The Porter family, if you can call it that, stood in silence as Baxter ran down the Church driveway, past the fence, and onto the main road.  I decided at that moment that if I won the dice game I’d leave Alabama forever.  Even if I didn’t win, I had big plans brewing in New Orleans.

“Let him go.” Shane said. “Running is his meditation.”

We watched in silence until he was entirely out of sight.

Then we started fighting again.

Murray Dunlap's work has appeared in about forty magazines and journals. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, as well as to Best New American Voices once, and his first book, "Alabama," was a finalist for the Maurice Prize in Fiction. He has a new book, a collection of short stories called "Bastard Blue," that was published by Press 53 on June 7th, 2011 (the three year anniversary of a car wreck that very nearly killed him…). The extraordinary individuals Pam Houston, Laura Dave, Michael Knight, and Fred Ashe taught him the art of writing.

Dead Head, fiction by J.L. Smith

Tonight of all nights Dottie had to go and develop a mind of her own.  Gears ground when he shifted.  Brakes squealed — air hissed from a hydraulic system that needed an overhaul.  Shocks worn so thin he felt every bump on the four lane highway.  Too bad, because it was a beautiful night to drive, roads clear — only a few cars here and there and the occasional rig passing on his left.  The kind of night he wished he could flip to autopilot and let her drive the rest of the way.  But he was a long way from that, technology-wise.  And the way she was acting, he'd need to stay awake to watch her.  Watch both of them, actually, because Dale was standing in the seat now, pressing her face to the window and streaking the glass he'd wiped down that morning.

"I told you to sit down," he said.

"I saw a sign for McDonald's," she said scooting back on the cracked vinyl.

"Couple miles yet," he said.  "You've got to stay in your seat until we stop."

She crossed her ankles, legs sticking straight out because she was too small for her knees to even bend over the edge.  "I love my new boots," she said.  They were silver.  They had been the bait to get her into the truck.

Walt shifted down, winced as gears hacked like rusty saws through steel.  Dottie lurched up the exit ramp belching smoke and grumbling.  He made a wide turn at the golden arches, frowning.  Air hissed from leaking hydrolics.

"Mommy said I couldn't have them."

"That's what your daddy's for," he said.  "To give you what your mother won't."

"Mommy doesn't eat McDonald's anymore, either.  She says it's bad for me.  I think she doesn't like it because it's fattening and she's worried about her thighs."

Walt laughed.  "She's been worried about those for a long time."

He took a twenty from the envelope beneath the seat and counted the cash left.  "Don't move," he said.  Knees stiff and back sore he climbed out of the driver's seat and pushed the door closed.  Faded black letters on the once vibrant green fender, Cora's cursive handwriting: Dottie.  The paint was dull now, pocked with the dirt of two hundred thousand miles that had worn at the metal like a river carves out a canyon.  Living heat rose off the pavement and out of the radiator, undulating the air.  He tugged at the passenger door which had a recent habit of sticking.  When he got it open Dale leapt into his arms.

"Oof," he said, catching her.

"Last time I was at McDonald's was for Sarah's birthday," she said.  "Ronald was there, and I got to eat anything I wanted.  Ice cream and apple pie."  She giggled.  "Two desserts.  Can I have ice cream?"

"Sure you can, Pumpkin."  He set her down and took her hand.  She looked both ways for traffic then led him into the bright restaurant.  Dale's boots clicked against the red tiled floor.  She ordered a Happy Meal for the prize and a Quarter Pounder with cheese, a large Coke and an ice cream sundae.  He wasn't sure how she'd get through all that before the ice cream melted.  "Just coffee," Walt said, handing over a twenty.

They sat at a booth across from each other.  Dale dug into the ice cream with a spoon, offered some to Walt but he shook his head, smiled while she managed to spread the syrupy white cream all over her mouth.  When she started on the hamburger he excused himself, went to the bathroom and washed the grime from his weathered face, brushed out his mustache and beard with long, thick fingernails, and wiped his arms and neck with a damp, rough paper towel.  His brown eyes were sallow, sunken.  He had rough cheeks, a fading hairline, spotted brown scalp and ears grown long like his father's.  Fifty-four years stared back at him, more than half that spent behind the wheel.  Arms locked against the porcelain he listened to the water's cascading echo and counted four calls of "Daddy," before going back to the dining room.

A little boy about his daughter's age stood with his mother next to the playground.  The woman watched Walt approach with eyes ex-wife beady.  Dale, shrieking, lumbered through a bin of colored plastic balls which she tossed into the air.  Her hamburger lay half eaten on the table, the Happy Meal untouched.

"Is that your daughter?" the woman asked.  She had a long, thin face and a mouth that formed neither a frown nor a smile.  She was decidedly unattractive.  "She kicked my son off the playground.  She needs to learn how to share."

"Sorry," Walt said.  He hadn't wanted to bring any attention to them.  How would it look, truck driver out here in the middle of the night with his kid?  "Dale," he barked.  "Come here."  Dale crawled out of the bin.  "She's just a kid," he said to the woman.  "Gets carried away sometimes."  He winked: she was a mother, she must know about rambunctious children.  Dale, arms boneless, shuffled to her father's side, her head down, a whimpering child dreading punishment.  "Apologize to the boy," Walt said.

Dale studied her boots, voice barely above a whisper.  "I'm sorry."

"That's my girl."  He patted her on the shoulder, demonstrating pride.  The woman nodded curtly, put her arm on her boy's shoulder and walked away.  Walt gathered the uneaten food and took his daughter's hand.  They said nothing to each other on the way to the truck.  He opened her door for her.  "Hop on up," he said.  She obeyed, sat quietly while he came around to the driver's side and struggled up the step and fell in behind the wheel.  "What was that about?"  He put the bags of food in the small refrigerator behind the passenger seat, placed where he could get to it while he was driving.

She shook her head.

He turned the ignition key.  Dottie rumbled, engine whirred but wouldn't start.  He pulled back and counted ten then turned it again.  She kicked once and he pressed lightly on the gas and she cut out.  He counted ten and tried again.  She turned over.  He put on a little gas, pulled out the choke.  Dottie rumbled but kept firing, cab shivering over the rumbling engine.  He patted the dashboard.  "That's my girl," he said.  He settled himself in, shifted.  Dale stared quietly out the window as he maneuvered the truck back on to the highway.  After five minutes of silence he said, "You have to learn to share.  It's an important part of life, sharing.  We give and we get.  We don't get to keep.  Or at least, not all for ourselves."  He gunned the engine as he shifted to emphasize his point, hoped she wouldn't notice his hypocrisy.

"I was there first," she said.

"I don't want to hear it.  You were wrong to kick that boy out."

"Yes, daddy."

Trees and dark fields flowed past.  Mile marking reflectors blinked like the eyes of animals lurking on the edge of night waiting to pounce, devour the truck if it stopped again, too soon or too late.  Dottie fought his efforts to shift gears, her aging engine demanding rest, restoration.  He didn't have time to stop, not now.  McDonald's had cost him another forty minutes and he was already two hours behind schedule.  As though tormenting him, the GPS he had installed last week beeped to tell him he was off course.  He'd have to drive all night, that was all there was to it.  He had hoped to stop at a motel, let Dale sleep in a real bed, but there was no time for it now.  He reached for his CB microphone but changed his mind.  He had turned it off hours ago to cut the chatter, spend some time with his kid.  That was the whole point here, to spend time with Dale.  Father and daughter on the open road together.  Eventually Cora would find his channel and start calling, but he'd worry about that then.

