by Ray Cluley
“Put your hand here,” she said.
He did.
When her breathing became heavy he could smell the wine she had been drinking.
“Now,” she said eventually, gasping between kisses, pulling him, urging him inside.
“I need to put something on.”
“Don’t bother, I’m on the pill.”
“I need to.”
He got up, opened the bedroom door.
“Where are you going?”
“It’s in my coat,” he said, glancing back. The sheets had become tangled at Angela’s waist, exposing her breasts. The indoor stars cast a green glow over her skin and James could barely control himself. This had to work.
He grabbed what he needed from his coat and put it on. He used a generous amount of glue. He put the CD on while waiting for the glue to dry. A bit of mood music.
“I can’t wait long,” she called over the intro, and the sounds she made around her words added truth to them.
He went to her with a new eagerness, one he knew he could control, and was pleased to hear her gasp when the light from the hall behind him put his body in silhouette. His shadow stretched out on the floor before him, mighty and slender between his legs and better than anything he’d seen on the internet. His pocket rocket.
The sound Angela made was one like the laughing sob she’d made on the phone.
“James?”
“You’ll feel me this time,” he said. “The Earth will move.”
The capsule tip was heavier than he’d anticipated and the model bobbed with his steps. Angela backed away from him, gathering the sheets around her body.
“What the fuck is that?”
“The Saturn Five,” he said. “Completely to scale.” He’d caught some skin between the two main halves of the model but the pain was only slight.
He leapt onto the bed as if launched by the first of her screams and he tried to joke with, “Thrusters ready, prepare for launch,” as he grabbed at her thrashing body, tried to tell himself no, Houston, there was not a problem.
In the front room, Elton John sang about how lonely it was out in space, but James had found a way to make it all better.
He waited for the chorus.
Gator Moon
The body looked bigger by moonlight. A six-foot wedge of tarpaulin wrapped top middle and bottom with electrical tape, it sat in the flatbed of the truck looking bulkier than it had before. Maybe because now they had to move it. Had to bury it.
Nate and Boyce stared at it a while. The moon was red in the sky, a bloody eye looking with them and not caring what it saw.
“Alligator moon,” Nate said, seeing it.
Boyce stared.
“Yo, Bo.”
“It look bigger to you?”
“Some. It’s the tarp.” He looked up at the sky again. “We got us a blood moon up there.”
“Seems right fitting.”
“Heads or tails?”
Bo laughed. When Bo laughed he’d suck in two or three breaths and then he’d spit. “You call it.”
“Heads,” Nate said, but he grabbed the nearest end. He dragged it out as Bo wiped his palms on his pants and sidestepped left and right before taking some of the weight in the middle. Nate fed more of it to him and got both hands under his end of the body.
“Fuckin heavier, too,” said Bo. “How far we takin it?”
It was a humid night. Sticky. Nothing new for South Louisiana but nothing you got used to either.
“Just a little ways.”
They were parked by a cane field. They trampled their way into it with their burden. It sagged between them for a while and a few metres in Boyce dropped his end. Rather than pick it up, he grabbed the middle and helped drag it.
“Here?”
“Bit more.”
They found a gap between rows of crops that was deep enough in the field that no one would see them from the road. The truck, yeah, but not Nate and Bo, not unless they stopped to look for them. They dropped the body and exhaled together with a huff. Boyce put his hands to his back when he straightened and grimaced at the moon. Nate paced a few steps back and forth. “Get the shovel,” he said.
“It’s your shovel,” Bo told him, “you get it,” but he did as he was told anyway.
Nate squatted amongst the sugar cane, rested his arms on his thighs, and hung his head. He was tired. He’d been tired for days.
“Why you care so much about this nigger anyways?” said Bo, returning with the shovel on his shoulder and the six-pack in his other hand. The shovel he shrugged off with little care, but the beers he put to the ground carefully. He unhooked one and slung it to Nate, then popped the tab on one for himself.
