A Magazine of Poetry, Fiction, and Art
2 VOLUME 8 FALL 2008
Editor: Sharon DeVaney-Lovinguth
Cover Artwork Chris Luckadoo
Editorial Policy Wingspan is an annual literary and visual arts publication of Jefferson State Community College in Birmingham, Alabama. Its purpose is to act as a creative outlet for students, faculty, alumni and residents of the surrounding area, thus encouraging and fostering an appreciation for the creative process. The works included in this journal are reviewed and selected by a faculty editor on the basis of originality, graceful use of language, clarity of thought and the presence of an individual style. The nature of literature is not to advance a religious or political agenda, but to raise universal questions about human nature and to engage reaction. Therefore, the experience of literature is bound to involve controversial subject matter at times. The college supports the students’ right to a free search for truth and its exposition. In pursuit of that goal, however, advisors reserve the right to edit submissions as is necessary for suitable print. Appropriateness of material is defined in part as that which will “promote community and civic well being, provide insight into different cultural perspectives and expand the intellectual development of students.� The opinions expressed are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of the college administration, faculty or staff. Letters to the editor or information on submission guidelines can be obtained by e-mail at lovinguth@jeffstateonline.com. All rights revert to the author/artist upon publication.
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Contents Poetry/Art/Photography Chris Luckadoo Ashlie Williams
Untitled drawing 6 Modern Day Angel 7 I See You as a Question 10 Laura Secord Giving Blood— September 12, 2001 8-9 Emma Johnson Untitled photograph 11 Emily Johnson Life 12 Charles Woods Visions Towards Acceptance 13 Timothy Poe Pretty Much Dead 14 Jennifer Horne Cicada Song 15 Summer Evening on the way Home 20 Thomas N. Dennis Last Seasons: Four Haibun 16-19 Adam Hand It’s Nothing Like Sleep 21 Shawn Scott Half a Renaissance Man 22 Caitlin Roth Between Us 23 Daniel Howard The Drunk 24 Cassandra Ramos Strength of the Judge 5 Mona Lynn Trippa 26 Writing 27 I Saw You 28-29 Sharon Lovinguth Untitled photographs 30, 37, 41, 60 Taylor Nordan Southern Land Delights 31 Mary Jean Silvers Untitled photographs 32, 43 What Do You Hear? 42 Spencer Whisenant Stay With Me 33 Theresa Sorenson The Journey 34 Lisa White My Morning 35 Outlook 36 Jason Roche The Release of Barry the Bus Driver 38-39 Jenna Balcom The Way I Feel 40 Sandra Pugh Untitled paintings 66, 70, 89 Deborah Ann Cidboy Original drawing of Maggie 90
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Fiction Philip Thiebert “Cain and Abel” Stephen J. Malinoski “Magic Window” Nichol DeCastra “Goodbye Childhood Days” April Stotler Bad Moon Rising Chapter 1 Katie Boyer “Western” Jimmy Carl Harris “Into Thin Air” David Matchen “Bobby Lee’s Story” “The Mother”
44-59 61-65 67-69 71-73 74-88 91-97 98-117 118-127
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Chris Luckadoo
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“Modern Day Angel” Calmness and confusion wash over me at once, Hearing the voice of a modern day angel, Not knowing why its words choose to comfort me, How could this majestic sense my every need? Before I could stop it, a smile crept upon my face. Reason unknown, I allow it to fill my void. My heart races, my head spins out of control. This angel somehow reaches me, and touches the depths of my soul. I want to lay and rest awhile in this newfound comfort. I’m just so tired, so tired, and I can’t raise my hand, But I have to hold on and hold on tight or I might get burned by the flames of hell. So angel stay. Angel please don’t go away. Hold my hand and take my heart. Hide me from that horrid place that always gets so dark. I want to be engulfed by the safeness in the clouds. I want the rain to talk with me and wash away my doubt. So angel will you take me there? Can I count on you to rid me of this heartache and despair? Dance with me as the raindrops fall, And we’ll catch them on our tongues, And maybe bottle some up for a later time When delight is even more scarce.
Ashlie Williams
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“Giving Blood--September 12, 2001� Take my blood It has been through My heart. It is Hunting for words It is hunting for The world. Take My blood. Piece Of my soul. It Circulates love Does not carry Hate. It cannot Do hate. Still, Take my blood It signifies sorrow Signifies hope Connection Beyond me. Take my blood. No cure for The towers of fire The rolling smoke wall The lost and the Dying. No cure For what lies below No cure for Sorrows ahead. No cure for past wrongs
Laura Secord
9 For selfish consumption For gross inequality For blind insulation No cure for acts That drive humanity Into camps of hate. But Take my blood. Pint of red spirit. Take my blood, and See somewhere nurses Check donor numbers, Hang the bag Connect the line As essence of red Fluid of living Drips from human To human, as bucket of ash Passes hand to hand. Take my blood. Bitter pint. Red ale. Circulates love Does not contain hate Cannot do hate. Cannot do that. Cannot speak Take this blood. It Carries the soul's wish. It carries the soul's wish For human survival It carries the soul's wish. Laura Secord
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“I See You as a Question” I see you as a question Something I’ll never understand Now, all I really need Is for you to take my hand Pull me into the allusion Give me a smile and a reason for pain Show me you’re not real Convince me that you’re vain Form me into a robot Push me into faith Dare me to believe—everything that’s fake. Blind me with your affection Tempt me with your taste Ask me to keep searching—for your transparent face And once you’ve made me into your fool Let me fall and let me hate Only then will I realize that my heart was too late
Ashlie Williams
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Emma Johnson
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“Life� Life the immeasurable gift, flowing through my veins. Capture you, I cannot understand you, I try not. Some things better left to the unknown. The desire you create is insatiable. The music of this life is unpredictable, constant, and beautiful. Life that I inhale with every breath. Is enough to keep me craving more to keep me alive.
Emma Johnson
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“Visions Towards Acceptance” I stumbled up the stairs to God’s House and the door slammed and my shoes squeaked on the floor. The ceiling curved high above me; the pews lined an aisle to salvation. Father Marquez raised his hand: They brought him on a day When the sun was smoldering fury. A man relinquishing his soul Struggled to speak: “Come” is all he could muster Before the spear pierced. No one asked why when His eyes squinted; tears streamed. His mother begged; He calmed her with a nod. People pushed and stared. Women booed; men cheered; children mocked like clowns. As Marquez completed his sermon and I rose to leave, my body froze; comforting visions filled my soul. I sprang up to the glory of the word around me. Others offered up their mightiest of prayers. Outside, the sun shone brighter than I had ever noticed. My ears tunneled only the playful sounds of birds singing above me. My cries had been for mercy; now intended to share blessings.
Charles Woods
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“Pretty Much Dead” Your face is a shadow A lost memory. Your warming touch Has grown cold. Your caring love Has been forgotten. You left me so quick And you have forgotten me. But I am still here, without you. When you were here You were my source of happiness. I have tried to substitute you And over time I have. I waited for you Hoping you would come back And when my time of mourning was over I lost all hope for most things. And I think the worst part of all Is that you’re not here But you’re still alive. You walked out on me And that makes you pretty much dead.
Timothy Poe
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“Cicada Song” For years I lay in the dark. What went on above me didn’t touch me. A day came when something said “move.” In darkness I struggled, drawn by a deep memory. Finally, a new world: light, an openness that scared me. Also the discovery there were others like me. My hardened shell came off without much trouble. Now I am so new my skin gleams.
Jennifer Horne
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Last Seasons: Four Haibun
AUTUMN Fall makes you a present of its colors, the slow fade from gnat-eaten late greenery. It’s his last, and I am his favorite season above all other, he’s exulted in me every year he’s been alive. The yellow butterflies begin in late August (he’s noticed them every year, denotes the advent of autumn by them – they are migrating south) and by the equinox the nights have cooled considerably. A horn sounds near his last birthday. Hurricanes without names loom at the edge of his imagined-and-untaken vacation at the shore. an end to frog croak twigs chattering above us green gone yellow brown
Thomas N. Dennis
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SUMMER Summer tries to tell her it could easily be the last, that all things are close to ending unless something changes. The pretty swallow that flies in a room’s one window is about to fly back out. But the young see no death auguries in the johnson grass. Who would want to hear, to experience deeply just how tangential and precarious our own existence truly is – the close call on the interstate sometimes informs us – that bland miracles occur moment after moment, keeping us in breath and conversation with others. She studies languages: to do to be to have to go. Her ears do not hear words that limit her actions – this is freedom to her. She stays out late night after night partying at various friends’ apartments, spending her money foolishly. But at night if she stops a moment and goes to the window and opens it, she’ll hear a kind-hearted rendering of the famous Insect Symphony (they named it that as kids), bass notes courtesy of doleful tree frogs, and the brief chill she feels might help aim things differently, might tangle the karmic knots another less fateful way. The heat blasts through August. One night is particularly bad. remembering drones gaze up at the soft ceiling no school, lazy days
Thomas N. Dennis
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WINTER The snow gradually whitens everything; it is as it was when you were small and easily elated by unusual weather. You go outside near dusk just as a darkened sun eases past the moving storm’s flat line of cloud and over the lip of the horizon. Burnt pumpkin tingeing the high wild drifts out there. You walk further away from the house. Is it now or is it then? you wonder for only a moment. Later, the moon rises and transforms everything again. A dog screams from far down the street, and the lights come on in each house almost at the same time. Tires whine on ice. A silence big enough to encompass a whole life sweeps down, wind-like, and takes you out. christmas sun rises burnt orange across the white a siren far off‌
Thomas N. Dennis
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SPRING They’re in the car, waiting outside the library, watching the pollen settle on the hood of a very shiny black Crown Victoria across from them in the parking lot. Kids are walking home from school; buses roam the streets and a quickening has overtaken the traffic as rush hour approaches. She says: “English sparrows fornicating up there on the wires: look!” “I can just imagine the conversation. ‘Oh Nigel! My Nigel! Come with me to my nest, we’ll tell Trevor he must leave at once – ’ ” “It’s pretty bad when you start imagining the conversations of birds in copulation.” “Just my way of enjoying the season. Who knows if it’s not the last springtime I might see?” “Well who does know?” “You’re getting all deathy on me again, man. Is it the yoga, the meditation? If so -- ” “Wait wait wait. Are we not contingent creatures? I will see you tomorrow, but only if someone driving on the wrong side of the road doesn’t blindside me tonight. Or if I don’t flip my car into a pond – ” “Aw jeez the possibilities are gruesomely endless, dear person. I admit life is a bit chancey, and I take my chances, being as careful but yet as fearless as I can as I meander around. How about that?” “That’s pretty good. But what if the season – this season, these amorous birds – were tender messages advising me to get my shit together, that time is running closer than I think, that – ” “. . . entirely a matter of magical thinking, somewhat neurotic with potential for true psychosis.” He finishes up: “Oh it’s that crazy to imagine that everything speaks, even seasons and sparrows if we listen and allow ourselves to be open to them, all things sing their own song …?” memorial day pink blossoms and white blossoms still dogs on the road Thomas N. Dennis
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“Summer Evening: On the Way Home” Old man rocking on his small front porch. Old man riding in the back of a truck. Old man in overalls sitting on a curb, waiting. Oh, they’re surprised to be old. Where did their young-men bodies go? Bodies that loved with abandon, that lifted stones like they were pillows. Bodies that healed by morning, no matter the hurt. My girl-body is in me, swinging a swing, climbing a tree. My old-lady-body is in me, rising slowly from her chair to feed the birds. It’s only time. It’s only time. Filling the tank of my car on a rise where a barn once stood, I stand facing the last of sunset, rare breeze blowing on a June night. We are all going somewhere and we don’t know where. We have all been the same place but later we forget. Rocking is the truest motion a body knows.
