I blinked at the striped light like refractions from twin prisms and the knife slipped from my hand and I swiveled and the men behind me parted.

In a trance I retraced my steps and sat down in the sun with my back against the barn’s hot wall.

“Delmus, you all right?” someone asked, it sounded like Aaron Winters, and I heard myself answer, “I need to think a minute—”

An hour ago I had awakened under a grapevine, the empty fifth of whiskey rolling from my chest as I jumped up and was running drunk through the vineyard toward the frantic barnyard.

I remembered the pickups arriving for the harvest party, honking horns and shouted greetings, bottles passed in a wide circle, gunfire as the men took turns shooting Woody’s rifle, the blast at my ear when Aaron Winters rested the barrel on my shoulder and the running horse weathervane skated down the barn’s tin roof—

Then the shout that the horse had escaped the corral, Silva’s hired man had let it loose, and I hurried for the lasso and swung it wide over my head—the way Endicott had taught me 60 years ago—

I approached Kate’s terrified pony that had run up onto the lawn by the house, under the kitchen window where Kyla was having her morning coffee and Kate ate her cereal.

“Nice throw,” someone said and I was leading Sox from the barnyard, saying, “Easy boy, easy,” now stepping into the young orchard to quiet it, to get away from the gun­ and from Baylor Clark who’d been nipping at my heels, insisting that Aaron Winters had struck oil west of New Lund, that if I didn’t fill him in he’d tell everyone about Kyla’s mother—

I’d heard someone coming through the dirt, with my hangover the footsteps loud as a dinosaur’s tread.

“Aaron?” I said. “You alone?” I sat out of sight, under the young Suncrest peach, Sox’s rope tied to the branch.

“Just me.” Aaron was plodding through the deep white-ash soil without his hat, his short shadow thrown behind him like a stunted wing.

“I followed your tracks— Figured you were hiding— Or getting ready to ride off—”

He was breathing hard, it was work for him walking through the plowed ground. Aaron put out a speckled hand, grasping the peach limb above my head. He blinked, his washed-out blue eyes gazing down at me through the shade.

“You’re not sore, about the weathervane?”

“Forget it. You get rid of Baylor?”

“How’d he find out about the oil lease?” Aaron put his other hand on the branch.

“He knows everything. He’s a spy.”

“Your mother’s brother. Can’t do much, not with family.”

“Baby Brother Is Watching You,” said a voice among the silent leaves and I remembered I was drunk.

“I was ready to wring his neck.”

It should have been funny, coming from old Aaron, who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

“Join the club,” I said, picking up a dirt clod.

“I got hold of myself,” Aaron said. “He’s spreading some pretty nasty stuff—”

I threw the clod over my shoulder. Sox snorted.

“Kyla’s mother?” I touched a fallen crescent leaf, like the moon last night. “He’s full of shit.”

“Old news,” Aaron said.

With my finger I traced a circle in the blonde dirt. The narrow peach leaves stirred, casting shadows like fingerlings in a stream.

“Larry Jones knew something about Baylor—” I drew a line through the circle, then a second line, making a cross. “What was it, anyway?”

“Aprons,” Aaron said, “lambskins.”

I looked up at Aaron’s white face.

“Big profit. Sold them to the different lodges. That’s why Baylor joined the Masons.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“That’s what I thought it was, anyway—” Aaron’s voice trailed off.

“What do you mean?”

“Something Hazel told me. After Larry’s funeral. Something I’ve never told anyone. Something Larry never told me—”

Aaron stared off across the orchard.

“Looking back, I can see he hinted at it, in ‘Raisin in the Dust,’ that part about the Johnson Grass choking the fields and ditches. About the seeds of something evil here.”

My head hurt. When I looked up at the flickering leaves, the splintered light stung my eyes.

“You shouldn’t have got drunk the night before your party,” someone said at my right ear, it sounded like my dead mother’s voice. “All the Wild Turkey the Butterfly lowered on the string, after you dropped the Early Times—”

“Do I want to know?” My temples hurt.

“No,” Aaron said.

“Tell me,” I said.

“It’s painful.”

“What isn’t?”

“I want to tell you, Delmus.” Aaron looked down at me. “For your mother’s sake—”

“What’s she got to do with it?” I felt the old irritation spark and rise like an orange flame.

“I know you and Florence didn’t get along, after your dad died. I think maybe you blamed her a little for Walt’s death.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t. It just went that way.” But I did, I always had. “I’m going to get me a switch,” she’d say when I wouldn’t mind.

“It’s got to stay here, between you and me.”

“All right,” I said. I slashed another line across the circle in the dirt, so it looked like a pie.

“You were overseas. It was when Baylor decided he was going to write a book about Joaquin Murrietta and the buried treasure. Said if Larry Jones could write a book about Murrietta, he could too, only ten times better. He wouldn’t fall for an old wives’ tale about some ‘fancy lady’ finding the gold, using a crystal ball. He didn’t have to be a ‘damned professor.’”

“Yes,” I said. I made a furrow in the dust with my fingertip. “That sounds like Baylor.”

I’d just been talking about Murrietta— With who? Now the sectioned circle looked like a puzzle.

“Well, Baylor bought a great big new desk, set up an office. He had an old desk, real old. Real cheap. He tried to sell it to Larry, then to me. It was just good for kindling. Plus it was his. Nobody wanted it. Baylor began to bother Florence about it. He’d call and come over nearly every day. Said he’d never given her a gift, always meant to and never had.”

“Shit.”

“He wouldn’t let up. Said it was ungrateful if she didn’t take it, a present from her only brother. So finally, to shut him up, Walt went over in the truck. Baylor helped him load it, all the time bragging what a great desk it was, how happy Florence would be when she saw it. Baylor said he’d be over later to help them decide where to put it. They should put it somewhere important, so people could see it.”

“Aaron—”

“I’m coming to it. When Walt got home, Larry Jones was there. He’d had a hunch on a site and wanted Walt to dowse it on the map. Oil. Larry waved hello and pointed to the desk. ‘Baylor finally find a buyer?’ Larry said.

“‘No,’ Walt said, ‘a goddamned gift. Would you help me unload it?’                      “‘Christmas comes early,’ Larry joked, and Walt laughed, said what a bother Baylor was. So Larry and Walt got it down.

“Walt had started to dust it off, Baylor’d had it in the barn, when Larry said, ‘You know, these were pretty common once, mail order stuff. Just a cut-rate piece. But there was one thing. They all had a hidden compartment. I wonder if Baylor remembered to clean out all his secrets.’

“Larry was that way. He found Murrietta’s ivory-handled pistols in the cave.”

“Yeah.” Larry had brought one over. I’d held the heavy silver pistol in my hand, grasped the white grips carved with screeching eagles.

“Treasure,” said a different voice. “Under a flat stone .… These aren’t rhinestones but diamonds in my dress—”

“Larry leaned over, reached way underneath. Sure enough, there was a button, it worked a spring release. A secret drawer came open and Larry reached in.

“‘What do we have here?’ Larry said. ‘Baylor’s treasure map?’

“Larry handed Walt the piece of paper. Walt unfolded it.”

I looked up. Aaron took a breath, both hands on the limb, his white brows raised.

“That’s the moment that killed your father—”

“What?”

“Walt turned white, took one step and collapsed. Just like that.” Aaron lifted a hand and snapped his fingers. “Like a hammer’d hit him.”

“I never heard that—”

“No one has,” Aaron said, “I never did, not till Hazel told me. I guess Larry got Walt into the car and he and Florence took him to town, to the hospital. No use.

“When Larry brought Florence home, Florence asked Larry to put the drawer back in the desk. She asked him to drag the desk out in the barnyard and pour gasoline on it. She set it on fire herself, with a kitchen match. Larry and Florence were standing in the yard, watching it burn, when Baylor drove in.”

And Bob Brawley died that same day, of fire, over Nagoya, 100 yards off my silver wing—

“‘What the hell’s going on?’ Baylor yelled. ‘What the hell?’

“Florence never answered him. She never spoke to him again. Remember, when you got home from overseas and he’d come visit, for coffee? She would sit there, staring at the wall, at Walt’s picture of the grazing horses. ‘Florence—Florence, look at me when I’m talking!’ Baylor would say. She never turned. And later, when she was in the hospital? Baylor came to see her every day. She wouldn’t speak, she wouldn’t look at him, even when he begged her, as his sister, his last blood relative.”

“What was in the drawer?” I stared up at Aaron.

“A diagram. A map.”

“What map?”

“Gates,” Aaron said. “Each gate had a number.”

“What gates? The ditch?”

“At the bottom of the page each number had a name. Each gate.”

Aaron looked down at me. His eyes were sad, watery.

“I don’t understand.” Gate. Number.

“The Klan,” Aaron said. “They killed Endicott Lowell.”

I watched the ground tilt and rise. I put a hand down for balance.

“Jesus!”

The dirt glittered with grains of quartz and pyrite, threatening to ignite as a roar started in my ears. Each second was like an arrow going in. Each minute. I could die now, turn to dust.

The case was finally closed:

Negro Rodeo Clown Killed in Mysterious Stampede!

It was Baylor and his “friends” who put chili powder under the bulls’ tails, between shows while Walt and I and Endicott had the picnic in the pasture under the oak, Endicott in his purple pants and shirt and his face still painted with white paste, the orange wig beside him on the blanket before everything was torn and soaked red .…

“You all right?” Aaron asked after a while.

“No,” I said. “Real tired.”

In the barnyard a radio was playing, where earlier the men had taken turns firing Woody’s .22, where once Endicott had shown me how to throw a rope:

“Just like this, Delmus,” Endicott said, guiding my hand. “Thatta boy!”

“You’re wearing your dad’s boots.”

“Yeah,” I said to the sandy ground, “my Red Wings wore out.” I touched another fallen yellow leaf and again remembered the moon. “Like everything else.”

“I want to talk to you,” Aaron said, “while we’re still sober.”

“I’m not sober. I’ve been drunk since last night.”

Wild Turkey or Early Times? The bottle rolled from my chest when I woke under the grapevine. I thought it had fallen and shattered by the elm.

I ran a hand through my hair, what was left of it.

“I’ve been drunk all my life. Jesus—”

“I figured it was like that, when I saw you in town yesterday.”

“Odd cycle.” I glanced down the row of young peach trees. “Strange weather.”

“The wind is part of the process, the rain is part of the process .…  Like the phases of the moon—” Who said that? When?

“I can feel it,” Aaron said. “Everywhere I go. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I was going to wait until everybody left, but I don’t know if I can stick it out.”

“You going?” I looked up. I didn’t want him to go. Aaron was the only one I wanted to see.

“No, not yet,” Aaron said. “I’ll stay a while.”

“I appreciate it, Aaron.”

“Let me sit with you a minute.”

I lifted my hand and gripped Aaron’s as he squatted down beside me.

“There,” Aaron said, “that’s better.”

How slender his wrist was. Almost bone.

“Remember the meteorite, Delmus?” Aaron asked. “The one that hit the milkhouse?”

“Walt’s shooting star.” I nodded. “Rock of Ages.”

After the war a swarm of bees lived inside the thick walls and when I tore it down honey flowed like liquid gold from a spigot and Kyla and I skimmed the pool with buckets and poured it into milk cans.

“They saw it up in Fresno,” Aaron said. “Been tracking it. Some teacher at the college.”

“‘Someone’s vandalized it,’ he said, when Dad gave it to him. ‘This isn’t a natural break.’

“‘No,’ Dad said, ‘I guess God fiddled with it.’”

It was summer, hot July, I was 11. We’d been sitting on the screen porch drinking homemade root beer when we saw the sudden blinding streak that lit up the barn and then an explosion, a tin roof boomed, sparks flying up.

“What is it?” Florence cried.

“A meteor!” Walt said.

Walt and I ran out across the barnyard. I saw stars through the hole in the milkhouse roof. A black silverish rock sat on the concrete floor with the full milk cans. It was smoking, spirals going up toward the lit overhead bulb.

“Don’t touch it—It’s still hot.”

Walt sent me back to the house to call Aaron.

“The guy growled,” Aaron said, “but he took it.”

“It’s still up there, at the college museum.”

“Made of nickel. I figured you’d remember—”

“All the days of my life,” I said, dropping my hand in the dirt as I heard another sudden buzzing voice in my head:

            “And the third angel sounded his trumpet, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood .…”

Aaron set his hand on my shoulder. With a sigh he got to his feet and stood in the deep earth, then reached around to his pants pocket.

“Have a drink?”

He dropped a half-pint so I had to reach to catch it.

“Thanks—”

Old Granddad. I drank the burning whiskey, throwing back my head, and handed it back.

Aaron took a dainty drink, coughed, took a better one. He screwed on the cap and backhand threw the flat bottle in the air beyond the peach tree.

I started to rise, to make a failed effort to grab it in time, and eased back down as I saw the glass fall safely in the soft plowed ground, not like last night when I tripped and the Early Times floated from my hand and broke in a thousand wet pieces in the crescent moonlight .… “Damn it to hell,” I said on hands and knees before I heard the creak of a window sash—

“Wealthy man,” I said, looking up. “You must have found oil.”

“Not yet,” Aaron said, “maybe never. Maybe—”

He made a strange jerking motion with his arm.

“Aaron?” I thought he’d had a stroke, Aaron’s eyes were blank, empty looking—

Then I recognized the signal. I was tired, but I got to my feet. I gripped Aaron’s hand.

“By the level.”

“By the square.”

“Widow’s Son.”

“King Solomon’s Temple.”

Aaron stared steadily at me. Now his eyes were clear, intent, blue.

“Look at this,” Aaron said.

He was opening his shirt, showing his thin t-shirt and bony chest, then reaching in, as if to grasp his kidney.

Aaron pulled out a varnished peach fork.

“Gave up the L’s?”

“This is better.” Aaron held the V with two hands. “It’s Larry’s. Hazel gave it to me.”

I recalled it dimly. It had lain on the kitchen table as Walt and Larry had coffee. But it was different, there was something bright fastened on the end with electrician’s tape.

“What’s that thing?”

“A piece of the meteor.” Aaron smiled. “Walt fiddled with it.”

“You found oil with that?”

“After years of dry wells. Lots of shale, tar sand. Bentonite that time. Never oil. Then bingo, first try with this and up it came.”

“I didn’t even know you were drilling—”

Things were coming too fast. First Endicott, Florence and Walt, Larry. Now this.

“When?”

“At night. Secret. Capped it off. It wanted to gush. Right under the surface. It’s been on the move. Migrating.”

“You really hit?”

“Real pure, no sulfur. I meant to bring a little for you to taste, sweet, but I forgot—”

Aaron let one arm of the rod swing down, raising a hand to scratch his forehead.

“Lots on my mind. A big pool, it looks like, a lake of oil, the way it came up. Lot of pressure.”

No wonder Baylor—the murderer!—was antsy. He smelled oil. Everyone had looked for 70 years—Standard, Shell, geologists from Arabia and Iran. There was a fault, but no one could locate the deposit.

Understandably, Aaron was excited.

“It’s on the Island,” Aaron said.

“Jesus— The Island?”

Aaron nodded. “Where the Kings’ two forks split apart for a mile.”

“Jones always said it was on the Island—”

“He didn’t have a shooting star,” Aaron said.

Again he held it out with both hands, the rock shining at the end of the V.

“Let me see it,” I said.

“Here.”

I gripped the peach fork that once had been Larry Jones’. The Professor. It dropped straight down, the piece of star pulling heavily.

“You sitting on oil?” Aaron frowned.

“Naw, I’m rusty. The ditch line runs through here.”

I threw the stick back up, held it out lightly in my palms, but again, with a will of its own, the shiny star shot down.

“Pretty strong,” Aaron said, “give it here.” He took the rod, balancing it belt high, level with the ground, and I saw it plunge.

“It’s not here.” Aaron tilted his head to the side, feeling the pull through his hands. “It’s over there, real strong, right under the barnyard. Or no,” Aaron said, swinging the branch up again, “it’s farther on, by the house.”

“It’s the pump. Metal magnetism.”

“You sure?”

“Either that or Kyla’s mother. The rhinestones in her dress.”

“Shall I play a record?” said a voice.

“Unless it’s the old still,” I said. “In the cellar.” Suddenly, I was thirsty again. “The raisin whiskey. The barrel of bootleg wine.”

“Or the book, behind the loose brick—”

“What?” I turned. I’d been about to wade out into the dirt to retrieve the thrown bottle.

“Ford’s book,” Aaron said, holding the fork level again. He squinted, looking at me. “Remember the book?”

“The book is gone,” I said.

The slender peach leaves fluttered, casting shadows across my father’s boots, and suddenly I heard singing:

“I’m next of kin / To the wayward wind—”

“Wayward Song”, Larry’s book about Murrietta, the treasure.

“No,” Aaron said. “It’s in the car.”

“What’s that?”

“Ford’s book—”

“Whose car? Where?”

“Mine. In the trunk, locked up. I got it started. It was worth chancing a ticket, don’t you think, Delmus?”

“You sure it’s safe?”

“It’s in the tin box. Wrapped in the Ghost Shirt.”

