by Kevin Egan
We headed east out of town, walking arm in arm, occasionally taking wet tongue kisses from each other and sharing the whiskey. I was a lightweight at this point and there was plenty to go around. A police car pulled up alongside us and out popped Badgley like a fuckin' Boy Scout.
"Drunk in public, my friend?" he said.
"Fuck you Badgley, I'm just walking him home!" Zoe said.
"Let the man answer for himself."
"Fuck you Badgley, she's just walking me home…" I nearly collapsed.
"Zoe, this isn't a trick is it? You haven't accepted money from this young man for unspeakable deeds have you?"
"Fuck you, Dwight," she said.
He put us in the back of his cruiser and drove us to my mother's house. Before he left he said, "If you feel so bad about your sin, you should go to confession."
"What do you think I'm doing now?" I said.
"The same thing you were doing when you killed Samantha," he said and then drove off.
Zoe was drunk and high and so we busted through the door, embracing each other, and we pushed through to the bedroom, which was probably the only bed Zoe had seen in weeks. I put it in her ass on my mother's bed. Afterward, we lay under the covers due to the polar vortex and smoked a bowl. Then she said, "Do you love me?"
"What do you mean?" I said.
"Not like…we're gonna get married and run off together…but, in general, do you love me?"
"More than you know," I said.
The stars shone through the ceiling, our bed floating among constellations of ancient warriors and syphilitic gods.
"I know who killed that boy," she said, "but I won't tell, even for ten thousand dollars."
I leaned up on an elbow and looked at her—chubby, but pretty around the face and giant tits that buried you like a grave. "Who was it?" I said.
"If you love me, you won't tell. Because it's bigger than just us… It's bigger than ten thousand dollars."
"What am I going to do with ten thousand dollars?" I said.
Tommy Who Loved to Laugh had a bad habit. Tommy Who Loved to Laugh also loved other things; namely, beating up on bums in the street. You see, Tommy Who Loved to Laugh was also Tommy With a Mean Streak and Tommy With a Mean Streak found bums—men and women—and put the boots to them. They were always too weak to defend themselves and never saw it coming. One second they're asking a yuppie kid for a dollar, next second he's kicking your face in while his buddies film it on cell phones.
That was the true Tommy Who Loved to Laugh.
"We didn't say nothing because of who he was," she said. "Everyone knows that his dad is a big-time movie producer. Everybody knows that he has a thousand lawyers lined up. You just stay away from him, and if you see Tommy coming toward you, you scram. Everyone knows that."
"I didn't know that," I said.
"You're not one of us," she said with a smile. "So much of the world floats over or under your head."
"I thought you were my people," I said.
"We are," she said and kissed me with veined lips. "But there are certain things you can only learn firsthand."
So it seems that Tommy Who Loved to Laugh picked on the wrong guy. Most of the homeless were fairly defenseless, but not this guy. This guy had arrived on the bus from out of town and then caught the next bus out of town. This guy had some balls and dignity left; maybe ex-military, maybe ex-thug, who knows? He was homeless, but he had protection. "I saw him," she said.
Tommy was hitting the guy with some rebar. He was trying to fight back, but got knocked down. Then Tommy took some lighter fluid and started spraying the poor bastard, getting ready to make a funeral pyre out of him. But our boy pulled a small revolver out of his waistband and put one shot in Tommy Who Loved to Laugh's head, and Tommy was down for the eternal count.
"Was it someone we knew?" I asked.
"Nah," she said. "But does it matter?"
"No," I said. "But what about the cops?"
"Let them put their thumbs in their ass. What are they going to do? Admit that Tommy, their innocent victim, was a sociopathic murderer? They'll leave it alone. Its for the good of everybody."
"Who knows about this?"
"Everyone we know."
"So nobody?"
"Exactly… Nobody."
During some of my smoke-filled visions, I remembered a story that one of the many people that have intersected my life told me, which has stuck permanently in my mind.
Frank Kennedy was walking home along the main drag. Frank was a working class guy—flannel over-shirt, glasses, two missing teeth and didn't give a fuck. He wasn't one of us. He had a life, a wife, and a kid, but looking at Frank you never would have shown any caution. You would've thought, This is a guy I can get one over on. But with that, you would be wrong.
This is the story that Frank Kennedy—who worked at the video rental store—told me one night when I was willing to pay attention:
He was walking home after a night at the bar. It was on Lake Road outside our shitty city and in the hills. He was walking home, a little buzzed, his three teeth in military formation and his ever-present flannel button down sagging out of his Levi's. A pickup truck with a bunch of kids pulled up and started throwing buckets of gasoline on him. "At first, I thought it was water," he said. "But then the smell hit me and I realized it was gas.
And they were laughing and striking up a lighter." But Frank was no joke. He pulled a .45 short-barrel from his waistline and zeroed in on the motherfuckers' heads, and those good ole boys had a sudden change of heart. They ducked into the bed of the truck, screaming, "Go! Go! Go!" and the truck squealed off into the night.
And there was Frank, .45 in hand, waiting for the match to drop to light him up into pure burning Hell. Just like the story Zoe gave me about Tommy Who Loved to Laugh's justifiable demise.