Jennifer Horne
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“It’s Nothing Like Sleep” I feel the decrescendo begin, The soft drumming slows, Skipping whole beats altogether. In the distance the brass chorus ignites. I still hear the wailing of a piercing melody. My brain is being scored and broken apart. Pious and beautiful is the brass. Searing is the noise of that machine. The churning melody gives way. The saints have entered my room, Bright and beautiful and blinding, A stark contrast to the grey stone walls. Their thundering melody fills me to the brim, My body gives way to the black abyss, But I have never felt more alive.
Adam Hand
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“Half of a Renaissance Man” All the things I’ve done until now Only the ancients could do with ease Imaginative worlds flash in my mind The pages begin to fill with scribbles of words Words that form to make no sense Inspiration jolts my imagination Opulent structures and divine creatures All splashed with vibrant color Ideas invade my hungry brain The great minds of the past are all the meat I need. I find that all I’ve done is so allusive to me As time goes by, I’ve skipped to one skill and then to the next None are conquered; none are mastered None are completed with these hands of distraction
Shawn Scott
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“Between Us� Punctuate my emotions with your malevolent voice Tell me my flaws and ridicule my nature Push my conquered heart to the edge of cliffs and watch as I plummet. Then I shall do the same. Happiness simply a fleeting thought in this desert tango of two Words fly and encapsulate our bodies in a cyclone of indifferences We are parted like ocean and connected the same We cauterize and lick our wounds trying to heal such vast openness The immense cloud cast soon will vanish into only fragments of the past And only needles of remembrance will alert to the sensations of what darkness was.
Caitlin Roth
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“The Drunk” His life is sad, Like a country song. And his whiskey bottle, Deep and empty. And his heart, Broken and over. His mud-stained clothes, Smell of vomit. Old memories come back, A little girl pulling his beard, His wife’s green eyes, Gazing at him in the night. Thoughts of a soft silk casket, Only encourage him Now to end, What never should have been.
Daniel Howard
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“Strength of the Judge� I once saw a glowing goddess A blinded beauty who quietly wept Tears like rivers and glistening torrents Which darkened the cloth on her trembling breast. Upon her shoulders she held a yoke And on each end a basket shook Weighted down with rights and wrongs. Her duty: decide which side to take. Though the tears betrayed her wants She stood firm with hands clenched tight In the sun and in the moon In the rain and in the snow She would not move one step. But I who did not possess her strength Could not bear to watch. I ran away haunted by the image Of the silent saddened siren.
Cassandra Ramos
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“TRIPPA” I missa you face I praya you Grace May God shine on-ya When all is with done-ya May you trippa be good Many blessings that would Till I seea you again Ima always youa friend. Peace*
Mona Lynn
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“Writing� I take with me, all my encounters A new century in sight. I take with me, cause I will be, The cutting edge of the knife. I take with me, an understanding, Of generations now marbleized. I take with me, my constant changes, And talent not yet realized. I take with me, documentation, Of changes as they appear. I take with me, my own imagination, And expectations of a featured year. I take with me, a planted seed, That grew into a tree. I take with me, the mill that shredded it, And turned it into confetti.
Mona Lynn
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“I saw you” I saw you stinkin’ by that tree The greeny blossoms attractin me Twas only a moment in time and space But I waited to see your lovely face Soon the air cleared and there you were Standing proud just like Ben Hur Do I dare, I thought to myself He is fit to be put on a shelf I felt a strange churning in me as well Lovely little pollups packin gale So as I geared up, my chin up and all I took one step as I heard him call Hey, you over there, come over hither! But by now I had fallen so on I slithered I just figured he was just as unique He wouldn’t think less should I leak I might blame it on the wet ground Repeating to myself how it would sound Oh no! he’s a runnin! Right to me He’s gonna know all about my tee But luckily I felt something mushy Kinda cold, kinda squishy Right in my hand waashish! Ain’t that just grand! All was good yellow tee green farts Manure to boost two young hearts Why, he is green and I am yellow Might as well be my fellow! We will live 4+ever true Skimmin pads in the morning dew This may be silly to some who see But to he and I, just poots and tee Yes green is green and yellow is yellow My standards may be low but I got the fellow! I could go on, if I must To include the farmer who saw us and cussed He didn’t like cows and horses to mix Mona Lynn
29 Every cow like me who teed in the open To attract a horse like I’d been hopen Sure enough that funny little day That farmer wobbled wildly as we ran for the hay I can hardly wait for tomorrow to come The life of a cow and horse on a farm Gee it’s late, wonder if he’ll come home That ol’ farmer man sure can roam Yes, I am yellow and green is my fellow Tomorrow we’ll meet again in the meadow. If you ever see a horse and a cow Or perhaps a dog beside a sow You may wonder what kind of life Could a horse have with a cow as a wife.
Mona Lynn
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S. Lovinguth
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“Southern Land Delights” Down home is pecan pie with cold lemonade, sweet summer rains, and Sunday church service. The southern cities smell of cookouts and fish fries, and barbeque pits. Southern boys raised on Coca-cola and Allman Brothers, love southern girls draped in a Sunday’s nest dress. Saturdays are easy times, there for football and alcohol, and cutting the grass. Dixie land is tradition and history, and will stay forever us.
Taylor Nordan
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Mary Jean Silvers
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“Stay With Me� Goodbye my love, I say I will see you again another day Oh, how I wish you could stay Stay with me forever in this place How I adore your beautiful face Stay here and let us see the world, at a slower pace But the fates simply will not allow And we must go our separate ways for now Oh, how I wish you could stay somehow It feels as if there is a void in my heart Every time that we have to part I have loved you from the start Each and everyday, my heart yearns for your love The love of an angel sent from above A love as pure and beautiful, as a morning dove If I could only tell you the way that I feel And show you somehow, that my feelings are real But instead my feelings I conceal But maybe, through this poem you will see The true feelings inside of me And what my love can really be For not a minute goes by, that I do not think of you And what a beautiful smile comes to my face, when I do Oh, how your love doth woo If only you did not have to go What beautiful seeds of love we could sow Although it is that time, you know Oh, how I wish you could stay But goodbye my love I say I will see you again another day.
Spencer Whisenant
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“The Journey� Paths of rounded pebbles tan and cream crunch as I move through the ancient garden planted by grey haired men. Cherry trees pink in blossom release a shower of silky petals that caress my flesh. Ruby throated humming birds shimmer above Tiger Lillies drinking in their nectar. Trees shaped like overgrown Bonsai surround my mossy space where I cease to feel time. Tastes of jade and emerald ignite my oneness with earth and sky, rock and silence. Gentle breezes play across my mind and carry it free.
Theresa Sorenson
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“My Morning” My morning took a new meaning that I am not ready to take. For my savages are restless to the breakfast that I make. They tear into the meat that blisters from the pan turn to me for more, for there’s no satisfying this clan. Whipping up a new glory, passing it down from the pan, they ate a little slower For chewing it demand. But once digested thoroughly restless savages they became, For new works of mine they knew were in the making just the same. When suddenly I realize the power that I be— rejecting further incident I walked away you see. In time the clan of savages will come to me again, not welcomed at my kitchen side They’ll sit properly in the den.
Lisa White
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“Outlook” I lost much once, I lost much twice, If I lost much again, yesI think that would be nice. If I lost much when There’s not much to lose, Is it fare to say that I lost as much as you? If I lost and I am happy And you lose and you’re sad, Am I worse for being happy, Or does it just make you mad?
Lisa White
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S. Lovinguth
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“The Release of Barry the Bus Driver” The tiny fan in the tiny corner of the tiny bus makes a tiny sound —whir. Side windows frame thirsty trees, derelict brown yards, panting dogs on sloppy porches. Houses housing, mothers inside looking out framed by different windows. Barry drives through heat, unbearable heat, carrying cargo. Unbearable kids jump off Barry’s bus kicking up dusty yards yelling “Bye Barry” A sound to combat nonsensical scream after scream. the last child leaps off. Barry drives filled with hate or the stale heat, for the tiny fan. Hate for the dogs, trees, hate for the houses, mothers with open arms ready to embrace their filthy children.
Jason Roche
39 As the sun sets ‘Why’ arises. Barry does not answer, instead picks up speed and plunges off the edge of the earth. Piercing atmosphere as wheels on the bus go round and round and . . .
Jason Roche
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“The Way I Feel� The way I Feel as you gaze and shudder, mesmerizing to me is your Touch Aching inside, as I Swallow guilt. The way I Feel remains ever-changing, no one knows the truth of my darkness should you regret, or paste over happy thoughts The way I Feel may not seem justified. Love will never forgive, what the heart has left unsaid. The way I Feel is like the Silence of Earth. The moment the world is waiting, and all at once, chaos strikes. The way I Feel feels no more than An awaiting for a disaster.
Jenna Balcom
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S. Lovinguth
42 What Do You Hear?” We call them words. Some hurt, some heal. Express, describe, teach, hide . . . We call them words. Some words formed In the mind are sealed In the heart. Words spoken in prayer Brought me safely Through hurricane Camille As she twisted, uprooted, and hurled Trees of a hundred years. Words of encouragement spurred me, As a nurse, to endure Foul smelling wounds, Emptying bedpans, And grieving families. We call them words. Words can fuel a riot Or calm a troubled soul. Words from the mouth Of the doctor in the delivery room Said: “You have a fine baby boy.” But then, too soon, “I’m sorry. We did all we could.” Always mean what you say . . . Always say what you mean . . . I still talk to my twin baby brothers Who will never cry, Move or open their eyes. We call them words.
Mary Jean Silvers
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Mary Jean Silvers
44 Dateline: Chicago. June 5 1947
“Cain and Abel”
When the big man walked in, I figured I would need hand grenades and luck to whip him. And this week I was out of both. “Do you know Wordsworth?” he said. “The poet ?” “The millionaire. He wants to find his brother Tom. ” “Why?” “Tom wants to kill him,” he said. “For?” “For sending Tom to jail for embezzling $100,000.” “Was the money recovered?” I said “No” I leaned back in my chair. I looked at the calendar. It had a picture of a blond wearing two strings playing on a beach. The calendar was two years old and the blond hadn’t aged at all. We should all be so lucky.
Philip Thiebert
45 I looked at the big man and noticed the scar tissue around his eyes. “Boxer?” I asked. He forced a smile. “Lefties killed me,” he said. “I boxed “I said. “ Middleweight. The punch that gets you is the one you’re not smart enough to look out for.” “That explains your broken nose,” he said. “I know, it keeps me out of beauty contests. I grieve about it everyday.” I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke drift. I leaned forward. “The point is. I am older and slower but I see this punch coming.” “Yeah,” he said. “This punch includes two brothers feuding. And … how do I put this… I would rather set my hair on fire than get involved with family fights.” He looked confused. I suspected he wore that look a lot.
46 “I read my bible too much. It offers comfort on cold evenings. You can look it up, if Cain doesn’t kill Abel, Abel kills Cain.” I said He still looked puzzled. I put it as plainly as I could. “I find Tom. Wordsworth kills Tom,” I said. “But they’re brothers...” “Tell it to Cain and Abel.” He started to say something. But he changed his mind. He ducked his head as he went out the door. Someday he would forget to duck and take the whole wall with him. When he left, I thought about buying a bible. I needed a doorstop. Then I thought about Wordsworth. The millionaire, not the poet and wondered why he had an ex-boxer working for him. Then I thought about the office bottle. The phone rang and I should have picked up the bottle instead. “Yeah?” I said
47 “Don’t take the job. Everyday above ground is a good day.” “Goodbye Tom,” I said. I hung up the phone very carefully. You never play cards with a man called Doc, you never eat at a place called Mom’s and you never let a punk threaten you. So I grabbed my hat and headed out to the better part of town. I was driving a ‘37 Crossley that year. It had enough room in it for me and my thoughts. And it whined every time I pushed it over 40. When I found the Wordsworth house, I headed up a driveway that could double as an airport runway. The house was no bigger than your average castle. No moat, but maybe they had a dragon hidden in the backyard. As I knocked on the door, I waited for someone to pour burning oil on my head. The big guy opened the door “Follow me,” was all he said. We went through the big house. I should have packed a lunch. But we finally made it to the garden. The radio was on and the Cubs were dropping the tail end of a double header. Ox
48 Miller was pitching and he had an ERA higher than the national debt. Mr. Wordsworth didn’t seem too upset about it. He looked at the big guy. “Goodbye Jake,” he said “Yes sir, I will be in the kitchen if you need me.” I watched Jake walk away. “He’s a big boy. Ever think about renting him out for a duplex?” I said. He let that one drift by. I eyeballed Mr. Wordsworth. I saw a nice old man with a nice new linen shirt that cost more than I made in a month. I saw a man who stuck his brother in jail for five years and then probably enjoyed a steak dinner that evening. He eyeballed me back, then snapped off the radio. I could hear birds chirping “What changed your mind?” he said. “A phone call. From Tom. He told me to back off.” He nodded. “How did he threaten you?” I said.