"How about a song?" he said.

She continued to stare out the window.  She was only six but already she had developed her mother's stiff resolve.

"Come on," he said.  "You pick it."

She turned, her mother's eyes wide.  She pulled loose strands of blonde hair out of her face.  She seemed about to jump out of her seat.  "You mean it?"

"Sure, sure, of course.  Keep me awake."

She smiled.

"That's my girl.  You shouldn't hide that pretty smile of yours."

She started singing, something he didn't know, which wasn't any big surprise.  He tried to hum along once he got the tune in his head, tapped fingers against the steering wheel.  Her voice cracked but she sang with all her heart, closing her eyes and clutching her hands to her chest, being theatrical about the whole thing, extending her arms as though the road before them and the blinking reflective roadside makers were the eyes of an audience cheering her on.

Dottie coughed and sputtered and choked.  Walt pulled her out of gear and flipped on the dashboard lights.  The engine temperature was rising.  He let the truck coast while he turned on the heater, reached under the dash to open the vents.  Hot air blew over his feet and quickly filled the cabin.  He cranked open his window to let out some of the air.  "Roll yours down, too," he said, but the passenger window, like the door, hadn't been opened in years.  She couldn't get it open.  The smart thing would be to stop, but he had too much distance to make up before morning.  He kept his speed at just under 55 and for five long miles watched the thermostat while Dale sang quietly to herself.  Sweat dribbled under his arms, tickled his back.  The temperature remained steady just below the red line and then slowly eased backwards.  Not all the way, but back to a more manageable temperature.

Dale pulled off her boots.  "I'm tired," she said.  It was almost two.  "I wish I was in bed."

He threw a thumb at the sleeper behind them.  "You can climb in back.  Ain't the Hyatt, but it's comfortable.  I'll wake you when we get there."

"No, my bed," she said, looking back through the curtain at a bare mattress with nothing but a rough red blanket wadded up on it and a pillow he'd taken from the house before he left.  It had been Cora's and it still smelled like her.  He never thought his daughter would eventually rest her head on it.  "I miss Princess," Dale said.  "She sleeps with me.  She'll be lonely."

"Your mother will take good care of her."

She shook her head.  "Mommy sneezes," she said.  "She's acerbic."

He laughed.

"It's not funny.  Princess has to sleep alone when I'm not there."

"She'll be fine for a few nights."

Dale looked back through the curtain then climbed through.  Walt watched her through the mirror explore the living quarters–if it could be called that.  There wasn't much back there, just a bed and a little refrigerator and a drawer for clothes, though he didn't keep clothes in it.  "Don't open that," he said, afraid she'd find both the gun and his collection of Playboys.  He kept his tools in a box behind the cab, on the trailer hitch.  She laid down on her side facing him, curled into a ball and pulled the blanket up to her shoulder.  They looked at each other through the mirror.  She smiled.  "Good night, Pumpkin," he said.

"Good night, Daddy."  She yawned and closed her eyes.

Walt flipped off the interior lights and stretched his back to settle into the seat that had long ago learned the pattern of his body.  Stars stretched across the bruised night.  Almost twenty years ago he'd stopped at a rest area off I-90 in South Dakota and had looked up at the stars dotting the sky.  He'd christened the rig then, for the stars that would guide him for the rest of his journeys.  That was before Cora, before Dale, before his world had come together and then fallen apart.  Back when Dottie was young and he was young and staying awake through these long night drives didn't seem too hard.  He yawned.  In back, Dale slept.  The audience had turned back into animals.  He checked Dottie's gauges and drove.  Two hundred miles to go.

***

Cora answered on the first ring.  "Walt?"

"Hi, honey."

"Thank god.  Is Dale all right?"

"We're fine.  She's fine.  Just out on the road."

"Can I talk to her?"

"She's asleep in back."

Cora sobbed.

"You know that gets to me, baby."

"Don't do this, Walt."

"I'm just spending a little time with my little girl."

"Please just bring her home."

"I miss you," he said.

"Don't hurt her."

"That's not fair."  He wiped sweat off his face.  "We're on a little road trip, is all.  Dale's never been out with me, not once.  Never seen how I live, where I live.  She doesn't know who I am."

"You're not allowed unsupervised –"

"Who says I'm not allowed?" he said, pounding his fist into the steering wheel.   "That damned judge?  What right does she have?  Can't see my own daughter without somebody watching us.  Like I'm a bad parent.  I'm not a bad parent."

Cora controlled her sobs.  "I know you're not."

"It's wrong to keep a father from his child," he whispered, not wanting to wake Dale.  "I work three-hundred-sixty days to keep that roof over your head, clothes on that girl's back, food on your table and in my stomach, gas in my tank, oil in my engine, all so I can keep moving, keep driving, stay one step ahead of everybody that wants to take it all away.  I pass through town to spend a few hours with my girl and you won't even take her out of school because you've got to work.  And that punk in the blue tie tells me I don't have the authority –"

"Three years, Walt.  What did you expect?"

"Three years of talk, Cora.  Nothing but talk.  I've talked and paid people to talk and listened to other people talk and even paid people to listen to other people talk and it's done me not one bit of good.  Useless words, Cora.  I'm done with it."  His own hot breath surprised him.

"Let me just talk to her for a minute," she said.

"She's sleeping, I told you that.  Not gonna wake her up now."

"Please, Walt," Cora said.  "Please don't do this."

"I'll call again soon."  He pressed the button to end the call.  He wished he'd told her he still loved her.

***

Dottie coughed as Walt pulled up to the loading dock.  He logged his driving time and mileage, subtracting the side trip to get Dale.  He recorded the McDonald's stop as being two hours to include a mandatory sleep break that he hadn't actually taken.  Dale was still asleep in back, blanket pulled over her head despite the heat.  He left the engine running and climbed down from the cab, approached a young man in blue denim overalls who was attaching a loaded trailer to another rig.

"Morning," he said.

The young man looked up, mouth unhinged.  He had black, crooked teeth and a long neck punctuated by a plum sized Adam's apple.  He glanced over Walt's shoulder at Dottie, wheezing like an ox who'd been run too hard.  "Inside," he said.  "Lou's the dock supervisor."  A stream of tobacco juice shot from his pursed lips and landed, splat, on the ground next to Walt's shoe.  He leaned over and cranked the hitch.

Inside Walt found Lou standing behind a lectern.  He was in his fifties, balding, white hair, glasses perched on the end of a nose that had been broken at least three times, pencil tucked behind his ear.  Walt handed him his manifest and log book.  Lou glanced at his watch.

"You're late."  He studied the paperwork, not meeting Walt's eye.

"Rest stop," Walt said.

Lou tossed the logbook at Walt, unopened, unexamined.  Walt just managed to grab it before it dropped to the floor.  "Rest on your own time."  He tore a slip of paper from a pad and held it out.  "Number three."  He jerked his head to the left.

