THUGLIT Issue Twenty-One

by Rena Robinett

  "Sure," he said. He leaned against the building and swilled on the bottle. Maggie nosed around in the gutter and then stopped to water a mailbox. Strolling down the sidewalk, I peeked in windows but saw no one. There was a small diner near the end of the block, and when I shielded my eyes to get a look inside, I half-expected to see bodies heaped over tables and sprawled about the floor, perhaps a horde of children with sickles and knives. But it was only a quaint little restaurant: coffee counter, pie case, a wall lined with empty booths.

  As the row of shops came to an end, so did the center of town. Beyond it was a railroad crossing and a cluster of grain silos sitting beneath the bright November sun. Farther still, standing in a field of dead corn, a water tower with the town's name painted across its fat belly.

  Only ten, fifteen minutes had passed when I returned to the Le Mans, but the engine seemed cool enough. "This place is a bust," I said. "She should get us to where I can find a mechanic to take a look at it."

  Hopper took one last, long swig from the bottle of Thunderbird and screwed the cap back on. The bottle was half-empty already. He placed two fingers in his mouth and whistled, then shouted for Maggie. When she came trotting around a corner at the far end of the street, he shouted, "Get your whore ass over here!" She whimpered as he grabbed her by the scruff and forced her into the backseat.

  "Bitches. They never learn," he said. When he looked at me, his eyes were glassy with cheap wine, and he was grinning with his cracked lips in a way that for the first time had me wondering what else he might have done to that poor dog.

  In the car, he helped himself to a cigarette from the pack on the dash, then asked, "You mind?" after he'd already lit it.

  "Be my guest," I said, then cut a U-turn and drove back through the center of town. You've about reached your last stop, anyway.

  He opened the bottle of wine again and took a long gulp.

  "What did I tell you about doing that in the car?"

  "Shit," he said, and breathed a frustrated sigh, "my bad." He waved the mouth of the bottle at me and chuckled, taunting me with it for a moment. The smell of citrus and alcohol brought back every good thing and every bad thing I'd ever done, and I felt my hands starting to shake again.

  "I'm beginning to think we should go our separate ways, friend."

  "Christ," he said. "Loosen the fuck up. You're way too uptight about this shit. You wouldn't leave a guy out here in the middle of nowhere, would you?"

  I didn't answer.

  "Nah," he said. "You probably wouldn't be able to sleep at night." He let out another drunk chuckle.

  "Maybe not," I admitted, thinking to myself, I rarely can these days.

  "Yeah, that's what I thought."

  Then, about a mile and a half back into the wide-open sprawl between Dix and the Interstate, it happened.

  "Damn, you feel that?" I asked.

  "Feel what?"

  "I think we got a flat."

  "Shit," he said. "You got a spare?"

  "Yep." I pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. "Shouldn't take long."

  I got out and walked around the car, checking the tires, then opened the trunk and shouted, "You mind giving me a hand back here?"

  He got out, and I heard him muttering as he paused beside the car. "These ones look okay to me."

  "It's the back, on the driver's side. You wanna grab the jack out of the trunk and bring it around?"

  I had the spare out, the lug wrench in my hand.

  He leaned into the trunk. When he came out with the jack, I brought the lug wrench around in a wide arc, the sound a dull thwap as it connected with the side of his head. For a split-second, it was almost slapstick funny. The way he looked at me with eyes that seemed to be saying, Hey, wait a minute, you can't… The way his legs turned to liquid beneath him. How he lay there moaning and grunting.

  Before I fully realized it, I was on him. Behind me Maggie went nuts in the backseat, barking, cheering me on, I imagined. Gethimgethimgethimgethim, I heard in that bark as I beat his face with balled fists until it no longer resembled a face and I was dizzy and out of breath.

  Always so exhausting.

  When I stopped, I just sat there for a moment, straddling his battered body. The blindness cleared, and I thought of my wife, my daughter.

  God, not again. Not again.

  Maybe I'd been wrong. Maybe it was all for nothing. She'd left, and who was I fooling, anyway?

