Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 31

Back End Errors

I'm not sure what's happening, but I'm losing scheduled posts. There may be a delay as regards future posts depending on how quickly I can work out what's going on.

The Emily Interview, fiction by Stephanie Dickinson

 *

Remember for me the day your mother made you quit school.

February 1902. I help her pluck two chickens and yet I want to clean away her crime. Wipe the red rain from the snow where the hens struggled to keep running, their heads axed behind them. They are still frightened in death. I breathe the cut odor of quill and feather, the severed wings. I shiver. Too cold for work dress and apron. "The pinfeathers," mother says, "you're missing some." Today is a school day and I won't be going. I'll never be a scholar who eats whole paragraphs from the primer. I'll not ride the cover's black horse bearing Demeter and Persephone to the winter underworld, hooves pounding frozen ground, cleaving it. Hardest-working student, I practiced my penmanship. Two long tables, a board before me where I wrote with a stick sharpened, then charred. I'll miss the roll call Emily. Like a girl lying on her back in pasture grass, lazily stirring the clouds. In the one-room where eight grades are taught by one nineteen-year-old girl, her lessons were my ribbon candy, satin curls with silver stripes. "Pinfeathers, Emily," mother reminds. Tiny soft fleece to warm the eggs I pinch from the broken body.

*

What was it like to covet a brother's college studies?

It is to be mesmerized, to climb stairs in summer when no one bothers the books, to enter his room and kneel by the desk and reach for them. Heat breathing from the trees, heat in the fields where workhorses stand five feet high, each weighing a ton. Gentle gray giants plodding through the south acre dumb to sentences. Ignorant to turns of phrase. Dust from the dirt road rises as a wagon passes by, dust falls on the ditch lilies. In my hands the heft of a book, the heaviness of the cover, how forbidden, how different from the wooden spoon, the knife, the scrub board, the rag, the hoe, the harness, the blue grist stone. The scent of its pages. Latin, Catullus, Passer, deliciae meae puellae, to touch the words, to taste them in my mouth. Another volume. Geography. Maps. Burma. Siam. Countries in pale tangerine colors. French West Africa. The Volta River. Gold Coast. My eyes leave the coast on the fine line like the delicate leg of a daddy-long-legs. I am on an in-land voyage of saffron ink. "Go fetch the clothes from the line." Mother's voice comes for me.

*

Tell me what a rumor of smallpox was?

We drink from the same dipper. The Moses children sit around the school's potbelly stove. Wilma. Francesca. Magdalena. Fern. And the boys Mathias, Arnold. Wilbur. They smell like wet feathers; gut muskiness. Like clothes gone without washing. I give them my bread, bacon cracklings smeared over the large cuts of rye. They cough, blow their noses on rags, then knot them under their sleeves. Fern is my favorite. Delicate as a grasshopper's leap. When Fern falls sick, the red spots appear. My mother has already taken Anna out of school. How glad my sister is soon to be married to the handsome tinner Frank. But I who love books am made to tie on the apron. I stand over the paprika-scented chicken soup, staring into bottomlessness. "Stir, Emily, just so the yellow skin won't form. Where's your head?" My hand pushes the spoon through the kettle's huge round. I pretend I turn to tallow, melt away. A rumor of smallpox. Mother fears a daughter with pocked face no man will marry. A daughter blinded. My turn to make the farmhouse bread. Lips pressed, I obey, white knuckled, I make fists of beaten dough.

*

Do you remember your wedding day?

My lips full, pouty. Look at me stand in sepia in 1906. I hold four long-stemmed white roses. Smoldering beauty, I had to tame. Gold Coast, Africa—my heart's desire—yet I chose the farm boy who made me wife. Rings given and taken, then a buggy ride to Kadgihn Studio. My boy-husband eyes the picture taker, I gaze into the faraway. My black hair's kink refuses its pins. The afternoon cookstove-hot, I follow the binder that four workhorses drag through ripened oats. My husband thrusts his pitchfork. I learn the truth of twine, cut and tie, chaff and straw, the bundles shat and separated. In the yellow air the visions mingle. Gold-painted faces. Men seven feet tall in loincloths. The jaguar's maw. Who remembers vows? Work is how we lived. Married in the morning and in the afternoon our honeymoon, we tramped the fields. Then in the darkness of our wedding bed more dirty sweat.

Stephanie Dickinson was raised on an Iowa farm and now lives in New York City where she struggles for the legal tender . Her novel Half Girl (winner of the Hackney Award given by Birmingham-Southern) is published by Spuyten Duyvil.  Corn Goddess (poems), Road of Five Churches (stories) and Straight Up and No Sky There (stories) are available from Rain Mountain Press. Her story "A Lynching in Stereoscope" was reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and "Dalloway and Lucky Seven" and "Love City" in New Stories from the South, Best of 2008 and 2009. She is the winner of New Delta Review's 2011 Matt Clark Fiction prize judged by Susan Straight. Her website is www.stephaniedickinson.net.  A new novella, Lust Series, is out from Spuyten Duyvil. It is violent, gothic, rural, and both feminine and feminist.

Two Poems by Timothy Gager

reply to the grumpy cashier at the fast food restaurant

Hello Sunshine!

just make my damn sandwich

'cause at minimum wage

that's what you're here for

 

Just a reminder:

no one died on a cross

making that bun

the body of Christ

and the fact that I'm 40

doesn't automatically mean

I'm checking out your body, Christ

I don't want anything else,

only what I asked for

 

I think I've done this before

I've set my eyes on your sour puss,

smiled and said thank-you,

salt-pepper-ketchup, please

go the fuck home

and continue doing nothing.

 

Exclamation for a Separation

which happened long Ago

Hey you. I've never spoken badly

about you but I need to start.

I just wanted to say how things are

for me regarding you. You

with no sense of forgiveness…believe

me when I say I still remember the

time I had to wrestle an apology out

of myself I never wanted to give.

Boy was that a mistake, I thought

you just wanted to smell the blood

of my weakness so you could say,

Ha, I'm a shark! Now, I can no longer

speak or even look at you. It angers me

like a match sparking a gasoline river.

I want you to die but not before I want

you to know that my feelings will remain

and that is a good thing. It is that rage

which never again wishes to break into your

heart; the way yours did to mine,

to hurt it, which motivates me to never be weak or

give in to a cold hearted unforgiving fuck

like yourself who will never have the

privilege of ever knowing me again.

You will still use others for your personal

gain but it will never be me. Here's some

advice: I still see that you are up to your

old tricks so I hope you've learned after

your career falls flat on your blank

transparent face. that I think it would

work out nicely for everyone. Chalk it up to

lessons learned. It's taken years of restraint

to not say I want to punch you in the face

then stab you. Too harsh? I'm not sorry!

See that! I've learned. I've just give you

fodder to talk about me the way you

always did, at least today, feel what's real.

 

Timothy Gager is the author of eight books of short fiction and poetry. He has hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts every month for the past eleven years and is the co-founder of Somerville News Writers Festival.His work has appeared on NPR and in  over 250 online and print journals since 2007. He has  been nominated for the Pushcart Prize nine times.

Dog, fiction by Charles McLeod

When I was twelve my dad stole payload from auger mines a county north of where we lived. Mom had fallen off a truss bridge drunk the summer prior and no thing, small or large, would bring her back. So my dad took to driving, to battle the sadness, but gas costs good money and to support his habit he began filching coal. His main problem was there aren't many places to sell coal back to, accept for other coal plants. Early morning he'd wait near the tall link gates of the companies he knew of, the back of his pickup weighted down so heavy it looked like it might snap. He was brain-soft from the loss of his wife and best friend, and the foremen and plant managers and rig drivers would laugh at him while he stood there, his flask soot-covered and true tarnished in his flat, big hand.

No one ever bought the coal but his story got around. We bred hounds to make ends meet and our house was covered in red dirt that their paws tracked in. We spoke of the normal things a father and son can without a mother to run translation. On weekends Dad would drink heavy and we would line dance in our living room, a station from Lexington reaching our transistor. Behind the house the coal pile widened. Dad kept it under a green tarp next to the kennel, the plastic weighed down with rail pins. The parents of a boy from school won small at state lotto and soon after bought a cable dish for their television. This family would invite me over and we'd watch, in full color, all the things that got beamed in.

The dogs grew and got sold or had new dogs. The first weekend of springtime the two men broke in. They'd fed the hounds pills past midnight and returned before dawn and killed them. They explained this to me and my father while they tied us with wire to chairs. I was scared and thought about my mother and some of the shows that I'd seen on television. One of the men took my dad's socks off and pulled his big toes back and broke them. I knew this was happening on account of the coal, though the men never said so. Outside the winds snapped the tarp.

When light broke the two men untied me. I don't remember what either of them looked like, aside that they looked like men. Both of them had guns and chrome on their belt buckles. The taller man ejected the clip on his gun and handed the weapon to me. My father was passed out where he sat.

You're gonna hit him until he gets awake and then you're going to hit him back to sleep again, said the man who handed the gun to me. If you don't, I'll put the clip back in.

I was barefoot and could feel the red dirt between my toes. I took the gun by its barrel and hit my dad across the face with it. He woke up and tried to move his arms against the wire and almost tipped the chair over. I was crying. I kept hitting at him. My eyes were closed and I could hear the metal on his face and head. He made sounds but never told me to stop what I was doing. I went at it like that until one of the men grabbed my shoulders and took back the gun. Their pickup had a Virginia plate with a "T" and a "2" in it. I told this to police on the phone when they'd gone.

 

I live in North Dakota now, a some miles west of Bismarck. I never married and do not want to. A wife will lead to children, and I've seen what they're capable of.

Treet™, Trash, and Pride: Finding Out What It Means for Me to Be Southern, essay by Kevin Brown

I have lived almost all of my life in the South, but I have never felt particularly Southern.  However, the two years I have lived outside of the South have taught me just how wrong I have been.  They have also caused me to struggle with exactly how I fit into the South and what one even means by claiming to be Southern these days.  Luckily, they also helped me to develop a bit of Southern pride, which I struggled with growing up and continue to do so.  In fact, I can remember the first event that made me proud to be from the South, and it started as nothing more than a joke.  A young woman I taught with was passing me in the hall and simply said hello.  I responded with "Howdy, howdy."  I should point out that I do not have a well-developed Southern accent; in fact, for most of my life in the South, people asked me if I was from elsewhere, usually the Midwest.  I have also never lived in Texas, but, for some reason, I have picked up saying, "howdy," to people.

Rather than simply walking on to wherever she was going, she stopped and asked, "Why did you say that twice?"  Of course, there was no real answer to this question.  I believe she truly wanted to know why I had said it twice, but I had no idea then, nor do I today.  I'm sure that I've done it since then with no real reason; however, since she asked, I gave her an answer.  I smiled and said, "Because I'm twice as proud to be from the South."  Now, that was simply not true.  I was in my late 20s, living outside of the South for the first time in my life.  I had lived most of my life in Tennessee, but I had attended graduate school in Mississippi, so I was well versed in the South, and I cannot say that I was particularly proud to be from there.

Since I knew that she was from New York state, I was simply trying to be a bit mischievous, but I really did not expect her next comment.  She took my comment seriously, as I later learned that she did not have a sense of humor, and looked at me incredulously, simply responding, "Why?"  It was at that moment that Southern pride was formed in my heart, as I wanted so desperately to have an answer for her question.  I wanted to be able to explain to her everything that was great about the first twenty-seven years of my life because they were spent in the South.  Instead, I had nothing to say.

That encounter happened early in the school year, in the fall semester, but a later event showed me that, no matter what I thought about my background, I was undeniably from the South, and it was up to me to own it.  I was having dinner with a young woman I was trying unsuccessfully to convince to date me.  She was perfectly willing to be friends, though, so we were out one night having pizza at a restaurant where the power had gone out.  Thus, it took a long time to get our food, as they were trying to get everything back in order.  Luckily, perhaps, it gave us a long time to talk.

