Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 24

The Unbearably Penultimate of Parable, poetry by Dennis Mahagin

I drove over the fat rope thing

that made the bells ding and

ling and then this grease monkey appeared

at my open window, wearing braided ponytail

with his Speed Racer eyes, brandishing

a tattered broach rag thing he whipped

about like … *what?* about twenty

watts of dirty lariat– surely

a dervish with a nascent

flourish.

"Fill her up?" he asked.

"Nah," I said "seven bucks of unleaded." …

"Seven bucks?"

"Yah."

This was a spot in Cougar, Washington where they still

did Full Service; in fact, if you tried to pump your own

a placard said they're just as like to call the law. Before

the days of video poker machines, or virtual speed balls,

a standing ad in the Thrifties maintained somebody

could come over (even, or especially, in the middle

of the night) to buy your car for scrap,

you sign over the title, oh, it never

seemed right.

"Check that oil?" said the kid.

"Sure," I said, as if late

for a picnic, Christ, needing a shave, and some

hitchhiker with brown Gandhi face and bomber

jacket, just to come shambling up the medium

island, change the direction

of my life.

Now the kid was going

great guns, Quixotic with squeegee

and copious ammonia bug juice in the middle

of my pane. Only 9 years prior,

Mt. St. Helens had blown

the cap off that whole face, and I knew

I should have been someplace, by then:

a feeling it, in my bones, yet you could get

plum discombobulated driving those winding

roads, up around Cougar. The sun

shining, like to break your freaking

heart; this kid had a tattoo of a miniature

anchor, inches away from his carotid

artery swinging like clapper

inside a bell. All of it, added

up just as well to a feeling

of being recounted

later: in a week, I'd lose

my ride to those cage crushers out of Gresham, fat

Sopranos with pompadors, that hideous running ad

inside a Thrifty. Little black snowflake smudgies

and a silver ball of steel, no bigger

than any picnic basket.

"Check that tire pressure?" said the kid, wiping

his forehead you haven't seen skinny until this

sweat, and then hiss, what I'd be telling you

about … "Nah," I said "listen how I get back

to Portland?"

He pointed south with left

hook, or claw I hadn't noticed

till now, sun glint on chrome, luminous moon

cuticle drilling down to the no thumb, no thumb,

no bone at all sir so piteous young and full of

jones. "Here," I said handing out my last

tenner, open window, scent of black tar

and choke cherries, fresh baked bread

infused by 3 in 1, I'd just turned thirty

two, up in Cougar sometimes smoking

rubber, and I hardly ever used

the rear view.

Dennis Mahagin is the author of the chapbook, "Fare,"

available from Redneck Press, and the print collection,

"Grand Mal," published by Rebel Satori Press

Good Pussy and Jerry and Kildow, fiction by William Pancoast

This town got any good pussy? was the first thing I ever heard Kildow say. New hires Jerry and Kildow had joined us on a job 100 miles northeast of Columbus seeding a golf course and there they were at 7:00 a.m. planning their evening foray into the little burg up the road.

I could use me a fat little momma.

Squeeze your dick so hard she’ll bring tears to your eyes.

That’s the one I’m looking for.

Let’s get this show on the fucking road then.

The show was the first flatbed of straw we would be working. It had barely got below 80 overnight and the bales radiated the day before’s heat. Jerry and I would be hauling them to load the straw blower Kildow had lucked into operating because of his small stature. Old Holland would be spraying seed with the water canon and the boss’s son Jake driving the tank truck hooked to the flatbed and blower.

Jerry had joined the Army in 1956 when he turned 18 his sophomore year of high school and spent a year and a half as a cook before being tossed for shooting smack. He never did figure out how it happened. Mostly just fell in with that crew from the Bronx. But he couldn’t kick it when he got back to Oakridge Ohio and it didn’t take long for his clumsy burglaries to lead the police to him. He ended up spending two years at the barbaric reformatory in Cranston. After that ordeal he was clean and hardly ever ventured past beer in the drug world. Now unbelievably he lived at home with his old man whose hobby had been beating the shit out of his kids when he got home from the bar every night but now was burnt out and disabled from the booze and cigarettes and steel mill.

Kildow was just a badass. He wasn’t a big guy. Five-eight maybe 165 pounds. But he would climb you like a monkey with oversized arms punching the face or back of the head at close range while he held on to the neck. Every bad dude has to kick a cop’s ass and he had done that when he was 21. Nobody that knew him bothered to fuck with him anymore.

Kildow and Jerry laughed more that morning than I had heard of laughter for the last five years with a machine gun barrage of jokes and ribbings and pussy rants. I found myself drawn to them yet I sensed the danger there. A person might venture too far into their fantasy world and maybe never come back. I just knew I needed to hear what they had to say about their world and the plentiful pussy there.

And then there was just work itself that led me to have enough respect for their world to enter it. The summer before I had been a hod tender. My arms and back swollen with soreness every morning for two weeks. In high school I had scrubbed the girls’s shitter at the J C Penney store while the cheerleaders waited after school to get in and pee and primp. The store manager knew my parents and I learned later that it was his personal intervention in scheduling that had placed me scrubbing the girls’ restroom while they watched. He wanted to teach me a little humility. I had the humility down. Anyone who ever worked a shit job with no exit in sight has plenty of that. I had become a working man by age eighteen as much as I could say that I was anything. I was intrigued by the antics of Jerry and Kildow and impressed with Kildow’s charisma. I would be one of them.

The first night we went into town around 8 in Kildow’s ’56 Ford. A rattly black coupe that he would bet anyone $5 they couldn’t snatch a five dollar bill off the dashboard while he was accelerating. I got to sit up front since Jerry and Kildow had taken a liking to me because neither one of them had ever known anyone going to college. I laughed and started to say bullshit but only got the bull out before Kildow slammed that baby in second gear and plastered me to my seat. We had picked up a twelve pack and the beer was going right to our heads with the heat and it seemed funny to all of us. I never saw anything like that I said. What the hell kind of motor you got in this? Jerry was laughing harder than any of us and kept saying over and over you didn’t fucking believe it did you Whitey? They had taken to calling me Whitey when they saw me that morning because of my blond hair.

Jerry slugged down his third beer through his laughter and became increasingly animated. By the time we had found the only bar in the crossroads town of Weber and ordered a pizza from down the street Jerry was getting bug-eyed and happy as hell.

That day on the golf course had wasted all of us. I had lost eight pounds according to the scale at the truck stop we were sneaking into for showers every evening. By ten o’clock I saw that I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with these guys. Nothing was happening at the bar and when I razzed my new friends about the loud-mouthed frizzy-haired lone female in the place they assured me the good pussy would be there later. I set off on the mile walk down the country road to the golf course where we were sleeping in a barn used as machinery storage.

We had set up cots in the barn and even with the end doors open to catch whatever breeze there was the place was hellhole hot. I sat on the end of my cot thinking over the day. Might have been the hardest day’s work I had ever done. It ranked right there with the hay-baling I had done a few times. This was a prevailing wage job since it was all municipal and state projects so I could make enough money this summer to pay all my college expenses. I climbed in my sleeping bag and closed my eyes listening to the crickets and some night birds I couldn’t identify and smelling old manure and oil and grease. I felt a plop on the edge of my pillow. I inched my hand over and felt the fur and then came the flurry of bat wings as the sonofabitch took flight again. I pulled the bag over my head and passed out.

Rise and shine motherfuckers was the first thing I heard in the morning followed by time to shit shine shower and shave. Laughing I pulled the covers off my head.

Good pussy Whitey. You should have stuck around.

Jerry and Kildow were already dressed and getting it together for another day in the field. I had to hurry to avoid being left behind as Kildow revved that big old motor and spun the tires in the gravel just outside the barn. Jake and Holland were staying at the motel beside the truck stop and we met them for breakfast there. Jake was getting ready to finish his MBA in the fall and all he could do was bitch about having to work every summer in order to get his college bills paid and a wad of cash in his pocket for beer and girls at school.

At breakfast Kildow got to talking about a Beagle he had growing up and which had dug holes all around its dog house to stay cool in weather like this. It lived its entire life except when it was taken hunting chained to an eye-bolt on the dog house in the backyard. After he had done six months in the pen for the cop beating he moved in with a girl who had seen him while she was visiting her brother and they had gotten introduced at visitation. Her place had a fenced in backyard and he moved his fourteen year old Beagle there from his mother’s backyard. The first weekend out of prison he spent building a dog house. He figured the old girl could make up for lost time in this clean and safe new home. But she fussed over her surroundings laying pained by arthritis in the opening of the new lumber-smelling structure just like she still wore the chain and never strayed 10 feet from the dog house. He had to move out after a couple months when his girlfriend discovered what an incurable cockhound he was. Left his old dog because of the little girl who loved her then got a call that she had snapped at the three year old. He went and got his dog and took her out to the reservoir where he held her underwater. I just wanted her to feel what freedom was like Kildow said and ate his pancakes.

That day was hotter than any I ever remember in my entire life. We sweat so much and then quit. Our skin got dry and clammy then we sweat some more. Jerry was having trouble picking up the bales by lunchtime his hands were so swollen and blistered through the cheap cotton gloves we had picked up at the truck stop. The sweat dried in salty circles around our eyes and the straw dust coated all the skin bared. Every now and then Jerry or I would collapse on the trailer bed and wait for the energy to return then get up and go another round with the bales. They got heavier and heavier as the hours passed. I thought hard about how it would be to have this to look forward to all my life. Shit work in the hot sun. Jake was riding in the shade of the truck so he really didn’t comprehend how the sun was draining us.

At the afternoon break at 3:30 we had about 15 bales to go on the second flatbed. Jake wanted to go until seven so we could maybe finish up early on Friday so he could get home to his girlfriend. I was watching Jerry when he said that and saw him shudder. He and Kildow neither one were in a position to call it a day. Holland sat stoically listening. He would do whatever the boss told him but you could see the numbness in his eyes.

We were all in pain and I guessed it was up to me to save us. Without a union there weren’t any rules in our favor. Suppose we just finish that load and call it a day? I said cautiously.

We need to get this hole done today Jake said. Holland? he asked the old man who was really the brains of the outfit.

Holland had been at it for thirty years with Jake’s dad who was a conniving little man who had figured out how to bid on state projects from books in the prison library. I never quit he said. But I’ve had enough for this day.

We quit at 5:30 and the last thirty minutes into the new trailer of straw Jerry was happy as hell. Don’t get any better than this he said and I saw that the impending cessation of pain was what he was referring to. Looking forward to cooling down and getting a shower and having a few beers to save our lives from this inferno. We maybe weren’t a whole lot different from Kildow’s dog I thought one day years later mulling over that day of my life. Maybe all behavior is about escaping pain.

I got me a nap in an easy chair near the trucker’s lounge after my shower. That and a steak dinner at a Lake Erie marina restaurant twenty miles to the north had me feeling like a human being again. We hit several honky tonks on the way back south after supper. At the last one when we walked into the chill of a fully cranked air conditioner Jerry elbowed me. There you go Whitey.

Kildow led us to a table with three college looking girls. I followed along. Then he leaned forward with his Popeye forearms bulging toward the girls as he placed his hands on the table. Ladies this is your lucky night. Whitey here is God’s special treat for the female species.

After buying me and the girls enough beer to get us half drunk Kildow winked at me and he and Jerry left.

I’ll take you home said the one I had taken a liking to.

Next morning in the barn I woke to Whitey got him some pussy!

I wasn’t going to tell them I didn’t.

The little blonde with the nice titties!

Brunette with the hairy box!

Mostly we talked about sociology. She was also majoring in it at Ohio State in Columbus.

 

After breakfast I was in the truck with Jake going to help fill the tank with water and mix the grass seed. The old tanker bounced down the fairway to the water tipple by the railroad and I braced myself to keep from banging my head on the window.

You and that ex-con were taking it pretty easy yesterday. I saw you laying around back on the flatbed.

I looked at him through the morning haze the temperature already bumping 80. Bullshit.

Bullshit? I saw it. I don’t know why the old man keeps hiring these fucking bums.

Jake was cute. Dimpled cheeks unworried face. He had been five years ahead of me in school and drove a new red ’57 Chevy convertible and had a pretty girlfriend to ride around town with him. Us younger kids would see him at the root beer stand or the drive in. He had been somebody we wanted to be.

But now as I looked at his perfect profile in the morning sun slanting through the windshield I hated him for the spoiled punk that he really was. Nobody fucking off on the flatbed yesterday.

He jerked his head to look at me. I say you were. Ex-con fuckoffs and you.

Fuck you.

He was pissed mostly probably because he had to be here with us bums and pushed his right fist over the seat space and caught my chin. I gave him back a right cross and he leaned away then grabbed me in a headlock. He was strong from playing football in high school and college and I couldn’t get away. I started punching him and he tightened the vise. When we hit a big rut his grip loosened and I hit him in the nose and he let go.

Fuck you. I’m quitting. You’re a fucking asshole.

No no. I need you here.

I saw that he had quickly realized he would be shorthanded and not be able to get the work done for the rest of the week.

Double our breaks. Two in the morning and two in the afternoon. No work after three when it’s so fucking hot.

He stared at me with the spoiled jock anger jumping out of his dark eyes. Yeah. Yeah okay. Four though.

That day and the rest of the week passed a little cooler. With our extra breaks and one early quit day we all recovered some and added a little weight back. Jerry was a lost creature with a big heart and I liked him. Friday afternoon the talk turned to getting home and ready to party. Be at the Grotto Jerry told me. Good time acoming!

I had never been to the Grotto which was an uptown bar full of what us kids had always called greasers losers hillbillies. When I got there about eight the place was noisy and teeming with the Friday night worker crowd. Standing at the end of the bar was Jerry all lit up and bug-eyed and off to the races. This week was what he did now that his life was straightened out. He worked hard long hours without the desire or know how to get rich and then he got fucked up and had a good time with the money that he had earned.

Standing with him was a chunky girl with a white halter top which glistened in the strobe lights that activated when the band played. Jerry waved me over to join them and hugged me into the girl who had turned to face me and now had her breasts squished into my stomach. Man this is Gina he yelled above the noise of the music and squeezed us harder. She grabbed my dick and then squirmed back towards Jerry.

The evening was a blur with Jerry buying drinks for folks he knew and spending up the paycheck advance he had gotten earlier in the day. I cashed my check and bought us a couple of rounds. Kildow got there about ten and it was then I found out that Gina was his girl. She whispered into his ear and he winked at me guess you two already met and slapped my shoulder.

