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THUGLIT Issue One

Page 3

by Shaw, Johnny


  I’m team Jacob!

  I’m team Edward!

  How a meat dress was so nouveau— risqué.

  Jesus Christ! When was the fucking bus coming?

  Then—salvation! The bus appeared around the corner. It rumbled up the street and, with whining airbrakes and long hiss of air, slowed at the bus stop.

  Brandy sighed, grateful the noise had severed the grape vine, put a stop to the buzzing rumor mill. She was amazed how animated, fast-talking, these kids could be in the unbearable heat.

  Obnoxiously, one of the Erica’s said, “Hello? Do you mind?”

  The bus doors had opened, Brandy realized. She was blocking the way.

  All the Marks, the Ericas, shoved past. Brandy quietly boarded onto the bus, with the rest of the adults.

  With disgusted but resigned looks, they quietly boarded. Obediently they fed their money to the money feeder while the kids continued their inane gossiping.

  They filed onto the bus, one after the other until all were on board.

  As they did, two young men horseplaying in the aisle nearly knocked over an old lady trying to make her way to the back. None of the unruly youngsters offered up their seats so the older folk could sit, rest. Nothing was said.

  That would be them some day, Brandy relished: forced to ride the bus to their retail jobs—or their jobs waiting tables—because their cars had been repossessed. Or rather because they could not afford a car to begin with.

  Jesus, she realized she just described her own pathetic life. How long had she been working at Macy’s, anyway?

  It occurred to her the only jobs around anymore were those working behind a counter, or behind a bar, or waiting on tables in a restaurant; the Walmart-type jobs. Or, if you were lucky, cleaning bedpans in a hospital.

  “Hey, watch it! You almost knocked her down,” one of the kids spoke up.

  “Fuck you!”

  “Mind your own business, fucker!”

  *****

  When the metro light rail doors opened, Angel Rodriguez crammed into the train. Into the thick crowd of passengers.

  Squeezing next to Brandy, she sighed loud.

  It had taken her forever riding the #65 bus to reach the light rail, putting up with all those rude, obnoxious punk kids the entire time.

  Now she would have to spend god knew how long on the light rail next to another punk kid.

  He said nothing back.

  Maybe he hadn’t heard her sigh, she guessed.

  Thank god, she thought to herself when she caught a glimpse of him. Spying on him from the corner of her eye, she tried not to look obvious doing it.

  Her first impression was: evil gang-banger. The fact alone that he wore baggy clothes spelled trouble and meant he was likely no good. But then again, she realized, all the boys wore baggy clothes nowadays. The girls: unbelievably tight clothes, the little whores.

  Etched in the window glass, she eyed a piece of graffiti. All the money spent on the light rail, to help people get around easier, improve their lives and the environment, some asshole writes graffiti on the train.

  Some asshole like him, Brandy figured.

  She wished Honda hadn’t recalled their airbags. Then she wouldn’t be in this mess, standing next to this devil. How much longer would it take Honda to fix her car, she wondered? Was that fire in his eyes? Did she actually see flames? And tiny horns?

  How much longer must she put up with public transportation?

  If it wasn’t her car getting recalled, it was always something.

  The train jolted; everyone swayed with the movement, like water vacillated in a bowl.

  Angel jostled against Brandy, and she could swear she felt him grope her tits as he did.

  Then, quickly he moved away. But the crowd was so thick, he only managed a few feet.

  Again, Brandy thought on the exquisite bottle of Beringer White Zinfandel. The one she had saved all month.

  Suddenly, everything was okay.

  She went to stroke her gold chain, looked down at her violated tits, and saw the chain was gone.

  Grinning, he looked her over. She could feel his fiery eyes on her.

  Among the nest of gold chains about his neck, she saw her chain: the little cocky, arrogant prick!

  He had stolen her chain!

  Now he was grinning, daring her to do something about it.

  Over the intercom, the next stop was announced. The doors opened.

  Brandy waited.

