Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 26

Coming Home, poem by Teisha Twomey

I reach below the sink, compare

the proofs of the bottles beneath.

Eighty is best and I pour the glass

half full, watching the diet Coke turn gold,

beautiful as amber. I climb the stairs

the way I am use to, as a child tiptoeing

to my bedroom. I do not wake the man

in the master bedroom, his hands gripping

the bruised arms of his woman. I sleep

above the shotgun my mother had hidden

below my mattress and forgotten about long ago.

It waits there. No one suspects the room

with the unicorn wallpaper. I am just visiting

tonight. I have this secret beneath the surface.

I try not to roll over. Something might go off.

Teisha Twomey was raised in New Lebanon, NY. She graduated from MCLA in 2010. She is currently working on her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

Sugar, fiction by Misty Skaggs

On a hilltop faraway, in another time, I had a pony. Papaw tethered her to one of the tall, thin maple trees situated in the dead center of the bright, green acre of clover we called the front yard. And I stood, hypnotized at the picture window, pressing the chubby, pink flesh of my cheeks against the warm plexi-glass. For hours, I watched her lope lazily in wide, steady circles stopping to snap up mouths full of sweet, tender grass. Her long pink tongue tickled me and when she’d stomp her feet and throw up dust, I’d stomp mine, too. Mommy said I was too young for a pony, and at four years old, I was. But she was a gift horse, an unplanned present from the absent father to his bastard daughter. The only thing he’d ever brought me before was a Cabbage Patch Kid without her adoption papers and half of a Reese’s peanut butter cup.

My young busty, bumpkin of a mother couldn’t quite bring herself to refuse when Frankie brought his beat-up, pickup down our long driveway with a sparkle in those blue eyes of his, eyes wide and clear like mine. She had a big heart and he had a palomino pony prancing around the bed of his truck, tethered to a tool box. The loose ends of a big, pink bow tied in a knot around its neck got trampled and tangled in the shit around its feet. A shock of shiny mane fell across her forehead and the chocolate brown splashes of color in her tan coat caught the spring time sunshine. And I called her Sugar.

“Now, sweetie, sugar…” Frankie began when he stepped down out of the dusty, black Ford.

His snake skin boots crunched gravel as he strode toward the two of us with purpose, grinning to reveal a row of small, white, perfectly fake teeth. The stiff collar of his plaid, Western shirt was open wide across his chest and a thin, gold crucifix glinted through the bramble of hair there. Absentmindedly reaching up, with a thick thumb and index finger, he smoothed down his full mustache. It was like a blonde Burt Reynolds had swept down all the way from Hollywood, into the hills and out to the Ridge, especially to visit us. We were both blushing.

Mommy was harder than her curves would lead you to believe. She put her hands on her generous, soft hips and shot him one of her squint-eyed, scathing looks. The kind of look that makes you feel guilty and you‘re not even sure why.

“I know what you’re thinking, sweetheart,” he continued. “But you worry too much! I broke that pony myself, just for my baby girl!”

I seem to remember the pitch of his voice being a little high. But somehow still thick and rich and dripping honey. I definitely remember he was a smooth operator. Confidently sliding one arm around my itty bitty body and the other around my mother’s waist, he lifted me up to run my baby fingers over Sugar’s coat. I buried the other little girl hand in the golden curls at the nape of his neck. When he smiled, we wanted to trust 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.

First Aid, fiction by Ellis Purdie

The front fairing and headlight of the Yamaha were torn off and cracked, its windshield splintered and electric green paint scuffed in patches not unlike the road burns on Jesse, his son. The front wheel was bent, kicked out.

“Not what I’d hoped to see in my garage,” Luke said. He remembered the moment he said it that he and Leanne were separated. He remembered the phone calls from her lawyer he’d not returned. Looking around the garage, he took note of what was his, since he wasn’t sure how much longer he would own the house. Without Leanne’s income, he wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage.

Leanne held a lit cigarette to her side between her fingers. Smoke coiled up her wrist before thinning out. “You think we can afford to fix it?” she said. Her delicate left hand trembled when she brought the cigarette to her lips—a tremble that had not gone away since the incident. Her dark hair was done up in a bun with two long strands framing her handsome face, and a beauty mark was penciled onto her chin, a thing she’d been doing the last few weeks. Luke didn’t ask. She wore the white chiffon shirt and khaki shorts, the beige heals. She looked as good as any of those sitcom wives on TV.

Luke shrugged and passed a hand through his graying black hair. He took his wallet from his pocket and opened it. Thumbing through a few business cards, he found the one from the bike shop and slid it out, stuck the wallet back into his jeans. “I’ll call and get an estimate, but that’s the best I can do right now. I’d just assume he never got back on the thing.”

Leanne looked across the street. Parked cars had crowded near their neighbor Eli’s house for a crawfish boil. She drew from the cigarette, breathed out a jet of smoke toward the ground. “You know that’s not an option,” she said. “He loves racing.”

A white pickup came up the packed street and almost passed the house before slowing. Leanne waved an arm at the truck. “Over here, sweetie,” she said. The driver, a male, backed up the vehicle and eased into Luke’s driveway and parked. A kid—no older than thirty—stepped out of the truck and approached them. He wore blue jeans and boots, and a vest like the bull riders Luke had seen on ESPN. He had a crew cut, a sharp nose runneled down the middle. From being broken, Luke figured: he’d boxed, knew the look.

“You in the rodeo?” Luke said.

The guy grinned. “I am. Chet Ray,” he said, and offered a hand.

Luke shook Chet’s hand. “Are you going to ride a bull right now?”

Chet laughed. “The rodeo’s tomorrow; the vest’s for luck.”

Leanne came over and put an arm around Chet’s neck and hugged him. “Hey, sweetie,” she said.

“You’re not at the party?” Chet said. He touched the small of Leanne’s back.

“I’ll be over in a minute,” Leanne said. “Me and the man here have to talk.” She tilted her head toward Luke.

Luke was “the man” now, whatever that meant. This whole thing felt like it was taking too long, and Luke wanted Chet to go on.

“I meant the rodeo,” Chet said.

“Oh, well—we’ll see. You know Jesse’s bummed up upstairs.” She waved a hand dismissively at the wrecked motorcycle. “I don’t know that I can leave him.”

“I got you,” Chet said. “Well, let me know if you decide to come, we’ll get you in for free. And don’t worry, Jessie will heal up. I can’t tell you how many times I should have been done riding. You just have to get back on the bull, or—the bike in his case.” He shook Luke’s hand again. “Good to meet you.”

The two of them went back into the garage, and Luke stood and looked at the motorcycle again. Leanne stayed in front of the door opening, watching Chet cross the street to the neighbor’s house. The day was bright and she was black against the sun-drenched street. “You were saying,” Luke said. “‘Not an option’?”

“He loves the sport. He’s been talking about going pro. You want to tell him he can’t do that?” Leanne said. She took to Jessie’s futon that had been there since May when he graduated from college. She let the cigarette fall and pressed down on the embers with her heal.

“He could have been killed,” Luke said.

Leanne nodded and crossed her legs. “I know that. I was never crazy about the bike, Luke. I was never crazy about you putting on those gloves, but you did. You stopped when the time came. It’s Jessie’s life and he wants to take risks.”

“Jesus Christ. Risks. Is that what your rodeo boyfriend has been pushing?” He spoke as if the bike hadn’t been a leap of faith. The Yamaha was Luke’s attempt to show Leanne and Jessie that he could take chances. He wanted back under the same roof with Leanne, and thought that if they could spend time together watching Jessie compete in races and cheer him on from the bleachers on warm summer nights, things would get better. The way they were when their firstborn, Thomas, was alive and playing football.

“Leave Chet out of this,” Leanne said. “He’s just a sweet kid from Little Rock who rides bulls.”

Luke sat next to her. Jessie’s small refrigerator was plugged in and humming next to the workbench where Luke kept his tools. He took out a Dr. Pepper and popped the tab, sipped the foam from the rim. “Where’d you meet him?”

Leanne kicked her fingers through the tendrils of hair at her neck. “Eli brought him to Sam’s Lounge a few nights ago. He just moved here. He’s looking for friends.”

“So you’re just friends?”

“Luke, let’s not do this.” She glanced at the Dr. Pepper. “Do you want ice for that?”

He pushed out of the futon and got to his feet. “Sure,” he said. She wanted to get him ice. That was like her, and he was glad she wanted to.

They went inside the house and Leanne took down a glass from the kitchen cabinet and filled it with ice at the freezer, handed it to Luke. She slid open the windows above the sink that faced the street. The light was golden across the kitchen tile, pleasant, and the small curtains billowed at the window. Karaoke had begun next door, someone singing Steve Earle’s “Guitar Town.” Leanne leaned against the counter. “So are you going to help me and Jessie or not?”

Luke filled the glass and walked to the pantry to throw the can away. “Help you how?”

“Help pay for the repairs,” Leanne said.

“I’m not sure I can afford the repairs,” Luke said.

“The three of us go in on it the cost shouldn’t be that high,” she said. “He’s never been happier. He’s not going to quit.”

“Why are you worried about repairing the bike? He’s done for the rest of the year at least. We can talk about it later.”

She threw up her hands and sighed. “I knew you’d back out on this,” she said. “You’ve never let the boys hang on to anything.” She glanced to the side and her blue eyes met Luke’s before she looked away, tapped her heel once against the tile. He knew the look. It was a habit she had not broken, saying “boys.” Even four years after Thomas’s death, Leanne still referred to their children by two.

Luke brought a hand down over this face. “I’ll get an estimate. Maybe I can talk them into a deal or something. If he goes pro, maybe they’ll sponsor him; that’s got to count for something.” He crossed the kitchen and put an arm around her and she went stiff and stared out the open windows. There’d been a time when he’d know how to comfort her, but not anymore. They weren’t the same people. They had each responded in a different way to the death of their son, and they had grown around his absence in a way that made them strangers.

Leanne turned and walked toward the front door. “Jessie’s upstairs,” she said. She went out and passed between the parked cars and headed for the neighbor’s house.

The house was quiet and cool and Leanne kept it clean. The ceiling fan in the living room was whipping around, making white noise. Luke took the stairs to Jessie’s room. His door was covered in band sticker, names like The Lemonheads and The Replacements, stuff Jessie listened to in his car, some of it Luke liked. Luke knocked.

“It’s open,” Jessie said.

Luke turned the knob and slipped in, closed the door behind him. He sat down on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb Jessie’s leg. The room was a mess with his son’s things: boxes not unpacked, a suitcase with his clothes spilling out of it, a crumpled fast-food bag on his desk. His crutches leaned against the wall. Jessie sat up on the bed, his leg propped, the TV on. The leg was in a pristine white cast, a single signature over the foot with an imprint of red lips on it, from Jessie’s girlfriend, Luke assumed. “Feeling any pain?” he said.

“Not too much right now, feeling more stiff than anything.” His black, short hair looked ruffled like he’d been sleeping, and a cowlick stood up in the back. Jessie had a soft face with green eyes and pointed nose.

Luke stood and went over to his son. “Here, take hold,” he said. He stuck out his arm for support. “You might get up an stretch, let the blood get to the rest of your body.”

Jessie reached up and gripped Luke by the forearm and pulled himself out of the bed. “It sucks. I had all summer to enjoy that bike.”

“I know it, me too,” Luke said. He realized when he spoke that what he had hoped for himself and Leanne this summer was gone. Leanne would be taking care of Jessie when she was home, and would likely want Luke to come by and take over so she could get out of the house. Jessie put a hand on Luke’s shoulder for balance, and Luke leaned over and took the remote from the nightstand and turned off the TV. There was the faint sound of music playing next door.

Jessie rotated his neck and shook out his arms, said, “You think it would be all right if I went next door?”

Luke shrugged. “I guess, if you can keep the leg up and have someone help you back upstairs.”

Jessie hobbled to the wall where his crutches stood. “I’ll get Chet to help me,” he said.

“Jess, ask anyone but the bull rider. Please.” He helped his son get the crutches under his arms.

“You don’t like Chet?”

“Not really. Who wears a vest the day before the rodeo?”

“It’s ritual,” Jessie said, his crutches clicked as the hit the floor. “It’s no different than when you’d pour ice water over your head before a match. I figured you’d like that.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little soon for your mom to be dating?”

They made their way down the hall to the stairs. Jessie handed Luke the crutch that had been under his right arm and took hold of the handrail, eased down one step at a time. “I think it’s all right for both of you to move on he said. He took a step down and pushed through the pain with a forced breath. “You guys are getting a divorce. It’s not like you’re cheating on one another.”

Luke felt the dread of change move up his stomach to his chest. The stairway was dim and at the bottom orange light tilted in through the back door, bright against the hardwood floor, pretty in a way he had no access to. Before long the house would be for sale, or Leanne would be living in it with someone else. He thought about the lawyer again, the calls he had not made.

They reached the bottom of the stairs and Luke handed the crutch back to Jessie before they made their way to the front door. Outside, more cars were parked along the street before the neighbor’s house. Luke stared at the open gate to the left of the house, where guests were shelling crawfish and drinking beer, where the music played out onto the quiet of the street. The spice from the boiler pots rolled to him on the air as he and Jessie walked toward the yard.

They went through the open gate, and Leanne’s eyes met Luke’s from her lawn chair next to Chet, and she got up and came over to them. Chet followed, reached Jessie and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Let’s get you a seat, daredevil. You hungry?”

Jessie looked over his shoulder. “They’ve got it from here, Dad.”

“You’ll call me later?” Leanne said.

Luke nodded, turned and went out as he had come in. He pressed the button on his key and unlocked his car, got in. The air inside was warm, and Luke lay his head on the steering wheel and closed his eyes. Inside the car, the music from outside was muted, sort of like when he’d be in the locker room before a match, hearing the bass boom against the cinder block walls. But he wasn’t going out to win a match, he didn’t have that in him anymore, and all he felt was loss. He turned the engine over and pulled out into the street, pointed the car toward the highway.

 

When he pulled into the driveway, his neighbor Dunlap’s Rottweiler, tethered to a tree, strained against his chain and barked.