Kildow could dance and he got Gina sweated up and sat her down and found a fresh one and kept going. He was smooth like a gymnast in movement and strength. It was after one when they started on the Bacardi 151 lighting it on fire before they did shots. I had been trying to leave for a couple of hours but now my evening was escalated as I took my turn at the shots and did two that I remember.

Then it was closing time and Jerry said we’re going swimming you’re driving and I was jostled out the door by six or eight of the friends I had made that night. I got in my ’49 Chevy and sat in the relative quiet of the parking lot listening to cars starting and revving and Jerry said follow that Studebaker and I put it in gear.

I wasn’t fit to be driving and was all over the road. I had heard of the place we were headed an abandoned quarry about eight miles out of town but guys in my generation had never partied out there. It all seemed like a bad idea. Jerry was still cranked and he just shook his head no when I asked if we could call it off. Always got to finish he said.

When we got there and had started along the path through the woods we heard the splashing and yelling from the wide expanse of inky water barely lit by the half moon through the haze of clouds. Gina was the only girl there and she happily strolled among the naked guys half of them strutting around with hard dicks.

Jerry was stripping down dropping his clothes in a pile. Come on he said.

I took off my t-shirt and dropped my jeans and there was Gina in front of me. Before she could grab my dick again I dove off the bank and joined the others in the water. The chill of the quarry finally cooled me after the week of heat and I treaded water watching the goings on around me. Kildow was behind me huddled in the water with one of the guys.

Then we were all on the bank getting dressed. I pulled my pants on and Gina put a lip lock on me and grabbed me again. I heard Kildow laughing off to the side and then he slapped my shoulder. Good pussy he said leaning into my ear as he and the other fellow bumped past. Touching Kildow’s girl scared me and I stood still with her hanging on to my rear belt loop.

I smelled weed then and took a hit when it came my way. Another couple hits and I realized how drunk and fucked up I was. We were all on the dark path again and Gina was hanging on to me and it became apparent that she and I were leaving together. I heard Jerry jabbering and he joined us at my car.

I was out of the parking lot first and gunned it to show off. Nearly lost it and headed back to town. I was having trouble seeing now and wondering what the hell I had got myself into. I had me a little hillbilly girl I was going to fuck if I wanted to. Jerry was talking a mile a minute like maybe he had gotten some speed in him.

I was going too fast when I came to the curve a mile from the quarry and the right front wheel went off the right side of the road. The berm was deep and when I pulled back the steering wheel jerked out of my hands and banged my wrist. Then the car veered clear across the road and I slid into deep grass that grounded my frame and stopped us like a parachute would then spun us loose in a circle. I felt Gina sliding away from me and grabbed her arm then watched as Jerry slid on out the passenger door that had been jolted open.

I got stopped and sat in the quiet then saw the headlights behind me. My door was jammed so I pushed Gina out the door and slid across the bench seat. A couple other cars pulled alongside the road and in their headlights I saw Jerry lying at the base of a tree. I got there at the same time Kildow did. He turned Jerry over and it was obvious his neck was broken. Blood covered his scalp and his eyes were still bugged out.

Gina get in my car he said.

Kildow’s face was calm and lit up by the headlights behind us. Whitey it’s been nice knowing you.

I had no idea where he was going with this. Was he going to kill me after what I had done to Jerry? Man I’m sorry I said.

Shit happens. You get in your car and get the fuck home. You weren’t here tonight. No one ever seen you.

But Jerry. The truth is….

There ain’t any truth one way or the other about this. There ain’t anything true or false anywhere I’ve ever seen Whitey. Stuff just is. I’ll take care of Jerry.

I stood and backed through the group and Kildow and another guy already had Jerry picked up. They tossed him in the trunk of the ’56 Ford.

The cars were pulling out and heading back to the quarry. Kildow leaned on the window of my old Chevy. Get you lots of pussy Whitey he said and was gone.

I drove slow on the way home. The way I should have been driving earlier. But I was in a different world then.

I didn’t go back to work the next Monday. I had enough money saved up to get through the second summer session and fall and winter quarter at Ohio State in Columbus. I got a room on 12th Avenue and dug into my studies. In the fall I looked up that girl from the honky tonk and ended up marrying her a year later.

I learned from the hometown paper that Jerry had broken his neck at the quarry when he dived into a rock in the shallow area a ways from where we had been swimming. I changed my major to philosophy that winter. Figured I’d find out if there really were true and false things in the world.

As best as I have been able to figure through my bachelor’s degree in philosophy and the master’s degree in psychology and twenty years of counseling folks and all that I’ve learned as a human being there are some things that are true and others that are false and some are both.

I had expected to feel bad about what happened to Jerry. I wanted to feel bad. But I never did.

William Trent Pancoast's novels include WILDCAT (2010) and CRASHING (1983). His short stories, essays, and editorials have appeared in Night Train, Solidarity magazine, and US News & World Report.

 

Building a Church, fiction by Lara Konesky

He was quite certain that life mostly was nothing but creation and evolution.  Boys were supposed to become men and all that shit, and the men build families and houses and empires.  He thought a lot about the word man, and the word man was different than the idea of a man, and the idea of a man was nothing but a social construct forced upon him.

Most men fight demons and they spend so much time fighting demons that they just stay.  Stunted.

He was deep in thought and did not want to have sex with his girlfriend.  Sex with him, he knew, was an event that took too much energy. He wanted to save his energy for pondering.  He knew she really wanted to, though, because her eyes and her hands became needy creatures with fangs and a bone to pick with him for not giving her everything she wanted.

He let her give him head, and she seemed fine with that.  He didn’t ask if she needed anything in return, but she didn’t seem to be unsatisfied so he just let it go.

He actually thought maybe a nap would be better than thinking.  His girlfriend asked him for his credit card, and he gave it to her so she wouldn’t bother him for awhile.  Mostly, he liked to be alone.

Most men stop fighting only to rest their minds.

“Have you ever watched a person die?” He asked his girlfriend, who was done shopping, and was lingering around his personal space until he noticed her.

“Is this some role playing game?” She asked, suddenly excited.  Her eyeballs leaped across the room and did a joyful dance.  He stared blankly at her silly eyes.

“You are stupid. I am not sure why I love you.” he said, and she took it as a compliment.

“Most people have bodies of water, but you have a body of Vodka,” she said, and he took it as a compliment.

"Your religion is one of apathy. You worship not giving a shit about shit." She told him, on the last day they spent together.

Later on, she told her friends he was probably gay. This was the only explanation for how little they had sex, and why he hardly looked up from the movie he was watching when she finally left for good.

Lara Konesky is a 33 year old part time ESL teacher, lazy bum ass, and writer from Columbus, Ohio.  Her first book, Next to Guns, can be found at www.grievousjonespress.com (Grievous Jones Press, 2009). She co-edited (with Andrew Taylor, Erbacce Press) and contributed to Blood at the Chelsea (Erbacce Press 2010), an anthology of writers writing for other writers. You can also read Lara's work online and in print at New Aesthetic, Gutter Eloquence, Curbside Splendor, Word Riot, Left Hand Waving, and various other rad places.…

News from the Hills and Surrounds

This post is a continuation of what I wanted to do with FCAC from the beginning; that is, to regularly post relevant news and tidbits as related to literature and Appalachia and so forth. I get a fair number of articles worth sharing, so I'm going to do one news post a week. Feel free to comment. It'll be more fun for everybody. Please please feel free as well to email me similar articles you find in your internet travels. I'll post a link to your site if I end up using a link you send me. Hit me up as well if the URL no longer functions, or if you have any other questions. rusty.barnes@gmail.com

These articles were found (mostly) through Google alerts attached to the terms 'hillbilly,' 'redneck,' 'white trash,' and 'Appalachia,' with occasional articles lifted from the Appalnet listserv.

MTV Loves Creekers

A.M. Homes' Latest Characters Rich White Trash?

Grow Appalachia Program begins at PMSS

Russell Lee’s Appalachia

Unearthed artifacts help pinpoint key Hatfield-McCoy family battle in eastern Kentucky

Mountain residents want to be allowed to continue killing marauding elk

TV's 'Justified' might not film in Kentucky, but its stories are firmly rooted in state

Stopping the decay: dental woes in Appalachia

U.S. Coal Industry Not Well-Positioned to Benefit From Increased Short-Term Global Demand

EPA's Progress Report on the Effects of Hydrofracking on Drinking Water

Gas Drilling Is Called Safe in New York

The Fire, fiction by Rod Siino

On the day of the fire, my father and I stood in the snowy parking lot of my apartment complex and watched the water from the hoses transform my basement unit into a wading pool. The smoke escaping from the broken windows of the four-story brick building drifted upward, stopping about fifty feet above the flat rooftop. There it hung–not black, exactly, more a charcoal gray–a result of some freak inversion effect causing it to hang there for hours after the last flames had been doused, a lingering reminder of my current circumstance.

The next day, when the thaw hit, everything began to melt, and I began to move out. We walked through the foot-high water in my living room, floating paperback books and record albums bobbing around like so much litter in a polluted lake.

“Get those up,” my father said, pointing to a corner of the room.

Like a corpse doing a dead man’s float, my brand new golf bag with a new set of Tour blades was knocking against a wall from the waves we made by moving about the apartment. I gathered them up, heavy with water and grime, and threw the bag over my shoulder as a caddy does when he readies himself to walk a fairway. All I wanted then was to head to a range; hit some balls; swing free and easy and ready myself for the next round, but that wouldn’t come for months. We silently walked out of the mess and into the snowy daylight and freedom of the parking lot, puddles and snow melting all around us. I leaned the bag against my truck, shivering, cold from wading through my apartment. We stood there, an old man and his grown son, and hugged. It was the first time he’d hugged me since I was a kid. It was the last time he’d ever hug me.

That set of golf clubs had been one of many I’d owned throughout my life. When I was a boy, my father had brought me home my first golf club, which he’d found in the bin of used clubs at the pro shop of the course where he played every week with his buddies from work. My father was an electrical engineer, and worked for a defense contractor. His real love, though, was the game he played once a week, weather permitting. We lived together, just the two of us, in a small town in Massachusetts. This was long after my mother had left us and then died in a car accident. His golf day was Saturday, and on the particular Saturday he brought me the club I was twelve and, at that time, was gradually becoming aware of his affinity for the game. We watched the pros on television often, and he’d speak in reverential tones about their abilities, as if these were traits everyman should have. “See?” he would say. “Do you see the concentration? The focus?”

From the moment I first held that junior 7-iron with a facsimile of Chi Chi Rodriguez’s signature etched into the back, I set out to learn the game of golf. It was a good way to break into it, my father said, having just the single club.

“Learn it a club at a time,” he said, “if you ever want to be a shot-maker.”

I carried that club with me wherever I went. I’d stand in front of our black and white television on Saturday or Sunday afternoons studying the pros, imitating their swings, in awe of their calm under pressure. Sometimes I stood at attention, as I would in church during those times when you’re supposed to be quiet, in total silence while the announcer whispered about Jack Nicklaus looking over a five-footer for par, or Arnold Palmer on the tee hitting another big drive–always striking the ball so hard it looked as if he’d need traction for the torque he’d exerted on his back.

“He’s trying to hurt that ball,” my father said with a smile.

Back then, Tiger Woods wasn’t even born yet; the best golfers were guys like Nicklaus and Palmer and Gary Player, playing at places with names that captured my imagination: Augusta, Baltusrol, Shinnecock Hills, Winged Foot, The Royal & Ancient, and Pinehurst #2.

My father was like many fathers, apt to point out to his son life’s lessons from the minutia of the seemingly unremarkable. He wasn’t big on platitudes, though. He’d never say a thing like, “There aren’t any shortcuts to success,” or “If at first you don't succeed try, try again.” For him, golf and the professionals we watched transcended what until then to me were simply clubs and balls and pretty pictures of fairways and greens. I gradually came to understand that the expanse of a golf course was more a place of refuge where you were alone with your thoughts, challenged yourself in small ways, where subtle changes have profound effects on final results.

Walking around my neighborhood, cutting through neighbors’ yards with friends or even by myself, I could be seen with Chi Chi on my shoulder, a twelve year old boy dreaming of becoming a shot-maker—to have the characteristics my father found so important: confidence, focus, driven by the desire to be excellent at something. Nothing then, or now, provided more motivation for me than to make my father proud of me. At first I played in my backyard with plastic golf balls, and then, sometimes with my father, went down to the school playground with used balls from his bag.

“Be a shot-maker, Pete,” he would say.

It seemed that I shanked and hooked and sliced a thousand shots before I’d move to the next club. I’d spray balls across that field at every angle and trajectory in my sometimes futile attempt at mastering a club. Eventually, I graduated to a full set, learning each club as my father prescribed.

One summer, I was probably thirteen or fourteen by then, my friends and I laid out a nine-hole par three golf course on the playground. We used just our 7-irons, a club that typically yielded shots of a hundred thirty yards or so for us. The course incorporated a parking lot as a water hazard, and the woods all around as out of bounds. If you hit the school building, it was a two-shot penalty. Given our love for the sound of smashing glass, if you broke a window it was only a one-shot penalty, even if your ball was lost inside the school. We used the jungle gyms, slides, swing sets, see-saws and even a sewer grate, all scattered across the field, as the holes. Hit the target and you were considered “in.” Win the match and you’d win the Masters, or one of the Opens or the PGA.

As I practiced early on and learned more about the game from my father and from the pros on television, I decided I’d always be a golfer. But I never wanted to be a professional golfer. I would leave that to those on the Tour, the disciplined players who could get home from a hanging lie two-hundred fifty yards from a green surrounded by deep bunkers or water. Me, it’s taken time, but I’ve developed a serviceable game–one that comes and goes, takes me to the heights of joy as much as it does to the lowest levels of frustration. I’ve played many rounds, even won a couple local tournaments like my father did, but making a career out of it wasn’t for me. I could never take up as a profession that which I love so well.

 

Growing up, I spent most of my time outdoors. It’s what comes with living alone with your dad. When he was at home, he’d give me things to do around the house, and do things with me, help with homework or talk about golf techniques. When he was at work or out with his buddies, he gave me leave to do what I wanted, which usually meant walking the neighborhood streets with my friends, playing in the woods, golfing on the playground. He was there for me when I needed him, though. Years later, when Tom Taylor set fire to my apartment building, causing most of my belongings to suffer water damage, my father was there carrying furniture and soggy books out of my apartment and into a rental van. It took us two days in that January thaw, and by then he was nearly seventy years old.