The third bay was empty.  Walt backed the trailer in until he felt the bump against the dock.  He jumped down and fetched chucks from the tool box behind the cab, blocked off his wheels.  A sign next to the open door read, "No Engine Idling."  Walt shook his head.  She might need a bit to get started again, but he needed to impress these people.  He needed the work.  He climbed back into the cab and shut off the engine.  The trailer door opened.  He checked the back to make sure the bundle of his daughter was still snug beneath the blanket.

From inside the warehouse he watched as the crew unloaded his trailer.  Forklifts rumbled across a metal ramp, carried out pallets of goods.  He had no idea what he was carrying.  These days he didn't care.  A job was a job.  If somebody wanted something hauled, he'd do it, no questions asked.  The inside of the trailer was a mess, walls dirty and dinged, a door that got stuck most of the time.  The tires were balding.  Mud flaps had long since given up flapping anything but their shredded selves.  Eighteen years, six months.  That's how long he'd had that truck and he took good care of her.  Did.  Past year or more had been especially hard, all his friends selling out to the big conglomerates who paid for the upkeep on their trucks, provided health insurance and retirement plans.  Walt had always been a loner, though, liked the job because he was his own boss, picked his routes, picked his loads.  More and more, though, the big companies were undercutting him.  They had modern equipment and tracking capabilities.  It was becoming increasingly hard for him to find work.  It had been ten months since Dottie'd had a good overhaul and she was long overdue.  This job and the return would just about cover oil and filters and new plugs and gaskets and, maybe, a new set of tires.

He again handed his log book to the dock supervisor.  Lou glanced through it and shook his head, breathed in and out.  "'Pears in order," he said.  "Inspectors 'll believe it anyway."  He signed it and handed it back to Walt.

"What's the return?" Walt said.

"Dead head."

"I was supposed to drop in Raleigh."

"You were supposed to leave with it last night," Lou said.  "I gave the run to another driver."

Walt grabbed the lectern.  "But that was my job."

"Outta my hands."

"Son of a bitch.  What am I supposed to do?"

The dock supervisor shrugged.

"Got anything I can take?  I'll go anywhere.  Haul anything."

"Nothing that ain't been assigned."  He wasn't looking at Walt, flipped through the papers on his makeshift desk, scribbled notes.  He stared at Walt's hands gripping the podium.  "Wait around, you want.  Somebody might bail."

Walt looked out over the parking lot.  Rigs were lined up to the street waiting for an open bay.  His chances of getting anything were slim. He could wait around, but what would he do with Dale?  The two of them couldn't just sit in the cab for the next, what, day, maybe more.  They could get a room at a motel for a night.  He could make some calls, find another run.  Working on his own meant he had no office to find work.  It was all up to him, job to job, site to site.

"Shit."  He took his hands off the podium.  "Where do I get my check?"

"Checks are mailed out next week."

"Next week?  I'm supposed to get it when I drop."  Lou continued looking through papers.  "Maybe they left –"

"Nothing."

"Cash then?"

"Look, office opens at ten.  Wait around or come back later and talk to someone upstairs."  He thumbed the warehouse as though the whole building were upstairs.  A phone on the wall next to him rang; he grabbed it before it finished it's first.  "Yeah.  God dammit, I said four.  Yes that's what I said.  Think I don't know my own damned voice.  Yeah, yeah.  On my way."  He slammed the phone down.  "Christ, I gotta do everything around here."  He shoved past Walt and hustled around stacks of boxes on pallets.

Walt climbed back into Dottie and counted the cash left in the envelope.  Dale needed a real bed and a bath.  He couldn't afford a hotel, not now.  He folded the envelope and slid it back in the pouch hidden beneath his seat.  He closed his eyes, leaned back, breathed deep and counted to ten.

"Dale?"  He flipped on the interior lights.  "Time to wake up, Pumpkin."  He crawled behind the red curtain, pulled back the blanket.  She was gone.  He laid the blanket back on the bed and pulled it away again thinking that, like magic, she would reappear.  But the bed was still empty.  He pressed the mattress.  She was gone.  He yelled her name but his voice traveled nowhere in the confines of the cab.  He pulled out the drawer, thought she may have crawled in there, but all he found were his Playboys and his gun.  There was no where else to hide.  He kicked open the door and jumped out, landing stiff-legged, hard.  His right knee popped; he crumbled.  Pain shocked him like ice water.  It was an old injury, a bad tackle in high school.  He lay on the pavement, suppressing a scream, clutching his knee.  His face hot, tears welled.  He began to hyperventilate.  He concentrated on his breath, teeth gritted against the pain that shot up from his leg, stretched over him like plastic wrap, suffocating, mouth dry, sweat dripping into his eyes.  He gasped quick gulps of air that did nothing to stifle the pain, the unbearable pain.  He forced himself to breathe.

Dale.  He swallowed the dryness, opened his burning eyes and breathed, once, deep.  All it took was once and then he could do it again and again and then he pushed himself off the asphalt.  Shaking, muscles as tense as soft wood under a heavy load, he grabbed the open door and pulled, managed to get his left leg under him and steadied himself on it, leaned against Dottie for support.  He took a few more deep breaths then bent over to look under the chassis.  She wasn't there.

His right knee was already swelling, flesh pressing against his jeans.  Veins pulsed with his thumping heart.  He didn't care.  He couldn't.  If he stopped any longer, if he let himself continue to think about, to even look at his knee, he would not be able to go on.  Find Dale, he told himself.  Think on your feet, you're good at that.

"Dale," he called and waited, blood banging a steel drum in his ears.  He hopped along the trailer and leaned against the dock.  "Hey," he called into the warehouse.  "Anybody there?"  The young man with the apple in his throat appeared, eating a sandwich.  "Yeah?"

Sweat stung his eyes.  "Have you seen…a little girl?"  He swallowed, the pain like a bristlecone.  "My daughter.  She was sleeping…inside.  Gone."

He took a thoughtful bite of his sandwich.  His Adam's apple bobbed.  "Nope," he said.  "Don't think so."

"Can you ask?"  With a tensed claw Walt pinched the muscle above his quickly swelling knee.

"You all right?" the kid said.

"Just ask."

Lou emerged from behind a plastic curtain, fat belly lobbing ahead of him, cigarette curling smoke from between two arthritic knuckles.  "What's the problem?"

"Little girl," Walt said.  He struggled with shallow breaths.  "My daughter."

"Yeah?"

"She's gone," he said.

"Kids aren't allowed on the dock or in the warehouse.  Company policy."

"Have you seen her?"

"You could be fined."

"She was asleep in the truck.  I don't know where she went.  She was there when I went in, and she's gone when I come back."

"You left her alone?"  His tone was judgmental, contemptuous.

"She was asleep."

"What'd you leave her alone for?"

"I thought she'd be all right."

"Mm-hmm."  He blew smoke into morning air.  Walt shivered, though it wasn't cold.  "We'll keep our eyes open."

