THUGLIT Issue Sixteen

by Devon Robbins

  "How much farther?" Patrick asked.

  "There," Callie said, pointing.

  They approached a striped flag hanging next to a sign that read, If you have any produce-related puns, lettuce know.

  "What the fuck is that?" Patrick asked.

  "Our place," Sam said.

  Patrick, for a change, was speechless as Sam pulled onto the dirt ruts leading to their farmhouse. He drove a quarter-mile up the driveway from the roadside barn, pulled around behind the house and parked. He turned off the engine and sat.

  "What are you waiting for?" Patrick asked.

  "Your lead. What do we do with…him?" Sam nodded at Pete, whose open, blank eyes stared at the seatbacks. Despite the wound dressing, Sam could smell the ruptured bowel over the odors of blood and piss. Pickett had been right about the kid's chances. He'd just been on the hopeful side of how long they had.

  "Bring him. I don't want him stinking up the car," Patrick said.

  Callie said, "You seem pretty okay talking that way about a guy who was a friend."

  Patrick shoved the muzzle of the gun in her ribcage hard enough to make her gasp. "You don't know a fuckin' thing about me!"

  "Let's just go inside and we can take all the time we need to sort things through," Sam suggested.

  "You gonna make me some tea, hippie?"

  For the second time, Sam decided silence was a better answer than provoking the man with the gun. He opened his door and climbed out. Patrick scrambled out the passenger side door, rushing around the front of the car, desperate to keep his pistol trained on Sam. "You two get Pete and let's go."

  Callie and Mickey helped with the body while Patrick let himself into the house. He looked around in a manic state, checking shelves and drawers and small spaces all around. Sam and Callie's home was cluttered, and things toppled over, falling off shelves, breaking or rolling away as he rifled through the place.

  "What are you looking for?" Callie asked as she and Mickey eased the body onto the hardwood floor.

  When Patrick didn't reply, Sam said, "He's looking for something we'd use to defend ourselves."

  "Smart man."

  "There are no weapons here," Callie said. "We're farmers."

  Patrick practically guffawed. "Bullshit! "You got knives in the kitchen? A fuckin' meat mallet? Yeah, you're a real pair of hippie peaceniks." Patrick kept searching. Mickey plopped on the sofa, holding his head in his hands. Sam offered to brew the cup of tea that had been joked about in the car.

  Patrick closed the distance between them and slammed his fist into Sam's stomach before Sam realized what was happening. The lanky farmer dropped to his knees beside the dead boy. He tried to retrieve the breath that had been knocked out of him and gagged on the smell emanating from the corpse.

  "You think I'm stupid? Am I fuckin' stupid?"

  "The opposite," Sam choked.

  "Fuck, dude!" Mickey said.

  "What now?" Patrick said.

  "Look!" Mickey held the hinged lid of an ottoman open with one hand while raising a gallon bag of weed for Patrick to see. "The thing is filled with this shit!"

  Patrick glanced at his surviving partner, his eyes widening. He walked over and snatched the bag away from Mickey. Opening it, he inhaled deeply. "Farmers, huh?"

  "It's a crop," Callie said. "There's a bong in there too if you want to mellow out some. Please. That's our personal stash. You're welcome to it."

  "You got more?"

  "We've got a whole field of it outside," she said. "Behind the corn. Leave us alone and you can take as much of it as you want." She looked at her husband with her eyebrows raised. He nodded back at her.

  "You two knock that telepathic shit off," Patrick said. "I'm not going to go looking for some secret pot field while you call the cops. Where did you really get this stuff?"

  "The field is a hundred yards through those doors," Callie said. "Take what you want and go. We won't call the police."

  Mickey held open another bag peering in as if he couldn't decide whether to fill a bowl or stick his head in and motorboat like a teenager with his first thirty-six double Ds.

  "Right, you won't. You don't think I know medical is legal up here?"

