Graveyard of the Gods

by Richard Newman

  Cora turned around to face him, and Gene rolled onto his back.

  “Did you ever find out how they did it? Never mind. I don’t want to talk about it. Is this where they hit you?”

  Cora’s right hand moved to Gene’s gut, around his belly button. Her fingers felt small and cool, but he could feel them starting to warm up.

  “More here,” he said with his hand between his solar plexus and belly button. Cora moved her hand there.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “A little.”

  She stroked his belly gently with her fingertips.

  “Does this feel good?”

  “Yes.”

  Cora continued rubbing and stroking his belly, making wider and wider arcs toward the top of his boxers. Clearly this was more than wanting to be held. It felt amazingly good, but his heart was also pounding in his chest. Gene thought that if he had sex with Cora it would be the fourth woman who had previously been with Miller.

  “What about Miller?” he asked.

  “He’d understand. He’d probably think it was pretty hot—he was such a perv.”

  As her hand made its widening arc, Cora’s fingers dipped down below the elastic of Gene’s boxers, then they went out again. It felt exciting, exquisite. His heart was pounding and his hands shook a bit, but Gene still wasn’t hard. When she came down a third time, her cool fingers rested on his dick and felt that it was soft, nowhere near an erection.

  “Are you OK?” she asked. “Do you not want to be doing this?”

  “No, I’m OK. Just drunk as hell. Sorry. I’ve had a lot tonight.”

  Gene raised himself on his elbow with one arm so he could see her and put his other hand on Cora’s tight belly. He felt her belly button ring, which he hadn’t noticed before. He also noticed two inch-sized slices of pizza tattooed on her right hip just above her panty line.

  “Um, Cora? Why do you have pizza on your hip?”

  “It’s the missing pieces. Miller always said I was his missing piece. One night we decided to get tattoos. I felt I deserved more than one measly piece. He has a pizza with two pieces missing on his right shoulder. I have a rack of meat, too.”

  Cora rolled over and showed Gene a rack of meat with a top hat and cane dancing on her left hip.

  “I got that in college.”

  She rolled back over on her back, and Gene’s hand, which covered most of her belly when his fingers splayed, stroked softly between the two tattoos and circled her bellybutton ring. It moved up to the edge of her bra, between her small breasts and then down to her panties, making wider and wider circles. Eventually he found the courage to dip his hand beneath the black waistband and felt the edge of her pubic hair.

  “Here, just hold me,” she said, rolling back over to her right side.” Gene put his arm around her shoulder, and she fell asleep within a minute.

  Around four in the morning, Gene woke up and had to piss again. When he came back to the bed he saw Cora, her lithe little body half covered by the sheet. Gene slid the sheet down a bit and looked at her ass. It was gorgeous and perfect in the neighbor’s driveway light, and Gene started getting hard. He stroked her back and her waist, her two slices of pizza, and down her left arm, moving all the while toward her black panties, the swoop at the small of her back and where it began rounding out in the shape of her perfect ass. Cora made no motion, and Gene stuck his fingers inside the back of her panties and then moved them around her hip and toward the front, where she had a small, closely cropped rectangular patch of pubic hair. A little welcome mat. He started to slide his hand down in between her legs, but Cora’s hand grabbed him at the wrist.

  “Mmm-mmm!” she said in a strong “no” tone that meant Sex now? With my dead boyfriend’s brother? Are you crazy?

  Gene wondered how she could be so fickle, then figured maybe she’d been more drunk than he’d realized. Gene moved his hands back to his own side of the bed and lay on his back. He still had an erection and considered for a moment taking care of it himself, but that was out of the question. Even in the next room, on the couch, it would be just his luck for her to walk in on him. He was not going to get back to sleep now, not in this state—sober, aroused, Cora’s achingly sweet body next to him, an inch away yet out of reach, so he got up and went back to the couch. His phone showed 4:12 a.m. He looked around the room and thought about Granny Hoppenbrauer in the nursing home. He wondered about his mother and if she understood her son was dead. Then he thought about Miller propped up in a hog shed with two bullets in his head, Miller and Cora enjoying a Cardinals game, and Five Star down the street. Finally, he remembered Jimmy Tosti’s nose and gut profile at The Egyptian Trails.