49 He reached over to the table, picked up a letter and handed it to me. It read “I am out of prison. I will kill you.” “Simple, but eloquent,” I said. “Think you can find him?” Wordsworth asked. “For the right price.” He took five 100 dollar bills from his wallet. It was the right price. “Anyone know where your brother might be?” “Only one—she was going with Tom when he got caught.” “Her name?” “Cooke, Courtney Cooke. Redhead, admitted being 34. Lived somewhere on the Southside – but that was five years ago.” “Alright. What about Jake? Can you trust him?” “I’ve trusted him for 15 years. Like a member of the family.” I didn’t mention he sent his family to jail. The $500 felt good in my wallet and my bank account wanted to adopt it.
50 He clicked the Cubs game on, leaned back and closed his eyes. I left as Ox Miller gave up a homerun. I thought I could find my way back without a compass and a roadmap. I wandered down a long hallway that I hoped lead to the front door. The shot came behind me. I turned and sprinted down the hallway, flew through the back door and saw Jake standing over Mr. Wordsworth. Wordsworth was sitting in the chair with a bullet hole over his heart. His head was resting on his chest. He seemed to be scowling as if the Cubs would never win. I snapped off the radio and said to the dead man, “The Cubs will probably never win in my lifetime either.” I shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it and looked at Jake. “Let’s have it.” “Tom did it,” Jake said, “I saw the whole thing.” “I thought you were in the kitchen?” I said. “I came out of the kitchen, the back door, saw Tom behind that wall. He fired and Mr. Wordsworth was dead when I reached him.”
51 A millionaire had died. The birds started chirping again. They didn’t seem too upset about it. “Let’s call homicide,” I said. The homicide boys didn’t waste a lot of time. It was a closed case, they had an eye witness, they could file the paperwork and be home in time for Junior’s Little League game. While the homicide boys poked around, I looked for the letter. It wasn’t on the table and it wasn’t on the ground. It had vanished. I filed that under “none of my business.” I drove home in the Crossley and pretended the radio worked. I got static on one station, a crooner who tortured the high notes on another and an ad that said 15 out of 20 women suffered from damaged hair. I hoped someone, somewhere was hosting a fund raiser for those women. I sat in my apartment and drank some bourbon. I sat a little longer and drank a little more bourbon. It was none of my business. Wordsworth was dead, I had $500 to pick my bank account off the floor, and so I went over and picked up the phonebook.
52 I got lucky. I found a Courtney Cooke living on Fifth Street on the Southside. It wouldn’t hurt to talk to her. I was a curious fellow. There was no traffic and I made it across town in under 20 minutes. The Crossley’s engine growled the whole way. It was a small house with a battered postage stamp of a lawn. I walked up the two wooden steps and knocked. When she answered, she wasn’t pushing 39, she was beating the hell out of it. The only thing I could tell from her eyes was the sale price of Maybelline mascara. “Courtney Cooke?” “Yes?” “Tell me about Tom Wordsworth.” Her smile dipped a bit, but she pulled it back. “Oh, I haven’t seen him in years” “I heard he retired upstate about five years ago. Is he back in town?” I said. “I’m not sure.” I took a twenty out of my wallet.”
53 “Look honey, this is my best price. I have no expense account.” She took it. “I’ll be back,” she said. I stood on the steps and heard a car roar by with a bad muffler. Somewhere I heard a radio blasting Glen Miller’s In the Mood. I did some math. Miller had been dead over three years. Wordsworth had been dead over three hours. Add that up and you came away with nothing. The door opened and she handed me a piece of paper. It was an address on Sixth Street, about a mile away. I parked in front of an apartment that had been built at the turn of the century and had stopped pretending to be respectable a decade ago. It was a wooden structure and the only thing keeping it up were the termites holding hands. I scanned the mailboxes and Tom was in apartment 203. I would have taken the elevator, but it was filled with dust and stacks of old newspaper. Someone was betting the market for old newspapers would come back. Probably the same person who predicted 1929 would be a good year.
54 I found apartment 202 and discovered apartment 203 next to it. Those correspondence detective courses were paying off. I knocked. Then, I tried the door and it opened. Someone should remind Tom to lock his door in this kind of neighborhood. Only it wouldn’t make a difference. Tom was dangling from a rope hanging from a rafter. His head was hanging at that strange angle, when your neck decides it has supported your head too long and just snaps. A chair was tipped over at his feet. I sat on a couch that had cigarette burns in it. I figured one more burn wouldn’t hurt, so I lit up a pill. And I stared at Tom and he stared out the window at a brick wall across the alley. I looked at the chair. I walked over and picked it up. I shoved the chair below him. It cleared his feet by a good foot. I thought of all the people who had been connected with the case. I walked out and closed the door behind me. I didn’t bother locking it. This time she didn’t open the door the whole way. I stuck my foot in it and shoved. It knocked her back into a small
55 living room and I was standing in a hallway that smelled of cat urine and stale cigarettes. “I’m expecting someone,” she said. “If it is who I think it is., you’d better have a bag packed, a taxi waiting and a ticket for Mexico,” I said. “What?” Your friend Jake just played old west and strung up Tom. Left him swinging from a rafter. And the sheriff was nowhere around.” I sat down and rubbed my neck. I was tired. It had been too long a day. Too many murders, too many lies and too many suspects. `
“You see Courtney, Mr., Jake is not a nice guy. He
strangled Tom then hung him from the ceiling. But he forgot he is a foot taller than anyone else. So he hung Tom too high. Or is it hanged Tom too high? I always get those two mixed up.” She looked at me dazed. Mixed up or not, that explained the foot gap between Tom’s feet and the chair.
56 She sat down and looked at me. She had moved from dazed to irritated .. “What does that have to do with me?” “Everything” “I underestimated Jake. I underestimate people a lot. I thought Hitler was just another crackpot, I thought FDR wouldn’t last more than four years and I thought that Truman was just a hat salesman from Missouri.” “And underestimating people is bad for business. They might take away my license and stick it back in the Cracker Jack box.” I was talking just to talk, trying to get the facts to stand at attention in my head, but like tired drunks, they kept stumbling over each other. I was tired too.. I rubbed my eyes and tried again. “Jake knew I would come to you. I think he knew that Wordsworth would remember you and send me to you. “ “You’re nuts,” she said. “Aren’t we all honey? We’re all living in a big can of mixed nuts and we keep bumping against each other.”
57 “You are making no sense.” “Okay, Digest this. Jake knew you would finger Tom for me, I go see Tom and shucks, he has committed suicide. I buy the set-up…” “So?” she said. I sat back in the chair. ‘How much did he promise you?” “He didn’t promise me a thing.” “Tom is dead, Wordsworth is dead. That leaves you honey. Three take away three equals zero.” “Wait a minute.” “If we have that long, “I said. “ “Jake didn’t say anything about killing Tom— I want out of this mess,” she said. “So do I honey,” I said. “Now tell me everything Jake said.” “Well. We met about three months ago at a dive called The Garden. We started going out. Then one day, he tells me he and Tom had embezzled the money together. Tom went to prison….”
58 “And now Tom wanted his share?” “Yeah, Jake promised me $50,000 if ….” It all happened in the time it takes to change your mind. He must have come in through the kitchen and started shooting – she went down and she would never have to worry about fighting old age anymore. I dove to the side and started pumping bullets. I got lucky. Which is better any day than getting dead. He stumbled back in the kitchen and I saw him drop. I walked into the kitchen and he was pouring blood all over the pinewood floor. I held my gun on him, but I didn’t need to. His gun was by my feet. I kicked it into the living room and he would never walk that far ever again. He was breathing heavy and he didn’t have long. I had to ask. “Why didn’t you kill Tom yourself? Why drag me into it?” “Didn’t want anyone to know I was looking. You were the alibi. With Wordsworth dead and Tom a suicide, you’d swear to the police that Tom killed the old man.”
59 “Because Wordsworth showed me the letter that you forged?” “Yes,” he said. “And because you set it up to make me think that Tom hung himself ?” I said. “Hanged,” he said. “Where is the $100,000?” And then he grinned. “I spent it, some on booze and broads and the rest I wasted.” Then he was gone. It was an okay line to go out on. I called homicide and I got in the Crossley and I drove home. I poured myself a drink and thought about a girl I loved in eighth grade. Her name was Martha Clark and I hoped she married a nice guy with a steady job and they had three kids and they went to the country club every Saturday night for dinner. I don’t know why. I just hoped it worked out for someone in this world.
Philip Thiebert
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S. Lovinguth
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“Magic Window” Stephen J. Malinoski
Andy wanted an X-Box 360 for Christmas. When Christmas morning rolled around and there wasn’t an X-Box 360 in sight, it took all his strength and willpower to not cry. Andy’s mother loomed over ‘ him brandy in one hand, cigarette in the other, as he opened his last present with slow and deliberate rips of the wrapping paper. He had excitedly awoken her in the kitchen earlier that morning. “Oh, a baseball bat,” he said then slouched his shoulders. “You know, why not just say ‘Thanks, Ma,I really appreciate it’ You know, you’re a spoiled rotten kid. Rotten.” Andy’s mother said her tongue heavy.
A few days later Andy asked his mother why Santa had not brought him an X-Box 360. He had been watching a James Bond movie, he was dreaming of one day having his own secret lair and henchmen to do his dirty work, when he saw a commercial for XBox 360s. They now included the hot new game ‘KILL STUFF 10!’ His mother was in her usual spot sitting at the kitchen table yapping on the phone with much exaggerated hand gestures. The kitchen
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She resumed the conversation via laughter in her normal, soft, kind, phone voice. Andy walked away deflated again feeling defeated. He thought maybe Jesus would get him an XBox 360 if he asked nicely.
It was later that night, after Andy’s mother had forced him to bed, that he began to doubt the magic of Christmas. Christmas is a stupid holiday in the cold, he thought. Retarded-decorated-dead pine trees. Just then Andy’s bedroom window flew open and a dark dressed man landed face first on his floor with a black trash bag crumpling over his shoulder. Andy jumped up and grabbed his baseball bat. “Are you a ghost? Like from Christmas past?” Andy asked after a few moments, shaken. “Nah man just a crack-head dude,” winced the man as he lifted his face off the carpet. Andy relaxed and lowered the bat a little, “Oh, okay I was kind of scared there for a second.”
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Andy could see he had a goatee that didn’t quite connect on one side. His eye balls were slightly yellow. He had several moles and red scabs on his face. Andy could tell that he had not showered in a while, mainly by his strong, unpleasant smell. The crack-head sat up. He felt his front tooth; then, with a dull snap, pulled it from its socket. “Wow,” Andy said. Tossing the bloodied, broken tooth over his shoulder, the crack-head began to rummage through his trash bag while he said: “Look I need a place to stay. Is it cool if I stay here for tonight?” Andy thought a minute then said “Well I guess. I need to ask my mom if it’s alright—” “Nah, man like nobody can know I’m here bro,” the crack-head interrupted. He produced a beer can from the trash bag; he tapped the top with his finger tips then popped it open, emptying its contents in one swallow. He looked in Andy’s direction, grinned, and offered a throaty laugh.