“Hush,” Luke said. He unlocked the front door of his trailer and went inside. Though Luke was out of the animal’s sight, the dog was still barking and the thin walls of Luke’s rental barely muffled the noise. The house was spare, and Luke stepped over the air mattress in his living room. He’d decided against buying a bed or much furniture since he had not planned on staying there long. A television sat on the floor, a dusty box deal he’d purchased at a Salvation Army, and Luke bent down and pressed the power button, lay back in the fold-out beach chair he’d brought from home. He checked his watch; he was due at work in four hours. He managed the night shift at Comfort Suites and also did the accounting and figured he needed a nap before he left. He left the TV on and rolled off the chair and crawled to the air mattress. The plastic was cool against his face and body and the air near the floor comfortable. He closed his eyes. Thought the TV made noise, Luke could hear the dog barking. The Rottweiler would stop for a few seconds, but Luke could not relax, knowing the dog would start up again. He got up and scissored open the blinds. A woman was strolling her toddler, the dog barking at them. Luke remembered strolling his boys. They had been born just a few years apart, and he thought about how good it felt to walk them down the warm street with Leanne, how it made a hard day at work fade from memory, his worry lifting as the sky reddened with dusk. Maybe he needed to walk.

He got up and went back out, stepped off the porch. He whistled, clapping his hands. The Rottweiler growled in Luke’s direction, but the closer Luke came the further down the dog cowered until his tail was tucked between his legs and he was pissing. “You want to go for a walk?” Luke said. He gave the skin on the dog’s neck and back a pull, and then went around the side of the Dunlap’s trailer to the front door and knocked. In a bracket bolted to the wall of the trailer, an American flag sagged, bleached from the sun.

Dunlap answered the door in wife beater and blue jeans. His gray-yellow hair was gelled back, face stubbled and expressionless. The outline of a tattoo beneath his shirt. He had a thick Cajun accent. “Champ,” he said.

“Don’t call me that,” Luke said. He motioned with his head towards the back. “I was wondering if I could walk your dog.”

“Andouille?” Dunlap said. “What’s he need walking for?”

“He won’t shut up for starters,” Luke said.

“Hell, if you need me to quiet him down, just say so, I’ll beat his ass.”

Dunlap made to walk out and Luke stepped in his way, held up a hand. “I’ll walk him.”

Dunlap’s face tightened, and he glared at Luke. “What’s it matter to you? I thought you were leaving soon.”

“Not likely,” Luke said. “So can I walk the dog or not?”

Dunlap stepped outside, looked around, sucked his teeth. Walking the dog was a bigger deal than Luke had anticipated. “All right, fine, but don’t be gone long, and put him back on the tether when you’re done. Come on, I’ll get his leash.”

Luke came inside and stayed in the living room while Dunlap went in the back to the kitchen. A throw of kudzu consumed the outside of the windows, making the room half dark. Dunlap came back with the leash and a Corona, handed the leash to Luke. He tipped his beer toward the backyard. “Like I said, tether him when you’re done.”

“I’ll bring him back,” Luke said. He opened the door and walked out and took the steps down. The dog hunkered down and pulled himself across the ground with his front paws. Luke unhooked the tether from the dog’s collar and secured the leash and they walked toward the alley behind Luke’s trailer. The dog began to run and Luke picked up his pace. The muscles in the dog’s legs went taut, showing groove, and Luke liked watching the dog’s movements. A pure-bred Rott probably cost somewhere between six and fifteen hundred dollars, and it seemed wrong to leave something that costly tied to a tree. Dunlap didn’t appear to have that kind of money, and Luke wondered where the dog had come from.

Up ahead, where the alley intersected with the street, a woman carrying a plastic bag passed by. She had long blonde hair that reached almost to her waist, blue jeans ripped at the knees and flip-flops. Her hair lifted lightly against her back as she walked. She looked at Luke and slowed and began walking towards him.

The dog began to run and jerked Luke’s arm and stopped in front of the woman and sniffed her leg. She set the bag down, crouching, and took both of the Rottweiler’s ears in her hands. Likely she was older than Luke by a few years, but she didn’t look bad. She had been prettier at one time, in college or high school. He liked her smile, her straight teeth, though one in the front was set further back, rimmed black. She had small mouth with full, red lips. “Look at this sweet boy. How old is he?” she said. Her voice was slow and sweet like honey.

“I don’t really know. He’s not mine.”

“Who does he belong to?” she said.

“My neighbor.”

“Is he a rescue dog?”

“If he is, I guess he went from one bad situation to another,” Luke said.

She pursed her lips and looked to the side. “Yeah, I know how that is.”

He liked how her lips looked when she did that.

“Do you know where Eve’s house is?” she said.

He looked past her, ruffled the dog’s neck. He didn’t know an Eve. “They have a last name?”

She shook her head. “It’s supposed to be a secret.”

Luke brought up his phone from his pocket. “You have a number? You can use my phone.”

“I’ve got two, but no one answered earlier.”

“Try now,” he said.

She took the phone and dialed one of the numbers, hung up after a minute. Someone answered the second number, and after they spoke for a few minutes the woman handed the phone back to Luke, bit her lip and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Shit. Nothing’s easy,” she said. “There’s some kind of process.”

She was looking for a safe house.

“They need to do a get-to-know-you with me, there’s paperwork—” She rubbed the back of her neck and sat cross-legged in the street. “She said they can’t take me until next week.”

“What’s your name?” Luke said.

“I’m sorry. Miranda,” she said, holding out a hand.

“Luke,” he said, and she used his hand to get back to her feet.

“You mind if I walk with you guys a ways?” she said.

“Yeah, you want me to carry that?” He motioned toward the bag. “You can take the dog for a while.”

Miranda handed the bag to Luke and took the leash. They walked past a cathedral and toward the highway. They didn’t talk about much. An old, mustard yellow mustang passed them with its windows down. From inside the car, music played that Miranda recognized. “I love this song,” she said.

“I don’t think I’ve heard of it,” Luke said.

“You don’t know The Replacements?”

Luke looked past the glare in her glasses, to her eyes. “I know that name. My son likes them,” he said.

She asked him where his son was, and he told her with his mom, at their house a few minutes north. Miranda nodded. She understood.

“Keep in touch with your kids if you have them. Even if there’s no custody battle the distance will change things.”

“He’s nineteen,” Luke said.

After a while they came to a series of restaurants and fast food chains that faced the passing cars on the road, and seeing a Mexican place, Luke became aware of his hunger. “You want to eat?”

“I was hoping you’d ask. I’m broke,” she said.

They crossed the road over onto the new asphalt of the restaurant. The lot was warm with the heat of the day, and full of cars. “Are you running from their father?” Luke said. He tied the leash around a bar on the outdoor patio.

“No, I’m not running from him,” Miranda said.

Luke held up two fingers to the hostess, and when they were seated, he said, “Then why are you trying to find a safe house?”

Miranda sat back and brought her legs to the side in the vinyl seat. “I moved here for the wrong reasons. Andy turned out to be a meth addict. When I told him I was leaving, he put all of my things in the bathroom and locked himself in there with a shotgun.”

“Jesus. You didn’t know he was an addict?”

“Not before I moved, no,” she said.

“How’d he convince you down here?”

“He made me laugh,” she said. “For a little while, I guess that was enough. Some people just can’t help themselves, the world doesn’t work for them. I get it; I think I’m like that, too, I just, never did drugs.”

“I didn’t either. I boxed,” Luke said. “I liked the idea of going into the ring and only one person coming out. You get into the ring, you get a knockout, you go home, you heal up. Everything you did was for the one problem down the line: the match, and if you lost the match, well—you trained for another one.”

A waiter placed chips and salsa in front of them and they gave their drink orders.

“You won a lot?” Miranda said. She bit down on one of the chips.

“Enough, but after a while they just paid me to make the young guns look good. I was fine with it for a while, but then I had kids, and didn’t want them seeing their father busted up all the time.” He was sitting across from a stranger, but he didn’t mind. Talking with her had shown him how lonely he’d really been, and when she spoke, he didn’t feel as alone. Buying her a meal was fine, but he was thinking about letting her stay at his house, just until she figured things out. Maybe that was dangerous, but he didn’t care, and liked not knowing how things would unfold. “So you never did meth with him?” he said.

“I told you no,” she said.

“I know. I’m just trying to figure out how much help you need.”

“How does anyone know how much help someone needs?”

The waiter brought their waters and Luke squeezed the lemon into his and let go of the rind. “We’ll look into the safe house again next week. Do you need a place to stay until then?”

“Yeah. I do,” she said.

The waiter came back and they put in their orders, and when the waiter inquired if that would be all, Miranda asked if she could order a beer. Luke wasn’t sure it was a good idea; he didn’t know her history. She could’ve been an alcoholic, but the beer might help her relax until he could get her into the shelter. He’d take care of her. “Sure,” he said. She ordered a Corona in a bottle and they gave the waiter their menus.

Miranda took off her glasses and set them on the table, rubbed her eyes. She pinched the red ovals on the sides of her nose where the glasses had been. “Do you work?” she said.

“I do,” he said. “I manage the night shift at the Comfort Inn and Suites. I do the accounting as well.”

She took her glasses and cleaned the lenses with her shirt. She smiled with her eyes. “Can you stay anywhere in the world for free?”

Luke nodded. “If there’s a Comfort Inn, I’m welcome, as long as I have reservations.”

“Do you ever go anywhere?”

He studied the dessert menu by the salt and peppers shakers. “I haven’t really. I’ve been too busy trying to make things right here.”

Miranda pulled on her water through her straw. “My parents never took me anywhere. The one time we went to the beach my daddy acted like such an asshole that we left two days early. He didn’t get to take me crab hunting. Have you ever been crab hunting? At night on the beach?”

It seemed like such a simple thing, something he should have done in his fifty-one years on earth. “No. I don’t know why, but I haven’t.”

Their food was brought the table. Chorizo tacos for him, chicken enchiladas for Miranda. Steam whirled and hissed off of her plate. She started cutting into her food. “We should change that. I remember a little girl, the day we left she had been crab hunting the night before and had caught one. Said she threw sand over it, then plucked it out. She’d kept it in a clear plastic cup, filled with a few inches of sand and seawater. Its bleach-white shell stuck out from the top of the sand.” She put her silverware down and chewed at her lip. “I wanted to touch it, but we had to go.”

 

The house was dark when they reached Luke’s place. He attached the tether to the Rottweiler’s collar. He started to take the leash to Dunlap, but Miranda asked him to open the door. “I really need to pee,” she said. They went inside and Luke crouched down and switched on the lamp on the floor next to his mattress. He went to the kitchen and did the same for the overhead light. “I’m sorry there’s not more,” he said.

She furrowed her thin brows. “You think I’d have a problem?” she said, closing the door behind her.

He went to the bedroom and stood outside the bathroom door. A line of light came into the bedroom from under the bathroom door. “Take anything you need in there,” he said.

“Thank you, hon,” she said.

Luke checked his watch. He needed to start getting ready for work. She’d been in there about ten minutes, and he’d started to fear something was wrong and knocked. “Are you okay?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. She sounded distracted. The door unlocked and opened a few inches, and there she was, standing in front of the mirror in a cheap cotton bra that held up her small, pale breasts. She turned her back to the mirror and there was a deep bruise across her shoulder blade, and a few inches over, a strip of gauze kept in place with first aid tape. She peeled the bandage off and underneath the skin was busted, scabbed black and in need of cleaning. There was the sound of her shorts sliding down her legs, and she opened the door wide and filled the room with light. She sat down next to him on the bed, brought his hand up her cool stomach, his thumb sinking into and then passing over her navel.

 

After, he made her sit on the bathroom counter while he opened the cabinet under the sink and took out the rubbing alcohol. He reached over and pulled a length of toilet paper and folded it and dabbed it with the alcohol.

Miranda put her hand on his upper arm: the arm with the tattoo of a small boxer with the words “Glory Bound” over his head. She studied the tattoo, whincing every now and then, and let him swab the cut. “My daughter, Elise, she races horses. Her horse is named Glory.”

“Do you ever watch her?”

She kept talking, but he was paying attention to the cut. The dried blood broke up as he daubed the skin and the paper became dirty and began to wear. He placed the tissue in the trashcan and took up a few more sheets. He tilted the bottle and the alcohol swishes against the sheets and he cleaned the gash with gentle strokes until the wound was pink and clean. “I need to get to work,” he said.

“Maybe you could call in?” she said.

He thought about that. “Probably not a good idea. You’ll be fine here, though. You can call me if you need anything.”

Miranda put her shirt on. The leash sat coiled on the kitchen counter. Luke grabbed it and the two of them made their way to the door. Once outside, headlights from Dunlap’s driveway flared into Luke’s yard, and Dunlap stood with another man in front of the vehicle.

“Oh, shit,” Miranda said and pulled Luke by the shirt back inside.

“What?” he said.

“That’s Andy, and that’d Dunlap, his dealer. If he sees me here it won’t be good. Christ.” She put a hand to her forehead and leaned down against the front of the kitchen counter, held in a sob.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Luke said. He crouched down and she leaned into his body. He thought about being in the ring: how he’d close his eyes deep into exhaustion and lean into his opponent, trying to get a breath, one more swing.

 

 

Old Ironhead, novel excerpt from Mark Powell

The child died in a sunlit market. The child died in a Vegas ring. Still, the years came and went. Wars and rumors of war. A decade of erosion that ended with morning. Maybe half past four and a taste in Bobby's mouth like dryer lint. He heard the dogs outside, nails scratching the porchboards, and raised his head to see the beer cans that littered the room, little aluminum barrels in a pasture of gathering light. Somehow he had fallen asleep beside a Coors tallboy, the warm glass bottle balanced perfectly in the mattress depression. The mattress otherwise empty. His wife and boy having not returned. His life having not been restored. Only the dogs to greet him.

He stood uncertainly, still a little drunk, and was halfway to the kitchen when he thought of his brother and remembered today was the day. I’ll be damned. So that was what the party was about.

He dumped Purina into several Kool-Whip bowls and filled a pie tin with milk for the cat he sometimes saw. It was two, maybe two and a half hours down to the prison but it was early and there was no rush, time enough to sit on the porch and watch his dogs eat, two beagles and a big one-eyed collie-shepherd mix. He was glad. He loved this time of day best, how fragile it was, the light a clean presence, not unlike that morning in Baghdad, the way it laddered into heaven. But soon—too soon—sun began to light the fields that fronted the house, broadened over the green grasses feathered yellow, and spread on down the gravel drive, past the shed to touch the swing set they had never come back for.

