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The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. —JOSEPH CONRAD
His hands gripped the rifle with manic desperation, fingers undulating in and out like the tentacles of a deep-sea creature who had no knowledge of the sun.
“God can be everywhere at the same time if he wants, but he ain’t in every building that calls itself a church. You can stand in a pulpit and call yourself a minister. I can roll around in mud and call myself a pig too. Don’t mean you was called to preach, and it don’t mean I was meant to be pork chops,”
No one knows the hidden rivers of a man’s spirit like his mama.
He’d heard a few people at the Bureau say you got numb to the cruelty that lives at the core of some creatures that passed for human. Titus thought if he ever got numb to the things he’d seen today he’d eat his gun.
His father never spoke about his dreams, but Titus hoped he saw his mother there. He hoped his father’s dreams were not like his own.
It was like seeing Jesus drinking Henny.
As he clicked on report after report, Titus couldn’t help but feel like he was a character in an old Twilight Zone episode. A man cursed to forever miss a departing train by just a few minutes. That was what policing a small town felt like some days. You were always a day late and a dollar short. You stood there over a broken body covered in bruises or a wrecked car that reeked of whiskey, with your broom and your dustpan and a mouthful of regret. Just a janitor tasked with picking up the pieces of someone’s broken life.
When he got inside the house he found his father dozing in the recliner he had tried to dissuade Titus from buying for him. Titus got a blanket out of the closet near the front door and spread it across his father’s lap. Albert snorted once, then pulled the blanket around himself.
“Could be. I could also have monkeys fly out of my butt. Don’t mean I’m gonna start buying bananas for toilet paper,”
“A lie can be halfway around the world while the truth is still pulling up his britches,”
The myth of Main Street in the South has always been a chaste puritanical fantasy. The reality is found on back roads and dirt lanes under a sky gone black. In the back seat of rust-mottled Buicks and the beds of ramshackle trucks. The heart of Charon County beats in time with the spirituals sung in church on Sunday morning. But its soul is a truth that can be scried from the sweat of illicit lovers, the blood that drops from the lips of the PTA president after her husband has had one too many, too many times. It can be augured from the serial numbers on the tens and twenties passed from the
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“And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride,”
“Boy, you so straight they can do geometry by your backside,”