  "Why did you have to keep pushing?" I asked him. "Why couldn't you just listen, you sonofabitch?"

  Nothing.

  I got up, leaving him to twitch in the dirt while I loaded the tire and jack back into the trunk. I noticed a small smear of red on the wrench and wiped it off on his filthy cargo pants before tossing it in with the rest of the stuff.

  Looking down the road in either direction, I saw only yellow ground and open space. Stillness.

  I dragged him through the gravel into a ditch of tall grass, left him there. There was blood on my shirt, and it occurred to me that I had been wearing the same clothes for days. Before closing the trunk, I dug through my duffel for some clean ones. Stripped naked. With the sun shining on my bare body, it felt like an Indian summer out there.

  Dressed, I stuffed the dirty clothes into the trunk and closed the lid.

  Once on the road again, I reached over for the half-empty bottle of Thunderbird on the floor of the car. The remainder was gone in a few swift swallows as I merged back onto the Interstate.

  Maggie was still a little worked up, spinning in circles in the back seat, but she seemed to be calming down. "Come on up here, girl," I said, patting the seat beside me. She jumped over, and I scratched behind her ears. She lapped at my battered knuckles. I lit a smoke and burned it down. By the time it was gone, my hands had stopped shaking.

  The Le Mans made it about a hundred miles farther before I had to stop for gas and a jug of engine coolant. I also hit a Bag 'n Save, where my hands drew some furtive glances from the cashier as I paid for a sack of dry dog food and a couple more bottles of Thunderbird.

  While Maggie chomped away in the parking lot, I went through Hopper's backpack. All that was inside was a bundle of smelly clothes, a pocket knife, and a wallet-sized stack of papers held together with a sticky rubber band: address book, and several pre-paid phone cards. No ID, and nothing worth keeping. I dropped the bag and all its contents, along with the bloody shirt from the trunk, into a dumpster behind the supermarket. Then, after consulting the Rand McNally I keep under the seat, I took to the state highways and county back roads, hoping to make the Iowa line by nightfall.

  The Midwest whipped by in a blur of outdated factories, foreclosures, and broken dreams. An entire life spent trying to escape, trying to break free. Go out west or down south, grab some of that better life you hear about but never see. Find out it's the same everywhere. Come back home. That's it. Full circle.

  Now that I'm here, I should probably sleep it off. Maybe check into a room, get a shower, wait until morning. But I've come this far.

  She's been living with her parents while I've been away. I understood then, and I understand now. I lose my temper sometimes. Have a jealous heart. But we're a family, and like I said, I'm trying to change.

  I keep my feet straight as can be on my walk up the porch steps, and when she opens the door, the feeling, the weariness, lifts and I feel lighter.

  "Hi, honey," I say. "I made it."

  Her face looks strange, confused. She goes to close the door. I put my hand up to stop it, push it back open. "Honey, you don't look so good," I tell her. "You feeling all right?"

  "Christ, Alan, your hands." She sniffs the air. "Are you drunk?"

  I was about to lie, but my attention moves past her as our daughter, Ellie, comes running down the hall from the back of the house. "Daddy!" she yells and leaps into my arms. She's a smaller, spitting image of her mother. Tight brown curls. Pale skin and blue eyes. So blue. And she's delighted to see me.

  "Hi, baby," I say, h
ugging her tight.

  "What are you doing here?" my wife asks. "When did you—"

  "Is that our puppy?!" our daughter asks, peering down toward my feet.

  Maggie is circling my legs, mangy and disheveled. "You bet, sweetheart," I say. "She's a rescue dog."

  "Where did you rescue her from, Daddy?"

  I look from my wife to our daughter. "From a bad man, sweetheart."

  "What happened to the bad man, Daddy?"

  "He went away, sweetheart."

  "Are you staying, Daddy?"

  "Yes, sweetheart," I say, turning to look my wife in the eyes. "I've come home."

