Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 27

Six Seconds, poem by Mike Lafontaine

what do you have to say for

yourself

you say nothing

what can you say

words will either

save your relationship

or doom it

but silence

is key

you say nothing

do you have

something to say

to me

you don’t

you feel nothing

more than nothing

you feel ill

you feel like a child

wanting to be left

alone

not interrogated

you say nothing

I hate you

she says

you look at her

you smile inside

you have been

given an out

do you take it

though

will she haunt you

or could you be

without her

that’s the choice

you have and you have

exactly six seconds to

make it.

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 has loved and lost; lost hope and regained it. 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.

Six Seconds, poem by Mark Lafontaine

what do you have to say for

yourself

you say nothing

what can you say

words will either

save your relationship

or doom it

but silence

is key

you say nothing

do you have

something to say

to me

you don’t

you feel nothing

more than nothing

you feel ill

you feel like a child

wanting to be left

alone

not interrogated

you say nothing

I hate you

she says

you look at her

you smile inside

you have been

given an out

do you take it

though

will she haunt you

or could you be

without her

that’s the choice

you have and you have

exactly six seconds to

make it.

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 has loved and lost; lost hope and regained it. 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.

Innings, essay by Jim Parks

I came by it honest, this business of writing up courthouse wars.

It was what was going on that summer – forty summers in the past — in the heat of cotton season.

They had disbarred the DA; the Sheriff's race was dirty, hateful; the Democrats were evenly split between the Dirty Thirty faction in the Legislature, Governor Preston Smith and his cronies in the insurance biz, and the conservative banker candidate for Governor, Dolph Briscoe.

The boss was a boozer from Chicago, Kansas City — points mid and west – an old time Hearst man with ties to liquor, guns, women — and cars, flashy, fast, long, low-slung cars.

All the stuff no well-rounded man of the world would think of leaving home without.

The war was carried out in the courtrooms, the council chambers, schools, hospitals and personnel offices – all the places where small town prairie dwellers meet, greet, and then haul off and kick the shins of the competition in a good-natured exercise of the American dream.

Second place is first loser, and the prize for that lackluster performance is a set of steak knives.

Ouch.

But the old Yankee knew a story when he saw one, and the idea was to sell newspapers.

Anybody accuses you of just trying to sell newspapers, you agree with them most heartily. Tell them 'Thank you, sir,' and urge them to write that down.”

He took a sip at that sour mash he drank, and added, “Offer to let them write it in your notebook.” Stashed the jug back in the bottom desk drawer.

Black Irishman grown old, the kind with two jet black eyebrows that looked like caterpillars crawling over thick, black hornrims, a red potato nose, and a full head of fluffy white hair.

Like most who hail from the west side or the neighborhoods Back of the Yards, he said he was from “Chi-caw-go” — not She-cah-go – Chi-caw-go.

Dude knew how to write a story, too. He put it this way.

This is a story newspaper. Hey, never let the facts get in the way of a good story, guy. It just isn't done that way around here.”

Around here.

Black land covered with cotton that looked like someone spilled an even coat of popcorn across the landscape. Gaudy sunsets, moments somewhat sublime on foggy mornings when you catch a mama fox and her pups nosing their way out of the woods along the creek bottom or a hawk circling lazy and raptor-like in a sky so blue it hurts to look at it.

In the afternoons, the sun passed its meridian with a vengeance and began to bake the brick veneer of the old building; the only breath of air stirring was that of the old ceiling fans in their lackadaisical, slow turning.

And then Mr. Bob came in the door and called my name where I sat beating on a cast-iron manual typewriter, trying in hundred-plus degree heat to make subject, verb and modifier agree in tense and conjugation at a grimy old oak desk with the dust of nearly a hundred summers worked into its grain.

"Jimbo!"

He knew me.

The High Sheriff, he was, the one who made Raymond Hamilton give up in the woods near Jack's Branch when Bonnie and Clyde came to break him out of his jail – back in the bad old days, when there was no money and people got a secret kick out of reading all about a bunch of badasses raiding the coffers of the ones who fixed their wagons and dried up the money.

Wore a spotless silver belly Stetson square on his silver head like a crown, its brim turned up all the way around like Mr. Sam, Truman or Johnson – or Big John Connally.

Wore a suit and never carried a gun. Said he didn't need one. Made his “boys” wear suits and keep their hog legs inside their jackets.

Think of the news pictures of Capt. Will Fritz or Chief Jessie Curry on November 22, 1963.

He held out his checkbook the way the old timers used to do it, said, “I need you to fill out my check for another year's subscription to the paper, Jimbo.”

Waited while I filled it out, then signed the check with a flourish while I wrote out a receipt.

I thanked him.

You didn't know Willie and I were next door neighbors for 40 years, did you?”

I knew that. Knew it well.

Willie. My grandfather — farmer, mechanic, merchant – drove a Lincoln limo with a V-12 in it, chewed cigars, played dixieland blues on clarinet. Squinted out of photos with a well-chewed cigar and a newspaper folded up and thrust into a side pocket of his jumper.