When it touched the wall of long leaf pines that marked the back of the property he knew it was over, and walked inside to undress in front of the mirror. Pulled off his shirt and stared at himself. He had gotten the tattoo in Colombia, a bald eagle with its white head and gold bill, talons ribboned with the slightest gleam of light, the most patriotic thing he could think of right there on his left pectoral, centered above the heart. It was meant to indicate some sort of gratitude, he thought, but he wore it now like a mark, a stain that would discolor and fade but never fully erase. He'd wanted that little shimmer he got when they played the National Anthem but wound up with a dead child—murdered child—and an air-brushed chest.

When his breathing drew shallow and quick he walked naked into the bedroom and in a small notebook beside his bed read the last entry, made last night in the midst of his sad and private celebration:

FIREBOMBINGS:

HAMBURG, DRESDEN, KOBE, TOKYO…

He flipped back a few pages.

 

FORT PILLOW MASSACRE (APRIL 12, 1864)

DEAD: 297

 

That was enough, his shame contextualized, weighed and measured, and he showered and pulled his clothes from the dresser Nancy had left. Some boys told him he should show up in his Class A's or at least his BDUs, get a little respect from the Corrections Officers running the joint, but Bobby knew what uniforms did—one motherfucker prodding another, comparing patches and campaigns—and didn’t want his brother’s release to turn into a pissing contest. He had the law on his side after all. For the last seven years Donny had been locked down at Lawtey Correctional in Raiford, a little nowhere town in the middle of a Florida pine range, nothing outside the prison but mobile homes and a skank-ass McDonald’s, all of it camped along the edge of a ten-thousand-acre National Guard artillery range. But today Donny was getting out. Didn’t matter what Bobby wore. He dressed in jeans and a button-down almost on principle, good Tony Lama boots, then, just as he was headed out the bedroom door, grabbed a ball cap with SEVENTH SPECIAL FORCES GROUP twilled across the front because if there was one thing he had learned, it was that you don’t ever know.

In the kitchen, he opened one of the Ripped Fuels stacked in the fridge, packed a thermos and cooler beside the box of Donny's CDs, the only thing his brother had asked for. His own mementos were as meager: a Swedish SIG 550 rifle and a single MRE (#4 Thai chicken), both in the closet along with a copy of The Koran in Persian Farsi. The rest was Nancy's. The kitchen full of knick-knacks and photos gone dusty and pale. His wife’s stuff. The way she had left it, as if all she had wanted was excuse enough to run.

I’m not the one who killed that boy, Bobby.

Those two boys, he heard her say. You and your brother both. But she had not said this. She had just loaded the Civic, strapped little Bobby into his car seat, and drove away. He rinsed his coffee cup and put it back in the drying rack, told the dogs he’d see them that night, and left for town.

Hardees was off Main Street and he turned by the sanctuary of La Luz del Mundo to pull into the drive-thru. It was the only place open and he bounced up to the bright menu, the cooler secured with a bungee cord but the other junk rattling, post-hole diggers and scattered ten-penny nails, crushed empties he dropped through the slide window.

“Arlo Phillips,” he said into the black box. “Quit snoozing on the job, boy.”

“Bobby Rosen.” The voice was scattered and loud. “You out early, sergeant.”

“Headed down to pick up Donny.”

“Is that right? Today's the day?”

“He'll be a free man by noon.”

“I thought I heard somebody say this was the big day but I never did know for sure. Well, good for Donny.” the voice said. “Good for him. You know I’ve always thought the world of old Donny.”

“I’ll tell him I saw you. Let me get some breakfast here.”

“Why don’t you come inside and eat? We’ll have us a pow-wow.”

“I better get moving.”

He took his food and pulled out. Plastic orange juice container. Steak biscuit. His jaw stiff and slow to comply, which was nothing new. There were mornings he felt himself growing old like a tree, long and gnarled, hands brittle from years of abuse. Everyone else was turning dumpy and pale, but not Bobby. He watched the housewives at the Dairy Queen, fifty pounds overweight and standing in line for biscuits and gravy, their fat kids hopping up and down. They would liquify. But one day old Bobby would just up and burn. Not that he didn't deserve it.

He left Waycross and headed south through fields of cotton and soybean, big irrigation rigs trussed across the furrows like suspension bridges. Hit the St. Mary’s River by seven and stopped just across the Florida state line to refill his thermos. He had the cooler in the bed of his truck, a few forties and a fifth of Jim Beam—a little something to welcome his brother home. It was for later, but he was nervous and took a nip off the Beam and a little more and before he knew it he was back on US-1 with a thermos half-full of liquor. Seven years was a long time. He had gotten eighteen months for a fight that went bad, not his fault really, an ugly night if ever there’d been one. Everything haywire and caustic.

Donny had almost served out his sentence when he’d gotten involved in an incident. Bobby sleeping in a metal shipping container in Baghdad when he heard. Fucking Donny. Got caught playing lookout while two men took eight inches of galvanized pipe to the head of a thieving CO. He could have walked away, fingered the men, cut a deal with the State’s Attorney, but wouldn’t say a word. Instead he lost his gain time and had another five and a half years tacked on. Bobby had shown up hoping to talk sense into him. Staring through the plexi-glass at the little jailhouse songbird tattooed on Donny’s throat. The one thing his brother would never be.

“What the hell’s my rush?” Donny had asked him. He leaned back and lit one of the Marlboros Bobby had brought him. “Besides, minute it even looks like I’m talking I slip in the shower, fall on a shiv that just happened to be there on the floor. Wind up with a four-pint transfusion and my name on a couple of organ donor lists.” He shrugged. “Where’s the fucking hurry there?”

Donny’s wife had already left him, his arrest not the reason really, just the last last thing. She had a kid with another man now, sick and shrunken headed, legs clattered down to almost nothing. Some sort of blood disease. Stephen, his name, a sweet kid, though Bobby wasn’t even sure the boy could walk anymore. For a while people had come like pilgrims thinking the boy was some sort of conduit of grace. But he just kept getting sicker and after a while folks left him alone. And of course Bobby’s wife had left him, too. He’d been at Bagram when he learned that, Skyping with his own boy when his wife walked in and told little Bobby to go in the other room for a minute, I need to talk to your daddy. She said some things about responsibility, about an absent father, but Bobby heard what was beneath it. In the end it was about her need, her want. And all of it stacked against the world. Which is why this is just so awful and hard. Yet she never shed a tear. Left it to Bobby to cry later that night on a cot while around him men snored and farted, dark for but the soft blue glow of men texting wives and girlfriends, in a fire-fight one minute and on Facebook the next.

After that, he'd come to the conclusion he didn’t understand the world. So fuck it, fuck every last one of them. That had been his answer at one point. Except it only went so far. You could only say it so many times before you were alone and what you meant wasn’t fuck them but help me, stay with me, be near to me. How we are all alone together—it had taken all four deployments for him to understand.

He stopped again at a rest area just north of St. Augustine. He’d veered too far east and knew it. Not unintentional if he was honest with himself. Which he wasn’t sure he was up for this morning. He hit the head and gulped warm water from one of the automated faucets. It was morning now, late enough for the sun to burn the fog from the wide lawn of wet grass that separated the parking lot from I-95, and families were out, piling out of mini-vans and walking dogs. Sun visors. Mickey Mouse ears. A boy maybe six years old, same age as his own boy. He hadn’t seen little Bobby more than once a month since his discharge, since the boys at CID had found no grounds for further investigation and he was quietly nudged out the door, his discharge honorable, his benefits intact. Today he was missing his son a little worse than usual.

He took a last drink of water and wiped his mouth on a paper towel.

He’d known what he was doing, then as surely as now.

When he got back on the interstate he almost immediately saw the mileage to Daytona Beach. Donny’s night of reckoning. The night was supposed to be a sendoff: Donny was finally married and Bobby was on his way to shoot a few camel-jockeys. They’d be drinking beer and watching the Bulldogs play football by September. Good times were coming. Better days ahead. They’d driven down for the 500 and after Earnhardt hit the third turn wall, they'd crossed the highway to the Hooters where they proceeded to get fucked up twice over—once for Old Ironhead and once for themselves. Donny was standing in a booth, pitcher in each hand, howling like a wounded animal while the rest of the restaurant howled back. He dropped singles from between his teeth into the cleavage of passing waitresses, which wasn’t really how it was done—it was a family place: Bobby could see several kids over near a bank of TVs playing ESPN—but no one seemed to mind, what with the pain, what with the unholy unfairness of their loss.

At least that was how it had appeared to Bobby. He’d sunk into the plastic banquette—drunk since noon—and knew he was beyond dislodging, crying and downing Bud. He was three weeks from Kuwait and then he would be downrange from those evil Iraqi fuckers and he sensed how tightly he scratched against the hard eyewall of the storm: there would be rage, and then quiet, and then his world would fly apart.

They were back in the motel parking lot when Donny got into it with a biker. Donny defending poor dead Earnhardt’s honor when the man pulled a switchblade from some hidden pocket and Donny hit the man so fast it seemed not to have happened. Then again and again, the man unconscious on the ground, a hairless side of beef with blood running through his nostrils and over the iron bolt fastened there.

 

 

Lawtey put him less in mind of the firebases in Afghanistan than of high school. Low cinder block buildings painted a piss-pale institutional yellow. A lot of unhappy people milling around the gate. Of course there had been no razor wire at his high school. Some mean-ass kids who probably could have used it, but no wire. Here there was roll after roll tangled along the chain-link that bowed inward as if shouldering an unbearable weight. It was the only soft shape to be found. The land flatter than Georgia. The highway a plumb line of hot macadam. The slash-pines in ordered rows. He didn’t see any gun-towers but knew somewhere men were watching.

The gate buzzed and he swung it open, walked to a folding table where a man in khakis and a Florida DOC hat sat with a clipboard and a Guardian hand wand. Early fifties, Bobby guessed. A patchy beard and eyes closing down in the corners. He gave the man his name and emptied his pockets, took off his belt buckle and walked through a metal detector. The man handed him what appeared to be a small pager with a large gray button in the center.

“Clip it to your waist,” the man said. “There’s a little clasp there on the back.”

“Panic button?”

“Something happens hold it down for three seconds. Somebody’ll come running.”

“I’m just here to pick up my brother.”

The man looked up from. “You Donny Rosen’s brother?”

“That’s me.”

“I'll be dogged.” The man almost laughed. “Good luck to you, buddy.”

He left his driver’s license at the control room and was escorted by a large black woman to a small sterile room. A metal table and chairs. An empty water cooler beneath a wire-grid ventilation fan. The bulletin board was tacked with fliers for worker's comp and third-hand camper shells.

“I’m gonna lock this behind me,” she said, “but you need anything you just knock. He's been out-processing all week. It’ll be a little while yet, but we’ll bring him in here as soon as we can.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at him as if she didn’t quite trust him. “There are some things you’ll need to sign.”

Sometime later the woman came back in carrying a cardboard box.

“His personal effects.” She dropped the box in front of him. “You can sign for em good as him.”

When she was gone Bobby removed the lid. Ragged Nike running shoes. A Braves ball cap. A t-shirt gone yellow with mildew. Donny’s wallet—his license had expired. Donny’s blue jeans—the Daytona International Speedway ticket stub was still in the pocket, folded around an illegible receipt from the Hooters. A time capsule on that night. And not a thing worth saving.

A little while later his brother came in wearing blue scrubs, his name and DOC number blanched off the front. He looked older, wizened, skin browned and smelling of sunblock. When he smiled—he was smacking bubblegum, smiling and smacking orange bubblegum—Bobby saw he was missing two incisors. Finally looked like the pirate he'd always been. He signed three forms—his official release, his parole agreement, some bullshit waiver—and a half hour later they were in the parking lot, not speaking until Bobby took two cold ones from the cooler and passed one to his brother.

“Happy fucking birthday to me,” Donny said. He popped the cap and sipped off the foam. Through the wire they could see the desk sergeant watching them, hands clawed through the links like a kid at a playground.

“Should we do this elsewhere?” Bobby asked.

Donny shook his head. “They ain’t saying nothing. They’re happy to see me go.”

“He keeps looking over this way.”

“They wouldn't have me back.” He raised his beer. “This ain’t even a misdemeanor in my book.”

He downed it in one slow swallow and when it was gone gasped and wiped his mouth on the back of one hand. “I appreciate you coming down for me,” he said, “but you know I can’t go straight home.”

“Mamma's looking for us.”

“I hear you, but that don't change nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you just can’t go from one to the other like that. You get edgy. You need a little in between time.”

Bobby looked back at the wire and off at the empty highway. “I think mamma’s planning some sort of welcome home for you.”

“She tell you that?”

“She kind of hinted around.”

Donny nodded. “I just need one night,” he said. “You could call her or something. You got any money on you?”

“A little.”

Donny took another beer from the cooler. “Call her and ask her to wait one night.” He opened the passenger side door. “Folks from church is all it’ll be. I don’t want to see them anyway.”

They ate at a Taco Bell out near the interstate. His brother looking older and meaner by the minute.

“For the last six months I’ve just laid in my bunk and thought about today,” Donny said. They were outside at a metal picnic table, cars stacked up by the on-ramp, a tour bus unloading in the parking lot. They were drinking forties from the silver cans but no one seemed to notice or care. “Then it gets here.” He shrugged. “Shit turns out just like everything else.” He pointed his burrito at the highway. “Let’s head south for a little. What’s the next town down?”

“Daytona, I guess.”

“Scene of the crime. That’d be perfect, wouldn’t it?”

When they were headed south Donny took his face from the window and looked at Bobby. He’d been snoozing since they pulled out, since Bobby had called their mother to tell her they wouldn’t be in until tomorrow, nothing big, just a snag with the paperwork.

“So you’re all the way out yourself now?” Donny said.

Bobby nodded.