  It was time to leave.

  FIFTEEN

  “GOODBYE, CORA,” Gene whispered into the bedroom so as not to wake her, then stepped out the side door under the carport into a gray, dreary world. Another wave of dark clouds had herded in from the west, and he walked fast, already feeling the first drops on his now stubbly head. He tried to remember how to get to his bike. His stomach was more stiff than sore, and it helped to walk a bit and stretch it out.

  Dawn was just beginning to haze behind him, and as he walked west toward downtown, Gene was surprised to still see the dawn-like blue from television sets through the windows of Metropolis homes—up early or up all night? He wished he’d swallowed some water before he left. The storm was coming toward him, and water dripped off trees from the previous rain, but he was dehydrated. Despite feeling dried out, he spit every few blocks from the rank brown taste of the Camel Lights, the sour residue of Southern Comfort, and more than the usual amount of gurgling bile during the night.

  When he finally reached his BMW, it was raining full on, but Gene hoped if he rode fast enough he could push ahead of the storm. He gulped the cool water from his saddlebag and popped a couple tropical Tums, then pulled out of the police station parking lot, catching a last look at Superman with his “TRUTH—JUSTICE—THE AMERICAN WAY” motto that compelled Gene to lift the visor on his helmet and spit more sourness from his mouth. He sped quickly down an empty Fifth Street, which turned into 45 East. Gene drove past all the little monuments that had greeted him upon his arrival—Dr. Brush, Big John, the signs for the Giant Superman—which seemed like days ago and not sixteen hours. As he drove past the sign that had welcomed him to Metropolis, population 6,500, Gene puffed out a sigh of relief that he had managed to get out of town without further incident.

  He was also relieved that he hadn’t had sex with Cora. Even though she was his dead brother’s girlfriend, he liked her more than any woman he’d met in years, and he liked her enough that he hoped a friendship might be possible before anything else. If he had been able to muster an erection when they were drunk and impulsive, a friendship would have been awkward, guilty, and difficult, if not impossible. Gene regretted that he never got her phone number or email, but he would try to track her down. He didn’t even know her last name, but at least he knew where she worked. Mostly he hoped Dickie Shoats, with his cowboy boots and loyal band of assholes, would leave her alone.

  The ditches on either side of the highway were swollen with muddy, pesticide-foamed water. Gene had had enough of driving through this sodden region of Southern Illinois and decided to turn north on Highway 145, which would get him home faster, almost straight north through the Shawnee National Forest, all the way to Carmi. The more he rode, the harder and faster the rain came down, slicing from his left at a 45-degree angle, much of it seeming to find the small opening between his helmet and jacket, streaming onto his neck, and dripping down his cold, sodden shirt.

  He rode past the gravel road entrance to Dixon Springs, where his family had camped when they were young, before their father crawled into his bottle of Scotch and never crept out. Gene remembered one fall camping weekend when the whole area swarmed with copperheads. Copperheads always thrived at Dixon Springs, but this trip in particular occurred during the peak of migration season, when snakes from a fifty-mile area sl
ithered to their denning bluffs. Miller had called it a copperhead convention—golden-brown snakes some called moccasins or death adders, often tinged with red or rust, from the size of pencils to the size of bicycle tires, twisted in streams, crawled down partially fallen trees, curled on and under rocks. The two boys had been out hiking, and one moment they noticed the ground below them was moving. Thousands of copperheads crawled across the forest floor through the fallen leaves like thick strands of a gigantic moving carpet. He hadn’t been afraid then, but now, as much as Gene loved snakes, the memory made him shiver. As if on cue, he glanced into his rearview mirror and saw the snake-eyed headlights of a bright yellow sports car gaining on him. Jimmy Tosti’s Dodge Viper.

  Gene guessed they’d been watching all the exits in town and Tosti had been following him at a distance all this time. He’d been driving about forty minutes. It should have been past dawn, but the clouds had darkened the sky and the rain was coming at him harder than ever. The Viper was fifty feet behind him when the headlights flashed. Gene held his speed—a little over sixty. It was a twisting country road, and his bike had the advantage of taking curves better than the Dodge, but not in the rain. And it didn’t matter anyway as they were coming to a long flat stretch.