  The doors closed; Brandy grabbed all the chains from Angel’s neck. She leapt from the train!

  The daring leap thrilled her. Snatching the chains from Angel’s neck, taking back what was rightfully hers.

  It was exhilarating.

  She felt more alive than she’d ever been.

  Then Angel was prying the doors open.

  She felt cast into some surreal horror flick, her world turned upside down. Wedging one arm through the gap, he pried the doors open. Then his other arm was through.

  The train pulled away, picking up speed. No, he was not going to make it.

  Please, she prayed—

  no, no, no, no.

  Thank god, she was saved.

  He pried open the doors and, jumping from the train, he looked to Brandy with eyes like murderous slits against the glaring sun.

  Screaming, she ran.

  Angel chased on her heels, shouting, “You’re fucking dead bitch when I catch you!”

  Her shopping bag flopped wildly at her side.

  She ran—so fast—the people, and storefronts, and the buildings she ran past, blurred into ghostly echoes.

  To her, all that mattered was running, staying alive.

  She ran—faster, harder.

  Then rounded a corner and—

  —ran straight into an alley.

  *****

  The world caught up to her, upside down.

  Everything slammed into focus at the mouth of the alley.

  Angel lifted her by her waist, as if she were filled with air; threw her face-first to the pavement. Her cheek broke like porcelain against the alley.

  Inside her face, she felt the shattered bone slide around. She tasted blood, opened her mouth. The blood squirted out.

  “Fucking bitch!”

  Turning Brandy over, her gold chain fell from her cleavage. She started crying.

  “Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I thought you stole it!”

  She gargled on the blood, spilled it from her mouth, “Please! I didn’t know! Oh my god! I’m so sorry!”

  He hammer-fisted her face.

  Why would no one help her, she wondered? Where were all the good Samaritans, the cops to her rescue? Her eyes swelled shut.

  The last thing she saw before her eyes closed was the young hipster artist drinking from his cup of Starbucks.

  Finally, her knight in shining armor had arrived.

  “Not my problem,” the kid hurried past.

  Across the street, the Marks, the Ericas, were taping her murder on their cell phones.

  Her forehead, swollen and gigantic, looked ready to burst.

  Her eyes: puffy, blood-filled black sacks.

  “Fucking bitch!”

  Angel stomped on her stomach. He jumped up, down on her stomach.

  He jumped up and down on her chest, missed, and almost fell over.

  Kicking her in the head, her neck snapped.

  Then he jumped up, stomped on her face, and her nose crunched into her face. The kids across the street gasped, but kept taping.

  *****

  Angel held the gold chains up to the sun.

  The gold glinted in the sunlight, and Brandy’s chain caught his eye.

  From his doorway, Momma Rodriguez waved to him: the run-down, Spanish colonial revival.

  It was midway along the broken street, the cracked sidewalks. Worn concrete the city of Phoenix had neglected fixing, or had forgotten alltogether to fix.

  The little hovel, where they eked out their living.


  Same as the rest of the dirt-poor residents of Garfield district, the ones lucky still to have homes.

  He thought on the little ratty crack girl; her homeless family…

  …fuck them!

  bitch he'd stomped in…

  …fuck them!

  On beating that uppity bitch to death, he felt some remorse. The cell phone tapings would likely catch up with him, he realized.

  He regretted that most.

  Not that any of those kids cared, really. So why should he?

  Because apathy was the new America.

  The day still brutally hot, the sky still laden with hazy green smog. He saw pigeons, and doves, and sparrows; the ugly and obnoxious black great-tailed grackles. They soared gracefully in the sky.

  A few blocks over, he heard the sirens of all the police cars, and all the ambulances, and the fire trucks still cleaning the bodies—the mess—of Lauro, the murdered kids.

  “Is this the motherfucker right here?”

  He felt the gun at his head.

  Miss Padilla and her boyfriend stepped from the shadows of another abandoned house.

  So fast, Angel didn’t have time to notice them before it was too late and her boyfriend was behind Angel, pointing the gun.