It came back to me, the reverb of life, swirling through my mind, twisting and turning back on itself. Life and death and hate on endless repeat.
I sat there on my porch and let out a long drag from my bowl and took a long swig from my bottle and Zoe clambered up tight to my hips. Oh, but was that the true story? Was that what happened to Tommy Who Loved to Laugh? I hoped so. I hoped that was his fate; to meet with the reaper, the one who settles all debt. The one who says, "One life is worth another," and cares less for prestige or history.
"Where is he now?" I asked Zoe.
"Who cares?" she said. "At least that Tommy fuck is dead."
I took her hand and we stood up, a little dizzy from the booze and smoke. I brought her downstairs to the garage and flipped the light on. Mom's Oldsmobile sat rusting beneath a tarp. I pulled it off and fanned away the dust.
"Get in," I said.
"What are you doing?" she said.
"I want to test a theory."
I fired that eight-cylinder engine to life and it roared like a lion in a den. I pulled up the garage door and night poured inside. Zoe got in the passenger seat. I put it in reverse and peeled out of the garage.
Funeral
by Michael Cebula
Within fifteen minutes of hearing Daddy was sick and probably dying, I had quit my job and was standing in the dirt next to a two-lane country road, looking for a way to get back home.
"It's an awful thing," the cook had told me, when I explained the situation, handed over my apron, and told him where to send my last check. "I am truly sorry to hear it."
What a strange thing to say—I was nobody's idea of a good waitress.
You don't actually stick your thumb out when you hitch. You just stand by the road and wait. Sometimes, of course, you have to explain what you're not doing there on the side of the road. "I'm not a prostitute" being something I have said more than once in my life.
Hitching is easier when you're a girl but it's harder too. Easier because you're more likely to get a ride and harder because of why you're more likely to get one. So you follow rules, you pretend you have some control over what happens to you. Never get in a van.
Or in any car with more than one man in it. Walk away if the driver looks you in the eye too long when he pulls over. Or if he never looks at you at all when he asks where you're headed. Or if he glances in his rearview mirror more than once before you get in.
A girl I knew thought she had it all figured out. She said that when she hitched, she always lied to the driver, told him she was going home because she just found out she had HIV.
"How do you work that into the conversation?" someone asked.
"What if he has HIV?" someone else asked.
Pay attention to everything. Act weird enough that he won't try to fuck you, but not so weird he throws you out of the car. Remember that what's weird depends on who you're with. You can cut your thigh with a razor blade, above your knee and below your skirt, a straight line for each exit you pass. Or you can ask the driver if he has accepted Jesus as his personal savior. It's been years since I last hitched, but the lessons you learn as a kid stay with you forever.
The sun seems very close and I have to squint and shade my eyes to watch the crows circling the soybean field across the road. It's hot, a heavy July heat that presses on my chest and makes me want to lose this dress and these awful shoes and wade into the pond I know is behind the field. But I push those thoughts from my mind, I remain standing on the road, I wait. When cars drive past, the dirt along the road stirs up then settles on my sweaty arms and legs like a paste.
If someone doesn't pick me up soon I won't make it.
All the other times in my life that I have hitched, I was desperate to get away from somewhere. But now I am desperate to get to somewhere—to get home, before Daddy dies, before he's gone forever. No one's at my heels this time, but the feeling that I'm not moving fast enough, that I'm not going to make it, is the same. All I heard is that he is sick and probably dying, but I don't know how old that information is or even if it's still accurate. For all I know, right this second, he might already be dead and buried. Or maybe he recovered and right now is out somewhere hunting, breathing the same air as me. Either way, I will have lost my chance and this eats at me. Hard to believe I've been gone from home for five years.
There's no phone in his house and I wouldn't call if there was.
I wait for a long time, with no luck. Some drivers ignore me, a few honk at me, and one man grins wide and yells out the window of his truck, his words lost in the wind but not exactly unknowable. No one stops or even looks like they consider it. The crows have left me too, chased away long ago by this unforgiving heat. I am too far from home to make it on foot, but I don't know what else to do, so I slip off my shoes and head down the road, walking barefoot over the brittle, yellow, sun-killed grass that lies just outside the pavement. It will be dark soon and these roads are not much traveled and for several miles I am alone, except for the mosquitoes and the cicadas and the endless rows of corn standing watch along the road.
"You will be fed to pigs," I tell the corn.
When evening takes hold, and I have lost hope of getting a ride, a middle-aged man driving an old Ford pickup with a bluetick coonhound in the back pulls over next to me. He has thick glasses, a calm voice, and the most elaborate comb-over I have ever seen. How terrified he must be of windy days. I imagine him fixing his hair in the morning, as careful as a girl before a date, telling himself nobody could tell the difference. The quality of your life can be figured by how many lies you must tell yourself each morning before you can step out your front door.
I too must tell myself many lies, so I thank the man for stopping and get in the truck.
I was real little when Momma disappeared, but I remember how afterwards the sheriff and his men came out day after day and dug all around the house and in the woods surrounding it. I sat next to the holes while they worked and made mud pies for the deputies.