  Nut Lobby

  by Preston Lang

  "I'll always love my girl. And I'll never really forgive myself for failing to prevent her death. So if there's anything—anything at all—that I can do to keep another parent from the pain that I've gone through, then I will do it. Let's make sure that our schools are safe. Because some of our children…"

  And here he broke down—just a bit. When he started again, he had a hitch in his voice. Every word was shaky but perfectly clear.

  "For some of them, a nut is poison. And allowing poison into our beautiful children's classrooms—is something I must fight against."

  Lance Garvey, with his sad, sad, deep blue eyes. They let him put up a slideshow of his daughter: the same eyes but happy, happy—infinitely delighted. When Garvey was all done, he cried—not loud but wet. Everyone was crying, and I was toast.

  How do you follow that?

  After Garvey, you can't go hard. You can be polite and drop a few stats—the health benefits of the peanut, how we actively fund research into allergy prevention and care. You can not say that seven deaths a year is an acceptable level of casualties. You can't talk about the fact that more children are killed by dogs than nuts, and you can't call out Garvey for being a grandstanding prima donna. The truth is, after Garvey drops the bomb on a School Board, you might as well just bow down—on behalf of the national peanut council, I, Lydia Todd concede victory to your tears and your well-crafted mass-hysteria. The vote came in at 7 to 0. Lance Garvey had won again. He'd knocked off Mr. Peanut's top hat and fucked him right through the monocle. And all I could do was sit and watch. Again.

  I flew home and waited for the council to let me know where the next big battle was. It wasn't long until they told me: Raines County at the end of the month.

  "Garvey's going to be there," the boss told me. "But it's Georgia."

  Garvey was going down to Georgia, into the heart of peanut country. A few years ago, the idea that you could even introduce anti-peanut measures in Raines would have been laughable. But times change. If they took Raines public schools, the rest of the state would tumble like dominoes, and if Georgia went under, we'd be done. On the other hand, a win could turn this around—a clear and defiant No to rally the troops.

  The night I got the news about Raines, I took a walk out in the cold to buy myself some smokes and sort things out. It wouldn't be enough to show up in a smart blouse and talk about the eternal benefits of old arachis hypogaea. The game had changed, and I was going to need something a little more aggressive. There was a payphone out by the little convenience store. I bought a pack of Camels and called Bruce. I'd made up my mind.

  "Do you know anyone who could take care of that crying bastard?"

  He didn't say anything for half a minute, and I waited him out. Bruce is no joke, and I'd paid him for work in the past. We've done some light-to-medium B&E, digging up dirt on major players, and we've done some unambiguous intimidation. More than once, he told me I was playing too soft.

  "Take care of?" he said finally.

  "No more trouble from."

  "That's a…that's a real piece of something to think about."

  "Say no if you can't help."

  "Well, I can help. But you have to be sure this is what you want."

  "It's what needs to be done. What'll it cost?"

  "Look, I'll give you a cell number. After that, it's all up to the two of you. I don't know anything."

  I know, there are other solutions, but the anti-nuts won't even think of them, won't even discuss compromise. I once suggested dedicated peanut allergy classes—maybe each school district could host a separate facility for the weak little fuckers. Next thing you know, people are screaming Interment Camp, Jim Crow, Yellow Stars, Pink Triangles.

  I've been spit on—yes, actually spit on—called a corporate lackey, a monster, a heartless fiend, had my rental car defaced. They draw a peanut with the horns of the devil, pentagram across the shell. A bloodstained Jimmy Carter feasting on children? I mean, what the hell? This is the kind of hysteria that I have to deal with.

  But let me tell you something else: there was a study that found a strong positive correlation between severe nut allergies and violent ideation. This is peer reviewed in the scholarly journals—correlation of .87. So understand that these kids you're crying over are the ones who are going to start skinning cats, the ones who'll bring a Glock 9 to prom. I'm not saying they're all like that, just 87 percent of them. That should make you think.

  And I get the irony. I'm speaking against violence, but I'm the one who's trying to hire a hitman. Okay. Yeah. Well, there's a place for violence if it can serve the greater good. When Seal Team Six took out Osama, no one was telling them they were monsters. And, you know, this is actually a much better analogy than you may be thinking: a small group of ideological extremists hijacked the national conversation and bent it to their own purpose. Fuck that. Someone's got to put on the night vision goggles and flush them out of their hole. Someone has to protect our freedoms.