I stared into Aaron’s blue eyes.

“I’ve been looking for it.”

“I figured you had.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“I had it. Walt gave it to me. He was worried you’d get killed in the war.”

From Ford to Walt to Aaron.

“You didn’t throw it in Walker Lake?”

Ford had told them to, when he was dying in 1932 and read from the book and stopped the rain and then Raymond sang “Rock of Ages” and my grandfather gripped my hand—“My hand is a stone in a river. Now the river’s in you—”

“Nope.” Aaron shook his head.

“Why not?”

I wanted to drive up today and drop it in Walker, weight the box with stones and watch it sink and disappear through the clear water, so the sky wouldn’t rain and ruin the raisins.

But the book was Aaron’s now, and the Ghost Shirt sewn with the colored hawk like a butterfly. Once it had belonged to Fall Moon, Ford’s first wife who knew the Ghost Dance—

“The whole Valley’s a lake,” Aaron said. “A sea. At least it was at one time.”

Like Atlantis in reverse, I thought or remembered. “Edgar Cayce believed in Atlantis—” I’d told somebody, in a dream, maybe the woman who held the end of the string .…

“You can lose something anywhere,” Aaron said. “Or find it.”

“I’ve lost the touch,” I said, looking away, at Kate’s horse.

Now I wanted to ride away, like Silva’s hired man. He’d tried to throw on the saddle blanket and Woody’s rifle spooked Sox.

“Depends what you’re looking for. Gold. Oil. Water. Something else.”

“You were looking for oil.”

Remember Ride Away? You and she won the Raisin Day Race, before the Baptists late for church ran her down, came back at night with the bloody front end and tried to pay 20 dollars?

“I found oil,” Aaron said, “on the Island. Enough to float a battleship. You’re in, of course, if you want to be. Anyway, you’re in my will. You know that. There’s something else.”

“What else?” I couldn’t take much more.

“Delmus,” Aaron asked, “what’s that?”

“What’s what?”

With the divining rod Aaron was pointing at the horse.

“I think it’s a horse,” I said. “I’m not sure anymore.”

“Or a donkey?”

“Horse,” I said.

“Good. Now remember the burros, with the black crosses on their backs?”

“Jerusalem donkey, jack and jenny.” JJJ.

“When did Jesus ride a donkey?”

“On Palm Sunday.”

“Who told the disciples to meet at the house with the white horse?” Aaron asked.

“Jesus did.”

“What is Al-Buraq?”

“A white animal with wings.”

“How big?”

“Smaller than a mule, bigger than a donkey.”

“How far can it stride?”

“As far as its eye can see.”

“Who rode it to heaven and back?”

“Muhammad.”

“What happened at the Dome of the Rock?”

“The angel Gabriel took Mohammed to heaven.”

“What will the Mahdi, the 12th Caliph, ride when he returns at the end of the world?”

“The Moslems keep a black stallion in a stable.”

“Is it ready?”

“It’s saddled night and day.”

“Who is the Mahdi, Delmus?”

“Jesus.”

“You’ve done your homework,” Aaron said. “And a horse and donkey are brothers, aren’t they?”

“I guess so.”

“You know the poem about the donkey?”

“No.”

“‘The Donkey,’” Aaron began, he cleared his throat and lifted his chin.

It was a strange world. Aaron had just given a history lesson, now he was going to recite a poem in the middle of the orchard:

“‘When fishes flew and forests walked

And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

Then surely I was born.’”

But why not? Aaron had a voice strong and sure as Raymond’s was when Raymond sang—

“‘With monstrous head and sickening cry

And ears like errant wings,

The Devil’s walking parody

Of all four-footed things.’”

Aaron had been a lay preacher now and then, but no steady church would tolerate his gospel—

“‘The tattered outlaw of the Earth,

Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb.

I keep my secret still.’”

            Aaron had initiated me into the Masons. “If a tree falls,” Aaron used to say, “the other trees hear it. So do the stones in the Petrified Forest.”

Lots of times Aaron addressed Larry’s classes at Fresno State—about pioneer days, geology, Indians, even religion and his perpetual motion machine—

“‘Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.’”

I remembered now, I knew “The Donkey,” it was one of my favorites.

“What’s it mean?”

Now Aaron was waiting.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Think hard,” Aaron said.

“My memory’s no good anymore.” It was true, I had a bad headache. The sun made me squint.

If I’d dropped the bottle by the elm, how’d I get drunk and wake up in the vineyard Sunday morning?

“There’s only one thing to remember.”

“Who wrote it?” I asked. “A Mason?”

“Catholic,” Aaron said. “Chesterton. A drinker. He wrote ‘The Man Who Was Thursday.’ About Sunday, which is all the days—”

“I don’t think I’ve read it.”

“Remember that book Jones had, with the drawings the drunken Roman soldiers carved on the wall of the guardroom? After the Crucifixion? After they threw dice for Christ’s purple robe?”

“I’m with the Master now,” I thought suddenly, watching Aaron’s bright eyes. “He washes his read hair in the blue bowl.”

            Who said that? Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet, in the book, “There Is A River”—

“It was a man, on a cross, with the head of a donkey.”

“Awful,” I said, “that’s awful.”

“Yes, but you can learn from fools, even criminals.”

I could see Baylor’s head, on the body of a bull.

“And from good things,” Aaron said. “The mountain dogwood, four white petals, each one with a notch. The cross on the sand dollar. It’s the same one on the burro’s back. The monarch’s chrysalis on a blue gum leaf, hanging upside down in a ‘J’ above the milkweed pods.”

“Have you ever read about butterflies?” asked the woman who lowered the bottle on the shining cord. “Ever seen the king of them all?”

“All of nature was crucified?”

“It’s all a broken mirror of one thing,” Aaron answered, holding the branch. “The red bud, Judas Tree, first to flower in the spring? The blooming limb, where Iscariot hung? Christ’s profile in the line of the continents, the continental plates? On and on, all pieces of one puzzle.”

“‘Out of many, one,’” I answered.

“That’s right! And not just once! Many times!”

“You found it,” I said, watching Aaron’s excited face.

The Knight’s Grail, the Brimming Cup. The Philosopher’s Stone and Key. Aaron’s Rod. Oil, the formula to make lead into gold­, Murrietta’s gold turned to diamonds disguised as rhinestones in a dress—

“You can’t find it alone,” Aaron said, blinking his eyes as if he woke from a dream. “Jones couldn’t find it. But I have a hunch. I can feel it, straight as a line, deep.”

Aaron cocked one eye, aiming down his pointing arm past my shoulder.

“It’s a long vein, sleeping, untapped—”

“What is it?”

Aaron turned, dropping his hand.

“What are you looking for?”

In the gusting breeze, Aaron’s thin hair blew back, white, like a prophet’s in a storm.

In late August of ’84 you stood west of Lemas with Aaron Winters who kept the book and star and with his peach-fork found the lake of oil on the Island, between the Kings River’s blue channels—

My hand is a stone in a river. Now the river’s in you .…

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“But you’ve been looking.”

“I’ve got a map,” I admitted, glancing at Aaron. “A kind of map. Found it in a magazine.”

“Oil?”

“No— Something else.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure.”

I’d laid it out on the bench in the barn, drunk, under the orange bug light, the night the Olympics opened in L.A. and Pearl Bailey led the crowd in “When the Saints Come Marching In.”

“Masons?” Aaron said.

“Mason Valley,” I answered.

“Walker Lake?”

“Jack Wilson.”

“Wovoka?”

“Ghost Dance. Mormon Trail.”

“San Bernadino?”

“Valley of Smoke,” I said, watching Aaron’s face.

“Then where?” Aaron asked quickly.

I hesitated

“Tell me if you know!”

“Ciudad de Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Angeles— The end of the trail.”

“City of Our Lady,” Aaron said. “Queen of the Angels.”

“Or Fresno. Lemas,” I said. “New Lund.”

Aaron wiped at his eye.

“I always told your dad, I said, ‘Walt, it’s right here where we stand. I can feel it, right under my boot, like a heartbeat, like a fountain ready to spout up!’”

I bent down, scooping a handful of dirt. I stood, letting the grains sift like gold dust through my fingers onto my father’s boots.

“It’s the Garden,” Aaron said, one hand gripping the limb of the peach tree. “Right here. Right here where we stand!”

“It’s everywhere,” I said, opening my hand and dropping the white ash soil. “And nowhere. When you reach out it turns to dust.”

I’d forgotten to wear my cap. Where was it? The sun was burning, straight up. High noon.

“No,” Aaron said. “Not dust.”

“Why not? Everyone’s going broke, Reagan’s getting ready to blow up the world and they’ve got his picture in every store in town. Everybody’s asleep. We’re way east of Eden, past Goshen in the Land of Nod.”

“It’s the weather,” Aaron said, staring up through the leaves. “Clouds and wind. Salt breeze. Sea.”

“It’s going to rain,” I said. “Three years in a row.” No weather song of Wovoka’s, the Ghost Dancer, would stop the clouds soaking the drying grapes laid out down the vine rows.

“A rain that’s rain and isn’t, a rain like light that’s light but more than light. I’ve had dreams of a woman. A beautiful woman. She speaks to me, tells me things. Things if I told you, you’d think I was crazy.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “Last night I dreamed a woman lowered me a bottle of Wild Turkey on a string.”

Or was it a woman with a veil? Mystic smile .… “Mona Lisa men have named you—”
Who played the record and lifted the sparkling dress?

“I’ve seen them,” Aaron went on, not hearing. “Every one of them.”

“Seen who?”

“All of them.”

“All of who?”

“Everybody— Jones. Your dad. Raymond. Endicott. Ford. They’re here, all around, like candles burning.”

“Ghosts,” I said, looking at Aaron. “They’re all ghosts.”

“No,” Aaron said. “Not ghosts.”

He slipped the forked rod over the limb and put out both hands, palms up. Now he flung them in the air.

“Like a phoenix, a fire rushing from the ashes. I’ve seen your friend Brawley.”

“Bob was blown to pieces. Over Japan. Forty-five years ago.”

Aaron bent toward me. “In Necis Renascor Integer,” he said softly. “INRI.”

“‘Reborn, intact and pure—’”

“All of them. Every one. Your mother too. That’s why I had to talk to you.” He waved his arm sideways. “They’re all here, waiting.”

“For what?”

“For the right time.”

“Delmus? Where’s the Big D?”

I heard the men calling from the barnyard.

Where was Delmus? The wind blew, moving the clustered peach leaves like fingers.

“I don’t know what to say—”

“What did Chesterton say?” Aaron asked.

“I don’t know.”

“‘The Tavern doesn’t lead to the open road. The open road leads to the Tavern.’”

Aaron slipped the divining rod back into his shirt and fumbled with a button. “Come on,” he said, “they’ll be out here in a minute.”

I untied Kate’s horse, then hesitated. I turned, looking into Aaron’s eyes.

“Roma,” I said.

“Amor,” Aaron answered.

We stood for a moment, looking at one another, and through one another, at the long ranks of doubles, of men and women lined up behind each of us for a thousand years.

Now the orchard seemed crowded, there were whispers among the trees, the crackle of silent, invisible fires, as if an army were encamped.

“Everybody is alive again, I don’t know when they will be here, maybe this fall or in the spring, by the sprouting tree when the green grass is knee high,” Wovoka said when he woke from the trance, when the white eagle brought him back from heaven to Walker Lake.

“Ready?”

Aaron touched me on the shoulder and we started back to the barnyard, through the young orchard and deep ground, me leading the horse, Aaron walking slowly behind me, his arm leaning on the horse’s back, the three of us 10,000 miles from Jerusalem.

“Delmus! Where you been?”

“Taking a breather.”

The barnyard was strewn with trash, beer cans and paper plates, watermelon rinds, empty .22 shells. The derrick for the hog stood to the right of the barn door, where Silva’s hired man waited, hands at his sides.

Aaron held the horse while I went into the barn, past the men in chairs drinking, a circle playing poker around the bale of hay. I could hear the forklift’s motor, Briggs unloading the raisin bins south of the barn.

“You going to shoot that hog?” Will asked.

“Just as soon as I saddle this horse,” I said.

“Going somewhere?” said Baylor, looking up from his cards.

“No,” I said.

I took the saddle from its peg, the bridle and Indian blanket, stepped back into the light.

The hired man positioned the striped blanket and I threw on the saddle, lifted the stirrup, tied the cinch. Aaron adjusted the bridle.

“Okay,” I said, dropping the stirrup. “Amigo.”

“Gracias, Señor.”

“Por nada.”

Silva’s man swung up smoothly into the saddle. He touched the horse’s flanks lightly with his heels and he was off, trotting down a vine row.

He held himself a little like Celestino Rodriguez, the tail gunner on the Beau Geste. Head back, neck straight, chin square and level.

“Cada cabeza es un mundo,” Celestino used to say. “Every head is a world.”

“He going to pick grapes from a horse?” Baylor asked.

Someone laughed, drunkenly. I ignored Baylor.

“Who’s going to help me?” I asked.

“Right here,” said Bill Woody, striding forward. “I got the gun.”

“Here.” Earl could hardly stand. “Have a drink.”

“Okay—” I turned, put a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “For the road.”

“For the tavern,” Aaron said, nodding seriously.

I took a drink, a small one, and handed the bottle back to Earl.

“Let’s go.”

With the other men behind me, the sitters up from their chairs, we marched around the barn to the poor pig’s pen—past the A-frames and the pulley and ropes, the swinging hook—

and I remembered the yellow crescent moon above the roof and Kyla’s ageless attractive mother at the upstairs window—

“Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?” sang Nat King Cole. “Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?”

“Ever seen the king of them all?” she asked as I sat beneath the elm.

Smiling, in blue velvet spangled with Murrietta’s diamonds—“I found the gold with a crystal ball,” she’d said, the swinging bottle of Wild Turkey safely lowered on the string—Dolly Mable dipped her head and lifted the shining dress to reveal the striped span of the butterfly’s amazing seven-colored wings—

“Delmus? You all right?”

It was Aaron’s voice. He was leaning over me as I sat against the barn wall. The men were behind him, looking down at me with 20 worried faces.

“Yes, Aaron,” I said. “I’m okay.”

“What happened to you?”

“I remembered something.”

“What did you remember?”

The circle of drunk faces leaned closer to hear, waiting.

“That I was happy—”

That was it. It was like déjà vu and now my friends were laughing in agreement as Bill Woody lifted his rifle and fired five times in the air and the flock of purple pigeons flew from the loft.

Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher, and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and his stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Montreal Review, and other journals. He lives with his wife, Vicki, on the Central Coast of California.

“You know I like to go fishing,” Ten said, “at least once a week.  I do not like to work indoors.  I won’t make much money.”

“Well, but I like to have nice things.”

“And I understand that, Joley, and you’ll have as good as I can provide you with, but you’ll also just have to be reasonable.”

Joley sipped her beer.  The night felt oily, cold and good, on her bare arms.

“Where’ll we live?”

Ten dug a thumbnail into the pop tab of a Busch can.  The white spray flew up at Joley.  She receded, blinking in outrage her eyelashes now dewed with shattered foam; Ten snickered.

“You turd!”

“What’s wrong with my place, the one I got now?” Ten asked.

Joley bugged her eyes and slumped accusingly.

“Ten,” she said.  “It’s a dirty, single-wide trailerhouse.  It’s falling apart.  There’s a big hole right in the middle of the living room floor.  Nuh–uh.”

Ten shrugged.  “All right.  We’ll move.”

“Okay, when?”

“As soon’s you get moved in with me, we’ll move.”

“Why do we have to wait until then to move?  That’s moving twice.”

“Because,” Ten said.  “Married people move together.”

The real truth was that in his heart, and for years, Ten had imagined the entry into his marriage house as a romantic thing.  Drinking beer all day, hauling boxes with his shirt off.  Cussing and farting around, laughing with his friends, who’d help him out.  Taking breaks to eat delivery pizza—standing up, no napkins—while his pretty wife stayed in the house, unloading and organizing the marital estate.  She’d wear a sundress, order the pizza, go on the beer runs–and when they were done for the day, she’d sit on his lap on a chair in the lawn and listen to his buddies’ stories and laugh at his jokes, at his own stories.  Laugh when he and his friends started play-wrestling late at night, when the beer got ahold of them.  Then she’d drag him into the house by the buckle of his belt while the boys hollered and catcalled from the circle of lawn chairs.  Tickling his belly with her fingers, kissing him, loving him, holding him, sending fire through his brains–and she’d fall asleep and he’d go back outside to continue drinking beer, and the boys would roll their eyes and make their bawdy comments, and she’d be waiting in bed for him when he returned at dawn.  That’s how he’d always seen it.

“But I’ll have to move once,” Joley said, “then move again.”

“Hon, we can’t get married and you still be living with your parents.  Not even for a little while.”

“Why not?”

“Dammit Joley, there’s just a way things are.”

***

Joley’s mother, Larissa, encouraged the marriage.

“He’s just so good-lookin’,” she said.

“He is.”

“You two’d have such good-lookin’ babies.”

“Mama!  Do you like Ten, Daddy?”