  Sam sighed. His guts had stopped cramping enough to allow him to sit back on his heels and put some distance between him and Pete. "We look like a dispensary to you? The law says they have to cultivate their own. Plus, there are plenty of people who want to smoke recreationally and don't have a doctor willing to write them a scrip for 'stress.' We don't want the police looking into our business any more than you do."

  Callie chimed in. "We'd probably get almost as much time for what's in that ottoman than you would for…" she couldn't bring herself to say "killing Garrett." Instead, she clapped a hand over her mouth. To Sam she seemed to almost be vibrating with anxiety. If he wasn't fighting nausea and stomach cramps, he'd feel the same way. But Patrick hit hard. A boxer, perhaps. It was all Sam could do to keep from vomiting on the rug—the one they joked really tied the room together, but now was covered in a boy's blood.

  "We'll take you to the field. You cut as much as you can fit in your car. Take the rest out of the ottoman and leave us alone," Sam said.

  Patrick looked ready to rush Sam again as he pushed himself up off the floor. Instead the gunman stayed by his partner, out of swinging range. A comfortable shooting distance away.

  "You can have the money from last weekend's market too. It's in the safe in the bedroom. Take it all and leave us alone."

  "I look like a drug dealer to you?" Patrick asked. "What am I going to do with a carload of weed?"

  "You look like a man who doesn't want to walk away empty handed," Callie said. "You didn't get what you want at Cutter's place. But you can still win and no one else has to get hurt."

  Mickey sidled up to Patrick, the freezer bag still open in his hands. "I know a guy in Pawtucket who'll buy trunkfuls of this shit."

  "We'll show you. Make up your mind when you see what we've got."

  Patrick waved at the glass doors with his pistol. "After you."

  Sam and Callie stepped over Pete's body and opened the doors to the back porch. Patrick and Mickey followed behind.

  The couple led the way across a big back yard past a bunch of rusting farm equipment and a picnic table. Fifty yards from the house was a row of corn stalks. They pushed their way into the overgrown green mess. The stalks were thick and untended. Patrick keeping his hand tight on Callie's elbow in case she or her man decided to make a run for it.

  As Sam promised, another fifty yards away, the unmistakable odor of dank began to drift toward him. A combination of pine, sage, and skunk teased Patrick's sense of smell. He lifted his head a little to get a deeper whiff.

  Callie's arm jerked out of his hand as she and her husband hopped ahead of their guides. Patrick took a quick step forward to catch her arm, but she side-stepped him, disappearing into the green.

  Patrick took a lurching step after her. The metal clack sounded a half-second before the dull meaty thunk and almost two seconds before the field was filled with his screaming. His wails carried, but never echoed back in the dense vegetation. He dropped to the ground pawing at the bear trap clamped to his shin. Even through his jeans, he could see the leg was broken and half torn through—as if the hippies sharpened their traps.

  Patrick looked around in a panic for his gun, but couldn't find it. It might as well have vaporized as soon as the trap sprang. He couldn't control anything his arms did for several seconds after the teeth snapped shut and he figured he must have flung it into the stalks. Now he was beginning to shake with shock, his body refusing to do anything he wanted it to. The dry earth was turning muddy, his life soaking into the earth.

  Mickey dropped to his knees next to the trap, looking at it like the device was a living thing that might bite him too. "Fucking shit, dude! What the Christ is that?" After a moment's hesitation, he tried to pry open the jaws, but couldn't. Patrick let out another long yowl as Mi
ckey's efforts to free him only resulted in the steel teeth grinding into his shattered leg, further tearing flesh and sinew.

  Patrick tried to say "bear trap," but couldn't unclench his jaw. He forced out a grunt that sounded like, "Find gun," but Mickey shook his head, brow furrowed with confusion.

  A black shape backlit by the blinding afternoon sun appeared behind Mickey. Patrick's warning was drowned out by the howl Callie let out as she reared back and swung. A whump followed her voice and he caught a glimpse of the short-handled military shovel, its sharpened edge embedded in his brother's neck before she wrenched it free and a hot wet spray splashed Patrick's face like a full glass of hot water. Callie grunted once with effort and began to bellow in rage.