As was my wont, I was telling stories about my childhood and asking her about hers.  She was from St. Louis, originally, and she had gone to college in Rhode Island.  To the best of my knowledge, she had never been to the South, nor has she to this day, over ten years later (and, no, I do not count Missouri, especially St. Louis, in the South, Mark Twain excepted).  We were talking about foods of our childhood, so I decided to tell her about my favorite meal:  Treet™,[1] pork-n-beans, and macaroni and cheese.  I don't believe I mentioned white bread and butter that we would have on the side, but that inclusion or omission would not have affected her response.  She looked at me and said, "No offense, but, what were you?  White trash?"

I would like to say that I had a response for this, as well, beyond simply arguing that I was not white trash.  I had had a rather lengthy discussion with one of my classes about the difference in terms like "white trash," "redneck," and "hick" earlier in the year, so I should have been ready to have such a conversation with her.  I was the perfect person to educate her about the connotations and denotations of such terms and explain what life in the South was truly like.  However, I did not and, in fact, I could not do so.  The truth was that I did not know what I was.

Not surprisingly, since that time, I've done a good deal of thinking about terms like these and where I fit in the South.  I've also talked to my family more and found out more about our background.  Growing up, both of my parents worked, and I never heard stories about their early married life, before I was born.  Since they've retired and since I've started hearing more stories from my older sister, I have found out much more about what life was like in the eleven years my parents were married before I was born and when I was very young.  I can still say that we were not white trash, but I'm not sure exactly what we were.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there is no entry for "white trash."  Instead, you have to find information under the more general heading of "trash."  The fourth definition for that term is "A worthless or disreputable person; now, usually, such persons collectively. white trash, the poor white population in the Southern States of America; now also used outside the Southern States of America," while a reference to the fourth definition of "white" also tells the reader that "poor white folk(s) or trash" is "a contemptuous name given in America by Blacks to white people of no substance (1836, etc. in Thornton Amer. Gloss.)."  It is interesting to me that the OED references the racial conflict between African-Americans and the poor whites, as my only encounters with any derogatory terms referring to poor Southerners has come from the white middle– and upper-class, as in the case of my friend.

Looking back at my childhood and just before I was born, part of this definition fits.  The fact is that we grew up poor, though I would never have known it at the time.  My sister tells me a story about the years just before I was born and a particularly bad Christmas.  My brother, who is nearly three years older than my sister and ten years older than I am, once asked my mother if Santa Claus didn't like our family because we didn't get very many presents.  Not surprisingly, his question so upset my mother that, from that year on, any extra money (and some that was certainly not what anyone would define as "extra") went to Christmas presents for the kids.  Thus, since I came along later, I never knew that we were ever in financial trouble.

Of course, part of my ignorance was simply because I grew up around other kids who were poor.  I accepted hand-me-downs from a good friend in my neighborhood who was two years older, and no one in my neighborhood made fun of me.  They wouldn't, as they wore clothing from their older brothers or cousins or friends.  In fact, I passed on some of those clothes to other kids in the neighborhood when they were too small for me.

In our school system, not only was I not seen as poor, but my family was seen as well-off, despite all that I did not have.  Even though I was almost always the last in my neighborhood to get anything that was trendy, be it clothing or electronics, students at my county school envied me and where I lived.  Our neighborhood was named Martindale Estates, and we had a neighborhood pool that families could buy into.  Many of my schoolmates lived in trailers out in the country, and they had few friends who lived within walking or biking distance.

I never had to go on the free lunch program, unlike many of my friends.  Again, there was no shame about being on the program, and the teachers would often announce information about the program to the entire class.  Whenever students had to sign up or go to a meeting about it, it was announced over the school intercom, and students would simply get up and go.  There was never an attempt made to hide the names of the students to protect them, nor did they have any shame about accepting the help.  Even in middle school, where anything seems to be free game to use for abuse, I never heard a student attacked for being poor.  I can only imagine that anyone who would have done so would have had to defend himself against the entire school.

The part about being called "white trash," then, that bothered me so much is the implication that one has no worth or drive.  Both of my parents attended college, though only my father finished, and he went on to earn a Master's degree.  When I was two, he got a job teaching at the university they had both attended, and my mother worked there as a secretary.  Thus, when I was growing up, we were clearly upwardly mobile, and my parents strongly encouraged me to follow that path.  My brother and sister, both of whom grew up during much more difficult times, struggled in school and did not seem interested in that approach to life.

It is this classist tint to the term, not the racial one cited by the OED, that can grate on a person.  In her article, " 'Excavated from the Inside':  White Trash and Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller," Karen Gaffney writes, "The stereotype blames poor whites for their poverty, constructing them as inferior, alleviating responsibility from whites in power who maintain the status quo.… The emphasis on trash constructs poor whites as garbage, undesirable and disposable, in order to preserve the non-trash status of middle– and upper-class whites."  My parents both grew up very poor, as my father's father worked in the coal mines until he developed black lung, causing my father's family to move repeatedly and live several times in the housing projects.  My mother can honestly say that she did not own a winter coat until she was in middle school, and she and her three sisters shared one bed for many years.  My friend's comment blamed my parents for the meal that I had told her about when, in fact, they were working to raise our family up out of the poverty they had known into a better life.

A few years ago, a new Brady Bunch movie was released, where the Bradys still lived like they were in the 1960s and 1970s, but everyone else was in the 1990s.  At one point, Carol Brady is shopping, and she buys an inordinate amount of red meat.  A neighbor sees her doing so and criticizes her for feeding her family meat (one must recall that the Bradys lived in California).  Her response is that her family is growing, and they need to eat meat to do so.

Growing up in the 1970s, my parents took the same approach, as did almost all families then.  They paid little concern to high sodium levels, and low-fat was a fad that had not hit yet.  Their main concern was that we had some sort of meat at every meal, no matter what it was; thus, if all they could afford was Treet™, then that's what we got.  We ate Hamburger Helper™, salmon patties (made from salmon in a can), Tuna Helper™, spaghetti, Chef Boyardee™ pizza with pepperoni (we had to have a meat, and it was cheap), and cube steak, among other meals.  In each case, the meals were cheap, but they gave us the meat our parents thought we needed.

They had to feed a family of five on a budget, so they did the best they could.  Even today, my favorite meal of a can of Treet™, a box of macaroni and cheese, a can of pork-n-beans, and a piece of white bread with butter is still quite cheap.  I went to the store to check prices, and a can of Treet™ was on sale for 99 cents (normally $1.29), a large can of pork-n-beans (31 oz) by a name-brand company was $1.69, and a box of family size, name-brand macaroni and cheese was $1.94.  If one went with store brands, two 16oz cans of pork-n-beans were 80 cents, and the macaroni and cheese was on sale for $1.00 (normally $1.25).  Thus, this meal for five would range between $2.79 (for store brands and with everything on sale) to $4.92 (for all name brands and nothing on sale).  This type of meal would stretch a thin food budget in ways that most meals would not and still give us the protein they thought we needed.  One serving of Treet™ alone would provide each of us with six grams of protein.  The macaroni and cheese adds another sixteen grams, and the pork-n-beans would pack in six more.  This cheap meal provides each of us with twenty-eight grams of protein for a much lower price than almost anything else we could afford.

Other meals are similar in cost and nutrition.  Hamburger Helper with a pound of hamburger would cost $5.94 for store brands and 15% fat hamburger, and Tuna Helper with a can of tuna would cost $3.34 for store brands.  In both cases, though, when I looked Hamburger and Tuna Helper were both on sale for $1.00, bringing the cost down to $4.79 for the Hamburger Helper and $2.19 for the Tuna Helper.  The Hamburger Helper would give us 26 grams of protein, while the Tuna Helper serves up 25 grams.  Our parents could provide us with about 25 grams of protein for one meal for less than five dollars per day, and that amount is in 2008 money, not 1970s and 1980s income.  My friend's interpretation of our eating habits shows only a middle– to upper-class upbringing that is ignorant of the struggles of the poor, no matter where they may live.

Unfortunately, those outside of the South (or even those who live in the urban South with no knowledge of either the urban or rural poor), are unable to distinguish simple poverty from white trash or any of the other terms used to denigrate those who are struggling to survive.  Sometimes, though, my defensiveness about growing up in the South led to problems, not the speaker's ignorance.  In the same year in Indiana, I had a conversation with another young woman about my perceived lack of accent, and she used another term that is often used derogatorily and which I took as such, only to find out that I was the one who was mistaken in this case.  I told her that I did not have a Southern accent, and she simply laughed and responded, "Kevin, you're somewhere between hick and Southern."

I should have known better than to take the term "hick" as an insult, and my only defense is that I was obviously having trouble dealing with people who did not understand the South.  Thus, my defenses went up, and she had to explain what she meant to prove that she did not mean to denigrate me or my accent.  It is true that the definition of "hick," according to the OED is "an ignorant countryman; a silly fellow, booby"; however, the focus can be on the "country" part, not the "ignorant" part, which was my friend's intention.  It is true that my mother's accent could easily be described as a hick accent, as she sounds like she is from the country, as opposed to the Southern accents that movie stars usually adopt, which sound like rich plantation owners.

In talking to others, I'm not even sure that "hick" is limited to the South, and the OED certainly doesn't limit it geographically.  I had a friend in college who was from rural Pennsylvania, and he often used the term "hick" simply to refer to those who lived in the country, as he did.  It was not an insult; merely a descriptor of where one lived.  Unfortunately, when used as an adjective, it becomes a put-down, as in, "You went to that hick college?" or "I used to live in a hick town, but then I moved to civilization."  Thus, according to my friend, even though I have an accent that is similar to a hick, I am not a hick in the pejorative sense.

However, I did have at least two distinct phases when I wanted to be a redneck, one of which was precipitated by my friend from Pennsylvania.  When I was in college, I often wore doo-rags to class, so I was always on the lookout for good bandanas.  I had a Soviet flag and a Union Jack at one time, and, near the end of that phase, I found a large, purple, paisley bandana (it was the late 1980s, early 1990s, OK?) that would hang halfway down my back.  I even tie-dyed some bandanas.  However, my favorite bandana was one that my friend bought when he was home in Pennsylvania over break; it was a Confederate flag.

We both noted the irony of a Yankee buying me a Confederate flag bandana to wear on campus in an area of East Tennessee that fought for the North, and that irony made wearing it that much more enjoyable.  In fact, I have often taken great joy in poking holes in Confederate mythology by pointing out that I'm from Northeast Tennessee, so I know what it's like to be both a Southerner and a winner.  Note that this type of comment does not make one popular with other Southerners.  When I was not wearing said bandana, I often wrapped it like a headband and hung it around my rearview mirror, as was the trend among rednecks when I was growing up.  In fact, I once joked that all one needed to get free car repair service was such a bandana.  If you raised the hood on your car with that around the mirror, rednecks would come out of nowhere to help you fix whatever was wrong with the car.  When I was younger (and dumber, I should add), I believed this was a clever insult; I know now that it says something about the kindness of Southerners that I took for granted while growing up here.

According to the OED, a redneck is "A member of the white rural labouring class of the southern States; one whose attitudes are considered characteristic of this class; freq., a reactionary."  It goes on to say that term was originally an insult, and it often still is, but it is "now also used with more sympathy for the aspirations of the rural American."  I'm not sure exactly where they see evidence of the term being used as a sympathetic one, though it's certainly been co-opted by Southerners much the same way that gays and lesbians have tried to take back "queer."  In fact, when I was in high school, I worked at a Kroger grocery store with a fifty-something-year-old woman named Merle.  Her son would often come and pick her up in his low-rider truck, which had the word "Redneck" painted on the top of the front windshield.  Of course, he wore this term with pride, much as Kid Rock and Toby Keith have done with "white trash."

