by Joe Meno
“Motherfucker …” L.B. mumbled. “Stupid motherfucker. You pushed that too far,” he whispered. “Done push me too far.”
Junior just stood over that poor fool, tensing his fingers into hard white fists that were smeared with L.B.’s blood and snot, squeezing his fingers together hard. He gripped L.B. around his throat and pushed him up against the wall, then dug his big white fingers inside L.B.’s mouth. He yanked out his polished-white teeth and held them tight in his trembling hand.
“This is the end of it now, you hear? We’re all evened up now. Don’t even think of trying to settle things any different. We’re all even now, you hear? Don’t try anything dumb or you’ll never get these teeth back.”
L.B. nodded as his face began to turn white. He ran his pink tongue over the hollow spot where his teeth had just been. He spat a little in some defiance, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“They’re gonna know. This whole town’ll know what you did.”
Junior shoved L.B. once more, then strode out of the room. I stood there with a frown, staring at L.B.
“What you looking at?” he finally grunted, swiping at the air. “What’s so goddamn funny there, con?”
His empty gums gave a little whistle as he spoke.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” I closed L.B.’s door for him and went across the hall. Junior had already pulled the bird free from the floor and had it cupped in his white, quivering hands.
“Best thing I can do is bury him outside, I guess.” He stroked its thin belly, holding it tight in his hands. Its dull eyes were half opened, slightly covered by thin pink eyelids.
“Do you need any help with it?” I asked, patting him on the shoulder.
“Naw, I’ll do it alone.” He pulled a silver can of beer free from the plastic six-pack ring and walked out of his room. The dark black nail still lay on the floor. I bent over and picked it up, then held it in my hand. I looked up. Hung right on the opposite side of my wall was another picture of the Virgin Mary. This one was of her holding the Baby Jesus in her arms, cradling him under her blue veils. Her skin looked so soft and warm and blushed. There was a gold halo all around her head, wrapping the Baby Jesus in precious holy light. I stared at it for a long time, holding my breath to watch as her skin seemed to almost be trembling, almost sighing as she rocked her baby to sleep. I felt myself grow quiet and still and calm, just staring into her sweet pleasant face. Then I heard some kids shout something somewhere outside, playing some game, and I turned and looked away. I snatched the last can of beer from the plastic ring, closed Junior’s door, and walked down the huge hallway stairs and out to the backyard.
Junior was right beneath the white wood porch, sipping his beer and digging in the soft black dirt. That precious little piece of land had to be the most fertile tract in all of the Midwest. There was enough bodies laid in that little square patch to grow a few dozen acres of corn. I crept under the porch and knelt beside ol’ Junior, sipping at my beer as I watched him prepare the bird’s ing place. He had a shiny gold-and-yellow cigar box and a thin little tissue to serve as a burial cloth, I guess. He held the tiny bird in his hands, rubbing his thumb over its side.
“That little thing had the nicest little eyes I’ve ever seen,” he whispered, slow and quiet like he was a little drunk.
“Sure did.” I smiled. Then I looked down at the dead baby bird and sucked in my breath quick. Its tiny black eyes were both gone. They had been plucked out. There were two tiny black holes in the sides of its soft little head. It was awful seeing a baby bird all mangled up like that.
“L.B. did this to that bird? Tore out its eyes?”
Junior shook his head, still holding that poor bird tight.
“No. Just stabbed its neck.”
“Then what the hell happened to its eyes?”
“Took them out myself just now.”
My teeth shook in my head. I looked Junior hard in his big round face. His eyes were black and solid and firm. I took a swig of beer and looked away.
“What the hell didja do that for?”
Junior mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear. He laid the tiny bird in the yellow cigar box and gently pulled a tissue over its body. He dug into his front pocket and placed L.B.’s three teeth around the bird’s head like a kind of crown. Then he carefully closed the top and fitted the box into the hole he had dug. He knelt beside it, staring down at the yellow tomb, moving his hand over the lid, gentle and slow.