“Saw his wife in the store,” Nate said. “Saw his boy, too.”
Bo guzzled beer then nodded as if the answer was good enough. He bunched up the top of his grubby t-shirt and wiped his mouth with it.
Nate put his can of beer down unopened and picked up the shovel. “I’ll dig for a spell,” he said.
Bo nodded.
Nate’s flannel shirt was soon damp, new sweat mingling with old, but once you got a rhythm going it was easy enough. In the distance, a deeper darkness of rain cloud waited in the sky.
“You ever fuck one?”
Nate paused, leaning on the shovel, and wiped his brow.
“Hey, Nate. You ever fucked a nigger?”
“Woman of colour.”
Bo snorted a laugh. “Sure. Whatever. Or a man of colour, if you’re liking that these days.”
Nate tugged the shovel free and got back to tossing dirt.
“I’ve done Mexican, if that counts,” Bo said. He crumpled the can he’d emptied, tossed it, and pulled another from the pack. “Ain’t never done no knee-grow though.”
Bo thought on that a while as Nate heaved soil to one side. When he stopped to open up the last few buttons of his shirt, Bo handed him a beer and Nate swapped it for the shovel. Bo looked at it for a moment, shrugged, then hopped down into the shallow trench. Nate stepped out.
The beer was warm. He rubbed the can across his brow but there was no moisture to be had. He only wiped his own sweat around.
“You know, niggers in the old days did this with a hog,” Bo said, turning the soil. “Buried it in the field and made the moon go red with its blood or some bullshit.”
“It’s dust in the air makes the moon red.”
“Dust. Yeah. So?” He shook some spilled soil from the cuff of his pants. “Still red.”
“And they didn’t bury the hog, just its blood. To make their crops grow. Make the cane bigger.”
“Hog’s still dead ain’t it?” He looked at Nate. “Would’ve been easier to bury a hog.”
Nate needed to walk around a bit, roll his shoulders, so he stepped over the body to pace a line of cane. But mid-stride, the body bucked beneath him. It flopped up in a violent spasm that tore some of the tarp.
Nate yelled and staggered as it scissored again, stumbling as it writhed on the ground, and fell onto his back beside it. In the shallow grave, Bo pushed the shovel away from himself and flattened up against the opposite bank of soil with a cry of, “Jesus fuck!”
Nate grabbed the handle of the shovel from where he lay and brought it up and over in a long arc overhead. It came down hard and the body was struck motionless for a moment. He got to his feet while it was stunned and hit it again. Finally he stepped the blade of the shovel down, tearing the tarp open and cutting into flesh. A line of blood spurted, dark and hot on Nate’s bare chest. He brought the blade down once more, driving it down with both hands, and then everything was still.
“Careful,” Bo said, stepping forward, looking into the tarp.
Nate grabbed a full can of beer and thre
w it at him. It caught him directly in the face and he fell back, clutching his mouth and nose. “Fuck!” he said at Nate, then clutched his face again. The can lay fizzing at his feet, a geyser of beer soaking his legs.
“You ain’t dead, are ya? Just clipped you is all.”
“All right,” Bo said, checking his hand for blood, touching his face, and checking again. “Okay. All right. I get it.”
“What did you fucking shoot it with, a cap gun?”
“I said all right, I get it.” Bo bent for the beer and put the hissing can to his mouth. He took a few gulps, then broke the tab open to drain it properly.
Nate used the shovel to turn folds of the split tarp. Inside lay the body of an alligator. It looked dead, but it might not have been. He’d opened a gash in the yellow hide of its underbelly and there was a hole above one of the eyes from where Bo had supposedly shot it.
“Tough sonofabitch,” Bo said, looking. “Didn’t wanna die, did it?”
“Would you?” He rolled the gator to the shallow ditch they’d made. “This is good,” he said. “Yeah. This is better. We get its blood now, too. As it dies.”
“I think it’s dead, Nate.”