“Mamma never said much in her letters.” Donny with his eyes on the road, the forty clutched between his thighs. He had put on the old tennis shoes and jeans but left on the blue scrub top. Bobby was embarrassed he hadn’t thought to bring him anything. “Talked about the church mostly. She went on about Marsha for a while till I told her to just forget it. But I never knew for sure if you were all the way out or not.”

“I am.”

“Honorable?”

“That’s what the paper said.”

A few miles later Donny spoke again: “Combat Tracker. That’s the MOS, wasn’t it?” He sipped the beer. I-95 a green wash. Billboards and fruit stands. Cut-rate tickets for theme parks. Neil Young's “After the Gold Rush” was on and Bobby remembered Donny playing it over and over growing up, maybe seventeen and the music vibrating through the walls. “I never understood how you could call a man that,” Donny said, “and then he goes and tracks somebody in combat and they want to lock him up.”

“It wasn’t that simple.”

“And to bring up all the Vegas shit. Like we had planned the thing from birth.”

“It really wasn’t simple at all.”

“I never said it was simple. I just said I can’t understand it.” He turned in the seat and fumbled with the slide window. “Think I can reach that fifth? I meant to put it up here with us.”

“We’ll be in town in fifteen minutes.”

He turned around in the seat. “You realize I haven’t had liquor in almost eighteen hundred days. Had some nasty homebrew but nothing else. Liquor and pussy. I been dry on both counts.”

They took the Ormond Beach exit and drove down A1-A, the highway clotted with traffic lights and families at crosswalks, arms full of babies and beach chairs. Late morning by the time they got a room at the Beachsider. Twenty-second floor. A balcony overlooking what you could see of the white sand though it was mostly just jeeps and pickups. Sun flashing off radio aerials. Folks plopped down with their coolers and umbrellas. Bobby took off his shoes and lay on one of the beds while Donny took a shower.

“I need to get some things,” he said when he came out. He sat on the end of the bed and flipped on the TV. “Just maybe some jeans and a shirt. My underwear’s all right.”

“Get whatever you need.”

“Look at this,” Donny said. “The Spice Channel. That shit’s On Demand. I tell you some cat inside figured out how to rewire something or other and we had it going for maybe three days before they caught on? Every con in the joint packed into that sweaty little box.” He shook his head and killed the power. “If you can float me I’ll hit you back as soon as we get home.”

Bobby pointed to the dresser. “My wallet’s right there. Take what you need.”

“I’ll hit you back as soon as we get home. I got some money coming my way.”

He watched his brother count several bills, twenty, maybe thirty dollars.

“Take—” Bobby said, and watched him leave the bills on the dresser and slide the entire wallet into his pocket. When the door shut Bobby closed his eyes. He had about four hundred dollars on him after paying for the room. Four hundred dollars and a Visa that may or may not be canceled by now. He didn’t care. His only brother. Bobby had a job managing a giant pine plantation called the Farmton Tract. It didn’t pay much but it paid in cash. He could withstand the loss.

He went into the bathroom, pissed and swallowed the vitamins he carried everywhere. A multi, Omega-3, B-complex. A plastic spoon of granulated creatine chased with tap water. Closed the bulk curtains and shut his eyes. Could feel the creatine between his teeth, the grit. He slid his tongue along his gums. His notebook was on the nightstand but he didn't bother opening it, just lay there, tongue working the warm space of his mouth. Atrocity, he remembered, is defined as 1. atrocious behavior or condition; brutality, cruelty, etc. 2. an atrocious act. And 3.—the one he thought of the most, the one he thought of right now—a very displeasing or tasteless thing.

 

 

 

When he woke it was almost one and Donny still wasn’t back. Bobby was itchy and hot but lay there a moment longer, tried to sort the dream that was already fading. It was Nancy, he was sure of that much. Nancy that first time together, the way she looked at him, those liquid brown eyes rolling over his face, mouth twitching with the slightest hint of amusement.

Who is this man?

He was stationed at Camp Merrill in north Georgia and on their first date they took a canoe down the Chattooga in the middle of a drought—his idea, a terrible idea—and he remembered the way she looked at him after they dragged the sixteen-foot Old Town over the riverbed and were drifting in the warm waning light, the sun sinking slowly into the long evening, that languid sensuality as they floated past Russell Bridge. The day was hot and heady with the smell of laurel and jasmine and they kept having to stop to pull the canoe through broad shoals of egg-shell rock. But it was worth it to glide atop the deep pools, the surface a gauzy green and dusted with pollen. Bobby in the back and Nancy reclined into him, her head in his lap and bare feet on the gunwales. Her bathing suit was blue and clung to her stomach and when he took his face from her hair Bobby could see into the dark hollow between her breasts. They took out at Earl’s Ford and wound up making love on a stack of life vests in the bed of his pickup, calves sandy, shoulders pink with the first blush of sunburn, alone in the graveled parking lot while above the sun slid west, slow as an hour hand.

The rest came quickly. They married and bought the house in Fayetteville between his deployments to Colombia and East Timor, their wedding reception at a white-columned inn, a colossal birthday cake screened from the highway by staggered rows of Eastern Hemlock. Bobby in his dress uniform. Nancy in her mother’s A-line with its brocade corset and long train that spilled behind them as they hurried down the front steps beneath an arch of swords.

He put his hand beneath the sheets and slipped it into his boxers, held himself, thought of Nancy and waited. It scared him how monogamous he had been, all around him men and women hooking up in barracks or at resupply posts. Bagram one giant swingers club. The Green Zone. Eating in a KBR cafeteria before screwing some leggy second lieutenant in a back room at the motor pool. Body armor and a box of Trojans—he knew men who wouldn’t take two steps without both. But he hadn’t even looked, let alone touched, and wondered now if that had been his undoing, his failure to adapt. He gave himself a few soft tugs. When he fantasized it had been some incarnation of Nancy, Nancy younger or Nancy older, Nancy that summer they spent a week on the Outer Banks. Nancy the weekend they got snowed under in Gatlinburg, just the two of them and a big jug of red wine. But to hell with it. He took his hand away and opened his eyes. He could lie here all day and didn’t think it would happen.

He got dressed and drank down what was left of the Ripped Fuel, found a gym in the phone book and started walking up Beach Street past several surf shops. Farther along the street devolved into a wino seediness, better than half the stores shuttered, a shopping cart rusted on the curb beneath a sign marked NO PANHANDLING. Brown-bagged parking meters and trash that had blown against the boarded front of what had once been a beauty supply store. But it looked like a good gym, windowless and constructed from cinder blocks. The silhouette of a boxer crouched beside cursive script that read Olunsky’s Boxing and Fitness Emporium.

Bobby hadn’t been in a gym in years. He still hit the heavy bag out in his shed at home or out at the Farmtown tract, but somehow the gym was different, something about standing there, hands taped and gloved—it felt like coming home. He and Donny had grown up boxing. Donny was the one with the talent but Bobby had stayed with it. He knew now he shouldn't have. He was a patient and skilled practitioner, but that didn’t mean he could fight. He boxed his way through Golden Gloves mostly on guts, slipping through the lower rounds only to lose some bloody decision at another obscure regional championship in Jacksonville or Savannah. But he had never quit, and by twenty he and Donny were living in the Palm in Vegas, fighting Saturday night undercards for five large.

Bobby was lean and small-fisted but he was also a gym-rat, gorging on eighteen-mile runs and three-hour weightlifting sessions. Manny Almodovar had trained them before Manny’s Parkinson got bad and Manny had a conditioning circuit he ran his boys through called ‘The Gauntlet.’ Most fighters made it through two, maybe three times if they were particularly badass. Bobby ran The Gauntlet eight times and was on his way to number nine when he simply keeled over. This fantastically muscled body lying on the rubberized floor, twitching. Manny told him later it was like watching a horse die.

But intangibles can only float a fighter so far, and eventually it turned, just as Bobby had known it would. By twenty-one he was getting routinely knocked out. By twenty-two he was sliding toward complete obscurity. He took a bad beating one night against a left-handed Mexican and finally had the good sense to walk away. Donny agreed but wanted one last hurrah. The fight against the Puerto Rican was supposed to be it, a sort of rear-guard action, a last payday before he followed his big brother back home to Georgia. But the Puerto Rican wasn’t supposed to be seventeen, and he wasn’t supposed to be as narrow and lithe as a fawn. And Donny most definitely wasn’t supposed to kill him. But it happened because, as Manny told him, that kind of bad energy is always everywhere around us, lurking. Donny had just been unlucky. He didn’t mention the kid. Then everybody went home to try and pretend like nothing had happened.

What had followed in Iraq—Bobby was always thinking of the similarity in age, the same dusty skin glossed with sweat—had proven that it wasn’t so much bad luck as the mean edge of the universe, the certainty that violence would always and forever hang about him and his brother. An ugly avenging angel, but avenging what he guessed he would never know.

He hit the bags for maybe an hour, skipped rope and locked his feet into the sit-up board. It was almost three when he got back to the room. He showered and was back on the bed when Donny came in carrying a brown grocery sack and a shopping bag from TJ Max.

“I got some needed shit,” Donny said, and took out a bottle of Wild Turkey and a Ziploc of pills. “Met a girl, too.”

“You got something on you.”

Donny looked at his shirt front. “Blood.”

“Yours?”

“Hell, no.”

He changed in the bathroom and went up the hall to fill the ice bucket, came back and topped two plastic cups with Wild Turkey and ice. He handed Bobby a cup.

“This is the official cheers right here.”

“What are we toasting?”

“Everything,” Donny said. “Me getting out. You moving on.” He raised his cup. “This is to us getting over things.” He drank and dumped the plastic baggie on the bed. Xanax and Oxy 30s, Percocet and Celebrex. A few others Bobby couldn't identify.

“Now,” he said, “let me tell you about this girl.”

 

 

 

 

The girl had dropped out of Flagler College and danced at a club called Soft Tails. Twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. Half Seminole. Her family wealthy horse people up near Ocala. They were meeting her that evening but Donny wanted some food first, some by God real food. They passed the Speedway and drove a few miles to a steakhouse he had heard about. An old mafia joint where Capone was said to have stopped on his way back and forth to Miami. The building a white stucco monolith with a wide picture window along the back wall overlooking the Tomoka River. But no sign out front, no tourists. Just grass-fed Wagyu beef and a six-page wine list. They sat at a table and drank Johnnie Walker on the rocks.

“I need to get a cell phone,” Donny said. “I saw a Verizon place back up the highway.”

“How much of that money’s left?”

“Look here.” Donny turned his arm over to reveal a number scrawled in Sharpie. “She remembered to include the area code, just in case, I guess.”

“This the girl?”

“Kristen. You’ll like her.”

Their steaks came and they ate quietly, alone in the dark cavernous space, the restaurant seemingly abandoned but for a single elderly waiter and several ferns sprawling out of brass planters.

“Mamma wasn’t upset when you called her?” Donny asked.

“She was all right. Worried but all right.”

“What’ve people said about it? Me coming home.”

“They’re glad of it. They think you got railroaded.”

“I’m sure there’s plenty that aren’t so pleased.”

“The ones I talk to are glad of it.”

“Except I heard you don’t talk to anybody anymore.”

Bobby didn’t say anything.

“I'm not accusing,” Donny said. “There ain’t a soul I’d bother talking to either.”

They drove to a strip mall where Donny bought a cell phone. Bobby paid while Donny took the phone into the bathroom. They were getting in the truck when a message came in.

“That’s my girl,” Donny said.

He held up the picture of blurred flesh and smiled.

“What’d you send her?”

“Fuck, bro. What do you think I sent her? These kids know how to reciprocate.”

It was twilight by the time they arrived at the club, still early, the place empty and over-lit, the music quiet. A man kept walking onstage and gesturing for the stage lights to be raised or lowered. They sat at the bar and drank Jack and Cokes with several old men with comb-overs and boat-shoes, Donny’s fingers jumping as the volume gradually increased. Bobby watched his brother’s hands. His own hands throbbed and he clutched them in his lap as if they were warm animals, nearly-slain doves dying slowly, each in quiet possession of its own hurt. The pain was something he had come to accept, but tonight it was somehow worse. He realized all he wanted was to go back to the hotel.

“She ain’t here,” Bobby said.

“Give it time, brother.”

“You all right?”

Donny switched his eyes from the door to the stage and back to the door, fished through a bowl of mixed nuts on the bar. “What’s that?”

“Whose blood was that on your shirt?”

Donny smiled and motioned for two more drinks. “How’s little Bobby? I bet Nancy keeps him on a pretty short leash?” He laughed. “Both of you, I bet.”

“He’s doing all right. Seven years old. Will be on his birthday.”

“Seven years old. Goddamn.” He took a cashew from the bowl. “I heard Marsha’s boy’s dying. Some blood disease or something.”

“He’s pretty bad off. Some people claim he has these visions.”

“Is he dying?”

“I haven’t seen him in a long time. I don’t think he’s doing any good.”

“I tell you this, when we get back ain’t neither of us going round there. Me and you, we got the death touch. Everything we lay hands on turns to shit.”

A few minutes later the house lights went down. The place was filling up, dancers beginning to circulate. Young women in platform shoes and sheer dresses sat in laps or made the rounds with serving trays. One girl with a leg twined around a man’s waist, a braceleted arm hooked around his head, finger stroking his hairy ear. A dancer came on stage. Smoke and lights and more noise. The room was cold—it suddenly occurred to Bobby how cold the room was.

“The fuck's wrong with you?” Donny asked.

“What?”

“Something wrong with your hands?”

“I’m all right. They just hurt.”

Donny reached into his pocket and came out with a pill. “Take this.”

“I'm all right.”

“Didn’t you just say your hands hurt?” Donny asked. “That’s only a 30. Don’t be so damn stubborn.”

“I knew a fella at Bragg took a couple one night and never woke up.”

“So because some asshole went and ODed you won’t ease your own suffering?” Donny put the pill between his teeth, lifted his drink and swallowed. “You are bringing me down on my big night, brother, which, I can't help but say, is a real dick move.” He looked for the bartender. “We both need us a Jager-bomb.”

A little after ten Donny got another text.

“She’s going to pick us up out front. Just leave your truck and we’ll pick the piece of shit up in the morning. We're going to Pound Town tonight.”