Using the trailer for support he limped to the front of the rig.  The parking lot was huge, more than a mile, probably, in each direction, half again as wide.  Trucks were lined up, rumbling, spewing diesel exhaust, waiting for dock openings.  Drivers stood in groups, talking, but they were too far to hear him calling.  "Dale," he screamed and waited.  He fell against the bumper.  She could be anywhere out there, wandering amid the trucks.  Maybe she thinks one of them is mine and she's already crawled inside, fallen asleep on somebody else's bunk, he thought.  He tried putting weight on his leg but it was too painful to try to walk.  He stood while the dull throbbing pounded from his knee.  Blood rushed in his ears.  An aperture of blackness closed around his vision.  He clenched his jaw and breathed deep once, twice, three times, leaning back against the grill.  Heat rose from the radiator, from his swelling knee, from the cracked black asphalt, from his empty stomach, from his heart like a stone, sinking.  He would have to climb into the cab and turn on the CB, call some of the other drivers out there, get a search party together.  He knew when he turned on the radio he'd hear Cora begging him to come back.  What choice did he have?

"Hey, buddy."  Adam's Apple was on the dock.  He leaned over, hands on his knees.  "Security found her."  He spit a wad of tobacco juice onto the ground.

Holding his breath against the surging pain he pulled himself up onto the dock, lurched past the young man, lumbered through the plastic curtain, past the still smoking dock supervisor quietly judging him, down a hallway to a security guard soothing a wailing voice through a locked door–Dale: scared, sobbing and unwilling to emerge from the bathroom until her mother came for her.

 ***

The sun gave in to a bluebonnet sky.  Darkness settled across the field behind the house.  Not his house anymore, but he still considered it his.  He used to pull up and honk the horn, surprise Cora.  She'd run out across the front lawn in blue jeans and a faded grey sweatshirt, long blonde hair whipping in the wind behind her.  She pulled open the door and climbed up into the cab, wrapped herself around him before he could even get the engine shut off.  That was years ago, when they were still happy.  Or thought they were.

His knee, still swollen, throbbed less; he had hardly moved it in four hours.  Driving all day and into the night, trying not to shift, not to have to press the brake, the pain sheathing his head, blinding, unbearable, and yet it had to be borne.  They had stopped once for gas and coffee, dipped into his cash reserves, no use saving anything now.  Dale had groggily gone into the truck stop with him, opened the door and held the Thermos while he filled it with coffee.  When they got back to the truck she had fallen right back to sleep.

How hard it had been to get her out of the bathroom.  She cried from behind the locked door for thirty minutes, wailing for her mother, her cat, her blanket.  How hard it had been to convince her that he wouldn't leave her again.  How hard it had been to lie.

"Dale," he said, nudging her.  "We're home, Pumpkin."

She opened her eyes.  "Home?"

The door creaked.  "I'll help you down."  His knee was stiff but movable.  He climbed down, careful not to jump, teeth clenched against the throbbing.  Dale rubbed her eyes when he reached up for her.  "Be careful," he said.

"How's your leg, Daddy?"

"Fine," he said.  He took her hand.  They walked across the cool, dew stained grass.  Walt listed to the left to compensate for the knee he couldn't bend.  Dale yawned; it was contagious.  She laughed at him, his gaping mouth a black hole.  Could it absorb all the bad things he had ever said, ever done, would do?

The key lay hidden beneath the flower pot.  "Shh," he cautioned as he turned the lock.  He tried to squat but his knee wouldn't bend so he sat on the cool concrete, leg stretched out.  "You be a good girl now, you hear?"

"Yes, Daddy."

He kissed her on the forehead.

"Are you gonna stay?"

That depends on your mother, he started to say, thought better of it.  I've done enough damage, he thought.  "I don't think so," he said.  "I've got to get this run finished."

She yawned.  "You'll be back soon, though?"

"Of course."  How long before she stopped believing him?

She hugged him.

"Don't wake your mother," he said.

She smiled and winked.  "I won't."

He closed the door behind her and strained to hear her feet patter across the linoleum floor.  All he heard were the crickets.  He locked the door and replaced the key under the flowerpot.  He pulled himself to his feet and stared out across the lawn, at Dottie waiting for him.  She was still empty, a dead head about to chug through another long, lonely day.  Dale was better off without him, better off believing that his rig was full than discovering the truth: that he was hauling nothing more than air.  He was just another trucker hauling a trailer full of empty promises.  He hobbled down from the porch and walked across the cool morning grass.  With each step, as he moved closer and closer to the only home he had, the pain in his knee became worse.  By the time he got to the cab all he could do was stand there and breathe heavily until he mustered the strength to climb up and behind the wheel.

The short fiction of J.L. Smith has appeared in The Cynic Online, Halfway Down the Stairs, Every Day Fiction and eFiction magazine.  He lives with his wife and daughter in the remote northwest corner of New Mexico.  When not writing his novel he can be found pushing his daughter through the desert in a running stroller.

 

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Oxford Town, fiction by William Trent Pancoast

The littlest black girl came breathless from running and stopped by my desk in the laundry office.

You need to come quick. Ricky’s gone crazy.

I saw the alarm and fear in her face and got up and followed her the hundred feet to the bank of commercial washing machines lining the wall of the plant. In front of the bleach barrel Rickey stood unsteadily with the bleach paddle cocked like a ball bat ready to hit the other washman Darrel. It was a hot September day in the laundry where even in winter the temperature would be over 90 degrees.

Ricky had looked a little drunk when he came in but I hadn’t cared. I’d have been drunk at this place too if I could have been. As I neared he kept hitching the paddle back behind his right ear like he was at bat. Darrel had his eyes locked on Ricky’s and I figured he would do a takedown when the swing came. Darrel had been all Ohio in wrestling and at tailback for the Talawanda Braves in Oxford Ohio.

Excuse me I said to the ladies in the circle around the two washmen when I pushed past. There was me and six or seven black girls from the neighborhood down the hill on the north side of town and five hillbilly ladies from the countryside plus a couple of Miami University coed dropouts stuck in Oxford like lint on a piece of laundry.

Give me the paddle I told Ricky. He dropped it several inches right away and I could see in his eyes that he was relieved. He knew Darrel was going to kill him if it came down to it and he handed me the paddle making sure I was between him and Darrel.

I knew that the paddle was a lightweight balsa sort of wood and wasn’t going to hurt a whole lot even if somebody got hit with it. Not like it was oak or ash and heavy enough to bust a head.

Go clock out I told Ricky and he was sobering up now from the adrenalin and backed up a few steps then walked up past the office to the time clock. It was silent till he was gone then the black girls gathered chirping around Darrel. The football coach had told him to put on 15 pounds of muscle and get in top shape along with getting his ass enrolled at Miami University and he would let him walk on next fall for a tryout.

You’re a hero one of them tossed my way. The others cooed assent knowing that if Ricky had swung the paddle they and Darrel would probably have been blamed anyways since black folks in OxfordOhio in 1974 were still used to taking the blame for most everything involving conflict with white folks.

I was half crazy from lack of sleep and the workload I had taken on. I was doing my student teaching all day and managing the commercial laundry on second shift. The college and my sponsor teacher had told me I couldn’t do what I was doing and I’d said okay and went ahead with it anyway. What were they going to do? Throw me out of school because I had to work my way in the world? My days started at six and ended about 12:30.

All I wanted was for these folks to get the fucking laundry done so I could be finished for one more day. I didn’t even have time to drink anymore. I was surrounded in this college town by beer and drugs and pussy and I spent my days with a classroom of eighth graders then tons of bloody hospital laundry from DaytonOhio.