Willie.

We never had a harsh word, me and Willie,” he said. “I think he'd want me to tell you what I'm fixin' to tell you, boy.”

I nodded, looked him right straight in the eye.

"You don't put your feet on higher ground – son – you're going to the pen…"

Held up his hand and arched his brows to stave off any remark – the one I would in no case have dared to make – and continued.

“Right or wrong, son. That's just the way it's done. You shook these people up, and they will have their innings.”

Innings.

The expression brought back the crack of the bat, the moan of the crowd following the fly ball through the sky, the chatter of the infield, the hustle and pop of the ball socking into the pocket of a well-oiled glove.

Innings.

Then he told me the strangest tale. The most electrifying and impromptu interview I have ever been given.

“You can't outdo the law, hoss. Just can't be done.”

Said he didn't want any of this printed until he was long gone and forgotten, but he wanted me to remember what he was going to say.

“This bird named Barrow? They caught him a'stealing cars in Waco when he was about 14. He wasn't big as a minute – never weighed much more than 135–40 pounds. Shoot, he wasn't much bigger than his girl, Bonnie.”

As the story developed, it became very apparent what the old time lawman was talking about. He was explaining what classification of prisoners in jails is all about, and how it is used as a weapon – for good or evil.

Like the classic Jim Thompson character in “The Getaway,” “It does something to you – in there – It does something to you,” said Carter “Doc” McCoy.

“They put him in a high power tank down there at Waco – on one of the floors where everybody had been in the pen before…It was hard times, Jimbo. Mighty hard times.” He let that sink in. “And he wasn't but 14 years old. Get it?”

So Clyde Barrow went back to Cement City and the West Dallas world of Singleton Avenue wrecking yards with a new moniker. They called him School Boy – from then on – in the underworld of cops and robbers.

“You know what those old boys did to him in that jail house, Jimbo. He never was right – after that. The girl was just for show, you hear me? They always traveled with another young man.”

Another meaningful silence.

“>When they killed Lloyd Bucher, I said I was fed up. I said he was going to have a seat in that electric chair, and I was going to be a witness.”

Then he told the story about the robbery and killing of the pawn broker, jeweler, and suspected fence who had a shop out in the country on the old Ft. Worth highway – Lloyd Bucher.

The Barrow gang always traveled as if they were string banding, playing at dances in houses and halls and blind pig beer joints. They had guitars and fiddles – Clyde had a saxophone.

They came in the middle of the night and told Mr. Bucher they needed guitar strings. He didn't believe them, but finally they persuaded him to let them in, according to his wife.

Something went wrong, once he got the safe open. Crouched down, going through the money and valuables stashed there, he may have struggled, or he may have gone for a hideout gun he kept in the safe.

It was the Barrow gang's first killing, before the deputy at Atoka, before the two highway patrol motorcycle officers near Grapevine – the first one, before any of the rest.

Mr. Bob Wilkerson, then Chief Deputy, had thrown down the gauntlet. Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton would face execution.

He passed the word.

When School Boy heard it, he said there was no way he was going to just haul off and take a seat in Sparky. He would fight to the finish.

It was on.

By the time they were finished, it was Bonnie and Clyde 13 – nine of their victims were police officers – and The State of Texas 2.

Ex-Ranger Frank Hamer and a posse of Dallas deputies of Sheriff Smoot Schmid, the Harley-Davidson dealer in Big D, gunned them down with Browning Automatic Rifles at Arcadia, Louisiana, for the killing of the riding boss at Eastham Prison Farm the day they broke Hamilton out of that joint.

Mr. Bob finished his story this way.

"The night they executed old Hamilton, I had a word with him. I said, 'Son, have you got anything you want to tell me before it's too late?'"

“He said, 'The one who done this killing isn't here tonight.' That was all he would ever say. I asked him for that name, but he wouldn't give it up.”

Bob Wilkerson turned on his heel, put one well-polished wingtip ahead of the other, and walked away.

It was the last time we ever spoke to one another.

Jim Parks is a newsman, deckhand, farm hand,  ramblin' man and truck drivin' man. Keep him away from the firewater and  don't mess with his food or his woman.

Interview with Michael Gills

Michael Gills was McKean Poetry Fellow at the University of Arkansas and Randall Jarrell Fellow in Fiction in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. He earned the Ph.D. in Creative Writing/Fiction at the University of Utah. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Oxford American,Verb 4, Shenandoah, Boulevard, The Gettysburg Review, The Greensboro Review, Quarterly West, New Stories From The South and elsewhere. Why I Lie: Stories (University of Nevada Press, September, 2002) was selected by The Southern Review as a top literary debut of 2002. A 2005-06 Utah Established Artist Fellowship recipient, Gills is a contributing writer for Oxford American and a board member for Writers @ Work. He is currently a professor of writing for the Honors College at the University of Utah, and is promoting a second collection of stories, THE DEATH OF BONNIE AND CLYDE, and a novel GO LOVE.