  In his red blindness, Patrick was sprayed and splattered and doused as the dull metal clanging sounded again and again, growing duller, softer with repetition. The dank smell of the cannabis field was overwhelmed by the thick salt and iron taste in his mouth; its fullness in his nostrils made it hard to breathe. He spat and blew crimson snot on his chest, rubbing at his eyes until he could see again.

  Callie stood before him holding the red, dripping shovel. She threw it on the ground next to Mickey's pulped face and squeezed blood from an errant dreadlock. She spat on the body lying at her feet. "Fuck! You know how long it takes these things to dry?"

  Patrick retched, vomiting up the blood he'd swallowed. She kicked him in the face with a boot heel, smashing his nose and knocking him onto his back. She screamed unintelligibly at him. Her primal rage penetrating his skull, threatening to burst it like her shovel had done to Mickey's head.

  Sam pushed his way out of the stalks and lightly placed a hand on the small of her back. She slumped into him, wrapping her arms around his neck. He kicked at the metal jaws holding the gunman in place. Patrick's eyes fluttered as he struggled to remain conscious. "We don't get many visitors all the way up at the house," he said. "People around here respect our privacy."

  "We woulda let you go," Patrick sputtered.

  "You believe that, honey?"

  Callie turned and sneered, catching her breath. "Not after what he did to poor Garrett." Her voice was edged by palpable hatred.

  Sam's face darkened at the mention of their friend. He kissed the top of his wife's head, inadvertently smearing blood on his cheek. "Sorry it took me so long."

  "S'okay," she said stepping back, giving him room to pull the gun from a holster nestled in the small of his back.

  Unlike Patrick's lost junk gun, Sam's piece was a well-tended Smith and Wesson Governor. It was black and clean and looked like forged death.

  "The writer, Cutter, he shot your boy with a fifty cal Desert Eagle. We talked about our favorite heaters the last time Cutter came 'round the farm stand. He bragged about the monster he kept in his desk drawer. I'm surprised your kid had any guts at all when you brought him in."

  Patrick felt his face go pale.

  "What?" Sam flipped his head back whipping his tangled hair away from his eyes. "You see a Bible verse on a burger wrapper and think those people are in it to save souls? It's a brand, man. Would you rather buy your weed from a couple of nice bohemian farmers or some scar faced biker? Some people—people like you, shitheads from away—see us and think they can sneak into the fields at night to help themselves. Those people never leave the field."

  "You know what they told us every single morning in the Marines?" Callie said. She squatted to pick up her entrenching tool and ran a hand over the damp, stained earth. "Blood makes the grass grow."

  "This isn't how it was supposed to go," Patrick said. "This isn't right."

  "This is Maine. This is the way life should be," Sam said, squeezing the trigger.

  Dick Joke

  by Mark Rapacz

  It wasn't even his best joke. It was just cosmically well timed. Perfectly executed. The audience wanted him to roll through all his old bits, but he surprised them with this new one. He got the setup just right. It hit everybody right in the jowls.

  Except for one guy.

  There weren't many there, so Eddy focused on this one guy. Looked him eye-to-eye and decided he'd be his guy the entire night. He'd always find this guy. Arms crossed. The man alone. Story completely unknown. No way to know a thing about him. This is why Eddy would identify with him. He'd imagine his world and shit office and his shit wife and his shit kids and wonder what excuse this guy had to tell them to get away to a shit club in downtown Chicago on a Thursday night.

  And this man alone would always come in, drink his two drinks, get set in his chair with perfect fucking strangers—and Eddy knows the type of man he is because he looks like the most comfortable loser in the joint. He's been defeated. More, he's resigned to his own defeat. There's a difference. This man loves his defeat. It defines him. If he didn't have this one thing, he wouldn't have anything. His universe drifted on without him and he's now left here like a ghost. And maybe he's got a trench coat or maybe he's got one of those nylon ski jackets because it's always winter in Chicago.