Let’s do the laundry I told everyone. They grumbled as they made their ways slowly to their assigned areas. The first loads of hospital gowns from the dryers had just hit the folding tables and I put half the sorters over there. The big steam roller press we ran the sheets through was running good tonight. All eight of the washers were churning suds except for the cavernous four hundred pound capacity behemoth that Ricky had been pulled from and tossed like a bag of laundry across the concrete floor.

He’d called Darrel a fucking nigger then made the mistake of turning back to his work of stuffing a fifty pound mesh bag into the washer like it was business as usual after the insult. I have no doubt that Darrel had first called him a cracker like I heard later but I didn’t really give a fuck. There was laundry to be done so I could go home and guys calling each other crackers and niggers I didn’t have time for. Somebody somewhere along the line should be responsible for telling all humankind that some motherfucker sooner or later was going to call them a cracker or a nigger or wop or dago or a sonofabitch and that the correct response was to grin and say that’s not nice and walk away. But no. Young men and old men had to beat each other with bleach paddles and other blunt objects when somebody called them a name. Sticks and stones motherfuckers.

They were all back to work and I headed to the office and tomorrow’s lesson plan. We were going to listen to Richard Nixon’s resignation speech from the spring of the year. Classic dipshitese. God help us that a piece of shit like Nixon could have been elected president. There would be a writing reaction to his speech and I was jotting down topics when the littlest black girl was back again breathless.

Rickey’s mom is here.

The littlest black girl was hot and I loved it when she pressed up next to me. When I had first seen her and the others together the first night I saw that she was the littlest one and that’s what she always was in my mind—the littlest black girl. Her real name was Cindy. She wore oversized glasses. I liked her cute little ass and her nice boobs. She pushed close to my desk eyeing my lesson plan. I could feel heat escaping from the neck of her white blouse and smell a natural sweetness through her Ivory soap. I really was starting to like her.

You the manager? I heard gruffly from the doorway.

I am the tired motherfucking manager I wanted to say but instead said yes ma'am.

I learned in the next fifteen minutes from Ricky’s mother that Ricky was a fine upstanding youth with a family to support and he damn well needed this job and she damn well expected him to keep it or she would use her considerable clout as assistant head of housekeeping of women’s dormitories on the South Quad to damn well make my life hell at Miami University.

We had walked out of the office to the laundry area and she kept looking down the aisle at Darrel and he kept track of where she was looking and I wished there had been some gravel to kick. They were the Oxford Henleys I was told. Generations of them had lived on the same farm and little Ricky was destined for some form of great bullshit. I took in all she was saying. I didn’t want trouble with anybody.

 ***

I never aspired to be a laundry manager. I saw an ad in the Oxford Press for second shift help for minimum wage at the Oxford Laundry down the hill on College Avenue. I didn’t realize till I got there that it was a commercial laundry. They did one hundred per cent hospital laundry that I was soon to find was gross as punctured intestines. There were sometimes fingers or other amputated body parts wadded up in the bloody sheets or organic items no one even wanted to try and identify. Mostly it was just bloody.

I usually helped at the horrendous job of sorting. Help with some of the shitwork. Show the ladies I was one of them. And get them started on it. They would stand and look at it somehow thinking they could avoid what they knew they had to do. All of them had to say eww at least twice and examine each basketful as if sizing up the enemy.

I usually said let’s sort this shit and grabbed a tangle of gowns and surgical garb and they squawked like teenagers which half of them were. The black kids were all under age 20 and the white ladies were older picking up a few bucks for their families for Christmas. Whenever possible I assigned the older folks to this job. Having learned that bulling ahead was the best way to deal with bad shit in life they would get it done quick.

It was a nice June day when I applied for the job. My breath was sucked from me when I entered the place. Heat radiated off every item in the plant. Washers and dryers, Steam boilers and presses. But I came to find that it was a dry heat like they say Arizona has and was something a person could adjust to.

Minimum wage was $2 an hour. That would feed me. I had a thousand dollars saved up from my stint as a salesman and only needed to get through another nine months. Turns out they were putting on a completely new second shift to take care of a contract for a Dayton hospital and the owner wanted me to be the night manager. I had only wanted to work about twenty hours a week but he offered me $200 a week salary. I could hardly turn down a job in a college town during the Vietnam War at two and a half times the minimum wage. I took the job and it nearly killed me.

***

My lesson plan was finished and I was helping Darrel load the washers. I enjoyed hefting the floppy fifty pound mesh bags into the openings of the washers. It was good exercise and I didn’t have to do it if I didn’t want to.

I was probably responsible for the mess with Ricky and Darrel. The washman duties amounted to a person and a half job and we had two people to do it. They had been alternating on the shitty part of the job with one of them at any given time sitting for extended periods while the other worked. The boss had noticed this when he stayed over a few times and told me he wanted them busy. So I told them to work together thinking that they would only make each other miserable. Not get stupid about it.

I tossed a bag into the medium washer in the middle and saw a man enter the rear of the place through the fire door. He headed for the little roller press where Darlene was feeding pillowcases and an argument ensued. Darlene was one of the hillbilly ladies. She seemed glad to be here at work every night and did a great job helping get the laundry done and me home.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head no all the while tugging tangled wet pieces out of the basket.

There’s no fucking supper I heard him say.

She was telling him what was at home to fix for him and the kids and he stood looking down at the gray enameled concrete floor.

I took a step closer and he turned his head toward me. And you better just stay the fuck out of this he said.

Before I could react to what he said Darlene cut past me and was pleading for a few minute break to get her goofy half drunk husband out of there.

No problem I assured her and headed back to the washers. I kept my eye on them near the back door and in five minutes all the shouting was over and he stood looking at her with his lower lip quivering and I swear he wiped a tear from his eye before she pushed him out the door into the parking lot.

Darlene hurried over to me. Thanks she said. We need the money from my job. It won’t happen again.

I stood nodding my head and watching her hurry back to her job. With an education she would have made a good nurse or maybe a teacher. Folks worked hard. Everywhere I’ve ever seen it’s the same. People hump ass all day and night whatever it takes to make a living. Better than growing turnips for the king I guess but the workers always seem to get the short end of things.

I smelled John and turned to find the old man leaning on his broom. He was a human cloud of BO. Hot tonight he said blowing the sweet scent of Boone’s Farm Apple wine over me. That’s good wine he had told me one day. Better than that rotten Moger Daven he called the MD 20/20. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wasn’t even real wine. But Boonie’s was pretty friendly stuff for a dollar twenty-five. In high school we called it liquid acid. A bottle of that stuff would set you free. Sometimes I envied old John his daily Boone’s Farm.

John had been a medic on Guadalcanal. The first 24 hours left him crusted in a layer of blood and dust and sand and he had started shooting up with the morphine from the emergency kits of the dead men. It was the only way he could keep going and do what a man and a soldier needed to do. After that he would never again go another day without being fucked up on drugs or booze. Settling on the Boone’s Farm as he entered old age was probably one of the better choices he had made in thirty years.

The evening was moving along nicely now. The last of the dirty stuff was in the washers. The workers were all doing a great job. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Darrel and didn’t really know what to talk to him about. Today was payday and every payday Thursday I treated myself to a pizza and some beer. The laundry paid in cash and I fingered the $157.36 in my pocket and envisioned the pizza. I headed back to the office thinking maybe I could get a little nap.