She met them out front in a green Jeep, three girls, loud and drunk, and they piled in—Donny in the front, Bobby wedged in the back—and went wailing up the highway, drinking bottled Sangria and tossing the empties onto the shoulder, the stereo cranked.

“So what exactly were you two gentlemen doing in there?” the driver—Kristen, Bobby guessed—asked.

“Enjoying the sights,” Donny said.

“That place is sketch.”

“Like coochie city,” said one of the girls beside Bobby.

They crossed the intra-coastal waterway, the bridge a span of humped concrete and decorative tiles fashioned in the shapes of leaping dolphins, the land ahead a scatter of light, beyond that the dark ocean, a few harbor buoys winking. Bobby couldn’t get a good look at anyone until they pulled into the marina. They all three appeared in their late teens—better than a decade younger than Bobby. Kristen was tall and cinnamon in bikini bottoms and a yellow swim-shirt, the neoprene tight enough to flatten her breasts across her chest. Several piercings in her upper ear. The other girls were plainer through attractive, pale skin, bleached hair. Kristen introduced them: Jeanne and Destiny. They grabbed towels and Donny hefted a cooler. Kristen was already hanging all over him, kissing his neck, laughing.

Down near the dock they met two large Cuban men, older than the girls but younger than Bobby and Donny. One immediately began to wave his hands in front of him, palms down, as if signaling an incomplete pass.

“No way,” he said. “No fucking way, girl. The boat won’t hold that many.”

“Oh, come on, Sami.”

“Can’t do it. What’s the word I’m looking for? It won’t—What’s the word?”

“Displace,” said the other Cuban.

“It won’t displace that much weight.”

“Then I guess we’re leaving you two fat boys on the dock.”

Donny pushed past the men and threw his shoes into the boat. “We balling now, baby.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Fuck you, Daytona!”

“You in New Smyrna, dog,” Sami said.

“Well, fuck New Smyrna and fuck you too.”

Sami shook his head and stepped toward Bobby. “I’m cutting your boy some slack, but I don't mean to take his shit all night. He might want to cool out.”

“I got you.”

“I know Kristen say he just got cut loose and all, but he still might want to dial it down.”

A few minutes later they pulled out, all seven of them and the Boston Whaler riding low and slow past signs reading NO WAKE. Across the water was a seafood restaurant with flashing neon lobster claws that opened and closed. Bobby could see people moving along the broad deck. A band was playing and the sound carried loud but unintelligible. Sami drove and the other man—they weren’t Cuban, Bobby realized; he wasn’t sure what they were—stood beside him pouting and smoking a joint.

Bobby was in the back, seated between Jeanne and Destiny, the warm flesh of their thighs pressed against his jeans. They sped up and slowed again in a narrow channel. Houses and dock lights. Lawns right down to the cochina seawall where boats waited, tarped and raised on hydraulic lifts. He listened: the voices of children, folks moving inside screened porches. Bug lights. The steady chug of a sprinkler. Families: entire lives that were not his. The joint made a round, another, Bobby holding the smoke like a mercy, longer than he thought possible while Kristen yelled at Sami to go faster and eventually he pointed a flashlight out over the water and onto the sleek back of the manatee that swam alongside.

Donny put something in Bobby’s hand. The other Oxy.

“Don’t fuck up our night together. Don’t let it be like always.”

Bobby swallowed it with his beer. He could smell the girl beside him, her strawberry shampoo, and it was something about realizing how long since he had sat this close to a woman, something about the glossy manatee traveling beside them as if in blessing.

Don’t fuck up our night together.

Past the houses the channel opened into the backwater and the boat nosed up. The night air was warm and thick. Moonlight broke in the fold of their wake. They motored for another ten minutes and branched into a narrow channel where they idled toward a spit of sand. Sami cut the throttle and the second man jumped onto the beach and pulled the anchor line. The night suddenly quiet. The water like blood, warm and viscous, salt beading on the skin. Donny carried the cooler ashore and Sami dragged driftwood into a pile, lit a starter log beneath it. Long dancing shadows stretched over the water, the smell of woodsmoke, music from a tiny speaker. The three-quarters moon in and out of the high cirrus.

Bobby watched in merciful confusion. Inside the pill there was little sense. The gauze of Bobby’s brain. It was not uncomfortable. More like familiar: the state he had occupied since his discharge. The trance of days. The job out at the Farmton tract. The absent family. The dry rot eating his heart.

He lay on the sand with his feet up and his head propped on his hands, the tide running in and out so that his heels sank deeper. He could hear them laughing and dancing, drinking and running around the fire that was now a small blaze. Visible from space, he thought. Not the glow but his own perdition. He wondered for a moment what his mother thought. Her two boys violent men. The ruined apples of her eye. It was always Donny who had excelled. Donny who got the girls. Donny with the genius IQ who could’ve made all As and gone to Harvard if only he would apply himself, Mrs. Rosen. If only he would listen. But he would never listen. That was Donny's undoing. Bobby’s undoing was that he had listened too well. To his father and the men at the gym and later to Manny out in Vegas. To the drill sergeants and company commanders and finally to a puny PFC who, in the bright wonder of an RPG blast—a street in Sadr City strewn with plaster and destroyed fruit and, right there on the goddamn cobblestones, an entire human leg—had watched a boy flee from the chaos and screamed: somebody kill that motherfucker. It was Bobby who had chased him down and done it.

He raised himself onto his elbows and looked out at the dark water, something stirring there, the manatee, he thought. Then he saw the dorsal fin break. A dolphin maybe fifteen feet offshore. He climbed onto all fours and stood, staggered into the water. Toes into the warm muck. Jeans wet plaster. No fucking matter. He wanted to touch it. He thought if he could only touch it there might be not revelation but light. He put his hands out and waded, thigh-deep, waist, chest. The dolphin appeared untroubled. Playful. Breaking the surface and diving, breaking and diving. He would go home and tell his boy about this, little Bobby, still small enough to marvel at the world.

He reached but it slipped past him, dove. He turned to follow it when something hit him from behind and he staggered forward, collapsed beneath the water. He twisted, but it clung to him. He rose up gasping. The girl. One of the girls laughing into his neck with her legs around his waist. She slid off and he stood near the rear of the boat, gagging. Around them a rainbow of spilled gasoline spiraled from the outboard. She moved against him and kissed him and he pulled back to spit seawater.

“Come here,” she said, whispering, her hands on him, her mouth.

He moved again and she came forward and finally he pushed her back and she fell into the surf and was no longer laughing but screaming at him. What’s wrong with you? What the fuck is wrong with you? He didn’t know. He realized he was sweating. Standing waist deep and sweating and surely this was not right. She screamed again and he watched her go up the beach, wringing out her hair and twisting her hips. When she neared the fire he thought she was naked but couldn’t be certain. All that shimmer. All that shine.

He settled back onto the sand. It was okay now. He knew he would see things through, though it scared him to think of how far he was from morning, how distant from daybreak. But that was the pill. Knew a fella at Bragg took a couple one night and never woke up. Which was true. Knew a million fellas at Bragg that never woke up. But don’t fuck up our night together.

He slept then, or slipped inside the walls of sleep. When he woke Donny was on the sand beside him, a bottle of something in one hand. He waved a finger in front of Bobby. The finger sheathed with what appeared to be a used condom.

“That’s kind of a dick move, ain’t it?” he said. “Going after my girl’s girl.”

“She almost drowned me.”

“Big boy like you?”

“Scared the shit out of me. Dynasty.”

“Destiny.”

Bobby sat up. “She all right?”

“She bitched for a while then passed out.” He took a hit off the bottle and passed it to Bobby. Southern Comfort. “Get some of this.”

Bobby took the bottle and drank. “What the hell are we doing here?”

“Having the night of our lives. Celebrating my getting out. At least when you’re not assaulting the talent.”

“I mean with them.”

“Oh, you mean what are they doing with us? It’s the fucking novelty, man. On the beach with an ex-con. The sensitive dark-eyed beauty.”

“Kristen’s more like seventeen.”

“She wants to look into my damaged soul. She wants to heal me. Listen to what she told me: Call this a bamboo cane, and you have entered my trap. Do not call it a bamboo cane, and you fall into error. What do you call it?”

“You always were lucky with the girls.”

“Mamma always loved me more. That’s my thinking right now.”

“What about later?” Bobby asked.

“There is no later as far as I’m concerned. Later’s just the next thing down the line.”

“You didn’t learn a thing inside, did you?”

“No, I most certainly did not. Pride myself on that.” Donny pointed the bottle at the moon. “Actually one thing I learned inside—you’ll appreciate this—it’s that you can’t learn a thing. You don't step in the shit twice. You know what I'm saying? It just rolls past. The first time I got the shit kicked out of me. Wolfpacked outside the laundry room. I knew it was coming. Been looking over my shoulder for three straight days and all of a sudden they're on me and I’m right there with my face against the drain and I can feel a tooth come loose and all this fucking blood in my mouth, you know. I kept thinking: it’s happening; this is it right here.” He shook his head. “But then later—I don’t know—it was just gone, the whole thing. And what did I know? I couldn’t even tell you what it felt like. So later I’m thinking about it and some guy, I hear him say to somebody else, this is real, this is fucking real, bro. And I thought: no, it ain’t. This ain’t fucking real. Ain’t nothing real. You ever feel like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suspect it’s a lot of the same shit over there. You get bored. Sitting around waiting for something bad to happen. But then when something good happens.”

“It’s like it’s the sweetest thing in the whole world.”

“It’s like you didn’t even know sweet before, like you couldn’t even taste it. And then it’s fucked up but you start to think: maybe it’s worth it, all the shit for that one little taste.” He flung the condom into the water. “You ever think it was worth it?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Maybe sometimes.”

“I’d sit and think. Knowing all the time the thinking is all there is. You get out or you get home or whatever and it’s done then, that’s the end of it. Which is pretty much where we are right now.”

“I still can't believe that nice girl let you put your dirty old hands on her underpants.”

Donny seemed not to hear. “I want you to look up at the sky. You looking?”

“Fuck you.”

“Man, I'm serious. Look up there. In a few days Mercury and Venus will line up with the moon. We won't ever see it like that again in our lives.”

Bobby said nothing.

“You know what we should do, man?” Donny said. “We should plan something fucking epic. I mean pack up, get a bottle of Jack and some good weed and just go cross-country with it. I’d like to see the desert. I want to see a desert again before I die.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why the fuck not, man? Name me one thing that’s tying you down?”

“Work.”

“Work?” Donny shook his head. “I heard you were sitting out watching trees grow. Listen to me. Kristen said she’d go with us. She’s going up to see her folks in Ocala. They’ve got some friends in Arizona. Supposedly got this house up on a mountain we could stay at. She said we could just pick her up.”

“We got families.”

“We got ex-fucking-wives is what we got. And let me tell you this: I don’t want a family any more than I want a wife. It all came to me inside. Domesticity tethers you to this awful mediocrity. Without wives men would either be great or terrible but with them we’re just all of us some kind of nothing. Just plain. It’s no wonder you ran off to war. You get a wife and a house and a kid and pretty soon you’re just drowning in that daily bullshit. No, sir. No, thank you.”

He raised the bottle but it was empty now, passed it to Bobby as if for confirmation.

“I could see us out there on the open road,” Donny said, “just pure velocity. A white streak down the highway. We could blow up the universe.”

Bobby laughed. “You’re gonna wind up in hell, Donny. We both are.”

“Shit,” his brother said. “We ain’t going to hell. We’re in hell.”

 

Mark Powell is the author of three novels, PRODIGALS, BLOOD KIN, and THE DARK CORNER, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. He teaches at Stetson University in Florida.

 

Squirrels in the Attic, fiction by CL Bledsoe

Everyone in the house knew they were squirrels, except KT, who was sure with the conviction of an irrational mind further tainted from years of heavy drug use, that there were people – little people – living in the attic. They started coming in after Tommy, KT’s boyfriend, hired some buddies to repair the fire damage to the roof and pocketed the leftover cash from KT’s mother. The buddies did about as good a job as one would expect a couple meth freaks to do: meticulous and unfinished, which meant there were chinks the squirrels started exploiting.

KT figured they were little people after she got high and watched a movie the kids had rented about little people that lived in the walls of an old house and stole things. It was a logical connection for her: lots of KT’s things came up missing all the time. Jewelry. Money. Cigarettes. That, plus the noise of them scurrying around, and the voices she was sure she heard was just about all the proof she needed.

Just about. KT had the sense not to tell anybody about her theory until she had proof – except Tommy, whose response was his usual grunt – so she traded for a video camera from a tweaker and set it up in the attic. She left the house, sure she was going to be vindicated. Tommy waited until she was gone, went up to the attic and got the camera, and took it to a pawnshop in town. He used the cash to go on a bender. When KT got back to the house and found the camera missing, she ran outside and refused to return.

When Joey, KT’s youngest, and his big sister Chyna got home from school, their mother was waiting m at the bus stop, chain smoking and shaking.

“You seen anything in the attic?” she asked.

“Squirrels?” Joey said.

“No,” she shook her head vehemently. “Ain’t god damned squirrels.”

Chyna grabbed Joey’s hand and pulled him towards home.

“What is it?” Joey asked, pulling against his sister to hear his mother out.

KT looked around and leaned in towards her son. “These little fuckers. Don’t know how big they are. Tried to film ‘em, but they stole the camera.”

Joey laughed, but Chyna jerked him away, hard. They could hear KT, still talking, as they walked down the road.

“It’s not funny,” Chyna said, when they couldn’t hear her anymore. “We never should’ve let them back in the house after that fire. Grandmother said it was our decision, but you wanted her back.”

Joey was quiet. “Maybe she’s just confused,” he said.

“Yeah,” Chyna said. “May-be.”

 

KT didn’t come home for supper, so Joey took a bowl of mac & cheese and headed for the door.

“Be careful,” Chyna said, making him jump – he’d thought she was in the bathroom and wouldn’t see him leave. “She’s not right.” Joey nodded, and Chyna pointed to her head. “She’s not right in the head.”

Joey went outside and called, but his mother didn’t respond. He walked up the road and found her still at the bus stop. She was lying on the ground near the entrance gate and the sign that said Hunter’s Rest. He started to nudge her to wake her, but thought maybe she needed the sleep, so he set the bowl down beside her. He watched her sleep for a moment, but she didn’t move or anything. He was pretty sure she was breathing, so he went back home and played cards with his sister.