  Okay, maybe I'm getting carried away, but I get so sick of the restraint I have to show. You should see me at the meetings: all tact and professionalism. I have to say things like: "Your concerns are valid and your pain is moving, but let me just present a few important facts." And it all comes back to Garvey. With anyone else, it's a fair fight. I lose some, but I win some too. Not with Garvey. It's not just his sad story; he knows how to read a crowd. In the Bible Belt, he's quoting scripture; Berkeley, he's talking about intersectionality and fighting the patriarchy; Buffalo, he's all about the protein content in a chicken wing.

  Now, I've got some weapons of my own. When I can get Jif and Skippy and Planters to pony up a few dollars, we make things happen. And when we get a little dirt on School Board members, people start to make some pretty complex moral justifications. Let me tell you: the dirt you can shake out of the average American school board could cover us all in filth. But nothing on Garvey. The man was clean. And believe me, we dug.

  Bruce's guy lived in Northern New Jersey, so I made a meeting with the head of a chain of charter schools in the area. On the plane to Newark, I asked the flight attendant for a bag of peanuts—yeah, I always do this—and then acted shocked and puzzled when she told me that United Airlines hadn't supplied nuts for seven years.

  "Can you believe that?" I said to the girl sitting next to me, a snotty grad student from Ohio.

  She shook her head at my cluelessness and told me a story of her friend who went to a fancy French restaurant, ordered something he didn't understand, and went into anaphylactic shock. She only got crazier from there, while I stayed calm and tried to talk to her at her level.

  "It's about the environment, okay? In the future there's going to be two ways we're going to get protein—one is the nut. You know what the other is?" I asked.

  "Why don't you just tell me?"

  "Insects. Those are your choices. Meat is going to be off the table. Soy, dairy—goodbye. You eat a nut or you eat a mealworm. We need a healthy, stable nut industry in this country. Absolutely need it. And the dangers of the nut have been blatantly exaggerated."

  "Really? Just a few months ago in Cleveland there was this case that was all over TV. A little boy died from nuts in a brownie at a Halloween party."

  "Yeah, I know all about that case. You want to hear a few really interesting facts
about it? In the autopsy—"

  "You're unreal. You're going to dance on this child's grave just to make a few bucks for a special interest group?"

  "I'm not dancing on anyone's grave."

  "Kind of seems like you are."

  The attendant came back and told me—not the girl, just me—that I'd have to settle down or be subject to arrest on landing. I hadn't raised my voice once.

  That night, I met Bruce's guy at a pizza place in Jersey City. I came early and he came on time, walking right up to my table and taking a seat.

  "How do you know Bruce?" he asked.

  "We've done some things together."

  The guy was mean-looking. Not huge or cut up in the face or anything, but he had the right kind of heartless look in his eyes. I didn't mind that he went right to business.

  "You have money?"

  "Yeah."

  "Because it's going to be twenty-five thousand. Half up front."

  "I'll give you ten up front. Another ten when you do it."

  "It's not a negotiation."

  "Of course, it is. I have the cash with me. The rest I'll have after. I need it done by the 27th. If you can't get it done by then, it's worthless to me. I'll bring the rest of it back up here on the 30th."

  He took a moment, then gave me an ugly smile and a half-nod. I handed him the envelope with a hundred hundred-dollar bills. He peeked inside. Now, I can call in the corporate dollar from time to time, but I need to account for most of it. That money came out of my own pocket. That's how much I believe in what I'm doing. Let me say this exactly once: the peanut is great. There is no better food grown on this planet. It is worth defending however you can.

  Next I gave him the picture, the name, the address, the website, a picture of the house and the neighborhood.

  "Pretty blue eyes for a dude," the hitman said, looking at the photo of Garvey.

  "If you're into that kind of thing."

  "You want to tell me about him?"