But first I needed to sketch out the rest of my courses to complete my Master of Arts in Education. That’s right. Master of Arts in Education. Miami had developed a program to lure folks like me with a BA in English to come and take a few more English courses and the usual lame ass education courses in order to allow them to step inside an Ohio classroom.

Never mind that a BA in English was far superior to a degree in English education. I had started on the education route as a college freshman and lasted fifteen minutes into my first class. We were actually supposed to divide into teams and cut out paper dolls. Yes. We would learn teamwork that would be demonstrated by this childish exercise and would apply all the way to high school English instruction.

In my time here at Miami I had seen things. Behavioral objectives was one of them. I had sat listening in amazement to an exprincipal turned college professor explain how we would learn to write our lesson plans couched in terms of behavioral objectives. It would never be good enough to say we will read Neighbor Rosicky and discuss it in class. No. We would say that the reader of Neighbor Rosicky will learn the meaning of compassion and hopefully become compassionate. Hah. I’ve seen plenty of people who will never comprehend compassion and civility.

One such individual was in the graduate seminar in modern poetry that spring. I was a writer of short stories and had a novel underway but the poetry seminar was what was available. The logistics of the course escaped me and before I knew it I had ended up with Yeats and my presentation would be the first.

I was a Robert Frost kind of guy if I were to undertake poetry at all and was befuddled as we went around the conference table introducing ourselves. When it was my turn I said my major was Master of Arts in Education. One longhaired draft dodger thought that was funny and burst out laughing. I was getting ready to become a high school teacher to earn a living and this motherfucker was rubbing my nose in it. A gray-haired lady poked him with an elbow and he shut up.

So I’m mulling over my discontent remembering being made fun of because my daddy didn’t have blank checks for Miami University and bags of pot. Thinking about how I’m even going to survive the next eight fucking weeks of 20 hour days when the littlest black girl stood breathless again by my desk. I inhaled her sweetness and fragrance. I wanted just me and her to go somewhere.

She leaned into me and said Darrel’s uncle is here.

I looked quizzically up at her.

Do you think I’m smart enough to go to college? she asked.

I stood up and saw my chance to give her a hug and did. Yes I said you should go to college. She hugged me back and I was ready to see Darrel’s uncle.

Henry was a little shorter than Darrel but twice as wide and his breath smelled like garbage. I could not imagine what cheap form of whiskey could smell so foul.

I’m sure he had a noble purpose when he made plans to intercede at the laundry after he and the rest of the neighborhood heard of the fight. But now that he was here he didn’t seem to remember why he had come.

Darrel my nephew he said.

I shook his hand and it was like grabbing hold of a potato masher all hard and so big around I didn’t feel his fingers.

Equality he shouted belching a fog of garbage gas over me. We been through a lot.

I looked at Darrel to maybe see a way out of this but Darrel seemed as scared as I was becoming.

Justice the uncle thundered and brought his right fist down like a pile driver on the stainless steel work table buckling its center and leaving it concave.

I stepped back as much to get away from the stench of his breath as anything and he stepped right with me.

It ain’t agonna happen again he said.

This was a big man. Probably 350 pounds and not a lot of fat. I learned later from Darrel that night that Henry had played defensive tackle for the Steelers in the mid fifties.

Henry’s growling and thumping went on for another five minutes until Darrel’s aunt got there and started slapping Henry in the back of the head. Then she had the bleach paddle that had ignited this whole mess spanking his backside and chasing him across the floor as he held his hands over his ears and finally tumbled out the back door into the parking lot.

I looked at Darrel and he shrugged and I shook my head. I sat along the wall for a few minutes watching the folks work. The littlest black girl was by herself pushing baskets to the back of the plant and this told me the rest of the folders were sitting. Let them sit. Let the workers of the world sit when they can I decreed.

It was after eleven when I went out and fired up the box truck and backed it into the loading dock. Tonight three of the black girls volunteered to help push baskets and racks to the dock. Darrel and I sized up the load and got started.

I had always tried to be friendly and fair to Darrel and Ricky. They were different but both were honest and did their jobs. We were about half way done loading the truck when I asked Darrel what happened.

He called me a nigger.

And?

I grabbed him.

You made contact first?

He was drunk.

Yeah I said.

I wish I could have got Darrel and Ricky sat down together. It would all just have been all right. They both would have jobs and be moving ahead in whatever they saw as the paths of their lives. But Ricky’s mother and Darrel’s uncle had muddied that up. I didn’t ever want to see any of them again.

After we had finished and stood leaning against the dock I told Darrel this was his last night too.

He figured that was coming from the conversation we had had while loading the truck and nodded.

I heard the girls arguing about what kind of three two beer they were going to get at the carryout. One of them had her dad’s pickup and they were going spotlighting on the road to College Corner to see what was out in the country at night.

Hey I hollered across the cinder parking lot to the littlest black girl.

Hey what?

I shrugged.

She ran up to me and gave me a serious and squishy kiss then bounced giggling across the lot to the waiting Z71.

I shut down the boilers and locked up. Down the block I stopped at Domino’s and ordered a pizza. I drove out to Milville where I bought a six pack of real beer and drank one on the way back to get the pizza.

William Trent Pancoast's novels include WILDCAT (2010) and CRASHING (1983). His short stories, essays, and editorials have appeared in MONKEYBICYCLE, Night Train, As It Ought To Be, Solidarity magazine, and US News & World Report.  Pancoast is retired from the auto industry after thirty years as a die maker and union newspaper editor. Born in 1949, the author

The Witching Women at Road's End, nonfiction by Casey Clabough

Slightly more than a century ago a Mr. Sherman Clabough was sheriff of Sevier County, Tennessee. One of his now scarce-remembered duties was to see to it that any young man in the section who turned twenty-one work the roads for an indeterminate period so as to pay off his mandatory poll tax. Of course, in theory a young man might satisfy the sum out of pocket, but it was irregular for anyone to have much, if any, money in those times, especially folk who came from families back up in the hollows and hills. So it was that between the young men in the district and whatever convicts happened to be on hand, the roads in the county—some of which spanned and twisted high up onto remote lonely slopes of the Smokies—were tenuously maintained.

The sheriff was a tall, stern man with blonde hair and blue eyes that occasionally were remarked upon for their piercing quality.

"He don't need that six-shooter to put holes in a body," a local man was heard to remark.

The sheriff's pa, dead for nearly a decade, had been a Captain in the 9th Cavalry during the war and Sherman, as his name intimated, had inherited much of his father's martial bearing. Though he was the runt of the family and the youngest of the four boys, it was he who took after his pa the most and so everyone allowed it was natural he should become a lawman or a soldier rather than a farmer or a preacher.

Before he was twenty he married a Dodgen girl, Mary, who gave him one child and died not long after she turned eighteen trying to deliver another. He remarried to an Ogle named Beda inside of two weeks, before Mary and her infant were even settled in the ground, and she filled his house with six children in eight years, the last four all born within a year of each other.

Now entering his fourth decade and with a sizeable family to feed, Sherman did not take unnecessary risks, though in his younger years he had drawn his pistol more readily and even killed a man on one occasion while riding against the White Caps. Sevierville, having cleared its streets of such vigilantes and been purged by fire at the turn of the century, had become a peaceable hamlet and Sherman found his duties not especially perilous. The occasional family feud in the mountains and mean weekend drunk were the only times he ever gave thought to drawing his pistol, and more often than not it was his capable deputies who handled such matters as these.