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A real life bad guy! Andy thought. The crack-head began to pull out various items from within his trash bag: a pizza box, several unopened movies, a pair of underwear (that had apparently been used to clean up a ketchup spill and had since dried brown and crusty), several orange medicine bottles (this guy must really be sick, Andy thought), an X-Box 360, a —Andy’s eyes grew as big as quarters when they read on the side of the box “Includes: KILL STUFF 10!” “Okay,” Andy said. “You can stay, but on one condition.” The crack-head pulled out a plastic sandwich bag that held a glass cigarette and . . . rock salt? After filling one end with the rock salt, he lit the glass cigarette and inhaled deeply. Through thick clouds of smoke he exhaled, “Anything dude.” Andy ended up playing X-Box 360 all night and in the morning when he woke up—the crack-head was gone. The XBox 360 still remained, nestled by his TV. Andy tried to hide the X-Box 360 from his mother. However, this proved to be
65 harder than he thought, due mainly to the high volume of X-Box 360 games his friends would bring over with them. She never believed the real story but that was okay with Andy. Andy’s mother assumed that one of his friends must have had an extra X -Box 360 and loaned it out to him. As for Andy, from that week after Christmas forward, he left his bedroom window ajar with a cold beer can he took from his mother’s “beer fridge” sitting on the window’s ledge, along with a sandwich bag filled to the rim with rock salt.
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Stephen J. Malinoski
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Sandra Pugh
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“Goodbye Childhood Days” Nichol DeCastra When the morning came I would be off to attend college in Michigan. At the moment though, I was sitting on my
porch swing with the love of my life, Kyria, listening to Carrie Underwood’s version of “I’ll Stand By You,” playing on the radio that was perched on the railing beside us. We had been sitting on the porch swing since daybreak, talking and watching the shadows change with the sun’s rotation. I was sitting there with my ankles crossed and her head resting in my lap with her dark red hair falling down my legs like a blanket; her bright blue eyes hidden behind her closed eyelids. One of my arms was draped across her body while the other played with the swing’s chains. The words of the song danced over my senses and I was reminded of the moments when it looked like our friendship would be over; it always amazes me how outside forces can alter, for the good or the bad, a relationship between two or more people. The lyrics of the song reminded me of the rockiest point in our relationship, when we were just friends, and the bitch, Megan, had nearly destroyed our relationship. I blame her for getting Kyra into drugs. Though on the flip side I did want to thank her because since she showed her true face, our friendship evolved into something more. During those few rocky months of Megan being in Kyria’s life, she had battled with a drug problem before I found out. I nearly broke Megan’s teeth in for that influence. At the same time, I was battling an eating disorder due to our separation. Kyria was clean now ans I was eating; we were both going to therapy.
68 “You scared about tomorrow Mary?” asked Kyria, breaking the silence that had descended. “A little,” I admitted, “but not much. I’ll miss you though and my family.” “You had better miss me,” smirked Kyria opening the eyes that I loved so much and looking into mine. “I think I’ll be lonely here without you.” “I doubt that,” I answer. “Seeing how you tend to attract people like flies to cow manure.” “Nice image,” she retorts, rolling her eyes. “What am I supposed to do without you here all the time to watch my back?” “That’s what cell phones are for sweetie. And the computer. And let’s not forget the all time fossil of a favorite: snail mail.” “God forbid I forget snail mail,” she chuckles. There is more silence and then she shifts so that she is lying on her side and is facing the setting sun. “Do you think we will make it?” “What sort of shit is this?” I snort, and stare down at her resisting the urge to flick the shell of her ear. “It’s just miles Kyria and that’s not too major all things considered. I mean if we could survive high school and the bitch I am sure we can survive separate colleges.” “Maybe.” “Hey! If you’re going to start that pessimistic bullshit I’m dumping you from my lap and going inside. Let’s not talk about this anymore; it’s depressing. Let’s talk about something else.” “Alright. Sunset’s beautiful this time of year.” “Yeah, isn’t it? I wonder if the north has sunsets like this.” “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.” “You’re right, I don’t. How’s that painting of yours coming? You know, the one you won’t let me see?” “It’s good. I should have it finished by Christmas.” “How much detail is going into this thing?!” “A good bit.” “So, what are we going to do for dinner?” I ask,
69 glancing at my watch. “Do you want to go out or stay in and just order a pizza?” “I feel like Mexican.” “Nice.” “But I want to stay here for a little while longer.” “Me too.” The two of us sat there in silence while the song changed to “It is You (I Have Loved)” by Diana Glover. Kyria started singing along to it so softly, I just closed my eyes and sighed softly leaning back against the swing and enjoyed the last few hours. I smiled when I felt her tug at my hair and looked down at her. She was smiling up at me and reached up her hands and wrapped them around my neck before bringing me down to kiss my mouth. “I love you,” she whispered. “Oh really?” I asked, smiling. “That’s funny because I feel the exact same way about you.” We shared another kiss before returning to swinging and we watched the sun finish its descent, turning the sky into a patchwork quilt of pinks, purples, oranges, reds, and blues.
Nichol DeCastra
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Sandra Pugh
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Bad Moon Rising A Novel In-Progress April Stotler Chapter 1 The sea was a loud crashing beast as it devoured the shore and then vomited it back, rolling forward and back, just as the ironically appropriate song “Roll To Me” played on Ilsa’s wind up radio. I leaned against Jason and felt his arms wrap around my cool shoulders. He was sitting next to me on the log, his dark hair in damp threads around his eyes, laughing at something that Ilsa and Tony were doing. I wasn’t really focused on them. Instead, I felt hypnotized by the steady and predictable waves of the Gulf. My body was damp, drying from the dip that we’d all taken in the sea. The music was a frantically fast beat that was imitated in our movements. I swallowed a mouthful of beer as I turned to see Amelia get up and toss her bottle into the bonfire that we circle. It was eerie how the fire rose so quickly and how the sea seemed to roar in response as the heat washed over us. Despite it, I felt a chill. Despite the fireglow, despite the music, and Jason’s warmth next to me, I knew with a terrible sense of urgency that something was wrong. It reminded me of what happened to my sister. When I was young, maybe no older than six, my older sister nearly died. She’d been driving home from her job at the DMV when an 18-wheeler jumped lanes and slammed into her. If she hadn’t been keyed up from her day, she probably wouldn’t have made it. I asked her if she’d thought God had been watching.
72 All she’d said to me was, “Manda, when something in you says, ‘Look out,’ you better listen.” Her words came back to me on that beach as the singer crooned out his heart. I straightened on the log, the damp material of my swim suit catching on the woody splinters of the driftwood. Jason, Ilsa, Amelia and Tony all seemed to fade as I stared off past the fire and my friends to the horizon of the sea. The music ended and the DJ’s voice came onto the radio, announcing the name of the band and the location of their next concert. It didn’t register because the shape in the horizon was growing. “Mandy?” I felt the world rock, I felt pressure in my arm. I didn’t respond, my eyes narrowing as I tried to understand what shape was forming on the moonlit horizon. Urgently, with a sharpness that signaled alarm, Jason shook me again. “Baby? Baby, what do you see?” I stood staring as the mound grew bigger. I raised a bare arm and shivered as my finger pointed at it. “What’s that?” Did my voice just crack? Why was I shaking? Jason’s hand slid down my arm to rest on the back of my thigh. “I don’t see anything,” Tony said, confusion coloring his normally sure voice. “Amanda, what is it?” Ilsa asked, her accent tinting the words. “Jason, look, she’s all freaked out,” Amelia said. I ignored all of their talking shaking even more as I realized that the mysterious shape was getting bigger. “Okay, Baby.” I felt his fingers over mine. “Let’s just take away your—” Jason’s voice lost its patronizing tone as he stared at the shape. “Holy shit!” It was huge. Run Amanda. It was an inner voice. “Dude, what is that?!” Tony gasped out. I trembled, a terrible knowing filling me. I didn’t know why or how, but I knew that if I stood there a moment longer, I was going to die. I tripped in my haste to turn, my right arm scraping on the splintered log. “What? Hey, Mandy!” Amelia cried. “Where are you going?” I couldn’t answer. I leapt over the log and tore off through
73 The sand to the parking lot, 100 yards away. I knew with an instinctive certainty that the beast—and it was a beast— was coming this way for me. I didn’t turn. I didn’t scream. I didn’t stop running. Just as I got to the car, I looked up, my hand fumbling for the door. All four of my friends stood in a line at the edge of the surf as a colossal being stood, his red eyes trained on me. Run Amanda. My inner voice warned again. Run far and look not back. The voice was male, I realized. It was warm and sounded almost as frantic as my heart. Run Amanda. It urged. I stared, unable to look away, my eyes locked. My feet felt rooted as I gazed into those beastly red orbs. With a swallow of fear, I felt it watching and I knew I was done for. AMANDA! The voice broke the connection. At the same instant the beast roared. I got into the car and fumbled frantically for my keys. The purse held them. With no consideration for the Altima’s gears, I slammed the car into reverse and backed out. I turned but didn’t look back. My name is Amanda, and there is a monster hunting me. ***
April Stotler
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“Western” An homage to John Updike’s “A&P” By Katie Boyer
So in walks these two drag queens with feathers waving and sequins blazing. I’m working the customer service/cigarette counter, on the same wall as the front door, so I don’t see them until they’ve tip-tapped their way around the gourmet bread stand and into the deli corner. I caught the yellow headdress out of the side of my eye, and at first I thought it was a delivery of balloons or something, headed in the wrong direction. When I realized the flashes were coming from two very tall girls in feathers and heels, and one in a sequin leotard, I dropped the carton of Marlboro Lights I was trying to scan smack on the floor. The lady with the dirty blonde hair at my register looked at me with this melty sympathetic face, like she knew how hard it was to stay on the wagon and was old friends with shaky hands. I’m sure that she’s in AA, actually, because last week she came in the store and apologized to the manager on duty for stealing a single can of coke out of a six-pack one time. She said the confession was part of “Step Eight.” By the time I got her smokes all bagged up and her out from in front of my counter, the girls had moved over into the produce section and were pinching the avocadoes with their fingernails and giggling. I’ve always wanted to be in show business, no doubt would have given Vegas a run for its money if I wasn’t under 5 feet with kind of chunky legs, so I took a long appreciating look from across
75 the gourmet bread stand. That’s when I noticed, of course, that these two girls were actually guys. They were painted and powdered alright, but the lipstick and the glitter couldn’t quite hide the strong, square jawbones and wide shoulders, not to mention their calves, muscled and filled out like canon balls. All their man features, with a couple of notable exceptions, were plain as could be under the glamorous woman ones. One of them was in these midnight blue satiny leisure pants, slit up the outside to the knee so you could see his fishnet stockings and silver platform sandals. He had this kind of tender pinkish skin, like it wasn’t used to being on display, and the florescent green tint of the overhead lights made him look a little sickly. He was what you might call “cute” if you caught him on a good day in the sun, but in here you could tell he was a little uncomfortable. He kept tugging the hem of this blue cape attached to the straps of his sequined bra-top, like any second he’d wrap completely up in it and dart out the front door like a great sparkling Batman. There was this one, and then there was the other one, who was strutting around like he shopped in feathers all the time. You kind of got the impression he had talked the other one into getting dressed up and coming into the store. He had this kind of magnetism that could probably convince just about anybody to do just about anything, and that much was obvious even from behind my counter. His skin had a warm soft tone that made me think of a sunset in the desert, or of some kind of hunter who slept under the open sky. He wasn’t straight up white or black or Mexican – Lord knows we get plenty of all them in the Highland Avenue Western – but his skin had kind of a blended color, like a sepia version of an old photo-
76 graph. He had these full-socket, deep brown eyes obvious from about a mile away and gold shadow up to his eyebrows. He was the one wearing the headdress that had caught my eye, and already he and those feathers had merged into one new animal in my mind. There was a sequin cap that came to a peak right in the middle of his high forehead, and pushed a few dark curls out the sides. The feathers started just behind the tops of his ears and sprung out proud in a kind of quivering halo, like a bird-man or this African tribal spirit I saw a picture of in second grade. He was moving on through the produce section, the other one following so close he was almost hugging him, swaying his hips and his head a little every time he took a step and making the feathers quiver. He had abandoned the avocadoes and started turning over one clear plastic package of strawberries after another, acting like people do when they have no idea what they’re going to buy and are just trying to kill time. He was wearing these leather boots the same color yellow as the headdress, with these bright gold tassels bouncing around where the zippers brought them up snug around his knees and threw dewy reflections off his chiseled thighs. His leotard was a whole jumbled mess of yellows, first a darker bruised-banana color fabric underneath, then topped by sequins in a few shades, from nearly orange to lemon sherbet. The way the colors waved reminded me of the tree reflections I saw in this pond once, in the woods behind my granny’s house, though for all I know there might have been some other pattern to it. The thing that got me, though, was the way the square front of his leotard made a kind of picture frame for his perfect collar bones and the soft place where they joined the muscles of his neck.