“Why did you pluck out its eyes?” I asked again.
“To keep those pretty things from being eaten out. Pretty little bird eyes shouldn’t be eaten by the worms.”
“Well, where did you put them?”
“Didn’t put them anyplace yet.”
I shuddered a little and wondered exactly where they were right then.
He nodded to himself, then began pushing the dirt over the top of the box in delicate little waves of black earth.
“There, that’s good.” Junior frowned. He wrote a single word lightly in the dirt, right over its grave. Hush. Then he took a long sip of his beer, clearing his dry throat. We both crawled out from under the porch. Junior stood up and wiped off his hands on his pants, then finished off his beer and crushed the dull silver can in his hand. The sun had just set. Rays of light still broke from the clouds. He looked like a giant standing there, but innocent and young, too, staring up into the sky, searching for the first star of the night. He mumbled something to himself, raised his hand up close to his eye, and pinched a silver star between his thumb and first finger, then closed his fingers tight and shoved that star he caught in his pocket right quick. We both took a seat on the steps of the back porch and stared down at our feet.
“Christ, Junior, you sure are a strange fucker sometimes.”
I took a slug of beer and shook my head with a grin. Junior gave a little smile, then patted me on the back hard.
“Don’t have to tell me twice. Heard it all my life.”
a beautiful thing
No restless heart beats still and red and alone for long.
A kind of undeniable love began to blossom at the old Gas-N-Go. Junior started leaving messages for some secret love in black plastic movable letters on the sign out front. It was his duty to change the sign every week. It all started simple at first, maybe even as some kind of mistake.
Motor oil sale—2 for $3
The Special: Spark—you ought to have
Poor Junior had solely misplaced the word “plugs” from “spark,” but in that sweet sentence there began appearing some kind of mysterious confession on that rickety white sign that hung out there alone in the sky.
Super sale on all used tires
Fair and round as
beguild eyes sapp’d
w luv
No one said a thing at first. Not even Clutch, our boss. Maybe he thought it was kind of a sweet thing, Junior having a crush on some lady. Maybe he thought ol’ Junior deserved love just as much as anyone. So our gentle-hearted patron just read the sign like everybody else, whispering to himself who he thought the object of Junior’s cryptic missives surely was.
But no one had a clue. Those messages were as confusing and hard to discern as any love signal I’d ever been sent.
Special—headlite bulbs
Alite thru th dark et nite
to tarry safely pure
Nearly everyone that entered the gas station would come up to me or Junior and shake their heads with a certain amount of curiosity and frustration.
“Sure is a peculiar sign out there.” Some old man wearing big blue overalls and a red baseball hat frowned. “What’s that last part mean?”
“Don’t have a clue myself.” I smiled. “Junior here is the one that arranges the signs.”
Junior just shrugged his big shoulders and finished sweeping up the floor.
“What the hell does that sign out there mean?” the old man mumbled, shaking his head hard.
“It’s awful hard to s
ee at night.” Junior frowned, sweeping under the rack of candy and gum. “It’s a lot easier when you have working lights.”
“What kind of nonsense is that?” the old man asked.
I just shrugged my shoulders and rang him up for a soda pop and twelve dollars of gas. It didn’t bother me that I didn’t understand. I could see Junior was a quiet kind of man, a man who liked to keep the sweetest, most private things to himself. He liked to keep most of his life locked away tight in that big barrel chest and only let it shine out through his eyes once in a while.
Soon enough, those messages out on that sign began attracting a lot of curious kinds of customers. Soon enough, whenever I’d look out those front windows there would almost always be someone driving by in their pickup or car slowing down enough to read the message fast, then they’d always shake their heads to themselves when they’d realize they couldn’t make any sense of it. People would drive by every Saturday afternoon when Junior would change the sign and try to sound the messages out as he made them, reaching up all alone on that ladder with his box full of black plastic letters.