Do you see any correlation between fishing and writing? I say that because I remember you and Dale Ray Phillips taking some time off during Writers@Work so you could take Dale to a decent fishing river, which I thought was a cool thing to do for a guy in mid-conference mode.

Writing has everything to do with fishing. My grandfather, Weldon Treadwell, was sort of a famous guide out of Shangri-La Boat Dock on Lake Ouachita in Arkansas. Morning's, he'd rise hours before light, listen to radio weather for the Ohio Valley to the Deep South, have us on a school of large mouth at daylight, casting six-inch Devil's Toothpicks at the fuckers, limited out by 8 a.m. At the cleaning station, huge bass named Big Arkie and Beelzebub and Bucket mouth would drag our fillet skins down into the deep where they glowed like hands. Write before daylight, use lures no living being can resist. Cast and cast and keep casting until you can hit what you aim at, the silver line singing. Learn to work your lure, jerk jig until *bam*, come home to daddy. Don't ever forget there's images down in the muck that can take your head off. Reach into the deep for such. Turn off your mochine by 8 a.m., drink coffee, hard to fuck up a day like that. For the record, Uncle Dale's the finest caster I know, can hit a five-gallon bucket at forty yards five times in a row. Once, this woman left her panties at his house over by Brenda's Bigger Burger in Fayetteville. He cut the crotch out, tied the four corners around a razor sharp treble hook and hooked a five pound channel cat from Otto Salassi's canoe over at Bud Kid. I'm swearing to god–there's no better story than a fish story.

Where did your novel 'Go Love' come from? Its style seems free to me, open to just about anything in those short sections. Not that you or your style are ever reticent, but this is different.

GO LOVE was written in one year of straightforward writing on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Those mornings before light, for four hundred pages or so, I never looked back. When one of the metal bands broke, I wrote by hand, just like my best mentors. There was this energy about that first draft, and I tried not to mess it up in revision. A dozen drafts later, a good bit of the fire's still there. I put everything I had in that book.

Ye gods. A dozen drafts? That's impressive. Does every story of yours go through as lengthy a process? Go Love seemed to me to not only burst with energy, but almost written in concrete. I'm going to be one jealous SOB, I think. I guess what I'm saying is the seams don't show. Did Bonnie and Clyde require that kind of Herculean effort as well?

I don’t think of it as a Herculean effort. That’s just how I work–doesn’t everybody? B & C is eleven stories, each drafted until they seemed right, then sent out until they were taken and published, and each one was subsequently nominated for the Pushcart though none won. The title story, which won Southern Humanities Review Hoephner Prize for best story published there in 2010, once had this whole long section on shipwrecks of the Outer Banks–fifteen pages or so that dragged it down. After that was cut, the pace picked up, but I’ve got this killer riff on shipwrecks now if anybody’s interested. I work from hard copies, mark the Jesus out of them, then revise and do it all again so each story sits about four, five inches tall when it’s said and done. Richard Bausch once saw a pile of story drafts (“Foolishness to the Perishing,” my first published story, Greensboro Review, no. 45, Winter 1988–89) and said, “Can I have a look at that novel?”

What writer is most indispensable to your own writing work?

There is no “writer” indispensable to my work, though plenty of regular folk are. To tell the truth, except for a couple of writers–like Uncle Dale or Rick Campbell, both fishing buddies–I’d just as soon steer clear of them. My wife and daughter keep me straight for the most part, as does a spring and summer garden and real hard work under the sun. That said, Fred Chappell–I heard he got up every morning at 4:30 to work, and I once sat outside his house and I’ll be damned if the lights didn’t come on at 4:30. When working, I try to do likewise until it’s routine.

How does living in Utah feed the writing you do about the south? Is there an exchange of energies somehow, with Utah standing in sometimes for another place you'd rather be?

I live in Utah because it’s kick ass to look off my front porch and see Nevada one way, these eleven thousand feet tall mountains the other, with flat out wilderness within a half hour’s walk from my back door. Alta Ski resort’s twenty-five minutes away. My daughter and I ski Sundays in season–our church. I love my teaching job. There’s no other place I want to be. This all makes a great backdrop to turn my inner-gaze south and east. Where my roots remain, though I’ve just published a piece called “Last Words on Lonoke” and I think I bygod mean it…

Usually I can get at least an inkling about the sources from which a writer's mojo comes, but your books mystify me in that sense. I see Faulkner sometimes, Barry Hannah others, even Larry Brown, but mostly I see what I think is your own true voice, paid for in blood, I imagine. How long ago in your career did you finally think to yourself, 'ok, this is the real work here, I'm doing it now?'

My first writing teacher, Buddy Nordan at U. of Arkansas, walked me out of workshop, down to the Arkansas Press and introduced me to Miller Williams who sat far across a big room at a desk. He liked my first poem, called “Night Dreams in Logic Class,” about meeting this girl in a barn where “eyes of hoses shone from buckled straw.” Thing was “hoses” was a typo, it was supposed to be “horses” only he loved that I’d thought of “hoses,” said it was brilliant. So my first poetry when I was a sophomore in college won a graduate writing prize from the MFA program at UA, which I won again, and then won fiction too. Eudora Welty said she wrote because she was good at it. I won’t presume to use Miss Welty’s words, but that early praise buoyed me and still does.