***

When trouble at last found Sheriff Clabough it was of a particularly woeful variety as it both implicated his official position and involved his extended family. One of his nephews, Columbus Clabough—the fifth child in his eldest brother Isaac's brood—had disappeared high in the mountains while working the roads to pay off his poll tax. Now everyone knew Columbus was no ordinary youngun of twenty-one. For one thing, he was either envied or admired among his male peers for having won the affection of the girl widely considered the prettiest thing around Gatlinburg, Cora Nichols. He was also the prized son of his father Isaac on account of having stayed on to work the family farm rather than taking after his older brothers and running off to Knoxville or to join up with the army.

It was a fact, however, that though Columbus was respected in those parts for having remained to help his ma and pa, there were aspects of his personality which were deemed not exactly in his favor. Some thought him mighty queer on account of the fact he always kept to himself so much, never leaving the homeplace up at the head of the hollow unless it was to attend the Banner schoolhouse, which he ceased to do at the age of fourteen, or run an errand for his folks in the Burg, which he always did directly and without any tarrying of his own. Though possessed of a good singing voice, he never attended church—not even revival, which generally was thought the best opportunity for a young man to accomplish any serious courting. Instead it was Columbus's habit when not working the farm to stray across the mountains, hunting, trapping, or gathering big messes of sang or ramps. What he came back with was always of uncommonly good quantity and quality, which drove more than one young man to try to follow him so as to determine where he harvested his bounty. Yet none ever succeeded in doing so. Either in a stream, a thicket, or on a rocky hillside, the boy's trail eventually would fade out and the thwarted tracker would return, not a little agitated and remarking how queer it was for a body to just melt away into the mountains like that.

Given such behavior, it surprised folks all the more that a gal like Cora Nichols had set her head on marrying a fellow like Columbus and done everything she knew to bring it about, from baking him cakes and pies aplenty to delivering them in her best red and yellow dress with neck cut low. She met with no initial success on account of usually finding Columbus out working the fields or away from home altogether on one of his jaunts across the mountains. By and by, however, he began to take notice of her and would bring vittles and furs and other things down the hollow to where Cora lived in a little cabin with her Aunt Azelia. Whenever he came to call the three of them inevitably would end up out on the porch in twisted old hickory limb chairs, perhaps in the wake of a meal, and hunt their heads for words to trade. Often this was a chore since Columbus wasn't the talking type and Cora and her aunt had said about everything two women could to one another on account of having lived together ever since Cora's folks had passed away when she was nigh more than knee-high. Yet they were all comfortable enough in each other's silent company in that way people not much given to talk often are.

There was never any sparking to speak of, nor even what might rightly be named courting, but a day eventually arrived when it may be said an understanding was reached.

"How come you quit the Banner school," Cora asked Columbus, leaning forward in her chair so that it creaked, "when you was the best at reading for your age?"

It was the most direct question she had ever asked him and Columbus was silent for a long moment before responding. "I don't rightly know," he said at last, eyes vaguely peering up the hollow. "I reckon I'd about learned what I could and didn't much care for the company no more."

Undeterred by this response, which implicated Cora since she had attended the school as well, she followed it with another question, just as direct. "And why is it you never go to church and never been to revival?"

Columbus shifted a little in his chair in what might have been a slight show of discomfort, though when he answered his voice was the same. "I reckon again I don't much miss the company and most times I'm away across the mountains somewhere come Sunday."

Then Cora asked her most direct question, the one in fact which brought about their understanding. "Do you reckon when your ma and pa are gone you'll live all alone in that house up at the head of the hollow and never go nowhere except across them mountains?"

Columbus was silent for a long time, but when at last he answered he looked Cora directly in the face, with the same blue eyes his Uncle Sherman had. "I've never given any thought to the time when ma and pa are to be laid to rest, and I reckon there'll always be spells when I'm away in the mountains." He paused before continuing. "But whatever others may say, there is folks I like visiting and company I hope to always keep."

Columbus grinned as he uttered these last words even as Cora blushed, and though Aunt Azelia remained silent as a porch post, the words in her mind were "Praise be."

 ***

Though Sherman Clabough did not know the particulars of his nephew's vague and unconventional engagement, word had reached him of the young man's impending marriage to Cora Nichols. A fair judge of folks on account of the duties of his office, the sheriff was not as surprised as others by the arrangement. Having sporadically taken note of the boy as he grew, he admired rather than took umbrage at Columbus's withdrawn silence, independence, and penchant for hunting up things in the mountains. Moreover, the fact that the boy had stayed on to work brother Isaac's farm was a comfort to his mind and he mused more than once that if the youngun were to become a little more sociable and were so inclined, he might make a decent deputy by and by.

Yet now Sherman feared the worst and suffered a not insignificant burden of guilt as each day passed following Columbus's disappearance. After all, it was he who had allowed the boy to conduct his road work alone, as he had requested, along the most obscure of mountain thoroughfares, many of which constituted little more than trails. At the time it had seemed a natural fit for his nephew's independence and extensive knowledge of the slopes. Yet now all manner of potential dangers haunted his mind: from chance encounters with rattlers or painters to human menaces from the likes of bootleggers or jealous admirers of Cora Nichols.

Columbus's axe, rake, and shovel had been discovered resting against a stunted chestnut tree at the end of a road high on a rocky peak as if they had been set there in no particular hurry, yet in vain Sherman rode the nearby trails and hillsides, putting his deputies and volunteer searchers to shame by staying out the better part of several nights and occasionally even sleeping in the saddle. Still the mountains offered him no clues and with each passing day Sherman's hope waned even as his deputies took to trading uncertain glances among themselves and the volunteers began to straggle away. After all, it was not unusual for a man to be taken by the mountains and the folks who lived among the Smokies had a feeling—not unlike a clock in the head—when it looked as though a body was gone for good. And as much as Sherman Clabough sought to ignore the ticking in his own mind, he had begun to accept, loath as he was to do so, that too much time had elapsed and it was not for him to lay eyes on his nephew again.

***

On the day of his disappearance, Columbus Clabough worked steadily toward the end of the road he knew was about to give out. He had passed the last residence, a dilapidated abandoned cabin said to have been built by a trapper before the war, some two miles back down the mountain and kept on along the switchback curves and crumbling limestone roadbed as the way grew ever narrower. Here and there saplings had sprung up in the road due to its lack of use and these he felled with one-handed blows of the axe, leaving them where they lay as he moved on, rake and shovel gripped together in his other hand. A more challenging task was lifting or rolling to the roadside boulders which had tumbled down into the thoroughfare. Some were the manageable size of cantaloupes or watermelons while others proved more on the order of trunks or chests. It was these latter rocks he struggled with the most, grunting as he awkwardly turned them end over end toward the road's edge.

It was getting on late in the work day. The sky remained overcast. Even though it was only the beginning of October, the air was raw and pointed, propelled by a constant breeze one often encounters when nearing the summit of a mountain. Columbus knew if he lingered much longer he would be hard-pressed to make it home before dark. Yet something within him—pride, stubbornness, the vanity of youth—filled him with a desire to finish off the road: to see both it and his labor on it to their respective ends.