And so, I grew to be most comfortable outdoors. I love the smell of fallen leaves, the greens and yellows of the grass during summer, and the sun on my shoulders year-round. Landscaping just seemed to happen naturally. Not a glamorous career, as my father often reminded me, but I’m outside most of the year, and I know everything there is to know about lawn care in this part of the country. The northeast presents challenges for grass because the weather varies to extremes between the cold winters and the humidity of the summers. When a customer wants to know about bluegrasses, fescues, ryegrasses and bent grasses, and which ones are best adapted here, I’m your man. I tell them I’m particularly fond of Kentucky Bluegrass for its excellent recuperative and reproductive capacity. It develops a dense turf stand, has excellent color and mows more cleanly than tougher-bladed grasses such as perennial ryegrass. It also has greater cold tolerance than either perennial ryegrass or tall fescue.

True, I spend winters doing other activities to keep me financially afloat, like snow plowing. But winter doesn’t mean that I stop thinking about golf. I still practice my swing indoors, where I can also do my visualization exercises. I close my eyes and see myself making shots, hitting fairways off the tee, dropping a 3-iron softly onto a postage stamp green from two-twenty, making a thirty-foot bender for a par. Sometimes I imagine I’m at the tee of the 12th hole at Augusta, my father in the gallery, looking at a hundred fifty-five yarder with a narrow, canted green guarded by Rae’s Creek. A shot-maker’s hole. Hit it too high and the wind can get hold of your ball and knock it down into the water or move it away from target; too low and you can skip it into the rear bunker, setting yourself up for a come-backer with the water waiting on the far side of the green. I picture myself dropping a 7-iron right next to the pin–every time.

 

Although the smell of the fire clinged to every article of furniture, clothing and other fixtures and accessories I owned, we dried it all out as best we could, packed up what was salvageable and moved me here. This was three years ago. I think the smell is gone now, but maybe I’ve gotten so used to it that I just don’t notice it anymore.

Were it not for my living room being in a state of disarray, it would be a pleasant setting for quiet summer nights like this one. I have proof. Photographs, currently in a safe deposit box, were done for insurance purposes at my father’s suggestion. He photographed this entire apartment, each and every surviving item, and packaged them all up in a photo album. He looked haggard that day after we’d finished moving, a little more hunched over than normal, his skin tone growing paler by the moment.

I told him to be careful, that he’d exerted himself more than necessary, but he scoffed at the idea of slowing down and said, simply, “Next time you’ll be ready.”

The photos he handed to me show a room that is more than just livable, no question; it was to be envied. But since I moved, I’m not a good cleaner. Except for narrow paths from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom to the only bathroom in the apartment, the hardwood floor has gone missing. Scattered around the apartment is my album collection of nearly a thousand, some without their original covers, lost in the fire. The albums aren’t the principal component of the clutter. Books and magazines, some in piles, some scattered, are everywhere. There’s unwashed silverware, unopened mail, opened mail, pocket change, soda bottles and cans, a pizza box, a few golf balls, an overturned table lamp broken from an errant practice swing, a Wilson persimmon head driver, a leather-gripped Tour bladed 7-iron and, of course, the record albums. All of the albums were once alphabetized within their respective genres: rock, jazz, classical, etc. Now none are alphabetical and most are unplayable.

Tom Taylor was never arrested for starting the fire. It was generally agreed, though, by those of us who were affected by the fire, that he’d done it. We’d heard the apartment complex, which he owned with a partner, was in the way of a larger development they’d wanted to build. According to the police, though, nothing could be proven. To what I’m sure was Tom’s great disappointment, one of my neighbors reported the fire before it could do permanent damage, so it wasn’t a total loss for insurance purposes. I’m guessing that at this point Tom has found other opportunities in real estate.

Like me, Tom was a golfer of some merit, and more than once the two of us had casually discussed what it would take to own and operate a golf course. He’d not been a member at a private club then, preferring to accept the invitations of those who were members. He often said he admired my turf knowledge and my abilities as a landscaper, and that one day he hoped he’d be able to offer me an opportunity to use my talents on something, in his words, “more substantial than just cutting and seeding lawns and doing yard clean ups.” Now, this, of course, was before the fire, and if Tom has similar aspirations now, I haven’t heard. He took golf seriously, though, and had a particular source of pride that he seemed to take great care in nurturing: Tom had an uncanny resemblance to Gary Player. The only thing missing was Player’s South African accent. A golfer well known for being in great physical condition, Player wore black almost exclusively. He had a certain appeal among fans and stature among his competition as someone to be admired, if for nothing else than his excellent sense of style. Nobody looked better in a pair of black slacks, a black short-sleeve Perry Ellis buttoned to the top, and black pullover vest than Gary Player. Tom, who like Player was short and slight, wore only black, even in summer. Just the way the pant leg fell off their knees and down to their feet, with the crease bending at the ankle; and their shoulders, broad as they were, accented perfectly by the ubiquitous vest. These were golfers with style.

 

After years of being a landscaper, I’d grown used to my father’s occasional politely negative commentary about my career choice. Although he said he was proud of me a number of times, he did express his concern about the inherent pitfalls of being a small business owner.

“A guy working out of his truck with a couple lawn mowers and a two-man crew is not a viable business long-term,” he would tell me.

Sure, I struggled for a while—all with the unstated aim of making him proud of me. It took me years to understand how to manage the costs associated with equipment upkeep and payroll. Not to mention the little things like billing customers, paying for supplies; and then there’s just dealing with customers, which in my case is more of a challenge because, for better or worse, my clientele have always been what I would consider wealthy – another way of saying that they’re know-it-alls with nothing better to do than tell me how to do my job. Just because a guy’s a doctor, he figures he knows everything. I have debated turf types with surgeons who don’t know the difference between a Bermuda grass and a fescue. One guy thought a rhizome had something to do with the atmosphere. Then there’s the financial side of dealing with customers. Ever try to get fifty bucks out of the president of a bank? Or from some thirty-year old millionaire? Let me tell you, there’s a reason rich people are rich. I maintain my cool, though. I’ve never come to blows with a customer. If they begin to piss me off, I smile and think of something else. Not a particularly healthy habit, I know.

All this, of course, validated to some extent my father’s argument in the first place. But I’d hoped he would eventually come to understand that I was happy staying small and playing golf, something I would ask him about now if he were still alive. I wish he hadn’t exerted himself so much during my move. I just wish he could be here now so we could talk some more about it; so he could see that although it’s been difficult, it’s also been rewarding.

 

I pick up the 7-iron now, from its resting place on top of an album stack, and take a sniff of the blade. No sign of smoke, just the sweet smell of summer grass. I’ve been thinking about something lately. Why not bring the playground golf course concept to my current neighborhood? My concern, of course, has been how my neighbors will react to this, but given that my golf game is far superior to that of my youth, I’m hoping my improved shot control will ease their concerns. I now live in an exclusively residential area of the city, at the intersection of five streets, creating a diagonal span between the farthest house from mine of about a hundred fifty to a hundred sixty yards, the current length for my 7-iron. This open space across pavement is especially appealing because it will give me an opportunity to work on the height of my shot, which lately has inexplicably flattened.

In addition to that, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to make a confident club selection. My father, I’m sure, would suggest that I just keep at it. Go to the range, he’d say, and practice. Even on the day he died, it’s one of the last things we talked about before I finally convinced him to go home and get some rest. When I got the call that he’d been rushed to the hospital, I’d been putting the finishing touches on organizing my new home. This was different from when my mother had died. Back then, I wasn’t old enough to appreciate any of it. I didn’t understand that my father’s grieving for her, despite the fact that she had left him, was an ongoing process that was wrapped up in everything he did and said. All he ever told me about her leaving was that she’d left to find something that she hadn’t ever found with him. Knowing the man as I did, I could see that his pensive demeanor might have been hard to live with. It was all in his head. As I was sitting next to him in the Intensive Care Unit, watching the machines keep him alive, I thought about how he was leaving me, and knew for the first time how he must have felt all those years about my mother having left.

He died that evening. The doctor said his heart gave out.

 

I practice addressing the ball now as I consider my ever-evolving plan. After reflecting on what I thought would be my father’s advice, I approached the local pro the other day at the driving range and had him watch me hit a few shots.

“You’re stiff on the back swing,” he said.

“You would be too,” I said, “if you raked, planted, seeded or cut fifty lawns a week during the summer.” Clearly he was more a student of swing mechanics than of the mental game of golf, which I’m betting is the real issue. This guy's got it easy, I thought, and I told him so. Out in the real golfing world there are greens to hit, not just plywood signs with numbers painted on them like at the range. Did he think Gary Player’s game got better by aiming at the person inside the little cage of the tractor retrieving balls at the range? Player could choose the right club at the right time every time, and always be in style. Until Tiger, golfers everywhere didn’t fully appreciate the combination of style and substance. For me, although I appreciate and admire style, I don’t have any. I can’t match a smart pair of slacks with a nicely fitting shirt. Even if I did, I don’t have the right body type to do it justice. Although my shoulders are nicely square, my legs are too short. I’ve got to be a shot-maker. If I can’t choose the club to get home with, I’m dead.

“Forget my back,” I said to the pro. “Get into my head. Help me get home. I need to pick a club!”

But he was unrelenting, insisting that if I was serious about my golf game, I’d consider a career change. This, I thought, sounds too much like my father talking to me about the landscaping business. Although he never would have suggested that my game would improve if I changed careers. Still, it resonated with me enough that I immediately terminated my relationship with the pro. With my plan for a neighborhood golf course, I won’t need him anyway.

The logical next step, then, is to speak with all those neighbors whose front yards will serve as the holes, and especially speak to the owners of the house a full 7-iron away. There’s a young dogwood that’s perfect for the pin, centered as it is between a driveway and a flagstone walkway. And, more good news: these neighbors are new, having moved in just last week. All I need to do, I hope, is to become friendly with them, and maybe offer them free lawn care.

I’m a planner by nature, and although this may seem like an over-simplification for the task at hand, I’m also a firm believer in meeting things head on. I look out my second story window now across the expanse of pavement toward the house in question, a 1920’s village colonial with white clapboard and newly installed energy-efficient double-hung windows. A red SUV sits in the driveway.

I hold the leather grip of the 7-iron, interlocking my fingers as I would on the golf course, and swing the club in slow motion, imagining the ball dropping softly onto my neighbor’s grass within inches of the dogwood tree. This, I think, is something I wish my father could be here to see.

Stuffing three golf balls into the pocket of my shorts, I walk down the stairs and onto my front porch. The smell is of humid city air mixed with cut grass, as a neighbor down the block mows his lawn. I stand on my own grass looking down at my feet, still clad in work boots. Although I rent, my landlord’s allowed me to experiment on this lawn as long as I take care of it. I planted creeping red, a fine fescue, before last winter and then tried over-seeding with Kentucky Bluegrass. The turf is performing quite well, and will make an excellent first tee. I consider getting my golf shoes out of my golf bag, but instead I drop the golf balls onto the grass and begin to take practice swings in earnest. My back is sore as usual, and as I stop to stretch I see someone walking across the designated first green.

He’s far enough away so I can see only that it is a man and not a woman, and that he’s dressed well, if not unusually, for this humid summer night. It being dusk, colors are sometimes difficult to distinguish, especially dark ones. I remember once buying what I thought was a black shirt only to find it was dark green, so I don’t want to be quick to judge. I stand completely still, and squint.

He walks from the SUV to the dogwood, dragging something behind him what appears to be a hose and sprinkler. Good lawn care is an admirable trait in anyone, and I’m delighted in this case for obvious reasons. At least as far as the lawn care goes. Gradually, though, it’s registering with me: not only is this guy wearing black, long pants and all, but he’s somewhat short with short hair and an excellent sense of style. My back begins to feel worse as I think about short golfers in good shape and the people they resemble.

There's very little traffic in the neighborhood tonight. The sky darkens as the sun begins to set, so I need to act fast. Whoever my new neighbor is, he's gone back into the house. I’ve abandoned my original plan, the one that included me endearing myself to these new folks. A new plan begins to take shape, but before I implement it, I need to be sure who I'm dealing with. I pick up one of the golf balls and stuff it into my back pocket. With the Tour blade on my shoulder, a grown-up version of that little kid who long ago toured the neighborhoods with a junior Chi Chi Rodriguez on his shoulder, I walk the expanse of pavement toward the house. I silently count the paces from my house to the neighbor's as I walk, three feet to a step. I'm thinking: why not confirm the distance?

I keep my eyes focused on the yard in hopes of seeing this guy again, in hopes of making a final determination that it is not Tom.

Eighty yards so far.

Nothing would make me happier than to discover that I've made a terrible mistake. Chalk it up to a long day in the sun. Maybe my new neighbor and I will laugh about it over a beer. Another guy dressed like Gary Player, that's not unusual. Good style is always “in.”

I imagine anyone seeing me now assumes I'm just taking a pleasant stroll, maybe headed the several blocks to the field down the street to practice chip shots. I’ve done it before.

One hundred and twenty-three yards.

A car drives by as I get closer to the house. The sprinkler passes back and forth on the lawn.

I'm less than a chip shot away now and I see movement in the house. A light is on in one of the first floor rooms. Silhouettes of a man and a woman behind a drawn curtain move around. The front door swings open and Tom Taylor walks out. He doesn't see me at first. I stop.

One fifty-one to the curb.

“Hello,” I say, and he turns. There is no recognition in his face.

“Hi.” He looks at the 7-iron on my shoulder. I think he’s scared. I like that.

I take the golf ball from my pocket and toss it up and down. I consider doing a Tiger Woods, using the club head and golf ball like a paddle and rubber ball, but I'm not in the mood to show off. I don't know what to do now, but I do know I don’t want this guy as a neighbor, especially in the house that was to have been the first hole in my neighborhood golf course. And there’s no way I’m going to give him free lawn care.

I don't say anything else. I turn and walk toward my house because I know what must be done. It's almost completely dark now, so I'll need to rely on street lights and light from the surrounding houses. When I reach my house, I lean the 7-iron against my truck, and go to my storage area in the basement. There, beneath more clutter, is a three gallon plastic container filled with used balls I've accumulated over many years. I never can bring myself just to throw them away.

Call it an adrenaline rush, I don't know, but my back doesn't bother me as I carry it out of the basement and onto the lawn. Next, I retrieve my golf bag from the apartment, set it up next to me, and then tilt the container of balls enough so that about fifty balls fall out. I’ll need all of my clubs tonight.