What are you working on these days?

I have a book of essays, WHITE INDIANS, under serious consideration at a press, and a 3rd book of short stories, THE HOUSE ACROSS FROM THE DEAF SCHOOL, about three quarters of them published, ready to mail out. Anybody wants to see it, say so. GO LOVE has turned into a quartet, and I’m about 100 pages into the first book, EMERGENCY INSTRUCTIONS, with the other two mapped out. A 4th book of stories, EARTH’S LAST NIGHT is tacked up (the title story appeared in The Wasatch Journal which, before they went under, paid real good money) on my wall and I’ve got a collection of poetry awaiting revision. I have a novel in stories drafted, sort of a redneck Canterbury Tales called TALES FROM THE HUNT. So I’ve got plenty to keep me busy for a while.

Lawless: Hillbilly gangster flick offers wild, violent ride

This sounds like a hell of a good time to me. Anyone see it yet?

I've got many weeks of content to get on the site, but you'll have to bear with me for a bit.

 

LAWLESS

Jay Stone

Galaxy Rating 3 ½ out of 5

Moonshine, fast cars, guys getting their throats slit, other guys getting important parts sliced off, and guns, guns, guns: it's all there in Lawless, a rootin' tootin' hillbilly gangster film that has just about everything you might want, with the possible exception of a point. As often happens in these projects, brutal violence, strong language and nudity become their own reward.

Lawless was made by John Hillcoat and Nick Cave, the director and writer behind the hyper-violent Australian film The Proposition. They have not lost their taste for blood or for evocative set design: Lawless takes place in the wild and woolly Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, circa 1931, a location awash in vintage Fords, gangsters with Tommy guns and dusty mountain towns with signs for Chesterfield cigarettes, Kist beverages and (my favourite) the Fire Proof Hotel.

Read more: http://www.leaderpost.com/life/Hillbilly+gangster+flick+offers+wild+violent+ride/7171340/story.html#ixzz258RoszcS

Book Review: Hillbilly Rich, by Jeff Kerr, reviewed by Graham Rae

Whilst contemporary technology-overloaded society may have created a vapid and transient instantly-obsolete fad-app-and-gadget obsessed age, the human heart in conflict with itself is an eternal and unchanging part of life and literature. This is truism is acknowledged by writer Jeff Kerr, whose fine, poetic, internet-and-TV-free tales in this volume evoke a more human and connected and interesting time and tide of human existence.

Hillbilly Rich showcases six short stories set in the Appalachian mountains on the Kentucky and Virginia border. The book’s cover neatly represents the major overarching themes of the fiction inside: alcohol and money and pills and southern discomfort. Kerr populates his writings with sinners and winners and losers and life abusers and drug users and brawlers and bar-crawlers, effortlessly and poetically evoking his characters in his half-dozen utterly human tales of weary-cum-energized woe and murder and suicide and redemption and damnation. If this sounds grim, it’s really not: the portraits painted here are life-affirming and disarming in equal measure too.

That old crime religion is invoked a few times during the stories, and there is a kind of quasi-religious feeling to some of the work (hardly surprising given the geographical region it hails from), but not of a preachy kind. Self-taught Kerr’s writing is almost analogous to the sketch of an ex coalminer in the pages, a man who hears the soft moving call of his God to make him create beautiful works of art in celebration of all existence.

The writer tells us in the fascinating seventh and final piece in the short book, an autobiographical piece explaining the title (‘hillbilly rich’ is a phrase that means you are not financially solvent but have enough to get by), that his work is a celebration and laying down of family lines by someone not born into a traditional bookworm family: “People like me aren’t meant to be literary people. My dad drove a forklift in a warehouse and my mother worked in a plastics factory. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners.”

So Kerr’s work mines rich black gold coalbursting seams of harshly-and-vibrantly-burning family fossil fuel to feed a bright blazing pure-heart conflagration story mosaic: a man seeks to redeem himself by releasing a captive wolf that will carry his image “in the hard run of a red wolf’s memory.” A trucker committing inadvertent infidelity has to defend himself against the husband of the man whose wife he was unknowingly sleeping with. A washed-up country and western star (and all his creator’s stories would make a fine C&W tune, dripping blood and whiskey and pain and emotional chaos) decides to take drastic action in a painful marital matter. And, in the story that is, to my mind the best in the collection, two sociopathic teenagers pointlessly shoot horses in a corral just for the sick and evil and despairing fun of it.

The last line of the latter tale (apparently unfortunately based on a true occurrence) also neatly encapsulates a common constant thread of Kerr’s prose: homespun honkytonk wisdom mixed with beautiful poetry. “There’s a lot of meanness in the world and you can’t trust fences to keep it out,” he intones, in a perfect sucker-punchline to the horrors that have just preceded this piece of simple philosophical truth. The country singer has a “rattling up all night and repenting in the morning” voice. A child scared by an apparition basks in familiar family safety of “unspoken love that chained through generations of blood and struggle to keep the shadows from becoming harder and more dangerous things.”