When I was a Senior in high school, I wanted to be a redneck, for some reason.  I am not sure why the desire hit me at that point, especially as I had spent much of my time trying to escape from the trappings of my Southern upbringing.  I even mocked my best friend (and high school valedictorian) out of some of his more extreme Southern accent, including pronouncing "yellow" as "yallow."  Thus, in addition to the red bandana I had around my rearview mirror (this was before my friend from Pennsylvania had given me the Confederate flag, of course), I took to trying to grow sideburns.  I am still not sure why I thought sideburns would help me be more of a redneck, but it did not help.  For some reason, no one looked at me and thought I was anything other than a general Southerner, whatever that is.

Of course, there are other terms that ignorant people use to describe those of us who are from the South, especially if we grew up poor.  We are called crackers, which the OED helpfully defines as "a contemptuous name given in southern States of North America to the 'poor whites'; whence, familiarly, to the native whites of Georgia and Florida."  Some people believe the term comes from "corn-cracker," which is defined as "a contemptuous name for a 'poor white' in the Southern States (from his subsisting on corn or maize); a 'cracker'. Also, a native of Kentucky."  The OED does not believe "cracker" has anything to do with "corn-cracker"; instead, it gives another definition of "cracker" which relates to people who boast.  The earliest usages of "cracker" certainly have elements of boasting in them, as this letter from 1766 shows:  "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their places of abode."  Of course, since they were boasting in the South; the term that referred to boasting changed into a classist epithet.

I did not hear "cracker" when I was growing up, only later when I was in graduate school, and then only in books and articles I read.  However, I did grow up hearing about hillbillies.  I grew up on the old country music of the 1970s, a group that certainly took pride in being hillbillies.  Unlike "cracker," there is no inherent insult in the term, as the OED simply defines a hillbilly as "a person from a remote rural or mountainous area, esp. of the southeastern U.S."  In fact, a newspaper quote from 1900 makes being a hillbilly sound rather positive:  "In short, a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him."  The limitation to Alabama is interesting, but most Southerners these days would feel quite happy if they could live the life of this "Hill-Billie."

Unfortunately, the term has taken on negative connotations, as people have taken the term to refer to people who live so far outside of civilization that they are unable to survive within it, as the television show The Beverly Hillbillies illustrated.  The stereotype of a hillbilly as someone who did not wear shoes or who eats possum on a regular basis is easily discerned in the definition, but even the quote from the newspaper does not pass judgment on one who lives in this manner; it simply states that one does.  In fact, most of that quotation implies a poverty that has been and still is true for hillbillies, in that they dress as they can because they have no means to speak of.  They live off of the land as best they can, as they are still so isolated that they scrape to survive.  Unlike white trash, though, they are not "worthless" or "disreputable"; they are simply poor.

The problem comes when those who do not understand the differences between these groups (or the true usage of the terms) uses them interchangeably; thus, someone who is simply a hillbilly becomes white trash, and a hick becomes a cracker.  Ultimately, these terms all alienate those to whom they are applied, keeping them from participating in society, keeping them from invading the civilization that those with money and power have created.  In "Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse in the Writing Classroom:  Classifying Critical Pedagogies of Whiteness," Jennifer Beech writes, "Rednecks, white trash, and hillbillies, then, are among the classes of whites who lack the power to define or shape cultural norms."

When my friend asked me if I was white trash, she was commenting on much more than what I liked to eat when I was growing up.  She was speaking of me as someone who did not have the power or ability to contribute to the society of the greater United States, someone who could not make an impact beyond my poor country school or neighborhood.  Most of my friends understood this idea and believed it themselves.  One day, a group of us were sitting around a tree in the neighborhood talking about what we might like to do one day.  Not surprisingly, as many of us played sports, we dreamed of becoming professionals.  The oldest among us said simply, "Nobody from Martindale will ever amount to anything."

If one is called "trash" long enough, he or she will begin to believe it.  Luckily, I knew enough to be offended by my friend's question and by the woman from New York's questioning of why I would be proud to be from the South.  What I still do not know is exactly what it means for me to be Southern, though I know that I am.  I know that I prefer smaller cities that are more rural as opposed to anything urban, though I enjoy visiting cities, but I'm also not exactly sure what that means, if anything.

Over the past ten years, which include a move to the Pacific Northwest that only lasted one year because I wanted to get back to the South so badly, I've at least come to admit that I love the South and being Southern, but I simply cannot define what that means, either in general or for me specifically.  I have tried to write about how I am and am not Southern, but I end up falling back on clichés and stereotypes, using accents and love of stories as some sort of arbiter of Southerness, making me no better than those who criticized where I'm from.  As I continue to shape what being Southern means to me, I know that I also must struggle against others' portrayals of Southerners as ignorant and as the South as some place I should be ashamed of.  Perhaps in educating them, I can educate myself, as well.

[1] Let me go ahead and differentiate between Treet™ and Spam™ here.  According to their ingredients, Treet's™ main meats are "mechanically separated chicken" and "pork," while Spam's™ are "pork with ham."  In both cases, of course, "pork" is notoriously vague (which begs the question for Spam™ as to what the difference between pork and ham is, but I'm guessing that most of us would rather not know where the "pork" portion comes from), and the descriptions of "mechanically separated chicken" are not pleasant, so I'll avoid going into that.  Suffice it to say that their parts of the chicken one does not normally eat.  Treet™ also adds "baked Virginia ham seasonings," as they advertise a "baked Virginia ham taste."  Spam™ also includes something called "modified potato starch," which I'm guessing is used to thicken it up.  Both also include preservatives, though Treet™ seems to have a wider variety of them.

The Miner's Friend, by Jeff Kerr

I fight the Mack truck around the bends of the mountains and I'm goddamned tired. Going back to pick up the last load of coal at Number 16 over on the Virginia side. My arm is sunburnt and hangs out over the truck's dented door where the name Cindy is painted in icy blue fancy cursive writing. Cindy is the name of my wife. I look to the right and see the stingy run of Ferrell's Creek. I drive by my home and see the dead swing set in the yard and wonder where the kids are. I wonder what Cindy is doing now. I blow the horn and listen to that booming moan like a ship out at sea instead of another sooty Mack truck coming back for another filthy load of coal.

I pass my house and I see Preacher Dell out on his porch looking out at me across the way. I see him but I wonder if he truly does see me for what I have become. I wonder if he sees me for what I had been. His old hand goes up slowly in greeting and I give the horn another blast.

I start making the uphill climb and around more curves, not seeing what's in front but only off to the side: green trees like giant heads of broccoli, huge khaki sandstone boulders, limestone rocks shaped like broken daggers, patches of houses whipping through the trees. Keep my eyes on the road, I tell myself and let out a bunch of air from inside me. It's a living, like they say.

I pass on over into Virginia and go past shacks falling into themselves and know that someone still lives there. On the side of the road, in the gravel and sand, a once pretty dog is now splattered, pink insides out of itself like a melon fallen. Poor dog, I think. The road narrows more and I go by a row of just alike houses, the old coal company houses of way back old timey days. I'm glad I got my own place even it is manufactured housing. Ain't nobody going to put me out. Not if I got any say.

My eyes dart side-to-side and I slow down and watch myself whenever I pass over into this part of Virginia, going around that uphill curve and then down into the valley. I drive past the Miner's Friend Tavern and I see the painted sign with the picture of a miner's helmet and burning lamp and I tense up. There are coal trucks parked out front in the gravel lot and I recognize a few of them and connect names and faces to those trucks. I feel my hand drift over the painted letters that spell out Cindy. I don't stop at the Miner's Friend no more. I don't stop nowhere no more but work and home. That's the conditions of my parole.

It used to be that I liked to party. I hauled coal all day, got off work, showered the coal dust and grit from my body best I could, rubbing every nook and cranny of my body. Then I buttoned up a clean shirt and my good jeans and went out to see what was going on. Sometimes I'd sit in a friend's house smoking dope and drinking beer. Other times I'd be over on the Virginia side where it was wet and sit in one tavern or another, drinking and listening to jukebox music. On Friday and Saturday nights a band might be putting down some boogie or picking mountain music and

I'd go and listen to it, dance with a girl lonely as me and drink in and out of what I thought was love.

My daddy would lecture me about my drinking and doping and how it wouldn't do me no good and mommy would watch me with bitter eyes. She went to Preacher Dell at the Free Will Baptist and prayed for me every Wednesday night and Sunday morning. She even tried to get Preacher Dell to come talk to me but he told her, "Wouldn't nothin' to do for a river but to let it run it's course."

Sometimes something stronger than a joint or a shot of whiskey would pass across the bar. Little folded paper squares of cocaine or meth and I'd snort it in the tiny Lysol reeking bathroom and party time would roll on to the dawn. My paycheck would be gone before Monday and the bills would pile up and would have to be late again.

I had me a daughter by a fat girl named Bern over near Fish Creek. The baby was named Clarissa. I got to see her every now and again, brought her a dolly or goody of some kind or other. Sometimes I brought them money, more often than not I didn't, I'm ashamed to say.

I was in a tavern clear over near Grundy in Virginia called the Ridgerunner. I was bent over a shot of Jim Beam and a Budweiser, my head nodding and listening to Ricky Stumley talk my ear off about the good reception his satellite dish was getting when I seen her in the corner sitting with a couple of other girls. She was pretty, but not all made up. Had blonde hair falling down her shoulders. Built good and strong, but not what you'd call fat. Had dark eyes like oil. Sad eyes. She was looking at me and I smiled at her.

Little while later she was sitting next to me and I was buying her drinks and she was listening to my troubles. She told me her name was Regina.

We went and made out in my truck. The hours become a hot blur and then she told me she had to go. We met up at the Ridgerunner a couple of times a week. Sometimes we went back to my trailer. I never got to see where she lived. She always changed the subject. I didn't press it; she was fun to be with. She took my mind off of the coal truck, she made me forget about Bern and my guilty mind over Clarissa. Regina never talked to me about getting saved or any of that. Her life was shots of Jim Beam, snorting lines of crank and turning up the stereo whenever the Kentucky Headhunters was playing. She loved the way they did "Walk Softly On This Heart of Mine."

I was sitting in the Miner's Friend. It was an October Saturday afternoon, the leaves orange and red like fire made out of paper. The air outside an early cold like the inside of a meat freezer. The lights in the tavern were dim, the jukebox playing quietly. Old men and young men going to be old men soon were up and down the bar, talking quietly, drinking. I had a beer in front of me and was staring down into it's gold when they came into the bar.

They were Hutchinsons, I knew that much. They were from somewhere near Grundy and I had heard stories about the Hutchinsons all my life. Stories about how mean they could be and all the guys they'd messed up. It was known that their daddy, Bobo Hutchinson, had killed his own brother over an insult years ago and the law did nothing.

John Hutchinson was weaving on the tavern floor looking up and down at all the faces at the bar. He had dark unruly hair in need of a cut. His beard was dark like the fur of some animal. His brother, Sean, was a smaller shadow of himself. He had green eyes that glowed like a bobcat's. Sean was but thirty years old and was missing most of his teeth. Neither one of those boys held a job in their lives. They grew dope and sold it. They bought houses, insured them and burnt them down for the insurance money. They collected welfare checks and spent the money on meth and booze. I didn't want nothing to do with no Hutchinsons.

"Hey, you Mullins?" asked John, looking at me. He had a wild smile breaking up the tangle of his beard. I nodded my head.

"Buddy, you been messin' with the wrong bitch, you know it?" he continued, looking sideways at Collins, the bartender, who was reaching under the bar.

"Leave it there, Collins," said Sean, his hand darting under his coat.

John came over to me. The smile was gone. I could smell whiskey on his breath. His eyes were red around the edges like he'd been up all night crying.