 

The first shot, a 7-iron, is lost in the darkness. I hear it thwack against something solid, probably the side of a house, but certainly not Tom's. The next shot, though, is perfect. It's a big 7-iron, a majestic 7-iron, a Tiger 7-iron, high and far. Although I never see it in flight, from the moment I hit it I know it's on target. The shattering of glass from Tom's second story window confirms it. That’s a one-shot penalty, I think. But I shake that off and continue. I practice drives and fairway woods. I practice drawing the ball with my 3-iron, and slicing it with the 5-iron. His SUV is the unfortunate recipient of an errant shot when I falter a little, my 6-iron trajectory flattens, and the ball careens off the pavement and into its tailgate. The thwunk from hitting the roof of the house, though, is especially satisfying. Tom's yells grow louder now, as he stands next to the dogwood.

Neighbors watch the commotion from their doorsteps and yards. That last 7-iron was pin high, ten yards right.

I'm in a groove.

I can feel it now, Dad.

I’m a focused shot-maker tonight. I could hit any target: swing set, jungle gym, see-saw. I could be on the 12th at Augusta and I would have no fear. That tiny green is mine. The water hazard? Not even in play. I’m outside at work and the club selection is spot-on. A little to the left and I'll be home.

Rod Siino grew up in a small Rhode Island town, and now lives in Massachusetts surrounded by horse farms and trees. When he’s not writing or earning a living to support the writing addiction, he’s being held hostage by his 2-year old twins, Bennett and Maya, who are convinced the world and everyone in it are here to serve their every desire without delay. He is contemplating a research project to determine the validity of this notion. Meanwhile, he is working to complete his first short story collection. His work has appeared in Inkwell, The Providence Journal and online at Zoetrope All-Story Extra, among others.

Quickmires, fiction by Mark Staniforth

The obituaries made the Quickmires out to be good people: hard-working, good-to-honest, God-fearing country folk — all that shit. They spun more fine words once they were gone than the family ever had hurled at them as they preached their fire-and-brimstone stories of imminent doom in the Kwik Save car park most Sabbath mornings.

Nine of them pegged it in the flames that Christmas Day night: old Artie and Missie, their three eldest — Jared, Nehemiah — Nemo for short — and Rachel; a couple of other lasses they'd snared in from out of the dale and had always claimed to be distant cousins; and a pair of blue-eyed, blond-haired bairns of no more than six months old whose names and parentage stayed unknown.

There were those who said they had it coming, stacking up all them gas bottles to keep them warm at the end of the world. Others whispered they signed their death warrants the day Jared Quickmire started stepping out with the lass of the Thackerays, had her bun up her hair and dress right proper and as good as sew up that famous filthy gob of hers for keeps.

They made the verdict accidental death. Those who made it so were town folks, from the same cloth as those who wrote the Quickmires were good people. Again, there was no queue of locals ready to pronounce otherwise: hardly no-one willing to spill their conspiracies for the TV crews who were quick to join the hunt for clues. But it's a fact plain as day that just about everyone round the place kept their own theory as to why the verdict was as bullshit as the obits: some said suicide, others said them Thackeray boys had been itching for something more ever since they'd headed up in a convoy of four-by-fours with enough loaded shotguns to leave nothing to chance, and stole back their lass from under the Quickmires' noses.

You could say at least those who perished in the flames did so in the seeming sure knowledge of where they were headed. The whole lot of them would head down the Kwik Save, stand in a straight line behind Artie ranting out his eternal damnations. He'd rock back on his heels and punch out his words like a flyweight boxer while the rest of them — Missie, Jared, Rachel, Nemo, sometimes the younger ones wore painted-on wholesome smiles and eager head nods that said Judgement Day was a thing to savour.

Sometimes, folk would nudge up close and throw insults. The bravest would go face to face, spit back their own raw theories on evolution. Some tossed eggs. The Quickmires would never address you direct, no matter the provocation. They'd keep preaching out their warnings while the yolks dripped down their fronts. Then soon as the church bells started clanging, they'd pack back in their old wagon and head back up that long, dead-end track of theirs for another week of near-on hibernating.

There were few dared venture up the Quickmires' lane further than the third locked gate with its daubed-on 'Keep Out' sign: a post box was propped by the side, though it was seldom filled. Far as folk could make out, the Quickmires were fairly much self-sufficient. They plucked out veg from the shallow moor soil and grazed a rag-tag bunch of sheep and goats. Sometimes, Missie Quickmire would venture down in town and clean the Kwik Save shelves out of soup tins. She'd nod her thanks but never look those who served her in the eye.

Folk had been working on figuring out the Quickmires long before their deaths, and their deaths did not discourage them. Truth is there's only a handful could provide any answers, and there's not so much as a soul still drawing breath who'd dare confront the Thackeray brothers in the hunt for clues.

Whatever, it can be said without contradiction that Jared fair tamed that girl. Zeta was a Thackeray a mile off, coarse-tongued and glinty-glared, and just as prone to thinking up new ways of expressing her fury as her good-for-nothing older brothers. Her scrap with big Betsy Wardle over some slight or other was a thing of legend: it lasted two whole hours and swung from the car park woods to the playground and up Lunns’ farm, and had them both stripped down to their bras and gouged in blood. It finished when big Betsy Wardle collapsed from exhaustion and rather than accepting the win Zeta Thackeray went and rolled Betsy Wardle right in the chicken coup and infected her up so bad she spent a week on a drip and to this day gets a thumping in her lughole that keeps her up nights.

A week or so in Jared Quickmire’s company and Zeta Thackeray was acting ready to drop to her knees and beg forgiveness. Whether it was her who set her heart on Jared or him intent on doing some converting is not clear. What is known is that Jared always was the finest looking of the Quickmires, with his shock of blond hair and eyes deep and green as moss pools, and there were plenty of lasses who would happily have born themselves again in his company. Those that saw them together spoke of Zeta Thackeray fair drowning in them eyes of his. She took to wearing the same shapeless sack dresses favoured by Missie and Rachel and washed the bleach from her hair and the coarseness from her mouth, moved into that Quickmire farmhouse pretty much lock, stock and barrel.

That was more or less that as far as Zeta was concerned, that is till them brothers of hers heard enough word of the Quickmires’ God-weirding ways they took it upon themselves to rustle her up a little unexpected salvation, Thackeray-style. No sooner had Zeta been hauled out than she was paired up with a squaddie from an army camp on the edge of town. They said he bagged her for half his yearly wage and the promise he'd take her as far from Fryup as possible and keep it that way. Some say she came out bleached of her mind and is more than likely seeing out her days in some sort of padded cell, or else six foot under in the only place the Thackerays could find to hide their shame.

 

Rachel was Jared's twin: like him, gold-haired and deep-eyed and the type who got plenty a lad in the Kwik Save audience scheming to get under that sack-cloth.There were even boys who took to hanging round the Quickmires' lane bottom, figuring if Jared had took a friend for himself it followed that Rachel might soon be on the look-out for a suitable husband.

Greg Bulmer was the only known lad to ever speak to her: he was heading home from lamping with a ripe hare hung round his shoulders and his couple of lurchers slunk down by his side. He was wading out through thick fog and chanced a little up the Quickmires' lane and all of a sudden out loomed Rachel, dressed for a summer weekend despite the freeze. She said, ‘can I help you?’ and eyed Greg Bulmer in a way that made his mutts coil up round his knees, and Greg to drop his quarry and not stop legging it till he reached right home. He said later, ‘sure as hell I’d seen a ghost that night, that I’d pick up the paper next day and find some Quickmire tragedy, and the way things worked out, I can't help reckoning it was some kind of sign.' Those who doubted Greg Bulmer's story were directed in his back yard, where from that day on his mutts shook and whined up each time a fresh fog fell, and never did catch another hare in the rest of their sad-arsed lives.

 

Nehemiah — Nemo — did not share the good looks of his twin siblings. His eyes were muddy and his build was sharp and harsh. Word was Nemo was the weak link, hankered more for good life than his God. Nemo had been more seen for a while, racing his old yellow Chevette round the lanes with its windows wound down and Megadeth tracks shaking out of the stereo, and there was plenty of talk he was seeing Tara Marley on the sly. It hadn't escaped notice that Nemo had gone absent from the Kwik Save parade for the couple of Sabbaths before the fire all but wiped them out. Tara Marley said nothing then and has said nothing since. Word was while the Quickmire place was still smoking, she sat through the cop calls struck numb with either shock or secrets.

 

There was just one Quickmire who survived the flames. The firemen in the first truck to arrive on the scene told how they almost mowed down a skinny young kid stood out front in the mud tracks. She wore a grubby little smock dress and stared out big blank eyes while her siblings' screams lit the sky. Dinah Quickmire was pushing eight years old. She got shunted off to some other long-lost cousins while folk did their best to try to make sense of things.

For round about seven years the Quickmire farm stood black and ruined and there wasn't hardly a soul had the nerve to go snooping. Boys would hang round the lane end past sunset and swear if the wind blew right you could still hear the screams. But over time the interest eased and it seemed the fire had about licked the Quickmires clean out of history.

Then one morning when the sky hung red and the rooks cawed round the bare treetops, Dinah Quickmire came home. She arrived with a bunch of those so-called relation folks and they set about working patching up the old place. They toiled all the daylight hours and kept themselves to themselves. They waved off offers of help from folk who sensed the chance of being centre of attention. Once they'd finished, save the scorch marks on the brickwork, you would never have known of the tragedy that once went on under that roof. Soon enough, Dinah came to taking up her old man's place outside the Kwik Save, jabbing her Armageddons like the best of them. She wore shoulder-length hair black as coal dust, and her eyes were same drowning type as her eldest siblings. There were plenty of boys reckoned those Sabbath they got a glimpse of salvation.

 

That first summer home, Dinah Quickmire took to swimming at the rockpool most Saturday mornings. It was Ged Blackstock who caught sight of her first, as he headed up the lane in the hope of hooking rainbows. Fact is that day he hauled in a whole lot more. Dinah's swimsuit was low-cut and gloss-white and stuck to her new-grown curves like celebration cake icing. You might have thought Ged would have kept the sight for himself, but he had the kind of gob that could keep nothing in for long. Soon a bunch of boys had gathered. They hid behind the bushes, watched her stroke the water, shake dry in the dawn light. There was something in her ways that kept them silent. Each time ended the same, with Dinah hooking back on her push-bike and heading back up the old track to that cursed old farm of hers.

Soon enough the tall talk started and it was no surprise when Jim Marsden vowed he'd be the first to tame her. Jim Marsden had fucked just about every other his-age girl round the place by the time he was fifteen, and he reckoned his quick wit and a bunch of Old Testament verses he'd lodged in his brain since hanging round Kwik Save would be enough to do the trick.

One morning, while Dinah was stroking through the lake's far reaches, Jim Marsden stripped down to his boxers and waded right on out. He flashed a thumbs-up and gasped as he sunk in the cold. The early sun dappled the lake surface. Jim Marsden swam slow out of ear-shot, kept a safe distance from Dinah who flipped to back-stroke and carried on seemingly unawares. She reached the edge of the lake as usual, shook out and pulled up a towel over her shone-up skin. Jim Marsden shivered out all bug-eyed soon after, made out he'd snared himself a good thing. When Dinah set back off up the Quickmire lane, leaving drip-tracks like a kind of lure, Jim Marsden ducked up after her, hauling Ged with him for proof.

 

Two weeks later, that same lane was trod down with traffic as the whole place lent a hand to the Marsdens and Blackstocks trying to hunt out their boys. They hacked back the gorse and poked round the lake side while a pair of cop divers did their best to dredge the murk. The cops were quick to fence off the farmhouse on account of those who claimed they knew full well the answer to the boys' fate lay behind those Quickmire doors. The cops drove Dinah and the rest of them out in a blacked-up van while a Thackeray-led mob roared and hollered. They kept them in two days for questions, and good as stripped the place back to its old knock-down self. There were plenty of rumours over what they found. There was talk they'd started hoarding the gas tanks again, and their closest outhouse was back full of food tins to last at least six months. There were bags of cash and piles of guns, and a pack of cyanide pills on standby in case Judgement Day got a little too hot. There were a pair of blue-eyed, blond-haired bairns in the cellar, with snow-white skin as they'd never seen daylight. There was all that shit and more. But what they sure didn't find was any shred of suggestion that Jim Marsden and Ged Blackstock had ever made it that far.

 

Eight months later the cops shelved the case. There were enough had started to reckon Jim Marsden and Ged Blackstock had cooked the whole thing up as a means for getting away. It was a just about believable story where Jim Marsden was concerned. He'd been boasting over screwing a girl from a tough part of town, the kind of girl whose folks made the Thackerays out like guardian angels. Jim Marsden had been working double shifts at the butcher's, and some claimed he'd spoke of saving his cash for a one-way ticket out of the place before the girl in question started to show. They reckoned he'd come to realise that only supposed death was ever going to be good enough for the family in question to stop from sniffing him out.

Ged Blackstock was a different story. His folks were fifth generation Fryup farmers and the whole bunch of them had rarely ever been known to venture beyond Fryup limits. Ged had shown no inclination to be different, and his hedge-hair and scrawny stick-out frame had pretty much made up his mind to show no inclination where girls were concerned. Some said his trout poaching trips were just a front, that he'd grown sick of the whole farming business and couldn't face telling his old man he wasn't up with the first-born tradition, but somehow it didn't ring true.

 

The Marsdens and Blackstocks are just about the only ones who still hold out hope of something. Each anniversary, they paste posters and launch TV appeals. They've paid for the lake to be dredged up twice more. There's been folk headed out of the forest with tales of wild-haired tramps, and more than twice the Kwik Save store room's been burgled of long-life food tins. They've even had a medium head in the Quickmire house, which is back to derelict. They say he headed out with nothing but a snow-white swimsuit to show. It's probably bullshit, but that's what they say.

Mark Staniforth is a writer and journalist from North Yorkshire, England. His e-book of short stories, Fryupdale, is available via Smashwords. He blogs random book reviews at Eleutherophobia. He likes boxing, curry and everything written by Donald Ray Pollock.

Tag-A-Long, fiction by Misty Marie Rae Skaggs

My fuzzy, earliest memories unfold in a sprawling house on a hill. A house situated at the peak of a ridge, overlooking a bright green holler we filled with corn and tomatoes and beans and a strawberry patch I loved to get lost in. We lived off a gravel road, off the main road, on a dirt road, off the grid. We lived nestled safely inside our heritage, inside a house with character…gumption, that my family built from the basement up long before I was born. I've seen pictures of Mommy laying foundations. A broad shouldered, big-busted fifteen year old in cut-offs and pig tails, bandana tied tight across her forehead. She's preserved — sweaty and sort of tinted sepia and frozen in time with her muscles straining against the weight of a fat, concrete block. Two tow-headed little girls with gap toothed grins bounce around her legs.