In the titular essay, the writer tells us that his grandfather would tell him “tales involving animals and their mysterious ways, strange mythical hill beasts, ‘hants and violent events torn straight out of the death ballads my Paw-Paw would tell me. Other stories were told by my parents, uncles and aunts on boozy evenings.” It seems thus that Kerr’s tales are just his way of extending his 180-proof moonshining family oral tradition beyond unfamiliar familial gatherings and injecting it straight into the bloodstream of sedate literary America, often using animal similes to do so; people are compared to raccoons and foxes and snakes, with the cruel mystical beauty of nature in all its red-in-tooth-and-claw gory glory playing just as an important part in the tales as the characters themselves.

The stories in Hillbilly Rich seem almost anachronistic in a way; they could have been written anytime over the course of the second half of the 20th century, pretty much. But that’s just the point here: people are people, and great stories about the human race scratching and clawing itself and drawing confused not-coagulating mountain-running blood will be around for the rest of the human race’s existence. Kerr is a fine, emerging talent; his simple, direct, pure, honest, seemingly effortlessly-honed tales could teach many a more experienced writer what a true season in existential hell or dazed prose heaven is like without breaking a sweat.

PURCHASE:

Graham Rae is a Scotsman now living in Chicago. He has been published for over 25 years in venues including American Cinematographer, Cinefantastique, Film Threat, 3ammagazine.com, and Realitystudio.com. He had a novel published in 2011 by Creation Books, Soundproof Future Scotland, and he will never see a penny from it. He’s not bitter. Bitter is for lemons.

Jeff Kerr currently lives in Milwaukee, WI. He has deep roots in the southern Appalachian mountains of the Kentucky and Virginia border country. His work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Now and Then, Hardboiled, Plots with Guns, Hardluck Stories, Criminal Class Review and others. He has been a featured reader at Book Soup, San Quentin Prison among other venues. His short story collection, Hillbilly Rich, can be ordered directly at JeffKerr1965@gmail.com.

Interim Fun at FCAC with a Larry Fondation interview

Larry Fondation is neither Appalachian nor rural, but I find his fiction about the urban poor and disadvantaged a welcome tonic when I get tired of rural lit. He is LA all the way, and the author of four novels/short story collections, some of them in collaboration with visual artists. He's  the real deal, and I recommend any of his books unreservedly, though my favorites by far are Common Criminals and Angry Nights. His takes on the homeless and downtrodden are more powerful than Carver ever thought of being. It's icepick-sharp minimalist fiction, and can't be talked about enough. The following excerpt is from an interview Fondation did for William Hastings and the Industrial Worker.

1: What is most striking about your books is the style, your compression of line and event. Whereas many realists go for the long line, the expansive book, you have moved in the opposite direction. And yet, realism is never lost. How did your style come about? There are echoes of Algren, Farrell, Borges, Dos Passos, but its always you.

Stream-of-consciousness went for the flow of the mind, of thought; I am trying for the flow of action, of events. I don't think most of us – especially in this "Information Age" – live our lives in a smooth and continuous narrative arc. Particularly not the poor – people without power who must react to the actions of others, rather than have the opportunity to initiate. So my style has emerged from how I see and hear and experience street life, as it were. The influences you cite are definitely there, but also Selby, Genet, Mary Robison (among contemporaries), Guyotat, Iceberg Slim, Beckett…I think we need a kind of "street Beckett" to reflect life as it is lived now…

Also, I am highly influenced by the visual arts. The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson talked about capturing life at "the decisive moment." The idea is to evoke a broader, more complete story at a given moment in time….

Finally, when I was a punk ass kid in blue collar Boston, our lives on the corner were marked by long stretches of boredom, punctuated by short periods of intense action – sex, violence…I think that's the way it goes down for most people….action is a cure for boredom…

2: You say that we lack a narrative arc, or at least a smooth one, in our daily lives, especially the poor. How much of this is purposefully imposed upon us? Is it to the benefit of others that our lives lack narrative?

Rich or poor, I don't think any of us have a "narrative arc." That's in a sense imposed on all of us. For one thing, it's what sells. Though sometimes, I think a narrative arc, a three-act structure, whatever, works for some stories and in some ways. It can help shape how we think about story, give it meaning…Having said that, what the poor are deprived of is the opportunity to tell their own story, smooth or rough. That's the injustice. And the imbalance of that power is why "free speech" per se – especially as the Supreme Court defines it – is such bullshit. The bully pulpit, unfortunately, belongs to those who own the microphone.