  Jimmy Tosti pulled within twenty feet and flashed his lights again. There wouldn’t be much point in trying to outrun the Viper on this stretch of highway, especially in the rain—the car’s souped-up engine could easily run him over. But Gene figured that if his former friend were going to shoot him, he would have already.

  Cautious, Gene slowed a bit while the Viper pulled into the oncoming lane. As they traveled side by side about fifty miles an hour, Gene looked over through the passenger window, lowered about eight inches. Jimmy Tosti smiled at him and saluted, a military salute, held a bit longer than usual, two or three seconds, then Gene saw him turn the steering wheel toward him.

  Gene had just enough time to slow up and steer his BMW onto the shoulder, but the Viper kept coming, almost touching him. Gene’s tires left the pavement and chewed the wet grass, and he had no choice but to jump the swollen ditch and plow into the wall of tall green cornstalks. His bike slipped in the mud and spun almost a full circle, throwing him to the ground. The mud and corn had slowed him down and broken his fall, and he quickly climbed back on. The engine sputtered and coughed. Through his helmet, Gene could smell steam and burnt dirt.

  With a quick backward glance at the Viper, sloped down in the ditch, the right fender covered with mud, he saw the door on the driver’s side open. Gene revved the engine and headed through the corn stalks, aiming for the far corner of the forty-acre field, by a scrim of trees where typically there’d be a tractor entrance that would let him cross the drainage ditch. Riding over the rows was like going over waves in a small boat, and Gene stood on his foot pegs, pitching violently up and down. Cornstalks whacked his shoulders and leaves slapped his visor. With his knees aching and legs shaking, he finally turned and followed along one of the gulleys to avoid all the bobbing up and down. For several years, off and on, Gene had been a crop walker, walking through fields and checking crops for pests and weeds. He knew how most farmers planted and that the track he was on now would swerve to the right, closer to where he wanted to be. He didn’t have that much farther to go, only a few more rows to plow through before he’d find a viable exit. Now the thick cornstalks whacked him on each shoulder every half second. The blows were starting to add up, reminding him of the training courses and obstacles at Camp Pendleton, when he was pushed to exhaustion. Gene considered that to anyone watching, riding through a tall cornfield on a motorcycle might look like fun, but he now knew there was a good reason why he’d never seen anybody do it.

  At the edge of the field, he slowly nosed his way out of the corn rows into some tall grasses, thistles, and clover. About twenty feet to his right was the entrance he had hoped for, not far from the scrim of trees that followed a small, muddy creek and kept it from eroding the fields. Gene looked down the road, saw no sign of traffic, and turned right. He’d never been in this area before but decided to follow the road west and north for a while.

  The rain didn’t look to be easing up any time soon, and it washed off the mud but not the green stains on his bike. Gene felt bad for the farmer and figured he’d probably torn through three or four hundred dollars’ worth of corn. He followed the road, tacking alternately west and north until he came to Shawnee National Forest road, which he knew ran into 145 a little south of Glendale and then again north of it. His shoulders were tired and sore and covered with chloroplasts. His stomach was still sore from the previous night’s punches, the Southern Comfort, the nicotine he’d swallowed, plus the usual bubbling acids that Tums could barely neutralize. His legs were tired from standing and taking the bumps of the furrows. And he was tired of the rain, which had found its way into every invisible gap and crevice, chilling his flesh and pruning his fingers and toes. Gene figured the best plan at this point was to hole up and hide somewhere.

  The area was full of abandoned houses. Gene could always spot them, and after a few miles he found what he was looking for—a vacant house with the exact proportions of a shoe box near the junction of Shawnee National Forest and Glendale Road. The lawn hadn’t been mown in years, and the grass and weeds and thistles stood waist high. Its plastic siding hung a dirty yellow, covered with brown splatters and stains—the color of a spotted banana a few days past its prime. A brown plastic gutter had half fallen off the front and side, and the rain poured off it into a small pond that had formed around the house. It may have been the most dismal house Gene had ever seen. It was perfect.

