THUGLIT Issue One

by Shaw, Johnny

  *****

  A few days after me and Cora had our little talk, I was back at the Gleaner’s Union. Whiskey jugs making the rounds, some of the boys talking about hiring out when Jerry Sherrill said to hell with that. He was headed into the mountains to trap bears. Said them pelts would bring fifty dollars or better down in Casper. But you couldn’t walk the furs out. You needed a animal.

  “You really think there’s still bear back there?” I asked.

  “I know there is,” said Sherrill. “And wolf. Mink, even. They’re begging for pelts down in Casper. You got them rich ladies out in New York paying top dollar, you know.”

  I thought about my dead team of horses. “Be damned,” I said.

  Ron Weizkowski come riding up. He’d brought along another jug. He joined in the jawing and allowed that if a man had four-legged transport, there was pelts for him up in the mountains.

  “You’d need that good horse both ways, though,” he said.

  “You got a good horse,” said Sherrill.

  “She’s all right,” said Weizkowski, eyeing his mare. “But she don’t hold no candle to that Mustang of Ryne’s. I ought to know. I just seen it.”

  “Did you now?” I said.

  “Over on Pumpkin Ridge,” said Weizkowski. “Asked him if he didn’t maybe want to join us. He said he had business elsewhere.”

  “I know where, the son of a bitch,” I said.

  *****

  We called Ryne all the names, and Harlan all the names, and Griselda all the names. The jugs kept going around and we decided we best look into this ourselves. About half a dozen of us mounted up. We didn’t have no plans. We hadn’t got that far along. Them that didn’t come cheered us as we left, holding up jugs in salute. I rode double with Weizkowski.

  Righteousness kept us warm the seven-mile ride to Harlan’s, wind blowing to beat a banshee. Harlan’s place was scrimmed over in a year’s worth of weeds. He hadn’t put no crop in. Too busy getting owned for wages. Harlan’s cur set to yapping and the front door swung open and there was Griselda Harlan standing in a square of light, hands on her hips. Looking disheveled in a pretty blue dress, the kind a woman wears when she plans on getting seen.

  “Hello boys,” she says to me. “Where you headed?”

  They was all looking at me. I could tell if I didn’t say what was needful, no one else would.

  “Right here,” I said.

  She wasn’t no kind of fighter, Griselda Harlan. She backed out of the entranceway leaving the door swung open and we piled in. Crowded in that front room where a couple gas lamps hissed. Good fire going in the stove. The table laid for two, glasses and china. Ryne was in there, all right. Eyes twitching like a trapped creature. He had on a clean shirt. The only man there whose shirt was.

  “Hello fellas,” Ryne said. “Looks like I wasn’t the only one feeling neighborly this evening.”

  “Some more neighborly than others,” I said.

  Griselda bustled over to the stove, put on a kettle.

  “You can leave off with the coffee,” I said. “You know why we’re here.”

  Griselda clanged down the kettle. I could see her hands shaking.

  “We all got to look after one another,” said Ryne.

  Sherrill spit on the floor.

  “Cut the shit,” said Weizkowski.

  “Hey now,” said Ryne. “There’s a lady here.”

  “Ain’t no lady I can see,” I said.

  The room got quiet.

  “Now boys,” said Ryne, holding out his hands.

  “You been fooling where you ain’t ought to of been fooling,” I said.

  “We can’t have it,” said Weizkowski.

  “Hell, boys,” said Ryne, “it ain’t what you think.”

  “No, it’s worse,” I said. “Ain’t it, Griselda?”

  Griselda looked at Ryne to say something else but he never did. He ran.

  He crashed out of the back bedroom window, screeching like a little girl. We got turned around, banging into one another and back out the front door, Griselda’s china smashed to the floor.

  Like I say, it was a year’s worth of weeds out there. Out back of the house they was tall as a man. That and we was half-cocked, in no kind of condition to go tracking in the dark. We might of gave up the whole business but for who stepped out of the weeds.