77 Some feathers dipped down from the headdress and framed his shoulders from the back. Just looking at him felt like a gong in my whole body. The way he was holding his mouth gave him this sort of bored look, kind of snooty, like three minutes ago he’d run out of entertaining things to do and come in the grocery store to keep from falling asleep. I guess if you’re a man walking around in the Western in yellow leather boots and a feather headdress, that’s the only kind of look your face can have. He had to have felt my stare on him like a heat lamp, but he didn’t tip. Not this queen. He kept right on moving, past the apples and garlic and tomatoes, around the crates of featured wine and chocolate, back to the processed cheese and lunch meats. Every step he took was careful, weight rolling from the stiletto heels to the pointed toes, like he was used to showing people just what a walk should look like. He stopped to think, I guess, and put one hand up so casually to brush a bent-over feather off his forehead that I felt the floor jump a little. Then he started moving again, taking the blue one’s arm and leading him back down the wine-peanut-butter-mayonnaisemustard-ketchup-salad-dressing-koolaid aisle and out of sight behind the beer coolers. The tips of a few yellow feathers bobbed along just at the top of the coolers, so I was ready when they popped out the other end of the aisle in front of the cappuccino machine and almost ran over our 95-year-old customer, a sweet old blue hair who rides the bus up from her retirement home a block away and takes about an hour and a half to harvest all seven aisles. She looked up at these two towering over her and squinted for a second, then shooed them
78 away like they were cats she wanted off her sofa. They looked at each other, scrunched their noses up toward their thick eyelashes and giggled again. Then they tip-tapped arm in arm right on past her, the bird-man kind of helping the blue one stay steady. “What’n the hell’re those?” Tawanda said from the office behind me, where she was counting money. “Ain’t no reason for a man to be in feathers.” “Don’t get all wound up, Tawanda,” I said over my shoulder. “They’re showgirls.” Tawanda’s a single mom with three kids, and she’s always acting like she’s got all the answers. As far as I can tell, though, getting pregnant is the only thing she’s ever excelled at. She’s 22, and I’ll be 24 in July, so it pushes my buttons pretty hard when she talks to me like I’m the kid. “Showgirls my ass,” she said. “Them’s a couple a freaked up fairies playin’ dress up. I know one thing - they ain’t gonna be playin’ at that for long.” I forgot to mention Tawanda thinks she’s going to run this place some glorious day, maybe in 2023 when she’s got ten kids instead of three and they’re all old enough to be cashiers and she’s so tired of sleeping around that unloading the produce truck is her idea of a good time. But I could see she had a point. It’s one thing to have a couple of drag queens on stage in some smoky Tupelo casino, where the lights and the music make them seem totally aloof and mysterious, and they just kind of give you and your boyfriend ideas about what to do when you get back to your room. It’s another thing to have them in the flesh, in broad daylight, strutting right past the Krispy Kremes and the Birmingham News.
79 Them being anywhere in Birmingham in daylight, actually, is probably not such a good idea. Girls dressed like that might get arrested for prostitution anyway – no questions asked – but guys? That could cause some kind of short circuit, the kind where some meathead good ole boys can’t stop their fists from swinging. It’s not like we’re out in whitebread Brook Highland or anyplace like that, but Birmingham’s not exactly the kind of town where anything goes. Our store is right across from the exit ramp off Highway 280, and far enough up on a little ridge that the roads beside us look down at the tall buildings in downtown. We have lots of homeless people who do their shopping in here, mostly for spaghetti sauce it seems like, and we only run them off when they start panhandling in the parking lot. That asking for spare change bothers the middle-class people who stop in on their way to somewhere else, but it just about sends the richies we get right over the top. The richies are usually only in here because they’re eating at one of the fancy restaurants also taking advantage of a location halfway between whitebread and downtown. We’re around the corner from the Hot and Hot Fish Club and across the street from The Veranda, a joint owned by a former New Orleans chef that new money contractors and their chain-smoking secretaries come to so they can feel glamorous. On the other side is Bottega Favorita, where people pay about $45 for a slice of pizza and a chance they’ll run into the mayor or somebody like that. If there’s anything all these people have in common, though, it’s the ability to get real bent out of shape over somebody not acting right. By now the guys had come back through the bagged chocolates and were standing at the flower-and-gift counter, asking Loretta
80 something. The bird-man waved his hands around like he was cupping something in the air. Loretta waved her hands right back, then she pointed, then the guys pointed and turned on their heels and passed right by the water coolers and disappeared for a second down the paper and cleaning products aisle. Loretta flashed a big gaptoothed grin at Maudie behind the second register. Maudie just shook her head and looked down at her hands folded up on the counter, like she was saying a little silent prayer or something. I started to wonder where these guys came from and if they had any idea what they’d walked into. But here comes the wild part of the story. At least all the other cashiers think it’s wild, though I personally think it was kind of inevitable. The store was pretty empty, since it was a Tuesday midmorning and the lunch rush at the restaurants hadn’t started yet, so there was nothing much to do except lean a little on the shelves of cigarettes and wait for the feathers and sequins to pop back out one of the aisles. After awhile they emerge from the far side, the frozen foods, the blue one with his cape actually wrapped around him since, sure, it’s pretty chilly over there. So here they come, past the displays on the ends of the aisles, past the 24-pack Dr. Pepper specials and the tortilla chips and the salsa and the energy drinks, Birdman with one hand pressed to the side of his face and the other bouncing something heavy. I can see them heading for Maudie’s register, since it’s the only one lit up over there, but right as they start getting close to it, one of our regular neighborhood homeless residents elbows in front of them with his arms full of Budweiser and a couple of jars of spaghetti sauce, his sweatpants all baggy with the change he panhan-
81 dled that morning in Five Points. Maudie looks more than a little relieved. So the guys come over to me. Birdman slides his purchase onto the counter, smooth as if he’s telling a secret everybody already knows, and I feel the weight of it in my hand as I pick it up and raise it to the scanner. Vaseline Brand Petroleum Jelly – eight ounces $5.99 plus tax. The register says $6.53. Now his hands are empty, except for a big emerald and gold ring on his right middle finger, so I wonder where the money’s coming from. Still with that bored look he slides a credit card out from the widest part of the left strap of his outfit, from just above the smooth curve of his chest. The tip of the card sort of brushes that dip where the two collar bones meet, and for a couple of seconds I couldn’t think of anything else. Really, I thought that was so sexy. My fingers lost all traction on the plastic bag I was trying to peel open. I wondered if he would let me put the credit card back there when I was done with it. But then the train really starts to come off the tracks. Mona comes in from the back dock where she’s been chain smoking and chewing the fat with the owner of the Indian restaurant next door. She starts to head for the door marked ‘Manager’ to check on Tawanda’s drawer counts when the guys catch her eye. Mona’s pretty hard-boiled, plays poker and shoots whiskey and bets on boxing, but at work she wants everything dull and respectable so we won’t scare anybody off. She stands stock still for a minute, taking in the feathers, then her jaw clenches and she marches over. “Boys, this ain’t the circus,” she announces. The corners of Birdman’s mouth sort of twitch, like Mona has said something funny, and I wonder for a second if he’s noticed, like
82 I have, that her voice sounds like a goose honking. “No, I suppose it’s not,” he says in a careful bored voice. “That’s so awfully disappointing.” Actually hearing him talk started a little ringing in my ears, like happens when you hear a person’s voice for the first time. It came out a touch breathy, with echoes at the bottom, the way it kind of sloshed over “suppose” and purred around “awfully.” The words spun with an accent I couldn’t quite place, and all of a sudden I slid right down his voice into his dressing room. He was sitting in front of a gigantic mirror, the kind with big light bulbs lit up all around it, with lipsticks and tissues and a big powder puff all jumbled up on a table in front of him. The Blue One was sitting beside him plucking his eyebrows, and they were laughing with their manager about how they once saw a rival’s beaded false eyelash fall off in the middle of a wink and glue his eyelid shut. At my house, now, if I want to get a little dressed up for my boyfriend, I pull out my Wet N’ Wild lipsticks and matching nail polish and bring an extra lamp into the bathroom so I can really see what I’m doing, or – if it’s for a special occasion – I’ll use a little bit of eyeliner and grab the feather boa he bought me in Biloxi. “’Suppose not’ nothin’,” Mona says. “This ain’t the circus, boys.” That made me laugh a little, when she repeated it, because she said it with such weight, like it had just occurred to her that the tigers and trapeze she’d been looking for all these years were just never going to appear. She didn’t much like my snort – she likes moral support as much as respectability – but she just kind of jabbed me with her eyes then went back to trying to work her body around so she could square her shoulders off against the guys.
83 Birdman’s bored look turns a little bit amused, and one hip kind of pops out as he’s standing there giving Mona the face-off she wanted, but before he can get out what’s forming on his lips, the Blue One pipes up with the exact squeaky voice I expected out of him. “I swear,” he said, “we aren’t looking for trouble. We just came in for the one thing.” “I got no problem with you shopping,” Mona tells him, and I can tell by the way her eyes widen a little bit that she’s just noticed that’s a brassiere hiding under his cape. She looks away for a second to gain her composure and her eyes fall on their purchase – the Vaseline. This time her whole face clenches, and I can see her mind trying like hell to back away from the cliff she just sprinted up to. “But you gotta be dressed decent when you come in here,” she manages. “Honey, we are decent,” Birdman tells her, popping his hip back in straight and turning away from Mona, back to me with my mouth hanging open a little. He’s clearly getting irritated, and I can sympathize, I guess. The Highland Avenue Western must seem pretty narrow compared to where he spends most of his time. “Boys, I ain’t gonna argue with you. If you’re gonna shop in this store, next time you better come in dressed as men. We run a clean establishment here, nice and respectable, and I ain’t gonna have it turn into no freak show.” That’s being respectable for you. Birdman just kind of grunts and tosses his head so the feathers do a little dance, dismissing her. Mona brings her meaty fists up to her hips and leans forward, like she’s just dying for him to make something of it.