"Stand your ass up," he said.

I sat there on the barstool.

He grabbed me by the front of my jacket and pulled from the barstool. The stool clattered against the curling linoleum of the tavern floor.

"I done told you to stand up!" he yelled.

Men left their stools and stood back. Some left, the door swinging open and the bright October light a shining rectangle against the tavern darkness.

"What's he done?" asked Collins.

Sean turned to him, "He was messin' with my brother's wife. That's what he done."

"I never messed around with nobody's wife," I said, pulling away from John's hold on me.

"You tellin' me you don't know a girl named Regina Hutchinson?" asked John, spit flying from his mouth as he reached out and shook me by the arm.

"She told me her name was Regina Thompson," I said.

"He's a lyin' stack of crap," Sean said.

"You think I'm goin' to let you lay out a-doin' my wife and then sit in here braggin' on it with these coal mining asses, you got you another think comin' there, buddy," said John.

I could see Sean pulling his hand out from under the folds of his coat just over John's shoulder.

"We're goin' to learn you but good," said Sean.

I pushed against John and he stumbled back. I punched Sean in the face, feeling the knuckles of my hand break. I shoved past bar stools and pushed out through the door. Sunlight hit me and I squinted. I ran cross the gravel lot to my pickup. I got in, my hands shaking, blood running in lines across my knuckles. I started the truck and heard the Hutchinsons slam out of the Miner's Friend. I heard their voices loud as I pulled out of the lot, gravel spitting behind me. I got on the road and startedback to the Kentucky state line. I saw a beat-to-hell Dodge pickup pull in behind me through my rearview mirror. The truck rode my bumper around curves. I couldn't control the truck and slid off the road and bounced against limestone boulders.

I was shaking in the cab when they turned their truck around and drove back slowly.

They parked in front of me. The Hutchinsons took their time getting out of their truck. They walked towards me. I could see them through the cracked windshield. I wiped the blood from my eyes. John had a Bowie knife about as big as a pirate's cutlass. Sean had a .38 with a butt bound with electrical tape. They were both laughing and joking, but I couldn't hear what they were saying.

I didn't even think about it. I reached behind me and the shotgun from the rack behind me in the cab. I broke the breech and saw there was a shell. I got out of the truck and snapped the breech shut.

"He must think he's a-goin' squirrel huntin'" Sean said.

"He hain't goin' to do nothin' but lay down and die," John said, all the jokes and laughing left his face. He held that knife in front of him and started towards me.

I raised the shotgun and didn't even think about it. I fired and my ears filled with a cloud of noise. John staggered back. The front of his shirt beaded with blood. The beads grew darker and filled and he went to the ground on his knees like he had been knocked down into prayer. Sean dropped the .38 and bent over his brother.

"John? John?" he kept saying, his voice breaking like a scared child's.

John's eyes went pale and he mouthed something I could not hear.

Sean bent his ear to his brother's mouth. I saw Sean nod his head and whispered, "I will."

John fell back on the ground. He looked up at the October sky and shook like he was freezing. Sean held to his hand.

I threw the shotgun across the seat of the truck and got in. I started the ignition and looked at the Hutchinsons there next to the road by the limestone bluffs of Kentucky. Sean looked up at me.

I pulled the truck back onto the road. I passed by the Hutchinsons. Sean stood up from his brother and I heard him yell, "Murderer! You killed my brother!"

I watched the Hutchinsons disappear in the rearview mirror, a bluff of limestone finally taking them away from my eyes. My hands shook on the steering wheel. I thought about driving as far from trouble as I could get. I drove past my mommy and daddy's house. I drove past Preacher Spivey's house and the tears came.

I pulled off to the side of the road and sat in the truck with a million things going through my mind. I looked down at the shotgun beside me on the seat. I knew I had to face things.

The judge gave me five years and let me out after one. The Hutchinson's mother said that John probably deserved the killing. She also said I should've put the gun on the girl while I was at it.

All I wanted to do was straighten the rags of my life out. I got my old job back hauling coal and I put a downpayment down on a manufactured home. It was real nice and came with everything you needed. I stayed away from dope and just a little beer now and again. I don't hang out at the Miner's Friend no more. I don't go to the Ridgerunner. I keep my ass out of the taverns.

Sometimes I go to the Freewill Baptist Church and sit with my hands folded in my lap. I let Preacher Dell's words wash on over me like a hot river of tears. I listen to the choir sing their songs of redemption and I shake sitting there in the pew, my hands folded in my lap. It was there at the Freewill Baptist that I met a pretty girl named Cindy. She sang in the choir and was kind to me. She didn't care none about my past. We got married and started a family. I had her name painted on the door of my coal truck in icy blue lettering like a tattoo. I wanted people to know that she was always with me. I always run my hand over that name whenever I drive past the Miner's Friend.

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.

Kicking to Go On, fiction by Samuel Snoek-Brown

His heart knocked like a fist against his breastbone as his own knuckles beat against the heavy metal door. A desperate yapping came ricocheting toward him from inside. He bounced on his feet to keep warm; he hadn't imagined a March cold front could sweep this far down into central Texas. And no one told him the door would be locked.

Then, the snick of a deadbolt, and the metal door scraped along the jamb and Bobby was inside, still bouncing and breathing into his hands but inside now and ready to work.

The man who'd opened up for him said, "What the hell you doing here so early?" He had to shout over the voices of the caged and anxious dogs.

"Just like to be early," Bobby said louder, unused to speaking over echoing animals. "First day and all."

"Well shit, man. I stay away from this place long as I can. Cut out early, I say. Michael Sirus. Call me Mikey."

Bobby said his own name back, and they shook hands, and Mikey cocked his head toward the back. Bobby looked instead at the man's face, a thin pink scar ripped from the left cheekbone down to the lip as though disappearing into Mikey's mouth. A long and cocky grin.

"You ever done shelter work before?" Mikey said.

"Nah," Bobby said.

"Why start now?" Mikey took them into little break room, the cinderblock walls there a buttery yellow, all the little pores and cracks of the cement blocks puttied up with thick paint. They leaned against the counter and Mikey poured coffee into two Styrofoam cups. Bobby shook his head and held up one hand, but Mikey said, "You'll want this, trust me. I like to hit the whole pot with a few shots of Irish. Too damned cold lately for coffee alone."

Bobby smiled but kept eying the scar. He took the offered cup though he didn't want the whiskey. Didn't want to soften his mind against the work ahead.

"Seriously," Mikey was saying. "Why work here?"

"I like animals," Bobby said. Mikey laughed and looked into his coffee cup. But Bobby said, "No, no shit. They fascinate me."

"You're gonna hate it here."

"Sergio said the only people who work here are the ones who love animals," Bobby said.

"That little Mexican? Don't get me wrong, I'm no racist, but that guy, he just gets a kick out of hiring gringos to work for him." Mikey slugged the last of the cup and poured another. "He's right, though. I dig animals. Big fan of cats. But that's why you'll hate working here. It's killing them that gets to you."

Bobby looked at him. He set down his coffee cup, shifted his weight. Then, carefully, he said, "Huh?"

"Euthanasia, Bobby. We all gotta do it. Simple as math. Only got three dozen cages, but we get in something like half a dozen animals a week, and we give away maybe two or three a month, rotate another fifteen with the other shelters in the area. That's five or six too many, Bobby. We put down an animal or two a week."

"Jesus," Bobby said.

"Yeah," Mikey said. "We keep friendly by sharing the guilt—only person here who doesn't give the shots is Ma, the old receptionist."

"Jesus," Bobby said again. But he had counted on this.

Mikey had been right: Sergio and a guy named Elmo were the only Hispanics in the shelter. Sergio himself addressed it in the break room the first time his and Bobby's schedules overlapped. He'd said, "Eh, gringo, why you wanna work here with a couple of Mexicans? That ever keep you up at night? Knowing you work for a wetback?"

"Your shirt looks pretty dry to me," Bobby'd said.

Sergio had laughed. He said, "You're all right, Bobby. I thought you'd be like every other prejudiced gabacho in this town, but you're all right." Then he'd left. Bobby had refilled his styrene cup and turned to the empty doorway and said, "How do you know I'm not, you fucking spic." His words were calm. He tried them again. "Fucking spic." It still wasn't right. So he'd practiced at home as well.

But Sergio and Elmo, whom Bobby never met, they were it. Everyone else was white. Bobby liked this, liked working for a Mexican. Up in Normal, Illinois, there had been a black woman, LaShelle, who hired him as an exterminator. In the long winters, when the world froze over, he would lay in bed at night and dream of fucking her, not because he liked her but because she was black. He'd heard, back in high school when kids still spoke this way, that it was all pink in the middle, and he tried imagining that, her dark legs spread to show the little strip of magenta in all her wiry hair. He couldn't get aroused. He tried imagining himself angry with her, imagined beating her, raping her. Nothing worked. He didn't feel anything. Most nights he got bored and watched a nature program instead, ragged hyenas gnawing a zebra while Bobby cleaned his insecticide tanks and spray nozzles.

In the spring, he read the angry history books the Revisionists wrote, struggling against the illogic when they said the Holocaust had never happened, when they explained how six million Jews had scammed the world. He read that the Jews killed Jesus; Bobby didn't care about Jesus, or about Jews. He read that the Jews had all the money, but Bobby had a home and never went hungry. It was all one big conspiracy that Bobby was outside of. But he had studied; he'd tried to learn hate because it was the easiest emotion he could imagine feeling, the only one he thought would ever get through.

Then, in the summer, when the fire ants marauded north to Normal and invaded the peaceful suburbs with their red Texas fury, he would strap on the tanks of poison LaShelle gave him, and he would slip into the growing heat to spray the world in chemical fog, killing everything, even that part of himself that knew, knew he could never be a racist no matter what he said, or studied, or killed.

There had been a news story, carried along the backs of the fire ants, trailing north from Texas. A man, a black man, tied to a truck in Jasper and dragged through the streets. Daylight. Suburbs. Horror.

As a boy in Normal, Illinois, Bobby had a dog: Sandy when they adopted her, same color as Bobby's hair. A Chow mix with a punched-in face and a curled-up tail that never, ever stopped wagging. Bobby changed her name to Lady after the dog in the Disney movie, and he watched her shatter the milk bones he threw her after dinner, and he walked her through the thin woods outside Normal, hoping the dog would sniff out interesting carcasses abandoned in the woods.

She got spooked in storms, kept trying to jump the fence in the back yard. His parents had rigged her on a runner, one of those chains clipped to a line high overhead, each end bolted to a tree so every time the thunder beat the sky she could dash about in a panic but still not clear the fence. Now, instead of walking Lady, he just stood over the fence and watched her, fascinated, because sometimes, straining against the pull of her runner so hard she'd raise herself up on hind legs and stay that way for half an hour, she'd bark at every Hispanic that walked their streets. Never the white neighbors, sometimes the black neighbors—but she definitely had it in for the Mexicans, the Ecuadorians, and the two old Puerto Ricans from New York. She strained against her leash, pulling the runner taut like a bow string, herself the fingers holding the tip of some invisible arrow, and she barked and barked at the Hispanic neighbors who passed their house. Bobby never knew why. But he wanted to find out. She was a good dog in every respect he knew a dog could be, so he reasoned that hatred must be good too.

When he was grown and ready, he followed the trail of the fire ants south, to Jasper, but found nothing to help him, so he went then to the cities—Houston that hot and muggy fall, San Antonio in the gray winter—then north and west, to the hill country. Peaceful, but teeming with ants.

 * * *

"What's with the scar," Bobby said in the break room on his second day. Mikey was spiking the day's second pot of coffee.