  Cora.

  “This way, Pa!” she said. “Come on!”

  Wasn’t nothing for it but to do like she said. We followed her over the cracked alkali ground. She knew the lay of the land but good. Ran us right up the little draw where Ryne was trying to make a hidey hole out of a fox den.

  Things might of gone different for him if he hadn’t run, so that a ten-year old girl had to smoke him out for us. Now our blood was up. We glugged down the rest of that whiskey and yanked his trousers down and took out a sharp knife. Held Griselda, made her watch, sobbing. After, I saw Harlan’s cur loping away into the night with Ryne’s manhood.

  *****

  Cora, she hung tight to me the whole ride home. Six miles over the hills, cold wind cutting us all the way. First couple miles, didn’t neither of us say nothing.

  “He going to live, Pa?” Cora finally asked.

  “Not well. But he ain’t going to die, if that’s what you mean.” We rode on a ways. “You understand, don’t you?” I asked.

  “You can’t go rutting someone you ain’t married to,” Cora said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I like this horse, Pa.”

  “He’s a good one, all right.”

  That Mustang was, too. He’d ride me right up into the mountains and carry the furs out. Keep me off the wages. Cora behind me patted the Mustang’s shanks.

  “You going to take me up with you after the bears?” she asked.

  “How’d you know about that?” I said.

  She shrugged. “I know.”

  Magpie

  by Hilary Davidson

  The sheriff who called about my mother-in-law’s death sounded genuinely sad about it. “She looked like she was called up to the Lord all peaceful-like,” he said, in a deep voice that had a lingering drawl to it. “She went in her sleep, I reckon. I’m sure she didn’t feel no pain.”

  He told me that she’d died of a heart attack, and that it had probably happened a couple of days earlier, given the state in which she was found. “Couple of her near neighbors hadn’t seen her about, so they went over, and then they called me. Poor Mrs. Carlow. Let me give you my number so your husband can call me.”

  I dutifully wrote it down, then folded the paper and put it into my purse. It was just before noon, and Jake was probably with a patient, maybe even in surgery. Telling him the news about his mother over the phone seemed heartless. I could drive to his office and reveal all in person, but given that he hadn’t spoken to his mother in years, that seemed like overkill. The news could wait until evening, after he got home. There wasn’t anything either of us could do about it now. His mother had lived in the western edge of Ohio, close to the border with West Virginia. Jake and I were in Los Angeles, where we’d moved for his medical practice. We’d been there almost five years, and even though his roots were in hill country and mine were in Cleveland, the West Coast felt completely like home.

  Jake surprised me an hour later, the tires of his Porsche squealing into the driveway. I met him at the door.

  “My mother’s dead,” he said. We clung to each other for a while.

  “I’m sorry, baby.”

  “Ludy said they think she died in her sleep.”

  “Ludy?” I pulled back. “You talked to your sister?”

  “She called to tell me what happened.”

  “She called your office?” My stomach suddenly clenched into knots. “How did she…”

  “Never mind that now, Erica. I need to think.” He pushed me away and headed for his den, slamming the door behind him. I was too surprised to say anything, or to go after him. He didn’t seem sad so much as unsettled.
That wasn’t a surprise: it was normal to mourn a parent, even one who was a mean, manipulative person. Jake had cut off contact with her years ago because of her abusiveness, and while he was right to do it, I suspected that his conscience wasn’t easy right now. Any sense of loss would be made worse if it was accompanied by guilt.

  When I knocked on the door, he didn’t answer. I listened at it for a moment, but all was quiet. He had alcohol in there, I knew, but no food, so I went to the kitchen and made him a sandwich. I put it on a tray and wrote a little note on an index card—I love you, baby—and left it in front of the door, knocking to let him know it was there. An hour later, it was untouched, like a rejected peace offering at the altar of an angry god.