84 All this while, random customers have been crawling out of the woodwork and are peeping in on our little scene. The homeless guy is still standing by the front doors, half-pretending to read the newspapers, but his mouth is hanging open so I know he’s been watching us. A couple of plump Mexican girls are gazing at us over the top of the bread stand, whispering, and a businessman with an Auto Trader is staring at us from Maudie’s line. Maudie is staring too, in fact, and everybody’s just kind of holding their breath. “Sandy, have you rang this stuff up yet?” Mona asks after a second. “Yeah,” I say, “but I gotta swipe the card.” “Well swipe it,” Mona says, kind of mean, but I’m not too worried about pissing her off. We’ve been on the same bowling team for a couple of years – and partied together even before that – so I know how she is with her temper. Besides, something else was kind of tugging at my mind. All the while I was selecting “credit” from my screen and going through the motions of swiping and punching and waiting for the receipts to print out, I was thinking. When I tore off the receipt, my hand was shaking a little, and I noticed it even more when I picked up the pen to hand it to Birdman. His fingers kind of brushed mine when he took the pen, and I held a corner of the receipt while he signed with a flourish of initials I couldn’t read. He hands me back the receipt, and I drop his copy in the bag and am just about to lift the weight of the jar over the counter to him when I come to a decision. “Wait,” I say, “these are on me.” I grab a little packet of Kleenex from beside the bubble gum and drop it right in the bag with
85 the Vaseline. Birdman looks straight at me, like he’s shocked and kind of disappointed, and for a second it seems like he’ll say something. Then he sort of arches one eyebrow and spins away, taking the Blue One by the arm and dragging him out the front doors like a parent taking an unruly kid outside for a switching, and I’m left standing there with Mona and her second chin quivering a little. “What in the hell are you doing?” she demands. “What?” I say, innocent as a baby. “Are you trying to piss me off?” “No,” I say. “I’m trying to be polite to our customers. You didn’t have to treat them like that.” “Like what, Sandy?” “Like crap.” “They were the ones treating us like crap,” she said. “Turning this store into some kind of damn...strip tease...sparkle cabaret. Throwing it in our faces what they were about to do to each other. It’s sick.” I try to find a comeback that can hold all the things going on in my brain, set Mona straight about minding other people’s business, but what comes out is: “If the shoe fits, Mona. If the shoe fits.” It’s a saying of my granny’s that she uses as a kind of catch-all, and she’d probably cackle if she heard me throw it at Mona. But I can’t tell right away if it’s made the impression I want. “There is something bad wrong with you, girl,” Mona says after a second. “Uh-uh,” I say and give a little sigh. “There’s something wrong with you.” I pull loose the ties on both sides of my bright red apron
86 and pull it over my head, rolling it over a few times and leaving it in a wad on the counter. I punch it once for good measure. “I quit,” I say. The Mexican girls on the other side of the bread counter glance at each other and walk away quickly. Mona grunts and starts stroking her eyebrows out from the bridge of her nose, like she does when she’s pissed and needs a cigarette. Instead of going off, though, she just sort of raises her head and looks me in the eye, and I can see tiny red veins flashing out from the center. “Sandy, don’t you do this to me. Not today, not over a couple a homos in tights. You know I’m busier than a one-legged man here.” It’s true, I do know she’s been working 14-hour days and probably won’t go home until midnight if I don’t stick around and do my thing. But when I think of how she tried to threaten that gorgeous man, of how she made this backwater seem twice as dull and narrow as it usually does on Tuesday, my stomach gets so tight and scrunchy I want to duck my head into an empty lettuce box. “No,” I say. “I’m done.” I squeeze into the office behind me and sidestep Tawanda so I can get to the time clock in the corner and punch my card. Then I pull my backpack off the shelf and head out, not even looking at anybody as I go. The doors swish open and I push out into the rising humidity, looking for my guys in the parking lot. I catch a single yellow boot pulling itself into the driver’s side of an old red Mazda, and I step out from under the hanging ferns to see if I can catch them. The car backs toward me, too quickly, and I jump away just in time. I can see Birdman through the windshield, his feathers off and what looks like a giant stocking on his head, and the Blue One beside him looking
87 pretty wilted. I wave a little and start to step forward, but the tires squeal and the car jumps past me. Their tag reads “British Columbia,” and I have to wonder for a few seconds where in the hell that is. When another car comes into the parking lot, I kind of sigh and get back on the sidewalk, drop my backpack off my shoulder and rummage around for a cigarette. I go to the end of the building and lean on the railing, where I can look down the street and see some of the cars pulling up to Hot and Hot and the Veranda. The valets are starting to scamper a little, bouncing in and out of cars like rice in a hot skillet. When I get about halfway through my smoke, I can finally think again. What I’m trying to do is picture a world where Birdman and Mona exist side by side, where she can run her store and he can wear sequins all day and all night if he wants to. I’m replaying their little scene in my head, sometimes socking Mona before she can get a word out, sometimes agreeing that drag queens are too much for customers at the Western. I’m replaying the scene all kinds of different ways, when all of a sudden it hits me. That look on his face when Mona confronted him. That wasn’t the look of him laughing at Mona’s voice. That was the look of the cat that ate the canary, as my granny would say. That was the look of a bully who had just tricked you into picking the fight. Mona fell for it, and so did I. And now I’ve got no work, and she’s got twice as much. When I finished my smoke, I went back into the store, trying real hard not to get noticed by Maudie and Loretta. I snuck my way around to where I could see into the office. Mona was sitting there, bent over some paperwork, her forehead smooshed against the ball
88 of her hand. That settled it. I went up to the door and cleared my throat real loud. She raised her head. “What do you want, Sandy?” she asked wearily. “So, um,” I said, clearing my throat a little more. “I was just thinking, um, about how rent’s due next week. Maybe we could count the last 10 minutes as my break?” Mona looked at me with this kind of blank expression, like what she was really seeing was not my face, but a newsreel of my previous offenses and even fewer good deeds. I thought for a second she wouldn’t take the bait. “Alright, dammit,” she said at last. “But I swear this is the last time you quit before I fire your ass.” “Cool,” I say. I punch her lightly on the shoulder and turn to look for my apron.
Katie Boyer
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Sandra Pugh
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Deborah Ann Cidboy
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“Into Thin Air” By Jimmy Carl Harris
Maggie shooed a fly from the rim of her glass, turned the glass so her lips would not touch the fly’s perch, took a sip of tepid beer. “God, how long has it been?” “Since?” “Since we sat in that little bistro off Market Street and shared a decently chilled glass of beer.” Hank shouted over his shoulder. “Dos cervezas. Mucho frio, por favor.” Maggie tucked a damp wisp of brown hair behind her ear. “I don’t want any more.” He shrugged. “Reached your limit?” She pushed her half-empty glass away. The fly immediately reclaimed it. “We need to be up early tomorrow for our grand adventure.” “Darling—” “I know.” She waved a napkin, watched the fly dance away, return. “They say the view is even better than in Bhutan.”
92 The waiter appeared from the gloom behind the bar. “No hay cerveza fria. Mañana.” Immobile, the permanent part of the tableau, he offered no alternative. Hank stood, tossed a handful of coins onto the table. “Sí, sí. Mañana, mañana.” “Don’t be rude. The beer’s never cold this late.” Hank bowed deeply to no one in particular. “My sincere apology.” He belched. “Please forgive your humble servant.” Maggie rose, smoothed the wrinkles in her white shorts. “You’re in fine fettle for climbing.” “Never fear, my love. Just a stroll in the mountain air.” He took a step, wavered, grinned when she put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Mañana.” ~~ Hank slowed, waited. “We need to get to the top.” He took a deep breath. “Before dark.” Maggie caught up. She shivered. She’d perspired freely in the torrid humidity of the lower elevation. Up here, the air was far cooler and turned her sweat into a clammy chill on her skin. “We started too late.”
93 “We’re almost there.” She peered over the edge, at the somber green of the junglecloaked valley below. “We’re always almost there.” He stopped around a bend in the trail, attempted another deep breath, drank from his canteen, spilled water on his bare knee. She studied his face, the silver stubble of three days’ growth, the deep lines etched into flushed skin, the doubt joining the weariness in his eyes. “It’s almost dark.” He turned away from her scrutiny, looked at the sky. “Another hour. Maybe.” “We could find shelter. There might be a cave.” He took a step upward, away from her. “We’re almost to the top.” “We’re always—” “You said that.” ~~ Hank sat on a boulder, his hands gripping his knees. “The view. Worth it. Better than Bhutan.” He tilted his head, took a shallow gulp of air, tried to connect his eyes with hers. “You remember.” Maggie glanced up the trail. “The view in Bhutan?”
94 “Yes.” “We never made it to the top in Bhutan.” He pulled himself erect. His foot slipped, dislodged some stones. They rattled down the trail and over the edge. “Trail was treacherous in Bhutan, too.” He dug his boots into the loose surface, continued to climb. “No view’s worth dying for.” He answered over his shoulder. “Making it. To the top. That’s worth it.” They were in a gray universe, the jungle below gone to charcoal, the sky above to slate. Only in the distant west was there color, the ochre stain of the sun fading toward purple. Somewhere, nearby it seemed, the silence was pierced by joined screams, one of rage, one of terror, each as wild as the landscape. Another tremor ran through her. ~~ He waited for her, pointed at the cave. “We’ll make it. To the top. In the morning.” ~~
95 The cave smelled of animals. Hank and Maggie ate the meager fare he’d thought enough for one day—raisins, crackers, chocolate. They searched for anything to fuel a fire but found nothing. Hank said they could survive by sharing body heat. He held her, his arms tight about her, their legs crossed, her head pressed into the hollow of his shoulder. He’d caught his breath, some, and spoke into her ear. “We’ll go back to Bhutan. Remember that old Buddhist monastery at the top of the mountain?” “I don’t remember.” “Sure you do. It had blue tile on the façade. They said it was abandoned.” “Try to get some sleep.” “We’ll turn it into an inn. The trekkers need a place to overnight. It’ll be perfect.” She thrust her hand inside his shirt, felt the flutter of his heart. “Try to sleep.” “We’ll need, let’s see, lamps. And wine the tourists can stomach, not that rancid local stuff. And a record player. My uncle had a good one, the old wind-up type. At his cottage in Dorset. Remember?” he waited a moment. “Remember?”
96 Her voice was muffled. “Dorset?” “Yes, darling. He had sheep. Nasty, you said.” She lifted her head. “I remember Dorset. Sheep are nasty creatures. But that was our best year. I’d just graduated, you’d recovered from your malaria, we hiked all over Dorset. That delightful pub—” “Hard to find.” He coughed. “Old records. Beatles. You remember. Dorsey.” He coughed again. “Exchange rate. Rupees.” She returned her head to his shoulder. He seemed to sleep, she did not. After a while, his arms fell away from her. She remained huddled against him, felt the heat drain from his body. ~~ At daybreak, Maggie sat up but stayed close to him. For a time, she let the bright sun warm her while she ate the last of the chocolate. She watched a large bird balance, almost motionless, on a rising current of air. The bird stared at her with the feral intensity of a raptor. She slipped her hand into the pocket of Hank’s khaki shorts, found his handkerchief, shook it out, spread it gently over his face. Then, she went down the mountain, into the pungent heat of the val-
97 ley, along the muddy trail through the jungle, to the village, where she hoped someone would tell her what to do.
Jimmy Carl Harris
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“Bobby Lee’s Story” By David Matchen I am a bottom-feeder. Something happens upstairs, and it all comes sifting down—rumors, backstabbing, orders that don’t makes sense, directives, policies, pork. You have to shake your head and wonder how such vacuous people get to the top while you are still beating your brains out, doing your job--even doing it well. But you know the answer. The people running the show are the relatives, the friends—the people who don’t have to look for jobs. Political appointees from a couple of state agencies talk over a two-hour lunch, a friend’s name comes up, some hard-working slog gets notice, and the friend appears—redecorated office, personal secretary and two assistants to do the job one poor bastard did very well for the last ten years. So it goes in the Department of Environmental Management (the cruel and ironic name of the agency where I toil), and so it goes in every state department, agency, office, college, or center I have ever heard of. That’s why I am on the bottom. I have no political friends. I’m not connected. My daddy was a factory worker and my
99 mama worked in the meat market at the A & P. I have no political pedigree. The taxpayers are lucky that most things in government run by themselves. Everything is routine, and though I have a dozen loose-leaf binders establishing policies and procedures piled precariously in a corner, I’ve never looked at them and nobody has ever asked me if I know what they say. Nobody knows. Things get done despite the system and the politicians in charge. Right now my job is to handle a big load of pass-through pork, something folks may never have heard of or imagined who do not live in Alabama. Maybe when you were a kid you swallowed something—a marble, a ring, Aunt Sally’s glass eye—something that would not digest. Your dear old mama had to examine your shit the next day to see if it passed. That’s what pass-through pork is, something that enters the system on one end and comes out the other undigested and ready to be sent on to the friends and relatives of the politician who inserted it in the first place. In this case Senator Grayson put three-quarters of a million into our budget, but not for the agency’s use. I take the money after it has been duly laundered through our bookkeeping department and distribute it to bogus enter-
100 prises, all run by the senator’s immediate relatives, in the form of contracts for consulting. Naturally, these people do not and cannot provide any service for environmental management because they are ignorant and illiterate yahoos who have spent their whole lives bellying up to the public trough. If the local newspaper gets wind of the pork that did not digest, the politicos upstairs will say the senator generously provided money from his discretionary fund for some consulting, and I will say I was doing what I was told. The recipients will wave their contracts and claim the work was done at five hundred dollars and hour. Indignant denials of impropriety will follow. The senator will call the paper and the story will be relegated to the back pages and then disappear altogether. In a month nobody in the state will remember it happened. By Thursday the checks were in the mail, so I was a little surprised on this January Monday afternoon to feel a dark presence standing behind me at the entrance of my cubicle. I turned just in time to find the senator himself lighting a cigarette. By law you can’t smoke in a state office building, but this ordinance, like most of the legislation, does not apply to the legislators.