Continue:

Spite and Malice, fiction by CL Bledsoe

After Tommy took the PCP, KT told him to calm down three times; each time, she made a point of standing closer and closer to the shotgun, the first, moving across the room near it, the second, with her hand on the barrel, and finally, holding it, pointed dead at his gut. Each time, he laughed and called her a name her mother would’ve killed him for, but she hardly blinked. Finally, after the fourth time of him pushing her down, rubbing her face in the carpet so her skin was seared red from the burn, she waited till he went outside to piss on his car tires, let him sit back on the couch, and asked as calmly as she could muster, if he was going to calm down.

“Fuck you, bitch,” he mumbled.

So she shot him with birdshot. She tried to step back but didn’t want to go back so far it dispersed beyond that hard gut of his. He looked down at his gut, dotted with red marks like a garden of red flowers, KT couldn’t help thinking (she was a little stoned herself) and just shook his head.

“Damn,” he said, more laughing than surprised.

“Well I’m sorry,” she said. “But I told you.” She set her jaw and gave him angry eyes.

“You can’t go shooting a man in his own house,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But you brought it on yourself.”

He shook his head again and tried to rise to his feet. She put the gun down (well away from him) and helped him up and then helped him over to the phone. It took him a second to dial.

“My bitch wife just shot me,” he said. She punched him in the arm. “Well hell, you did. Y’all need to send a ambulance pronto.” He handed it to her to give directions and went back to the couch.

KT put her hand over the receiver. “Don’t go to sleep, Tommy,” she said. She nudged him with her foot.

“Well hell, let’s play cards till they get here,” he said. She hung up and dealt out two decks.  “You always cheat,” Tommy grumbled.

“No,” KT said with a smile. “You just don’t know how to play worth a shit.”

The kids got back from school to find the house empty. There was a note from KT that said she’d be out on bail in the morning, so they made themselves cereal and watched TV like usual until Joey went to his job at Pizza Hut. Chyna usually slept until he got home, and then went on her paper route, but this night Joey came in late, red-faced, holding up a ticket.

“Tags,” he said. “Almost took the car.”

She read over the ticket, which told her nothing useful, while Joey related the story of how he’d passed a cop on the way home, turned off on a side road when the cruiser appeared behind him, but was ultimately pulled over.

“Cop wanted to impound the K-car,” he said. “Cause we got no tags or insurance, but I convinced him to let me take it home.”

“Good job,” Chyna said, which made Joey smile.

“What are we going to do? Ticket’s going to cost $400 plus we got to get tags and insurance,” Joey said.

Chyna thought about it. “We’ve got to ask mom, I guess.”

 

KT came home the next morning and found the kids waiting for her. She didn’t think to ask why they weren’t at school, and they didn’t tell her.

“Where’s Tommy?” Joey asked.

“Hospital.” KT explained the events of the day before while Chyna scrambled eggs for everyone. “They let me out, even though I’m a felon with possession of a firearm. They tried to get me on attempted manslaughter. If I wanted to slaughter somebody, he’d be slaughtered.”

“Why’d they let you out?” Chyna served the eggs on mismatched plates. She gave the Christmas one to Joey since it was his favorite.

“Cause I agreed to do a little something for the City Prosecutor,” KT said as Chyna sat the only actual porcelain plate they had in front of her.

KT celebrated her freedom so hard that by the afternoon, she was in bed sleeping it off, which set Chyna in a fury.

“She gets lonely when Tommy’s gone,” Joey said, by way of apologizing for his mother.

“Hell, he’s got it better than we do. He’s getting that good hospital food, got a comfy bed,” Chyna said. “Probably on morphine, knowing him.”

“We can’t pay the ticket,” Joey said.

“I know,” Chyna said.

They sat on the couch listening to their mother snore in the other room.

“We have to go,” Chyna said. She rocketed to her feet.

“They’ll know we’re not her,” Tommy said.

Chyna shrugged. “Who gives a shit?” She went back into the bedroom and shook KT until she regained something approaching consciousness.

“Where’s the meet?” Chyna asked. “Mom! Where’s the meet?” KT mumbled something incomprehensible. Joey brought in a cup of water and offered it to Chyna. They exchanged shrugs and dumped it on KT. She sputtered and woke mumbling curses.

“Where’s the meet?” Chyna asked.

“I just need a minute,” KT said.

“That’s okay, but where is it?” Chyna asked.

“House on Levesque. Package.” She gave the address only after Chyna shook her fiercely.

“Then what?” Chyna put her ear to KT’s mouth as the woman mumbled something. She went to KT’s purse and pulled out an envelope.

 

They pulled up to the house twenty minutes later. Chyna ran up to the door and knocked while Joey stayed in the running car.

“You’re an hour late,” a voice said from behind the cracked door.

“Sorry. Traffic,” Chyna said.

“Traffic? Shit,” the man said. “You got it for me?”

Chyna gave him the bulky envelope from KT’s purse. “What’s this?” The man examined it suspiciously.

“Fuck if I know,” Chyna said. “Give it up or I take it back.” She put her hand on the envelope and the man snatched it inside. The door slammed. She heard the sounds of him tearing the envelope open and then nothing. She banged on the door. “Come on!” It jerked open and another envelope slid out.