The kids saw KT still sleeping on their way to the bus stop. When the bus came, Chyna got on quick, but Joey saw his mother sit up and wave at him. He pointed at the bowl beside her, and she dug her fingers in and ate some. He watched through the bus window as she gummed it, sitting cross-legged, until the bus pulled away.

When they got off the bus that afternoon, she wasn’t there.

“Thank God,” Chyna said.

When they got home, she wasn’t there, either.

“Should we look for her?” Joey asked.

“Hell no.”

“What if something’s wrong with her?”

Chyna turned furious eyes on her brother. “She’s a grown ass woman afraid to come in the house because there’s little people in the attic. Of course something’s wrong with her.”

Joey went quiet, and Chyna let him sulk for a good hour until she grabbed him and went looking.

They found KT sitting by the lake, watching the water. She smiled when they came up. There was grass and plant stems that might once have been flowers, if you were kind, in her hair. They didn’t know what to do so they sat beside her.

“Mom used to bring me fishing out here all the time when I was little,” KT said, finally. “We’d sit in a boat with a little umbrella like we was in some movie. We couldn’t talk – momma would slap me right in the mouth if I made any noise at all. So we’d just sit there.” She smiled and Joey smiled to see it.

“Your daddy used to take you fishing out here, Chyna. You remember?”

“Yes ma’am,” Chyna said. “He was always drunk.”

“He was.” KT laughed. “He’d get mad and cuss the fish for not biting. Nothing was going to bite, though. The water’s too polluted. He’d bring his gun and threaten to shoot anything he saw, but he never saw nothing.” She laughed again and Chyna laughed too, despite herself. They lapsed into silence until Joey spoke.

“They’re just squirrels, mom,” he said.

“Hmm?” she said, still lost in reverie.

“In the attic. It’s just squirrels coming in.”

KT nodded and Joey and Chyna exchanged relieved looks.

KT put her left arm around Joey and her right around Chyna and pulled them close. “That’s what they want you to think,” she said.

Once he realized she wasn’t going to get eaten by a bear or anything, Joey actually thought it was kind of nice. Over the course of the next few days, Tommy was gone, which eased up the tension around the house. Every morning, KT was there to greet him as he got on the bus. He’d bring her food, and when he got off the bus after school, she’d greet him and give him the dirty dish so he could take it home and wash it. In the evenings, he’d find her wherever she’d wandered off to. She refused to come near the house, but she wouldn’t actually leave the Hunter’s Rest neighborhood.

Chyna was embarrassed, of course, but even she had to admit it was nice in the evenings, just the two of them. Until a neighbor showed up to knock timidly at the door and complain.

“She’s just walking around,” Chyna said.

“She slept on my doorstep last night,” the woman said. She was a heavyset, squat women Chyna had always thought had kind eyes.

“She thinks—“ Joey started to say, but Chyna nudged him.

“I’m really sorry,” Chyna said. “She’s been sleepwalking lately.”

“I just opened the door, and she was lying there like a…like a cat…” The woman played with the hem of her tee-shirt with nervous eyes.

“I’ll talk to her.” Chyna smiled. “Thank you,” she added.

The woman looked from Chyna to her brother and back. “Are you kids doing okay?” she asked in a serious voice.

“Yes ma’am,” Chyna said. “Joey’s on the Honor Roll this term.”

“Well congratulations, young man.” She smiled at him. She looked at each of the kids again and then turned to go, but paused. “I don’t mind her visiting, you understand, I’m just concerned.”

“We understand,” Chyna said. “Thank you.”

“And you kids, if you ever want to visit, come on by.”

“Thank you,” the kids said in unison.

The woman left and Chyna closed the door.

Tommy came back after the third or fourth day. He went straight to bed and didn’t emerge until the next day. “The hell is KT?” he asked when he saw the kids.

Joey explained.

“Shit,” Tommy said. “Well go get her. I need something.”

“She won’t come inside the house,” Chyna said. “The neighbors are complaining about it.”

“Hell with the neighbors,” Tommy said. “They call the law?”

“Not yet,” Chyna said. “But one of them came to the door about it.”

“Shit,” he said again.

When the kids got home from school, Tommy was there along with a different car in the yard. Inside, they heard pounding and all sorts of racket coming from the roof. Later, Tommy came in with one of his buddies and went back into Tommy and KT’s bedroom. The kids heard them laughing and listening to music late into the night. The next morning, as the kids were eating breakfast, Tommy came out.

“Tell your momma I got rid of the squirrels.”

“She doesn’t believe they’re squirrels,” Joey said.

“Well whatever the shit she thinks, I got rid of ‘em,” Tommy said. He stomped out. They heard his El Camino thunder to life and the tires squeal. A little while later, Tommy’s friend emerged from Tommy and KT’s bedroom. He stood in the hallway for a long time while Chyna and Joey finished their cereal and washed their dishes, and then he came and sat at the table.

“Would you like some cereal?” Chyna asked.

He waved the offer away, obviously disgusted at the thought of food. Chyna put their dishes away, grabbed Joey’s hand, and led him outside while Joey watched the man stare at the countertop as though he saw something other than green Formica.

 

At the bus stop, KT was waiting with a crooked smile. Her clothes were muddy and damp. She smelled like the trash at the bottom of the can.

“We’re almost out of cereal,” Chyna said to her.

"Well go get some,” KT said. “You got a job.”

Chyna was quiet and wouldn’t look at KT anymore.

“Tommy got rid of the people,” Joey said.

KT turned her weird smile on him. “How’d he do that?”

Joey glanced at Chyna, but he was on his own. “He hired a guy to help him clear them up. And he fixed the roof so they can’t get back in. He’s still there, the guy.”

“Is he?” KT said. She looked towards the house. The bus pulled up and Chyna took Joey’s hand and led him on board. KT winked at him as the bus pulled away.

When they got off after school, KT wasn’t there. Joey felt a little tightness in his belly that only got worse as they walked down the drive to their house. Inside, they could hear music from the master bedroom. After a while, KT came out. She was wearing clean clothes and didn’t smell anymore. They both watched her, but she just went to the fridge and got something out. Tommy came behind her and rubbed himself against her. She turned to kiss him. The kids looked away.

“This place is a pigsty,” Tommy said to Chyna. “Y’all kids get busy and clean up.”

Joey put away his homework and he and Chyna started cleaning. When Tommy and KT went back into their bedroom, Joey watched his sister for a reaction.

“Nice while it lasted,” was all she said.

 

CL Bledsoe is the author of the young adult novel Sunlight; three poetry collections, _____(Want/Need), Anthem, and Leap Year; and a short story collection called Naming the Animals. A poetry chapbook, Goodbye to Noise, is available online at www.righthandpointing.com/bledsoe. Another, The Man Who Killed Himself in My Bathroom, is available at http://tenpagespress.wordpress.com/20.... His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South's Million Writer's Award. His story “The Scream” was selected as a Notable Story of 2011. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 5 times. He blogs at Murder Your Darlings, http://clbledsoe.blogspot.com Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, Prick of the Spindle, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. Bledsoe lives with his wife and daughter in Maryland.

The Bitter End, poem by Mike Lafontaine

Your teeth are crooked

she said – they shoot out

at awkward angles – just like you

she figured me out fast

I have lots of nervous energy

I can be intense

that’s okay she said I like that

in time she did not

I lost my mind for this girl

for the first time ever

I was a terrible crying drunk

for many months

my friends did not want to

hang out with me

I was a bummer

rebound girls of all shapes

and sizes did not help

it took me two years

to get through it

I bumped into her

and her daughter the other day

at fucking Target

of all places

my heart broke again –

that kid could have been mine

if I was normal

she smiled and said

I looked well

I told her motherhood

agreed with her

I said hello to her daughter

she cowered into her mother’s skirt

we smiled some more

she said she had to go

I said sure it was great

seeing you again

she said it was

great to see you too

she then grabbed my arm

looked me in the eye

and said – take care of yourself

and walked off

I exited the store

crossed the road

and entered the bar

Mike Lafontaine has lived in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. He has had a lot of crappy jobs and some good ones; he seems to attract women with mental problems. He earned a (BA) Bachelor of Arts in Drama, Writing and Performance and then a (MA) Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Macquarie University. He currently lives in Sydney, Australia with his girlfriend and their dog Lloyd. His work has been featured or upcoming in Word Riot, Fried Chicken and Coffee & The Camel Saloon.

 

 

Our Lady of the Rockies, fiction by Eric Bosse

I meet a girl and her father on the crest of a hill. She waves as the dog and I climb, and the dog bolts so fast I think he might hit the hilltop and keep running into the clouds and on to the sun. I hold back a shout with a fist to my lips, and the dog skids to a stop and licks the girl’s shoes. When I get close, the father juts his chin to greet me. With one hand, he blocks the wind from a camp stove. With the other, he flicks a silver Zippo. It sparks but won’t light, and he tosses it to the dirt. His fingers are black with grease. “Always something,” he says, and he reaches around to scratch his own back.

The girl rubs the dog’s ears, and I ask her questions. She is twelve. She figure skates. She loves vampires and feels “discombobulated” by the leap from elementary to middle school. Her hands dance as she speaks of cell-phone coverage, her dead best friend, and a stainless-steel stud someone will punch through her eyebrow the day she turns eighteen. Her apple-yellow hair hangs in a thick braid down the back of her pink T-shirt.

“Knock it off already with the piercing talk,” her father says.

I scope out the glen below. It looks empty, and I tell the father I will pitch my tent a bit downhill. He asks what I’m up to in the woods on a Wednesday. I say I got laid off, and he tells me to join the club.

“You remind me of a boy I know,” I say to the girl. “A special boy.”

She smiles then frowns and looks to her father. He examines his hands. I pick a burr from the dog’s coat and feel an impulse to give the girl a gift. But I have only the dog, and he is not mine to give.

The father tips a canvas chair onto its side by the camp stove, grabs his lighter, and coaxes a blue flame from the burner. “Give me the coffee,” he says, “and those sausages.”

The girl pets the dog again.

“Hurry up,” her father says.

She unzips a backpack, hands him a tin pot, and pulls out a plastic bag of ice water and a pack of eight sausages. The dog sniffs at her knees and crotch. I tug him away by the collar. The father asks if I have enough food. I point a thumb over my shoulder and turn so he can see the trout dangling from my pack. I tell the girl to stop by later if she wants to play fetch. She says she might. Her father tells me no offense but he won’t let her visit a stranger in the woods. I say good call. And, as the dog and I hike downhill, the girl sings the same catchy pop song my son was humming as I drove him to the mall this morning — a song my wife has insisted Satan himself surely composed.

I make camp and dig a fire pit on the far side of the draw. The dog sniffs everything in sight while I fry the trout with wild onions and morel mushrooms. Whiffs of pork and garlic from the sausages on the hilltop swirl through the fir trees and mix with sage, trout, olive oil, smoke, and mist off the stream. I look around and breathe it all in. This is the first peace I have known in weeks.

I have come to the woods to escape drama at home. My wife and I have long suspected our son Peter is gay, and we have worked hard to come to terms with this. Erin wanted to take him to psychologists for counseling. I argued for loving the sinner even if we hated the sins he might someday commit. Our worst fear was that one day Peter would ask us to pay for surgery to make him our daughter. But the real shock came two months ago, when he sat us on the sofa to announce he would forgo gender altogether.

“I am not a boy,” he told us, “and I am not a girl.”

Erin’s grip nearly broke my fingers. She asked Peter what the hell he was, then. He had a term for it:

“I am an asexual androgyne.”

I put my arm around Erin’s shoulders. She jerked away and asked Peter if he was some kind of sex robot. He said, “Oh my god,” and she warned him never to use the Lord’s name in vain. Meanwhile, the dog licked his paws.

“Sorry,” Peter said, “but I won’t let society dictate my identity or tell me what to desire.”

“Have you joined some kind of cult?” Erin asked.

Peter stood up. “I don’t expect you to understand,” he said. “But I do expect you to love me as I am.”

I felt strangely proud of my boy, or whatever he was, and it was pride — not judgment, not regret — that pushed a tear from my eye. Peter saw this, and he too started to cry. I reached for him, but Erin dropped to her knees and burst into prayer. She shouted at the ceiling with such force I expected her to conjure the wrath of God then and there. Peter’s face crinkled. He ran from the room and took the stairs three at a time. His bedroom door did not slam, but it shut hard and the lock clicked. The dog came over and put his head in my lap. Erin turned to me.

“You have to put a stop to this,” she said.

“How?”

“Pray on it. Read scripture. It’s been a long time since I saw you with your Bible. Stop going through the motions. Consult Pastor Weaver. We’re losing our son. Do something.”

“I am,” I said. “I’m letting him be.”

Over the next few days, Erin made it clear she blamed me for Peter’s strangeness. I had let him play with dolls. I had let him wear towels as skirts when she was not home. I had refused to spank him, and I had permitted him to listen to popular music. This androgyny business was just a clever smokescreen to hide his homosexuality, she said. If I hadn’t kept her from intervening early on, maybe Peter could have been saved.

So she went after him hard. She grounded him indefinitely. Then she dragged him to Pastor Weaver, who knew a camp where they cured homosexuality. But the cure would cost three thousand dollars we did not have, so Erin opted to shout the gay out of Peter despite his repeated claims of wanting no sex at all.

“Where is your porn stash?” she said to him one night at dinner.

Peter squinted at her as if she were insane. “What porn stash?”

“I checked your browser history,” she said.

“And?”

“No porn. You must have magazines or videos. Where do you hide them?”

Peter looked to me for help, but I felt paralyzed. My marriage was crumbling, and the thought of living without a wife or an income terrified me. I stared into my tuna casserole and waited for Peter’s answer.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said.

“Take the dog,” I said.

“No.”

A week into Erin’s campaign of terror, we raced to the hospital so doctors could pump a black spatter of pills from Peter’s stomach.

Afterward, while Peter slept, Erin wept onto my chest. I felt so angry that I could not bring myself to wrap my arms around her. I had never been a violent husband and had not raised my voice in years, but it took all my strength not to punch her in the face right there beside Peter’s bed. I prayed that night for the first time in a long time, for more patience.

