THUGLIT Issue Thirteen

by Kevin Egan

  "I was always real into art in school or whatever, and one day it hits me—I could do tats for people," he says, excited. "Did most of these my own self. So it's like my body is sort of advertising, you know?" He flicks on the overhead light and holds out his arm towards me, nodding at an ugly blue mass on his hand. "You can't see that one real good, but it's Hobbes blowin' Calvin."

  His arm is too close to me. I can see each individual hair, the dirt beneath his nails, the yellow of his fingertips. My chest is tight, and I feel dizzy, but I force myself to keep the screwdriver in my purse, waiting to see what happens next.

  "Seems like the least Hobbes could do for him," I say and he laughs and agrees and jerks his hand back, uses it to wipe his nose. The moment passes and I can breathe.

  But a few minutes later his arm shoots out again and this time without thinking I whip out the screwdriver and bury it in his shoulder. He screams and we're off the road and over the ditch. Before I can realize what's happening, we've hit a telephone pool and his screams stop. Time does not slow, not like they say, this all happens fast in a confusing, violent jumble. When I open my eyes he is slumped over, not moving, his face a mask of blood and the screwdriver still in his arm. A tooth is stuck to the steering wheel. I'm okay, I think, except I bit my tongue and my mouth is filled with blood.

  He may have just been showing me another tattoo. Or reaching for his lighter.

  I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

  It takes me a long time to get the screwdriver out of his shoulder. Then I unbuckle my seatbelt, slide out the car window, walk through the soybean field and slip into the woods.

  One day your daddy puts an old mattress in the barn, and from then on you lay down with strangers, neighbors, a minister, men in uniform, a man with a burned face, another with a hook for a hand. One is so dirty, he always leaves a trail of axle grease all along your body. Some arrive mean. Others are ashamed, and then turn mean, wanting you gone the moment they slide out of you. None are better than others but some are worse than others.

  You don't know what they pay your daddy but you know your life isn't worth much. You know other things too. That crying does not help. Or begging, or fighting, or running away. And most of all you know that the creek is deep and he can make anyone disappear.

  Sometimes your belly gets bigger, perfectly and impossibly round, and he makes that disappear too. One time you try to hide it—oh yes, despite all you know, you try to hide what is growing inside you, hide it beneath baggy sweatshirts and the way you hold your body whenever he is around. And all that gets you is a terrifying June morning in a cow stall deep in the barn, bloody straw underneath you and Daddy leaning against the stall door, swinging a burlap bag in his hand while he waits until you're done pushing.

  I know this land well. There is an easy path I could take, one that would lead me through open fields and along deer trails that would eventually bring me home. But that way is winding and indirect and would steal time that I know I cannot spare. So I take the direct route, a straight shot home, pushing through one thicket after another, until my arms and legs and face are crisscrossed with blood and it feels like the woods are fighting against me, something Daddy has conjured to keep me from getting back home.

  When I finally get to the house, it is not yet dawn and I am hot and tired but not at all finished. The barn, the yard, the porch are all empty but there is a dim light inside one room of the house. I stand on an overturned ten-gallon bucket and look inside. There is Daddy, asleep on the couch. He is covered by a blanket, despite the summer heat. The slow rise and fall of his chest tells me that I have made it home in time.

  The front door is unlocked. I slip off my shoes and enter the house, as careful and as quiet as you would be approaching any mad dog. An old Coleman lantern casts a sickly yellow light across the room—and now that I can look real close, everything looks grimy and used up, especially Daddy. It's been five years since I last saw him, and time and sickness have done their work on him. He's like a skeleton now, as I had hoped he would be, his face sunk in and his gut deflated. He's surely not stronger than me anymore.

  Silent as I can be, not wanting to wake him just yet, I move some tools and old newspapers off a chair and sit down. Part of me feels like I never left this house and another part feels like everything that happened to me here happened to somebody else. With him sleeping like that and looking as bad as he does, I'm not scared to be here, which makes it the first time since I was real little that I am in this house with him and not afraid. But I'm not sure of myself either, not sure how to start or if I can really do what I've thought about for so long. And I know that if I can't do what I've planned, then I should have stayed far, far away from here.

  He doesn't open his eyes and when he speaks his voice startles me: "Figured you'd be back, sooner or later."

  My heart hammers in my chest, that old anxiety his voice always triggered. Even as sick as he is, his voice is enough to make me get up from the chair, ready to run from the room. But my feet don't move, I just stand in front of the chair. Maybe it's the wasted sight of him on the couch or these last few years living on my own, but there's something inside me now, something that wasn't in me the last time I was here, and it is small and it is fragile but it's just enough to keep me in the room.

  I wait until I am sure I can trust myself, that my voice won't waver. Then I say: "Heard the good news and rushed on home." My voice wavers anyway.

  I've never talked to him like this before. When I lived here, I was afraid to even imagine such things in my head for fear they would leak out, and I'm ready for him to jump up and smack me and pound my head against the wall like he's done so many times for so much less. But he doesn't respond to what I say. He still has not so much as opened his eyes, just stays there on the couch as if I hadn't said a word.

  A long minute passes in silence. I am not sure how else to go on, and he doesn't seem ready to speak, so I ask, "How'd you know it was me?" Even before those words are out I am angry at myself—all the times I thought of this moment, and already I've been reduced to a little girl again, asking dumb questions, giving him control.

  "Smelled you when you walked out of the woods. Never forget your scent," he says and then sniffs noisily like an animal and laughs.