101 He stuck out his hand for me to shake, before I had a chance to get up, and sat on the corner of my desk, the only place he could park his patrician ass in my confined little world. “Listen, Bobby Lee. I just been talking to some of my colleagues, and they tell me that maybe we ought to delay the distribution of those consulting contracts. That girl reporter from the News has been asking questions, the one that broke that story about the community college and the money they were passing for me last year. I can’t use that place again, and she’s trying to mess this up too. She apparently hasn’t got enough to do up there. Anyway, I need for you to hold off for a while, at least a couple of months until she has something else to occupy her time.” That would have been a pretty long speech for most folks, but it poured right out of him without a pause or a hiccup. He was used to talking and used to getting his way with words. He flicked his ash into my trashcan. I watched smoke curling up for a good ten minutes while he went on about women with nothing to do, until his cell phone called him off to sow tares somewhere else. I have never been so glad to see a corrupt, self-serving, pseudo-Baptist, glad-
102 handing Christian leave. I doused the smoldering papers with a half cup of cold coffee and went for a drink. Twenty minutes later I was sitting in a lounge about two blocks from the capital, one of those places without a window anywhere. You see a lot of legislators and lobbyists in there. Most people don’t know it, but a legislator can, by law, take a bribe anywhere except on the floor of the Senate or the House. A good many of them take the money in this lounge. When I looked up from the bottom of my glass, Ricki the bartender was staring me in the face. Her blouse showed a goodly portion of both breasts. She said she’d asked me twice already if I wanted another drink and promised not to ask me again. I tapped my glass. Since the checks really were in the mail and had probably arrived at their several destinations by now, I had to find a way to get them back before the greedy spawn had a chance to cash them. Although I could stop payment, I would have to go through the accountant to do that, and she might wonder if they really were consulting fees. I could imagine her conversation with the aforementioned reporter from Birmingham. Most of the working stiffs in our
103 little agency are either unaware of what really goes on or don’t have enough courage to blow the whistle, but she might be an exception. If I could get the checks back, the senator could call the paper and nip the investigation (if there was one) in the bud, and I could redistribute the money in a couple of months. It was a plan. When I finished the third single-malt, I went to my apartment, made a grilled cheese sandwich, watched an episode of Deadwood, and slept like an innocent person. There were five relatives in all, each receiving $150, 000. Four of them did not particularly need the money to pay the rent or buy diapers and such. In fact they had been receiving money for so long without doing any work for it that they were pretty well off. The exception—Buddy, the senator’s brother--worried me. He spent heavily on drugs, alcohol, women, and roulette. No doubt the senator could have supplied him with the first three and gotten him a break at the casinos, but it might have left the public’s servant vulnerable among the Bible totters, especially since the senator regularly campaigned against sin. I could call the others, but the prodigal had no phone.
104 Since I had a vague idea where he lived, having sent him the check in question and the odd thousand on several other occasions, I signed out one of the department’s gray Crown Vics on Tuesday morning and drove east on I-85 until I got to Lanett, a municipal corpse where the obscenely wealthy owners of the cotton mill had moved the operation to Guatemala and left the illiterate workers to fend for themselves in the computer age. Some of the victims were still living in the mill houses where they were born. The only thriving businesses were pawn shops and paycheck loan establishments. I passed a billboard announcing Lanett to be the birthplace of Fob James, a dubious distinction since he nearly bankrupted the state during his two terms in the name of fiscal responsibility. I drove straight through the place and into West Point, Georgia, which, if anything, looked more destitute than Lanett, many of its buildings boarded up and a lone patrol car just north of town hoping to catch somebody headed out to West Point Lake to smoke a few joints. At the end of State Line Road I took a left on what must have been a paved road at one time, but now was only asphalt patches. Finally I took a right down a dirt road, a wash-board, potholed pig trail with kudzu growing on both sides, until I almost
105 killed a man in a motorized wheelchair cruising around a curve at a big oak tree. He kept going, but I backed up to take a look at him. He had one arm with part of a hand on it; the other was a stub, like both of his legs. I asked directions to Buddy Grayson’s place. It took him a minute to answer because he was fumbling to light a cigarette with an old Zippo. “You go on down there about a mile and turn right on that little private dirt road. Right ‘fore you get to it about five dogs are gonna run out from up under a gray house. When you see them, you know you’re there. He lives about another half mile down that road in a trailer.” He was talking around the cigarette and got it lit about the time he got to the trailer. “Much obliged.” “Don’t mention it.” I looked back to see him weaving through my dust, still in the middle of the road. I located the road, just as he said I would, with dogs nipping at my back bumper. The trailer was no surprise either. It was a single-wide, rusty and sitting on some concrete blocks. An eighty-five
106 Olds Cutlass with the gray paint flaking off told me the subject was home. Parts of cars, some chicken coops, a shed, and three mongrel dogs, one with tits almost dragging the ground, gave the place character. Buddy was in, all right, so far in that he was not likely to leave very soon. I knocked and yelled his name, but after a dead silence I said the hell with it and went in. He had apparently shot up and was on mattress in the bedroom in a state of suspended animation. I helped him to the kitchen, ran some brown water from the sink faucet into an unwashed boiler and sloshed it in his face. He collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table. He did not seem open to conversation, but I had come too far to leave without the check. “Hey, Buddy! Can you hear me?” I shook him and slapped him a little. Quicker than I ever thought he could, he reached for a thirty-two-twenty just behind him on the sink cabinet. I saw it more clearly, frame by frame as he shifted it to point right in my face. “Who the hell are you?” “I’m Bobby Lee Morkus from Montgomery.” I stuck out my hand, politician style. Buddy cocked the hammer.
107 “What the hell you want?” “Senator Grayson sent me to get that check back, the consulting check, the one you get every year about this time. Last year it came from a college in Birmingham. This year it came from Environmental Management. Maybe it hasn’t come yet, but if it has I need it back.” “I just deposited it. How do you think I bought this shit?” I was just thinking how I might be able to get it from his bank, especially if the banker knew that the senator wanted it back, when Buddy fired off a round. The next few seconds went be very quickly, but I will try to slow time down to tell what happened. The bullet just grazed my arm, ruining my only really decent suit. I grabbed a skillet with congealed bacon drippings from the stove and swung it backhand, with a lot of top spin, knocking the gun from his hand. Then I proceeded to beat the living shit out of him. I whacked him on both sides of his head and then right across his nose and mouth for good measure, blood and teeth flying. When he slumped to the floor, I kicked him several times in both kidneys and once or twice in the balls, just in case he might think about getting up. By the time I was through I
108 could see that Buddy would not need the money, unless he had no burial policy. The iron skillet was cracked and I had blood all over me. When I stopped shaking and breathing hard, I found in a cabinet over the sink ten bottles of Ezra Brooks, each a full six years old, the labels said. Clearly he was trying to reduce his number of trips to the state store. I chose one with the seal in place and turned it up. Drunks have no taste, but at the moment harsh was what I needed to think. If you kill a man, even in self-defense, there will be an investigation, and I knew that this situation could not bear much scrutiny, especially if some legitimate peace officer got involved. The senator had settled into a political career that would be worth tens of millions before it was over. My life would not be worth a preacher’s promise of heaven if he were exposed. I could just bury the broken mess in the woods and leave quietly, but the purveyors of vice might miss him. Eventually there would be the dreaded inquiry, the senator’s name would be in the papers, and I would be dead. Anyway, the guy in the wheelchair had eyes, even if he had no limbs. There was nothing to do but report to the sheriff in the county courthouse, a
109 man who had reputedly made a comfortable living from drug dealers and pimps, and see if he could think of some way out of this mess. I washed off all the blood I could see, covered up my ruined clothes with a raincoat from the car and drove back to the main dirt road, took a right toward 431, and then drove south to the county seat, a courthouse square surrounded by a slum and decaying mansions for the formally aristocratic whites. There was no middle class. The courthouse dated from the 1870s, redbrick with silver cupolas at each corner. It had been used once in a film about Mississippi civil rights murders, I believe. The buildings lining the streets around the square were mostly empty; an abandoned movie theater, now apparently a warehouse for New Holland farm implements, stood on one corner of the square and diagonally across the street was a place selling used furniture and clothes. A few impoverished souls were scattered along the sidewalks, mostly sitting with their legs dangling into the street, waiting for something that only they knew. I pulled up to the courthouse, entered the north side of the building, and walked down a long hallway that led me past doors
110 with large opaque glass panels, each bearing signs in black letters— Probate Judge, Tax Collection, Sheriff. I entered the last and found a couple of deputies seated at a metal desk and eating from a paper bag with “Hardy’s” in orange letters. A waist-high picketed wooden partition with a gate separated me from the eating deputies and a receptionist who looked as if she might have been someone’s mother. The sheriff himself, I learned from Mama, was inside a glassed-in area with the blinds pulled. I knocked on the Sheriff’s door and found a hulking man, perhaps a little worse for drink and cigarettes. Acne had probably spoiled his youth. Sitting down, he seemed big, a nine-millimeter automatic holstered at his waist making him even more menacing. He was working on some forms, his mouth full of hamburger. He looked me in the eye, perhaps divining that I was a government official, and asked, “What can I do for you?” He didn’t seem to mean it though. “I’m Bobby Lee Morkus from DEM, and I’ve got a little political problem I think you can help me with.” “Bill Folsom’s chicken houses leaking into the river again?”