After three days in Crisis Watch and a month in the psych ward, Peter came home loaded with Zoloft and conviction. But Erin was ready. I begged her to take it easy on him, but she cut off his Internet access and declared her shame for what her son had become.

Then came three weeks of full-on Armageddon. The more Peter resisted, the harder Erin prayed. And the harder she prayed, the less I believed that God gave a damn. So I knocked on Peter’s door. And I knocked again.

“What?” he said from within.

“Hey, Pete, how about you and I go camping, just like old times?”

“Is this some desperate, backwoods attempt to convert me?”

“No,” I said. “I promise.”

He opened his door, hugged me, and said maybe it would be best if he stayed home to sort things out with Mom. We looked at each other and both knew that was impossible. But did this stop me from leaving? No, it did not.

After the trout cooks all the way through, I set the cast-iron pan in the dirt and get on my knees. “Dear heavenly Father,” I say. And no more words come. I had envisioned this as a prayer for sanity, and for wisdom. I had promised myself I would stay in the woods and the wind and the rain until I stumbled onto the path down which God wanted me to lead my family. Yet now, with just me and the clouds and the smells of forest and sausage and trout, I cannot bring myself to say a simple blessing for my meal.

So I sit cross-legged with a plate on my lap and eat as the dog watches every rise and fall of my fork. His whiskers twitch, and he licks drool from his lips. I set down my plate with half the fish still uneaten, but that dog does not budge until I tell him to go for it. When he leaps up, lightning splits the sky. As he eats, thunder rumbles down the valley. The rain begins, and the girl and her father scramble into their tent. They zip and unzip it and gather their things.

Eventually, at dusk, the sky clears and the girl climbs out onto the highest boulder. She looks down and waves at me and the dog. I want to reach up and wrap a sweater around her shoulders. I pretend not to see her and scoop mud onto the embers of my fire.

Long after the moon goes down, I wake to the girl’s father’s shouts. He growls and curses at the night. The dog barks, but I put a hand on his head to hush him. I unzip the window flap of my tent. The father’s flashlight spins on the hilltop like an airway beacon.

“Watch out,” he shouts. “There’s a bear out there. Or maybe not a bear, but something big.”

I hear nothing but the man’s voice and the trickle of the stream. After a while he gives up on me. He and his daughter whisper for a long time, and the dome of their yellow tent glows like a second moon until the sky turns purple and fades into baby blue.

Around noon, the girl arrives at my camp with hugs and kisses for the dog. She tosses pinecones into the stream, and the dog fetches them. Her father shows up, too, with a handful of stone arrowheads. He lets me hold one. It is small and dull and surprisingly heavy. We’re not the first ones here, he tells me, and he wipes his neck with a red bandana. What he wouldn’t give, he says, to build a house on that ridge.

I ask where he comes from, what he does, and if he knows how lucky he is to have such a bright little girl. He is a contractor without contracts, he says. He comes from Butte, and his daughter isn’t half as innocent as she might seem. But it feels right to bring her into the wild, away from friends and computers and a mother who coddles her.

I tell him to never stop coddling her. And, without a thought for how the question might sound, I ask if his daughter likes boys.

Maybe he sees the stress in my eyes or the tightness in my lips. Perhaps he thinks I am a molester or a rapist. Or possibly he just pities me as I fumble his arrowhead to the dirt. But he doesn’t pick it up. He tells me to keep it. I, too, leave the arrowhead on the ground. I am in no mood to bend over. The man calls to his daughter, says goodbye, and tells me to watch out for bears.

I hike a mile to the lake. No one is there. A loon touches down on the water. He folds his wings, looks around, and calls over and over for something or someone who never arrives. I toss in a line. The dog sits up and pants. I think about Peter and the mystery of what he has become. I realize that he isn’t done becoming. After all, he has three years left of high school, then college, then his whole life. And, really, what has my wife become? Erin has always been deeply religious. Until now I have compensated for her mean streak, pretended it wasn’t there. Yet in many ways, she is my rock. I want to be that solid ground for her now, for both of them, but I have no idea how.

I reel in a good-sized rainbow trout, bash its head on a rock, poke a knife into its gills to bleed it, and hike back to camp.

When I get there, the yellow tent is gone from the hilltop. I climb up to see their campsite and find no trace that they were ever there. Then I gut, clean, and fry my trout without the smell of garlic and sausage blowing down the hillside. And the smell is all wrong. So I pack up, hike back to the car, and drive home in the dark.

Passing through Butte, I see Our Lady of the Rockies — a 100-foot-tall Madonna on a cliff above the town. She stands there, all lit up and bursting with love, stretching her concrete arms wide to embrace the world. Surely her gesture is meant to inspire, but it strikes me as weak. It reminds me of me. And for a while I give into the temptation to blame myself for all that has gone wrong. I love Peter and Erin, but emotion alone is not enough. Like the statue, I open my arms, stand tall, and wait for something to happen.

When I get home, the house is silent. I see Peter’s light under his door, but I don’t hear him moving around in there. So I crawl into bed beside Erin. All night, I dream of bonfires, forest fires, and ashes in rings of stone.

Erin and I wake at the same time, eye to eye across the gap between our pillows. She sits up and covers her breasts with the sheet. She asks why I came home so soon then tells me she wants a divorce.

“Can we eat breakfast first?” I ask.

Outside, brakes squeal, a garbage truck’s compactor roars to life, and a trash can slams to the street. I pull Erin close. She pulls away, gets out of bed, and wraps the sheet around her body.

“He’ll outgrow this,” I say. “Give him time.”

“No,” she says. “I’ve prayed on it.”

“Then give us time,” I say.

And she says she has prayed on that, too. This is her final word on the subject. She carries her work clothes into the bathroom and locks the door. I push my face into the pillow and feel the dog’s wet tongue on the foot I’ve dangled off the end of the bed.

And for several days — when I’m not boxing up Peter’s and my possessions, applying for jobs, or arguing with Erin, whose heart has grown crooked and gnarled with knots — I sample sausages from butcher shops around town. I cook these with trout and sage. Sometimes Erin rallies enough to thank me for these dinners. Peter, the vegetarian, refuses to try them. They are good meals, but they do not give off the scent I crave. I soon quit red meat in favor of chicken and seafood. And, once the divorce paperwork arrives in the mail, I eat no meat at all because I can no longer shake the image of that trout’s eyes as I bashed its head on a rock.

At some point Erin and I find ourselves standing together in the laundry room. She asks why Peter and I still live in her house. I tell her I will not leave until I have everything I need. She asks what that means, and I shrug. She piles dry clothes into a wicker basket. I tell her to stop. Then I get down on one knee and ask her to marry me all over again.

“Come on,” I say. “This time at least we’ll know what the hell we’re getting into.”

She puts a hand over her mouth. Then she shuts the dryer, grabs the cordless phone, and locks herself in the bathroom.

Four months pass, and I live with my things in the basement. I eat little and cook almost nothing. I’ve lost forty pounds. When I walk the dog, the neighbors say I am wasting away.

I know now what was missing in my failed attempts to conjure up that elusive odor of sausage, sage, and trout. One simply cannot extract pollen, sap, and mist from the forest air and bring it home. But on winter afternoons, wrapped in the heat of the house, I sometimes stroke the dog and catch myself longing for the smell of that meal. I think about the girl and her father, as if our chance encounter marked a crossroads — as if the odors in the air that night carried meanings I had failed to grasp. I sift through every detail. I shift the angle of a rock and the slant of an arm. I adjust the balance and heft of the gear in my pack. I shuffle the order of moments and string the daughter’s words through the mouth of the father — and his words through her mouth — hoping to catch them out in a lie, a dodge, a moment of truth. I fumble around for some toehold on which to scramble back through time and ask that girl and her father in the full light of day to please take my son’s faithful, dopey dog as a gift.

Yet I love this dog. I bought him as a pup, a present for Peter’s birthday. But Peter ignored him from the start. Now the dog goes wherever I go. He naps with me on the couch in the family room. He rolls in the snow when I shovel the walk. He nuzzles my wife when I pass her in the hall, and he licks Peter’s wet shoes after school. And, after the dog has loved them, he sits at my feet and sleeps. I understand now that he is mine, and he shows me the way.

Eric Bosse has published more than forty stories, some flash fiction and some longer, in such magazines and journals as The Sun, Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, Zoetrope, Eclectica, Night Train, The Collagist, and Wigleaf. His story collection, Magnificent Mistakes, was published in September 2011 by Ravenna Press. He lives in Oklahoma with his wife and forty-seven children, give or take forty-five.

Soil, poem by Joshua Michael Stewart

She needs to get rid of the revolver

wrapped in the blood-splattered dress

tucked underneath her driver’s seat.

She parks the Chevy on the shoulder

of a gravel road, the engine ticks

in the morning blaze while cicadas

drone their prayers. Jeremiah sings

along with the radio. She steps out

of the car with the swaddled gun

and a wrench snug against her chest,

hops a drainage ditch, and climbs

a barbed wire fence, careful not to snag

her skirt. There’re horses further in the field.

A stallion raises his head, twitches

an ear, and then lowers his breath

back into the dew-drenched grass.

She hollers back to her brother: Jeremiah,

you stay. I won’t be long. He waves her off

with a fat hand through the rolled-down

window, annoyed that she’s interrupting

his song. There’s a rhythmic swish

as she clumps deeper into the pasture.

Grass blades stick to her wet shoes, burs

cling to her cotton hem. She kneels down

behind a bosk, and thinks about the man

alone in the church pew, the way doom

stretched across his face like a prairie fire

leaving a landscape of despair as she raised

the revolver a ruler-length from his forehead.

She yanks tufts of tall fescue out of the ground,

and claws at the black earth with the wrench.

She wedges the bundle into the narrow hole

and bulldozes the dirt over the shallow grave.

She brushes off her knees, and wades back

to the car glinting in the sun. Jeremiah glares

as she plops herself behind the wheel,

and clunks the heavy door closed.

Sorry Jeremiah, she says, nature, you know.

She cranks the engine. The Chevy backfires.

Gunshots crack against the walls of her memory

just as they did among cathedral arches.

As they pull onto the road, Jeremiah cranes

his neck to watch trees, clouds and horses

fall into the abyss of the side view mirror.

Joshua Michael Stewart has had poems published in Massachusetts Review, Euphony, Rattle, Cold Mountain Review, William and Mary Review, Pedestal Magazine, Evansville Review and Blueline. Pudding House Publications published his Chapbook Vintage Gray in 2007. Finishing Line Press published his chapbook Sink Your Teeth into the Light in 2012 He lives in Ware, Massachusetts. Visit him at www.joshuamichaelstewart.yolasite.com

'64 Suicide Lincoln, poem by RJ Looney

Daddy came home from work

one Wednesday in July at 2 pm

smelling like beer

not talking to anybody

after that he didn't stray too far away

spending most of what would be his last year

in Mam-maw's old tractor shed

playing a Peavey Strat copy

through a beat up matching amp

he'd picked up at Pancho's Pawn & Loan

We could tell when he was on the Yellowstone

amp cranked up to 11

the neighbors up the hill

would raise hell at us on the party-line

to make him stop

August was hot as a malaria fever

and he wrote a whole catalog

of songs that didn't rhyme

with mean-sounding titles like

Burn Up World

'64 Suicide Lincoln and

Murderous Bible

When October rolled around

he took Uncle Junior's car trailer

to the junkyard and returned with ten car fenders

mostly GM products

November afternoons

were spent in Old Milwaukee

with the little Savage bolt-action .22

shooting them full of holes

or pinging in thumb-sized dents

with a 2 lb. ball peen hammer

other times working them over

with pitted leather work boots or gloved fists

In the gray of winter

he set to practicing

the trade he'd learned

at 17 in reformatory

skills acquired as payment

for a well placed

and equally deserved shovel

delivered to the face of his own Daddy

to sober him up

the patched metal fenders

once again smooth as glass

primed and begging to shine

with paint he couldn't afford

St. Patrick's Day

called to the neighbors up the hill

to light out for NOLA

so Daddy liberated some 20 odd gallons

of John Deere green from their shop

and sprayed his fenders with it

suspended from the tractor shed rafters

like ornaments on a brown Christmas Tree

I came home from a party

Sunday morning after he'd finished them

still drunk on malt wine

and saw the light from the shed

a cold north wind

banged the open double doors around

those old fenders bumped each other

like bleached out cow bones

making hollow thumping sounds

scratching away their new coating of stolen love

He was slumped down in a chair facing them

one spent .22 shell on the concrete floor

a blue dot between his eyes

flowing crimson into open coveralls

We never took the fenders down

and on days when I know

the wind is just right

I'll drive out there

open up the doors and play

Daddy's two chord angry songs

through that fuzzy old amp

behind the hollow bony beat

of his memory

RJ Looney has lived all but eight months of his life in Arkansas.  His poetry has been published both in print and online, most recently in Pigeonbike: Beyond the Broken Bridge, Salt Zine, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and Thunder Sandwich.

The Smoking Ban, fiction by Caroline Kepnes

Hannah missed the way things used to be. Now, if you wanted to have a cigarette at The Tavern, you had to walk out onto the deck. But it didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that everyone inside was smoking, flicking their ashes, singing along to rock songs that never got old, not here on the island anyway, where people weren’t expected to grow up, where the old would get drunk and lament the fact that they never got off this damn sandbar and the young would balk, why would you even want to get off? The old would shake their heads and remind the young that they were young. And then some song would come on and they’d all want to dance and they’d forget what they had been talking about in the first place. They all chose to be teenagers, except the few who turned eighteen, hopped a ferry and returned only annually, at Christmas, with heirs of condescension that only affirmed to the locals that staying on island meant you were stronger, more whole of heart and more specific somehow, able to have all the experiences you needed in one place. You were loyal and you deserved to get drunk and pat yourselves on the back on a regular and frequent basis.