“Sure I do,” her father said.  He was reading a Playboy magazine at the kitchen table.  He was happy at the prospect of getting Joley out of his house:  the grocery bill, the phone bill, the gas bill, her car payments, insurance, her clothes …

***

Ten’s full name was Brandon Mustang Bass.  He was the tenth child of Penelope Ruth Bass and Chason Bass, Jr.

The bobber hit the pond and made a thwock sound like a tennis ball.

“Good lay,” Jason said.

“That’s what they tell me,” Ten said.

They sat in Jason’s dad’s motorboat on swivelchairs that went the full three-sixty, on seat-cushions that wheezed and dripped old water.  The pond’s surface was peaceful and reflected the sun and the image of the boat.  They drank beer for three hours without saying hardly a word, without catching a fish, each silently withdrawing his line from the water and replacing the dead or mangled or escaped minnows out of the tin bucket sitting between them at their feet.

Beery, contemplative, half-jubilant from a day of rest and perfected desire, Jason opened the talks.

“You gonna marry Joley Scudder?”

There came a long pause while Ten cleared out his throat.

“Yeah I believe I will.”

“You love her?”

“Yep I think I do.”

“Well.  I see that.”

“Nn.”

Jason now paused.  He watched the pond face shudder.

“She’s got her that sweet little rear-end now.”

“Fabulous.”

The night fell and they returned to the shore and became like wild hogs:  snorting, barking, pounding the earth in search of what fueled them.

***

There was a rickety church in Red Oak, Oklahoma where Joley’s mother had learned the manners of Christian living.  The crowd who gathered inside its wood-paneled walls to serve as witnesses to the Scudder-Bass Wedding were, by and large, sunburnt, for they were a youthful crowd, and there had been a joint bachelor-bachelorette party held on the beach at Sardis Lake twenty-four hours earlier.  They did things to each other at that party you’d never believe.  There were seventeen girls there, and four of them got pregnant.  That party had a pregnancy rate.

So everyone was sunburnt and hanged over—all with nagging senses of shame at being in church after what they’d done the day before—and the fabric of rented tuxedos and rented dresses scratched at the burned and waterless flesh of the young.  The wedding went by in a shout.  The principals blew all the big lines.

When it was done, the kids stripped out into play clothes, gobbled up barbecue brisket and wedding cake, got drunk, and resumed the fornicative spirit.

***

Joley woke the next morning in a hotel near Fort Smith, Arkansas, her new husband naked beside her under the stiff hotel sheets.  She explored his bones and cartilage until he waked up.  They showered together, dressed, and went out to the mall.  He bought her a bottle of perfume and a pair of sandals, a cassette tape of Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind, a Mexican food lunch, two dresses, and a ticket to see A League of their Own.  She cried and cried against his shoulder during the last fifteen minutes of the show.

***

Ten Bass had four hundred dollars hidden in the only book he owned, a copy of The Book of Mormon he’d ordered free from the LDS church when he was sixteen, understanding it to be a kind of western starring Jesus Christ and featuring Indians.

Joley Bass had no idea this was the extent of her new marital estate.  She carried into Ten’s decrepit trailerhouse a set of pink luggage filled up with dresses, panties, trinkets, County Fair ribbons, stuffed animals, a denim-jacketed Bible, all of her makeup, and one large magnification mirror.  She never even unpacked all the way.  They were there together four months when she ran out one night, after a fight over how to slice onions.

“What the fuckin’ hell does it matter?”

“You’re stupid as shit, just stupid as shit.”

“You’re a dumb bitch.  God!”

“Why wouldn’t you do it that way?”

“Because it DOESN’T MATTER!”

“YES IT DOES!”

“NO IT DOESN’T!”

“YES IT DOES!”

Ten had severed the ends, peeled the skin, and set the onion on the flat side for bisection.

“That’s against the grain,” Joley had pointed out

“Huh?”

“You don’t need to cut it against the grain like that.  You need to cut it with the grain.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does.”

“Nah.”

“Yes, it does.”

“It really doesn’t.”

And so on.  And so forth.

***

Joley was bawling when she slammed the trailer door and bawled as she walked the half-mile through town, from the bare lot of scrub grasses where Ten kept his trailer, to the home shared by her high school friend Margie Diller and Margie’s husband, Phil.

Phil stirred a pot of pinto beans while Margie sat on the couch, holding Joley around the shoulders.

“I just want to go out tonight and have fun and FORGET him,” Joley said.

Margie sneaked a look back at Phil.

“It’s all right with me,” Phil said.  He just wanted to eat his beans and watch his TV in peace for once.

They got ready using Margie’s makeup and left the house at eight-thirty in a wake of hairspray fumes.  They bought a bottle of Everclear from the liquor store and two extra-large fountain drink Dr. Peppers from the convenience store.  They drove back and forth through town.  They rolled the windows down and sang along with the radio.

***

Casey Green and Shane Lawson were two young men who’d grown up in Talihina but had left for the oil fields.  They were just home that night to get laundry done and visit their folks.  They were sitting in the grocery store parking lot with a pint of rye whisky on shares when they noticed Phil and Margie’s car.  They saw the women through the rolled-down window, singing their lungs out and bouncing in the seats.

“Casey?”

“Yup.”

Casey started up the motor and handed over the whisky.

***

They trailed the girls to the north end of town.  Margie hooked Phil’s car around the marquee-stand of the Circle H Restaurant.  They were idling there when Shane and Casey pulled up beside them.

“Hey!” Casey yelled out, elbow on the door.

Shane leaned over from the shotgun seat, to let the girls appreciate their numbers.

***

Ten heated up a can of black beans and a can of Ranch Style pinto beans and ate them using slices of white onion like spooning chips.  He didn’t know where Joley was, and he didn’t give three shits on a slaughterhouse floor.  He listened to baseball on the radio and went to bed.

***

Joley stank of curdled hairspray, liquor, beer, sweat, smoke, dirt (from a fall on her ass in a watershed pasture), dry, mingled venereal fluids and fading perfume; her breath was chunky from all of the above, and from having not brushed her teeth after three hours of sleep in the cab of Casey’s pickup truck, and then from having eaten a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos for breakfast.  She had chewed up all her lipstick.  She’d wrinkled her clothes.  She could not have answered with definitiveness which of the two men had put her arms and legs akimbo with hasty leverage in the pickup truck’s front seat.  Margie dropped her at the curb near Ten’s trailerhouse and pulled away, off to give her own dark accountings.

Joley limped up the rusty stairs (she’d twisted her ankle somehow) and went inside.

The living room air was stale, the morning sun gray and broken.  She stood there a second, letting all the lights adjust.

Suddenly, she heard a brief whistle and a loud thunk.  She flinched and saw an arrow in the wall behind her.  It thrummed at the fletching, like a shook pencil.

Ten sat on a footstool in the corner—his face pale, his body shivering.  He was holding a crossbow.

“Get right the fuck out of here,” he said.

“Ten—”

He stood and reached for the pile of arrows at his feet.

“Get out,” he said.  His voice lifted and rolled, mad and grave.

“Ten!”

He squatted and fumbled for an arrow and Joley was out the door, screaming like an ambulance.

***

Ten paid a three hundred dollar fine and moved to Ada, Oklahoma.  He lived there for the next four years, working construction.  Joley went back to her parents, and her father watched his monthly overhead rise like a mercury thermometer on a hot afternoon.

***

There was almost no sun left in the day, just a little orange leafing out by the horizon, reflected in the water like night’s afterthought, a burn of color to set off the vast and glasslike darkness of the lake.

Ten and Jason sat in the boat.  They kicked a beer can every time they moved their feet, they were that drunk.

“Herrnnh!” Ten said, before a loud and difficult fart plopped out his backside.

“I second that ee-motion,” Jason said, and copied Ten.

The grass on the bank sizzled with the mating calls, conversation, gossip and war cries of the wetland insects.  The air was so clean, so cool and aromatic, it touched their nostrils and lips like fingers made of camphor.  Fireflies were starting up.  The balding sky laid bare a crown of stars, hitched together by purple space.

“You ever feel,” Ten asked, “like there’s jus’ somethin’ wrong with bein’ a man these days?”

“If you’re gonna ask me,” Jason said, “to do that thing, the … the what’s it called … that … choppin’ off people’s dicks thing … what’s it called?”

“Castration.”

“If you’re gonna ask me to castrate you, so you can live out your lifelong dream of bein’ a woman, with a vagina and all—well then, you know I’d do it for you, man.  I’d do anything for you.”

Jason stretched out his leg and reached for his pocketknife.

“Give me a second here.”

Brian Ted Jones was born in 1984 and raised in Oklahoma. He is a graduate of St. John's College. He lives with his wife, Jenne, and their sons, Oscar and GuyJack.

“There’s some T-3’s in that bottle,” he said, pointing towards the shelf on the far side of his room. His grandpa was down in kitchen, just a short ways off his room, and was making dinner. Samantha was helping him. “You got anything for me?” he asked.

I put a five dollar bill on the bed, just out of his reach and I stood, the straightening of my knees pushing the chair backwards and away. I walked across the room and shook two pills from the bottle. I chewed them like Tums and walked back to the side of his bed. If I was to get him out of the house tonight, first I’d have to get him dressed.

“Samantha,” he hollered. He didn’t reach for the five or even watch me as I moved. His eyes were tuned to his TV, his mouth towards the door. He never turned that TV off, not even when he had his radio on. It was a constant roar in the little room. The paneling shook, and the heavy cigarette smoke, pulsed.

“I’m hurrying,” she shouted back.

I hadn’t seen her except when she opened the door to his room for me. She had been dressed plain and easy, a simple white t-shirt and jeans, but she still looked good. I don’t know how he got her to stay, she just seemed to stay. But for what one don’t know.

“Hurry up, Goddamn it. I can’t take my pills without any food,” he said, all of us knowing he didn’t need not one more. But what’s a person gonna tell a cripple?

Kyle had got hurt when the skidder he was running had tipped over. He’d rolled down a hill, the roof landing on him at the bottom. When I’d heard, I’d pictured the top of that yellow Caterpillar tipping and coming down on him like a jaw. It had nearly bit him in half. When I’d heard, I kept thinking about night crawlers and how we’d pinch them in two when we fished. He would have died if his boss hadn’t found him and called the paramedics. He was lucky.

“You need to get out of here,” I said. “Get your shit together, and let’s get.”

“You going to dress me? It’ll be fun.” It wasn’t exactly humor filled. His black hair hung loose almost to his shoulders. It had been long before the accident, but he had refused to cut it since. “Hand me my cowboy hat,” he said, pointing towards a black Stetson on the floor to my right. I didn’t move. Samantha would help him change after she brought him dinner. I would go and sit with his grandpa while she was doing it. He would ask me about my folks, about my long gone brother. But the whole time I would be thinking about her rolling him, shifting him. Eventually she would come get me and we would go.

“You’re going all-out tonight, then?” I asked Kyle, straight.

“If you’re gonna go, it might as well be all the way.” He turned his face towards the door then back to me. “Where in the fuck is my chicken?” he asked. His eyes, dark brown, looked flaked.

***

We got to McNeal’s about midnight. Kyle didn’t get up before late afternoon any day of the week, so midnight was the middle of his day. I was tired, and not just because the pills had started to work through me. But my nose was itching. The thing about pills like that, at least as far as I’m concerned, isn’t that they make you feel better. A lot of the time they just make things bearable. Smoother. Life gets to be like the sound of ice skates, if that makes sense.

Kyle had sat beside me during the drive over, while Samantha had been wedged in the backseat with his wheel-chair. We took my car because her car was too small for the four of us, if you count the wheel chair as one. She had to sit in the broke down pieces for everything to fit. My trunk was full of clothes, so we had jammed it into the seat.

The unloading was tougher than the loading. I didn’t know what to do to help Samantha, so I just stood back. He nearly hit the ground when the board he used to slide himself into his chair tilted back. He caught himself on the top of my door. I heard the cheap metal of my car bow, his weight bending something.

“That door ain’t gonna shut right,” he said. He arranged himself in the chair. I started to walk and Kyle didn’t roll forward, just sat there looking.

“Do it yourself,” I said. But it wasn’t mean spirited.

“I’ll do it, Jimmy,” Samantha said. She had changed from the t-shirt into a yellow tank top. She had kept the jeans. I had watched from behind as she changed in Kyle’s room. She hadn’t been shy about it. She turned around and pulled her shirt off. Her browned skin was white where her bra line was. Angry red bands stood out on her shoulders from the straps. I could see light hairs forming a v-shape above the waist of her jeans. Kyle didn’t even look.

“Push me, woman,” Kyle said, and I shook my head.

Samantha didn’t say a word, just grabbed the chair’s handles, and pushed through the wet grass. I thought she would slip in the dew, but she didn’t. He pulled a cigarette from a pouch somewhere on the chair and struggled to light it as she worked her way to the backyard. We could hear the music and talking from where we were. The McNeal’s were rich. They’d gone to Tennessee for the week, a vacation, and left their only boy to watch the house. He had his own place outside of town, but was throwing a party like he was still in high school.

“People will think that I’m shittin’em,” Kyle said. He couldn’t get the cigarette lit, the jostling of the chair making his hands bounce and the tip of itdance.

“They all know,” I said. Not very many people visited him now.

Lots of people came in the beginning, but as time wore on, and the novelty, something, wore off, fewer and fewer came. Now it was me, Samantha, and a couple more. Our other good friend, Dale, had moved away pretty recently. He went sober and moved to Columbus. It seems funny to move to a city to get sober, but sometimes it works. It’s not really the sober part that’s surprising, it’s that he was able to stay out.

It used to be that the three of us, Dale, Kyle and me. Once, when Dale, Kyle and I lived together, Dale and I talked about Kyle and Samantha. This was before the accident. I told him that Kyle didn’t deserve Samantha and he said I was right. Kyle was cheating on her with some little blonde. That girl was married to a guy in the army. He was in the Iraq, and Kyle was sleeping with his wife. She kept seeing him after the accident, even after Samantha moved in. She didn’t stop until she saw Samantha put a catheter in him. Dale had said that Samantha would look a lot better if she’d lose the ten pounds she’d put on since graduation. “I’m not saying she ain’t good looking, I’m just saying we’d all be better off with a little less extra poundage.”

But he wasn’t going to be here, and Samantha didn’t need to lose any weight.

“Well, hello there,” Kyle said, laughing as we turned the corner of the house. A fire was burning close to the deck of an above ground pool. Extra wood lay underneath the deck, up to the edge of the pool. Even though it was hot and there was a fire, the pool was empty except for the dozens of floating beer cans. Trucks were circled like wagons in the grass, their lights all pointing inwards towards the fire. The music blared from the trucks’ radios. It was pretty organized for that group, all the radios on the same local station that played new country. One truck, a red-cabbed flat-bed dually, was backed up to the very edge of the pool. The treble on its radio was threatening to shred the speakers.

“I need something to drink. You want anything?” I asked them.

“See if anyone has a bottle of wine I can buy,” Kyle said.

“I’ll get my own,” Samantha said. People who hadn’t been to see Kyle were beginning to inch towards us.

I had always thought Samantha was tough, but these last few months proved it. Her father had left when she was young, and then everything that happened with her own grandpa, but she didn’t talk about it. Really, she didn’t talk much. But when she did, she seemed happier than she had any right to be.

I walked away from them, trying to get lost in the party. My head buzzed from the drugs, I knew I would get sick eventually, but didn’t care. I went around and thought about begging beers. I didn’t really talk to anyone, but I wasn’t the most popular guy in the world. I stood next to the fire, kicked at it, made sure it kept burning. I watched Kyle and Samantha. She stood behind him, drinking slowly from a bottle, and he held court. That’s what it looked like anyway.

***

It’s easier to get lost in a party of thirty than people think. Somebody had turned the outside lights of the house on. People had been pouring in and out of the first floor. It was beginning to become a mess.

I’d surprised myself by not drinking. I’d got to talking with some boys I’d gone to school with, Turley and some other Jenkins. It may have been one of his brothers. All those boys seem to get rolled up. Big and tall the lot of them. But I’d rode those pills out and was beginning to feel myself.

Turley was nearly kin now. He was gonna marry a cousin of mine, or so the story went. After what my uncle had done to him after he got my cousin pregnant, I don’t see how he could. I would’ve been scared to come within a mile of the girl, but Turley still kept hanging around. I’d asked them if they had any wine, finally, feeling guilty. Turley had laughed and had walked into the house. He brought a bottle back out and held it by its neck. His hands looked big enough to wrap the neck twice and strong enough to wring the cork straight out.

“I found it,” he said. “Swear to God. Right there on the ground. Just laying. Someone must have dropped it.” His cousin or his brother slapped him on the shoulder, laughing. I grinned back at them. Their arms thick as rolled rope, seemed to grow like branches out of their t-shirts.

“Take care of that baby cousin of mine,” I said. I took the bottle by its bottom

Turley counted up on the fingers of his just emptied hand. Counted up through four, and when he got to his thumb he looked at me, serious as a heart attack, “Which one?”