The layout of the place seems a little funny looking back. Our rooms weren't stacked one on top of another. We weren't separated by stairs and stories, by floors and ceilings and doors. Instead, skinny hallways wandered off from the kitchen and living room. Lazy, carpeted paths meandered back to the bedrooms and the bathroom and the brand new garage that always smelled of pine needles and grease.

On Friday nights, the sprawling living room was filled with a fine mist of Aquanet Extra Super Hold. The kind of no nonsense hair spray that could take your breath away if you were unlucky enough to stumble through a fresh, pungent cloud of it. That was the smell of brand new femininity being pushed to its limits. The cute little girls from the snap shot that stuck with me, were almost all growed up. Wielding two giant, shiny, purple cans, they worked simultaneously — shaking and squirting, clinking and hissing, gossiping and giggling. They ate up ozone and lifted layer after layer of soft blonde hair, eighties style. It left a strangely sweet, chemical scent hanging in the air to mix and dance with the smoke from Mamaw’s Winston cigarettes and the strains of a Bad Company record blasting down the hall. It tasted like rubbing alcohol on my tongue if I opened my mouth too wide as I laughed loudly. Around the same time the sun slid down behind the ridge, my aunts started getting ready for high school dances or rural route parties that unfolded in some barn or trailer down the road a little ways.

Papaw would settle into his spot at the end of the couch, leaning on the frayed, plaid arm, half watching the local news and half watching my aunts prissing and preening. If Mamaw wouldn’t let them out the front door, they’d wiggle through the tiny bathroom window eager for Friday night freedom. In spite of the fact that the window was an even tighter fit than the acid wash jeans the girls loved to squeeze into. I was the look-out, perched in a wobbly way on the toilet seat staring up and out on tiptoe through the rectangle of evening air just above my head. I never told, not once. And they promised one day they’d take me with them out into the night way past my bedtime.

Twenty years later, the phone rang. At two in the morning. And it was that shrill, worried kind of ring I can never sleep through, no matter how drunk I am.

“Hello?” I mumbled.

“Get dressed. We’re comin’ to get you.” Shelly snapped.

And I thought I heard angry, female voices in the background, rising and falling frantically. Stabbing at each other in the wee hours. I heard my aunt Stacy screaming words that hadn’t slipped past her lips since she found Jesus —

“That sorry sonuvabitch! He thinks he can hide from me? Well I’ve got news for him, this whole county ain’t that fucking big…”

And the line clicked.

And suddenly I was scooting out of bed and sliding into my jeans, leaning over to knot my beat-up sneakers tight with my head still spinning at a hundred proof. I recognized that tone of voice, had heard it from her before. She meant business.

The girls must’ve flown over Stark Ridge, picking up speed down straight stretches on Christy Creek. By the time I was snubbing out my first cigarette butt on the stoop they were squealing through the red light on Bridge Street and slamming to a stop in front of me. Fifteen minutes flat.

“You ready?” Shelly asked, whipping the silver car door open.

“What’re we doin’ guys?” I mumbled, already shuffling towards them with an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Shelly and Stacy had been in bed by midnight for the last decade. They were responsible, respected women now. Women who brought some of the best dishes to church potlucks and doled out sound advice to fellow members of the congregation and the community at large. My aunts were the beautiful, blunt, hillbilly versions of suburban soccer moms. With a vengeful, Baptist, God on their side. But I still remembered the days when they were bigger than me, straddling my chubby wriggling form in the front yard, applying Charlie horses and Injun burns liberally until they extracted the secret or promise they expected. I remembered before.

“You’re driving. We’re riding. Are you going or what?” Shelly was already squeezing into the backseat of her Toyota Camry.

I was sliding behind the wheel.

It was never really a question.

Stacy hadn’t spoken a word. The only movement from the passenger seat was the insistent bounce of her right knee. It was a steady, automatic jerk forceful enough to jiggle the whole car in an anxious shiver. I inched out of the parking lot of my apartment building and turned onto US 60.

“You know where Blue Stone’s at?” Shelly asked.

Clicking the turn signal down, I nodded and fumbled in the floorboard looking for the lighter my trembling hands couldn’t quite hold onto. But instead of a light, my fingers found about a foot of cool, lead pipe crammed between the seats. Stacy smacked my hand away and I was six years old again. Slouching guiltily and hunching my shoulders, I cracked my window open wider, ready for the sticky air to hit my face. My sweat smelled like cheap vodka and all I could think was, I need a drink. Or those last two valium stashed in the bottom of the Band-Aid box at the back of my medicine cabinet. We crept through every aisle in every trailer park in the out that winding road. Crunching up and down gravel aisle after aisle, we were looking for someone we loved.

When I was six years old, Stacy was twenty one. She was a brand new mother and a wife of five years at that point. I can’t imagine. Here I am, inching up on thirty and barely able to take care of myself, an undergrad with an alcoholic gene and a broken heart in a one bedroom apartment next to the water treatment plant. When I was twenty one, I was busy discovering booze and loud, punk rock bands at hole in the wall bars halfway across the country. Stacy was working full time and coming home to care for a two year old girl with her Daddy’s big, brown eyes and a typical only child attitude. Twenty years later, that adorable little girl, the one who would lip sync to Dolly Parton and strut her stuff on the coffee table, is the reason we were out that night. She’s the reason Stacy was twitching and Shelly was poking me from the backseat, signaling for me to slow down every time we passed a little red sports car with big, gaudy rims.

He hit her, she said. Her frat boy boyfriend, her first serious boyfriend, the one with the loud mouth and even louder cologne. He choked her and beat her and threatened her life and she had managed to hide it from all of us. I think that’s the part we couldn’t understand, the part that really pissed us off. How could we not see it? A family as close as ours. A sadness in her eyes or a tremble in her voice that meant so much in hindsight. For months he had moved among us undetected, bullshitting about the Giants at family birthday dinners and bringing Mamaw flowers. I think I knew the moment I got into the car we were out late looking for revenge. We were taking advantage of the few hours when my aunts could slip away from their lives and their selves and their sleeping husbands and children. Our search was damn near exhausted when we happened across what we’d been looking for.

Stacy spotted the souped up car he loved to spend the rent money on in the parking lot of a popular restaurant. I could feel my pulse in the palms of my hands as I gripped the steering wheel, easing up behind the unsuspecting couple. My teenage cousin pulled out of his arms and looked back and for a split second, I saw her face captured in the headlights. She was terrified, eyes wide and swollen from crying. But I couldn’t really tell if she was afraid of him or of us.

“Leave it running,” Stacy said, opening the door and stepping out.

Shelly slid across the backseat to follow her as she stormed toward the hot, red, car.

Suddenly, I felt disconnected. Moving without thought, operating on auto pilot I leaned forward, grabbing the pipe and dropping it in the driver’s seat as I got out. The car door became a flimsy shield positioned between myself and what was about to unfold ten feet in front of me.

Shelly was always the tallest of the females in our family. And she was bean pole skinny since birth, all arms and legs and long neck. But those arms were deceptively strong for her slight frame. They were muscled up from years of lifting and pulling and stitching countless bales of heavy denim at the sewing factory. Her workouts sprang from sweaty summers yanking tender tobacco plants from their unsuspecting beds and hefting ten pound, blonde haired, blue eyed babies along with her everywhere she went. Once she wrapped those arms around Kelly’s waist, I knew there’d be no escape.

“Get the hell out of that car!” Shelly commanded.

And I watched, in slow motion. Her arm reaching out and then coming back, grasping his striped shirt collar tight. Even the back of his head looked scared and surprised somehow as she snatched him out of his precious automobile and deposited him on his ass on the concrete. Scrambling to his feet, he opened his mouth —

“You crazy bitch!”

Stacy stood stock still in front of him, her fists clenched into rocks and planted on her hips. I never saw his face that night. He didn’t dare to look away from her, a woman possessed and bathed in lamp light and head lights and raw, unedited anger.

“Now son,” she began. I could tell she had been practicing this particular speech in her head as we were driving around the curves across Blue Stone. “You know you’ve got a whippin’ comin’.”

“Bullshit!” he protested, moving closer to her with his chest puffed out.

“You can either stand here and take it like a man or I can tell my sister to get that .45 out of the back floorboard,” she offered the ultimatum simply.

He stepped back and dropped his head and Stacy cocked her arm at an awkward angle. She issued a hard right hand to the side of his face, to a sensitive spot right above his ear, and he dropped to his knees.

And then she fell on him — both fists flying through the thick July air with purpose. She connected again and again, his head and neck and shoulders. The single diamond of her engagement ring snagged pieces of his scalp. Dark droplets of his blood splattered and dribbled down over the car’s pearlized paint job. The red didn’t match. All I could hear were the sounds Stacy’s grunts of exertion and the hollow, dead crack of his skull when she hit him. And hit him. And hit him. 

Misty Marie Rae Skaggs, 30, is a two-time college drop-out who currently resides on her Mamaw's couch in a trailer at the end of a gravel road in Eastern Kentucky. Her work has been published here on friedchickenandcoffee.com as well as in print journals such as New Madrid, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Limestone and Inscape. On June 9th, she will be reading her poems on the radio as part of the Seedtime on the Cumberland Festival. When she isn't baking strawberry pies and tending the backyard tomato garden, she spends her time reading and writing damned near obsessively in the back porch "office" space she is currently sharing with ten kittens.

Her Daddy's Money, fiction by William Matthew McCarter

Her Daddy’s Money was the hottest rock club in the Parkland; filled with Technicolor brilliance; a kaleidoscope of lights pulsing to the beat of primal music that penetrated and inundated the senses as it changed the milky white skin of young, long-haired, scantily clad women into varying hues of amber, blue and then scarlet red—the color of sin and decadence. I hastily inhaled the bubble gum scented smoke from fog machines mingled with the burning tobacco and the steady stream of alcohol flowing through the air—the unmistakable scent of a promiscuous nocturnal existence, doing light speed in the fast lane of life. A surreal fantasia; a modern Saturnalia; where you set aside all of your troubles and ride the carousel of inebriation.

As I rambled, stoned immaculate glowing radioactive in the dark, through the black lights leading out to the mezzanine where the tables were, I sensed how all of the lights acted like filters on a photographer's lens; distorting reality, filtering out the lines on your face, the minor imperfections that gave away your mortality; the small gray hairs that were beginning to rear their ugly heads; the love handles that began to accumulate as the years flickered by; the tiny crow's feet that were beginning to grow around the eyes, demonstrating that time waits for no man, reminding you that not even the pyramids of Egypt were eternal. The lights, the fog, the booze, the music; they were all filters, hiding those imperfections, insecurities, incongruities and inconsolable emotions. At Her Daddy’s Money, we were all gods, each of us immortal, celebrating that immortality in a land of terminal bliss where all humans want to go and none of us seem to get there.

We found a table over by the wall and soon, a beautiful waitress dressed in a black mini-skirt and tight, white pullover with her areola borealis pushing through the thin fabric asked if we needed anything to drink. Roscoe, A.J. and John all got beers, but I wanted to be daring in this filtered wonderland and ordered a Long Island Iced Tea, a marvel of modern toxicology. I never understood how you could pour every kind of liquor in the kitchen sink into a tall glass, cap it off with a squirt of Coke, stick in a lemon and magically make it taste just like Lipton Lemon Tea. This magical elixir was invented by a real David Copperfield of the cocktail glass and its sole purpose was to take the libation bearer into the atmosphere – to make you so fuckin’ high that you’d have to climb a flight of stairs to scratch your balls.

Most of us lived the greater part of our lives submerged – we were submerged in the superficial reality of our own consciousness – snared by the chains of our making – entombed in the iron cages of personal prisons that we construct ourselves. I didn’t drink alcohol as a social act and I never drank in moderation. I drank to get rid of the chains, to wake myself up, to move beyond the realms of my superficial consciousness. It seemed that the unconsciousness of being really fuckin’ drunk was a real liberating experience for me. I was stoned and wanted to cap off my buzz with as much alcohol that I could take in. I wanted to be efficient in my substance abuse and despite the fact that I had been somewhat depressed before, I was determined to finish off my evening in Dionysian fashion. “Let the madness begin,” I thought as the waitress returned with a tray of drinks.

“Did you see that girl's ass,” Roscoe exclaimed, as the waitress walked away. I looked up and saw the firm round cheeks of her cupcake ass carefully framed by a pair of black panties with the very short length skirt gently resting on her sculptured flesh. “Her cheeks wiggle around like two wildcats wrestling in a burlap sack,” he continued.

Briefly I thought about the waitress with the wildcat ass. Maybe if I could get inside that mini-skirt and feel that shrine of her perfect flesh up close and personal, then I would forget all about losing Cassidy. Soon, I came to my senses and reminded myself that nobody picked up waitresses except for people who worked in the club and the guys in the bands that played there. These vampires of the barroom weren't usually off work until three o'clock in the morning and the bar closed at one, so it was prohibitive to even try to pick them up. They were a part of the lights, the music, the fog and the liquor; they were illusions that just helped you to buy into the fantasy.

"Would you like to buy a rose," another hot looking chick asked, holding up a whole orchard full of long-stemmed roses neatly wrapped up in pretty paper.

"No thanks, I already ate,” I responded and then gave her a sly smile. She looked back at me like she was studying me and I could tell that she obviously didn't care much for the subject.

Love…lust…infatuation…baredickin'…it's all a lot like the roses that they walk around selling in the barroom–some guy springs for a rose, gives it to a chick and takes her home. She puts that same rose in some water and tries to nurture it, but it's already dead. Slowly it begins to fade and finally withers away into nothingness and so does the love, lust, infatuation and baredickin. All the leaves of the spring that are green turn to brown in the fall and wither away, crumbling in the wind. Your passions burn to ashes. You spend your whole life looking for love and all you ever get is pussy. I guess that's not so bad though–when life gives you a lemon and some girl comes along and squeezes it for you, you gotta make some lemonade.

As I watched the flower girl walk away, I took careful note of the outline of her figure that poked through the tights she was wearing. All of the girls who worked at Her Daddy’s Money were some real hotties. I suppose that was a prerequisite to getting the job: If you couldn't be one of the beautiful people, at least you could be pampered and waited on by them. As the flower girl continued strolling around the tables, peddling her tokens of love, I wondered if she was in love with someone, or if she had ever been.