  “That’s him,” Miss Padilla said, “Fuckin’ no good rotten kid.”

  From their doorway, Momma Rodriguez waved.

  Looking to the sky, Angel saw the sun, the birds in the sky.

  The boyfriend flashed a mouth full of gold, “Take back what’s yours,” he said.

  Miss Padilla smiled, satisfied.

  Then she snatched back the gold chains from Angel’s hand.

  He looked in his palm before the gun took his life, and he was holding Brandy’s thin gold chain, the one she had hoped to pass to her daughter someday.

  The Gleaner's Union

  by Court Merrigan

  I come home from the Gleaner’s Union hangdog with a corn whiskey stumble in my step, trying not to believe what the boys was saying. How a man didn’t hardly have a choice no more. How he had to hire out. The boys who still came in to the Union, they was stalwart, they knew good as me the difference between laboring for wages and working your own land. But young ones can’t eat your knowing all winter, can they?

  Cora sat by the stove, skinning spuds.

  “How you been, little girl?” I said to her. “You go out walking today?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  She looked up from that half-skinned spud all ladylike, knees pressed tight together, hands on her lap. Cora never sat like that unless she was bad upset.

  I pulled up a chair. Took the tater and knife out of Cora’s slick little hands. Wanted to wrap her up in my big arms but that wouldn’t do, big as she was getting.

  “Ma,” I said, “I plain forgot to change out the goat’s hay. Maybe you want to give it a look.”

  “I already been out there,” said Ma. I just...” Then she saw how I was looking at Cora. “Yeah,” she said, reaching for her coat. “I better check.”

  She’s always been a good woman.

  “Now what is it, baby girl?” I said to Cora when Ma was gone.

  “I was over round Griselda Harlan’s place today,” she said.

  “Cora...”

  “I know you told me and told me. But I didn’t mean nothing by it. I was coming back out of Seven Mile Draw and you know that tree line they got’s the best way to get back. It’s out of the wind.”

  “Out of sight from the house, you mean.”

  Cora nodded. We’d all helped Harlan plant in that windbreak and of course them trees come up like weeds the first years before the drought and alkali. Now they was just thick tangles of branches for pheasants to hide out in.

  “I seen Mr. Ryne and Griselda,” said Cora.

  “That’s Mrs. Harlan to you, little girl.”

  “Him and Mrs. Harlan. I known it was Mr. Ryne because of that Mustang of his tied up outside.”

  “Go on.”

  “I saw em, Pa. Together.”

  “Together.”

  “I just wanted to see, Pa. I couldn’t help myself.”

  Feature of life out there in that hardscrabble valley: no one had curtains. Couldn’t afford em, for one thing, didn’t need em, for another, what with your nearest neighbors living miles away.

  “Well, what’d you see?” I asked.

  “They was rutting, Pa.”

  She didn’t have to say it, of course. Maybe I shouldn’t of made her come out with it.

  “Mrs. Harlan, she was bent over the table, and Mr. Ryne, his face was all twisted up and...”

  “That’ll do, girl,” I said. “They see you?”

  “No. They was too busy.”

  We sat there a while, pondering the possibilities.

  “Pa,” Cora said, “you can’t go rutting someone you ain’t married to, can you?”

  “No, baby girl,” I said, “you cannot.”

  *****

  You want to go back, you’d blame it on Harlan’s taking the job with the railroad. Course, he only took that job on account of the alkali eating up his land. For that you’d have to blame God. Or the government putting out the land around Spirit Lake, Wyoming, up for homesteading, what used to be Indian ground—but of course they never done nothing with it. Hundred-sixty acres free and clear if you pledged to work it seven years.

  Course, we wasn’t up here three years before the drought come on and never let go and the alkali started leaching up, poisoning the soil yellow so nothing would grow on it. Then you throw the Depression on top of that.