"Wondered when you'd ask. Came from the job. We had a real bitch of a cat once. Came in spitting and kicking and throwing one hell of a fight. She popped loose from Elmo and scrammed, shoom, right up the goddamn wall. You look at these walls." Bobby looked, the yellow paint a slick skin on the cinderblocks. "I still don't know how she did it. Anyway, by the time we found her, she'd made it into here somehow—" He walked to the refrigerator and swiped his hand back near the wooden cabinet overhead. "Got up into that cabinet there, damned if I know how, and when I went in to get her, she shot out right at me and wrapped herself around my head. Elmo trying to get her off, and her trying to stay on, kicking at me to get a better grip. It was like she was digging a trench right in my fucking face." He rubbed a finger along the scar, back and forth, remembering the cat's claw there. "Lucky there was just the one deep runner."

"Did you kill her?" Bobby said.

"Would you believe we found a home for that little bitch?" Mikey said. "Tame as a goddamn lap cat now. Fat, too."

"How do you know?" Bobby said.

"I'm the one who took her home," Mikey said—a grin, long and jagged where it spread from his slit lips to the long pink line in his cheek. "She's my cat now. Keep your enemies close—who said that?"

"What'd you name her?"

"Still just call her Bitch."

"And she's tame now?"

"More or less. Every now and then she gives me this look, though, like she's reminding me what she did. Like she wants me to know she could do it again." He laid his finger along the scar and held it there.

"I put the lock on the cabinet up there," he finished. "Sergio wanted to nail it shut, but I said the lock would be more practical. Brought the lock in myself." He smiled again, that long torn grin, and he raised his Styrofoam cup to Bobby. "That's also when I started bringing in the whiskey."

 

Spring in Texas was where northern summers come from, the heat stirring early before waving off the hills and rising up the continent. Bobby stood outside his tiny apartment in the forgotten center of town. Early as April, already in shirt-sleeves, that last winter front long since swept away. He drank a bittersweet cocktail of Southern Comfort in beer. A neighbor in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt stoked the coals in his tiny porch grill and sent over a plume of fajita smoke. Bobby looked over and the two men nodded to each other.

"Is it always this warm in April?" Bobby said.

"Warm?" the darker man said. "It's barely sixty degrees out. Still feels like winter to me."

"What's it normally get to?"

"Shit, it oughta be seventy degrees already. Wish it was. I'm freezing out here."

"Hm," Bobby said. He ran his shoe through the dirt on his slab of porch, hoisted his spiked beer, and walked out into the shabby complex yard. He'd seen a mound off in one corner, and he went to find it.

It lay like a dried fecal lump cast out from the frigid ass of a dinosaur. Prickly with tiny dirt clods, pocked with holes, still and asleep. He'd not seen ant hills like this in Illinois. He toed it, but nothing happened. He set down his beer and cast about, looking for a stick. One lay off near the sidewalk, and he got it and set to poking, dissecting the mound. The bare brittle grass crackled behind him, and he spun on the balls of his feet with the stick up, but it was only the neighbor walking up to him.

"They sleep until it gets hot," he said.

"Fire ants—I know."

"Little bastards," the neighbor said. "Can't kill em for shit."

"You can try," Bobby said. He turned back to the mound and poked deeper.

"Hey, you want a bite of fajita, man? My old lady makes some mean seasoning, straight from her mama's mama back home. Good stuff."

"No," Bobby said.

"Huh," the neighbor said. He stood a moment, then left. Bobby poured his beer over the strewn mound, stood up, went back into his own apartment.

"Spic," he said, to try the word out again, the first time since Sergio. It still didn't feel right. Nothing felt right.

When he was four, he'd stood watching Lady at the fence one hot afternoon, her still a puppy and running in circles free because she wasn't yet big enough to jump in the storms. He'd stood a long time. Finally, she'd run to the fence for a pat on the head, and he looked down not at her but at his own feet. They were covered in a crawling black fur, only it wasn't fur, it was ants. He'd stood directly in an ant hill all that time, and now the ants had swarmed his feet, determined if not to move him off then to devour him there. He'd screamed, and his mother had come and collected him kicking and punching at her, and she'd set him, clothes and all, in the tub for a baking soda bath. His feet swelled up and turned a cranberry color for two days, and he cried the whole time, but really, he'd never felt a thing.

* * *

 Bobby watched.

Mikey fiddled with an old tool box, extracting syringes and bottles, explaining while he worked. The cat squirmed in Bobby's tight, thin arms. They both wore powdered latex gloves.

"With cats, we use this," holding a bottle, "a sedative, measured out according to what the cat weighs. Milder than the killer, and we don't have to use it, necessarily, but you can feel how that cat is ready to pop right now, just shoot out your arms like it had a bottle rocket up its ass. The first sedative makes it easier."

"It?" Bobby said. "The cat's a he, isn't he?"

"The cat's about to get dead, Bobby. It's an it. That's how I work. Got it?"

Mikey tapped the needle, then reached over Bobby's straining arms and jabbed the cat in the rump; the cat kicked in violent thrusts and twisted its head out of Bobby's fist. It bit Bobby's hand in the soft meat between the thumb and the first finger, and it stayed there, driving its tiny teeth deeper into Bobby's flesh through the latex.

"Hoh-oh, shit," Mikey said. He laughed. "Hang in there, Bobby."

Bobby hung in there.

Mikey had drawn out another syringe and poked it into another bottle. "We use a wicked little blend of sedatives on the dogs, because they're bigger usually. I don't know exactly what the mix is. They send it to us ready made. I just do my end with the needles."

The cat went limp, its jaw relaxed and its heartbeat slowed to match its long, heavy breath. The air was hot on Bobby's hand, hot already from the wound, the blood collecting under the second skin of the glove.

"This here," Mikey said, "is the nasty stuff. Pentobarbital." He flicked the needle and squirted a bit of the drug into the air. It landed on the cat's face and ran into its closed eyes. "Cats, they get a hundred and twenty milliliters of this stuff per kilogram of body weight. Stops the heart cold in just under thirty seconds. But dogs—" He jabbed the new needle in, depressed the plunger, held it a moment, and slid it out again. "—Dogs only get twenty milliliters per kilo. Now why the hell is that? Dogs get more sedative but less juice in the end?"

Bobby had been listening, learning, and he'd missed the moment. What used to be a limp and sleeping cat was now a cat collapsed, a body with a void inside.

"Damn it," Bobby said.

"What?" Then, seeing, Mikey said, "Yeah, it's tough. I was so shaken up my first time I couldn't even cry until I got home. It was like I'd died, too."

Bobby looked at him.

"Yeah," Mikey said with his eyebrows raised, his head bobbing in affirmation, "I cried. I bawled. Everyone bawls their first time. You will too, later today or sometime tonight I guess."

Bobby stared, first at Mikey and then back down at the cat.

"But the thing you got to remember is, it's just a cat, Bobby. Just a cat. Or just a dog. Or whatever. It don't matter. With me, it's a kind of release, you know. You're saving them. You just gotta keep saying that, Bobby. Or something like it. You gotta have a gimmick. Loving death, being a merciful angel for these little things, that's my gimmick."

"What other gimmicks are there?" Bobby said.

"Oh, lots. Jeanine, she hates them. Not really, but she makes a hell of a show of it—cusses up a storm when she's in here. And Elmo, he always sticks them backward so he don't have to see their faces. Shit like that."

Bobby nodded.

"You got a girl?" Mikey said.

Bobby shook his head.

"Get one. A girl can help, you know, after doing this shit."

"I wouldn't know what to do," Bobby said.

Mikey laughed. "Didn't say you had to love her, Bobby. Now here," he said, waving at Bobby to retreat, "back up. They usually shit and piss all over you when they go, and we've gotta clean you and the rest of this place up. Then, I'll go buy you a beer over at the `Coon."

Later, the gloves stripped away but the chemical smell still hanging on their raw hands and in their scrubbed shirt-sleeves, Bobby and Mikey drank beers at the Raccoon Saloon. After his fourth, Bobby could speak. He said, "I can't feel anything."

"I know," Mikey said. "My lips are numb."

"No," Bobby said, "I don't have feelings." Mikey pulled at his lips, let a finger trace the scar, and Bobby dropped it. He said instead, "I think I'd like to try my first time with the needles next week." Mikey said sure and slugged his beer. Bobby said, "I think I'd like to try it alone."

"Slow down, partner," Mikey said. He laughed, then he didn't laugh. "You'll want to give it time, Bobby. Take it slow."

"I know," Bobby said. "I know."

  * * *

The spring of Bobby's eighth grade year had been frenzied with wintry storms, cold fronts bashing down from Lake Michigan or across the plains. The earth froze, thawed, percolated mud until it froze again. And in a lull one week, as the sun warmed a runny earth, Bobby had walked his street each day with his hands over his nose. There'd been a smell in the neighborhood for days, and it was getting worse. His parents complained of the smell; his neighbors called once a day. Finally, Bobby's father sent him around back to see if Lady had killed or shat something foul enough to pollute the neighborhood. "When's the last time you even saw that dog, Bobby?" his father had asked. But back at the fence, staring into the wide pen that ran behind the house, Bobby couldn't find his dog. He whistled into the wet air. He climbed over the fence for the first time in a long time and started clapping and calling Lady's name. He walked to the tree near the house, where Lady's plastic-coated runner was bolted. The other end ran into a cluster of trees by the back side of the fence. Bobby walked with the runner in his fist, the cord slipping through his fingers with a slow plastic burn, until he entered the trees.

Lady must have been desperate in the previous storm. She'd scrabbled up the tree and between two high limbs, squatting in the crotch to jump and clear the fence in spite of her runner. But it had held. She'd snapped against the tug of the runner and fell almost to the ground. But only almost. The runner had stopped her. She swung now from the leash, a week later, her head to one side and her black tongue fat and drained to the gray of over-chewed gum, hanging out her open jaw. Blood had crusted against her teeth and around the little fog-blue marbles of her dead, bulging eyes. There was a little pile of shit, nuggets covered over in a blacker liquid in the grass beneath her, and her piss had matted the fur around her hind legs and her tail. Flies crawled around her nose and inside her ears, probably working their way inside to lay little sacks of maggots on the soft folds of her brain.

He screamed. But it was like the day of the ants, the scream a noise issued from his throat like an alarm, for he found he did not love this dog, nor did he hate that the dog had died. There was nothing but a situation that called for alarm, and this, in turn, alarmed him. Even at the age of thirteen.

His parents came out, and his father crawled over the fence and carried Bobby out to his mother, then got a hatchet and went back in to hack down the runner cord. Lady fell with a heavy flump. Bobby scrambled away from his mother and tried to climb back over the fence, tried to go and stand over the body, to see more clearly what the decomposition was like, what the insects were doing with the corpse. But his mother caught him, and Bobby was trapped on the outside of the fence. He couldn't get any closer, not to Lady, not to anything. He looked at the dog. He sniffed, closed his eyes.

Behind him, his mother touched his shoulder and squeezed it, then laid her forehead against his back, and said, "I know, I know, I know."

  * * *

Mikey scraped a thin fingernail over the scar, down, back, down again, as though keeping the wound fresh.

"Remember," he said, "they seem pretty docile at first, but they'll get you." Bobby nodded, but Mikey went on. "No shit," he said. "I knew this girl once, got down close to a mongrel to kiss it—she'd do shit like that, kiss them right on the lips—and this little mutt snipped up at her and bit her clean through the lip. Right here, a canine on either side. Clean through."

"Shit," Bobby said.

"And you know what that chick did? She went and put a ring through it, like she'd pierced her lip herself. I'm not lying. Told that story like she was proud."

Bobby nodded. He snapped on two latex gloves, and he said, "Did you fuck her?"

"That chick? Nah."

"Lesbian," Bobby said, nodding again.

"I don't think so. Shit Bobby, you're so prejudiced, man."

"Not really," Bobby said. By he was trying. It was the only way. Distance everybody, distance everything, keep it all clean. Clean right through.