Quickly, I dismissed that thought. Bartenders, waitresses, dancers, and nearly all of the creatures of the night weren't allowed to fall in love. It was some kind of unspoken or unwritten rule. If they did fall in love, then their careers were pretty much over. Their appeal lied in their patron's belief that he or she could get in their pants. As soon as the creature of the night became attached, then they became untouchable and as soon as they became untouchable, they lost their appeal and then lost their livelihood as a result. Love is a luxury they can't afford. I soon came to the realization that I was a creature of the night as well and I couldn't afford to love anyone either. The best I could hope for would be several strings of midnight rendezvous–an endless road of lust winding on into eternity, leading nowhere. At first, the thought of this seemed pretty depressing, but then, I thought that it was very liberating as well. Creatures of the night never had to worry about getting their hearts broken. There would be no more Cassidy’s letting down the toilet seat of my dreams.

Roscoe and I were the first ones to finish our drinks and decided to walk up to the bar to get another round. Although the waitress was beautiful and I would have liked to watch that wildcat ass of hers walk away at least one more time, she was pretty overwhelmed with the crowd she had on her hands and we drank much faster than she waited. While I was waiting for my second Long Island Iced Tea, Roscoe ran into Zero at the bar. He and Zero were talking about leaving the bar to go road hunting so I left him there and walked back over to the table where John and A.J. were sizing up the crowd and talking about this new song by a band called Collective Soul that the DJ was playing. As I got back to the table, I thought to myself, "John will be up in the DJ booth hanging out with Crystal before too much longer.”

Although John was married, he was a terrible flirt and I think hanging out with Crystal stroked his ego a little bit. Sure enough, John ran off to the DJ booth and A.J. ran off to the men's room to take a piss and powder his nose with some booger sugar, leaving me sitting at the table trying not to think about the "c" word and looking around at all of these women who could possibly help "salve over my wound," so to speak. Before I had the opportunity to fully explore all of my options, John came back from the DJ booth and started jumping my ass about appearing depressed.

"You better cheer up, mother fucker," he started, "There's more skanky bitches where Cassidy came from."

"John," I pleaded, "Just get off it. I’m just chillin’ out with my tea and takin’ in the scenery."

"I'm serious man–if you don't start being your drunken happy self, I'm going to go up to the DJ booth and have Crystal embarrass you in front of all of these people." he threatened.

"Go ahead and do whatever you want," I replied.

"Fine, I will," he said, walking away toward the DJ booth.

I didn't think there was anything that John could do, so I just sat back in the chair and enjoyed the monstrous buzz that I had going on. The next few minutes seemed to race by like a thoroughbred horse at Louisiana Downs as I began to feel my teeth getting numb from all the chemicals I had put in my body. Just as I starting riding this killer buzz, a spotlight hit me right in the face, nearly blinding me and Crystal’s loud voice came echoing through the PA system —

"Ladies–what we have here is a broken pathetic man,” Crystal said as she shined the light on me.

"This man was supposed to be getting married this afternoon, but the girl that he has been dating for the last seven years stood him up at the altar–John, here, was supposed to be the best man at the wedding and he says he'll pay any of you ladies a dollar just to dance with this poor jilted groom and maybe Billy can get past it all."

I could have killed him. That cocksucker really did it this time. All I really wanted to do was sit in the corner, feel my teeth getting numb and ride out this kick ass buzz I had going and he had to go and mess it up for me–the mother fucker even used my real name! Now what was I going to do?

No sooner than she had made the announcement, this chick with the biggest titties I had ever seen walked over to me and asked me to dance as Crystal blasted "Far Behind" by Candlebox from behind the DJ booth. I thought that “Far behind” was a good choice given the imaginary circumstances and would have complimented her on her excellent choice of music if I hadn't been swept away by the giant rack that was attached to the girl I was dancing with. She smiled at me and it was obvious that she was in dire need of some dental work–she could eat a peanut butter sandwich through a set of Venetian blinds. By that time, I was too far gone to care about her teeth (as long as she didn't bite) and wanted to make a good show of the whole masquerade so that John wouldn't have felt like he had gotten over on me with his practical joke.

The song ended and the girl and I kept dancing while I played along with the charade, laying it on thicker and heavier as the music played on. With her light blue and somewhat bloodshot eyes, she gazed directly into the heart of the deception that my comic soul had been weaving. We kept looking at each other and smiling. For a moment, I felt as if I could fall down inside of her eyes, but then realized that I was just really drunk and could probably fall down just about anywhere.

I soon discovered that she was at least as drunk, if not drunker than I was. Picking her up seemed a whole lot like shooting fish in a barrel. When things seemed easy like that, I had more confidence than Don Juan scaling the walls of a nunnery and consequently, got the same kind of results. It didn't surprise me at all when I offered to take her out to the van and get her stoned that she accepted. I knew I had it made after that. I always believed that if I could get a girl stoned or make her laugh, I could do almost anything to her. I had already got this chick to laugh a lot so I was sure that anything short of sticking my dick up her ass was fine with her.

You know, most of the time, I thought of myself as being a pretty good guy. Usually, I wasn't so devious about picking up women and didn't resort to elaborate schemes such as that one, but the elaborate scheme seemed to be working and so I just decided to say, "There but before the grace of God go I," and roll with it. One of life's little ironies was that if you really wanted to be a good guy (and I believed that I did), then you had to be able to think like a bad guy because although girls want to be with a good guy, they are somehow attracted to bad ones. That's why at your twenty-year high school reunion, you find out that the prom queen is still married to the high school quarterback who is still beating her up when he gets drunk on Friday nights and is still working at the IGA or selling insurance.

As the girl and I walked out the back door and headed toward the van, the music…the lights…the fog…the filters…all seemed to be stripped away and faded into the sultry silence of the Midwest midnight. Despite her snaggletooth smile, the night seemed almost becoming of the girl. Either that or the Long Island Iced Tea's had kicked in and clouded my vision in the fog of inebriation. Either way, it didn't really matter.

A.J. had left a joint stashed in a compartment in the back of the bandwagon that used to be where the paramedics kept some gauze or something. We sparked up the joint, huffed, puffed, and blew our brains out. Soon, I was feeling up the iron works inside of her dress. She was wearing one of those skin tight, spandex kind of things that looked more like a raincoat than a dress. This all weather fuck suit was so tight that it held everything in – her waist, her hips, and her ass… all of it. For a minute, I was reticent to unhinge the thing. I was scared that if I was crazy enough to unwrap her, there would be this huge sound and I’d suddenly have a life raft on my hands, but then decided that I had just smoked too much pot and was paranoid. I unleashed the beasts that she had hiding in her blouse and was amazed at how big they really were. Titties always seemed to look bigger up close and personal–unless the chick tried to trick you by wearing some kind of push up bra or stuffing or something. Bitches like that were evil. It was false advertising and they deserved nothing better than to wind up picking up some schmuck with a sock shoved down his pants.

Her body felt unexpectedly good. Before too long, we were going at it all hot and heavy while Otis Redding sang "Try A Little Tenderness" on the stereo. About half way through "These Arms of Mine," I heard the door begin to open, but couldn't answer it because I was in the middle of something–actually, it was more like somebody–the girl that I had been dancing with–and yeah, I knew her name–even though I was wasted, but I couldn't tell you that–something about protecting the innocent or trying to preserve the dignity of the guilty–actually, it's more like who gives a shit: life was just a carnival; she was just another ride and I was just another squirrel trying to get a nut so what does it really matter anyway? Well, since gossiping drama queens from Whitetrashistan need something to talk about and you can't call her "Oh, God" when you're not pounding her pee hole, let's just call her Melinda.

"You see, Billy gets really drunk and then comes out to the van and falls asleep–It never fails. The funny thing is," he paused with laughter, "he curls up in the fetal position and looks just like a little baby–watch," John said as he opened the door to the van and much to his surprise, found me banging Melinda. Most people would have shut the door and let it go, but John didn't fit the definition of what most people would call most people and social nuances like not interrupting your buddy while he's trying to knock off a piece of ass were never his strong point. Even if John had been born of noble blood and had possessed the traits of a gentleman, I was his best friend and the temptation of busting me banging someone in the bandwagon on top of the pecker track blanket would have been too much of a temptation for him anyway.

With Melinda and me stuck together and shivering like a couple of dogs shitting peach seeds as the cold wind rushed in the open door and pounded our bodies, John acted like nothing was happening and reached in the side door grabbing several beers from the cooler. He then passed them out to his entourage and smiled mischievously as he sparked up a joint that he had stashed in his pocket. I wasn't sure if Melinda didn't notice what was going on or if she was just too far gone to give a shit, so I just pretended like nothing in the world existed but the uglies we were banging together and kept pounding her as the madness went on around us.

When Roscoe started singing a verse to "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes." the jig was up; Melinda discovered our audience and she tried to kick me off her with the ferocity of a farm animal. "She'll be riding six white horses when she comes…" and then I did, whipped it out and erupted all over those enormous titties. After I snowcapped her Rockies, I got really self-conscious about being naked in the back of the band truck. Although I didn't really mind the spectators when I was wearing her–after all, what could they see — bare ass in the moonlight; I didn't like the feeling of being some sort of side show attraction and grabbed the pecker track blanket to cover myself up with, leaving her with only a crew sock to try and stretch across her enormous tits. The crew sock didn't do much good and I soon realized what an evil thing gravity could be if you were a girl. Either that or I was beginning to sober up a little bit and saw her in the light with all of her human foibles because those barroom filters were wearing off.

John and our entire entourage were standing out in front of the band truck, laughing, drinking beer and smoking as I struggled to put my pants back on. Melinda was holed up in the back corner of the band truck trying to get dressed when I got out of the van and slipped on my shoes. When I climbed out of the bandwagon, I noticed that A.J. had walked away from the whole scene and was standing at the rear of the van and felt obligated to comment on his noble behavior.

"You guys are a bunch of Cretins–At least A.J. had the good breeding to walk over to the rear of the van," I said as John continued to laugh hysterically about the situation that Melinda and I had found ourselves in. The truth was that we were all a bunch of Cretins. There were centuries of peasant blood and peasant culture coursing through us. If there was anything noble about our bloodline, it likely would have been thinned by the generations of us who had surrendered our lives for the illusory gains that we had received over the years – illusory gains that didn’t amount to enough to keep us subsequent generations from being bottom feeders as well.

"A.J.'s got nothing on you two," John said in between his hysterical laughter, "There was some pretty good breeding going on right here in the back of the van.”

Roscoe grabbed a notebook out of the front seat of the van, wrote something on it and then held it up like he was showing us a chart or a graph and, appropriated his best Dick Clark American Bandstand impression, said, “I give it a five. It has a pretty good melody line, but you really can’t dance to it.”

William Matthew McCarter is a writer and a college professor from Southeast Missouri. After completing the PhD at The University of Texas-Arlington, he has been busy writing and publishing work that brings attention to rural America. McCarter has recently published academic work in The Atrium: A Journal of Academic Voices, Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice and Fastcapitalism. He has also published critical work in The Ascentos Review and in The Steel Toe Review. McCarter published a short story, “On the Road in ’94,” in A Few Lines and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent creative publications have been in Stellaria and Midwestern Gothic.  McCarter has also published book reviews in Wilderness House Literary Review and in Southern Historian. In addition, his first academic book, Homo Redneckus: On Being Not Qwhite in America was published in March of 2012.

Poor Town, fiction by Kathryn Kulpa

It’s a poor town. Garbage piles up on sidewalks, bursting out of split bags, sour and milky donut shop coffee running in brackish rivers to the curb. Nobody comes to pick up the garbage, or sometimes they do, not every week: there are strikes, layoffs, nobody knows. People would complain, but who would they complain to? No one owns these houses, or maybe someone does, but he doesn’t live here.

It’s a poor town. Skinny cats slink through overgrown grass on the edges of potholed parking lots that have seen too many winters. The parking lots are never full. The store signs have letters missing. Their windows are plastered over. Out of Business. Going Out of Business. Saddest of all, sun-faded and once hopeful: For Lease. The people in this town don’t shop. They have no money. But of course this isn’t true. People shop. They take their payday loans against a payday that might in theory arrive someday and buy dead men’s sweaters, reconstituted mattresses, watered-down paint. They shop where the poor shop, Only a Dollar, Family Dollar, Dollar Daze, Dollar Knights, Dollar Dementia, Fistful of Dollars, Dollar Dollar Dollar. They eat dented cans of candied yams, boxes of powdered milk with labels in a language they can’t read, failed merchandising experiments pulled from the shelves of rich people’s delis after their expiration date. Squid ink ramen noodles. Pomegranate coffee.

It’s a poor town. People smoke. You see their tired arms dangling out the windows of their aged, blasted-looking American cars, trailing toxic clouds. You see their faces and you know: they are the faces of people for whom the worst has already happened.

It’s a poor town and a warm night and there is a boy sitting on the cracked cement stairs of a shuttered lunchroom, his finger on a plastic straw, twirling an empty soda can on its axis. Somewhere, not too close, a dog barks. A dusty-blue Cadillac drives by, windows open. A song flies out, sweet and breathless, urgent with desire. The singer a young black man, dead at an early age, like this boy’s brother, last year; like the boy himself, next year, or next month, but that’s not in this song now, in this voice that yearns and still believes. The boy looks up. Something guarded and old slips from his face. The song rises into the early summer dusk, the same here as anywhere. 

Kathryn Kulpa is believed to be indigenous to Rhode Island, although her true origins and purpose are shrouded in mystery. Her short story collection, Pleasant Drugs, is a popular item with shoplifters, who may or may not find what they seek in its pages.

HUCK & TOM in SOUTHERN ILLINOIS circa 1983, fiction by Joey Dean Hale

In 1977 Huckleberry Finn toppled into a salt water pit, reaching for the cap that had dropped off his head as he stooped over while attempting to catch a bullfrog with his bare hands and Tom Sawyer reached down from the bank and pulled him from the tainted water. Or was it the other way around? The blue cap read “Lester Pfister Seed Corn” and both boys were ten and the boy who had fallen in could not yet swim. So that must have been Tom Sawyer.

They were neighbors, with Tom living on a grain farm with his uncle and aunt, Silas and Sally Phelps, while Huck stayed at his dad’s old house though his father was rarely there and when he was home he was bitter and cussed and hit Huck with the forearm crutches he used to walk because of the polio that had plagued him since before time. Tom helped his aunt and uncle in their garden and eventually joined 4-H though his aunt never allowed him to bring Huck along when the family traveled to the Ducoin State Fair in August.