  That’s when we started finding out who was who. Some up and disappeared into the night, like them Okies down south jumping the Dust Bowl for California, giving up their land to get owned body and soul for a few bucks a day. Others kept their name on the deed and went out laboring, like Harlan.

  Like I say, Harlan got on at the railroad. A good job, too, working the lines across the state two weeks at a stretch. A hundred men a day down at the rail yard clamoring for that job. We all thought Harlan got lucky till we heard he took his wife Griselda along with him. She was a looker, all right. Flouncing around in skirts and makeup like she lived downtown in Omaha or some such and not on parcel of hardscrabble Wyoming dirt a hundred miles from anywhere. You could see how a man could come by a job by her, if she got left alone with the hiring man a few minutes.

  Harlan would be gone two, three weeks at a time. Not many women can cope with that kind of lonesomeness and Griselda wasn’t one of em. So Jack Ryne come along to comfort her. Riding a fine Mustang, best horse in Spirit Lake.

  *****

  Cora now, you couldn’t keep her to the homeplace if you strapped a plow to her back. I know we was sometimes the talk of folks, the way Cora would come strolling across someone’s place chewing on a hickory stick in her boy’s overalls, hair ragged short because she clipped it herself with sheep shears, toting along some Indian artifact she found back in the bluffs. Howdy doo, she’d say, have herself a drink of water out of the well and stroll on. I’d hear about it a couple days later and I know there was folks saying I should of reined her in.

  But I couldn’t do that. It was in Cora’s blood. I remember our first harvest here, when times was still good. Cora just turned up down in the fields, right next to the reaper, pretty as you please. She wasn’t but three years old. I held her on my lap as she grabbed at the chaff floating by, her thin hair smelling like wheat and everything in the world seeming open and possible. That was the fall of ’28. Good times ain’t been seen around here since.

  Cora knows this country better than anyone since the Indians, I guess. The draws and the buttes beyond the farm ground, every plant and animal and bug and fish. How many times did she show me things I never knew existed: deer beds, trout eggs, seep draws, edible berries.

  “What are these even called?” I asked her once.

  “Hackberry.”

  “How did you know you could eat em?”

&nbs
p; “I tried one.”

  “You could of got sick to death, girl. You can’t go around eating things you don’t know what they are.”

  She shrugged. “I know.”

  Being with Cora the world took on a wondering glow. I noticed cows had marvelously shaped noses, like she said, how ladybugs flitted like storybook fairies, ants dancing on the sand in the wind. You don’t go restraining a creature like that. No sir.

  *****

  There wasn’t no harvest that October of ’36. Some of us had known since May, when didn’t nothing come sprouting out of the alkali-killed ground. Some of us by July, when it hadn’t rained in three months and Spirit Lake got too low to pull any more irrigation water out of. Some by September when three hailstorms in four days pounded the last living crops into dust and nothing. October should of been harvest. Instead them of us that hadn’t run off to California or taken to laboring gathered at the Gleaner’s Union warehouse that we built together, talking about what was and what might of been. Pass around corn whiskey, roll another smoke.

  Cora had rode with me into the Union many and many a time during harvest back in the good days, sitting proud beside me on the seat. She’d grab a Coke out of the ice chest while we unloaded, prattling on to the bookkeeper Mrs. Rubottom about the critters and the clouds and the shape of the wind. Old Mrs. Rubottom nodding along as she kept track of the spuds and corn and wheat so we’d be sure to get our fair share at the end of harvest, each family proportioned to what it’d put in, sliding some of the profit over to families with newborns and sick ones, reckoning out payments on a tractor for everyone in the Union to share out.

  Now Mrs. Rubottom was dead, there wasn’t no call for bookkeeping, and I didn’t tote Cora along to the Union. Bunch of idled dirt farmers quaffing whiskey in a empty warehouse cussing at the world ain’t no place for a little girl.

  I had to walk in myself. The last horse on my team gave out in September after it drank alkali-poisoned water. I wasn’t the only one walking, I’ll tell you that. Them that still had horses were more lucky than good.

 

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