  So Eddy told this man a joke. And the man alone was into his set. Looked like he knew some of Eddy's material by heart, but Eddy refused to focus too closely on him. He was just a waypoint. Tell a joke, then check in. See him smile. See him nod. See him finish his drinks quickly because a man who's laughing is a man who's getting thirsty. They're the same man.

  And Eddy was hitting well with his old shit. Keeping it loose. Keeping it light.

  Then he landed on the dick joke. The one about the mob and the mayor and the bimbo and these are all people they know. These three people might as well be Chicago in the forever winter. So it hits everybody in some deep and indescribable way and there was this woman up near the front who was mouthing Eddy's routines as he described them, but this one bit she didn't. She couldn't. It was brand new.

  Writing on stage, they call it. All the legends did it and it's not fucking improv. It's not that hacky bullshit. This was something else. Eddy was receiving a message; he was an antenna there to take it in, and, if he did his job, everybody would feel the electric radio static of the moment that moved the cyclonic universe to shift its course a degree or two.

  And this woman shrieked because she was a quick one, knew Eddy's timing, and she was on the punch line before he could even get there, and Eddy had to race to catch up to her. That's when he hit with this new thing, and it connected the way all good jokes connect.

  It went zing!

  It created electricity, for a moment.

  But for Eddy, it was more than a joke. It was a question of relevancy, something he'd lost with both wives. He gained a bit back with this joke, and right as he was reveling in this rediscovered glory, he checked back on his guy, the one with the ski jacket and the shit job and the shit kids and the shit life—

  He was gone. Eddy looked past all the faces burning from the spotlight and saw the man's shadow hit the door and sit there, framed for a moment by the yellow lights of the street outside.

  And he knew then that he might've said the wrong dick joke and maybe that man's shit life with the shit kids was something he made up.

  Because the moment Eddy walked off stage Betsy was there—an old hag who owned the joint and who Eddy fucked back in '94 when she wasn't looking so bad. She was telling him, "You dumb fuck, you didn't know who was sitting front and center on your show?"

  "Nah," he said, and he was shaking at that moment, but that was the post-show comedown. All adrenaline. He was feeling good. Alive for once.

  "He's Jimmy Piccarelli's man, you dumb fuck. We sat him right there so you'd know. Don't you know a Jimmy Piccarelli man when you see one?"

  "He looked like a man—no different. Shit job, shit life. That's what I created for him."

  "And that's your problem, Eddy. It's always been your problem. You got stage eyes."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means when you're onstage you're looking at a different world."

  "Aren't we all, honey?" Cal
ling her honey usually lightened her mood.

  "You're such a dumb fuck, Eddy. I mean it. This time I think you screwed the pooch."

  "I've never known what that meant."

  "It means Jimmy Piccarelli's man's gonna bring that joke back to Jimmy. You remember Chuckles?"

  "Yeah, I remember Chuckles."

  "It wasn't suicide."

  "No shit," Eddy said because clearly it wasn't. It's damn near impossible to kill yourself jumping off a three-story building.

  "Look," Betsy said and she grabbed his arm, dragged him back into the green room. The opener was still in there stealing beer, which everybody did. Betsy had a coffee can on top of one of those little fridges. Five bucks a bottle for piss swill. "I was there the night they got Chuckles. I saw what they did."

  The opener piped up, "Everybody knows what they did."

  She looked at him. She had those eyes with the eyeliner and the putty face. She always looked this way. Eddy had trouble imagining his younger self fucking her.

  "Shut up you little prick."

  The kid just grinned that kid way. Too young to have the world shit on him.

  "I'm gonna enjoy seeing you humbled," Eddy said.

  "Right, Eddy," he said. "You killed it tonight. Jimmy's man definitely liked the dick joke, dude. Killed it." He pounded the butt of the beer in his palm like it meant something.

  "How's being divorced at twenty-six?"

  "How's losing two wives, your house, your show, and all fucking relevancy ten fucking years ago, old man?" Then the prick took a swig.

  Betsy was on him with her claws, her floral print blouse turning into a multi-colored vortex as she jangled him out with her African bracelets.