The boys rode an ancient Blue-Bird school bus an hour to school and then rode the same route in reverse on the way back home. The sun shined hot through the side windows of the bus and made the boys sleepy though they still wrestled and joked around in their assigned seats and one day when they rode the bus across the low-water bridge they witnessed a truck driver dumping salt water into the river, right where they sometimes refilled their canteens on their hiking and fishing excursions.

When they weren’t in school or doing chores they explored the remaining woods, those woods not yet pillaged by farmers and developers. They walked, then biked, then later rode Honda three-wheelers down trails and lease roads, across fields and sometimes into town to buy sodas and cigars and Hawken chewing tobacco at the gas station on the highway. Often they would see the man everyone just called Walter, who had been arrested for window peeking several times, using the outside payphone though he was never talking, merely listening, scratching his gray whiskers and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his filthy shirt or jacket, depending on the season, but no matter what the weather Walter always sat astraddle of his bicycle. And usually when Walter encountered teenage boys he pedaled away quickly to avoid their verbal abuse and the occasional rock or bottle.

The boys fished every farm pond and every good camping spot on the river that slid by their hometown and down along their rural neighborhood, although whenever Huck and Tom trespassed on Fred McDougal’s land, the farmer who owned and farmed most of the land in the county, they were more cautious and always double-checked to make sure they left no signs of them ever being there.

In the fall and winter they coon hunted with Huck’s dog Rockford until Huck’s dad took Rockford hunting while Huck was asleep and the hound followed a coon across Route 50 and was killed by a passing semi.

In the spring the boys hunted mushrooms in the woods along the river and every year Huck got poison ivy on his legs and fingers. Or was that Tom? In the woods they carried empty bread sacks to fill with mushrooms, sneaking onto McDougal’s property for those big morels, and one year they grew thirsty as they bicycled back up the road and stopped to refill their canteens at the church on the county line where Tom attended services with his family though Huck had never been inside and in the basement they discovered sugar and packets of cherry Kool-Aid and mixed up a pitcher using water from the faucet. Then a few weeks later the school bus broke down and those kids who lived relatively close got off and walked home, traipsing past this church, and when Tom suggested they go inside and make some Kool-Aid the older kids said, “Don’t you pay attention in church? You’re not supposed to drink that water. Some kind of chemical run-off from Fred McDougal’s fields ruined the well.”

They fished all spring and summer and squirrel hunted in the fall and when they discovered the oil field tank truck down by the low-water crossing, dumping salt water into the river then reloading with fresh water — though there were two signs stating, “No loading or dumping water” — they waited in the weeds like snipers and after the truck driver stashed the intake hose under the edge of the decrepit and unusable iron bridge the boys blasted that long black rubber tube full of holes.

They fished constantly and hoarded packets of salt from restaurants in town and used the salt to season channel cats they caught and cleaned and rinsed in the same water from which they had been taken and roasted the fish on sharpened sticks, foil-wrapped potatoes baking in the coals of their fire.

They fished non-stop in good weather and at fourteen knew everything. They knew Walter was a pervert and a window-peeker but more than likely posed no threat to them. They knew Fred McDougal to be a counterfeit-Christian who would do anything for a dollar. They knew Becky Thatcher was pretty and kind and truly religious but Amy Lawrence was much more fun to take into the trees at the edge of the park at night during the Fall Festival. They knew everything about everything until they brought up the day’s last trot-line, the river water like chocolate milk, and they saw the evil mystery fish snagged on a 5/0 hook, crawdad’s tail hanging out one side of his mouth like Castro’s cigar. Huck steadied the boat while Tom lipped the fish as one would a bass — or did Tom steer the boat while Huck removed the fish? — but this beast sank his fangs deep into the fish remover’s thumb. Their little jonboat rocked and jerked and six eyes grew wide and a previously caught bullhead flopped over the transom. And so they stashed their holey boat, bandaged the hand with an oily rag, and bicycled out of the river bottoms with that mysterious evil fish and five catfish, twisting on a stringer tied to the handlebars, collecting dust and flopping less the further they pedaled up the path. When Uncle Silas met them on the county line he said, “That’s a grennel. They ain’t good for nothin. Huck, your dad’s gonna be in jail quite a spell this go round. You’re probably gonna have to go stay with your aunt in town.”

So Huck had stayed with his aunt occasionally though he often slipped out and stayed at his dad’s old house, alone but comfortable, and when he did stay in town he would get up early and wait for the bread man to leave his truck unattended behind the grocery store and then Huck would snag one or two boxes of donuts for Tom and his other friends at school. Then at noon he would walk up town and spend his lunch money on two-cent pieces of green-apple gum and various flavors of nickel Jolly Ranchers, selling most of it later back at school for a dime or sometimes a quarter apiece to any kid with a sweet tooth and cash.

Huck smoked weed with the older kids in the park while Tom took sports too seriously and hung out with the jocks but the boys maintained their friendship and Huck often rode his three-wheeler to Tom’s house and once when Huck was kicked back on Tom’s bed, reading a fishing magazine, waiting for his friend to finish the putter-butter and jelly sandwiches they were taking with them fishing, Tom’s Aunt Sally stepped out of the shower and into the hallway, thinking she had the house to herself, and Huck saw her in all her glory as she strolled down the hallway naked, and afterward he liked her much more and was even more polite to her though he knew he was still not one of her favorite people.

And later when they got their driver’s license the boys roamed the country roads in the darkness. In 1983 large coons would bring twenty to thirty dollars at the fur buyers, even road kill coons if the fur was not damaged, so they cleaned the roads of any carcass worth selling. Then when muskrats invaded the river and began to destroy the river banks and the large levee around the nearby fields the boys began trapping muskrats and selling them for eight bucks apiece. The farmers who owned the acres inside the levee praised the boys and thanked them and gave them permission to hunt and fish and whatever else they wanted. So every morning at daylight the two boys, both juniors in high school at this point, made their way along the top of the levee, down the rough narrow trail that seemed to consist entirely of lime and mud and relentless thorn bushes. And even though Huck was against it, when Fred McDougal flagged them down, wanting them to trap the rats on his property adjacent to the levee Tom agreed.

One particular Wednesday morning the taller of the boys carried two muskrats in each hand, his blond hair blowing in the cold wind where it fluttered down past his brown sock cap. Thorns and bristles scratched against his coveralls and hip-boots. The other boy wore stained and faded overalls and a heavy tan coat with a long tear across the shoulder where red insulation peeked through, three muskrats in each of his hands. A black cap covered his scraggly brown hair and the briars clung to his clothes and vines laced around his thigh-high rubber boots and when they reached the place where they usually descended into the woods onto the trail that led to Tom’s truck Huck said, “Wait up.”

The teenager dropped the wet rodents and retrieved a pint bottle of Jim Beam from his hip pocket and took a swig. The whiskey glugged within the clear glass then warmed his chest.

“Give me a shot of that,” Tom said. He tossed down his dead rats, wiped his hands across the backside of his coveralls and took the bottle.

White ribbons of clouds streaked the gray sky and though it was seven o’clock in the morning the sun was nowhere to be seen on the murky horizon. Even the birds remained quiet and after another quick drink the boys moved on toward the rusty blue 4x4 Chevy that sat parked on a dirt road a quarter mile into the trees, their crunching footfalls the only noise in the cold solitude of the woods.

They tossed the animals in the bed of the truck among five other muskrats and shucked out of their over-clothes and traded the rubber boots for tennis shoes. Then Tom stuffed his trapping attire into the front corner of the truck bed before he hopped in, fired up the motor, and flipped on the heater and the radio. After a quick weather report the DJ spun Centerfold by The J. Geils Band and Tom said, “Have you seen this video?”

“I don’t guess so. Do they play it on channel 13?” Huck took another drink of the whiskey then tucked the pint bottle deep into one rubber boot.

“I doubt it. Me and Becky saw it in town there at Willie Temple’s the other night. They got cable, ya know.”

“Willie Temple?” He rolled up his overalls and stuck them in the floorboard beside his boots, then climbed up in the 4x4 and slammed the door. “What was you doin at that peckerhead’s house?”

“His folks were out of town so he had a little party. No big deal. Just a pony-keg. We just stopped in for a little while.” When Huck said nothing Tom said, “I bet you’d like that video.”

Both boys had gotten their hands wet earlier, setting the muskrat traps under water, and though their hands were now dry they remained dark red and painfully cold, as were their feet. Huck leaned forward and held his hands over the warm air from the defroster vents in the dash as they drove out of the woods.

“So when are we gonna go sell that fur?”

“Well, I can’t today,” Tom said. “I gotta take Becky to Effingham after school. You wanna go sell it?”

“I’m not sure when my aunt’ll get home with the car,” Huck said. He gazed out the filthy passenger window at the bleak muddy fields and the leafless trees. “She don’t really like me haulin dead stuff around in her trunk anyway.”

When they reached Huck’s dad’s old place they tallied up their take out in the garage. Tom said, “Well, let’s see. If old Muff gives us the same price as last week we’ll have twenty-three muskrats at eight bucks.” He found a small scrap of paper and an old ink pen on the oily disaster of a work bench and after swirling the pen around a few times to get the ink flowing he multiplied the price by the animals. “One eighty-four. And then ten coons at — say, twenty-five.”

“He ain’t gonna give us no twenty-five dollars for those run-over coons.”

“They ain’t too buggered up. But let’s just say, seven coons at twenty-five and then maybe twelve bucks for those others.”

“He probably won’t even buy that possum.”

“Oh yeah Huck, they get five or six bucks out of em. And he might give us thirty for a couple of those big coons.” He figured on the paper then said, “We might get a couple hundred bucks apiece.”

“That’d be handy,” Huck said.

After hanging his boots and overalls on a hook in his dad’s old garage Huck hopped in with Tom and the boys hit the road again. Fifteen minutes later when they reached the city limits Huck said, “Run up by the grocery store so I can get a Mt. Dew.”

“Hang on. I gotta swing by and pick up Becky. Then we’ll all stop and get a drink.”

“So you and Amy Lawrence are done with, huh?”

“Oh yeah. Me and Becky are the real deal. I’ll probably end up marryin that girl one of these days.”

“Good luck with that.” Huck had no interest in Tom and Becky’s love life though he had been contemplating Amy Lawrence more and more all the time.

They took a left on Jefferson Avenue and when they pulled up into the yard at Becky’s house she immediately stepped outside in her brown suede coat and pink stocking cap and gloves, books clutched tightly against her chest. Her father the judge stepped out on the porch and waved to them in the truck and they waved back.

Both guys opened their doors but she walked around and climbed in on the driver’s side and she and the driver kissed. “Hey, Huck,” she said to the passenger.

“Hey there,” he said.

As they turned back onto Main Street Tom squirted some window washer fluid on the windshield and the dried mud streaked and smeared and grew much worse before it finally got a little better but before Becky could complain about not seeing the road Tom said, “You sure smell good today.”

“Thanks,” Huck said.

“I meant her perfume.”

“Thank you,” she said then wrinkled her nose. “But something definitely reeks in here. What is that?”

“It’s Huck’s aftershave.”

“That’s bullshit. I don’t even wear aftershave.”

They all three laughed and Huck said, “Really, it’s that coon scent we use to cover up our smell.” He pulled a tiny round glass bottle from Tom’s glove compartment. “Here, try a little.”

Becky pushed his hand away and said, “Don’t you even open that while I’m in here.” Her blond hair was pulled back and she wore Tom’s class ring which she had resized by wrapping blue yarn around the side opposite the azure stone. She said, “Ya know, that smells just like Study Hall did last week. Like someone poured some of that nasty stuff down in the heat register or something.”

“I wouldn’t know nothin bout that,” Tom said. He parked on the street in front of the grocery store and the guys bought Mt. Dews from the machine. A few kids they knew cruised by and honked and across the street a few underclassmen hunkered down in their coats and trudged south down the sidewalk toward the school, book-bags in hand.

Becky said, “What are we doing this weekend, Tom?”

“Don’t you remember? Me and Uncle Silas are goin deer huntin down south in Pope County. I been tellin ya for a month now.”

“Well crap,” she said. “I wanted to go see An Officer and A Gentleman at the movies.” She sipped her soda. “Maybe I’ll just get Huck here to take me.”

“He’s probably got other plans.”

Huck said, “Hopefully.”

By late Saturday afternoon the temperature had risen to 47 degrees but a fog settled over the landscape and the air hung damp and surreal. After his aunt left her house with her new boyfriend Huck loaded the coons and muskrats into the trunk of her old car, leaving the run-over possum to lie beside the conibear traps they had taken up Friday morning.

Then he took a shower before driving south-east to Potter’s Fur Shed which sat way back in the river bottoms but up on a high bluff so that even though the driveway flooded almost every time it rained no water ever reached the building. Huck wore his new gray boots and blue jeans and a black western shirt under his denim jacket and his hair was still damp and combed in place when he stepped into Muff Potter’s amid the displays of rubber boots and overalls and hunting coats and knives and traps and calls and scents and lures and an outrageously huge bear trap leaning in one corner just for show.

Behind the desk old Muff, deep in conversation with a rough looking coon hunter, stopped himself in mid-sentence and said, “Good Lord. Look at that.” He slurped coffee from a heavy ceramic cup. “You gotta hot date tonight, Mr. Finn?”

“Not really. Just takin somebody to see a movie here afterwhile.” The room smelled of raw flesh and musk and new rubber boots. “I got some coons and rats out in the trunk for ya.”

Muff said, “A movie? Well, my land. Now don’t you go handlin that fur. You’ll get yourself all greasy.”

He pushed back from the desk and as if on cue the rough looking guy disappeared behind the curtain that divided the office from the skinning room.

“You been deer huntin, Huck?”

“Naw, Tom went down south huntin with his uncle. I just been busy helpin one of my neighbors feed hay. You go?”

He pointed to the orange pin on his hunting cap. “Killed out this mornin.”

“Get a big buck?”

“No, I shot a young doe. But she’ll be better eatin anyway.”

Muff followed Huck outside to study the animals in the trunk. There were splotches of blood and fat on his Carhartt jacket, the cuffs of his gray work pants tucked half-heartedly into his black engineer boots.

“Boy, you and Tom sure been busy, ain’t ya?” he said. He hefted a few of the larger coons and brushed their hair back and held them out at arms length and then he blew a part into the fur of a few of the muskrats, as if merely a formality.