I stared at him. I knew he was joking, trying to rile me. I spun the bottle in my hand. The label on it looked weathered. I wondered if it was old or if it was just treated to seem that way. It rasped as I spun it, the edges catching on the hack-sawed edges of my nails.

“You love that little girl?” I pointed the sealed cork at him. The red and purple foil caught the light from the fire. It would flash and crinkle gold.

“Aww,” he said. He moved towards me, slightly down the long aching hill that ended somewhere off this ridge, down in some hollow somewhere. “That baby’s mine,” he said. He turned and seemed to look at the pool. “That ought to be enough.” The brother walked off, knowing when, I suppose, to leave something alone.

“I hope it is,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I was protecting, or even if I was.

“Let’s open that thing,” he said. He jerked it out of my hand and walked back towards the house. I followed him. He walked straight in the sliding glass doors straight into the kitchen. His big work boots, light brown and leather, thumped across the hardwood of the kitchen. There were other people inside. Hid off in bedrooms and on couches. The glow of a TV quivered around a corner. Turley dug through the drawers swearing.

“Goddamn,” he said, “folks as rich as this ought to have a corkscrew laid out in the open.”

“Yeah, I reckon they ought’a,” I said. The kitchen and the dining room were nearly on top of each other. There was a little table that looked out onto the lawn and the pool, and I sat down in one of the wooden chairs. The seats of them were faced with cushions, blue and red checks. They were tied to the backs of the seats by ribbons. It felt almost like I was sitting in the kitchen.

The hardwood stretched through both, and it all smelled like lemons and bleach. I thought back on that little trailer that we used to share, me, Kyle and Dale. Cigarettes and whiskey. It’s not such a bad smell when you get used to it. Sweet warm beer, sticky in the morning sun. The table was clean and smooth, not even crumbs from their toast or sugar from their coffee.

“Found one,” he said. He held both up to me. The corkscrew was ivory handled and shaped like a ‘t’. The screw of it seemed about two inches too long. There was a roar from outside, and I heard a truck rumble to life. I didn’t look outside, afraid the fire had done something. “This thing’s worth more than both of us put together,” he said.

Turley stabbed the cork through the foil working it in, setting his jaw like a man who was enjoying his work, a pleasure from a job hard done. He tugged twice, then a long slow shuddering pull, and the cork popped out. He smelled it, waving it in front of his nose. “Very fine year, sir. Some of the best wine I’ve ever found.” The tip of the screw had burst through the under side. Pieces of cork clung to it. I was afraid he would catch the end of his nose. He didn’t get glasses, just sat down beside me, collapsing his long body into this family’s kitchen chairs.

“So how about you, Jimmy? You got a woman?” He drank, the green rim of the bottle hidden behind his lips. His black hair was shaved short. It was summer. His kid was six months old.

‘I don’t know,” I said. I took the bottle from him. I wanted to wipe it off, but then thought how that would look, him nearly my own blood, and just drank. I could feel it in my teeth, the acid of the wine biting my tongue and my gums, burning and hurting. “No.” I said.

“Aww,” he said. “But I saw you looking at that little girl out there. Your boy’s girl,” he started snapping his fingers, looking down and away. The TV in the other room was laughing and blue, footsteps thumped upstairs, and for a second my world lurched and I wondered if this was what life was really like. “What’s her name,” he said. “Grandpa just died?”

“Samantha.” I said.

“Yeah, Samantha. I seen the way you look at her.”

“Just looking,” I said. I handed the bottle back to him. “You know how it is.”

He drank from the bottle. I watched the apple on his throat move up and down as he drank the McNeal’s wine. When he lowered it there was red around his lips. His teeth were stained purple. “I know,” he said.

There was third roar from outside, this time louder and I looked out. The flat-bed truck, raised high on its suspension, had been backed closer to the edge of the pool. People were diving in off of the flat of the back. It was somebody’s dad’s work truck. Kyle had positioned himself next to the wheel-well. I could see him shouting up at the four boys in the back of the truck. They were all stripped down to their underwear. One was in briefs, the other three in boxers. The red and brown hair of their heads was slicked back. They glowed in the light from the fire which had grown considerably. It had worked its way up to the deck, smoldering and scorching the treated lumber. Everyone seemed to know what was going to happen, but no one cared.

I stood up from the table, the chair pushing back and away from me. Turley seemed to say something to me as I walked out. I slid the door hard, angry at what was going to happen. It banged into the house, and I grimaced thinking about the sound of all that plate glass. Samantha was at the truck, her shoulders barely coming to the door handles. I could see the mud sticking to the underside of it. She was trying to talk to Kyle. The four boys jumped down barefoot and heaved him up onto the wooden bed. I jogged to the bed, licking my lips trying to get the stain off.

Kyle was in the back of the truck, the light from the growing fire licking at the treated lumber—swelling up around it—and he was smiling. He was wearing his cowboy hat but had taken off his shirt. The scars from the accident looked purple in the light. There were four round scars the size of quarters from his chest tubes. There were scars running down his belly disappearing into his sweats where they had fixed his pelvis. I could see scar running down his shoulders, disappearing onto his back. It’s hard to tell sometimes where the doctors stop and the accident starts.

The other boys scrambled back onto the bed. I looked at Samantha.

“He won’t listen,” she said.

“Goin’ all out,” Kyle shouted. The music bounced into the heady night air. He leaned forward. “You all want to see something crazy?” He started to push at the wheels as hard as he could. The bed was seven feet, and when he’d reached the end, he’d barely reached any kind of speed at all. The chair seemed to tip off the back of the truck. One wheel caught the aluminum edge of the pool, snapping him down into the utter black of the water, his voice, disappeared a sudden. The music kept up, so did the sound of the flames. No one moved.

The chair floated to the surface, the seats on it lifting it, but Kyle didn’t come back up. I felt Samantha’s hand on my arm. I wasn’t sure whether she was holding or pushing but I went. The boys on the truck didn’t move. I heard Turley shut the door to the house, the same rasping and slapping sound it had made for me. I lunged over the edge, my knees banging and shaking the whole thing.

I didn’t go under but for a moment. My shoes finding the bottom, my hands finding Kyle, his arms thrashing and beating in the water. He struck at me hand and at my wrists. My fingers slipped over his skin. I felt his scars, the soft and always tender lumps of his flesh. The pink puckers of skin where the doctors had fixed what was nearly ruined. I dug at him, going under finally, into the ink of the water, grabbing him not with my hands but my arms. I raised him up in an embrace, gripping him tight under his arms. We came out of the water together, his legs touching mine like tentacles. I remembered when we were kids, fighting and rolling with him, testing each other like animals.

He sputtered water into my face. “I’m swimming, Jimmy,” he said. His long black hair streaked back from his raising straight from the water. It made him look younger. His face was nearly translucent, and I wondered the last time he’d seen the sun.

“You was drowning, Kyle,” I said. He was taller than me. I had forgotten. I could feel his thighs bending back and away from me as I held him, my hands locked behind his back. I looked first to the deck, but the flames had covered it. The crowd had moved to watch it instead of Kyle. They were cheering it to go, hoping it on. I carried and pulled him towards the truck, the water sickeningly warm. Samantha watched us, watched him. She glanced at me and nodded, sharp and hard. She was asking for him. I stopped, the waves pushing us together, lapping at us. The warmth of the fire made me think that it would circle us, surround us, the aluminum, melting and dripping into the grass, the edges, bow and bend, before they gave  way, and the two of us would be washed out and rushed towards Samantha, towards her feet, a mess of arms and legs. But the real light from the flames cast her shadow back and away, up the slight rise towards the house. It stretched to Turley, the dark bottle in his hand—Turley, who watched us all now, was covered in the ink of her.

Jeff Wallace received his MA in American Literature and his MFA in Fiction from Indiana University. He is the author of numerous short stories and has been published in magazines such as The Louisville Review, Appalachian Heritage, Keyhole Magazine, Plain Spoke, and in such online journals as New Southerner, and Still:The Journal. He lives in Mt. Orab, Ohio with his wife Emily, son Oscar, and mutt Memphis. He currently teaches at Southern State Community College and is working on his first novel The True Story of the Appalachian Revolution.

I rolled my eyes in a big dramatic way and turned the key in the ignition. While I tugged at the straps of my black sundress and regretted not wearing a bra, Bill stuck his shaggy head out the window like a half-blind sheep dog. He waved wildly to the gaggle of relatives once removed gathered in the grass of the yellowed front lawn to see us off. He shouted his best twangy “Bye ya’lls!” and “Take cares!” at the top of his lungs. I didn’t look back; too busy fighting the lump in my throat. The trusty little motor groaned, but then sprang to life.

“Funerals are not fun,” I replied, wiggling into the seat, finding the worn out spot where my bony ass belonged on these long drives south to my grandparents’ defunct farm.

The drive was becoming more and more familiar because it had been happening more and more often lately. Bill seemed suddenly excited to interact with my family. The same ones he’d referred to as “brainwashed redneck hicks” the first time he met them. We’d slept in the barn on Easter and on the foldaway couch for two nights of Memorial Day Weekend. Christmas was coming up quick. I sighed.

“Ooh. No. Well, I didn’t mean it like that…” He awkwardly twisted at his bushy, trendy mustache and searched for the right thing to say. “I’m sorry your Papaw passed, Carlene.”

“Wasn’t my Papaw no ways.” I asserted as I lit up a Kool and inspected my French tips.

I couldn’t stop the small smile that snuck across my menthol flavored lips. Maybe funerals were fun after all. My grandmother had looked happy for the first time in my lifetime. My childhood tormentor was finally vanquished by old age. Bill laughed. Big and loud, breaking my concentration. I glanced over at him, taking my time as we chugged slowly up the road — watching beams of late-fall sunshine dance down through the canopy to flatter his face. He was handsome, but still. Bill was no Burt Reynolds. In spite of the luxuriously hairy chest and upper lip and the charming smile sparkling in his eyes. No matter how many Western shirts he bought at the Goodwill. Even though he found that tacky gold chain at the flea market. Bill was no Bandit.

“I love it when I get to come home with you. The vernacular really comes back. You said ‘no ways’ and I counted like, four ‘aint’s’ today! And a ‘reckon’. My little Ellie Mae!” he reached out to lay a heavy hand on my thigh.

“Fuck you and fuck the Clampetts,” I meant it.

I swatted his warm palm away from the knee he found under my black skirt. That shut him up for the first time all weekend. The next few miles were quiet except for the half-broken buzz of the heater and the crunch of gravel beneath my tires. I hated that sound when I was a kid. I squeezed my eyes closed tight and imagined a monster, grinding bones between his false teeth, wearing overalls but no shirt. That sound meant coming back to the only horrible place I could really call home. That sound was a sickening grumble, leading to a sharp right turn that followed a dirt path back in time where women were property and what went on behind closed doors was nobody’s business. I heard it for the first time when I was four years old and my mother packed her bags in the middle of the night and pointed her VW Rabbit forever north. Frankly I don’t remember much about Mommy.

The stories Granny told were idealized. At night, especially in the fall like this, she’d talk for hours on end about my mother while the brisk wind was creeping in through cracks around the foundation and freezing our toes. When we were huddled together in the same broke down bed my mother was a prodigal daughter, a flower too beautiful to flourish in the used up dirt of our craggy bottom land. She had to be forgiven for allowing her roots to spread. In Granny’s mind, she would return to us someday. Save us both. Carry us off like fallen petals to a far more, delicate place

The stories Pop Orey told were demonized. They were lurid sketches of my mother the whore, caught in her bikini, grinding up on some farm boy next to the cow pond. His anecdotes were relayed in the most uncomfortable places and ways. His anecdotes were designed to make me squirm and feel sick. He would laugh hard at the dinner table and rub at his shriveled up eye, pressing it closed with a wrinkled fist. I knew he could still see her there in that dark place in his mind, young and lithe and compromised. By him. I remember thinking that she must be able to feel his dirty, half-blind glare no matter where she was. That was our connection. I grew to know and dread that look. I learned to sneak out the window almost every night to escape into the arms of some good ol’ boy and the cab of his truck.

My one and only first hand memory of Mommy was the way she ratted her bangs up even bigger on the front seat of the tiny green car that morning when we slid into the muddy driveway of Granny’s house. She was frozen in my mind, puckering in the rearview and dragging the slick, scarlet point of her lipstick across that funny face. It made me giggle then. My mother is the lingering smell of Aqua Net and cheap perfume poured on too thick. A young stranger in acid wash and a halter top.

Bill brushed an arm against my body reaching for the radio and I jumped out of my skin. Hot ash bumped against my fingers and dribbled down to my leg. I smashed it against my black jersey skirt and made a hot gray smudge.

O that old rugged cross, so despised by the world, has a wondrous attraction for me…

Strains of a hymn everyone knew blasted out of the huge speakers Bill had installed in my trunk back when he was so into industrial music. The voice was a high lonesome whine, quivering with the fervor of the Holy Ghost.

“Where do they find these people?” he asked.

“That’s Mrs. Marlene Reynolds-Rowe-Wright.” I mumbled.

Bill guffawed. I can’t think of any other word for it. He brayed like a damned donkey.

“Are you serious? How would you know? That name is pretty priceless though.” He smirked.

“I lived here for sixteen years with no television. And on a Sunday afternoon Mrs. Marlene is on basically every FM station. Her daddy and both of her husbands preached. Two out of three were evangelists.” I cracked the window and tossed out my cigarette butt. “Good money in it I guess.”

Mrs. Marlene had finished up, but the old rugged cross was getting no rest. Reverend Wright dramatically hiccupped for air, engulfed in the will of the Baptist Lord and spreading His gospel in gasps over the air waves.

“Jeeeeesus Christ!” I complained instead of exalting.

My long fingers darted out and mashed the button closest to me. The voice of the guy from Swap Shop two counties over droned on ten decimals too loudly about mixed Beagle pups for sale or trade.

“You’re no fun.” Bill pouted.

I wondered why he still thought that pouting was cute as I fumbled blindly in the console for another smoke and paused at a shot-up STOP sign. Then I wondered why my radio favorites were tuned to the local stations here instead of the trendy college stations back home in our trendy college town. Bill reached for the dial and turned down the volume, he flipped through the fuzz and pop country.

“I’m in search of more Mrs. Marlene. And I’m also going to start calling you Ms. Carlene. Ha! You keep smoking those old lady menthol lights… ” He reached into his shirt pocket for a pack of Lucky Strikes.

It had cost him two extra bucks to look like coolness unfiltered.

“Don’t.” I snapped. “And Mrs. Marlene Wright would never smoke. It makes a woman look old.”

“How would you know? Did you ever meet her? She’s a local act, right?”

“Granny knows her.” I said and laughed at the idea of Mrs. Marlene referred to as an act.

It came out more as a cough meets grunt.

“Whaaat? Iva and Mrs. Marlene are friends? That’s got to be hilarious. I bet she has big hair. And lots of make-up, Tammy Faye style.”

“She makes the best potato salad on earth,” was all I could think to say.

We pulled out onto the main road and Bill was quiet as he stumbled upon Mrs. Marlene doing her trembling soprano version of Amazing Grace. He stared out the window at the scenery, stroking his mustache one handed and smoking with the other. I could tell he was trying hard to look pensive and reverent when he checked himself out in the passenger side mirror.

I thought back to Mrs. Marlene standing in Granny’s quiet little kitchen slicing up carrots and shelling beans.  She was the only friend I ever remember Granny having. And Mrs. Marlene wasn’t Tammy Faye. She was natural and ethereal and graceful. Her manners and personality were as sweet as her voice. I stared at her fingers as I leaned on the counter and she hummed some old country song. Every single bean snapped and shelled perfectly to the will of her delicate touch.

Bill was distracted gawking at trailer park residents as we neared what passed for town. I rolled down the window and exhaled deeply, mapping the place in my mind. First you drive past the Dairy Queen on the left and a parking lot packed with bored small-town teenagers. Next there’s the high school. And the brand new, state of the art, public library — half-filled with the same smelly, moldy paperbacks from the old public library. There was the nursing home and a low income housing complex; the “Get TAN! And Video!” and the only drug store I know of where you can still get floats at the counter. I didn’t tell Bill about that. That quaintness was strictly for me to share with chocolate soda. Two gas stations, one of which was also a general store, were placed strategically on the far ends of the main strip. As we pulled up past the first gas station, I breathed in Brazier and had to lean towards the evening air.

“Let’s get milkshakes!” Bill suggested.

“I’m going to puke.” I retorted.

“No. Fucking. Fun.” He slumped in his seat, drumming his long fingers on the dash and pulling one knee up to buff a spot out of his snake-skin cowboy boots with a napkin he found in the floor board.

“Can we at least stop at the general store? Your cousin said they sell plug tobacco. That twisty kind your Granny chews,” he continued.

“Wild Duck,” I said flatly.

“Why thank you, Ms. Carlene, darlin’! I had plumb forgot what it was called,” he fake drawled. My stomach made an angry rumble in response to his giggles.

When I met Bill, he was William. William Joseph Fitzwell Jr., a history student with a pony tail and an acoustic guitar and a dog-eared, paperback copy of Howl in his cliché back pocket. Now I lived with a monster I had probably helped to create. It suddenly occurred to me that I planned to marry a fictional persona. Billy Joe Fitz. I was riding through my home town with a suburbanite skater boy turned wannabe hillbilly and I felt ill. The guilt reminded me I was a sell-out. A traitor. Too good for my raising. I escaped and left it all behind, without the courtesy of looking back. I was my mother. Only worse. Now I had brought in an interloper, someone to cash in on the novelty of my culture. An outsider to laugh at how excited my Granny was about her new indoor toilet.

“Yeah, we can stop at the gas station sugar.” I fake drawled back.

The gears were in motion. I had made up my mind.

“That’s more like it, woman!” he chuckled.

He didn’t even notice my hands shaking on the wheel as I whipped into the busted asphalt parking lot. Bill bounced out of my car and swaggered into the store. Iridescent threads glittered in his new but vintage “cowboy shirt”. As soon as he had mounted the steps and cleared the screen door, I rummaged through my purse until I found a piece of paper, a busted pen and a rubber band. After jotting out a note, I wrapped the white scrap around my cell phone and snapped the band into place. With barely a grunt, I kicked three big plastic suitcases out of the back seat and dropped the phone on top of the pile. I saw him in the rear view as I pulled out, trotting down the wooden steps with a chaw in his mouth. I turned back the way I had come. His jaw dropped and his chaw dropped and tobacco juice dribbled from the corners of his hip mustache as he read the note I’d left behind -

It’s over.

Don’t try to call.

You know me and Granny ain’t got no phone out here in the sticks.

Triple A will be here to pick up William Fitzwell in the next two hours.

Billy Joe Fitz might be shit out of luck.

Now that Pop was dead and six feet under, Granny and I wouldn’t hide under the covers and whisper in fear of repercussion anymore. The normally drab little house would be filled with the smell of funeral flowers and rebirth. Tonight Granny and I would sit at the kitchen table in our pajamas and turn on all the electric lights like Pop would never let us do. We would drink sassafras tea and eat blackberry cobbler and listen to Mrs. Marlene’s old timey hour at ten p.m. Tonight we would get out the farmer’s almanac and get into the moonshine and decide which vegetables to put out by the signs of the moon come spring.

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.

Sometimes I stay up late and listen to Mama talk on the phone to the friends we got. She says if Lee don’t stop shooting up she’s gonna die soon, even with all the money she made from dealing because money can’t go into your arms and save you. Mama says all she does is deal and shoot up and deal and shoot up over and over again. I’d like to think I know Auntie Lee pretty well, but I never knew she liked shooting guns up in the air. When I ask Mama about Auntie Lee’s shooting up Mama says it’s not what I think, and I’m too young to know it. Mama tells her friends that she should know it’s a hard thing to stop doing, she says one time a long time ago she couldn’t stop either. Mama says it gives you a feeling like nothing else and that she misses it every day. I know lots about my mama, but this shooting up, it makes me wonder. I can’t picture her with a gun.

I might go to Auntie Lee’s while Mama’s not looking. Mama doesn’t like me to be there. I snuck over once before, when Mama was talking about Lee’s angel dust friends. I love angels. At Christmas, Mama and I cut up angels out of paper and tape them all over the house. When I asked Auntie Lee about angel dust, she said it’s a different kind of angel, a better one. Then she gave me something and made me cross my heart and hope to die before I told Mama. She called it angel dust. Angel dust makes me feel very free, like a bird, with all things bright and beautiful and rainbows and unicorns. Mama says Auntie Lee does it to escape reality, like that Uncle Jack is gone and now she runs around with Hell’s Angels. I didn’t know that angels can come from hell but I guess it makes sense if you think about it. Hell and Heaven are both out in the beyond where you don’t have leaky faucets or overalls, you just have what’s you on the inside. Mama says it’s good to escape from everything and we all need to once in a while and that you can’t go around judging people for how they like to escape. You can only worry for them. She also says it’s dangerous and that cops don’t like it and they’ll lock you up for using it. It seems crazy that the police would not want people to be happy because happy people don’t do bad things. I still have a little angel dust left and Auntie Lee says to save it for a time when things get so bad that I want to go away to peace and love. Then all her weird friends with the long hair and the loud leather laugh and laugh about nothing. They say they’re high but I can see that they’re right here near me.

So I wake up early the next morning and I watch the big boy on the corner sell stuff. Maybe he’s selling angel dust, who knows. He once gave me a sticker and told me that holding the sticker would take me on a roller coaster of rainbows. Actually, no. that was the first boy. One night I heard a loud noise like a firecracker and lots of sirens. I never saw that boy again. Then one day there was a new boy, like the old boy, only smaller, with new stuff that Mama said was the same as the old stuff. That was when Lucy and Susan stopped coming over to my house because their moms said it wasn’t safe here because of dealers and crack houses. None of the houses on my street have cracks in them. Some have boards on the windows but no cracks. What crazy mamas Lucy and Susan got.

I walk to my Aunt Lee’s house and knock on the door. She has lots of friends over and they’re all tripping or something. They drink punch that makes them trip but they don’t fall on the floor. My mama’s punch doesn’t make me trip and Auntie Lee must not know how to make punch right. She comes up to me and picks me up and swings me around so that my feet fly. Her eyes are all fuzzy and she must have had lots of punch because she can’t stand good. She’s like a baby learning to walk and I ask her about shooting up because I hear her friends talking about that but the music is louder than I think it’s ever been and she can’t hear me over it.

She puts me down and yells. “What?” And she takes some sugar and puts it in her nose. She calls it coke which is stupid because Coke is brown and comes in a can. She says I might like it and I am thirsty so I say okay and we go into the other room where there are mirrors on all the tables and people sit on the floor. The big Hell’s Angels look funny on the floor, like they have so many muscles that they can’t sit normal Indian style or anything and Auntie Lee tells me to sit down and a guy with a great big mustache gets up as soon as I sit down as if I have cooties and tells Auntie Lee that she’s a sick woman and she says to forget about him and she gives me a straw but I still don’t have a glass of coke but she says the straw goes in my nose. We do this at school sometimes. Well, mainly the boys do it. They stick straws in all the holes on their faces and wave their arms around. Auntie Lee says I’m supposed to breathe in the sugar on the mirror into my nose and it will make me feel really good. Maybe if you bake a can of Coke it’s just sugar and I want to ask her but she’s napping so I do like she said and–

Suddenly the room is everywhere and I cannot stop laughing and I am the best girl in the world and it is almost too good to be true that I get to be me and then it’s gone and the room is black and bad and I am on the ceiling looking at me on the floor. I look dead. Like I’m playing dead in a murder mystery game. I try to pick myself up but I don’t know how and now Auntie Lee is awake because one of the Angels kicked her and she’s trying to wake me up and she’s crying.

“Wake up, baby. Wake up.”

But I am not waking up even though I’m awake on my insides because I know I am. I can see. Nothing looks the same now. It’s like watching a screen and sometimes I am the movie and sometimes I am the audience.

The next thing I see is the graveyard near my school. The weeping willows are all there, swishing. My family is there, swishing. Everyone is swish, swish, shake. Some of my friends from school are there but not all of them. Mama is giving Auntie Lee evil eyes and I don’t understand why they didn’t bring me here. Where am I? Who’s watching me? Mama never lets me stay home alone. Then I remember the last time I can remember feeling something in my body. It was when the big Angel stood up fast, when he was mad at Auntie Lee, and his boot touched my book and he said sorry right before he went.

I stay in the sky now and I wonder and I watch and I wish I had some of that special coke but I know I won’t ever have it because I don’t have my body anymore which means I don’t have my nose. I wallow. I’m lazy bones and if Mama were here she’d yell at me to go out and build something in the backyard. Sometimes I see angels, the ones with wings, all white and delicate. They don’t have angel dust. They don’t make me feel unicorns and rainbows. They’re like the ones you try and make in the snow when school is closed and you’re in your snowsuit outside on your backside looking up. I’d rather have the other kind. I can’t help it. The angel dust, or the Angels from Hell who put you on your lap and let you sit on their bike. My baby sister would think I’m crazy. She’s just a toddler so she still thinks these angels are the best, you know, because they’re good and innocent and all skyward and pure. I wonder who would win in a fight, one of these or one of my angels. It’s pretty boring up here. I have time to think about this stuff. And I guess if I have to stay here forever, well I guess if I could go back I would stick to coke you drink and angels you make in the snow. Not that it matters. If I went back now, Mama would be so mad at me for going that it wouldn’t be much fun anyway.

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

There’s a light tickling touch on her skin when they get brave enough to land below her waist. It isn’t unpleasant, but it never lasts. What she feels deeply is the sting of penetration and the desire to scratch an itch. And the fleeting fear of disease. She tries not to scratch and slap at the probing pests. She thinks of afternoons on the creek bank with a good looking felon who had the decency to keep a blanket and cold beer in his Mamaw’s wicker basket. She’s covered in sweat but not sweating. The bugs can smell it.

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.

It’s a sick sort of entertainment, until a woman in a quilted apron runs out to save her dog. The mountain lion drops the small dog, in a mess that looks like a brain and zeroes in on the screaming woman.

You’ve dreamed about this woman, imagined that she would open her door and feed you warm pie and a hot cup of coffee. You’d sit on her couch and pet that muzzy mongrel of a dog until his tail shakes off. Now, she back peddles, eyes the side door over her shoulder, legs tensed about to spring, as the mountain lion slinks down low.

You find yourself shouting, “Don’t run! It’ll pursue you and kill you like it killed your dog.”

“Rufus is dead?” she says.

“Don’t run.”

You’re about twenty yards away from the dead dog, thirty from the lion and forty from the woman and these distances are decreasing. The big cat is locked in on the woman and you can tiptoe almost to the dog, until a stick snaps under your boot. The mountain lion turns with stink eyes and starts walking toward you.

The woman does not listen and turns to run, but the cat is no longer interested in her. It has begun to survey you, as if it wonders how you got here and why you were in the woods in the first place. You refuse to show it any fear and you’re not afraid to die; you’ve thought about it every day but you quickly review your options here on earth. You already know not to run and standing still will most likely not work either. You guess you could get to the dog before the mountain lion can harm you and flip him the carcass the way a lion trainer folks over a hunk of meat. You step toward the dog’s body.

After two steps, the dead thing jerks and it tries to stand. The mountain lion jolts toward the suffering animal. You’re almost an arms length away but the mountain lion moves at a great rate of speed and reaches the dog before you can and runs off toward the woods. You feel the breeze from it against your leg.

A gunshot whizzes past your cheek and you can see the woman standing erect a foot from her door. When she pulls back again, you hit the ground but she misses once more and you hear her cry out angrily.

When the police come you’re on the front steps drinking coffee out of a cup that says “Sea World”. The woman gives up her story, that you are a hero and not an intruder she was trying to shoot. You don’t have any identification but you tell them everything you know. “My name is Jake,” you say.

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 ten years and is the co-founder of Somerville News Writers Festival.

Timothy's work has appeared widely in print and on-line He has had over 250 works of fiction and poetry published since 2007 and of which eight have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

“I see a ‘dillo crossing the road, I don’t try and hit ‘em. If you’re tryin’ to do something, that’s premeditation.” The gas gauge was slipping under a half tank, the air conditioner screaming against triple digit heat shimmering on the asphalt running out in front of us straight as an arrow.

“Old man Stryker,” Danny said, “now there’s a pre-historic animal. Another matter altogether.” Danny swerved the Eldorado back and forth, tires squealing, beer cans rattling in the back seat.

“He knew what he was doing. He planned it. Hard to figure what’s inside a man’s head. That’s what courts are for, right?” Danny slapped the steering wheel and let out a whoop, re-adjusted his cap.

“Get me another beer, pard.” I handed him a warm can of Turbo. Popped one for myself.

“Stryker?” I said. That old dude’s done, man.”

“Ain’t old when he owes me four hundred large.”

“From what, that union picnic fund? Your little scam?”

“You can’t even count to four hundred.”

Four hundred sounded big, and my mind started to drift. It was the heat, the long ride and the creaky leaf springs in the Caddy’s chassis. Made me think sometimes about weird stuff, strange smells and things, trying to be funny. My way of passing time. The warm Turbo made me think of one.

“This beer tastes like warm goat piss,” I said. I wanted Danny to laugh.

“How do you know what warm goat piss tastes like?” he said.

“I thought it was kind of funny. The beer, it’s warm, that’s all.” I took another swallow.

“Seriously, four hundred grand?” I said.

“I ain’t waitin’ twenty years for him to get out and shovel some old rock pile and pull up a suitcase full of cash. He ain’t gonna last twenty years, neither, and ain’t no one else talkin.”

Danny brought me along for the ride, he said, keep him company while he had some business to tend to. I was the navigator, the map reader, and a bit of a mind reader too.

I unfolded the map of Texas, a criss-cross of colored lines and a big patch of blue, the Gulf of Mexico and a bunch of border towns hanging on the Rio Grande. Boyd State Prison was a click west of Fairfield, halfway between Houston and Dallas if you were coming up that way. Four hundred miles southwest of Shreveport, by way of Dallas, the way we were coming, and we still had to fight through Big D, almost a hundred miles away. My thumb was on Fairfield, or close enough, my middle finger planted on where I thought we were.

I looked up. Into the fat barrel of Danny’s .45 Colt 1911. He ain’t going to try driving and shooting driving seventy five miles an hour with an armadillo feet up two miles back.

“Just seein’ if you were awake there.” Danny laughing, his teeth yellow, lips cracking. “No big ideas now, hear?” he said.

Ideas, I had plenty. Ideas of what to do with the money. Ideas that Danny Mather knew nothing about.

“I know a car wash in Dallas,” I said. “Bikini Girls rub your car nice and smooth and you drive off smelling all good. Stop and get some beer, clean this trap.”

“Clean car’s a sign of a sick mind,” Danny said.

God conjured up ‘sick mind’ when he took a look at us, I thought. We were created long after God thought it all up. I knew that.

“Dallas coming up soon?”

“Uh huh.”

“You ever shoot a guy in the back?” Danny pulled his cap down low when he said it.

“In the back? You mean, like when he’s walking away from you?”

“No, shit face, in the fuckin’ back yard. The back room. Jesus Christ.”

“No. Not anything alive.” Danny started a rant that lasted all the way around Dallas on I-635 north, around the tip of town through Mesquite, outskirts of Garland and University Park and Richardson and Carrollton where we stopped for gas and filled up with leaded high octane. When we got back in the car Danny weighed in again, shifting gears.

“Not counting road kill, name your best shot, ever. Number one, dead to rights kill.”

“A big Buck. Up in Montana. 30–06 cartridge ripped the gut, put him down on the spot.”

“Yeah? How far out?”

“Two hundred, two hundred fifty yards.”

“Verified?”

“I hunt alone.”

“You hunt alone.”

“Used to think no one wanted to go with me ‘cause I get up around 2:00 AM, long before I’m up in the short grass hills and into the woods. I figured no one wanted to go with me because I’m always taking the shots, getting there first and stuff.”

“You figure Stryker’s got anybody on the inside?”

“I told you.”

“Tell me again.” The Caddy had a little shake in the passenger door panel down where the window was rattling.

“The way I remember it, he’s got a couple lifers in his circle. They know guys on the outside who know guys, that kind of stuff. He’s got enough to pay off anyone he thinks a threat.”

“And you heard that from who?”

“You know, I’m not real good with names.”

“You’re not real good at a whole lot, are you?”

“Crack a bull’s hide at two hundred yards.”

“Yeah, you be good at that. Might be good at drinkin’ beer. Screwin’ low life Mexican chicks. Good things come in small packages and you most definitely might probably have a very small package.”

“Texas Hold ‘Em, I walked away with thirty seven hundred after an hour and half. I flopped a pair of kings, best hand I had and that was that. And don’t talk that way about Mexican girls.”

“Squeal and deal.”

About that time we were ten miles from Boyd State. Barbecue joints and body shops lined the highway off the Interstate and when I asked Danny if we wanted to stop for some ribs he said ‘We?’ like some kind of sarcasm was in order. He gave the Caddy more gas and my stomach growled, my blood sugar low. The smell of mesquite and roasting pork lingered and I popped some chewing gum but didn’t offer any to Danny. Stryker. That dude was legendary in these parts. Former minor league pitcher and an original investor in the poultry packing plant that employed close to seven hundred folks, when it was going full steam, and then, somehow, the story went, the money vanished. Stryker was found laid up in a motel with a couple of guys he said were his accountants and when police checked, they weren’t on anybody’s payroll. Stryker went down on three counts of embezzlement, and I never could figure how you could be caught for embezzling money from your own company. The money is yours in the first place, no? Stryker plead not guilty, six million in company funds disappeared, and Stryker was in for twenty. He was seventy three years old now. That gave him another 18 years to go and he’d be an even 90 years old. (My math’s not too good) That left a couple of still unanswered questions, in my mind. We were three miles from the prison.

“How come you’re the only one who thinks Stryker owes you money?” I said. “I mean, the company 401k stock I know went south, but what about the other workers?”

Danny looked at me for a moment, and turned back to the road. A billboard flew by advertised the upcoming Texas Rangers season ticket plan if you liked baseball in the baking oven of Texas summer. I didn’t.

“Because,” Danny said, “technically, Stryker never declared bankruptcy. Which means he stills has liabilities. They don’t go away. The union negotiated a fixed amount of the contribution, and just because he’s in prison, he’s not absolved of those debts.”

Absolved meant something I wasn’t really up on. But I knew money laundering. Done a little myself, when I had transactions needing to be hidden. Small time stuff. Phony autographed baseballs. Counterfeit football jerseys signed by me, ‘Emmit Smith’, ‘Troy Aikman’, swap-meet shit guys hung in their game rooms, sold out of the back of a pickup.

“Like the Swiss bank account thing?” I said.

“Or laundered through a big ranch in Montana with one of his fat-cat cattle baron buddies. Throw a few million at a fictitious ranch nobody checks on, you got yourself a safe haven. Banking, dude. It’s how the rich get richer.”

The sign into the prison looked as nondescript as an announcement for a bake sale or a company Christmas party, only a lot more fine print. A low painted white brick border and chaparral bushes marked the entrance.

We parked behind the basketball court in a fenced tarmac pen guarded by three barbed wire fences and a tower with a bull in a wide-brim hat holding a scatter gun. Inmates were shooting hoops, wearing dark blue pants and lighter blue long sleeved shirts, sleeves rolled up to expose massive iron-pumped arms and prison tats with a fresh shine from the lotion they applied to keep the skin moist and lubed. The iron hoop clanked, the boink-boink of the ball bouncing off rough asphalt. A couple of men were smoking and watching. They all saw us getting out of the Caddy and straightening our shirts that were wrinkled and sweat-soaked and messy. I wondered if twenty years in the joint was worth it to get out at 90, or 80 for good behavior or whatever they call it when you wash dishes real good or swab the men’s room floor like you mean it.

Going through security—first a questionnaire asking for names, addresses and that kind of thing, two brief interviews with burly guards with fat automatic pistols strapped to Sam Browne belts and cuffs, pepper spray and batons poking down across their butts like tails—I considered the trade-off again. Twenty years in a medium security state facility for the possibility of getting out with a few million. Better than working as a grave yard shift poultry packer wearing plastic gloves and a shower cap for a few years like I did. Danny was a lead, not doing much on that midnight-to-eight shift except flirt with Mexican girls and order take-out from an all night Thai place. I was in charge of disposing scrap. That’s what they called the head and feet and the entrails. Scrap. Crap with an ‘S’. They went in a bin that cooked in a broth of vegetable juices and went out in a truck that emptied the contents at a couple of cat food plants up the road. Grocery shopping one day, I was examining the contents of can of Kitty Pride, trying to find out if maybe this particular can had anything I’d had a hand in.

I ended up losing almost $6000.00 in my 401k program and I didn’t qualify for the matching grant, they’d said, even for a supposed valuable employee like me. That was what they called the guys who went a year without an accident. A valuable employee. If you chopped your finger off or got a nose bleed in the vat you were somewhat less valuable. But the six grand was gone. And Danny said we’d get it all back. And it was about to start, right now.

The visiting room was empty, the glass partition smudged with fingerprints where people put their hands up and imagine they’re touching their loved ones and reading forlorn messages through a six inch Plexiglas plate that distorted the light and made the person on the other side look pale. I waited, sitting in the folding metal chair next to Danny Wade, wondering how this was going to play. Stryker, I’d remembered, had a daughter, who must be in her sixties now, and a deceased wife. He was tall and thin with gray hair, not much though. That’s what I remembered.

The door opened on the other side of the glass partition and an arm motioned through the opening. The belly protruding on the hugest black man I’d ever seen was the first thing I noticed. Then his tattoos, fading blue and black against his dark smooth skin that stretched over a pair of thick hardened arms. He sat. Looking at us. Then he spoke.

“You the guy who sends the letters?”

Danny nodded. He motioned to me. “My friend, Mack Gant. I’m Fred Solomon. You’re the Bat Boy, right?”

The huge man nodded his head and light glinted off his forehead and dome, shaved smooth and shiny as a bowling ball.

“We passed on all those rib joints coming in here, didn’t we Mack?” Danny. Acting like he was some guy named Fred, calling me Mack, a name of a guy I knew who stole a crate of Dallas Cowboys jerseys and got busted not a mile from the stadium and didn’t even know who Michael Irvin was.

Danny went on. “See, we real sensitive to coming in here dripping with sauce and licking our fingers. Wouldn’t be right. How’s the food in the joint? You said you worked in the commisary.”

Pete frowned with his eyes, ran thick fingers over his dome, brought his hands together on the formica counter.

“Since you ain’t kin,” Bat Boy said, “you got about five minutes. Cinco minutos. Food prep talk ain’t gonna cut it, you know what I mean.”

“Christmas comes once a year.” Danny sounded like he had come kind of code going, something I couldn’t fully appreciate. “This holiday season, you all set to do your shopping? And how ‘bout them Cowboys?”

“Fuckin’ Cowboys. Give me those old boys, Dandy Don, Staubach. Men. Know what I’m sayin’?”

It looked like Danny did know what he was sayin’. They stared at each other, Danny working his hands into a knot, Bat Boy moving his lips around teeth that needed work, and when Danny leaned towards the Plexiglas his breath fogged it a little bit and he drew a circle in the frost with his finger and put an X through it and wiped it off with his sleeve.

Pushing his folding metal chair away from the counter, the huge black man stood up, signaling that the visit was concluded. The door swung open, he walked out and the door clanked shut. The light on the other side of the Plexiglas shut off, leaving us looking at a darkened slot of well-guarded prison space as if the huge presence of the Bat Boy, now gone, left a void of matter, a black hole of no specific gravity at all.

“Dude, you got me in the mood for some of that road barbecue,” I said.

“Did I?” In the thin fluorescent light there were little hairs sticking out every which way on his eyebrows. “Let’s get out of here.”

On the way out the guards were grim faced, nobody saying ‘Have a nice day’, or ‘Y’all come back and see us’, the phony, folksy sayings people in the south laid on you when you were leaving. They looked at their watches, checking the time, counting minutes and hours until their shifts were over and they could go home. We were in the Cadillac on our way out through the entrance with the white painted brick border, Danny mentioned that Bat Boy had a thirty year sentence for armed robbery, his fourth conviction, and he wasn’t going home anytime soon.

Ten miles outside of town, there weren’t any freeways or major state highways, and Danny stopped at a one story motel that eased back about a hundred yards from the road in two long rows of pale green rooms separated by a lawn and a pool, a neon sign out front saying the place was called the Loco Road and we checked in. Two rooms. Danny wanted to take a shower so I went out to the pool and counted dead crickets floating on the water.

An hour later it was still over 95 F and we sat outside at picnic tables behind a take-out stand and ate combo plates of pork spare ribs and brisket and wiped up the sweet brown sauce with white bread that came wrapped in foil, piled up the plastic forks and knives over the bones and covered it all with paper napkins to keep the flies off. Our paper cups were half-full of Lone Star beer and we stared at the sun setting out over the Texas plain in a nice soft, orange glow, that meant heat would hold up until midnight, at least. Danny started talking.

“It’s the myth of the American west,” he said, taking a swallow of beer and putting the cup down. “White men settling this country, cowboys and Indians, that John Wayne thing, guns going off and shoot-outs. Not so much told about the people getting robbed, towns getting looted, what happens to folks in those towns who get left behind with no money.”

I just listened.

Danny said “So Stryker goes to prison, but what happens to the people he ripped off?”

“The Bat Boy. You corresponded with him?”

“If I tell you, then you know something, right?”

“The circle on the window with the X. Your signal?”

He nodded out towards the empty Texas plain.

“When that big elk went down I was talking about,” I said, “no one saw it but me. That was it, the last one I ever took.” I pointed to the front of the take-out shack. “You want some cobbler or something?” Danny shook his head, so I kept talking. “Big old Buck probably had good years out there on his land. Fight off a few stags, a Buck gets his way with his herd.”

“I love it when you try to make sense.”

“That feeling I had to do it again? It never happened like I thought it would. One time, that was all.”

“One for you, one for the boogie man.”

“No. Not like that. I don’t believe there’s a big scoreboard up there, keeping track of what’s going on down here. Don’t believe it happens like that.”

“That’s why you’re a Baptist and not Catholic. Everything matters. Everything you do. Why’d they invent confession? ‘Father I shot an elk but I won’t do it again. Say five Hail Mary’s and don’t let the door hit you in the ass’.” Danny laughed. He finished his Lone Star and spit out of the corner of his mouth. “I’m going to turn in. Pick up a paper in the morning. Tell me the headlines.” Danny got up.

“Everything matters?” I said

Danny’s hands were on his hips, his back to me.

“When you were shop steward.” I said. “Did that matter?”

“They voted me in for that.”

“But did it matter. What you did, or what you didn’t do, did it matter? To you? To anybody?”

“She was Mexican, man. In a fucking poultry plant.”

I looked at Danny, waiting as long as I could before I was going to have to ask him again. He raised his eyes. He had his chin up like he was striking a pose.

“You like Mexican girls,” he said. “Don’t you? No big deal, a one night stand’s as good as another.”

“You were the shop steward, voted in as shop steward to look after things. Someone people depend on. It was the graveyard shift.”

He was right in front of me now, close enough I could smell Lone Star and see sticky sauce holding on his lip. I stood right up to him.

“Why do you think we’re here?” he said. “Why do you think we’re doing this?”

“You’re doing it. And I think you’re doing it for yourself.”

“Yeah, you got what they call great visionary perspective.”

Later, he’d turned the lights off in his room and I went outside to the dark pool reflecting headlight glare from a car crunching into the gravel lot. Light from the ‘Loco Road’ sign flickered and buzzed with the crickets and mosquitoes with a nervous hovering energy. I tried to think.

Whatever Danny’s plan was, it was going on in a prison, and that, I knew, made it subject to all kinds of unknown elements and forces. And to me, Danny had a $400,000 problem with his mythic view and his heroic place in the history.

I went to my room and pulled out the portable police scanner radio, closed the door and went back to the metal lawn chair by the pool. I put it on low, plugged in an earphone and listened to a dispatcher and a couple of officers in squad cars in the parking lot of an all night donut shop. I put the radio on my stomach and leaned back in the chair and watched the reflection of the Loco Road sign in the pool. Danny had insisted on paying for one only night. The scanner was quiet, the air settling, and then a siren sounded in the distance, a low wailing horn for ten seconds, followed by coyotes yipping and screaming. The scanner crackled and the dispatcher was calling all units, probably a half dozen patrol cars on the all-night shift and they were being summoned, called, told to report one-by-one and get over to the prison fast and wait for further instructions. The night world was in motion.

The top drawer of the nightstand in my room slid open and I turned the night light on at the same time, feeling the Glock 19, checking the magazine and slipping the gun inside my waistband, went out and closed the door.

Danny answered after a half minute of knocking and calling out his name as low as I could. He stood in the dark doorway, nothing but his underwear.

“What the fuck do you want?” His hair was all over the place and when he saw I had a gun he pulled back from the door. I went in, closed the door and clicked on the ceiling light from the switch next to the door. I set the chain.

“Danny, sit down.

“The fuck you doin, man?

“Give me your cell phone.”

“I asked you a question.” He had his hands spread out halfway like maybe he was thinking he could make a move and stop what was happening.

“I said give me the phone.”

“Use the desk phone.”

“And the keys to the Caddy.”

“Oh, you’re not serious, dude. This ain’t going down like this. You think I don’t have backup?”

“Not here you don’t. You give me the phone and the keys or it gets messy, right now. I’m just along for the ride, right? Couple of days in Texas, doing a little job? That’s what you said. Little job with an accomplice you can pin the whole thing on if it goes down wrong.”

“I’m representing the union’s money that was stolen. It gets paid back this way, that’s what this is. Put the gun down. We’ll go over the details again, you dumb shit.” He started to move his hands a bit. The Colt was most likely pretty near him, like he was some kind of real pro with righteous plans to save people’s money, something that would sound good in a statement if we’d get caught. Two dumb rednecks trying to do the right thing. If he’d just laughed once, twice, instead of saying things to me that made me think he thought I was a cracker along for a joy ride with nothing to offer except handing him beer. Sit there while he drew foggy Xs on Plexiglas and talking in pre-arranged code so I wouldn’t know the whole deal, enough to sound like it might have been my idea.

“Put your hands down,” I said. “Lace your fingers together and put your hands in your lap where I can see them. My fingers moved along the trigger. NOW …DO IT NOW.” He did, his hands folded on his navy blue boxers like he was praying, shoulders slumped and his chin fell a bit, his eyes still on mine.

Clean towels were piled up on the chrome rack outside the bathroom and I walked backwards with the gun on Danny, pulled some towels down. I slid them with my feet until they were next to the bed. I grabbed the chair at the small desk into position where I could sit, pull the towels up and still hold the gun. The television was behind me too and I punched on the power until a channel came on with an infomercial for liquid cleaner that worked on your car and even your dog and the guy was laughing and the girl gave an 800 number. Order Now!

The towel knot tightened up okay, I cinched it real well and told Danny to hold his hands above his head. Danny protested and the girl on the television was asking the fella if he’d actually washed a dog and he said ‘He loved it! You’ll love it too!, sounding like he and the girl had that television banter just on the edge of late night good taste. I tied Danny’s his hands with the towels and used the long leftover cloth to wrap around his mouth. The towel didn’t really have any way to tie over his eyes so I left it dangling behind his head. I started with the bedside drawers, both sides, looking for the Colt. I searched his overnight bag and I was thinking I was going to have to turn my back on him, and it was there, in the dresser, under a pair of socks that he’d taken off that had that dampness that stays until you wash them. I checked the receiver and there was a bullet in the chamber. The magazine was full, eight rounds of .45 caliber.

“Cell phone’s in the car.” He had a smirk on his face.

The Colt was well-balanced and I put it in my front right pocket.

“Get up slow,” I said, “and stand right there.”

It was after midnight, sirens wailing all over town and it was a chance, sure, but the car was only thirty yards away. All we needed to do was get to the car. The phone was the only way I figured he’d have to get any information, and if I was right, it would make a lot of my wasted years kind of fade to the background.

“Wait there,” I said. I cut off the plug from the floor lamp, then I cut the cord at the base of the lamp. It wrapped tight around his wrists, partially hidden by the towels.

We made it to the car without anyone seeing us that I noticed. I told him to get in the car and he did. The Glock pressed to his ear, Danny pointed his chin at the glove box and I thought at first, why would he keep the phone there? If he’d be getting a message from someone, he’d want the phone close to him. I never checked the glove box. I closed the Caddy door and went to his room and gave myself five minutes to search for the phone. Then I had an idea. The desk phone. Danny’s phone would ring if I called the number from the desk phone and then I’d know where it was if it rang in the room. But desk phones keep records of numbers that are called.

Five minutes. I didn’t have the phone. Outside, the Loco Road sign was off and the pool was smooth like a black slab of Onyx. The Caddy door was open, and Danny was gone. The keys were in my pocket. The sirens were still wailing and I put the scanner ear piece in and heard the dispatchers chattering with the patrol cars, voices chirping in, Ten Four, Ten Eight, Ten Seven, snapping off radio codes, checking in and out of the police frequency.

Officers in route…SWAT team engaged… ETA—— ten minutes!

Another voice checked in, right behind me.

“Give me that gun.” Danny’s voice. Before I turned around, there was a thought of whether he’d been able to get the towel untied, make it look like he’d just gotten out of the pool, or maybe he was standing with his hands tied behind his back with white towels dragging behind his ass like a fucking Sheikh looking for his camel. And then it came to me, where the phone was, before I turned around and played right into his hands. Because he had the phone. He had to.

“Think I didn’t bring a backup gun?” he said. “The laser dot’s on your skull.”

With an earful of 10–7 10–8 dispatch-speak radio tension building on what had to be a prison riot to get money from a convicted man who never said Damn, I’m really sorry y’all, I fucked up, here’s all your money back, Danny’s phone rang. No fancy ring tone, Danny’s phone tinkled with a tonal quality that belied coyotes and ten codes and the wailing honking siren. The phone continued to jingle and I didn’t move.

His voice was soft. “Yeah?”

Drop and roll, that’s what they teach you for a reason. The grass was dry and soft to absorb my body when I hit and when I turned with the Glock pointed, Danny was running away and I knew he didn’t have any backup gun. The phone was my only chance. Danny would rat me out the moment any heat came his way and talking my way out of things wasn’t my specialty. With sirens wailing and the prison going into lockdown, the phone would be his only way of getting information. Text, a code, a voice message, something on that smart phone had the location of what Danny was looking for. Stryker’s money. Crouching behind a line of shrubs alongside the cement pool apron in the darkness, I swung the Glock on a low arc. A man wearing underwear and his hands tied couldn’t get far, but if he’d gotten his hands free or thrown on a shirt, he might move around the motel grounds without attracting much attention. I had the key to his room, so he couldn’t go back there. So I waited, and listened, tracking the motel lot with the gun at full arm’s length, thinking Danny had to make a physical move, sometime. The air had hit bottom, the temperature at its low point and the dawning day would heat up soon. I got comfortable in a crouch tracking the gun in a 180 degree arc, turning to check my back. No other movement, no sounds, sirens off. With the earpiece stuck in my ear I listened to a dispatcher squawking officers locations, barking messages and codes to squad cars and backup teams, a SWAT team standing by for a ‘Go’ command and I imagined automatic rifles trained on unknown targets, squinting through night vision scopes for shimmering pulsing ghosts, greenish and grainy. The infrared glare of human body heat.

My memory drifted, back to grim graveyard shifts packing poultry.

Stryker took a tour of the plant at night one time just after midnight. His hair grey and jelled, he kept looking at his watch, and I’d thought he wanted to get home and catch a late movie or wake up his wife, but I hated to attribute that quality to the old man, that he might be like the rest of us and want a quickie before turning in. He was on parade that night, smiling at the Latinas on the conveyer belt—Stryker prided himself on the fact that it was a clean, sanitary place for chickens to come to rest—and in the canning department, where steam guns went full blast during break and cleansed the place like a germ warfare laboratory, he found, the story went, a dead rat under a young woman’s purse. What he was doing looking under a woman’s purse? He’s said his assistant spotted it, but I hadn’t seen anyone with him. A sanitation violation, Stryker claimed. He took the woman into his office and offered her a simple solution. A blow job was the only sensible thing, he’d been said to say, or she’d not only be fired, he’d have her removed from the union. She’d never work in the industry again. A ‘rules violation’. Cannery Workers Local 62 shop steward Danny Mather stood by and said nothing. That’s what the woman had told some co-workers, that Danny had a smile on his face when she went to her knees and did what she was told to keep her damn job. She filed a grievance. It was dismissed before it even got to the union grievance committee. I’d mentioned it to Danny once. I asked him if what was being said was true, that he stood by and watched the woman lick Styker’s balls in order to feed her children. Danny said I had some awakening to go through. An awakening, he said, to better understand the way the world worked, in all its manifestations, and a bunch of gobbledy-bullshit that I told him I was ashamed to hear him say. After lunch break, I was out on the parking lot when the woman came out who’d been summoned to Stryker’s office, going out to her car, her shift half done, but her career finished, and I tried to talk to her. She kept on walking, and I heard her crying and talking quietly on her cell phone. I felt so bad for her I tried to call her later that day but her phone never picked up and she was gone. Danny won another vote for shop steward the next month or so and the issue never got discussed. I felt like I was carrying some kind of burden I couldn’t shake.

Purple bloomed on the horizon now and twenty yards away on the grass, I saw something. It was the white towel, and I flexed and stretched my legs, dispatch quiet near five minutes by then. The light switched on at the motel office. Two figures, one at the counter, the clerk wiping his eyes and pointing to the hallway. Danny walked out under the shadows of the overhang towards the room. In his boxer shorts, holding something in his hand. He passed the red white and blue light of the Pepsi machine, stopping further down the walk way at the door. He turned a key, went into the room.

I made it to the machine and had a Pepsi clunking down the chute into my hands in under thirty seconds. I cut a hole about an inch square on the bottom with my knife and poured a little bit out, and held the can so it wouldn’t leak any more Pepsi. I needed what was left.

Danny would be getting some clothes, wondering how he’d get the Caddy going, but I had a moment, a moment of surprise, and a mostly full can of Pepsi. The door to his room unlocked and I held the door closed, listening, and when I heard the shower, it was time to move in. He was humming, something bluesy, and then the shower went off and the sliding door opened, and I moved on him, holding the Pepsi can so I could plug the end with the Colt and when he saw me he smirked and dropped the towel like I was supposed to get horrified that a wet man would be standing naked in front of me with a wicked grin.

“You remember her name?” I said.

“You talkin’ shit, man. Way over your head.”

“Keep your hands in front of you.”

“I’ll cut you in. You think I’m not gonna take care of you?”

“There’s two questions. Do you remember her name?”

“This about you and the Mexican girl?”

“These are my questions. I’m along for the ride, remember?”

“Who’s name?”

“Wrong answer. Next question. You can say you’re sorry. Say you have some regrets, remorse.”

“That’s not even a question.”

“It’s close enough for you to suck your last chicken wing.”

“I don’t look back man, never have. How much are we talking about here? Ten grand? Make it twenty.”

“Her name was Juanita Benitez.”

“She don’t mean nothin.”

“Yes, she does. She means this.” The .45 burped through the Pepsi with a wet pop, not much more than a truck dropping a downshift on the highway. Danny had a hole in his forehead and a silly grin on his face, cherry-colored mist and a whole bunch of cordite-blasted Pepsi sliding down the glass shower door and after I wiped the gun down I laid the Colt on the bathroom tile, turned and went out the door and clicked it shut with the ‘Do Not Disturb’ placard swinging on the knob. The cell phone had an orange glow, like a palm-sized night light.

Wiping down my room didn’t take much time, and the Caddy let out a groan at first when I fired it up, but its power fed off high octane and ran like hell out onto the pavement and out past the prison where blinking lights and beacons and spotlights were dancing around the grounds like a fire-dance luau on Waikiki. Danny’s cell phone was winking again. The first message I’d picked up just after I turned on the Caddy was the one I’d expected. Something about ‘the to-go order ready for pickup…need delivery instructions’, something to that affect, and I’d keyed in my phone number, clicked a happy face on the text menu and this was the reply. The open road was flat, smooth and empty, a rosy dawn rising behind me, and I flipped open the cell phone to read the text.

‘Update account status; ready for delivery. It’s hot in the kitchen.’ An overpass was coming up and I pulled under the concrete and stopped the Caddy so I could punch in a response. Link him up with a website I used sometimes for transactions I didn’t need people nosing around in. Pay-Pal, Visa, off the books stuff. Collectibles, a passport photo, things that could be done without a problem, if you could get the money.

Bat Boy had to have a position in this whole thing, a kickback, a payoff, something that had to be pre-arranged. Best place to get up on all that was about a hundred miles from where I was, so I drove out and up onto an old county two-lane road past grazing Angus cattle and hay bales like stacks of pink gold in early morning light. The country radio station was playing Waylon Jennings, and then real sudden the DJ broke in and said there was more breaking news coming in, sent it over to a reporter on a phone saying he was live at the prison with an update.

The Cadillac had adjustable power seats with a bunch of switches on the driver’s side so I angled the seat back and turned off the radio. Into the marvelous Texas prairie I drove, where I wasn’t going to see another town for at least an hour.

A great day to drive. It was going to be a hot one.

Kurt’s first novel, Split Decision, details a desperate hunt for an injured and missing professional boxer, and is currently in agent-query mode. He’s a student in the University of California Riverside MFA program in creative writing.

His work has appeared in NoHo>LA, Urban Living Magazine, Fried Chicken and Coffee, and SaddoBox.com.

Kurt worked on-air as co-host for Inside Dodgers Baseball seen on television outlets throughout Southern California and Nevada.

Jack had been given the job on his fourteenth birthday as a gift from his father and from the Jones family. His father, the estate’s care-taker, had asked Mrs. Jones if she could find any work for his son. Jack’s father told him that he’d had to beg the old woman to even consider him for any work at all.

She was a tyrant, his father had said. His father liked to use words like that to show he wasn’t as ignorant as he seemed to think Jack thought him.  She’d ground up men all around her, he’d said. Her husbands (there’d been three), her son (she’d never had a daughter), and the men who worked for her in the mines. Oh, she ground those up, his father had said. Ground them up for the mortar that held that Big House together, he’d said. His father had been drunk or else he wouldn’t have spoken quite so openly with him. “It will be good for you to work for the woman,” he had said. “It’s an excellent opportunity,” he’d said, a little drunkenly, accentuating the “x” and the “t” of those strange long words.

Mrs. Jones had cousins and nieces and nephews, but they were all gone. Off to school. Off to the east, out of the hills somewhere that the coal money took them. Mrs. Jones was still there like a scarecrow in a cornfield long after the harvest. “Make you a man,” his father had said. “Even if it is woman’s work.” Sometimes his father said things by not saying them to show Jack that he wasn’t as ignorant as Jack seemed to hope. In the foyer, Jack wiped at the sweat that had formed on his freshly shaven lip

“Don’t just stand there. You’re here to help me—so help me,” Mrs. Jones said.

Jack hurried to her as she tottered to the grand staircase in the middle of the foyer. He hunched to the old woman and offered his arm. She took it with thin, hard fingers, her nails on the outside of his bicep biting into the muscle. He felt the cold of her gold watch lying against the softer inner part. That’s real gold, Jack thought.

He’d lived on the Jones’ estate his entire life but he’d never been inside the main house. His father even was always kept at a distance, the discussions of the gardens or the fences were always done on the porch or in one of the barns. The barns used to hold horses but had been converted to holding bull studs. What the Jones family had once owned in coal they now owned in meat.

It was a monstrously large home, easily ten times the size of the caretaker’s cottage that he and his father lived in. The only other deep wealth that he’d ever seen had been on television, in flickering two-dimensional images. What was here, now, was different. It had the feel of a museum, of objects that he could look at but never touch. But here he was, guiding the old birdlike woman up the staircase. Marble, Jack saw, covered with a blue Persian rug that poured down the center of the stairs like a waterfall. The rug was soft and a little worn with the hardness of the stone beneath it.

At the top of the stairs she led him down a dark hallway. What had once been a large and open hallway was now closed and narrowed. Boxes were stacked three-deep on both sides of the hall and rose from floor to ceiling. Large black letters were written on the boxes, non-sensical to Jack: “DWC” cried one, “AAC,” lamented another. As they moved into the hallway, she hurried her steps and released his arm. He could no longer walk beside her but moved behind her and put his hands on her thin waist like one would a child on a bicycle. The two were soon in near dark but Mrs. Jones continued forward with seemingly no worry. The spiced smell of old cardboard filled him as the darkness came in. He felt the need to sneeze but for some reason felt that this would be a cardinal sin to her and he fought it off. She stopped and turned left. There was the click of a lock and the cry of brass workings. He heard her moan and felt her body lean forward into what must have been a door.

“Switch with me and push,” she said. “Something must have fallen.” She moved back towards him and gave him no room. He crushed himself into the dark boxes and felt the insides of one move, something dragging and grinding against something else. Something popped in the box and he felt bony fingers on his stomach. She pinched him hard on his stomach. He could hear her hissing in the dark. “Those are Danny’s wedding dishes in there, boy. If one’s broken…” she let it hang in the dark like a noose.

“It didn’t break,” he said. It was the first words since he’d introduced himself.

“You’d better hope.”

Jack slid past her and up to the door. He leaned into it, pushing with his legs, his tennis shoes slipping on the hardwood. He leaned harder, his body a lever, and the door slowly opened inwards. The boxes hissed as they slid on the floor in front of them. Bright light shined through the crack in the door.

“Far enough,” she said. “Crawl in there and move them. Stack them neat when you do.”

Jack scraped his way between the door and the facing into the room. The windows in it were dusty but large and overlooked the south lawn of the home. Light came through, softened by the dust but bright. Around the room were more boxes, how deep he wasn’t sure, but again stacked to the ten-foot ceiling.  The legs of a bed, the four posts as well, could be picked out on one side. Three doors were exposed opposite of the bed. Everything that wasn’t door or window was locked away behind the boxes.

The boxes blocking the door had tipped into the floor like a child’s blocks. One had ruptured and had spilled a box of silver watches, silver tie-clips, and pearl cuff-links. They had scattered on the floor like dice. Jack knelt and put them into the small tin box they had come from. He remembered Mrs. Jones’ gold watch. The boxes rose around him. He looked at the cufflinks, how they seemed to glow in on the dusty hardwood floor, he remembered pitching pennies, the closest to the wall got to claim them, and how Mrs. Jones knew nothing of this box, of these links. He did not need them. He took them and placed them into his jean pocket. He placed the watches and the tie clips into the tin box and back into the large cardboard box that contained it. He moved easily and quickly in this. Then, just as quickly and just as easily, he stacked the boxes as he’d been told.

Afterwards, when a path had been cleared and Mrs. Jones could enter the room, the two of them spent the day going through Danny’s old clothes. She would pull a pile of clothes out of the closet (it was behind one of the doors and was bigger than Jack’s room in his home), and make him go through each piece. He had been shocked at first by what she expected.

He had gathered a shirt, a blazer, and a pair of slacks from the floor (she had picked out the set so that they would match—Jack wouldn’t know how, she had said) and told him to try them on. He’d picked them up and started towards the closet to change but she had stopped him.

“No,” she said. “Here, in front of me. It’s quicker”

Jack gripped the clothes in his hand, bunching the shirt in his knuckles “I’m not sure…” he said. He looked out the window, the dust that covered it, and then to the door. He felt the cuff-links in his pocket. The boxes stretched up and seemed to reach over him.

“Just change, boy. I’m too old to care about that. Your kind don’t care what a woman sees” She gave him a knowing look.

Jack slowly pulled his t-shirt over his head. He became aware of the smell of it, like wood and cigarette smoke. The smell was on everything he owned, but it was so present that it had disappeared. Here though, the strangeness of the smell and the way it covered all that he had was plain. Soft light fell across him from the dusty windows. He undid his belt, getting the length of it stuck, fighting it. It then stuck in a loop. He had twisted it putting it on and had not known it. He felt a rising in his stomach and a bubbling in his chest, and felt the backs of his eyes go soft. His face reddened. He looked sharply at Mrs. Jones, his face trying to screw itself into an embarrassed apology.  Mrs. Jones was looking at the boxes. Jack pushed down his pants, his pale and thinly-haired legs looking cold. Mrs. Jones still looked at the boxes. She seemed to be counting them.

Without her eyes on him, Jack quickly dressed himself in Mrs. Jones’ dead son’s clothing. She ‘tsked’ when she saw how the white sleeves weren’t quite long enough. The black pants were tight around his middle. She walked to him and, hooking her hard fingers into the front pockets, yanked them lower on his hips. She looked into his face with anger. She gave him another set. Again, embarrassed, he changed. Again, her eyes were not on him.

Finally, after hours of changing, Jack had a gift of neatly folded clothing. He was told to wear these when he came to work. He also had the cuff-links for which he had no use.

***

“No, goddamnit, the blue umbrellas. Easter’s past. It’s the fourth of July next. I swear, it’s like you have no sense. None at all. It’s a wonder your father hasn’t run you off.” Mrs. Jones threw the yellow  umbrella he had handed her at him. Jack was able to block it, but the sharp metal tip ripped through the thin cotton of his long-sleeved dress shirt and cut his forearm.

“Go clean yourself. Don’t bleed on anything,” she said .

The parties were planned to the smallest detail. Everything had a purpose. Jack’s father, though the Fourth was still a month away, had spent weeks planting red, white, and blue petunias all around the property. Patriotic bunting was hung around all the porches and from the eaves. Jack worked with Mrs. Jones. The upstairs portion of the house was sealed off. Jack, under Mrs. Jones’ watchful eyes, had draped thick velvet curtains at the top of the grand staircase. Upon entering the front door, the upstairs landing looked as if it were an emptied theater, the curtains waiting to be pulled back and for the show to begin. There was a golden rope that would tie the curtains closed the night of the party.

Jack left the abandoned servant’s room and walked down the dark hall. His footfalls were silent on the thick red carpet, the sound dying there at his toes. The bathrooms were scattered throughout the home and whatever wing on the second floor they happened to be on Jack would have the right door. He fumbled in the darkness trying one door and then the next. Most rooms were filled with the boxes. So many things, Jack often thought, locked up.

After he had found a room to clean himself in, disposing of the waste paper by placing it in his pocket, he returned to her. She was asleep.

Often, when left alone in a room, Mrs. Jones would lie down on the bed of the room they were in—if there was a bed, if not there was certainly a couch that she could recline in—and she would fall asleep. The first time it had happened, he had woken her as gently as he could, but it had only made her incensed. She had smacked him, screaming that she did not sleep well, not at night, never must she be woken. He had never woken her since. When this happened she would sleep for hours. He would leave her there and search the house as he pleased. He would look through the boxes that filled the house and would take things, small but precious things, from her. He would walk with them to town, pawn them, and then go shopping. He was amazed at how much some very small things were worth and how little some of the larger ones would bring. Mrs. Jones would keep a ring worth two hundred dollars next to a piece of costume jewelry, both of them wrapped in the same black velvet cloth and tucked away into the corner of a large box of silverware and china.

Sometimes these sleeps would last all day. If she slept for longer than an hour, Jack would walk the grounds near the home. The lawn and the fence rows were all beautifully kept by Jack’s father. The barns, too, were kept in a pristine sparseness, as if the house inhaled the clutter from the estate. She kept all the meat cattle off-site, in a large flat-land farm farther north. The Big House farm was now only a stud farm. She had men scour the country looking for the next great bull. She only kept a few bulls at a time, never more than five. This summer she was down to one. The summer before she had auctioned off all the rest. The one she kept had not sold at her auction. Her reserve price had been set ridiculously high, 5,000 dollars, for the Longhorn.

Jack left the house after waiting an hour for her to wake. He stood on the back porch and looked out over the farm, noting the blue, red and white petunias his father had planted all along the house. There were more of them in hanging baskets on the corners of the porch. From the porch Jack saw the side of the black barn, painted in the spring by his father and some hired men. There was a neat gravel road that ran to its front. The door to it was open. Jack wondered how much an antique dealer would give for hundred year old farm tools.

He walked from the porch and towards the barn. The sun was high. The honeyed smell of the petunias and the song of the cicadas lulled him. He walked carefully into the barn. He pulled the heavy wooden door to. The sounds of the life outside were cloaked by the oak boards, the scent of the planted flowers disappeared into the smell of animal sweat, dung and the sweet acid of hay. The darkness, after the bright of noon June, blotted his eyes. He listened to the barn. He heard a fan ticking in the breeze that ran through the barn. He heard the creak of the boards. The grunt of the bull.

Slowly, his eyes returned to him. He could see the shapes of hanging leather straps. The long wooden handle and slick metal of a scythe. He went to it and picked it up. He swung it in the dark, feeling its length, the awkward motion of back it forced on him, and he heard the whistle of the blade. “This is how men used to work,” he said to himself.

That morning he had plucked two earrings from a jewelry box. They were small pink pearls. He had rolled them in his hands, the small silver clasps on their backs stopped them from rolling. Impulsively, he pulled them from his pocket and locked them onto his ear lobe, smiling slightly at the small pinch. He laid the scythe back in its place.  The bull grunted again. In the cavern of the barn the sound echoed around him. Its hooves sounded soft, like a man’s foot stumping out a cigarette. He looked as closely as the dim light would allow and saw nothing worth taking. Again, the bull grunted.

He groped in the near dark towards the birth of the sound. There in a stall stood the bull, enormous and black. It had been born on the farm and Mrs. Jones had bred it numerous times. It shook its horns at Jack, pawing softly at the ground. It moved towards him and brought its face close to him. It chewed its cud, its mouth moving in a lazy circular motion. Jack looked into its watery eyes.

Behind him, the door to the barn started to open. He heard his father’s voice loudly addressing another man.

“Well, some damn fool of yours sure as hell shut this door. You’re like to cook that monster alive. Then we’d all have hell to pay.”

The other man tried to answer back in a voice tinged with fear. The weakness in his voice, which Jack knew would only push his father farther, was evident to even Jack.

“Just shut your goddamned mouth and help me get this place cooled down before the old woman pisses herself.”

Without thinking, Jack jumped into the bulls stall. It was large and clean. The hay trough ran along the side and Jack brushed passed the bull. It stomped and shook its head, narrowly missing Jack. He stole behind the trough and ducked into the hay on the floor. The men came through, his father leading. His father stopped as the other man continued. The sound of an industrial fan came upon the man’s disappearance.

“How you doing, you big bastard,” his father said to it. “You all right, sunshine?” He cooed to it and held out his hand. The bull shook its head again and grunted. It took two half steps and lunged with its horns. Jack’s father stepped backwards laughing as the bull’s body rammed the gate of the pen. “Mean all the way through.” He chuckled again as he did at fools.

“All right, Hoss, let’s get on.” His father shouted. “Behind as it is. Goddamned parties.” He turned and walked from the stall. The sleek shape of the other man trailed quickly behind.

The bull raged and stamped in its pen. It thrashed its horns, scratching at the boards. Jack rose gently from the floor. The bull quieted its motion. The bellows of its chest raged under the skin and muscle of its ribs. It turned and looked at him again. It turned it head to the side as if asking him a question.

“No,” he said quietly.

It turned its head again as if moving the sound of the words from one ear to the other, rolling them like a cannonball.

Jack moved gently to its side. He could feel the air vibrating from the power of the bull’s lungs. It stepped closer to him. He could feel its wet sweet breath through his shirt. He reached out his hand and touched its horn gently. Startled, it tripped backwards.

He moved past it quickly and lifted himself over the edge of the stall. He landed softly on the other side. The bull was again gently chewing its cud, the same placid look in its eyes.

***

“Don’t dawdle, ye hear me? You’re like to kill me with your slowness. Like an old maid,” Mrs. Jones said. She struck him at the back of his legs with her cane. There were to be guests from the east and from the south on the Fourth. It was a mid-week Holiday and the guests would be staying all week long. The boxes that he had moved earlier he was now being forced to move again—what he had done in June no longer sufficed.  Mrs. Jones would have him clear one section to another and then have him clear that section by moving boxes even deeper and higher into the house.

It was hot work. The Jones’ estate did not have air-conditioning or even ceiling fans. Jack carried a box fan into every room that he cleaned. Mrs. Jones moved quickly from room to room, taking stock of all the boxes, opening them and checking their contents and then, arbitrarily, instructing him where to take them.

Since the morning when his father had nearly discovered Jack in the barn, Jack had gone several times to visit the bull. He would sneak in before coming to the estate, during the cool mornings when the barn doors remained closed. The smell of the barn, the darkness, the hiding and secrecy, drew him. He would wear the women’s jewelry he had stolen from Mrs. Jones: pearl ear rings, thin diamond tennis bracelets, large jeweled rings. He would go and stand next to the stall of the bull. It seemed to have no interest in him. It would watch him for a while, but when he made no moves towards it, it would go back to breathing and eating. He would talk, telling it what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go: “Miami,” he would say. “It’s supposed to be beautiful. I’ve seen pictures and movies. I’d like to go there for college.” Other days he would talk of Alaska: “It would be cold, but the men are supposed to outnumber the women by four to one,” he said, grinning, surprised at his own honesty and the delectable nature of his fantasies. But these fantasies were short and he always knew that Mrs. Jones was waiting for him.

He carried the boxes silently from one room to another, sweating and grunting with the weight and the heat. His back and shoulders, which at first had bothered him of an evening after work, were now taut and sinewy, like his idea of a savage. He would stand in front of the mirror on the door of his room and flex his arms, tighten his thighs, and smile at what he was becoming. His father had caught him squeezing his bicep while they were eating dinner. He’d smiled at him then.

“Hard work is good for you, ain’t it? Get’s your head straight,” he had said. They were eating in the cramped kitchen. The smells of sour cornbread, bacon grease, and brown beans seemed to make the room hotter.

“Yeah,” Jack had said. “I didn’t think it’d be as tough as it is. She’s pretty constant on me. And those boxes each weigh a ton.”

“That’s how women are,” he said as he shoveled in a spoon of brown beans. “Your mother was the same way. Always something to do. Men are apt to do nothing when there’s nothing to do. Women will cook so they have dishes to do. That’s why you gotta choose careful when you get married.” He raised his eyebrows knowingly at this and leaned towards Jack. “Now show them muscles you been working on,” he said, grinning. Sheepishly, Jack flexed his arm. His father’s big hand clamped over it and squeezed.

“Nothin’ more than a knot, yet. It’s comin’ though. I knew you needed a woman to set you straight,” he said, and Jack’s heart had grown and lurched at once.

He was pulled from his remembering by Mrs. Jones. “We’re almost done with this one.” the old woman said, smoothing her home-made apron and work dress.  She was sweating heavily, her tightly pulled hair was coming loose in wisps around her face.  She too seemed to have become stronger. The springs in its frame squeaked from the sudden weight. “Turn the fan up and go fetch some ice water.”

Jack did both hurriedly, wanting to finish the rooms in this section of the house. He moved quickly and lightly. He took a shortcut down the servant’s steps to the kitchen, fetched the glasses from their spot in the third cabinet and filled the glasses with ice from the trays in the freezer and used the water from the filtered water tap. He hurried back up the servant’s steps and to the room. When he entered Mrs. Jones was asleep on the bed.  She had not fallen asleep immediately. Two small boxes which had been stacked were now on the floor by the foot of the bed. Both were opened and their contents were spread on the floor.

There were necklaces made of pearls, heavy golden rings, earrings with diamonds. Softly, Jack stole towards the boxes and the treasure. He knelt before the boxes at the old woman’s feet. He set the glasses down gently beside him, one to either side, on the dusty hardwood floors. He reached with trembling fingers to the jewelry. He ran his fingers over the pearls. He fondled the earrings. He slipped all three pieces into his pockets. He picked up a watch and laid it over his thin wrist. It was a woman’s watch, light and finely engraved. It glinted in relief of the angular bones of his wrist. He snapped the clasp. The sleek feminine curves of it and its cold metal on his sweating skin made him chill. He wouldn’t sell this one.  Carefully, he unclasped the wrist chain of the watch the watch. He held it between clasped hands. Without rising, he moved the watch towards his jeans’ pocket.

“I’d thought better of you, son” Mrs. Jones said quietly from above him.

Jack turned on his knees towards her, knocking the ice water over. The water spilled and flowed around him, wetting his knees. He looked up into the shining white face of Mrs. Jones.

She rose from the bed and Jack stayed kneeled in front of her. She smacked him across the face. He stayed kneeled, still looking up her.

The room was filled with the sounds of their breath: her breath a high whining whistle, the sound of train’s breaks, his breath the rattle of a near drowned man. Her body had straightened itself, her faced shone with righteousness. She smacked him again.

“Take it,” she said in a deadly whisper. “Take it and never let me see you again.”

Jack stood and ran from the room, gripping the watch. He ran down the hallways and out the back door. He could taste blood on his lips. He ran to the edge of the farm, to the hardwood forest that surrounded it. His face glowed with the heat of Mrs. Jones’ hand.  He knew she would call his father. He knew he could not go home. He walked through the woods until he saw the hulking shape of the barn. The dew of the evening was beginning to settle. Mosquitoes began to bite his arms. He still held the watch tightly in his hand. He clasped it onto his wrist.

He went to the barn door and pulled it open. He stepped into the blackness and felt along the rough wall with an open hand to turn on the light. The light crackled into the dark. The bull snorted at the sudden day. The barn at night was not the same as the barn at morning. The heat of the day lingered in the hay and the muck. The smells which had dissipated in the long cool night were thick in this early darkness.

Jack picked up the scythe from its place and strode to the bull. There it was, behind the high doors of its stall. It moved slowly, looking confusedly at Jack and at the scythe. Jack swung the blade, pendulum like, over his shoes. He watched the animal’s mute face as it tried to pull itself from sleep. The sweeping curve of the bull’s horns, Jack realized, matched that of the blade he swung. He leaned it against the door of the stall. He removed Mrs. Jones’ dead son’s shirt. He put on Mrs. Jones’ earrings and pearls. He turned his wrist and felt the weight of the gold watch. He took off the dead boy’s pants and shoes, leaving on only his underwear and socks. He took the scythe in his hand again. He opened the stall door.

The bull stood at the far corner, stamping its hoof. The sound of the running fan came from far off and above them. Jack imagined slashing at the bull with the blade. He wanted to cut at its face, to blind it, to knock off its horns. He imagined the struggle of his muscle against the bull’s, how its dark skin would feel as it, blind and polled, slammed into him. How he would turn under its hooves as they fell, died, together. He could see his nakedness with its blood and hide.

He imagined instead of leading it to Mrs. Jones home, riding it across the marble foyer, up the marble steps, and running down the halls, goring the endless boxes with its horns, spilling the guts of them onto the floor like blood and water, washing the home in all those things that were locked away and forgotten. Jack watched as the bull stood passively in its box.

He dropped to his knee in front of it and laid they scythe at its feet. He took off the earrings, the pearls. He turned the gold watch on his wrist, felt its lovely weight and cool. He unclasped it as well and laid it in the straw.

He rose, nearly naked, and walked away from it, leaving open the stall door. He left the light burning and the barn door open as well as he exited. The fan drew in the cool night air.  He walked from the place feeling the smooth and easy movement of the muscles of his chest, arms, and legs. The dew soaked his socks and he removed those as well, tossing them into the dark. He fought the youthful desire to run towards his father’s house, and he wondered what his father would say to him in his nakedness.

Jeff Wallace received his MA in American Literature and his MFA in Fiction from Indiana University. He is the author of numerous short stories and has been published in magazines such as The Louisville Review, Appalachian Heritage, Keyhole Magazine, Plain Spoke, and in such online journals as New Southerner, and Still:The Journal. He lives in Mt. Orab, Ohio with his wife Emily, son Oscar, and mutt Memphis. He currently teaches at Southern State Community College and is working on his first novel The True Story of the Appalachian Revolution.

The draw die booms at the front of the line and he switches on the conveyor. Panels come, and it’s load, hit the buttons, load, hit the buttons.

It seems noisier than usual this morning. They’ve turned everything up a notch again. Air hisses like angry snakes at his feet, scrap clatters down the chutes, the floor vibrates: squealing, clanging, grinding, scraping, shearing, the hundreds of presses going to war.

He reaches for the buttons and a tremendous explosion brings him off his feet. He starts shaking, can’t help it, and turns off the conveyor. A 40-ton die has just been dropped by a crane twenty feet from him.

Could get squashed like a bug in here, like old Hendricks on the door line, got his head caught in a welder. Said it was suicide…Ha! …something spooked him and he fell in.

Then he sees the foreman charging along the press line. The boss don’t scare this guy any. “Get me the safety man!”

“Turn that conveyor on.” The boss’s eyes are bloodshot from his nightly drunk.

He feels his shoulder twitch. No. Hitting him again might get him fired. Felt good the time he floored him, though. The boss looks up to the ceiling and acts real sad, like maybe he’s got problems, too. “What’s the deal?”

He points to the die. “Get the line going and I’ll call safety.”

He thinks of Granddad’s farm for some reason. When they lived in that coal camp he used to hike back to the home place to see Gramps. If only the old man could be here. He’d know what to do with this place—maybe plow it under and start over.

“Get the conveyor on.” He feels his shoulder twitch again and it scares him. Boss takes him upstairs, he’ll get time off, just get behind in child support.

The foreman shakes his head and walks away. Guess he don’t need trouble either. He turns on his belt and loads the panels, hits the buttons, sinks into the rhythm.

At break he heads up to the locker room with Al. He downs most of the Coke he bought at the vending area. Al grins and fills their cups from his bottle of bourbon. Al was in his division in Korea. Never knew him there, but it’s a sort of kinship—that and the fact they grew up not ten miles from each other in Southern West Virginia.

They sit watching the black smoke curl out of the stack at the powerhouse. The drink goes down easy. “Couple them kids went home already. Double time and all they can think about is getting out of here.”

He shakes his head. “Never been hungry, I guess.” Double time, though? That’s right! Today is Sunday.

Al laughs. “Little brats don’t know what work is. Like to get ‘em out in the fields for a day.”

Al pours himself another one and holds the bottle out. “I’m good,” he says and in a minute they ride the escalator down to the press room. As they split up he thinks about what Al said about working the fields. He never minded that, even the tobacco cutting. Come to think of it, those days sort of shine out from all the rest of his life.

He sets his drink on the greasy die shoe and pictures Granddad, Uncle John, Dad and him and the other kids out there. It was always sweet and damp in the morning. They’d be hot by noon, sweating and hungry, but there would be lunch of beans and taters and cornbread. Good thing, in a way, Korea came along and he got out of there before he went in the mines.

The drink eases the morning along, and the noise can’t get to him; but the building’s vibrating now. He always wonders why it don’t fall down.

He wishes he knew how he got this way. Depressive neurosis, the doctor always calls it. This time he’s going to make it, though. Got the best job anybody’d want. Made good money the last couple of years when he wasn’t sick. He was going to quit, but the doc talked him out of it.

Wishes he was still married. But it don’t do a bit of good to think back all them years to how it was. It’s him being crazy that did it. She and the kids just moved out one day while he was at work. All he ever done was try to make a living.

The doc figured it was from Korea, some sort of delayed reactive neurosis. Guess so, but he is never able to come up with anything real bad that happened there. All he remembers from the last few months of being married is he was real tired and fell asleep in his chair every night.

Well…least he can retire in 12 more years. You work hard, you get what’s coming to you. Don’t know what he’ll do all day, though. Don’t do nothing now when he has a day off.

The lunch whistle blows and he shuts down the conveyor and press. All there is now is this loud hum from all the 440 electric motors winding down. He checks the meter—only eleven hundred more panels and they’re finished. He grabs his lunch pail, buys a Coke, and heads upstairs to the locker room.

He’ll call the kids on the phone when he gets home today—that’s what he’ll do—make sure Tom’s keeping his grades up. Ain’t everybody can afford to send their kids to college. He hopes Tom knows that.

William Trent Pancoast‘s novels include WILDCAT (2010) and CRASHING (1983). His short stories, essays, and editorials have appeared in Night Train, The Righteyeddeer, The Mountain Call, Solidarity, US News & World Report, and numerous labor publications.Pancoast recently retired from the auto industry after thirty years as a die maker and union newspaper editor. Born in 1949, the author lives in Ontario, Ohio. (more information available at williamtrentpancoast.com)