“Yeah, you said that before.”
Bo climbed up out of the ground and Nate rolled the body in. The hole was just about deep enough but it wasn’t the right length.
“Help me get this off.”
Nate pulled at the tarp and Bo unfolded a knife to cut at the electrical tape. Most of the gator lay in the ground between them. When the tarp was off, Nate began scraping the soil away from beneath its tail so it would fit, shovelling the soil into the gaps around the rest of its body.
Bo said, “I’m only doing this because you asked.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry about your face.”
“That’s not what I meant. Why are you doing it?”
“They deserve some help a little bit. They got a shitty crop and no old man to work it.”
“Yeah, you saw them sad at the store, I know. Whatever. Got yourself an attack of good Samaritan, that’s fine. That’s your business. But you don’t believe this shit.”
“They do.”
The soil he dug away he tossed further down the trench.
“You can’t know that,” said Bo. “Just because they’re niggers? Shit, plenty of em got the church now, Nate.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I’m just saying, slave days is over, for better or worse, and it don’t matter none even if you’re right and they do believe it. Burying a gator to bump their crops won’t work if they don’t know you gone done it in the first place.”
Nate trod the tail down into the hole he’d opened up and used the shovel to drag loose soil over it. “You don’t need to know something’s happened to know it’s done something.”
Bo threw his empty can into the grave. “That don’t even make sense.”
“You spike a girl’s drink, she don’t know does she?”
Bo grinned. “Not if you done it right.”
“Gets horny, don’t she?”
Bo didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. It didn’t matter none to Nate if he understood or not anyways.
“You think it was racial?” Bo said eventually. “Paper said it was. You think it was?”
“Bo, stop bullshitting me, you can’t read.”
Bo sucked in his laugh a couple of times and spat. “They said he was beaten up good. His lady say anything in the store?”
“She weren’t talking much about it.”
“Figures. You think they’ll sell this place? It’s just her and the boy. I’d sell it.”
“Would you buy it?”
“Hell no.”
“Think anyone else will?”
“That why you’ve gone all Christian? This ain’t you, Nate. Helping thy neighbour. Burying a gator in her crops.” Bo clapped his hands on his knees. “That’s it, ain’t it? You want to bury your gator in her crops.” He laughed, spat, laughed some more.
“Pass me that there beer.”
“Sure. No, wait, hang on. I’ll shut up.”
Nate walked over the fresh ground a couple of times.
“They won’t know what you done,” Bo said.
“What?”
A wind whispered through the cane. It was a warm wind, not light with the smell of the Gulf but heavy with the smell of swamp.
Bo lifted his hands in surrender against what he saw in his friend’s face. “I ain’t going on about it no more.” He pointed at where a long line of earth rose up between rows of sugarcane. “I just mean they won’t know. You can barely see it any.”
Nate nodded but trod it down some more. “He wore a coin,” he said, “around his ankle. To keep away the gris gris or something.” He looked at Bo. “You know. Bad luck.”
“Didn’t work then, did it.”
“Weren’t wearing it that night. His lady dropped it into the grave with his coffin.” Nate smoothed over the turned soil with the flat of the shovel blade. “They believe in all of it. Like I said.”
“You was at the funeral?”
“Joe Witter was. He told me.”
“Must be true, then.” Bo watched Nate fuss a while longer with the grave. “What coin was it?”
“I dunno. A dime?”
“Hm. And where’s the nigger buried?”
Nate looked at him. “Shady Acre. Why?”
Bo took the shovel and raised it to make his point. “A dime’s a dime.”
Nate shoved him, but he smiled. “You’re a real sonofabitch, you know?”
“Daddy always said so.”
“You don’t want no dead man’s dime, Bo. That’s bad luck too.” He picked up the remaining beers and the tarp.
“Did they put a stone on his grave?”
“Seriously, Bo.”
“No, not a headstone, just a regular stone. On the dirt. Something big and heavy. Witters say anything about that?”