Milk—1.12 a gal
cool n pale
as a vestal breth
from petal’d lips
By then, Junior and I began having separate shifts. He’d work the morning, from six until two, then I’d come in at two and work until ten. I kind of enjoyed working late at first. I could sleep in until nearly afternoon, lie in my bed most of the morning, smoking or reading or dreaming, or take a walk around town down to the Boneyard River, or buy myself new shoes or clothes, and still have time to eat lunch and then go off to work. But then it slowly began to get to me. Sitting in that gas station all alone. Nothing but the music of crickets chirping outside to keep me company. Nothing but the darkness of night moving quietly by my side. I spent most of my time looking out, up into the sky through those gray front windows, all covered in creepy-crawling insects, scratching at the white light inside. I’d sit there at the Gas-N-Go all alone, singing some honky-tonk songs to myself, somethin maybe by Carl Perkins or the King, straining my voice under those dull blue fluorescent lights, staring out through the big, dirty-gray windows, watching people fill up their lonely tanks with gasoline and leave their money with me and disappear back into the dark from where they came. These homely, milky-faced housewives with bubble-headed babies strapped to their yellow housecoats and hips who pumped gas into their long brown station wagons, or old leathery-mouthed hog men with big tan Stetson hats who wiped their pickups’ windshields free of dried bugs, or the young, sweaty-foreheaded farm boys in blue flannel who had borrowed their older brothers’ greenstriped El Caminos, all souped up with chrome and silver that gleamed and streamed, they all gripped those long silver handles and slid the nozzles in and stared up into the dull blue night with the cool urgency that there was indeed some kind of destiny. That night, that sky, that whole universe seemed to be in constant motion, spinning in strange orbits of circumstance above my head, but not me. Not me. Me, I was stuck, as I ever was, in the pen or at that job, it was just the same. Watching the whole world gas up and go could leave a fella feeling awfully trapped and awfully lonely, if you can see what I mean.
After work one night, I had enough, finally.
I locked up the register, switched off the pumps, made a drop into the safe, gave the floors a quick sweep, and made sure the front glass doors were locked. I just started walking then, with nowhere to go particularly. Not that I’d admit anyway. But I had been thinking of the spot all night, there was one place on my mind. I followed Junior’s sign straight to a solemn bedroom window through the rural dark. I stood outside that girl, Charlene’s, parents’ house, running my hand along their white picket fence, sweating and mumbling to myself. Their house was nice and white and big. Their yard was green and long and wide and had thick weeping willow trees planted all around. Their green eaves hung on down, slumbering and whispering so gently in the dark. I hopped over the wood fence and crept along through the soft shadows cast down by those sleeping trees, holding my breath in tight, wiping the sweat and grief out of my eyes with the back of my work shirt sleeve. There was a light on in one of the windows on that second floor. I knew it right away. Her sister Ullele’s bedroom. I had crept through the same dark the same way nearly a hundred years before. I felt out of balance all of a sudden. I hid behind a willow and took a breath. I felt like I ought to turn around. I had no idea why I was there. I looked up into that lofty bedroom again. There was the light in the window all right. There was some shadow still moving inside.
I was like some kind of teenage boy all over again. I rubbed the sweat from the palms of my hands onto my black work pants. I tried to hold in all my breath and hope and panic all at once, looking up into that shining white light, praying to see poor Charlene’s golden face and some of the sweetest, most unconsenting brown eyes I’d ever seen. I climbed the thick, rubbery willow tree, digging my hands along its thin limbs, climbing up its tallest green branch. Then I shimmied out to the glowing bedroom window, nearly entirely out of breath. I knocked against the shiny pane just once, right before I got afraid that this wasn’t Charlene’s house or bedroom window at all. I could almost see some greasy-faced machinist waking up and returning my knock with the business end of a loaded shotgun. I shook my head and began to crawl back down the tree. Just then the window shade parted a little, and the darkest, most pleasant brown eyes appeared, squinting right into mine. It was Charlene. No other lady I had ever met seemed so beautiful and detached. No other woman seemed so lovely and mean all at the same time.