  That was when I started to worry. My husband was a man with a tender heart; he found it hard to hold a grudge against anyone, no matter how deserving. It had been so painful for him to cut off contact with his mother, even though he’d done so for reasons any sane person would understand. You couldn’t put up with a toxic person just because you were related to her; you still had to draw a line somewhere. Mrs. Carlow had actually made it easier for Jake by ignoring him. Jake had sent her a birthday card once, after they cut off contact. I only knew about it because his mother had crossed out her name with a spidery X and wrote RETURN TO SENDER on the envelope, so the card boomeranged back. How did you mourn a mother like that?

  I wandered aimlessly through our house, wondering what to do. Jake needed help, but I wasn’t sure how to give it to him. We’d been together for a dozen years, and yet sometimes I found it hard to understand him.

  When I knocked again on the door of his study, he ignored me. But he hadn’t locked me out, and the knob turned under my hand. I stepped over the tray and went inside. The blinds were drawn, but I could see Jake’s silhouette at his desk. He seemed to be staring into space. I didn’t hear the music at first, it was turned so low. The lyrics came as a whisper: “Oh, Death, oh death, please spare me over till another year.”

  “What is it, Erica?” Jake’s voice was just as quiet as the singer’s.

  I’d prepared a speech in my mind, but it slipped away. “I’m sorry,” I blurted out. “I wish I knew what to do to help you, baby.”

  Jake just looked at me with that hard, flat expression that came over him when he got lost inside his own thoughts. Normally, I could cajole him out of it, but I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to this time. He was too bitter and raw right now. He was dangerous at the moment, liable to do something rash if I didn’t pay very close attention to him.

  “There’s nothing anyone can do now. What’s done is done.”

  “It’s normal to have conflicted feelings in a situation like this. It’s…”

  “Erica, please cut out the bullshit psychobabble. I can’t listen to it now.”

  That made a lump swell in my throat. Jake almost never cursed, certainly not at me. He was more depressed than I’d realized.

  “I have to go out there,” he muttered.

  “You what?”

  “I need to go home for my mother’s funeral.”

  “Jake, she’s gone and nothing is going to change that. Going to her funeral isn’t going to help her. It’s just going to drag you back to a place you hate and bring back painful memories.”

  “I’d rather have the painful memories than whitewash the past.”

  “You’re so busy at work,” I pointed out. “They need you at the clinic. You can’t just leave them in the lurch.”

  “Why? Because some starlet wouldn’t get her boob job? Or maybe some spoiled teenager wouldn’t get her bumpy nose fixed?”

  “You’re picking ridiculous examples. You know you do wonderful work. Important work. Think of all the little kids you’ve helped.” Jake occasionally spent his weekends performing surgery, for free, on poor kids from the inner city whose parents could never have afforded to fix their cleft palates and other disfigurements.

  He rubbed his temples. “It’s not enough.”

  “Look, let’s make a donation in your mother’s honor. I was looking online, and there’s this one association that focuses on heart attack and stroke prevention for women.”

  Jake stared at me for what felt like a very long time. “How did you know my mother died of a heart attack?”

  “Oh, I…” I felt terrible for not telling him about the sheriff’s call sooner. But when he’d come home, he’d already known that his mother was dead, and he’d disappeared into his den before I’d had the chance to say anything. “The sheriff who found her called here, right before you came in. I was going to call you, but then I was thinking I should tell you in person, and then you came home and you already knew…”

  He put his hand up. “I don’t want to hear it. Just leave me alone.”

  I swallowed hard and backed out of the room. “Let me know if you need anything,” I said, pulling the door behind me. Just before it closed, I stopped and poked my head back in the room. “I love you, baby.”

  Jake just stared at me. I shut the door and tried not to panic.

  *****

  Jake surprised me late that night, leaving his den and joining me in bed. He didn’t want comfort or sleep. He wanted me. Maybe that was the only way he could forget his pain. By the time he was done, our sheets were sticky with lust and sweat, and I fell asleep in his arms, feeling at peace with the world.