It is not difficult to guess which course of action won out. Toil on he did, hurling or rolling boulders and chopping saplings, until he arrived at what he reckoned must have been the road's terminus. One must say reckoned, for though the imprint of the roadbed continued on, the saplings sprang up in clumps, mere inches from each other, and two great immovable rocks the size of wagons blocked any further potential progress by a wheeled vehicle.

The clouds had thickened, dimming the mountainsides, and casting the hollows into a deeper hue of darkness. Columbus knew it was time to depart and that he'd likely be walking in the moonlight ere he reached the other side of Gatlinburg. Yet he lingered on for a moment considering with some satisfaction first the cleared way behind him and then the wall of rock and wood which dictated the thoroughfare's end. But just as he turned from taking in the sloping mountainside forest which lay beyond the cessation of his efforts, his nose caught a whiff of wood smoke and another odor he could not quite place. Taking note of the shifting breeze, he determined the smell was borne from around the mountainside. He paused only for an instant, realizing that searching out the smoke condemned him to a night's journey or sleeping in the woods, yet he had embraced such privations before and, besides, had made it his life's business to search out the mysteries and forlorn places of the Smokies. Carefully he laid his tools against a chestnut trunk and set off in the direction the wind beckoned.

He walked perhaps a quarter of an hour in the fading dimness before he caught the smell again. It was stronger this time but issued it seemed from a place higher up the mountain. Accordingly, he adjusted his course, making his way patiently, taking short shuffling steps so as to avoid slipping on an invisible loose rock or tumbling over a wayward root.

The mountainside steepened, the quantity of trees lessening and giving way to bushes and outcroppings of rock. Columbus found himself leaning forward, grasping narrow trunks and edges of rock for support, before collapsing to all fours and drawing himself up bodily wherever his hands found something sturdy enough to bear him. It was dark now and he advanced as much by touch as sight.

At last he emerged on a rock plateau of sorts where he could stand straight again, and it was here his search concluded, for some way across the rocks, accompanied by the now-familiar odor, he made out the faint glow of a fire flickering in the breeze and what he took to be the hint of a voice.

It was not difficult to walk quietly over the rock and Columbus advanced slowly in the darkness, taking short steps, ears attuned. Yet silent as he treaded, when he came within perhaps twenty paces of the fire, a voice rang out—feminine, old, raspy.

"Come on over and fool your face, pilgrim!" it exclaimed.

"Yes'm," he replied into the mountain wind for lack of anything else better to say.

As he advanced the unsteady flames revealed two old women clad all in black standing on either side of the fire, on which stood a large earthenware pot.

The sight of the pot revealed to Columbus the odor he had been unable to name: moonshine. Yet he had never heard tell of woman bootleggers and ancient ones at that. Indeed, their bearing and the whole scene rather suggested his mother's childhood tales of witching women. Lacking in superstition, Columbus felt foolish at the thought but troubled nonetheless.

When he came to stand within the full illumination offered by the firelight, what he saw added to his discomfort. The two female figures might have been twins in their horrid decrepitude. They shared the same deep wrinkles, hooked noses, and toothless mouths, only one of the old women—the one he guessed must have called out to him—possessed twinkling, hard black eyes while the other wore a near-oblivious expression on her hanging yellow cheeks.

The more observant of the pair watched Columbus as her hand stirred the pot with a thick stick.

"Welcome, Columbus Clabough," she said.

"You know my name?" replied the incredulous youth.

"It's long been our habit to know what goes on in these mountains," said the old woman, "and we figure there's less than the number of fingers on a hand, the men who might hunt us out when we're about our business—and Isaac Clabough's wandering boy is one of them."

"But I won't hunting you," said Columbus, growing more uncomfortable.

"Yet here you are," said the old woman, black eyes flashing briefly in the firelight. "Here you are."

To combat his growing anxiety Columbus began to talk, unconscious of the fact his words occasionally stumbled over each other. He was working the old road that ran up the other side of the mountain. He had smelled the smoke. It was nothing to him what the two old ladies were doing up here.

The speaking crone interrupted him. "When there's folks that take an interest in a body's business, even if they don't mean to, well then them's folks a body most likely can do without."

For the first time the other old woman made a sound—a guttural, watery, ascending noise that might have been muffled laughter.

Columbus fought back something akin to fear. He was being threatened. The thought of such feeble creatures doing him any physical harm seemed laughable, yet he wondered if they were alone or if there could be others somewhere out in the darkness. How had these two hags toted a big pot to the summit of the mountain without benefit of any road or trail Columbus knew of? He shivered involuntarily.

"There's a comet a-coming," said the first one.

"What?" asked Columbus, nearly at wits' end. "What's that?"

"A thing that flies from place to place across the heavens. Folks will have never seen the like."

The other hag grinned.

"It'll glow at night," continued the first one, "and the tail that comes out behind it will be near as wide as the sky and black as coal."

She ceased stirring the pot suddenly and, flattening her wrinkled hand, passed it over the pot.

"The tail of that comet will sweep across the earth," she continued, "and when it passes some things will be changed though folks won't know what they are."

Then she lapsed into a raspy fragment of song:

                        There was an old woman didn’t have but one eye

                        But she had a long tail that she let fly.

                        Every time that she went through a gap,

                        She left a piece of her tail in a trap.

The crone grinned at Columbus in the wake of the last verse, the gaping blackness where her teeth should have been transforming the expression into a disgusting, mirthless gesture.

"What's the tune about, boy? It's a riddle."

Columbus, shook his head, no longer capable of thinking clearly.

"Why, a needle, of course," said the old woman, as if instructing a child.

"Now looky here," she continued, "you do something for us—you make like that needle and go where we say go for a spell—and you needn't pay no mind to comets and ailments and the like. You'll live a long life to boot, though its writ on you you'll never have any younguns to call your own.

"Elect to do otherwise and you'll have worries aplenty, now and on up till the time of your dying."

Columbus looked from one hag to the other, taking in again their dreadful physical degradation which nonetheless afforded them a power he lacked the capacity to fathom. He realized suddenly he had been sweating heavily, his shirt well-nigh drenched. The breeze shifted suddenly and the smoke of the fire washed over him, forcing unbidden tears to form in the corners of his eyes. He coughed softly, lowering his head, and on lips which trembled slightly he offered them his response.

***

Columbus Clabough died in December 1973, a few months shy of his ninetieth birthday and just a handful of weeks before I entered the world. True to the prophecy of the witching women he and Cora Nichols never had any children, and true to an oath they exacted of him, he never told anyone the nature of the service he performed for them. His body lies in LynnhurstCemetery, Knoxville, the secret buried with him.

 

Casey Clabough is the author of the novel Confederado, the travel memoir The Warrior's Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route, and five scholarly books on southern and Appalachian writers, including Inhabiting Contemporary Southern & Appalachian Literature: Region & Place in the 21st Century. Clabough serves as editor of the literature section of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities' Encyclopedia Virginia and as general editor of the literary journal James Dickey Review. His work has appeared in over seventy anthologies and magazines, including Creative Nonfiction, the Sewanee Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Clabough’s awards include an Artists’ Grant from the Brazilian Government, the Bangladesh International Literary Award, and several American-based fellowships. He lives on a farm in Appomattox County, Virginia and teaches at Lynchburg College. His eighth book, a biography of George Garrett, will appear in June 2013.