“Get down out of my father’s tree.” She frowned. Her hair glistened light brown from the light cast over her bare white shoulder. She had on a thin white slip that barely covered her most soft, most sighing parts.
“This isn’t your father’s tree. It’s its own tree. I’m just borrowing it for a while tonight.”
“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard. What are doing staring in my window at this time of night?”
“Hoping I could talk to you, I guess.”
She shook her head, giving a little frown. “Listen, are you gonna get down? I have to go to sleep. I have to work in the morning.”
“Where is it you work?” I asked.
“If I tell you, will you leave?”
“I guess. If that’s what you’d like.”
“I’d like to go to sleep.”
“Well, I’d like you to kiss me.”
“There’s not much of a chance of that.” Her eyes seemed so brown and deep all of a sudden. “If I tell you where I work, will you just leave me alone?”
“OK, sweet pea.”
Charlene furrowed her thin black eyebrows right at me.
“I work at the Starlite Diner. Down the street.”
I smiled, feeling my teeth fill up my face.
“That’s only two blocks away from where I work.”
“Where’s that?” she asked.
“The Gas-N-Go.”
“I should have known.”
“Oh, don’t be like that.” I smiled. “I happen to know you’re a little sweet on me.”
“Not in the least. Besides, I could never bear to associate with such trash.” She smiled a little, leaning over the window pane. I could feel the heat from her white skin moving over my face. “Now, will you kindly remove yourself from my father’s tree?”
“For a kiss?”
“No.”
I shrugged my shoulders a little.
“I guess I’m just gonna have to start singing then.”
Charlene shook her head. “My father might still be awake. He already hates you for driving my older sister mad.”
“Mad?” I mumbled.
“Lovesick.” She sighed, fluttering her thick black eyelashes. “He had to buy her a brand-new pony when you stopped coming by. Then the pony got sick and died and my father found Ullele sleeping out beside it in the barn, broken up and crying your name. Then she was never the same since.”<
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My face felt cold. I shook my head. “That was ten years ago.”
“So? He still had to buy her that pony and we all had to listen to her crying all the time. It was a horrible thing you did to her. Making her sad like that. I would push you right out of that tree if I had the nerve.”
“You’re just afraid to kiss me.”
“Is that so?” she asked.
“Afraid I might drive you mad.”
“Not in the least.” Charlene sighed, tossing her curly brown hair over her shoulder.
“Then why don’t you give me one just to find out?”
“Nice try.”
“So are you gonna let me take you out one night or not?” I asked.
“The night hell freezes over.”
“Could take a long time.” I frowned. “Be an awful shame not to go out just once to see if your sister was right.”
“Did you know I talked to her today?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“I told her you were back in town. She didn’t say a thing about it. She’s up in the asylum in Lademe now. Doesn’t make sense of too many things.”
“Lademe?” I mumbled. There was an asylum up in Lademe where they sent you after you completely went out of your mind. I had known a convict at Pontiac that had spent some time there. He said they wouldn’t let him sleep. There was always someone shouting or crying or screaming like mad.
“Yes. It happened about a year ago. She had moved in with this man from Colterville who used to tie her up and lock her in the closet when he would go on off to work. She tried to get away but he kept sweet-talking her on back, and it all finally ended when she tied him to the bed while he was asleep and turned on the gas and left him there to be poisoned all alone in the middle of the night. But he woke up and started screaming for help and the police arrived and there was a little hearing and then they decided poor Ullele needed to take a quiet little trip.”
My face felt like it was bright red. I had no idea what to say. I felt like it was all somehow my fault.
“That’s awful,” I said quietly.
“It is. She’s been up there eight months now. Doesn’t seem to be doing her much good.”