Back then the smoke was a raft wide enough to hold them all. Smoke in a bar was an airborne sea monster, slowly drifting, watchable as TV. The leather skinned older women huddled and puffed on ultra lights and whined about their husbands, cautionary tales for the young girls who sucked on real cigarettes, Marlboro reds, silently swearing to quit so they’d never look like that. The guys, happy guys, sad guys, drunk guys, guys who needed eight beers and a shot of Jack to get a buzz on, all of them slightly emasculated by the fact that they were clearly only comfortable amongst familiar people, people they could identify, for the most part, by name. All shared a deep suspicion of outsiders, of strangers. And that meant even if you hated someone you loved them because you knew them and they served as a target for some feeling you had, be it a good one or an ignoble one. The little black plastic ashtrays were everywhere, in the bathrooms, on the tables, in the bars. But not anymore they weren’t.

Now here she was, standing out in the cold, sharing a cigarette—imagine that, sharing—with Andrea DeWitt. They were out here because you couldn’t smoke in there anymore. It was cold. And they were women. And this was degrading. Being outside made smoking into an addiction, an affair, something illicit, which it wasn’t. They were cigarettes for fuck’s sake.

“I said this thing’s genius.”

“What?” Hannah blushed. She hadn’t been paying attention to Andrea. Of course, she hadn’t been paying much attention to her since they were in high school, when Andrea became the girl she was now, talking too much about nothing all of the time. Andrea never had brothers. Maybe that was why.

“The Butt Bin. These things are genius.”

Hannah looked at the Butt Bin and saw a giant black contraption, an inelegant bastion of practicality; what a stupid thing. Why not just put out some nice standard black plastic ashtrays? Butt Bins started showing up like cockroaches when the smoking ban went through and now they were everywhere. They were industrial, they were ugly and they announced themselves with a pride Hannah found obnoxious; steel nametags nailed to each one that read BUTT BIN. As if we were all so stupid we didn’t know what they were.

“I hate them,” Hannah said.

Andrea huffed. “Oh, Hannah, you’re funny. Anyway, the bake sale.”

Hannah simmered. She wasn’t funny. She was smart. But she knew Andrea too well to be stung. Andrea was basic. She preferred loving things to hating them. She was the type who’d get excited for some limited time ice cream concoction at McDonalds, eat it every day for as long as they had it, then talk about missing it for months until it was gone, until they were promoting some new piece of special, fleeting junk. Andrea didn’t have a critical bone in her body. If told to be excited, she’d get excited. She was deeply commercial that way. Maybe it was because of Buckets. In nursery school Andrea was mad for her puppy Buckets. Her father ran him over with the lawnmower. Andrea cried for weeks, always saying she’d never love anything that could be taken away ever again. Hannah told her that she would, but Andrea always shook her head no. They hadn’t talked about Buckets in hears, but Hannah thought Andrea never really stopped mourning that dog. She just had a cycle, anticipation, pleasure, mourning, and begin again.

She tried to smile at Andrea, “Don’t you miss smoking inside?”

“Heavens no,” Andrea said. “The stench. Yuck. So as I was saying, Skip and I may go to the Keys for a month.”

Hannah stared at the butt bin. What a crude thing. You’ve had six drinks and you’re supposed to put the butt into this miniscule slot? All that was missing was a sign that said FUCK YOU SMOKER.

“Hey I asked you a question,” Andrea said.

“Oh,” said Hannah. “Sorry.”

“How did I manage to hold onto Skip for thirty eight years?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m a great fuck. That’s how.”

Andrea didn’t talk like this. You didn’t suddenly talk like this after forty-eight years of friendship. And Hannah squirmed. “Well good for you.”

“What are you good at, Hannah?”

“Excuse me?” Hannah stubbed her cigarette on the deck, in protest against the Bin.

“I just told you I’m a good fuck. Everyone is good at something otherwise nobody would keep anybody around.”

“Well I don’t know.”

“It’s the one thing I have no doubt. I. Am. A. Great. Fuck.”

“That’s terrific.”

“Are you a great fuck?”

Hannah reached for the railing, but they were standing by the butt bucket. There was nothing to grab. “Maybe,” she said.

Andrea’s smile faded. “Well, you must be good at something else then.”

It was time go inside. The next time they spoke, there would only be talk of the bake sale.

 

Nate drove, whistling, one hand out the window. Driving drunk, Hannah thought. Nate is good at that. He was loaded, surely, but in April there was no danger in it. She couldn’t get Andrea’s words out of her head, plain as a prayer, I am a good fuck.

“That was good times tonight,” he said.

“Oh sure,” she said, trying. “I just hate having to stand outside. I miss the old days.” I am good at missing things, she thought.

“You and Andrea were out there for an eon. She okay?”

“She’s fine.”

“She looks good.”

Hannah didn’t agree or disagree. But it was true. Andrea’s husband was a fisherman and the nature of that lifestyle was extreme. A fisherman’s wife was either well fed with enough money in her pockets to clean out the clearance racks at Filene’s or she was drawn, dragging her feet and desperately in need of getting her roots done. They were island people in that way, Andrea and her husband, always in some extreme state, flush or broke.

“Hanny, you want a cup of coffee?”

The Dunkin Donuts loomed; a cop they knew leaned against his car out front, his head down, texting away on his phone, probably to some young slut on her way home from the Tavern. Was he a good fuck?

“Not right now,” she said.

“Nice get together, eh?”

“Yes,” she said. She and Nate didn’t fuck very often. It wasn’t because they weren’t good at it. The first time they had sex, on a blanket on deserted Sea Street beach, she’d been twenty-one and it had occurred to her as she was tying the strap on her bikini that she could go on fucking him for years and it would be fine. It worked. Their smells blended. His hands understood her body. She didn’t have to tell him what to do or pretend to like what she didn’t. And he wasn’t annoying, wasn’t talking dirty about his cock or pulling her hair too hard. No, he pulled just right.

“Well I sure as shit want a cup of coffee,” Nate said.

 

Nate was on the toilet for most of the night. Dunkin Donuts didn’t mix well with Jack Daniels. Nate’s digestive system had become their secret glue. It was a serialized story of cramps, internal pipes askew sounding, vivid descriptions of his movements, his aches, his aftermaths. Hannah was good at being let into the staggering horrors of old age, wear and tear. She let him talk about his trips to the bathroom like they were high school football games, sighing at the bad news, clapping for the good. Usually when he emerged, ranting about his system, swearing he’d never drink again she took him in her arms. She let him make his promises and she never questioned him when he’d be yearning for whisky a few days later.

Nate stepped out of the bathroom. “Now that was something. You think those shrimp were all right?”

“I’m sure they were.” She lit a cigarette. Theirs was a house you could smoke in. Other couples, particularly Andrea and her husband, made a show of smoking outdoors, even in winter. Dumb fucks, Hannah thought, freezing their butts off, probably getting the sniffles, when they could just smoke inside. Hannah liked a smoking house.

She put out her cigarette in her mother’s old ashtray and slipped down under the covers. Nate had gotten fat over the years; this was true, but it was a sign that he loved her and didn’t long for a mistress. She laid a hand on his arm and stroked him.

He chuckled, “I still say those shrimp were bad.”

“Well sure,” she said, trying to make her voice go raspy, trying to tell him what she wanted without telling him. “I’m sure those shrimp were very bad.”

“Ten seconds ago you said they were fine.”

“Nate, you know about those things more than I do.”

“Well do you think they were bad or not?”

“I trust you.”

He shook his head and laughed. “So, what did Andrea have to say? Skip said they might go down to the Keys.”

“She didn’t mention anything.” She didn’t know why she lied.

“Must be nice, able to just take off like that.”

“Well, then again, no job security, always worrying. Never knowing what’s running when. I would hate it. I like knowing what’s coming.” And that must be what she was good at: being comfortable. She didn’t get bored easily.

“Still, must be nice.”

Hannah waited it out. Nate got like this sometimes.

“You know I really hate those butt bins,” she said.

“Really?”

“Everything used to be more fun.”

“I had fun tonight.”

“No, Nate. I don’t mean it that way. I had fun.”

“You sure looked like you were having fun. Andrea and you were talking up a storm.”

“And we had fun. I had fun Nate, I did. I just was thinking, years ago, when you could smoke inside, it was more-”

“We were kids. Course it was more.”

“It’s not just that.”

“She say something that pissed you off?”

“I’m not mad about anything.”

He seemed to relax now, rolled over. “The butt bins are fucking brilliant, Hanny. You know how many cigarettes those things can eat? Danny Toule, he sells em, he’s making a killing. Soon enough, he and Char will buy the Keys, the money they’re making.”

Hannah wasn’t good at getting her feelings across. A different woman would have relayed her nostalgic woes in a way that opened the door and set the table and invited the man inside. She didn’t feel like having a pity party but she didn’t know how to stop him when he got like this.

“How’s your belly now?”

He looked at her, “No shrimp for a long time.”

He leaned over and shut off the light. He then put an arm around her and stroked her back in a go away way she knew well by now. She pulled at the sheets so their bodies could touch, at least. The smell of shit was there; the bathroom door was ajar. Her big toe found the backside of his calf. He gave in to her; it was Saturday. They went at quietly in their empty house and then it was done. She supposed she’d gotten what she wanted. Had he?

“Shit.” Nate leapt from the bed and stubbed his toe. He grabbed the newspaper. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“I thought it passed.”

“Damn shrimp. Tomorrow I’ll call Eddie and tell him.”

“Oh, Nate.”

“I’m going downstairs. Sorry about the smell.”

“You don’t have to do that. I don’t mind it.” 

But he was already gone. She felt stupid for telling him she didn’t mind the smell. Who didn’t mind the smell of shit? Eventually the toilet flushed. She listened to him pet the cat, open the refrigerator door, close the refrigerator door, scuffle across the linoleum, bid goodbye to the cat and proceed up the stairs. I am a terrible fuck, she thought.

“You know, Danny Toule said he can get us a butt bin, wholesale,” he said, climbing into the bed. “Would be great to have here. For when we have people over, for when we’re on the deck. Danny’s a smart shit getting in on that. Every restaurant needs one. Every single restaurant with an outdoor patio. Imagine the business. Smart shit says he just was outside smoking one day and saw one and called the company. Cold called. Now he’s rolling in it. Smart guy, smart guy.”

“Sounds great,” she said.

He was soon asleep but her eyes wouldn’t close, not even when the sun crept in through the blinds. Soon, she would fuck someone else and she felt terrible about that. Maybe she was being silly; people didn’t start running around because of a butt bin, because their husband didn’t hate what they hated. But maybe she was right; people started running around because of the stupidest little things. Because they didn’t see something that didn’t matter the same way, which shouldn’t matter, but did matter, which made no sense, which kept her eyes from closing up. Maybe she’d never sleep again and she laughed. A lot of people probably think that when they can’t fall asleep. She felt very unoriginal, like she’d been wrong about herself, like all her thoughts had been thought, like God probably made her the same day he made many others which was true; lots of people were born on May 23rd. That’s true of every day.

By the time he woke her up the next day, it was nearly one in the afternoon. He tickled her chin and laughed when she sat up startled. “Figured you’d want at least a few hours of daylight today, honey.”

He was leaving to go to work and she would never sleep with someone else. She would call Andrea back, who had called twice already and hear about the great deals she found at Filene’s. Then she would cook dinner—pork chops and corn—and see about cheap deals in Florida. When Danny dropped by with the Butt Bin, she joined him and her husband on the deck and sang praises of the thing as if she didn’t really hate it. Nobody, not even a genius, would have been able to tell that she was lying when she called the thing a great invention. And she didn’t feel bad about it, not really. Andrea was just kidding herself; there’s no way she was a great fuck. There’s no way she knew that the way you know your eyes are a certain color. If that were true, then other people know it and would have talked about it and Hannah would have heard that over the years. Andrea had gotten around in high school, after school. And she didn’t have a way of ruining her conquests for other women, that’s for sure.

Danny didn’t stay long and when he was gone Nate and Hannah returned to the warmth of the living room where they smoked and watched the news. Her husband didn’t really like that butt bin or he’d be out there playing with it the way he does with a new wrench. He was only amped up about it because he’d been drunk. Maybe it was the same with Andrea, going on about being a great fuck. Andrea’d had a few shots of Jaeger; it was possible she’d been talking out of her ass. But if alcohol was truth serum, then maybe their drunk selves were their true selves in which case Hannah didn’t have a secret, real self because she never drank so much that she said things she didn’t mean. Her head was starting to spin and she put out her cigarette.

“What’s wrong?” he said. He knew her moves well.

“Nothing.”

“You upset about the Andrea thing?”

“What Andrea thing?”

“Skip said she was going around telling everyone at the bar that I was the best lay she ever had,” he said. And he laughed and shook his head as if he was talking about their daughter, or rather, the way she imagined he would have come to talk about his daughter if they ever had a daughter, which they didn’t and wouldn’t. “What a crock, right?”

She had no reason to be mad. It wasn’t like she didn’t know that they’d screwed and she’d screwed Skip once, so they were even, and it was all before any of them were married. But to say Hannah’s husband was better at something than her own husband was to imply that she’d rather have him than her husband. And that was for sure rude. But they weren’t in high school anymore. They were old, drying up, outgrowing this kind of crap. If she were to get mad and not return Andrea’s phone calls, somehow she’d be the one acting like a baby because her bad behavior would be sober and deliberate. She wouldn’t win. She couldn’t win.

“Andrea has good taste,” she said. “You can’t argue that.”

And they laughed and went on watching the news and talking about some guy upstate who went and shot his neighbor’s dog and what an asshole he is and how he should fry. Somehow watching the shooter get cuffed and dragged into the cop car made Hannah feel better about her life, superior, and she supposed that’s why they sat here watching the news every night, not to find out about the goings on or form opinions about politics, but to feel like they were doing alright, in spite of having lived such small and downright incestuous little lives, like maybe, if they were here and not there, they had abided the laws, even the silly ones like the smoking ban. In some way, they had won.

Caro­line Kep­nes has been splitting her time between her home in Los Ange­les, CA  and her parents' home on Cape Cod, MA. Her fiction has been published in or is forthcoming in The Barcelona Review, Calliope, Dogz­plot, Eclec­tica,The Other Room and Word Riot. She spent the past few months writing a young adult novel The Dig that's available on all e-book platforms. Her YA pen name is Audrey Hart. In her spare time she enjoys reading about meth lab busts, Floridian criminal activity and wild animals.