"So," Mikey said, shaking his empty Styrofoam cup. Late in spring and still the whiskey in the coffee. He sucked at the last drops, pitched the cup to the garbage can. "You ready for this?"

"I'm going in alone?" Bobby said.

"You said you wanted to."

"Yeah," Bobby agreed. It needed to be this way.

Mikey shook his head, walked through the door to the hall, and Bobby followed, the two of them haunting the afternoon shadows gray as the wire cages. Mikey unlocked cage number eight, reached in, and pulled out a whimpering dog. He closed the cage, pocketed his thick ring of keys, and walked back through the echoes of the halls to the break room, alone.

The Labrador half-breed still had the bone-shaped tag someone had clipped to her collar: Licorice. Named, made real; abandoned, dead. She knew it, her end foreseen in the same animal foreboding that warned dogs of impending thunderstorms. Her haunches spread low in a brace against the stained concrete floor, and when Bobby took hold of her collar to coax her into the room, she added her own stain, the watery stream of rancid urine spreading under her rump and away from her tail. Bobby's sweat mixed with the powder in the latex glove. Licorice whined once but then hushed, concentrating instead on scrabbling her claws against the concrete, seeking purchase in her own pool of stink. Bobby's keys slipped and hit the floor, and Licorice jumped once, her hind quarters and then her forelegs coming off the ground so her whole body rose straight up in Bobby's grip like an armadillo beneath a moving pick-up. It was enough. Bobby hauled her in swinging by her neck, and she skidded, her paws clattering and sliding on the floor, and Bobby kicked the door shut. She was inside.

Bobby put his hands on his hips and looked at her. "You little bitch," he said.

He left Licorice in her corner, where again she whined and squatted on the floor, refusing ever again to move. Bobby opened the old tool case on the table and drew out the fat plastic syringe and two bottles. One was half-full with fluid the color of a bourbon-and-coke. The other bottle was smaller, glass wrapped in a paper druggist's label. Bobby pushed the needle through the rubber seal on the first bottle and pulled on the plunger, drawing up the sedative. He muttered, said, "Cocktail hour, sweetheart." He wanted a drink himself. Just not a bourbon-and-coke. Not an Irish coffee from the break room pot. Something stronger. Something to put him under.

Bobby squatted now, mimicking Licorice, and approached her in low shuffling motions. "Hey, bitch, hey little nigger bitch," he said, low in his chest so the foreign string of words hummed. "Come here you little black bitch, you kike bitch, you Arab bitch. Here little faggot bitch. Come here bitch."

Licorice shuffled a bit, too. She lowered her head and whined. She stank of urine, and Bobby saw she had pissed the floor in here, too.

He reached in as though to pet her, took her collar again but did not pull. He just sat there, her collar in his gloved hand, both of them panting. He held her, his eyes and her collar: she stayed put. Her breathing slowed. She resigned, sighed, and lay on the floor with her jaw flat on the concrete, her piss soaking into her fur. Bobby reached around her and slipped the needle easily into the muscle of her hip, depressed the plunger, sent the murky amber into her.

Hatred, he once had thought, would be just that easy. Find it somewhere and inject himself with it. Love was far more difficult; it had to be grown from the inside, like a mold, like those psychedelic mushrooms hidden under the wide clay patties of cow shit down here. Hate—and death—came from out there somewhere, accessible. But so far, it hadn't been so easy. So it had come to murder, a cold gray room with buckets and antiseptic and death in a syringe.

Licorice sighed again. She looked up at him without moving her head. Bobby retreated, watched her a moment, then stood and leaned against the janitor's table to wait. He closed his eyes. He listened to his breath, to her breath; the heartbeat punching in his chest was hers. He counted them, seventy, one-fifty, two-fifty, his heart rate increasing each minute until, when he had counted four hundred eighty beats, he knew about five minutes had passed. He opened his eyes. Licorice slept, her breathing heavy and her own heart rate slowed to a peaceful thump.

He turned and took out the smaller syringe, jabbed it quickly into the smaller bottle, and sucked up the poison inside. He depressed the plunger, waited for the squirt, and walked back to Licorice asleep on the floor. He took a long breath, said "You fucking bitch," and stabbed her with the needle. He called her a little white-trash whore, a wetback poonanny that deserved what she got; his voice thin and artificial but his pulse alive, his blood its own poison racing beneath his flesh, seeking escape. His chest tingled, dead-alive with that prickling sensation of something asleep having just woken up. He could feel it in there. An army of fire ants tramping across the inside of his sternum, the sensations he'd never had across his feet as a kid now erupting inside his ribcage. His own tongue fat in his mouth. Everything around him moving, things he'd never felt before. He licked his lips then left his thick tongue between them, a syrupy trail of saliva falling hard and fat against Licorice's slick black fur. He tried a smile and found one, losing it again to his concentration but knowing at last that he had a smile, sharp but genuine, and from there, who knew what he would discover. He felt her side. Her heart had stopped forever, and for one of those thirty seconds, his had, too.

 

 

Samuel Snoek-Brown is a writing teacher and a fiction author, though not always in that order. He's also the production editor for Jersey Devil Press. His work has appeared in Ampersand Review, Red Dirt, Red Fez, and SOL: English Writing in Mexico. An excerpt from his Civil War novel, Hagridden, appeared in a special issue of Sententia. He lives with his wife and cats in Portland, Oregon; online, you can find him at snoekbrown.com.

Missions after Midnight, poem by Misty Skaggs

The white, hot, halogen flash

of headlights

splits two lane darkness

of a Saturday night in the sticks.

We fly around curves.

Float up and over

hills

and hollers.

Asphalt slinks over ridges

like a fat,

black,

snake.

And we follow the snake.

Blind,

determined.

We are rural route heroines

to the rescue,

responding to the ringing, rotary call

of our drugged up

damsel in distress.

"Please", she pleads, "come and get me…"

The grinding, gray crunch

of gravel

blends with the hollow howl

of a mutt dog.

A mangy stray with saggy tits,

and sad eyes,

tracks our slow progress,

as we creep

and we crawl

through the moonlit trailer park.

Missions after midnight

are the most dangerous.

But we bluster on.

Little girls alone

in the baddest part of the backwoods.

No big, strong farm boys

to protect us tonight,

Just our sense of righteous bravado.

And the forty-five

And it's loaded.

Tonight we ain't little girls.

We're grown women,

we're cowboys.

Riding out on a doomed round up

motivated by fuzzy memory.

Urged on by nostalgic recollections

of another used-to-be little girl.

A far away, freckle faced little girl

with a gap-toothed grin

and a perpetual smear

of dirt,

highlighting

her high cheek bones

like blush.

She's lost in a haze,

that long ago little girl

we can't help but recall

when she calls out for help.

The two of us,

her cousins,

her kin,

her blood…

We see her deep set, bright,

blue eyes,

beneath the glaze

of Xanax

and Wild Turkey.

We see the blue eyes

of a little girl

who's seen too much.

Blue eyes grown world weary,

and bitter,

and jaded,

and old

too soon.

We call her name.

Half whisper, half holler,

half-hanging out the windows

of the nearly new Mustang.

Our trusty steed is quiet,

cruising up and down the aisles.

Slivers of light

split the night.

Makeshift sheet curtains

pull back to prove

to the paranoid,

that we aren't the cops.

And suddenly, she appears.

Stumbling out of the woods

at the end of the row

of Silver Bullets and single-wides,

behind the Frosty Freeze.

Gone is the grimy, Barbie t-shirt

and the ragged, ruffled skirt

we remember.

Replaced by daisy dukes

and scraped knees,

and sallow skin hiding under

an oversized hoodie.

No more chubby cheeks

or crooked smiles.

Now it's missing teeth,

and tracks,

and stretch marks.

The little girl

we used to know,

has her own little girl

in tow.

The sleeping baby,

blue-eyed like her

brand new Mommy,

is an afterthought,

confined to car seat,

lined with the stray,

sharp,

needles

of white pine.

Misty Skaggs, 29, currently resides on her Mamaw's couch way out at the end of Bear Town Ridge Road where she is slowly amassing a library of contemporary fiction under the coffee table and perfecting her buttermilk biscuits. Her gravy, however, still tastes like wallpaper paste. She is currently taking the scenic route through higher education at Morehead State University and hopes to complete her BFA in Creative Writing…eventually. Misty won the Judy Rogers Award for Fiction with her story "Hamburgers" and has had both poetry and prose published in Limestone and Inscape literary journals. Her short series of poems entitled "Hillbilly Haiku" will also be featured in the upcoming edition of New Madrid. She will be reading from her chapbook, Prescription Panes, at the Appalachian Studies Conference in Indiana, Pennsylvania in March. When she isn't writing, Misty enjoys taking long, woodsy walks with her three cats and watching Dirty Harry with her ninety six year old great-grandmother.

Noise, fiction by Allen Hope

At a quarter past six Slade realized he'd not make it to Marilyn's Pub 'n Sub in time for his meet-up with Jackson Saunders. He knew Saunders was a stickler for punctuality, but he still hoped to find him parked in the lot behind Marilyn's near the twin olive-green dumpsters when he arrived. It was their usual meeting place. The day had been a combination of blowing mist and drizzle, and though it had stopped an hour earlier the road was still shiny with moisture. Slade raised a hand to his mouth searching for a nail to chew. He found nothing beyond the quick. He tried the other hand and got the same result. He'd run out of meth on Wednesday. It was now Friday and he feared if he didn't find a new supply soon he'd gnaw the ends of his fingers off.

He finally made it to Marilyn's but there was no sign of Saunders. He parked anyway. Turning the radio on and scanning the AM band he found only one station within range, some rich fuck complaining about socialism. The FM band didn't fare much better.

He waited nearly half an hour frantically watching the highway, desperate for Saunders to pull in and offer up a quarter ounce that he was hoping would calm the noise in his head. He was about to call it quits when he saw the burgundy Chrysler that belonged to Saunders' girlfriend turn into the lot and park beside him. She waved him over. Once the door was closed and they were alone she started to say something but stopped. She was a frail girl with a reedy voice. Her skin was almost too white and her black hair greasy and smelling of acetone. Slade could tell from the redness around her eyes she had been crying. Thinking she had come to deliver the meth, he reached for his wallet.

"No!" she said. "Put that away! They might be following me!"

"What the hell, Kay! Who might be following you?" Slade said, wiping at the smudgy windshield so he could get a clear view of the highway. He watched a logging truck pass and then nothing.

"Jack said he was supposed to meet you here and needed a ride," she said. "When I went by his house the sheriff had him handcuffed stuffing him in a cruiser." She could barely sit still, twisting in her seat and making little jerky motions with her arms.

"Oh, shit." Slade felt his stomach churning and his heart thumping against his rib cage.

"I don't know what to do, Slade. Fuck. I didn't want to come here but I didn't want to go home, either." Kay kept reaching for the mirror and readjusting it like she expected a SWAT team to swoop out of the woods and haul her off. "The DEA was there, too, in their blacked-out Navigators or whatever it is they drive."

"This is serious, Kay. I heard they were operating in Elliot County trying to shut down the labs and the pill pushers over there. That whole county's like a drive-thru binge barn anyway so it didn't surprise me. But I never thought they'd work their way over here."

"Well, I can promise you they're here, Slade. Because that sure wasn't a bunch of tourists I saw who stopped to watch some hillbilly get busted."

They sat a while longer discussing their options. Kay decided to go to a friend's house for a few days. All Slade knew was that he had to find some meth and find it quick. And since it was too risky around Wayland he figured his only other option was to track down his cousin in Rock Camp and see if he could hook him up.