“You tell him it was a pleasure doing business,” the man said. Chyna put her hand on the envelope and he snatched it back inside. She reared back and kicked the door hard so that it slammed into him. He yelped in pain, and she grabbed the new envelope and glared at him as he held his head.

“Likewise, I’m sure,” she said.

Back in the car, Chyna handed the envelope to Joey, who had it open before she could say word one.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Pictures.” He showed her. “That’s two guys,” he said.

There were several pictures and a roll of negatives. There were doubles of some of the pictures.

“Blackmail,” Joey said.

“Good plan,” Chyna said.

The drop off spot wasn’t far. They passed a police car on the way.

“I think that’s the same one,” Joey said, turning to watch it as they passed. “What’ll we do if he gets us?”

“Give him a picture,” Chyna said.

 

She pulled over at another house on the way to the drop off.

“How we going to remember this one?” she said as she maneuvered beside the mailbox.

Joey looked around. The house looked like all the others except there was a bush under the window that sort of looked like a heart. “Love bush,” Joey said, pointing. He rolled down his window and opened the mailbox and stuck some of the pictures inside.

 

The drop off was at another house.

“I want to go this time,” Joey said.

“What if you get shot?” Chyna asked.

“It’s not shooting I’m worried about him doing to me.”

Chyna laughed. “Suit yourself.” She turned the car off. They went up and knocked. A man opened the door. He looked tired, worried, unshaven, which wasn’t unusual for the kids to see, but it seemed unusual on him. He ushered them inside and then stared out the peephole.

“You couldn’t park on the street?” He asked.

“People like us get towed if we park on the street in neighborhoods like this,” Chyna said.

He looked at her. “Young,” he said. “What’s your name?” She told him and he laughed. “Honey, you were doomed. What was your momma thinking?”

“I figure she was thinking of someplace far away from here,” Chyna said.

He nodded thoughtfully. “So where is it?” Chyna handed him the package. “You didn’t look inside it, did you?” He glanced in it and then studied both of them.

“No sir,” they both said.

“Well, as I understand it, your compensation has been taken care of already.” He paused as Joey cleared his throat and held up the ticket. “What’s this?”

“I need my car,” Joey said. “Can’t get to work without it.”

“So pay the ticket.” The prosecutor’s mouth curled into a sneer.

“Can’t,” Joey said.

The prosecutor shook his head.

“Sir,” Chyna said. “We don’t mean to impose on your hospitality, but I believe you are a good man, a man who knows what it’s like to be judged and treated unfairly. We just need help so that we can help ourselves. That’s all we’re asking. Not a handout.”

“I’m not a policeman. This is beyond my jurisdiction.”

“Nice guy like you, I bet you have a lot of friends,” Chyna said, smiling.

 

Afterwards, they went to three mailboxes before they found the right one.

“Hell, he didn’t even search us,” Joey said.

“Bet it was his first time,” Chyna said.

“With a girl,” Joey said, laughing.

Chyna stuck the pictures down between the seats of the car.

“What are we going to do with them?”

“Keep them,” Chyna said. “Just in case.”

“In case what? Couldn’t we get some money for them or something?”

“I don’t know,” Chyna said. “Thing about money is it comes and goes. Come on, let’s stop at Sonic and get some food while we think about it.”

“Really?” Joey’s eyes lit up like the child he used to be. It made Chyna smile. The future was bright and full of tater tots.

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/2011/08/01/the-man-who-killed-himself-in-my-bathroom-by-cl-bledsoe/. His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South's Million Writer's Award. 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.

Mindoro, poem by Rhiannon Thorne

I was two thousand miles of cornfields away from us,

hours from Mindoro, that shitty fold-out, your daddy's car

and a keystone night

when you sauntered in,

eyes blazing from a teenage drunk,

and your arms bare

hanging like battle axes.

I was home in the vineyards,

I had grape bunches on my eyelids, the taste of the sea on my tongue,

a sticky salt, a thing to suckle at like taffy.

I was already making my bed beneath the redwoods,

I had their needles in my hair

and their scent pressed against my spine.

I had given up your dusty road, your endless Wisconsin skies,

the taste of my tongue against your chest,

a sixteen sodium chloride.

I said,

I'm teleporting away from this place, this one night

crescendo

in my intoxicated stumble and my earthy feet.

I said,

who needs fingers full of oil stains, creases dark

like noir

against their flesh,

like they were building something living?

I want so much my west coast air,

a full breath without pawing at my cowboy killers.

I want my traffic lights like lazy eyes

and horns like heartbeats.

I want so much to want my hum and drum of a suburban city,

my beer-stained vagabonds with their paper bag penchants and shambly walks,

a street full of middle-class zombies.

I am here. My toes on a dusty road,

the stars cracking against the sky,

my stomach in protest, arguing the air smells sweeter here,

your sweat was a perfume,

I was something to plant and harvest.

There is a heavy price for your youth,

There is a heavy price for my pine trees shooting like arrows at the skies,

There is a heavy price for letting my heart thrum,

clap, clatter, clunk

sixteen again.