111 “No, nothing like that. Somebody killed Senator Grayson’s brother, and I need to keep his name and my name out of it.” He didn’t say anything for a minute, his eyes looking down at the forms, a big ketchup stain on one of them. When he raised his face to mine, there was a hint of malignancy in it. “How did the bastard die?” “Somebody beat the living shit out of him with an iron skillet. There must have been a disagreement. He was holding a pistol.” “You’d think a man with a gun would have the advantage in a case like that.” “I’m just telling you what I saw. I’m reporting a crime.” “No you ain’t. You’re trying to stay out of a crime. What were you doing there in the first place?” “The senator asked me to go by and check on him. Seems his health hasn’t been too good lately.” “According to you, it’s even worse now.” “Look, Sheriff, we both know Buddy was a drunk and a drug addict. The senator has managed to keep his existence pretty much a secret from his constituents, but if word of his murder leaks out, it could damage him with the voters. People in Alabama don’t
112 care what politicians do as long as it’s not connected to something sinful that can’t be explained away.” “You still haven’t told me why you were there. You ain’t somebody I ever heard of. Why would a state senator send somebody like you to check on a sorry piece of shit not worth anybody’s time?” “Look, you don’t need to know what I was there for. I just need you to help me get rid of the body and keep people from finding out, or if they do, to keep them quiet. The senator’s got a lot of money riding on this. He could be grateful.” He reached for his hat. “I guess we had better ride up there then.” When we got outside, he said, “Where’s your car? We can’t go in mine.” I pointed out the Crown Vic parked across the street in front of the state store. “Go in there and get us a pint. Hell, get us a fifth. We might need a drink before this is over. Maybe before we get started.” It appeared that the sheriff had not embraced the metric system. Wild Turkey seemed safe for a country elected official, so I
113 dropped three tens on the counter and didn’t wait for my change. ABC Board folks need to eat too. Within a minute we were out of town and the sheriff turned up the bottle. By the time we got to Five Points he had made significant inroads, and I was beginning to wonder if he would be sober enough to help me dispose of the body. He said nothing the whole trip, just looked at the pine trees and the beer cans in the ditches. We reached Buddy’s trailer in thirty minutes. Buddy’s condition had not improved. It was a little cold for flies, so he had that going for him. The left side of his head was caved in, and he lay in a pool of blood that covered most of the kitchen. Blood spatters were on the walls between the kitchen counter and the cabinets above. In fact there was blood on everything in the kitchen. The sheriff surveyed the scene for a minute and spoke without any sign of the Wild Turkey in his voice. “Go out there to the shed and see if he’s got some gasoline. We’re going to torch this piece of shit with him in it. Then we’re going to call the volunteer fire department. By the time they round up everybody and get a load of water, there won’t be nothing left. You and me will be standing
114 here in our official capacity but unable to do anything. If anybody wonders why we happened to be here, you just say you could not find his place and went into town to get some help.” “I can’t say that. I almost ran down some guy in a motorized wheelchair, and he gave me directions. He’ll know that story is a lie.” “Ah, don’t worry about him. I’d have his sorry ass in jail for riding down the middle of the road in that chair, except it would cost too much to take care of him. I’ll give him a couple of cartons of cigarettes. He won’t say anything. If he does, somebody’s liable to run over him.” “How’d he lose his limbs?” “Sonofabitch’s allergic to nicotine. It causes his extremities to shrivel up and die. The doctors have cut off about all they can. He was driving until he wrecked his pickup. Held the steering wheel with his left stump and pushed the accelerator and brake with a tennis racquet strapped to the other.” I went to the shed and found a five-gallon can with about three gallons in it. He poured some on Buddy and the rest on the contents of the trailer. Outside the sheriff cut off a sliver of heart
115 pine from a fence post, lit it, and tossed it through the open door. We ran away and the place virtually exploded. The sheriff was right. When the fire department, all four of them, drove up in a 1960s era truck forty-five minutes later, there was nothing left except the buckled metal walls and the frame of the trailer. The sheriff introduced me as a DEM agent checking on some chicken houses, and we stood around talking for a while, as they do out in the country. You can’t just walk up to somebody and ask a question or try to borrow something. You have to stand around and talk for a while, often about fishing or hunting or maybe somebody’s pickup truck or tractor you were thinking about buying. Everybody smoked the sheriff’s cigarettes and drank what was left of the Wild Turkey. It would be a day or two before things cooled down enough to investigate. After the boys left for the firehouse, the sheriff opined that Buddy in his drunken and drugged state had set himself and the trailer on fire trying to light a cigarette. It sounded just plausible enough that people who did not know him might believe it if they read it in the newspaper. I was satisfied and a little relieved that his
116 death had nothing to do with me, that the Senator’s brother, even though the Senator had spent a lifetime trying to reform him, had passed on to his reward, and that the Senator, after some photo opportunities at the First Baptist Church in his home town, could get back to the business of taking bribes and stealing the people blind. It was time to go back to Montgomery.
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“The Mother� By David Matchen
Albert Minter, a short, thin man, was standing at the kitchen counter making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In a mirror glued to the wall directly before him he could see his face beginning to sag. He looked for something in his reflection that he had not seen yesterday, a mole perhaps or some other sign of impending cancer, because his denim shirt had gotten progressively bigger as day by day he checked his fate. He knew something was wrong. Maybe it was rectal and somebody would have to cut out several feet of his intestines. Maybe he would have to wear a bag around his waist and smell always faintly of shit. Carefully he mixed the two ingredients in a cereal bowl and spread them with deliberation on a slice of white sandwich bread. Satisfied, he carried his dinner to a small pine table situated near the middle of the floor and poured milk into a Styrofoam cup. He sat and bowed his head briefly before taking a bite. It was getting dark across the gray fields and pastures visible from his kitchen window, deepening a sense of emptiness that
118 had been growing in him since his wife left, the kind of despair that comes with folly that cannot be reconciled. Even when it all began the previous spring, he had not been especially hopeful, partly because he was not sure what to expect, but something that he could not explain to anyone urged him on. A soft noise from near the back door of the house told him the snakes were awake. Albert only had a couple of copperheads, not nearly as many as the snake handling preacher he knew, but he only needed two, one for his ritual and a spare in case the primary died. His meal over, he draped a garment bag from J. C. Penney’s over his shoulder, picked up the two snake cages from beside the space heater, and headed out the back door to his pickup, a vehicle that might be described in a newspaper ad as having a rough body. He situated the bag behind the seat and carefully put the snakes on the seat against the door on the passenger side, far enough away, he hoped, that he might escape the truck if one decided to join him. He was deathly afraid of snakes, or anything that lived in the ground, and had been all his life. Even rat snakes scared him. He had heard of fearless men who caught catfish by hand, reaching into the re-
119 cesses of riverbanks to pull them out. The thought of it made the dark of the cab close around him. He drove slowly down the two-lane blacktop, ignoring the flashing lights of somebody in a hurry. Soon he was on a dirt road, muddy from the November rains, twisting through dense pines. After about a mile, he reached a little clearing where stood a small frame building with white asbestos siding. He had bought it for five hundred dollars from a preacher who had given up the trade and gone back to driving a bread truck. It seem particularly lonely in Albert’s headlights, though it was lonely enough as it was, no running water and no electricity, gas space heaters for warmth in the winter and windows that would open, partly, in the summer. He could barely see the remains of the outhouse on the edge of the clearing, pushed over by Christian youth, and a silver one-hundred-gallon propane tank, shining against the trees. He pulled up to the covered porch protecting the entrance to the building and cut his lights. Moonlight made the whole structure iridescent. He had not gone into preaching for money. No real preacher, he believed, ever did. He had kept his job at the rayon
120 plant, and Julia, his wife since high school, seemed satisfied being a jackleg preacher’s wife until he told her about his desire to commune with primal forces by means of snakes. She said, predictably, that she would not live with snakes, that she wouldn’t be able to sleep thinking about them crawling on her, and that if snakes were his destiny, he would have to face it without her. After that she said nothing to him at all. She just looked at him with the disbelief of a person who discovers everything in the chest freezer has thawed. Her departure, though strained, was calm and orderly. He helped her load the U-Haul with all her things and drove her to the apartment in town where she still waited for him to return to his senses. The bag over his shoulder, Albert went around to the passenger side to get his snakes. The moon gave him plenty of light to make his way up the steps and into the church without stumbling or bumping the cages. He did not want to rouse them. Getting one out without being bitten was hard enough, as it was. He shuffled to the pulpit, a lectern made of unfinished three -quarter inch plywood, and set down the cages in the pale light beaming through the windows on the left. It made three distorted rectangles along the length of the sanctuary.
121 He moved behind the pulpit where he slowly removed his clothes and draped them over it. He put his shoes on the shelf inside, next to a Bible and an ashtray depicting The Last Supper. From the zippered bag he removed a spangled white jumpsuit with flared legs and a cape and put it on. Last, he slipped on white patent leather boots and sunglasses with heavy, black frames. As always, he felt transformed. He opened one of the cages. With a forked stick cut from a dogwood tree, he carefully lifted out a lethargic snake and placed it on the floor in the moonlight. The snake seemed disinclined to move. Holding it down with the stick, he grasped it just behind its head with his right hand and near its tail with the other and lifted it above his head, almost forming a circle with the living snake. Mumbling the refrain from Its Now or Never, he moved his pelvis forward and back, then from side to side. Nothing happened. His need to perform snake rituals began on his job at the rayon plant. His work rarely brought him in contact with anyone, but sometimes Flora or one of the other girls from the spinning room came down to smoke cigarettes with him on their breaks. Even in their work dresses their bodies make him long to touch them in ways
122 he would never dare touch his wife. On these occasions he would go home in shame, sometimes burying his head in Julia’s ample bosom while she stroked his head. Feeling her chest rise and fall, he imagined himself as a young boy, his mother holding him on her lap rocking him, his head tucked under her arm while the clock on the mantle ticked. Only occasionally did he have to leave his stool to open or shut a valve on one of the dozens of large viscose aging tanks. In all, he worked about ten minutes of each hour. The rest of the time he read from grocery bags of paperbacks that appeared from time to time at his station. When he reached the bottom, he would sometimes have to wait for several days before another bag appeared. Where the books came from, no one knew. Albert never bought a book to add to the lot, and he suspected that none of the other men did either. Although mostly westerns spiced with a few Raymond Chandlers and Mickey Spillanes, strange books like Symbols of Transformation and The Origins and History of Consciousness would sometimes be in the bag. Other readers apparently ignored them, for they always looked new, but Albert read them. His life changed. He had been content fishing, hunting, and working his
123 job. Now he was alone in a church, dressed in The King’s Las Vegas outfit, and holding up a frightened snake. He wasn’t sure he was any better off. Albert lowered his snake and prepared to put it back into its cage. It was a delicate business to release the snake and slam the cage shut in one motion. He was about to perform this operation when he heard the only door of the church open slightly, and he saw a shaft of light hit the right side of the sanctuary. He froze. He wanted to get shed of the snake, but the thought that something was about to happen terrified him. Then he heard a hoarse whisper. “Is anybody in there?” Albert did not answer. It could have been male or female or something beyond male and female. It could have been the wind. It was brief and soft. The door opened wider and a figure, obviously female, stepped into the light. She spoke with more authority: “It’s you. I’ve heard about you.” “What do you want?” He could hardly get it out. “I saw your truck. I thought there might be somebody in trouble.”
124 This was a lie, Albert knew, because only people who wanted to get to this place came here. People did not pass by and stop out of curiosity. Anyway, he had heard no car. “I don’t need no help . . . you better get on back to where you come from . . . it’s no good for a woman to be out here in the dark. You go on and leave me be.” His voice coming back to him did not sound convincing. The figure swayed for a moment as if she were considering the advice. Then she came toward him, moving in and out of the rectangles of light. “You go on. I don’t need you here.” It was somewhere between a whine and a scream. “Don’t come any closer.” “I thought you wanted me, Albert. I thought that was why you came out here and did your snake thing. Well, now I’m here and you’re trying to run me off. Make up your mind.” She put a long cigarette between her lips and lit it. Albert could have used one himself at that moment. “I don’t know what I want, but I don’t think you’re it.” He was almost yelling, though she could not have been ten feet away. Something told him that he was not being totally honest.
125 “I don’t think you’re giving me a fair chance,” she teased. Smoke trailed from her nose. “Anyway, if I am what you expected, I’m not likely to be scared off by you, and if I’m not, you might not want me to leave.” Standing in his patch of light, she tossed the cigarette aside. She moved deliberately, but somehow the time streaming by him seemed even faster than his senses indicated. It was, he though, almost up. She was much taller than Albert. He could not quite make out her face, but he could see that she had dark hair and large breasts, some of which showed prominently from what appeared to be a Burger King uniform. Albert could see the breasts with no trouble, but everything above and below was vague. The snake, until now docile, gathered its strength and shot from his grasp, finding refuge behind an upright piano. As if the snake meant nothing to her, she moved within inches of Albert, yet he could get no better focus on her face. She unbuttoned her blouse, freeing her breasts, the nipples standing out prominently at eye level. No longer thinking, he took one of the nipples into his mouth and began to nurse. She enveloped him in her
126 arms, blocking out the light of the moon, and he lost himself in the warm darkness. He thought he heard her voice softly cooing to him. “Mother will take care of you, baby. You just relax. It’ll all be over before you know it.” When he came to it was daylight. The snakes and their cages were gone, and he lay before the pulpit naked. He felt something sticky on his thighs that might have been blood, but to look would have taken more than he had left to give. He knew that something had happened. He felt a calming darkness falling upon him. He wanted to sleep.
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Cover Art: Chris Luckadoo