Slade had stayed in touch with his cousin Louis by talking to him occasionally over the phone. Louis was five years older than Slade and had connections in every hollow and backwoods hideout within forty miles of Rock Camp. He was born smack in the middle of town one blustery summer afternoon when his mother swung by the post office to drop off a package and dropped Louis along with it. Louis was proud of the fact that he had lived his entire life having never ventured more than one county over from the one he was born in. He often bragged that if he didn't die in Rock Camp or one of the surrounding townships, it would be because somebody had kidnapped him and carried him far away, shooting him, strangling him, or simply burying him in a hole when nobody stepped forward with the ransom they demanded.

It wasn't until midnight that Louis finally answered Slade's phone call. He'd been down in one of the hollows drinking with some friends but left early when Jimmy Cotton convinced the others to ride into Ironton with him and find a drunk to roll.

"Listen," Slade said when he had Louis on the other end. "I was thinking of heading up that way tomorrow and…"

"What?" Louis cut in. "You ain't been to Rock Camp since you left. You in some kind of trouble?"

"No. I just thought while I was there you might know somebody could tie me into some crank."

"It's been kind of hot up here with the law and all, Cuz. Most people I know are laying low, afraid to do much. But I suppose I can take care of you. I've got some other business to attend to so why don't you come by, say about six o'clock. I'll have what you need. Sound all right?"

"I'll be there," Slade said.

Slade polished off a plate of country ham, eggs, grits and toast at Papa Joe's Café the next morning thinking that his newfound appetite was the only good thing to come from running out of drugs. He'd usually grab a sandwich or a quick bowl of soup somewhere, the needs of his stomach an afterthought more than anything else. He filled his Durango with gas at the BP station next door, stashed four twenty ounce Red Bulls in the cooler he'd brought, and hit the road for the two hour drive to Ohio.

Arriving on the outskirts of Rock Camp a little after two o'clock and with plenty of time to kill before he was supposed to meet Louis, Slade thought he might visit the ridge he remembered as a kid. He had lived a quarter mile below the ridge line in a place that was more shack than house. It was all his parents could afford living as they did from paycheck to paycheck. But they were gone now, dead before their time.

The blackberries were at their juiciest in late August and the horse weed vibrant and high, nearly choking the path that ascended from the old homestead. The climb was rough but Slade kept at it, managing the last few yards by using his boots to push aside the weeds. He made his way to an outcrop of rock and positioned himself well back from the edge. His greatest fear of late was acting on impulse, a sudden thought that might flash across his mind and cause him to react without any concern for the outcome.

"I'm not one to go killing myself," he said. "So don't even think about it."

This had become his refrain whenever the noise in his head kicked in and overrode nearly every good thought that came his way. It started after he got himself hooked on crank while driving a coal truck. First came pills. But when he discovered crystal meth was cheaper and easier to get, he switched over. The high was good at first, the feeling that he was invincible, that he could do anything he wanted and do it better than anyone else. But the noise turned everything upside down. It didn't matter to Slade, though. The only two things he cared about now were getting high and getting laid.

Slade balanced himself with one leg wedged into a knee-high crag of granite. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it, flicking the spent match toward the ravine. The valley at the base of the ridge looked to Slade like it always had when he viewed it from this angle. He imagined it as a ribbon of green that had fallen from the sky. There was hardly a straight section to it, just a series of bends and curves bordered by Sugar Creek on one side and a sheer wall of rock on the side where he now stood. What was once a county road with no offshoots was now peppered with driveways. Though they were mostly ruts worn into the clay soil they still provided access to the mobile homes set at odd angles along the creek.

The only structure Slade recognized was the single-pump gas station and country store at the valley's northern end. He was surprised by its longevity, how it had weathered the years and managed to stay in business. He remembered how the store once served as a gathering place for what he called the riff-raff of a welfare state. His father had been too proud to accept a handout in any form, even in the worst times, and he had taught Slade that if a man was having trouble making it in this world it was because he wasn't trying hard enough. Bad luck and misfortune were not excuses.

In the years following, and mostly on weekends after darkness collapsed like a mining disaster over the valley, the store became a hangout for local teenagers. Slade despised this new breed of teenager almost as much as the riff-raff. They could not be trusted. Like animals the worst of them would shoot a man for no good reason. Slade thought he was lucky to have escaped this place. He swore he would never return, not for any reason on earth. But his life had changed since then, changed in ways he'd never imagined.

A blast of wind from below fanned the goat's beard at Slade's feet. As he looked over the bluff expecting another gust he saw a foreign made car, a Honda maybe, and then a Ford pickup with a dog bounding in the bed as if it was trying to swallow every bit of wind that looped around the side panels, bisecting the valley. The traffic's movement relaxed Slade and he felt the noise in his head fading away. What Slade called noise most often came in the form of voices cajoling him, insulting him, or making demands that he struggled to resist though he was not always successful. But this time it was mostly a high pitched whine, and as it wound to nothing more than an annoying hum Slade began to feel at peace.

Then, "I'll be Goddamned!" Startled, Slade dropped his cigarette.

Thinking it was the noise starting in again he tried to cover his ears to get some relief. But his arms refused to abide.

"Is that you, Slade? Jeremy Goddamned Slade?"

Realizing the voice was not in his head but somewhere behind him, Slade turned to see a man dressed in camouflage pushing his way through a stand of sapling pines. He carried a shotgun slung over his shoulder. And though a gray-flecked beard covered most of the man's mouth, Slade noticed a picket of yellowed teeth that he took to be evidence of a smile.

"Goddamn it is you! What's it been, ten years, fifteen tops?"

"Don't know," Slade croaked, stepping off the rocks. "Maybe."

The man stopped several yards short of Slade. He spat a brown stream into the dirt and squinched his eyes, waiting for acknowledgment that here stood an old friend. When none came, the man lowered the shotgun to his side.

"You don't remember me, do you?" he said. "Damned if that ain't the shits. Listen here, we went to school together, me and you!"

Something about the man looked vaguely familiar but Slade couldn't see enough through the beard to put a name to him.

"Stanton Galloway, dammit! You helped me steal Bobby Turner's Pontiac the night I had a date with that gal over in Willow Wood and no way to get there."

Slade recalled that night. How Galloway had phoned, pleaded with him for a ride because he'd heard how a date with this girl was a sure bet to get laid.

"Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I got it. You promised if I took you to see her and you got some I could watch."

"Too damn bad your car wouldn't start," Galloway said. "You missed one hell of a show."

They'd concocted a plan that had Slade babysitting Turner, making sure he stayed liquored up while Galloway pinched his car and kept his date in Willow Wood. The plan was solid. Turner was an easy drunk. Drinking was a hobby of his, and if he didn't have to pay for the whiskey then so much the better. But when Turner came to the next morning and saw his car gone he grabbed a greasy towel off the floor and tried to smother Slade, still passed out and snoring in an old broken recliner. Faulting Slade made no sense but then nothing Turner did made sense.

"You near got me killed!" Slade said.

"Hell, we can laugh about it now. How was I to know I'd get a flat and him not have a spare in that big-ass trunk? The good old days! Eh, Slade?"

Before leaving, Galloway said he had a girl he wanted Slade to meet and plenty of good shit to smoke if he cared for that sort of thing.

An hour later Slade was sitting in his Durango at Galloway's with the windows closed and the A/C and engine running to ward off the afternoon heat. He had parked in a bare spot of yard just off the gravel drive where Galloway's mother had died. Crazy with grief, she drank a pint of bleach after her husband was struck dead by a cottonmouth while giving praise to Jesus. Galloway found her sprawled beneath a barren apple tree, a clump of red clay in one fist and her chin pink with the foam that had gurgled out of her as she lay praying for the end to come. The past began to come back to Slade. He remembered thinking the same fate awaited Galloway. And though it had yet to happen, the overall desperate look of Galloway's place meant it was still a possibility.

Slade reached for the A/C knob and lowered the temperature a couple degrees. He leaned back and again heard the noise stirring in his head but was too exhausted from hiking the ridge to fight it off.

"You are a dumb shit!" said a voice that sounded to Slade like a taunt from some fat grade-schooler. "Big high-and-mighty Slade!" it continued. "Never coming back to Rock Camp? Look around! Tell us where you are now!"

A knot of voices broke loose demanding an answer.

"Fuck you!" Slade said.

The ruckus shifted to laughter and Slade thought of the time in fourth grade when, doing chin-ups on the monkey bars, a sixth-grade girl and several of her friends cornered him once he hit the ground.

"I want to see your dick," the sixth-grader said. "We all want to see it." Two of the girls giggled, their eyes fixed on Slade's crotch. The Conroy brothers had stripped him naked a week earlier. They buried his clothes and forced him to jump into Sugar Creek if he wanted them back. Word got around. Kids called him Snake, Mr. Billy Club. And now here were a bunch of older girls demanding to see it for themselves. Slade's cheeks had suddenly felt flush, his skin burned. Reluctantly, he undid his belt and zipper. But when he put his hand down his underwear and grabbed his dick he pissed himself. By then Galloway and a few other kids had joined the girls and they all stood laughing at him. Slade wanted to kill them, every single one of them. Instead, he skipped school for a week. He hid in cornfields and barns grown over in woodbine and pictured himself dynamiting the school and everyone in it. From there he'd work his way through Rock Camp going house to house, shooting and stabbing until the entire town was littered with bodies. "That'll show the sick bastards," he'd sobbed. "Teach them to laugh at me."

A muffled roar roused Slade and he checked his side-view mirror to see Galloway slicing up the drive on a Kawasaki four-wheeler. A girl rode behind him, her chest tight against Galloway's back and her arms locked around his waist. They circled once and came again at Slade through a cluster of stumps in the side yard. As it came out of the stump field the Kawasaki caught a dip. When it hit the upslope the front wheels lifted off the ground and the sudden change of direction pitched Galloway forward with the girl piggybacked on top of him. For a second Slade thought all three of them—Galloway, the girl, and the Kawasaki they were fighting to stay astride—were going to roll like a barrel into the front quarter-panel of his Durango. But at the last second Galloway slammed himself against the seat and twisted the handlebars hard left. Gravel pinged off Slade's SUV and gray dust corkscrewed over the hood.

"Hell yeah," the girl whooped. She threw her arms around Galloway's neck and pulled his head back so she could bite his ear. The Kawasaki slid to a stop beneath a streetlight Galloway had snatched, its pole hammered sideways by a rockslide along State Route 217 north of town. He had wired a motion detector to it and bolted it to the side of his house for security, the first line of defense should any of his customers come looking to rip him off. Galloway hopped from the Kawasaki and tossed a gritty hand in Slade's direction, motioning him over.

"This here's June and that's Slade," Galloway said as Slade followed them through the door. "June lives one holler the other side of that ridge you climbed today."

"June, huh," Slade said.

"That's right," June countered. "The names April and May were already spoke for by the time Momma had me."

"Yeah, but they done run off," Galloway said. "Fucked ever thing there was to fuck in Rock Camp and decided to branch out, expand their territory."

"You oughtn't talk about them like that," June said.

"It's true, ain't it? Hell, I put it to both of them gals waiting on you to come of age." Galloway laughed. He smacked June's ass then watched her wiggle over to the couch and settle into the cushions.

Slade had known girls like June, girls with little more to do in such a ratty town than latch onto some man for sex and whatever else he might provide. He despised these girls almost as much as he had the new breed of teenagers. But he fancied June. She was still magazine cute with a tight body that bordered on skinny. And he liked the way her sassy hair was the color of cornstalks in late November, and how it hung just below her ears, capping her cheekbones and making her face glow like an invitation to a night of fevered wildness.

The laughter in Slade's head had quieted and he figured whoever the voices belonged to were as dumbstruck as he was by the girl's presence.

"Unless you're a goddamned statue sit the hell down," Galloway barked before leaving through the back door.

Slade chose a brown leather chair in a corner near the hallway. The armrests were grimed over and foam padding had squeezed through the cracked headrest and greened with mildew. It was either that or plant himself next to June. As much as he preferred June, though, Slade didn't want to risk pissing Galloway off. No need for trouble if he could avoid it.