  Gene pulled into a weedy gravel driveway that stopped about even with a cement walkway which right-angled through the high grass to a front door, set a few inches up on a poured concrete porch. The house could easily have been a modular home, prefabricated and dropped here on cinder blocks from a truck then cemented into place. There was no garage, but Gene slowly circled through the grass around to the back. There was a rusted grill and another concrete pad of porch and a cheap white wooden door. Gene got off his bike and checked the back door. It hadn’t even been deadbolted. In fact, the lock had already been broken, and the doorframe was soft from rot and looked like it had been repaired many times. He let himself into a small kitchen that anyone could see had once been used to make crystal meth, though not recently.

  Southern Illinois was filled with abandoned houses people used for making meth. People’s cottages off lakes or in the woods were used too, and families often opened doors to find their summer cabins ransacked and filled with glass equipment and bottles that reeked like cat urine and burned chemicals. It looked to Gene like no one had entered this house in several months, as the glass and countertops were covered with a thick layer of sticky dust.

  The door was just wide enough for Gene to wheel his bike through onto the linoleum floor. He turned it around in case he had to leave quickly and set his helmet on the only unoccupied space on the kitchen counter. An old brown refrigerator from the 1970s gathered sticky dust next to a swinging door that opened onto a combination living and dining room. There was no furniture. Thin green carpeting covered the whole room, and it squished as he stepped onto it—wet from water coming up through the floor or leaking down the walls or from the stained and leaking roof or all three. He walked through the rest of the house to make sure it was unoccupied, looking into a sad little bedroom with the same green carpet and a few wire hangers on the floor. He also walked partway into a foul-smelling bathroom where someone had sprayed black diarrhea shit all over the toilet. Gene closed the door with his foot, went back into the kitchen, and cleaned off an area of the counter where he could sit down and rest a bit. His left side was covered in mud, and his left boot had filled with mud and water, too, but he didn’t plan on being at this house long enough to take them off, and besides, the water seemed to have been cut off, perhaps explaining why the meth lab had moved out.

  Gene clos
ed his eyes and dozed several moments against the plastic fake-wood cabinets. His heart started racing as soon as he heard gravel crunching, and he opened his eyes to see two cars pulling into the gravel driveway—the yellow Dodge Viper, right bumper bent and dented and most of the right side smeared with mud, and a white Cutlass Supreme. They must have followed his muddy trail to this house, though he had hoped the rain would have washed it away. Gene pulled out his SIG and took off the safety. His cell phone vibrated inside his jacket. No number registered, and he answered without saying anything.

  “Farmer Brown?”

  Gene didn’t reply.

  “We have you surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”

  “Sure. I’ll be right out.”

  “I always wanted to say that. Don’t make us come in there after you, dude.”

  “Did you bring backup, Tosti?”

  “Always.”

  “Pretty chickenshit of you, Marine.”

  “Nope, careful. Can’t take any chances in this business.”

  “You should know I mailed all my brother’s notes and research in the mail yesterday. If anything happens to me, they’re instructed to give it to the newspapers.”

  “That’s pathetic, Farmer Brown. That’s the best you can do?”

  Gene realized now how desperate it sounded.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Come on out and let’s get this over quickly. Wish I didn’t have to, but I do. But I’ll make it easy on you. C’mon, Farmer Brown. Man up.”

  “Suck my ass, Tosti.” He hung up and turned the phone to mute. His battery had drained to 20% despite his barely using it.

  Gene figured his chances in a gunfight, surrounded, were slim, and his mind raced to think of another plan, another way out of the dismal, spoiled banana, meth-house death trap. The two “educators” sat in their cars, and through the front window it looked like they were talking on their cells. Gene started up his motorcycle, hoping they wouldn’t hear it from inside their cars and in the rain. Then he went to the back door, took out his pocketknife, opened up the screwdriver, and pried off the pins from the hinges loose in the soft doorframe. Through the front window he could see the car doors open slowly and the two men coming toward the house, guns in hand. It reminded Gene not of his military training but of the old Starsky and Hutch episodes he and Miller used to watch as kids. Jimmy Tosti went to the front, sending Zesty around the back. Gene put his shoulder against the refrigerator and slid it across the slick linoleum floor in front of the swinging door. The two bad things about his plan were that he could no longer see through the front window and he couldn’t ride his bike and shoot at the same time. But he had no choice—it was the only plan he could come up with, and he had to stick to it for now. He hopped on his bike, gave it a little rev, put his helmet on, and waited.