Daddy would sit on the porch, with a cigarette and a beer, his feet kicked up on the railing. "Dig all you want," he'd tell them.
Each night the deputies would knock the mud from their boots and throw their shovels in the trunks of their patrol cars, looking tired and pissed off and ready to break something. One afternoon before they left for the day, the sheriff took Daddy into the house and I could hear the sheriff yelling and screaming and Daddy talking real calm and then laughing. After a while, a deputy went in and pulled the sheriff away and Daddy stepped out of the house behind them and finished off his beer.
"Never let 'em see you sweat," he told me with a grin.
And then one day they were gone and never came back, just like Momma.
I asked Daddy if I would disappear one day too.
"That depends," he said, looking at me real serious. "Are you gonna keep askin' me stupid questions?"
I am awakened by a tongue in my ear—thick and wet and stomach-turning—and on instinct I reach into my purse and pull out the screwdriver, my heart racing. But it's just the bluetick in the back of the pickup, sticking his head through the cab window and grinning, confident that his sloppy kisses are valuable and much treasured.
"Sorry, but this is as far in your direction as I can go," the man with the comb-over and calm voice says. We've stopped at a crossroads that separates more cornfields. The man stares at the screwdriver in my hand and I realize I am panting as much as the dog. I lower the screwdriver to my lap and then put it back in my purse. When I do, the dog licks my face—and just then, I want to stay in this truck forever, just keep driving on an endless summer evening with this man and his calm voice and his dog. But I can't, and anyway he isn't offering. So instead I thank the man and scratch the dog's head and slip out of the truck.
"Be careful out there," the man says as he drives away. I start to wave, then feel foolish and tuck my hands under my arms, as if they cannot be trusted. There is a limit to kindness, but not hardship, and once again I find myself standing alone at night on the side of an unlined country road.
When I was growing up, there was never much money. Daddy got a disability check, though as near as I could tell, the only thing that made him unfit for regular work was a misguided sense of his worth and abilities. Some other ways Daddy made money: cooking meth, growing weed, selling pills, stealing tools. It was like one crooked dollar was worth more to him than two earned legit.
We lived in an unpainted shotgun house deep in the woods, the same house Daddy was born and raised in. There was a creek behind the house that flooded all the time. Our closest neighbor was maybe a half-mile away, the closest paved road another mile past that. We plugged holes in the walls with old newspapers and we had electricity about as often as we did not. Rains were a torment, and you learned to sleep in a wet bed. I never starved, but many days I woke up hungry and stayed that way, even as I cooked Daddy his dinner and watched him eat it. I ate best when Daddy was locked up, as he was from time to time.
But Daddy was not the type to be burdened by such things as reality, he was not one to let facts change the image he had built of himself. Even just sitting in his chair on the porch each night, drinking his beer, Daddy seemed to strut. He had long greasy hair that he would comb with his fingers as he talked and an enormous belly where he rested his beer. He was sure he had the world figured out, and each night on the porch he delivered a sermon while I sat at his feet. I don't think he always cared what he said as long as he was the one saying it, and sometimes it was hard to see much connection between what he told me and how he lived his life. The only place success comes before hard work is the dictionary, he might say one night, Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat. Or maybe, The harder you work, the luckier you get. A fat drunk lecturing you on the importance of discipline.
Even when he was spouting bullshit, all his talks circled back to his schemes, the ones from the past that had worked, the ones that hadn't (never his fault of course), the ones he was planning. It doesn't really matter, I guess, but I do sometimes wonder: did he always know he could make money off of me or did it just occur to him one day?
Near midnight, a wood-paneled station wagon pulls
over next to me. The driver is young and on something, his eyes wide and never blinking. But it's dark and I don't have much time, or many options, so I break a rule and get in, my hand in my purse, holding the screwdriver tight. He talks and talks, an unending flood that bounces from one idea to the next, with no relation I can see. Whenever he exhausts one subject, he laughs and says, "Not much for talking, are you?" and moves on to the next one before I can speak.
We run over a dead dog in the middle of the road and coyotes scatter into the fields, their eyes flashing yellow. There's gold in these hills, he tells me, buried long ago by the Indians. There's gold here, if you know where to find it.
One thing I learned from Daddy when I was real little is that the puppies never fight you when you put them in the burlap bag. They think it's a game, I guess—at that age, all they know is that life is just a bunch of fun new experiences. But with Daddy looking over your shoulder, making sure you follow through, they will soon find out the truth. You lower the first one into the burlap bag, put him next to the half a piece of cinder block, and he licks your hand. You lower the second one in, and now they both lick your hand. And on it goes. You can fit five puppies in the bag, but four is better.
Don't ask yourself the point of being gentle with them when you put them in the bag. Don't wonder what happened to Momma or what it's like to run out of air. Just know that Daddy is watching you, and you'd better not look away until the barking stops and the bag is gone beneath the water.
"You can kill anything if you got a burlap bag and a deep enough creek," being something Daddy would always say.
When we pass the county line and are a few miles from home, the driver notices me looking at the tattoos along his arms. Under the light of the dashboard, the ink on his skin looks like the scribbles of a deranged child. "They sure catch the eye," he says. I smile and nod and now he has found a new topic.