The inside of Galloway's house was worse than Slade had imagined looking at it from the outside. The walls were a mix of colors a maniac might paint just before blowing his brains out in a spray of gore. The ceiling was dark gray, while the walls were various shades of brown, orange, and a sort of yellowing white. The windows had been mostly covered over with plastic sheeting, though a few of the corners still peeled away providing Galloway a clear view of his yard. Judging from the array of guns scattered about the room Slade figured Galloway lived in a constant state of paranoia. He counted four, a deer rifle propped in the corner, a Colt Python 357Magnum on the TV stand, and a 9 millimeter Beretta and another handgun he couldn't identify resting on top of a blue plastic milk crate wedged between a kerosene heater and a sagging bookcase.

Galloway came back with a silver, crinkled-up lunch pail that he plunked on the bookcase.

"Get your ass up and get us some beer," he said to June. "I've got to put the four-wheeler in the shed."

Slade watched June pry herself off the couch and crunch her way over the peanut husks and hunting magazines toward the kitchen. A minute later she was back with two Stroh's. She set Galloway's on the floor next to the couch then crunched over to Slade. She drew Slade's beer to her chest and rolled it across her T-shirted breasts wiping sweat from the bottle.

"That ought to make it taste better," she grinned.

Slade grinned back at her. He accepted the beer while looking at the outline of her nipples through her Cuddle Buddy T-shirt, then admired the way her hips flared tight against her Wrangler cut-offs. Noticing how the dim light shimmered against her tanned legs he tried to imagine her riding naked beside him in the Durango.

"I know something else that would make it taste even better." At first Slade thought the words had come from one of the voices in his head. When he realized they were his own words he tried to backtrack but he was too slow.

"Why don't you come by my place later?" June said. "We can go somewhere private, out 141 maybe. Looks like enough room in that truck of yours for us to be all kinds of nasty."

"What about Galloway?"

"Galloway is Galloway. He ain't my boyfriend if that's what you're thinking. He keeps me high and I keep him from getting too horny." June circled behind the leather chair so she could keep an eye on the front door. She ran her hands inside Slade's shirt, felt the warmth rising from his chest and the hair coarse between her fingers.

"You won't be sorry," she said leaning in, her teeth nibbling gently at Slade's ear. "I promise you that."

Slade wasn't sure he could trust June. For all he knew Galloway planned to marry her. It could be she was the kind of girl who saw men as rungs on a ladder and him one rung above Galloway. Maybe she figured Galloway to be headed for jail and she needed to establish a new foothold, one with more stability than what Galloway had to offer.

"Why me?" Slade asked, trying to coax June's hands from under his shirt.

"Darling," June whispered. "You might have vanished from Rock Camp all those years ago but your reputation lives on."

She pulled her hands from inside Slade's shirt and shook her ass all the way to the couch. She eased into the cushions then blew a kiss across the filthy room. Slade tipped his beer back, felt the alcohol chilling his throat. A minute later Galloway beat his way through the front door.

"Goddamn heat," he said searching the room for his beer. "I hate the fucking snow but I'll be damned if this heat hasn't about killed me." Galloway spotted the beer, parted his dirty lips and polished it off in one long gulp. He tossed the bottle on a wad of newspapers and pawed his way over June, settling in next to her.

Slade watched the honey-colored bottle roll from the newspapers and spin a little dance on the hardwood. He thought of the old Galloway, the one in high school who would have flung the bottle as if it was molten glass instead of simply tossing it aside. The old Galloway was quick to anger and just as quick to kick somebody's ass for sport because rage seemed to be the primary element embedded in his DNA. Slade was thinking of the guns and trying to determine how much of the old Galloway still resided in the haggard figure seated across from him when June said, "Let's get fucked up. Maybe that'll cool you off."

"That'll just get me hotter than I am now and then you'll have to cool me off. But what the hell, maybe Slade here wants to watch. I owe him one." Galloway laughed and shot a look at Slade.

June disappeared down the hallway. She came back carrying a cigar box bearing the name MONTECRISTO FLOR FINA. She flipped the lid open and removed a glass pipe filled with a crystal-like powder. Angling the flame from a Zippo lighter under the blackened bowl, she inhaled and held it in while passing the pipe to Galloway.

Slade watched Galloway steady the lighter and clamp his mouth around the pipe stem, the end of his thumb calloused from the heat of smoking this shit a dozen times a day. Galloway sucked until the smoke was gone. He swallowed a cough and jiggled the pipe toward Slade.

"Hurry up, dumb shit! Take it!" The fat grade-schooler again. Slade decided the kid must've been elected spokesman of the day. He thought it was funny. Not only was he an addict but apparently the kid was an addict as well.

Slade extended a shaky hand and took the pipe from Galloway, careful not to drop it. The first hit left him feeling like somebody had uncorked a bottle of champagne in his head, the bubbles an electric current charging through his brain cells. He fired a second quick hit and passed the pipe to June. The three of them took turns until the pipe was empty, then refilled it twice more. Each bowl produced a high several magnitudes greater than the one before it. When they were done June put the pipe away and slid the cigar box under the edge of the couch.

"Holy hell," Slade said after a few minutes, his face almost as white as the powder he'd just smoked. He glanced at June and saw that she was rubbing her legs as if stroking the silky fur of a house cat. Galloway had sunk into the couch, his head rolled to one side and his eyes as blank as a retard's.

June noticed Slade looking at Galloway.

"I'd think he died if I didn't know better," she said. "But you never know. He might die yet with all the Oxy he ate today and now the meth."

June continued caressing her legs while she talked. Slade thought he could hear her purring too, trying to entice him to her end of the couch.

He wasn't sure what to do next but he was sure he couldn't just sit there and do nothing. He knew Louis would be waiting for him at six but there was plenty of time for that. He could wash his truck, or sweep the peanut husks and magazines off Galloway's worm-riddled floor. He thought he might even repaint the walls while he was at it if only he could find a brush and a bucket of paint.

June palmed a vein of sweat from her cheek and studied Slade, amused at the way he sat fidgeting in his chair. It was like watching someone whose clothes were shrinking by the second, the way Slade kept pulling at the sleeves of his shirt and clasping and unclasping his belt buckle. She figured he probably wasn't accustomed to meth as pure and powerful as what he'd just smoked. She muzzled a laugh when he reached for his leather boots and retied the laces several times each before he was satisfied with his efforts.

"How you feeling?" June asked, the frayed edges of her cut-offs inching upward, her fingers drawing little circles on the sweet spots of her thighs.

Something from outside caused the front door to rattle against its frame. The plastic on an adjacent window fluttered then went limp. It seemed the only thing that hadn't moved was Galloway, slumped like a corpse since June had stashed the pipe.

"I don't know," Slade answered. "I either feel like a million dollars or like my head's going to explode any minute."

"Hand me that lunch box," June said pointing to the bookcase.

Slade vaulted from the chair as if a copperhead had fallen in his lap. He retrieved the box, passing it to June and then watching while she unlatched the lid. She lifted a brown medicine bottle from inside, twisted the cap open and passed two red and blue capsules to him.

"Here," she said. "Take these. It'll knock the edge off."

Slade carried the capsules into the kitchen and washed them down with a Stroh's. When he came back he saw that June's hands had moved from her legs to her breasts. She squeezed at a nipple with one hand while her other hand caressed the tan skin beneath her shirt. Her eyes were closed and Slade stood mesmerized like what he was seeing wasn't real.

"Don't you think it's time to teach that sick bastard a lesson?" The fat grade-schooler asked, a reference Slade realized was meant for Galloway. It was Galloway who had led the other kids in laughter that day on the playground, then got everyone chanting bed wetter pants pisser until a teacher came over and ordered everyone to class. Slade felt the humiliation punch him in the gut. This was a problem he should have taken care of long before now but the timing was just never right. He glimpsed the Magnum on the TV stand but dismissed that option as too drastic. There must be a better way, he thought, something that wouldn't land him in prison.

He looked at Galloway, noted his shallow breath, his milky eyes and the way he lay burrowed in the couch like one of his customers had just cold-cocked him with a single blow to the head. When he turned back to June her T-shirt was draped around her neck, her breasts fully exposed. Slade knew then the lesson he wanted to teach Galloway. He crossed the room, stopping next to June just as she slipped a hand down the front of her cut-offs. He watched the circular motions her hand made beneath the fabric and heard low moans rising from somewhere deep inside her. When he looked at her face he saw that she was looking back at him, her movements inviting him closer, her eyes as clear and green as the ribbon of land bordering Sugar

Creek.

 

Allen Hope's fiction and poetry have appeared or is forthcoming in Apropos Literary Journal, Eclectica Magazine, Ghost Town, Sleet Magazine, Snow Monkey, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of Sonoma State University and previously worked as a producer and scriptwriter for Project Censored's radio documentary series, For The Record, which aired on National Public Radio. A former winner of the Genevieve Mott Memorial Literary Scholarship, he currently lives in Gallipolis, Ohio with his wife and two daughters.

Poems by Joshua Michael Stewart

GO TO SLEEP YOU LITTLE BABY

In her arms is a blue-eyed boy with a dirty face. Under her flowered dress, she has another on the way. They've been living out of an '85 Buick Riviera, parking all along the Ohio River. She stares out of the pockmarked windshield at a clapboard church. Yellow foxtail grass and ragweed swallow headstones in the churchyard. The sprigs' sway lulls the boy. The graves resemble unmade beds. She studies his long eyelashes as she hums an old Appalachian lullaby her grandma used to sing. Child Services had tried to take her son once before. Nightfall, she points the Buick toward the cold voice of the river.

OHIO, 1989, AGE: 14

 

From the thorny canthus

of his right eye

to his dagger-shaped jaw

 

runs a yellow scar

already old and faded.

He drags on a cigarette,

 

drowns ants in spit,

jokingly calls his buddy

a crackhead motherfucker,

 

a lemon wedge smiling

from his teeth. And in his eyes:

the green light of Wallace Stevens,

 

or better yet, a blade of grass

reaching out for a meager

amount of rain.

 

 

****

 

Venom in his voice,

a rattrap for a tongue.

A dust devil lives in his throat.

 

He's kin to the flatted-fifth,

son of a minor key.

The harmonic structure

 

of his soul possesses the tension

of a dominant-seventh chord

pleading resolve, resolve, resolve.

 

 

****

 

Water balloons, he thinks,

sliding his hands up her shirt,

deep in the tool shed. The recipe

 

 

calls for a tangle of limbs

and tongues—her lips waxy

with strawberry gloss, neck

 

tasting of Aqua Net and salt.

He feels himself push

against the inside of his jeans,

 

sure his prick will snap

like a stick. She unbuttons

him, clamps her legs around

 

his waist, digs in her glitter-nails.

He tells her that he loves her.

He's glad she doesn't say it back.

 

 

****

 

He delights in the smell of talc

as the barber brushes

the back of his neck.

 

It complements the little girl

across the street walking with her

mother in their Sunday best.

 

How the straight razor

used to dance in his mother's hands,

shuffling along the strop, gleam

 

in the lemonade light of summer.

His daddy slouched in a kitchen chair

set on the porch overlooking

 

the chickens scratching the yard bare.

She'd tilt Daddy's head back,

lather his scruff with a horsehair brush

 

and scrape the blade across his face,

holding the razor like a butterfly

by its wings. That was long before

 

the tractor crushed Daddy's ribs,

collapsed a lung, years before

she started reeking of whiskey,

 

a lifetime before she staggered over

and snatched the straight razor

from the boy's hands, and wheeled

 

the blade in a stupor, slicing his cheek,

all before he moved in with an aunt

he didn't even know, down the block

 

from here where the sun paints a square

on the black and white tile floor,

and scissors snip-snip in his ears.