He inspected the road kill coons a little more closely then scratched his chin stubble. “Tell ya what. I’ll give four hundred for the whole lot. How bout that?”

“How bout four-twenty-five?” Huck asked.

Muff smiled. “How bout three-seventy-five?”

“I guess four hundred’ll be alright.” He followed Muff back inside. A young man, not much older than Huck, in greasy blood-streaked overalls and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up carried the fur in from the trunk to the skinning room.

“So, is this young lady you’re takin to the pictures someone special or just a passin fancy?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He cleared his throat as Muff brought out his checkbook. “Think you could make it out for three-fifty, then just give me fifty in cash?”

“I don’t think that’d be a problem.” He smiled and handed over the long blue check and then removed a fifty from his ragged billfold. “Now you kids have a good time at your picture-show?”

That Sunday evening when Tom returned from deer hunting with his uncle he immediately drove to Huck’s dad’s old place where he found his friend watching a black-and-white television and eating Vienna sausages out of the can.

“Get a deer?”

“Shot a button buck,” Tom said. “Here’s some pictures.”

Huck picked up the Polaroids and flipped through images of Tom squatted down beside the deer in the bed of the pickup, his cousin Sid smiling with his nine-point buck.

“Them deer’s hangin down there in the shed if ya wanna go see em.”

“Maybe after this movie’s over,” Huck said.

“You get that fur sold?”

“Yeah, got four hundred even. We’ll have to cash the check tomorrow but I had Muff give me fifty in cash so I’d have a little spendin money.”

Tom plopped down in the only other chair in the run down living room. “So what all did you do this weekend?”

And so Huck told Tom about taking Amy Lawrence to the movies, leaving out most of the film’s plot and how he spent too much on sodas and Twizzlers and Bottlecaps. He skipped to the part about getting some wine from Old Joe outside the tavern and driving around in the river bottoms with Amy.

“I didn’t even know she drank wine,” Tom said.

“We had a pretty good time, I guess.” There had been a Cheech & Chong and a Richard Pryor and a few other movies playing that Huck would have much rather seen than An Officer and a Gentleman but that was the film Amy had wanted to see so that was the one they watched.

Huck said, “Later when we was drivin around we found an old lease road that goes back in behind the levee. Back on McDougal’s land. There’s a little low-water crossin there too, so we can use it to get across the river down there.”

“No way.”

“I’ll take you down there tomorrow after school when we put the traps back out. You are givin me a ride to town in the mornin, ain’t ya? I took my aunt’s car back to her house last night after I took Amy home, then just rode my three-wheeler back out here.”

“Well, I am supposed to take Becky to Flora tomorrow but we do need to get those traps back out.”

“Yep,” Huck said, thinking to himself, that girl always needs to go somewhere. He guzzled a can of pop and then tried to get the television station to come in better by adjusting the rabbit ears.

“Me and Uncle Silas stopped in up there at the gas station on the way back into town — he gassed up my truck since we drove it down there huntin — and them guys in there was sayin there’s been some more break-ins here lately. Ben Rogers’ dad had a bunch of tools stoled out of his shed and then old what’s-his-face over there by Wilcox Bridge had a three-wheeler and some chainsaws ripped off.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Huck said.

“I heard they’s trying to blame Walter but I don’t know.”

“Now where would Walter hide that stuff? In his little room there behind the Laundromat?”

“That’s what I was thinkin. But who knows.”

“Well, he is a weirdo but I don’t imagine he stole nothin.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

That Monday afternoon they loaded the traps back into the bed of Tom’s pickup and drove down to the levee. This time they went down the same lane as usual. They set the traps in the muskrat runs on the inside of the levee and took turns pointing at the deer and turkeys roaming around the enclosed fields. They counted thirty-seven deer and eighteen turkeys among the bean stubble and corn stalks and the seven or eight pumpjacks pumping oil into the tank batteries over by the east bank of the levee. The flares beside the wells seem to brighten and grow larger as the sun set and darkness took over for the evening.

Tom pointed to the gun case hanging in the rack in the back window of his truck. “Still got the 12-gauge here if ya wanna poach one.”

Afterward they sipped a little whiskey as they drove out of the woods in Tom’s truck. As per Huck’s direction they headed east at the county line until they reached the church, then cut back south, dropping back down into the bottoms. They followed along the outside of the levee, the road scarred deep with potholes and washouts. The path curved around a bend in the river then stopped at a T. They hung a right and crossed Jackson’s Bridge.

“Go on up the road a ways here.” He pointed ahead. “Okay, turn in that little road up there on the right.”

Tom said, “I never have been back in here. I figured the road just ended at this old well.”

“So did I. But keep on goin. I made it okay in my aunt’s junker so we won’t have no problems gettin down through here in this.”

It was now dark as they drove down this unexplored lease road covered with the typical hard dusty/oily road pack, trees thick on both sides and overhanging the path except at the wide place where sat an old rusty pumpjack like a dead dinosaur. They ventured further and further back into the woods then drove through a low-water crossing Tom had never seen.

Suddenly the road forked and Tom stopped. “So what was you and Amy doin way back in here?”

Huck ignored the question and said, “See, if ya just keep goin to your right, you’ll come to the backside of the levee, the south side. Okay? But see, if you took this here road to the left, you’ll come out right behind McDougal’s farm.”

“Oh bullshit.”

“I’m tellin ya. This comes out at that oil well behind McDougal’s house. Back behind his sheds. The pumper has to go down his driveway to get back there to pump that well. He don’t come this way.”

But Doubting Thomas had to see it for himself. He veered to the left and headed toward McDougal’s farm as Huck lit a cigar and rolled down his window. Soon the path widened and they could see the oil well flare glowing just over the next rise but as they topped that hill they suddenly drove up on Fred McDougal’s pickup parked crossways in the lease road. “Oh hell. There’s McDougal,” Huck said.

Tom shut off his truck and cranked down the window, listening to that laboring pumpjack, like a tribal drum. Huck said, “Let’s get outta here,” but Tom had already climbed out.

They heard voices among the silhouettes and as they walked closer to Fred McDougal’s truck they saw Fred pointing a shotgun in the face of a man on the ground while his son-in-law Archie aimed a flashlight in the same direction. Fred and Archie were dressed alike in practically new Carhartt jackets and workpants. Caps on their heads.

The filthy man on the ground wore dark thin dress pants and an old black sports jacket. His ivory ankles shining between the cuffs of his pants and his cheap blue tennis shoes. No socks. A red and blue sock-cap askew on his head.

Huck puffed on his cigar. He could tell it was Walter from town and noticed a bicycle lying in the weeds. The flare from the oil well blazed a dull orange, casting a gothic glow over the immediate landscape. Beyond that the world seemed distant and dark to the east. On the other side of the lease road a combine sat idling in the cornfield. Up ahead Huck could see a tractor hooked to a grain wagon.

McDougal said, “You boys been trappin?”

“We sure have,” Tom said. “We uh… we just come in a different way this time cause we’s thinkin about settin a few traps on the south end of the levee here.”

McDougal said, “You should’ve hung to your right where the road splits back there. That’ll take ya to the backside of the levee.”

The boys stared at Walter who seemed to be regaining consciousness, as if he had been knocked out.

Tom said, “What’s happened?”

“You boys might as well go on home and forget about all this,” McDougal said. “No need for you to get mixed up in it.”

Huck noticed Walter didn’t have any teeth and then he realized the bloody mouth and the broken dentures on the lease road. He tossed his cigar down and mashed it out with his boot.

“Don’t leave me with em, boys,” Walter slobbered. “They’ll kill me.”

“Shut up, dumb ass,” Archie said.

Walter leaned up on one arm. “They’s fixin to kill me before you all got here.”

“No, we was gonna call the sheriff and have him haul you back to the nuthouse,” McDougal said.

“What did he do?” Tom inquired as if working for the local newspaper.

McDougal turned to Tom but kept the gun in Walter’s face. “He was up at the house, nosin around. Lookin in the windows like he does. When I seen him, he took back down through here and I hollered at Archie there on the CB. He was shellin corn right yonder and then when I come down the lease road here in the pickup Walter here run right into Arch.”

“I’m tellin ya,” Walter said. “I was ridin by on my bike and saw two guys slippin into that west shed of yours. They’s gonna steal some tools or somethin.”

“Then why’d you take out down this way when I hollered at ya?” McDougal said.

“The way you was wavin that there gun I figured you was gonna shoot me.”

Arch said, “He ain’t as dumb as he looks.”

“So I guess we was lucky you just happened to be ridin by on your bicycle. You was protectin us from those thieves.”

“That’s right,” Walter said.

“Well, I didn’t see nobody else run through here,” Archie said.

“Them guys didn’t come this way,” Walter said. “They headed west. Probably had somebody waitin to pick em up in a car down the road.”

Archie kicked him in the ribs and said, “How many times you been caught lookin in on some old lady changin clothes? How many times you been arrested for makin obscene phone calls? How many times you done been down to Anna to the nuthouse?”

Tom said, “Have you already called the Sheriff or…”

“We’ll haul him back up to the house and use the phone here in a minute,” Fred said.

“Don’t leave me, boys,” Walter called out again.

In town Walter usually scurried across to the other side of the street just to avoid Huck and Tom. Not that they would ever have punched him or anything, just maybe unleashed their vulgar teenage mouths. But now here Walter was groveling, begging for help, as if he thought for some reason they were on his side.

“Shut up, Walter,” Archie said. He kicked Walter in the head. Then the ribs and groin.

“Hey, now,” Tom said. “Hey!” He could not feature them actually killing Walter but Archie just kept stomping him until finally Huck stepped back toward Tom’s truck. He reached in the open window and pulled Tom’s 12-gauge out of the unzipped case. When he stepped back around the truck he said, “Get off him.”

Archie stepped back and said, “What are ya doin, takin up for that sick bastard?”

“Look here, Huckleberry,” McDougal said. “You better think about this for a second.”

The pumpjack continued drumming its trance-like rhythm. Thump thump thump thump thump thump BAM thump.

After Walter somehow managed to sit up on his knees McDougal pushed the barrel of the shotgun against his whiskered cheek.

“What’re ya gonna do if we just shoot him?” Archie asked him. “Are ya gonna shoot us?”

Huck had not thought that far ahead but he knew he did not want to shoot anybody.

“Maybe,” he said.

“You boys got your head in the clouds,” Fred McDougal said. “Takin up for this pervert.”

“We’re not takin up for nobody,” Tom said. “But you need to either call the cops or… or somethin.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, boy,” McDougal said. “I work my ass off to raise a family and do what’s right and then ya got people like this. Or ya can’t even call em people, really. Runnin around — rapin — doin whatever the hell they want.”

“Then let’s call the cops,” Tom said, already envisioning his name in the paper once again.

“What’re they gonna do, lock him up again for a couple months? It obviously didn’t help the last time. He just can’t control his urges,” McDougal said.

“Go ahead and call the law,” Walter said. “Maybe they can catch them real thieves before they get plumb away, then you’ll see.”

“Shut up, Walter,” they all said.

“Oughta lynch ya right here and now and be done with it,” McDougal said.

“I thought you was supposed to be real religious or somethin,” Huck reminded him sarcastically.

“Hey now, I am a God-fearin man,” McDougal said. My whole family — we’re good people. Unlike this thing. So don’t even start that nonsense.”

Tom did not really know what to say but for some reason he said, “Uncle Silas said the reason everybody out here started drivin into town for church now is because your family ran em all off.”

“Your uncle can kiss my ass,” Archie said.

McDougal said, “Hey now, we work hard down here at the church. All of us. Me and Laverne. And Tina and Archie here. Darren and his wife Carla. Darren even fills in for the preacher sometimes. But that ain’t got nothin to do with this.”

“Your son Darren’s a preacher?” Huck asked. “The one who embezzled all the money from the Co-op?”

“Now… that was just a misunderstandin. And every dime of that was paid back. We’re good people.”

“So I guess it ain’t stealin if you pay it back, huh?”

“You don’t know nothin about it, Huckleberry.”

“I know if it’d been me or any of my friends we’d been in jail, not somewhere fillin in for the preacher.”

Walter chuckled weakly and spit blood onto the lease road.

Fred McDougal, Archie, Walter, and even Tom were all staring at him and Huck was not sure where he was going next. What should he say and do? What was Tom thinking?

Suddenly Walter made a clumsy grab for the gun in his face and a shocking blast exploded in the country night.

Nothing much remained of Walter’s face. It reminded Huck and Tom of a busted watermelon.

Finally Fred McDougal said, “He just… he just pulled on the barrel… he… I… I wasn’t really gonna shoot him.”

The boys stepped back toward Tom’s truck.

“Where are you goin?” Archie said.

“Home.” Tom tasted bile in the back of his throat. “You can call the cops yourself.”

“You’re witnesses,” McDougal insisted. “You gotta tell the law it was an accident.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll believe whatever you tell them,” Huck said. “You’re good people, remember?”

Archie started after them but McDougal said, “Let em go.”

So the boys quickly left the scene, knowing this time they would not be heroes in the newspaper. The town would not celebrate them and their classmates would not be impressed.

Though the boys did wonder what would became of Walter’s body. Would McDougal call the sheriff? And if so would he mention Huck and Tom had been there? Would the sheriff decide keeping the whole mess quiet was the best resolution for everyone. That McDougal had performed a public service by ridding the community of a pervert? Or would Fred and Archie simply and quietly chain Walter’s corpse to a concrete block and sink it in the river? Along with his old bicycle? Never telling anyone, not even their own wives, what really happened? Should the boys head straight to Becky’s father the judge with this story? Or should they simply forget it ever happened?

But none of that really matters. If the story continues Huck and Tom become adults and that story is not meant to be.

Tom does not marry Becky Thatcher and eventually become a vegetarian and Huck never lives long enough to die in a car wreck or any other unfortunate mishap. In some form or another Huck and Tom are destined to relive those years from age ten to seventeen for eternity. The name of the river does not matter. Nor does the year or the name of the town. Never will Huck or Tom grow up or grow old and right now they are out there somewhere living the only way they know how. And that is the way it should be.

Joey Dean Hale is a musician and writer in the St. Louis area. He received his MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and has published stories in several magazines, including Temporary Infinity Press, Marco Polo Arts Mag, and Octave Magazine, which also has his song “High Noon” posted online. In September 2012 he was the featured writer in Penduline Press — Issue 6 “WTF” — which included four flash fiction pieces and an interview with the author.  He has stories forthcoming in The Dying Goose and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine.