Things are different now. Every day I do pretty much the same thing, except Sunday. No sir, I don’t push that cart on Sunday. Man deserves a bit of rest. Six days to make a livin’. One day for takin’ a rest! That’s the way I see it.

My life’s all that hard, but it ain’t no picnic either. I’ve always been—well, poor, even when I had a family and all. Lived in East town. You know, lots of people won’t even go into East town on account of the colored people. Not that it’s all colored, get me, but they live there. Stay to themselves mostly.

I like that. Nothin’ worse than nosey neighbors. Colored ain’t all that nosey, not to me anyhow. Most people don’t trust me a bit. Call me a bum. Some folks run when they see me—lots of kids do—but most people don’t pay me all that much attention. At least that’s what they want me to think. Some folks just don’t trust me. I can see ’em watchin’ out of the corner of their eye.

I make my living pickin’ up things. That’s why I need my cart. I pick up things. Sell ’em. Most of the time it’s things people throw away. People throw away some of the damndest stuff. I furnished my house that way. All my furniture—stuff people just throwed away.

And it’s not only furniture, I found an old saxophone once just lyin’ out in the alley with the rest of the junk. Or, maybe a kid put it there, I don’t know. It played good. I don’t play myself, never took lessons. But I sold it to an old colored man who swore it was in great shape. Sold it to him for $27. Man, was I livin’ high then! Ate at the cafeteria and ever’thing. Yep, Robert’s Cafeteria.

I was standin’ right in front of the cafeteria after I ate myself a fine meal when I heard a couple of guys talkin’. One of ’em was a cop. I don’t know what the other guy did. But they were standin’ there on the curb talkin’, and this guy says to the cop, “You know the difference between a bum and a ’bo?” Lots of ’bo’s still hang out back of the old Frisco Building on Main, especially at night. The cop said he couldn’t see much difference, but the other guy set him straight.

“A ‘bo will work for a living!” And he said it like that, too—living! They both laughed real hard. Well, I decided right then and there that it didn’t matter what folks called me. Those fellas laugh like that ’bout anyone who ain’t like them.

I work, all right. Real hard sometimes. Lots of folks don’t really know nothin’ about me and maybe not a hell of lot of other stuff either for that matter. Some folks think that they are so damn smart. I never had a whole lot of schoolin’. Education just don’t mean a whole lot to me. I work, and I have a home. Oh, it’s not much to look at, but it’s a home, all right. It’s all I need. I don’t need all that much.

Yep, I work, all right. I cover this whole town in about a week. Just about a week. Up and down every street. I don’t really know how many miles I walk in a day, pushin’ that cart. Never even tried to figure it out. Too many. But one thing for sure, I wear out shoes pretty damn quick—even good leather shoes. I get lots of shoes. People throw away real good ones sometimes.

Like I said, I don’t know how many miles I walk or even how big this two-bit town really is. Sign says: JOPLIN: POPULATION 38,711. But what does that really tell a guy?

I’m a guy who likes my privacy—maybe I said that before—but people all over this town recognize me. I’m a bit of a landmark here, if I do say so myself. Even the kids. I can hear ’em screamin’, “Ol’ Henry! Ol’ Henry!” when they see me comin’. Screamin’ and squealin’ like I was a star out of a monster movie showing at the Paramount Theatre or even the Fox.

There’s a group of ’em—two girls, two boys, always together—climb up an old mulberry tree out by the alley in the north end of town. Not way up north where the rich folks live. No, this is before you get to those curvy streets with the alphabet names. About the three hundred block of Jackson or Sergeant. Up near the DeTar Clinic. Just a couple of blocks from the Safeway.

The minute those kids see my cart turn into the alley, the girls go to squealin’—even before they even see me. Then up they go into that tree, all four of ’em. They sit there as quiet as kids can sit, which ain’t very quiet, and they eat those mulberries—bugs and all. Bet they eat a quart of bugs every summer! It’s mostly in the summer when I see those kids. I just hold my head up and keep on walkin’—walkin’ and pretendin’ I don’t even know they’re up there. And they sit up there gigglin’ and munchin’ those berries. Bugs and berries—ha!

I remember one day last summer, they were up in that tree. I remember that day real well ’cause I turned into that alley on purpose. You see, I found a bunch of bottles of beer behind Jimmy’s. I don’t know who left them there because Jimmy don’t sell no beer in his place. It was a hot day. Anyway I drank about three bottles before I put the rest in my cart. So when I got to that alley, I was wantin’ to pee real bad.

There’s a spot down there with a lot of trees—well mostly bushes—but they’re tall enough for a guy to take a quick leak. In my line of work, you learn the value of bein’ quick. Comes in handy lots of times. I just sort of rummage through the trash. Then I slip off for a bit—you know, take care of “business.” Sometimes it’s one kind of business, sometimes it’s another.

Well, usually those kids stayed in that tree until I was long gone. But wouldn’t you know it, this was the day they came down. All four of ’em right there behind me. So I had to go on pushin’ my cart two, three more blocks. I was about to bust!

In the summertime, I see those kids all over town. I bet some days they cover about as many blocks as I do, but they never go into East town. Except this one time. I saw them over the viaduct at Landreth Park. That’s in East town—well, sort of. Anyway I saw those kids at the swimming pool at Landreth Park late that evening. At first I didn’t take a whole lot of notice ’cause I was on my way home. You’d think those kids would be at Schifferdecker or one of those fancy parks over there, not in East town—not in the swimming pool in East town. But it was those same kids. I’m sure.

Helen Losse’s first book, Better With Friends, was published by Rank Stranger Press (Mt. Olive, NC) in 2009. She is the author of two chapbooks, Gathering the Broken Pieces and Paper Snowflakes. Her recent poetry publications and acceptances include The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Review, Blue Fifth Review, Heavy Bear, Referential Magazine, Hobble Creek Review and Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont. She is the Poetry Editor for The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Most drivers, the ones leaning into the steering wheels of their cars and mini-vans, slowed down to a crawl through the curve. They knew the old oil mixed with the first sprinkles of new rain was worse than black ice. So they drove like it was midnight in December. The short-beds blew past Murphy’s loud and hard, spraying bits of coal the size of quarters from beneath loose tarps. Paid by the load, these drivers with call names like Spider, Grape Ape and Wild Bill didn’t care if the road ahead was coated in napalm.

When a rogue chunk of coal bounced across Route 6 and skipped to land at the tip of Hank Clayton’s boot, he picked it up and tossed it at a stray dog huddled near the edge of the garage.

“Hank! That anyway to treat a dog?”

It was his granddaddy, Burl, crossing Route 6 from his house atop the hill on Beauty Street, a short walk to the truck garage and adjacent building, which he owned.

Hank threw his hand up, formally, apologetically, and Burl waved him over to where he stood like a totem pole of flannel and khaki in front of the brick-broken building.

Checking the garage for Murphy or drivers and mechanics and finding it empty, Hank crossed the bramble thickets that separated Murphy’s and his granddaddy’s building by less than ten feet. When he made it over, Burl didn’t move his gaze from the sagging top of the building.

“We’ll need to start on the roof first,” Burl said and then looked to Hank. He adjusted his suspenders. “Gonna remodel this building. It’s about time, and I need your help. Particularly on the roof.”

Hank shielded his eyes from the sun with the back of his hand and studied the roof. The building was two stories and even from the ground he could see boards peeking up from the edge like driftwood, split and blackened, soft as sponge.

“I’m working over here for Murphy now, granddaddy,” Hank said, and motioned to the garage.

“What? With that bunch? That’s just tinkerin. What’s Peaceful got you doin?”

“Spraying down trucks and doing some repairs and so forth,” Hank answered.

“Doin some repairs, you say?” Burl went to the side of the building and placed his hand there, like a nervous father checking to see if his newborn was still breathing. “I shoulda taught you weldin,” he said after a time.

“Well, all the same, I don’t mind to help, but it’ll have to be on my days off,” Hank said. “I’m just working three days a week right now.”

“That gives us three other days to manage with, then,” Burl said.

“Four,” Hank corrected.

“Three. We don’t work Sundays.”

***

Like always, the rumbling crunch and hitch of his neighbor’s car grinding to start woke Hank at just after 7:00 a.m. Since renting the place more than a year ago, he had yet to use an alarm clock. Just went back to sleep on days off and got out of bed with the sound of the gutted car engine for days when there was work. Today there was work. Soggy boards to be pulled up and replaced and God only knew what else.

He went to the kitchen in the barely light of morning and poured a cup of coffee from half a pot left from yesterday. A microwave would be nice, he thought, gulping down the cold coffee quickly and cleaning out the cup at the sink. But then he should have just made a new pot, but granddaddy would be waiting at the building soon and he was a ten minute drive away.

Skipping a shower Hank dipped his head under the sink instead, wetting down the rat nests that had twirled into his hair during sleep. He toweled off with a dish rag and combed hurriedly with his fingers, thinking of the ladder, double extended to the roof, a dread settling into his stomach.

He’d never said a word of it aloud, but the building was pretty much a shit hole. At one time, there was a couple nice apartments upstairs and one downstairs, and a barber shop beside that. But that had been years and his granddaddy had bought it after all that was gone. Whatever plans he had, they were put on the shelf a long time ago. That was until yesterday.

Burl was there before Hank pulled in and work started right away. It was just after 7:30 a.m. When a light drizzle started just as they had the ladder positioned alongside the building, Hank secretly began to wonder if he might get a little money for helping. Some pay could go a long way in covering the rent and utilities and other debts he thought about less specifically, the ones that nagged him especially hard. Then the drizzle lifted off, back into the clouds, which moved away in a slow bulk across the ridge and dissipated like a swarm of colorless wasps.

The building was a shipwreck raised to the surface just off Route 6 and left alone, no treasure to speak of, no fine discoveries. From the roof, Hank could see into to what was once the top floor bedrooms, spyglassed through holes that looked as if they might have been the result of boulders falling from the nearby heavens of John Attic Ridge. There were more than ten of these busted out sections, the roof an opened mouthful of wooden cavities. And the rot inside was that much worse.

Hank lowered himself steadily through one of the holes during a break, mindful of rusty nails and countless other objects left in dangerous shards from the constant, pushing weight of weather and wind. Below was a bleached out dresser and he tested it with first one foot then the other until he was positioned solidly. He did the same with the floor of the old apartment until he was standing in a kaleidoscope of light from the outside world distilled through thousands of hidden cracks in the filmed over windows and plaster-curled walls.

People had certainly lived here. Families. In an area that served as a kitchen there were four chairs that seemed blown about the room. Two tilted against a far wall and the others sat upright but on opposite sides of the room. There were dishes in a cancerous sink.

Everywhere the floors were trap-door weak. Hank gazed up at the hole through which he had left the unfiltered sunlight behind as he made his way down a hallway running the length of the apartment. Not more than five steps in, he moved with caution through a doorway leading to what was once a bedroom. Claustrophobic in size, it was a child’s bedroom, he figured. A rectangle of cleaner hardwood suggested a place where a bed might have once been. In the corner he found odd toys, action figures, arms twisted and gnawed from where rats had rushed through and tested the items for food.

Hank stood for too long examining the toys. For a crazy moment he wished he might just stay in the room, sleep nights on the clean rectangle, the negative exposure his place of rest. At dawn he would arrange the toys in the room and sit quietly in the kitchen while the morning opened up the light show through the cracks in the walls.

“Hank! Let’s get back at it!”

The sound of his granddaddy’s voice ringing out from above, the shuffle of his boots overhead, muted but insistent, pulled him backwards from the bedroom. He went up through the broken section of roof and spent the next couple of hours forgetting the toys and kitchen chairs.

At lunch, they drove to the IGA for hot dogs with chili made from fresh hamburger and sloppy joe sauce. By dinner, Hank thought his granddaddy looked tired and finished, and with about an hour of daylight left, he called it a day. The ladder was retracted and tied to the back of the Datsun truck.

Of the thirty or so squares needed to repair the roof, they had stripped about four and replaced just two rotted boards. The work with his granddaddy had been uncustomary in its slowness, easy-going and a surprise to Hank. With the extra time and a decent well of energy left, he decided to drive straight to Jimmy Cole’s poker game on Thompson Fork Road.

***

He had stowed away twenty dollars for the buy-in and took the bill out of his shirt pocket as soon as he walked in the door to Jimmy’s tool shop, a rickety structure originally envisioned as a two-door garage which eventually became the poker room and general hideaway. He was greeted by familiars when he placed his twenty on the table in the center of the room.

“Sure Shot Clayton,” Jimmy said as Hank pulled up a chair. Hank’s dad had shot a man in the kneecap during a poker game once when the deed to somebody’s house was folded into a large pot in a no-limit hand. Since all these men had known his dad, Hank had inherited the name Sure Shot right off, the first night he played in the game.

“Who’s winning?” Hank said, counting chips out in four denominations of green, black, red and blue from a silver case on what would have been a fine, metal workbench. He had noticed Peaceful Murphy sitting in, but left it alone in his thoughts. This was poker. Not work.

“Thing’s already started,” Jimmy said.

“Okay if I take a hit on however many blinds and jump in?” Hank asked.

Jimmy looked at the others and they agreed by offering a silent disregard to the question. Murphy snorted lightly into the air.

The game usually went far into the morning with a tournament style Jimmy implemented after becoming a huge fan of the World Series of Poker on television a few months back. Before that it was straight money games and dealer’s choice. Now it was tournaments with timed blind increases and payouts to first and second place. And always no-limit hold ’em.

“This game’s the Cadillac of poker, boys,” Jimmy said, a cigarette hanging from his lip like some enormously long tooth busted loose but hanging on. He had just pulled in his third straight pot.

“Lucky tonight, Jim.”

Still stacking his chips even, Hank could tell it was Murphy’s voice offering Jimmy comment. Jimmy was one of Murphy’s drivers. The tone, sarcastic and accusatory, irked Hank, and he found himself wishing he would have went on home. This might not be work, but it was Murphy, and he couldn’t afford to toss away twenty dollars just for getting rattled at the table.

When Hank turned to the table with his chips balanced in both hands he saw Jimmy had already folded his buy-in with the rest, a wound tight roll of bills on a unvarnished table inches, always inches, from his elbow. He was in the game now whether he wanted to be or not.

“Drove by today and saw you and Burl on that old roof,” Murphy said as soon as Hank was in his seat.

Hank didn’t say much, just agreed, and the game went on in a ruffling of worn out cards and the clacking of clay chips. Jimmy was getting the best of it, but Hank had built a small stack, picking his spots and laying low.

When Murphy spoke to him again, it wasn’t about the game, no attempt to rattle him from his conservative, grind-it-out approach. But what Murphy said rattled him all the same.

“Tell Burl I’ll give him ten thousand for that buildin,” Murphy said in a bored voice, the voice he used when doing business. “As is. Not ten or twenty months from now after you all finish piddlin with it.”

It was Murphy’s deal and when Hank didn’t answer he stopped the rainbow movement of cards, placed the deck in his left hand and looked directly at Hank.

Hank had hoped to let the comment go, just idle talk he had no real stake in. Murphy’s continued stare told him that was not to be the case.

“It’s not mine to negotiate,” Hank said.

Murphy snorted again, resumed shuffling. “Who can talk to Burl about anything these days?”

Four hands later, Hank busted out and drove home thinking of how he should have checked kings on the river instead of pushing against a possible flush, thinking of how to mention ten thousand dollars to his granddaddy.

***

Alzheimer’s. Or Old Timer’s, as the old timers called it. Early onset, in his granddaddy’s case, but getting worse. And fast.

On the roof the next morning, Hank worked and thought of what it must feel like to lose memories. He imagined it would be better in some ways. But with his granddaddy, it only seemed to be recent memories that were gone. He remembered everything about his distant past, his days welding to build tipples or fixing machinery on contract at this mine or that mine. It was the daily things that were slipping. Mentioning Murphy’s offer was a daily thing, and Hank wondered how it would be handled. He decided to mention Murphy’s proposal as they loaded into the Datsun, eating their hotdogs as they went.

“Why would I want to do that? No sale,” Burl said, and pointed to a drop of chili on the seat between Hank’s knees. “Looks like that hotdog run straight through you.”

Hank wiped away the chili with the back of his sleeve. “That’s a good amount of money for a building that’s in bad shape,” he said. “You’ll spend more fixing it than Murphy’s offering to give.”

“I welded the gas line all across this ridge, all the way into Fischer County,” was the only response. “I even stayed in Fischer County, a town called Viper, through the week for more than a month. Came home on the weekends.”

The moment had passed. Until they arrived back at the building, the present moment was for his granddaddy what Hank imagined must have been a light sandstorm across a memorized landscape, like a room stirred in dust. A kaleidoscope where objects once sacred were left behind to be fought over by vermin.

***

The phone rang before he made it to the couch that evening. It was Angie. Her voice seemed distant and thick in the receiver. In the background, the muffled sound of drumming music told him she was somewhere with a live band. It was Saturday night and she was asking about child support.

“I’m behind. I know that,” Hank said tiredly, reclining onto the couch and closing his eyes. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. Murphy pays Monday. I’ll send it to you then.”

Behind closed eyelids Pearl played in the front yard, washed out images almost gone in his mind except her smile and the way she held onto the handlebars so tight her knuckles were white as clean chips of porcelain. Her smile was his happiness, her fear the knot in his stomach. Behind closed eyelids he held gently to the small of her back, the tiny muscles tightened there, moving across the bumpy terrain of the overgrown yard, all bravery and joy. And then her laughter, soaking the outside world in beauty and purpose. Life in fading images, a scrapbook in his mind sharp at the edges with the shrapnel of his slow-beating heart, images fading not from overexposure to light, but from a dark so deep it glowed in places like the transparent skin of creatures that would never see a morning unfold, never feel a breeze across a summer yard, the clenched embrace of another living thing more important than their own buried existence.

“You there, Hank?” Angie asked, the drumming beat louder as he figured she was making her way back to the entrance of the bar.

“I’m here,” he said.

“Just send the money to Mom’s address.”

He opened his eyes in the dark. “When can I see Pearl again?”

“When you get some groceries,” she said, and pushed a dial tone through his ear.

***

Murphy didn’t speak of his offer the next day at work. He was gone for most of the day. In and then out, but mostly out. Hank went about his business as usual, but noticed his granddaddy’s building more than before. No longer was it something his eye passed over. It loomed against the valley’s ridge line as jagged, still, as the bushy treetops in the backdrop. His granddaddy never wondered down from Beauty Street and so the building sat undisturbed and mute.

Hank let his thoughts wander during work about the building. He rekindled the image of the kitchen in his mind, remodeling it there with the Formica table top and only two chairs near the middle of the room just off from the sink, now a fine, shiny white with a silver-finished faucet and knobs . One for himself and one for Pearl. As metal clanked in first one tone then another, as air pressure released and the sharp barking of the metal and high hissing of the air mixed with other sounds emitting from the truck garage, Hank moved on to the bedroom.

Pink would burst loose here, onto the walls and then, a shade darker, along the crowning and trim. The clean rectangle was covered again with Pearl’s canopied day bed and pictures and designs adorned the walls, flowers and butterflies, clowns and kittens. But most of all Hank placed toys throughout the room. Stuffed animals and porcelain tea sets, dolls of all sizes, a vanity with a tiny chair for pretend preening, stacks of story books and more stacks of coloring books, an entire corner of the room devoted to these books, complete with a dandelion-colored bookshelf. The room would always smell of freshly washed hair, the aroma of a bubble bath perpetually lingering, an unseen misting of newness.

Hank rubbed grease across the knees of his pants and nodded to Spider as the trucker crossed the garage on his way to the front office, a shuffle and stomp of girth, his buzz cut hair slicing through the air before him like thousands of tiny razors. He returned quickly, swinging the connecting office door just hard enough for the hinges to stretch and give simultaneous pops before relaxing back into place.

“Where’s Murphy?”

“Not sure,” Hank answered. He pushed a truck tire upright and started wobble walking it to a short-bed parked sideways at the entrance.

“Goddamit,” Spider muttered. “Owes me money. I’ve held off on payday like this enough. He’ll have to ask somebody else next time. Just cause I ain’t got kids don’t mean I can always be the one he asks to hold off when things get tight. You tell him if you see him he owes me money.”

When things get tight? The comment surprised Hank. He eased the wheel to a stop and propped it against his side and turned to Spider.

“Murphy has money problems?” Hank asked.

Spider laughed at this and rubbed the top of his head. “It’s not exactly that kind of situation, even though I guess it might’ve sounded that way. Just tell him. He’ll know just what it is by exactly the way it sounds.”

Laughing again, this time more to himself than out loud, Spider started to the back of the truck where he had wedge-parked his own.

“What kind of situation is it, then?” Hank called to Spider, but the trucker was already climbing into his cab, cutting off an oncoming suburban as he pulled onto Route 6 and slow-geared away.

Hank rolled the wheel, standing about four feet high between his clutched hands, and leaned it against the parked short-bed. The driver was a man by name of Caudill, but everybody, like everybody else in turn, used their call names instead. Caudill’s call name was Torch. When Hank started on the wheel, Torch appeared from behind a stack of fuel barrels and called across the lot.

“Let Mackey do that, boy,” Torch said. He was waving his hand. “Murphy ain’t paying you no mechanic wages. Why in hell would you offer em up?” And then to some indistinct distance behind him he called out, “Mackey! Wheel’s ready!”

Mackey, a thin man with a patchy beard who had worked for Murphy for more than twenty years, in turn appeared from a corner of the garage. Hank saw Mackey throw a half-smoked joint into a pile of discarded metal fixings, rub his eyes and quicken his pace until it was just him and Hank standing beside the truck.

“Murphy gone for the day?” It was the first words Mackey had spoken to him in the three weeks Hank had worked at the garage. Usually he just finished his work, motioned his hand for another part, which Hank was always expected to intuitively know, and then returned behind the garage. He smoked joints the entire shift and was the only garage employee who could get by with such a thing. The drivers, it seemed to Hank, did whatever the hell they wanted on the road. Better for tracking along that napalm and getting another load. “Murphy gone for the day?” Mackey asked again, this time louder, upset at having to repeat himself.

“I don’t know,” Hank replied. He didn’t like Mackey’s tone. “How am I supposed to know?”

Mackey stared at him hard for four or five uncomfortable seconds and then laughed hard and started on the wheel, motioning with his hand when this or that was needed and Hank complied without comment until Mackey finally settled back and, peering about the lot, took a joint from his shirt pocket and held it lovingly beneath the orange flame of an ageless Zippo lighter.

Hank settled beside him, sitting directly on the ground even though Mackey had made the changed and busted tire his own personal recliner.

“Why would Spider think Murphy is having money problems?” Hank finally asked. He waited patiently, watching Mackey take a long drag on the joint, hold it for so long when he exhaled there was nothing in the air but air.

“The hell you talkin bout?” Mackey said breathlessly.

“Spider said he was tired of waiting on his paycheck. Said Murphy shouldn’t always stick him short when the money was tight,” Hank said.

Mackey laughed hard again, raising his legs into the air and wiggling his filthy boots, the tongues flapping without the benefit of laces.

“What?”

“What, shit,” Mackey said. “I forget you’re green, what a month into the job? I guess I forget because of your Papaw and all. Burl could weld and do electric like nobody.” He stopped and took another long drag and then said again, “Like. Nobody.”

Just as he was expected to know instinctively what tool or part Mackey might need next, Hank felt that something was coming, a further explanation. He waited for the harmless old burnout to finish. But there was a long silence and Hank stared evenly at Mackey, watched him take a last draw from the joint and crush it carefully underfoot. The old mechanic looked first at Hank and then around the lot again. Still nobody around.

“This might be some information useful to you, now that I think of it,” Mackey said after the long pause. “Old Spidey’s woman, Charlene, she’s a whore. You might get in a lick or two for the right price. I’ve had a shot or two when times were, you know, rough, like you got.”

Hank stood up, dusting off the back of his pants, feeling metal shavings peel into the palms of his hands. The metal shavings might have slipped beneath his very skin and made him invisible. The thought of pulling good timing Mackey off his rubber recliner and knocking him around some passed through his mind, a fleeting fantasy, a daydream, the place he’d been most of the day anyway. Instead he lazily shook his head and started back to the face of the garage.

“Bullshit,” he said, resting himself now in the dankness of the garage.

Mackey smiled and grabbed a variety of tools, turning back to the wheel for a beat or two and then turned back to Hank.

“Don’t believe me? Call her up then, greenhorn. Number’s in the book under Michael and Charlene Hall. That’s Spider’s real name. Michael.”

***

Dusk settled across the house slowly and Hank watched it fall across the kitchen and then the couch and then the living room floor until he sat in near total darkness. He was satisfied to see the darkness overtake the room. The room, the dormant items within the room, brought pain like he’d never felt. A blue and pink trimmed toy playpen for dolls, Pearl’s dolls, in the corner, now obscured by the dying dusk, was an open nerve in the daylight. In the daylight he watched over and over again Pearl leaning carefully over the edge and placing her dolls in, tucking them so gently and then pulling them out again to feed and fuss over them, rock them in her skinny, motherly arms, smiling at her gentleness and care.

Ten thousand dollars would bring Pearl back.

Angie would take the money and let him have Pearl. She didn’t want her anyway, and her parents were tired and old and couldn’t care for a child. They’d be happy to see either of parents take her in. Angie would go for it. Ten thousand dollars would be the shining light of God across this dying room of dusk and pain. Ten thousand dollars would be his salvation.

Draped across the couch, Hank rubbed his forehead, hoping it wasn’t the pain and hurt making him think crazy. He looked again, squinting now through the full darkness to make out the toy playpen across the room. All of Pearl’s toys were still in their place since the last time she came, more than a month ago. A stuffed animal, a dog she had named Spotty, a toy purse and a pair of princess slippers, a purple plastic microphone left dead across the coffee table. He picked up the phone and, instead of turning on a light, flicked his lighter, brought a cigarette to life and then flipped open the phone book. He found Murphy’s number and dialed quickly. He focused on the open nerves, driving him forward in the dark.

Sheldon Lee Compton survives in Kentucky.  His work has appeared in Emprise Review, >kill author, Fried Chicken and Coffee, Metazen and elsewhere.

This was springtime, and every barbed-wire fence in Lonoke County was blown over with honeysuckle. I was sixteen, getting driven around in Becky Mallison’s Gold Grand Prix, ZZ Top playing out the moonroof. She was a senior cheerleader with cold black hair, and my mother had hit the ceiling when she’d showed up at the front door in cutoffs and nipples showing through her halter top.

“Would you like to drive around?” she asked through the screen door, the car keys jingling in one hand. 1976, the year the great tornado ripped the roof off our post office, so mail got up in the jet stream and they found our stamped letters on the glittering ice fields of Canada.

I said, “Can I, Mama?”

O.W., my stepfather, was dead-heading home, his truck emptied of slaughterhouse turkeys.

“Okay,” she said. “If Jimmy goes.”

Becky said, “Fine,” and the three of us walked out and got in her Grand Prix, drove over the railroad tracks and there it was on the left, a slate grey trailer with a scarred head painted on its side.

We cut into the parking lot, cruised into a parking place and pulled the E-brake. “Want to see?” she asked, and smiled this wide smile. One of her halter straps had slipped and she was tan already, and her teeth were white and even. My kid brother and I got out, followed her up to the folding table where the truck driver sat with a cigar box, twenty-five cents magic markered on the flap.

My pockets were empty.

“Here,” Becky said, and passed over a dollar. “Go first.”

I climbed the steps, Jimmy at my heels. Leviathan’s arrival was an annual deal. Somehow it’d got out that the thing could commune with the spirit world, so everybody and their momma came to stand in line.

Jimmy pointed. “These idiots believe it talks to dead people.”

A lady up ahead of us lay down talking to the whale’s head. She’d got down on her hands and knees, put her mouth up close to one of the filmy eyes. “Daddy?” she was saying. “Can you hear me? Are you listening?”

“Shit,” Jimmy said. “Who’d p-pay for that?”

Behind us, Becky said, “Me.”

The woman on her hands and knees was crying–the grief was hard on her, you could tell. I wondered what I’d have to say to the whale’s head when my time came. I was thinking about the other-worldly feel of getting your ass kicked, how Momma’s face looked like inside the car the time O.W.’d killed it on a railroad track, got out, shut the door and walked away, how Momma’d sat there and hummed “Moon River.” until he disappeared.

“They sing,” Becky said, the three of us up to the twin blow holes now. Above, a sign said Leviathan was also known as Devil Fish, Gray Back, Mussel Digger and Rip Sack. The fifty-foot cow was permanently blind, the sign said, from swimming over mussel beds on her side, scraping up Goliath mouthfuls. “They can hear each other for a thousand miles.”

Jimmy and I looked at each other. Outside, somebody racked off muffler glass-packs– O.W.’s Chevy, it sounded like.

The woman cut us a hard look. Then she turned back to the whale, put her lips to the fetid face and kissed it. “I know. I know you didn’t mean to, Daddy. I fer-gid you.”

It was embarrassing, the whale’s eyes like greasy saucers.

We didn’t talk on the way home. The car was quiet and hot. Summer was on us. I had a job in concrete–a car was in the works. O.W. was mowing the grass when we got home–that look in his eye.

Becky let us out. “That lady was bonko,” she said, looked me square in the face. “Calling that thing Daddy.”

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

This is not a conversation possible without dope and shame. Jasper knows this, and he’s helped himself to Jackson’s brick of hash. By damn God, if I could catch up with him, but Jackson’s only a drinking buddy and not much else, so I’m not about to press my luck with what I’ve still got wagered on the table. But Jasper’s lost in the music of his own speech, and soon enough, all of us are growing bored and mean.

“You mean you make that little ole girl ram her Christian hand up your butt?” This coming from Skintone, his yellow neck bulging from his shirt collar like case meat. “That’s Goddamned Godless. I ought to put the law on you, Jasper.”

But Jasper will not let the romance be sullied. His eyes leak manly tears. He pleads. Jackson, unimpressed, heads over to the porch fridge and yanks out a pint of chilled vodka and pours out four glasses, setting them down at our open hands.

Now, to appreciate this, you’ve got to lay eyes on Jasper. He’s not a small man, but a soft mountain of toneless matter, skin moist as a worm. And this girl, this Janelle Hicks, is herself no teenage apocalypse. Skinny through the hips with a bad limp. When she comes at you quick, it’s spot on for a loosed asylum patient. But if we are to hear his version of the story right, this is our Lancelot and Guinevere. Our triumph and destiny.

“No, no,” Jasper hollers through his crying. “These are the truest plights of a good man’s heart. No law. . .no law of nature is broken here.”

It is hot, humid for nighttime in the mountains, and the mosquitoes are thumping us something wicked. Jasper was supposed to buy citronella sticks, but he says the store was out. It’s possible, I guess. At least he didn’t pass up the bag of lemons Skintone demanded, the sucked rinds now sloughed into the ashtray alongside the bashed teeth of unfiltered Camels. That’s where Skintone gets his color from, sucking on those grocery store lemons night and day, drawn to them like sin.

Skintone flings his cards on the table, curses us all blind and kisses his vodka. I’ve never once seen this religious fool so sober and each lick of drink seems only pushes him closer to clarity. We all spend a while sitting and listening for each other’s human sounds.

“You know what I have a mind to do,” Jackson says, not really talking to any of us so as the face of his own whim. “But to go out and run us a fox.”

Skintone snaps his eyes up from his mood. “Shit, how long’s it been since you worked them dogs? Four, five months?”

Jackson tips back in his chair, his hands joined over the back strap of his baseball cap, a pose that might just be enough to hold his brains in.“That doesn’t have nothing to do with it.”

I know we have no choice but to follow once Jackson begins to talk this way. He is our head, our heart, and we amble after his signals like numbed legs. I gather my car keys and billfold in my pocket while Jackson steps around to the backyard where the dogs are already alive and yammering, sensing something in the night air.

“I need to ride with you,” Jasper says to me.

“What do you mean, you need to?” Skintone spits. He’s raging with a deep, sinister calm.

“That’s not your concern,” Jasper whispers back at him, taking me by the elbow as we walk out toward the edge of the brick hard yard. I can smell dog shit out here somewhere.

I know where Jackson will want to hunt. Spellman Holler: about fifteen minutes outside of town, not far from where the old derelict Sanction County railyard has become a simple steel ache in a history only slightly brighter than this one. It is the place we all go when we go down to forget ourselves and what we lost some place just beyond faithful memory. We go to get drunk and hate one another for being caught alive together in this world and convince ourselves it is all because we love each other like brothers.

There is a steady watershed out there in the holler. Runoff courses the plumbed vertical shale, and after a good rain you can hear the sluice coming down like breathing from the mountains’ darkness. It is a kind of joyful death.

The car engine shudders and the valves rattle before the idle eventually roars and steadies. We lurch forward as I spin a wide circle, the CV joints popping like an old man’s knees. The night is washed with the vodka and my eyes search the road and the melted sweep of the treeline gusting past. I have my own bottle beneath the seat, and I bubble it twice or more as I drive on. I hear Jasper talking, but the words are queered. Something has fallen from them, defused by the fact of his steady whimpering. I have never heard a grown man cry for so long at a stretch. Of all that I hear, the only sounds that I register are her name and that word that is supposed to mean everything.

“Love is. . .is love,” he moans.

I know this. Every fool does. But true enough, I can see the genius of Jasper in the moment, the reason he is locked in fat flesh and womanish bones. He has conjured something dear from himself and I find him so suddenly beautiful it is hard not to kiss him full on the mouth. The urge is so strong I swerve wide in the bend, kicking gravel high off the shoulder, dinging the bullet riddled octagon of a stop sign. The back end of the car switches for a moment and then runs straight and true once the tires gain traction. We ride. The vodka drains.

Some impulse guides me to the place where I know we will find Jasper’s love, stooped over beneath Christmas lights strung from dented wainscoting, hustling neat booze to the late night drunks on a round plastic tray. Her uncle’s bar, where she works for nickels and catcalls. To this gloomy keep, we ride. Oh, Janelle, the lover rushes to you, my sweet!

I may be drunk. I may be. I nose into the gravel lot and meet Jasper’s amazed eyes.

“Take her, love her,” I say. “But hurry up.”

Jasper falls out of the car door and cuts his temple on the steel edge, ribboning his skull like a present, but he does not falter. He does not tarry. He careers ahead. Though I stay in the car, my love is with him, carried on his sallow sweating shoulders. In my mind I can see the sedated faces turned towards him, the gaping holes of their voiceless outrage. I can see his wan, female prize, wearing a cocktail apron and blushing coyly beneath her acne, eager to be whisked away to sylvan boughs and a gentle, loving rape.

I am driving again, forgetting them, rolling slowly out when Jasper beats upon the trunk of the car. I remember to stop, letting him and sweet ugly Janelle fling themselves into the back seat, their feet caught and dangling for a moment before I lurch forward and the door swats shut. They make sounds with each other’s poor bodies as I drive on toward the holler, the proof of their love delivered in a sharp chemical truth that begins to tell in my nostrils.

When we meet the holler, Jasper and Janelle have righted themselves. I watch them in the rear view mirror as they match buttons and calm their displaced hairs. The car is humid inside.

Skintone and Jackson are already here, getting the dogs out of their kennels. When he sees us, Skintone comes forward with a lemon peel smile, but his words are not friendly.

“What in the hell, Jasper. You bringing jailbait out here, now?”

“Stop your bitching,” Jackson says. “Let’s get out in the woods.”

So we do, moving down towards the treeline with the dogs thumping forward, eager for scent. We will not follow. That is not the nature of the hunt. Instead, we will build up a fire and put out sweating bodies next to it, heating ourselves to the point of pain because that is what we have always done. Because that is what the fox hunt is. That and listening to the long bays of the dogs as they crash through the distant dark. We will do that and carry our minds through the night after them as they chase the victim to ground. There will be no death, because death would end the trial too soon. Death would interfere with the love of torment, in both the dogs and the men, and that is something no one wants to happen.

Skintone snaps sticks and erects a small temple of kindling for burning. Jackson touches a spurt of flame from his cigarette lighter and we watch as the flame crawls up and begins to live. Soon, bigger deadfall is added, the ugly broken gifts of stormwreck. In time, the dogs cut a scent and start bellowing. Soon, I am lost to the tango of the building fire. The voices cross in the pale pulse where we all sit, but I do not say a word.

The dogs will run the length of the holler. They will run it and be deceived when the fox cuts a clever retreat, but they will run it again, venturing everything to bring the prey to bay. I have always known this because I have been alive forever.

I will not do anything now. I will not stand up to defend the weak when they are assailed. I will remain here, cut to the bone by the nearness of the fire when Skintone reels back and slams the vodka bottle against a stone. He will charge at Jasper, screaming the wrath of Christ to come, the wages of all sins of the flesh descending. He will spit his lemon peel from his jaundiced face, the pure sour triumph as the blood rises. Jackson will look away and listen for the dogs and Janelle will remain small and present, a mere figurine in rags. But I will not do anything now, though I am a defender of love, of the cock and the cunt. I am a defender of all the machinery of happiness. But that will do little to calm Skintone’s raging certainty. He is an admirable monster to me. None of us can do anything to stop him as he comes at Jasper, striking savagely at him with the complete true pleasure of an emptied and righteous heart.

Charles Dodd White was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1976. He currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina where he teaches writing and Literature at South College. He has been a Marine, a flyfishing guide and a newspaper journalist. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Collagist, Night Train, North Carolina Literary Review, PANK, Word Riot and several others. His novel Lambs of Men, a story of a Marine Corps veteran of World War I in Western North Carolina, will be published by Casperian Books in Fall 2010. He is currently at work on another novel and a collection of short stories.

Caroline heard of a different school in Bonham, some charity deal. My kid didn’t need anyone’s charity. But the authorities said they would arrest Fred next time he fisticuffed on school property. They would put him in juvenile. They’d relish that record-breaking youngest arrest in all of Tennessee.

Caroline pried open the teakettle and palmed the wad of bills. It’d shrunken. We vowed not to argue. Bad example for Fred. So we packed all we had into the truck and lumbered up the hump on the one road that crossed that mountain, a steep and pitted trace no longer maintained by the state. We ripped through bramble and green switches, shedding useless heirlooms. From the dizzying ridgeline, gravity showed us to Bonham.

Still whiplashed, we settled into life on the wrong side. Our neighbor walked a big cat – maybe a panther – on a leash. It was a dog’s leash and we saw it strain into the cougar or panther’s pulsing neck. This guy ran a small zoo in the woods behind his property and he looked mean, and we knew his kind of operation: cramped wire cages, no concern for the natural habitats. But he was friendly, too, mean-looking and friendly. Fred wanted to pet the panther so we waved and the zookeeper waved back, hand trailing smoke into the blue, and Fred put his hand out too, trusting both stranger and beast.

One morning Fred came home early from school, a note pinned to his shirt so he wouldn’t lose it. We knew this. The note would list what it didn’t mean when your kid got infested with lice. It didn’t mean: a) your kid was (necessarily) dirty, b) you were (necessarily) bad parents. The note soothed: all who live around the mountain, it said – rich or poor, owner or laborer – could suffer the peculiar biogeography of the region, its summers perfect for invasive forms of life.

I had ticks in my bed that summer, and ivies creeping through the slits feral cats clawed in the screen. The note on Fred’s shirt also requested a meeting at the school. This was unusual, but the Bonham way I guess. In the meantime, we distracted Fred from the itching. We asked him about school.

“We had to write our life story,” Fred said.

“What life story?” Caroline said, “He can barely write and he’s been asleep for nearly half of it.”

“His is a story of dreams,” I said.

“And then we had to write about our heritage,” Fred said, “but I didn’t know what to write so I drew the sun.”

Caroline and I agreed that we should tell Fred the truth about his heritage. How a strange parasite once divided the peoples of the mountain. How the patriarchs of those days quarantined the sick hosts on one side, kept the healthy half on the other, and designated the summit a sort of peace wall where the two camps could dump their trash, each inching the heap toward the downward camber of the other’s side. There were episodes of cross-mountain raiding, looting, and intimidation, we told Fred, our eyes widening as we made raiding and pillaging gestures with our arms. We delighted in embellishing the story, but I no longer knew how much of it I believed, and I realized that I could no longer discern my father’s embellishments from the rudiments of the older story.

I only knew my embellishments with any certainty. I told Fred that since we were dealing with history, he needed to know that the story might split and braid into stories. Inevitably someone would lie to him. This was when Caroline rolled her eyes, but I was getting excited now. There were conspiracy theories, I told Fred, which were accepted in certain circles on both sides of the mountain. One of them involved my employer, I told Fred, and I’d have to relate it in a whisper for fear of spies. I asked if this excited Fred. This excited Fred terribly.

The theory speculated that the balloon factory in the valley kept  its own historian on staff, and that this bored man invented the parasite – going so far as to forge research abstracts, microbiological data, and an illustration of the magnified worm.

Speaking in my normal voice again, I told Fred that these theories were largely discredited, because the balloon factory has done so much for the communities on both sides of the mountain.

I’d told Fred someone would lie to him, and now it was true. It’s hell, toiling to manufacture the symbols of someone else’s party. For a pittance, too.

“Which side were we – did we have worms?” Fred asked.

“No one can agree about that, son, and our ancestors left no written history. They were too busy surviving.” I pumped my fist to emphasize this point. “Surviving,” I repeated, “that’s our heritage, Fred.”

I met with the principal. He was some kind of monk. “You don’t want us to kill the lice?” I said.

“This is a Jain school,” the monk said. “We believe that every living being has a soul. We also think it would be a good lesson in patience if you used our alternative method. For your son, I mean. Compassionate removal is painstaking but ultimately quite freeing, Mr. Doppler.”

“Thank you,” I said, “for that.”

I couldn’t complain much. The Jainism seemed to calm Fred. Night, and the frogs in the gutters throbbed close against the rent house, their song pinching deep into the metal. None of the beasts of the wood could tell we’d moved in yet. .

Fred asked why he had lice. I had to think of something. “It is the waters we swim,” I said, “the mountain whose shadow we live in. Mt. Parasite, after all.”

We still weren’t connected to the grid, so we lit the storm candles and cracked the windows. Caroline sat Fred in her lap and starting drawing the dead dog’s flea comb through his hair, drowning each louse in a glass of water with a blot of shimmering soap in it. Caroline was painstaking, her tongue peeping out in concentration, her pupils sharp in the dark. “You’re not supposed to kill the lice,” I said. She looked beautiful killing the lice. She shrugged her bare shoulders and the zookeeper passed before the open window, pretending not to spy on our infestation.

The parasitic is especially taboo here – to call someone worm is the slur of the century. We all know that soon the balloon factory will outsource and float across the sea, and we’ll be left with nothing but this old rock of gneiss. It changes too, but slowly. We’ll have a little money from the government. We’ll have our cool mountain midsummer nights.

We have to live together and all that jive, even in mountain ranges whose histories are defined by isolationism, retreat– I try to teach my kid that, as is apparently required of me. But already he senses the subtle vocal timbre of doubt in every platitude we hand him.

“I never see anyone go back there – do you think it’s really a zoo?” I asked Caroline, as she picked the nits from Fred’s scalp.

“No,” she said.

“Me neither,” I said. “Wonder what he’s hiding.”

As the zookeeper moved farther from the window, we could see him riding his big cat like a horse up the mountainside.

Jack Boettcher is the author of the chapbook The Deviants (Greying Ghost Press, 2009), and recent work appears or is forthcoming in Fence, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. He lives in Austin.

When I was five my dad took me on my first real fishing trip. He would have gotten to it earlier, but he had spent most of my life on the road building a pipeline to move natural gas across the country. We took his little flat bottomed row boat out to County Pit 23 and shoved off into the water. He rowed while I looked around at the oak and elm trees that lined the banks. I was trying to spot a sassafras tree so we could dig up some root and make tea that night. My best memories of my dad up to then were of boiling the root, straining it then adding just enough sugar before we huddled together on the couch and watched whatever mindless thing the TV had to offer.

Dad found a good spot and handed me my rod. It was a trusty Zebco 33. His was fancier. We were after catfish and flatheads so we used chicken liver as bait. Chicken liver is great for catfish. When it hits the water the blood spreads and swirls and the smell moves out like a signal. Catfish are drawn like sharks from hundreds of yards away. Shad works well too, but you can never get the stink off your hands.

Dad popped the top on a can of Pabst and cast his line. Something hit almost immediately. He struggled a bit, then pulled in a small cat. It was too little, so he tossed it back.

“Grow some more, little man,” he said to the fish as he let it slither back into the murk.

Two hours of that and dad had hooked three good sized cats. All I had managed to catch was a baby drum, which I badly wanted to keep.

“No, son,” the old man said, “we’ll come back and catch him when he’s all grown up.”

I asked for help rebaiting my hook. Dad linked the liver over my hook then I cast into a shady spot near the bank and waited. Minutes passed. I kept watching the bank, wanting something to happen. Then my line went tight. Something big. I thought that I had the daddy of all catfish on the end of that line. The thing wanted to pull me into the water as badly as I wanted to pull it out.

Dad grabbed my arms and helped steady me while I fought. When the thing cleared the water I was terrified. The thing looked like a legless crocodile with fins. It was part monster, part dinosaur and part fish and I knew that it wanted me. Its  dead eyes spoke of reptilian hunger and prehistoric rage. This was that creatures’  planet and he wanted it back.

I took hold of the rough thing and tried to work the hook out of its razor jaw. My fingers went too deep and I felt the fire as the sharp teeth sipped through my flesh. Blood seemed to be everywhere and dad moved so fast that the boat almost overbalanced. He tore the thing from my hands and cut the line with his pocket knife. The monster slithered back into the murky water with tangles of my skin still hanging from its teeth.

I watched the gar until it vanished into the mud and knew that I would never swim in that pit again.

Nathan Tyree is a writer from Kansas. He has been widely published in print and online. He edits http://www.trickwithaknife.com and drinks.

In his truck cab he produced an uncapped light bulb. Below us roared the Pigeon River. “Keeps you up,” he said, “as in hard,” and I yelped when it burned my fingers. He barked a joyless heh. We got to talking: his wife was Sheila and mine was Lisa, and his kids were Ray Jr and Angel and I don’t have kids. After we were too high to talk I guess I told him to start driving. Two days and we were in Tulsa. Now it didn’t matter if the bulb was hot; the burn felt good. Sometimes he’d smack me upside the head, which we both liked. He asked what I’d do if he broke my arm.

“Go to the E.R.”

“But to me.”

“Break yours back?” He nodded like it was the right answer. He knew this stuff; so did his wife, who had more sense than to do what Lisa does, which is report me missing. Six days after I’d met him we rolled back into Pigeon Forge to find the cops at my place. “Drive,” Ray growls, so I did. Halfway up the mountain he pulled a sheath knife out and held it to my throat. “You’ve been filming me,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s your wife that called; they’ve seen the film.”

He was giving off this ugly leaden smell, and I could feel blood draining down through me, through my neck. “Thought it was you filming me, Ray.”

Ray looked behind us as if back toward Oklahoma, lowered the knife, and said, “Makes you jumpy.”

“Lisa, she was the one.”

“If you’re a cop, you’re a brave cop.”

He motioned for me to face him. When I did, he put the knife to my wrist and cut it open. My yell came out as a heh like his laugh. He did the same to his wrist and pressed them together. He said it was a Bowie knife from the Indian Wars and we were blood brothers. I said, “But what about…” and the loons hollered and he said if you catch it, you get the flu, is how you know.

At his house, a log cabin, a girl was jumping on a pogo stick. “Call if you get the flu,” he said, but then I left without his number. Back home Lisa ran barefoot into the mud and beat her fists on my chest. “I don’t know,” I told her as she carried on, “I woke up an hour ago outside the hospital.” Next thing I knew I was in the paper, which upset my ma. When I was twelve, she’d had a heart attack, and from that day on she went to church and never smoked. Lisa always told me “you’re lucky your ma’s so young” but truth is she wasted it on that heart attack. Anyhow she arranged for tests, my ma, and I set off meaning to have them, but on a billboard I saw a girl with black teeth under the words “Meth Destroys.” Something gunned in me like a jake brake and I decided to find that girl, get her high. I went to Ray’s and he walked out in his boxers followed by his wife. “You slept?” he said.

“That was a week ago.”

“So you slept.”

“Can I come in?”

There was this Cherokee in their house, and the four of us messed around while a pit bull watched from a cage. Next thing, the Cherokee was leading Sheila and her kids away. “I’ll never see those kids again,” Ray wept.
I wondered if I’d missed something. “Is there more?”

“You want to be my bitch?”

“What do you mean?”

He reached over, stuffed my balls between my legs, and said, “My bitch.” We drove across to Cherokee and played slots until we had cash to start cooking again. He had me wear Sheila’s panties when I went out for Sudafed. Law makes you buy just a little at each store but it adds up. So does the money, and we were broke when AT&T offered ten thousand to let them put a tower on Ray’s land. They disguised it like a pine and birds nested in it like it was any other tree. Ray would come upstairs with these water bottles and say go for a bike ride. In my bottle cages they sloshed around and mixed up while I tried to climb Mt. Cammerer. Each day I got a little closer to the top. The day I made it, there was a green cloud like an anvil moving across the valley. It hit me with a spray of mist and then I was opening a bottle, offering it my mix. A car sped by and I chased it down the slope and caught it, flipped it off, sped home to Ray.

“Where’s the other bottle?” he said.

I seized up: I’d left it at the summit.

“You drink it?”

“Can you drink it?”

“Well, you’ll die.”

At first I believed I really had. “Guess that’s your punishment,” he said.

“Don’t you care if I die?”

“There’s more of you where you came from.”

That kind of emptied me out, which he saw. “Just kidding,” he said after a while.

“So you think there’s more of me.”

“Well, just go fetch that bottle.”

Folks would come at all hours. There was a deputy who bought five hundred at a time and we would listen to his cop radio. One day, honest, a dude reported his wife had pissed in his coffee. “Call and say we’ll report to the scene,” said Ray. We piled in, Ray and the cop in front and me behind the grid. The siren screamed as we sped across town. At the man’s house Ray told me, “Stay.” I tried to get out anyhow but I was locked up. Whole hours passed before they came out chuckling.

“What happened?” I said when they got back in.

“Filed a report,” said the cop, and then a look passed between him and Ray. “Did he think you were both policemen?” I asked as we drove off.

“Maybe you should beat him with your stick.”

“Replaced our sticks with Tasers.”

“Tase him, then.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Won’t fit through the bars.”

“I’ll pull over.”

We veered off onto a dirt path and then Ray got out. “Stand up,” he barked at me. A wild boar was watching us from the woods. It had come to protect me, but Ray would tase it too. Stay back, I begged it in my head, and Ray lifted the Taser and at the last moment, as I shook, he said, “Just kidding.”

Things got better. We drove to a cockfight and busted it up, then went to another and won some cash. There was a guy the cop said was Dolly Parton’s brother. He smoked with us and Ray said, “Where’s your big tits,” and when he got mad Ray pulled the Taser out and tased him and we took off. Then the cop got to talking about Dolly and her songs. He said she’d written more songs than anyone in history, thousands upon thousands of them. “I admire that,” he said. “Me, I’ve written ten, maybe twelve songs.”

I said, “I bet she’d be having fun if she was here with us.”

Instantly I got scared they’d tase me for being a pussy again, but they must have liked it, because she got in and rode along with us for a bit. She’d done this deal with the governor called Imagination Library where poor kids get free books. It was on all the billboards, and Ray’s kids had read some of those books. Why she was in the car, she’d found out Ray’d stole them from her. I thought to warn him but I looked up and the next light was her road, Dolly Parton Parkway. The cop thought his own fingers were the ones that hit the signal, and I froze and next thing we’re at Dale’s, but if I tell you we watched Dale screw his girl and took his cash and pistol-whipped him, you won’t see how I sat frozen while that bitch stared through me and steered us toward hell. She wanted to show me what happens in hell when you give AIDS to your wife. She had it from her husband and that’s what her songs were about. She wouldn’t kill us just yet cause it would all be there waiting, come time.

I woke up alone with a note by the bed that said “Call your mom.” I drove to my ma’s and let myself in to find her at her table, writing. “Knock knock,” I said.

“Hi,” she told me without looking up.

“You copying a recipe?”

“Where’s Lisa?”

“Is it your brownies?”

“Who’s Ray?”

“He’s my blood brother.”

I could see she wasn’t meaning to bake brownies. There were some medical instruments lying around—a blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope, a roll of gauze—along with several pill bottles, and I figured she was intending to put Ray out of business.

“Lisa called here not fifteen minutes ago.”

“So then you know where she is already.”

“She told me she was at Shoney’s.”

I can’t explain. It was like all women were inside her right then, cussing me for not wanting them hard enough. I got to feeling she was a cop. I said if you’re so naïve, why’d you have that heart attack? I knew I just needed a hit, so I headed back to Ray’s, but no one was home. For the first time I went down to the basement and turned the knob. There he was in a chair, wearing a shirt and nothing else, waiting.

It took me a second to scream. I jumped and hit my head on the low ceiling. “Remember when you told me you’d break my arm?” he said.

I shook my head, stammering sorry.

“How would you do it?”

“I know you don’t want me down here.”

“Tell you what, go buy some whiskey. Here’s twenty bucks.”

I stumbled over myself running back upstairs. I knew he’d call his buddies, which was too much to bear. I sped through the holler full of dread. I ran over a dog and decided it belonged to a boy who told his dad my license plate so now I’d have to go back the long way while Ray screwed the whole state.

The clerk was a lady I hadn’t seen before, with icy eyes the color of blue Kool-Aid. “Back for more?” she said.

“Huh?’

“Run out?”

She was nodding at me, her curls bobbing along with her nods. “Of what?”

“George Dickel?” she said, and I thought, maybe I’ve got a twin, maybe Ray’s doing him right now and drinking his Dickel.

“I’m an only child.”

“I’m the youngest of ten.”

As she stared through me, I felt more fear than any soldier at war, but she rang me up and let me go. On the way home I passed the tooth girl and tried to count my teeth by feeling them with my finger but I lost count. I recalled finding Lisa on the phone with her friend, giggling about me. She thought Ray was part of her plan but the joke was on her, because I was in love, and I decided right then to help him get his kids back.

I carried the bottle in, unscrewed the cap, and presented it. “Look,” Ray said, gesturing out the window behind me. I turned and saw the pine woods across the road.

“You mad about the basement?” I asked.

He shook his head. “While you were gone,” he said, “I realized I hate you.”

I figured he was joking, so I laughed. “That’s what a pussy you are,” he said: “I say I hate you and you laugh.”

I set the whiskey down and asked what was going on.

“I got you screwed up and screwed your marriage up and never used a rubber and your ma won’t talk to you, but you like me.”

“So I should hate you?”

“So I should hate you?” he mimicked in the high voice of a pussy.

“What do you want me to do?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Stay here. I’m gonna go find my wife.”

He descended the porch stairs to his car. “Stop,” I called out, tearing up, and he pointed at my tears and said, “There’s the problem with you.”

After that things started to change. I started wanting to lose my teeth out of just spite. Weeks passed. I looked around for the billboard girl and found her in Knoxville. Her name was April and she took me to see some folks. There was a dude that hotwired cars, who drove me to the Atlanta bathhouse. He left after a few days but I stayed on. Your body needs dreams but you can get them while you’re awake. Every few days I bought something to eat from a machine. One day I got sick with fever chills, then I got better. When I finally went outside, two weeks had passed, because that was how long my car had been impounded. The bill was twelve hundred dollars, which meant it was totaled. I walked to Big Lots, found a truck, and hotwired it, which was the start of not being a pussy. The sun was rising as I reached Miami. I looked in the rearview and saw the weeks of fasting had chiseled my face, which led me to meet some folks. We drank rum in pools and sang Auld Lang Syne and one day I froze up and realized it had never gotten cold.

“It don’t,” said Vince, the silver-haired guy I’d been hanging with, but there’d been others before; now suddenly we were alone.

“What month is it?”

“March,” he said.

“I had a birthday.”

“Well, happy birthday.” A grin stretched out from either side of his cigar. I asked if he’d seen my phone. “They turned it off,” he said, “remember?”

I felt uneasy as he handed me his. Outside on a deck facing the canal I called the only number I could recall. It rang twice before I got an error message. If I wanted, it said, I could hang up and try again.

“City and state?” said 411.

I had to grip the railing to keep from tumbling into the water. “Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Dr. Lighter.”

They connected me automatically. Each ring was a shock to my chest but I kept holding on. “Doctor’s office,” said my wife.

I spoke her name. “You’re alive,” she said.

“Where’s my ma?”

“We tried to find you.”

“Lisa, come on.”

“It was in November, she—”

I threw the phone in the water. The number was on her ID, though. She could give it to the cops. That’s what I’m most ashamed of: letting myself think about her ID when I’d just learned about my ma.

I never went back inside. Twelve hours later a sign said Welcome to Tennessee. Below those words it said the state was home to Vice President Al Gore, but that had been years ago. I sort of broke down on the shoulder. The cop asked what was wrong and I pointed to the sign. He told me to get on up the road and that’s what I did. For months I got up the road to wherever I could. I figured I’d smoke till I died, which would happen when my mind ran out of dreams. All I had to do was quit dreaming. I would drive through the night, and if I started to dream, I slapped myself. One morning I rounded a curve and saw the moon over Mt. Cammerer. It had never risen so late before. I started keeping a list of the things it does. I built up a book of them that could have broken some ground but there was no use so I ripped it up and kept on driving. One of those AM stations was shouting about patience when the preacher asked, What will you miss when you’re dead?

It was the stretch where it stops being Dolly Parton Parkway and goes to two lanes. I was overtaking this car. I slammed on my brakes by the sign for Forbidden Caverns. I know how it works in those caves, you go through them together in a group. The whole group gets to know each other and makes friends. What will you miss, said the man, and I looked at the hills and thought, There’s nothing I’ll miss. Not Lisa, because I can’t stand what I did, and not my ma because she’s gone. As for Ray, my head sent a signal to my foot just as a semi rounded the bend. I sped up hoping to crash into it. The driver would probably live but if he didn’t, I’ve hurt plenty of folks anyway. I wondered if my ma would be there when I died, shaking her head along with the fucking Lord. I started to cry. My vision blurred and I figured it would keep blurring from there into oblivion, but at the last minute the trucker ruined it by pulling onto some dirt.

That’s when I drove to the rest area. I sat there touching myself as families pulled in and their dogs peed and finally a Hummer parked beside me. “You party?” said a fellow in a Braves cap. “I’ve got tons of room.”

His windows had a full tint, so we put down the seats and messed around, nothing special till he pulled a phone out and said, “Know about this?”

“About your phone?”

He swiped the screen and I looked down to see a grid of thumbnail pictures labeled with names. “It’s in order of how close they are.”

I touched one, and the screen filled up with a guy named Josh. 10 Miles Away, it said in the corner. “So it knows where I am?”

“No, it knows where I am.”

“Moon’s about to rise.” I pointed through the sickly tint of his rear window. Ten seconds later it began to peek above the summit of Mount Cammerer.

“Here’s a dude looking for now, and he smokes for sure.”

I took the phone and stared down at the inimitable fish eyes of Ray. To appear calm, I stopped breathing. He didn’t look so pale anymore. Maybe he’d followed me to Florida.

“Hit ‘chat,’” the guy said, and I obeyed. It occurred to me to type hey, which floated up the screen in a yellow bubble. Seconds later came the response: ‘Sup?’

“Say ‘.”

‘Nothing,’ I wrote instead, and then ‘Horned up’ chirped onto the screen. The guy grabbed the phone from me and typed with both hands. I watched the moon rise and shrink while my gut did the opposite. “Dude says come over,” he exclaimed, and I looked into the future and saw my teeth fall out of me. It would happen that day in 2012 when everyone thinks the world will end. What they mean is the world will carry on, but for each person something important will fall out of him.

“I’ll tail you,” I said, pocketing the phone, knowing he was too high to notice. I followed him until we came to an exit ramp. As soon as he’d passed it, I swerved off, crossed the highway, and turned around toward the first clear destination I could recall. I figured I had until morning before the account froze. The radio preacher was saying we’re made of dust and it won’t take much air for the Lord to blow us away. He said one lung of the Lord is the size of the world. I pulled into Hardee’s and signed on to find five guys with green dots: Clay, James, Anchovi, Just Lookin, and Kid. Kid was Ray and his distance was twelve miles. I checked my own profile: I wasn’t the Hummer fellow, but a black guy called Tyrone, twenty-one, headline reading “Don’t fall in love with everyone you see.”

I ordered a hamburger, the first time in days I’d thought of eating. A long journey faced me. An infinite number of directions led out from me, and I had to try each one—but suddenly Kid was eleven miles off. After a minute I hit the button again and it said ten. I thought of the jack pine and how readily Ray had agreed to it. He was coming for me and I had no weapon. They handed me my burger. I thought I might puke, but something in me reached out and devoured it and I was revved up with gas. I guess that that’s when I began thinking straight. I’d imagined driving in circles, hunting Ray like a fox, skirting his circumference. I saw now that the phone was a shield. There were eight miles between me and his house, and he was eight miles away, but the road twisted in on itself so many times that it was of no concern to my pulse to go there.

Back in the car I talked along with the radio to calm myself. Halfway there the phone said five miles, which was bad, but I reminded myself it was supposed to feel good not being a pussy. That’s why other guys liked it so much. I gritted my teeth and pulled up to his house and the phone said seven again. Maybe it was broken. I used my key and the door creaked open. If he could see me on his phone I looked like a black kid named Tyrone—unless he knew to begin with and my mug had a green dot in his head. That’s how it will be in another few years: like now, but in your head, we’ll drive all night just looking for folks in our head.

I felt my way to the basement and plugged in the bulb. It swung on a cord in front of a mirror in which I saw a St. Andrews cross and a workhorse. I walked to the closet and swung the plank and there was the knife. Its handle was wood and its blade curved and I’d forgotten what war it came from.

I was climbing the stairs again when my phone rang. Damien Warman, announced the touchscreen, and he said, “Where are you?”

“I’m not telling,” I said.

“You two think you can treat me like this?”

I was getting ready to apologize when I remembered this wasn’t my phone and a non-pussy would take advantage of that.
“Who are you?” I said.

“Screw you, bitch.”

“No, I asked a question. If you want to live—if you want to survive another minute of your worthless life, then answer it.”

There was a gulp. “Where’s Tyrone?”

“Dead. You’re next.”

“Where is he.”

“No, you tell me where you are.”

“Downtown Hilton.”

“Well, you best get yourself out of that Hilton.”

I can’t tell you what a thrill it gave me to say these things. I hung up, and then the screen showed the earth in space, the clouds moving in real time. The mountains were inching toward dawn. I guess the camera was on the moon. My blood heated up in anticipation of sunrise. Just as I was about to catch fire, Damien Warman’s name flashed across space. To be a pussy was to answer, to say just kidding, so I hit ignore. I found some gin and took a swig and realized the dog should be barking, so I went upstairs to his cage, in which he lay dead.

I had a new message from Kid. “Sup,” it said.

“Not much,” I wrote.

There was no response, so I looked at his profile: four miles.

I began to feel time slowing down. I went out into the night and ran the knife blade along my finger. It felt intensely strange, and I realized why: I was sober. I pricked another finger, then pricked them all and rubbed the blood on my pants. The cuts all stung. I was so sober I could feel pain. I looked at the moon, which was bisected by the jack pine, and knew on any other day I’d have believed it was broadcasting my thoughts to Ray. I checked the phone again and saw a distance of two miles.

It was curvy those last miles. I had about four minutes. There’s a lot you realize when you get sober. It occurred to me to look up “Zeela Tipton 1950-2009″ on the phone. I read, “After an illness, Zeela went Tuesday to be with the Lord.” I learned she was survived by two brothers and a daughter-in-law. I knew I might meet the Lord soon myself, and I wanted him to know there was some good in me. I typed Lisa’s number into Tyrone’s phone and wrote, “Ask Dr. Lighter for a blood test.”

The noise of a motor faded and grew closer. The phone said 500 feet. I hit refresh and it said 700 and then 350, which was about right.

I went in and pulled out the fuses. Through the peephole I watched a single shadow climb out of a car. My pulse was about four hundred. I saw the shadow lurch forward and grow larger. I had read the obituary to help urge myself ahead. I moved from the hinged to the unhinged side of the door. A siren blared for a split second. The last thing before he came in, I looked at the phone, which said zero feet.

The door swung open and his hand reached through the dark. I clutched the knife and plunged it into his arm. It sank easily into his flesh. I pulled it out and saw his eyes bulge as I stabbed again. As the blood spurted onto me he lunged toward me and I held tight onto the hilt. “Sarah,” he said as he sank, which is when I knew what that siren had meant.

He contorted away, making gurgly noises. I let go and ran outside. The cruiser window was open, and I could hear cops on the radio. “How do you know a Kentucky girl’s on the rag,” one of the cops asked, and then they all laughed as the pines heard my phone ring.

I’ve written ten, maybe twelve songs, I thought.

“Babe?” said Ray when I answered it. “I heard you’re back in town.”

“How’d you hear that,” I managed to say.

“I was on my way to you but I drove into the river.”

“I don’t live at your house anymore.”

“Lisa never answers your door.”

“I gave her AIDS. I caught it from you.”

“But you never came down with the flu.”

“You’ve ruined my life.”

“I have some crystal.”

The blue of the light bubble gleamed in moonlight as he told me he was at the S-curve near his house. “I like you,” he said, and I told him that was retarded and he said, “I’m trying to say things that I mean.”

His front door wouldn’t budge. I broke the window with a brick and climbed in and saw the cop sitting up against the door, meeting the Lord. I reached in his pants for Ray’s phone. I held it in hand and checked the distance: 2000 feet. A chill went through me then, because Ray had just talked to me on his own phone. It was like Ray had been talking to me from the cop’s pocket. I put the phone in my own pocket with the other two. I imagined the phones all talking to each other and to the pine trees. If I was high I might have tried to saw down the cell tower. Its trunk was metal but I’d have made sawdust out of the wrong pine and felt safe.

As I drove the cruiser, I checked my messages: Sup. Hey stud. Where u at. One was named Lucifer and he was ten miles away, which I guessed was ten miles down. I passed Dollywood, which is on a back road in a holler, not where you’d expect. I drove deeper into the forest. Finally I pulled off by a precipice where at the bottom of a ravine Ray stood by his wrecked car in water up to his knees.

“There’s a way down,” he said, pointing to a path.

I left two of the phones on the seat and carried the knife in hand as I scooted downhill. “How are you?” Ray said from across the water when I reached the bank.

“Fine,” I told him, brushing dirt off me.

“That’s my knife.”

“I’ll slit your throat with it.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it. “The crystal got wet.”

“My mom died.”

“Mine did too.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“Then get on with it.” He pointed to his neck.

“That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

“Mark’s on his way. Call and see.”

“Who’s Mark?”

“Cop from the dogfight. I made a deal with him: he’ll file it as a suicide.”

“Why don’t you piss off, Ray.”

“But it’s really what he’s coming for.”

It was easy enough to look Ray in the eye and still hate him. His eyes were fixed on mine, but that wasn’t a problem; nor was I touched by the sound of his voice. I hadn’t been prepared, though, for the effect of his breath. It smelled of bourbon and smoke and instantly I was in Tulsa drinking bourbon with him, holding him and thinking he was just a lonely child.

“It’s for my kids,” he said. “If you had kids, you’d understand.”

I guessed there was a fair chance he was telling the truth. “I’ve been in Florida.”

“I like it down there. Took Angel and Ray Jr. to the Daytona 500.”

I kicked some gravel into the river. It landed by his foot, and he said, “Remember at the Bristol Speedway, when you thought we were dying?”

I shook my head. “I’ve never been to Bristol.”

“You were lit up back then.”

“You were just as lit up.”

“But I was aware of it. You, you acted like you were surprised.”

I tried to imagine Bristol, which straddles the border of Virginia and Tennessee. I pictured a state line painted down the middle of a street. I imagined fast cars in circles and recalled a race in Mexico where the drivers steered by remote. The cars crashed over and over until I knew the stadium would explode. I dragged Ray out into a country I’ve never seen. What happened next, he punched me, right in front of the Mexicans. “Now you’ll have a black eye for your ma’s birthday.” He drove me to her house but by then we were in Leo, and she was a Cancer. I staggered inside and found her on the couch with her quilting circle. Those three ladies together weighed less than me, and they sat in a row like sticks of brittle.

“This is my son,” said my mother.

I can’t account for what came next. I looked down at the quilt, a patchwork maze whose path mapped all that I’d done wrong in her eyes. I saw my house when the bank forced Lisa out of it. I saw her in 2012, dying of AIDS. I saw my ma getting sick and writing in my baby book. It was a list of my firsts, which appeared on the quilt as triangles arranged in a loop. With that loop she was telling me I would never change. “Up your cunt with a plunger if that’s what you think,” I said, which she must have taken as a response to her words.

I stepped into the icy water and sat on Ray’s hood. “I need you alive,” I told him, taking his hand, pulling him toward me. He slipped on the algae but I held on.

“You were about to kill me,” he said.

“I don’t have anyone.”

“You’ve got Lisa.”

“I don’t want her.”

“You want me?”

“You’re better than nothing.”

He put his hands in his pockets and kicked at some rocks. “That came out wrong,” I said, and he looked at the far shore and said, “No, it’s true.”

Tyrone’s phone purred in my pocket. I pulled it out and Ray took it and squinted. “This guy’s twelve miles away. Says he’s glad I’m online again.”

“I wonder what that means,” I said.

Ray glanced into his smashed car. “Can you drive?”

I twisted around and looked too. I saw the river roaring around it, flowing into its broken window. Shards of glass from it would reach the Gulf, while others would sink into the ground here. I knew Ray wouldn’t change. He took my hand and pressed his fingertips to the holes in mine. The wind blew through me and the river was rising: it was nearly high tide. I could feel the tide even in my blood. That was how sober I was. If the new awareness had ended there with the glass and the blood, I’d have survived it, but I was aware also of being aware. That was the part I couldn’t bear. Otherwise I doubt I would have said, “So long as we find a dry bag first.” Otherwise I might have gone looking for folks that weren’t better than nothing. I might even have told them this story. As it was, I figured I’d keep quiet, because I knew nobody but Ray would have cared to listen.

John McManus is the author of three widely praised books of fiction: the novel Bitter Milk and the short story collections Born on a Train and Stop Breakin Down. In 2000 he became the youngest-ever recipient of the Whiting Writers Award. His fiction has also appeared in Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Tin House, and The Oxford American, among other journals. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1977, he lives and works in Norfolk, Virginia, and teaches at the MFA creative writing programs at Old Dominion University and Goddard College.

“Hey now, look at ole Sweets,” Wishbone shouts. “Goin’ again!”

Wishbone is lean and tall with hair cropped close.  He holds up his welding mask with one hand.  His black torso swells with muscle.

The other men look up. They clap and whistle at Sweets from a cracked oil tanker prop.  Wishbone drops his mask and relights the acetylene.  A cloud of sparks, soot, and steam rises from his torch, then vanishes into white hot sky.

Sweets resumes walking, eyes focused forward.  At the backdoor of the office, he tucks in his faded blue work shirt and mops his face with a rag.  Inside, unemployed men work the maze, trying their luck at each glass window.  Sweets rubs the foot of a rooster between finger and thumb in his pocket. He slows his breathing to even, controlled breaths, then opens the door.

Hours later, Sweets emerges from the building. He sits on the first step. His hips and knees burn.  He struggles to breath. Sweets enters and exits by the back door every Monday.  The other applicants sit out front.  Among them, a young man with smooth almond skin slaps his thigh. He says: No parades, no bond rallies, no jobs. Can’t even shuck oysters.  The others nod.  Some say amen.

At the back door, Sweets looks up to Wishbone, blackened with soot.  He sits down beside him. Both men drip with sweat.

“I’ll get over to Dauphin Street,” Sweets says.

“Kazoola’s might need you.”

“Sho might.”

“Ain’t no way to tell,” Wishbone says.

“Got damn,” Sweets says. “Maybe they’ll be havin another war.”

Benjamin Kale sits behind an ornate mahogany desk in suit and tie.  He swivels in his chair and watches Sweets and Wishbone through the third story window.  He watches Wishbone move, shirtless, and presses his palm against the glass.  Wishbone says something, gesturing with his hands, and Sweets nods.  Cold air blows through newly installed air vents.  From this distance, Wishbone could be any man.  He could be white.  He is young and strong and virile.  He might be a navy boy, home on leave.  Sweets might be his father.

Suddenly, the air feels over cold and Benjamin closes the vent.  He opens the window and leans out as far as he can.  He closes his eyes.  On the desk, a black and white photograph of his son lies face down against the wood.  In the picture, Ben Jr. sleeps on a riverboat bunk, his arms crossed behind his head.  In another picture, still upright, twin baby boys peek out from under blankets in a bassinet.  Ben Jr.’s wife will take them away.  She will take them to her family in New England.  They will be raised without a southern accent.  They will not know that Benjamin hired Sweets to drive his polished black car, despite the slide in revenue. They will not know that Wishbone will use Sweets to break into the Kale family home.

What they will know is this: A man known as Wishbone split Benjamin Kale’s skull with a fire iron and only got away with his gold watch on a chain. He was never found. My father will discover the watch in a pawn shop thirty years later. In thirty more years, he will die, and I will find it in his desk.  I’ve got it in my right hand, right now.  My name is Ben.  The watch does not keep time.

Murray Dunlap’s fiction has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Post Road, Night Train, New Delta Review, Red Mountain Review, Silent Voices and Smokelong Quarterly and others. His stories have been twice nominated to the Pushcart Prize and to Best New American Voices, and his first book, “Alabama”, was a finalist for the Maurice Prize in Fiction. After very nearly being killed in a terrible car wreck, the writer uses this site to vent: http://www.murraydunlap.com/.