“No.”
“No, what? No, they didn’t, or no Witters didn’t say?”
“Why?”
“It’s supposed to keep the spirit from wandering.”
“They probably did, then. Unless they want him to wander. Maybe he’s in this here field right now, wondering why you’re yabbering on when we’re done.”
They made their way back though the canebrake to the truck. Bo tossed the shovel in back and slammed the tailgate shut. Nate tossed the tarp in with it and gave the beers to Bo who took them up front with him. They both looked at the sky before getting in the cab. The moon was a full dull red and watching them still but then a cloud swept by and the bloody eye closed.
“Gonna be fierce tonight,” Nate said, looking at the clouds come in. The wind had picked up suddenly, or maybe they just hadn’t felt it in the field. It shook the cane around them.
“Yeah,” said Bo. “Reckon you’re right.”
Nate nodded. “Reckon it’s due.”
S
Nate dropped Bo off on his way home. For Nate, home was back off a track most people only took by mistake. Even so, you wouldn’t never see the house unless you were looking for it, and even then you’d get nothing but a brief glimpse between cypresses and leaning oaks draped with hanging moss. A line of chain with a stolen stop sign used to block the entrance to the drive up, and that maybe caught the eye of a passing driver once or twice, but Nate was out of the habit of hooking it back in place and now it lay in the dirt. He drove over it, bumped his way into dips and over stumps, and croaked the handbrake outside a one-storey trying real hard to be none.
“Home sweet home.”
The white paint had been gray the whole time Nate owned it, had cracked and flaked and blistered off the wood entirely in most places. Lichen
greened the guttering and the roof sagged in the middle. The porch leaned forwards and sagged in the middle too, as if in sympathy. One corner rested on cinder blocks. A window by the front door was missing a pane of glass. Nate had replaced it with a flap of cardboard torn from a box. He didn’t remember how it got broke in the first place.
He killed the lights, grabbed the crushed can Bo had left on the seat, and stepped out of the truck. He threw the can in the direction of an old oil drum but didn’t listen to hear if it went in. The oil drum was ventilated with rust holes and peppered with rifle shot and he used it for burning garbage. Beer cans thrown from the porch lay around it in crushed and folded shapes like tiny corpses.
The yard was knee-high with weeds, the dirt packed down only where he drove in and drove out and where the tread of his boots walked a path to the porch. He used to cut the grass and weeds but the mower busted when he ran over the metal nozzle of a hosepipe. Coils of cut rubber pipe were still out there somewhere, a snake hiding in the grass. The mower was rusting behind the house, which was where he dumped anything small enough to carry that couldn’t be burned. There was a watermelon patch back there somewhere underneath it all, too, someone told him once. Big stuff, like the corroding frame of a swing set, he left where they’d always been. The jagged necks of beer bottles hung from cords tied to its horizontal bar, smashed glass beneath testament to Nate’s skill with a rifle, pockmarked trees behind testament to the opposite. The swing seat dangled on one chain. It had belonged to whoever lived in the place before and Nate had kept it for his own boy, but the kid didn’t get brought for visits no more than three or four times. He’d be near the nigger boy’s age now anyways. Probably driving. Probably playing football or baseball and sticking his fingers in girls. Nate wasn’t missing nothing. He’d done it all himself and still remembered.
The porch creaked where it dipped under his weight and the screen door whined open. With the reep-reep-reep of the frogs, such sounds were his only welcome home. He let the door bang shut behind him and went through to the kitchen. He left the lights off, letting the bulb in the fridge scare away the dark for a moment. The door rattled and tinkled when he opened it because all he had in it was bottled beer. He took one, popped its lid, and guzzled it by fridgelight. He took off his shirt, soaked a corner of it with beer, neverminding how much of it spilled on the floor, and used it to wipe the dried blood from his chest. He threw the shirt aside, shut the fridge, and took down a vest from where it hung on the sink. He pulled it on as he sat at the table.