  In the morning, I woke up alone. Jake’s gym bag was gone, and I thought he’d gone to the club early to play squash. I was glad, because I thought that was a sign Jake had turned a corner, that the crisis I’d felt was impending was going to be averted.

  But then I realized Jake’s laptop was gone. Sitting in its place on his desk was a white sheet from a company that made some sort of line-filling injectable gel.

  I had to go home, it read.

  I crumpled it into a ball and threw it against the wall. Home? He still thought of that hellhole in the sticks as home? That turned my stomach. What about our home together? What about our life together? I picked up the phone, looked at the numbers Jake had called recently, and hit redial. What did he think he was doing? Was he determined to ruin his life? Jake could be impulsive, acting first and worrying about consequences later. I had to save him from himself.

  *****

  In theory, I knew where I was going. I got on a red-eye flight that night that took me from Los Angeles to Charlotte, and then a connecting flight on a commuter plane to Charleston, West Virginia. It was easy enough to rent a car and follow the highway west, to where it ran alongside the Ohio River, but once I crossed the bridge, I was on my own. Google Maps could only take me so far through the barren, miserable wilderness of hill country.

  Jake had taken me to visit his family there only once, just before we got married. We’d been engaged forever, and he was close to finishing his medical residency. “I can’t marry a girl my family hasn’t met,” he told me. That settled it.

  “They’re not going to like me,” I warned him. “They’re going to see me as some city snob in high heels.”

  “They’ll love you,” Jake soothed me. “They already know how smart and hard-working you are. That you were a scholarship student like I was. They know you were raised by your mom, and that she died when you were in high school.”

  “You told them that?”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Erica. You should be proud that you started with nothing and worked hard to get where you are.”

  “What else did you tell them about me?” I seethed.

  “Everything that’s wonderful about you,” he said, kissing me. “And I want you to see how wonderful it is there. You’re going to love it.”

  I knew he was wrong about that, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I’d worked hard to break free from government housing and food stamps, and I hadn’t done that so I could live in a mountain shack. I had other plans.

  The visit went just as badly as I knew it would. “Didn’t think I’d be seeing you ‘round here. Ain�
��t you able to come up with some excuse not to darken my doorstep?” Those were the first words out of Mrs. Carlow’s mouth when she saw us at the door. Jake, being his usual sweet self, mollified her. But she fixed her narrow blue eyes on me and pursed her lips, looking me up and down. Sometimes, when people met me, they told me I looked exotic and used that as cover to ask about my race. Mrs. Carlow didn’t ask that, but I felt those cold eyes parsing pieces out, not liking any of them. While Jake was able to thaw her out, she remained cold and rude with me. She didn’t come out and say anything directly. Her insults were carefully couched in statements that were hard to answer.

  “Them’s some fine clothes you have,” she’d told me. “What’s that old saw? Fine feathers make fine birds?” She turned to Jake. “Cousin Hark’s wife just walked out on him. She was one who always thought real well of herself.” Her expression made it clear what she thought of women who thought well of themselves.

  I knew, even then, that Mrs. Carlow believed she could chase me off. What she hadn’t realized was that I’d already made up my mind about Jake and my own future, and that there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. What she couldn’t have realized was how much I wanted her to hate me.

  I was thinking of that visit as I steered my rental car along the roads. Nature was something I loved in healthy doses. Being surrounded by hills and fields with no indications of people nearby—except for occasional tractor-crossing signs—made me nervous. When it got to be too much for me, I stopped the car and turned on my cell phone. Jake had tried to call me several times before I’d boarded my flight; I hadn’t answered, and once I’d turned off my phone I hadn’t turned it back on. He had to be sweating by now, wondering why I wasn’t answering. I dialed his number and he answered immediately. “Why haven’t you been answering your phone? I’ve been worried sick about you.”

  “Why did you go running off in the middle of the night? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He sighed. “I knew if I did, I’d never get here. I just had to do it then, Erica. It was important. Don’t be upset, okay?”