Rhiannon Thorne grew up in the Bay Area of California, a couple hours north of San Francisco in the wine country, which explains both her obsessive recycling and penchant for wine. Always an ambler, she currently lives in Phoenix, AZ with her body of choice, Jenner. She received her BA in English at Sonoma State University, has recently been published in Grawlix and The Legend, and is the co-editor of the literary publication cahoodaloodaling.

 

The Cab Knows the Way, prose by Mather Schneider

Whoever Nancy Gantry is, she lives in Bumfuck, Egypt. She’s scheduled for a 2:45 p.m. pickup. My teeth rattle as I progress down the washboard dirt road, like a zipper through the desert. No street signs, just sand, clay, caliche, open range, a few cattle, creosote bush, tumble weeds, and the massive iodine sun.

I can’t find her address. I pull the cab to a dusty stop alongside the road and call Nancy’s phone number which is on the pick-up order. Her ring is eardrum-popping rap music. I listen from 12 inches away.

Then, a woman’s voice comes on the machine: “Yo, I ain’t home, a’hite? Do what you need to do. Peace.”

Beeeeep.

I hang up.

Peace, sure. Fuck off.

I keep driving. I finally see an old blue trailer behind a couple of palo verde trees off the road. Two parallel tire tracks parlay through the prickly pears. I follow them in, slowly bouncing my way to the trailer. Junk and garbage coat the ground, beer cans strewn about, some looking at least 20 years old from brands I never even heard of. Mouse-infested mattresses, rusty box springs, skeletons of cars, broken toys, an old swing set like some medieval torture machine, weight set, heavy bag hanging from the only tree, a gnarled old Mesquite, overflowing garbage cans, collapsed swimming pool…

I honk my horn and wait. In a couple minutes she comes out. She’s 75 pounds overweight, with a kilo of make-up on her face. Her hair is the color of manure. Her face looks very Irish, very American.

She gets in the cab.

“How’s it going?” she says.

She’s high as a bat. Her movements are herky-jerky, she talks too fast and won’t look me in the eye. I smell the pot on her, which is undoubtedly mixed with pain pills or methamphetamine or both.

“Not bad,” he says.

“Any trouble finding the place?”

“Piece of cake.”

I start back down the dirt washboard road on the way to Tucson to her doctor.

“Yeah,” Nancy says, out of the blue, “I could be a judge.”

“Pardon?”

“I was watching Divorce Court when you got here,” she says. “Not much to do out here.”

“I imagine,” I say, looking at the bleak, hot landscape. But still, there must be something out there. Mountains in the distance, mountains in the rearview.

“I could be a judge,” she says again. “How hard can it be? You should see those people, they’re such liars! I can see it in their eyes. I’m great at reading people. I’m great at reading people’s eyes.”

Nancy turns and looks at me. We both have blue eyes.

I turn onto the highway and kick it up to 75 mph.

“Shit, I forgot all about this doctor’s appointment, I was in my pajamas when you showed up, watching Divorce Court. But it’s ok, I’m a fast dresser. I’ve always been a fast dresser. It’s the Indian in me.”

“Indian?” I say.

“We prefer ‘Native American’,” she says.

“You’re Native American?”

“One sixteenth,” she says. “I got free health coverage for life. But you should see how they look at me when I go down there. They look down on me, the other tribe members, you know. They’re some prejudiced mother fuckers.”

She takes out a bottle of valium pills and pops one in her mouth.

“Want one?” she says.

“Sure.”

“5 bucks,” she says.

“Never mind.”

“Hey, I gotta make some cash. Freedom Fest is coming up.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know what Freedom Fest is?”

“No.”

“Dude, are you living under a fucking ROCK?”

She begins to laugh hysterically. She slaps her knees and then slowly calms herself. She peeks around and looks at me again as if she can’t believe I’m real.

“Well, I live on the North side,” I say.

“Freedom fest, bro! It’s a CONCERT, man, a bunch of bands,” Nancy says.

“Gotcha.”

“You’re fucking with me aren’t you?”

“I wish I was, Mrs. Gentry.”

“Dude, you gotta get out once in a while.”

“I’m more of a homebody,” I say.

“Yeah, well, that’s no way to live,” she says.

Nancy continues to babble and I respond with a few “Hmmms” and “um-humms.” Then I only nod. Finally, I don’t listen to her at all, or give any sign of listening. I go to that place deep inside of me. My face becomes still and relaxed, and my neck too, and my shoulders and arms and hands on the wheel, all become relaxed. I don’t have to feel anxious, or that I am out of place. I don’t have to worry. The cab knows the way.

I was born in Peoria, Illinois in 1970 and have lived in Tucson, Arizona for the past 14 years. I love it here, love the desert, love the Mexican culture (most of it), and I love the heat. I have one full-length book of poetry out called DROUGHT RESISTANT STRAIN by Interior Noise Press and another called HE TOOK A CAB from New York Quarterly Press. I have had over 500 poems and stories published since 1993 and I am currently working on a book of prose.

http://www.nyqbooks.org/author/mather...