  Shame washes over me and I feel the urge to run again—this time it's overpowering, strong enough to beat whatever I thought had changed inside me. Oh you stupid bitch, I keep thinking, why did you come back? I turn and start to go, and when I am nearly out the door, Daddy coughs. It's a deep, wet cough, an ugly cough that would be hard to listen to if it came from anybody but him.

  I stand at the door and look back him. His eyes are open now, but he is staring at the ceiling not at me. We are separated by the length of the room, and I don't think he could catch me if I had to run. I raise my voice a little, try to sound confident, and call out to him: "That cough sounds real bad."

  He sort of shrugs under his blanket and starts to say something, but another cough interrupts him. Nothing has ever interrupted Daddy in this house, but the cough does that and more—it shakes his chest and makes spit fly from his mouth and land on his face. I wait, but he doesn't wipe it off, just keeps his hands tucked under the blanket.

  I leave the door open but take a few small steps back into the room. I try again. "That cough sounds real bad and you look worse."

  "It's nothing," he says, but he's quieter now and he still won't look at me.

  "No, it's bad," I say, another step closer. "Can't have much time left."

  "Got all the time I want or need," he says.

  "That's not nearly true," I say, to myself as much as him, and I walk closer still.

  "Beat much worse than this."

  I am nearly standing over him now and I pick up the lantern and hold it close to his face so I can look into his eyes. There is no fight in them, no danger, the man I knew is mostly gone. He's a doomed man, a dying man. I know now that he cannot get up from this couch with
out serious effort. I know that if I pulled his blanket he would clutch at it like an old woman.

  "Look around this house, old man," I tell him. "Look at you dying alone. What exactly have you ever beaten?"

  "Beat you," he whispers, so quiet I can barely hear it. "Beat your momma."

  There is a truth to what he says, so I don't disagree with him. Instead, I spend some time working him over with my screwdriver.

  There was a time, a few years ago when I had finally got away from home for good, that I tried, I really tried to move past it all. I even met with a social worker for a while, told her about the anger I felt each day, how it suffocated me, how it was eating me whole. I didn't tell her everything that had happened to me before I got away, not even close, but I thought I had told her enough.

  Then one day she leaned close, like we were friends. "Have you ever heard," she asked me, "that living well is the best revenge?"

  I paused then leaned closer and asked her: "Have you ever had someone try to see how far they could stick an old axe handle up inside you?"

  When I stop with the screwdriver, my hand and shoulder ache and I realize I have been shouting all the while. The noise does not worry me—if I know anything, it's that I can scream all day in this house and no one will come running. I back up a few steps, catch my breath, and stand in the center of the room, taking stock. Blood is everywhere—on the couch, on the blanket, splashed against the wall. Daddy is still alive, but just barely. I must be careful now.

  It takes me more than an hour to drag him to the creek. I do what I can, but it is not an easy trip for him and when we reach the creek, I am afraid he has died. I put my ear to his chest and I listen and I hope. There, very faint, I hear his heartbeat.

  I lean close to him, my lips next to his ear. "I want you to know," I whisper. "I want you to know that I am going to drown you now. Right here in this awful creek. And then I am going to leave you here so the crows and the raccoons and the rats can pick over your body. And no one will know, and no one will care, because your life has been a ruin. This is the funeral you deserve."

  He gives no sign of hearing, but I know he understands me all the same. When I drag him down into the water, he jerks a little but he does not really fight. I hold his head under the water and think of Momma and my lost babies. But the time for crying is long past, and anyway, there are more important things to do. I must burn down the barn, I must burn down the house, I must leave these woods without burning down myself. And for the first time I wonder if there are other men, men I once knew if only for a little while, who I ought to visit as well.

  AUTHOR BIOS

  KATE BARRETT is a Colorado native living, working, writing, and raising hell in Denver. She currently coordinates programming and classes on how not to be a shitty writer at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the mountain west's premiere literary center. Her short fiction has won her honors such as the Proctor Fenn Sherwin Short Story Award and recognition as a national finalist in the Nick Adams Short Story Competition.

  MICHAEL CEBULA lives in the Midwest with his wife and a couple animals. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Thuglit and All Due Respect.

  KEVIN EGAN works in the iconic New York County Courthouse, which serves as the setting and inspiration for much of his recent fiction, including "Joe the Terrorist." His latest novel, the noir-ish Midnight, was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013. His next novel, The Missing Piece, will be published in April.

  PAUL J. GARTH has had stories published in Shotgun Honey, the Flash Fiction Offensive, Thrills Kill 'n' Chaos, and has other stories forthcoming, including in "Trouble in the Heartland: Crime Stories Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen" and Needle: A Magazine of Noir. Perpetually in transit between Nebraska and Texas, he can be found on Twitter by following @pauljgarth

  MARC E. FITCH is the author of Paranormal Nation: Why America Needs Ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot (Praeger) and the novels Old Boone Blood and Paradise Burns, which is forth-coming from Damnation/Eternal Press. His fiction has appeared in such publications as Thuglit, The Big Click, eHorror, The Connecticut Review, and Massacre. He recently was awarded the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship for his upcoming work, Men Without Qualities. He currently lives in Harwinton, CT with his wife and four children and works in the field of mental health.

  TIM HALL is the author of The Bert Shambles Mysteries, featuring a poor bastard who works in a thrift shop while solving crimes on Long Island. The first novel, Dead Stock, was published in 2013 by Cozy Cat Press. Tim lives in New York City with his wife and son. www.timhallbooks.com

  BRYAN ROULEAU is a New Englander, a sailor, and a writer. He keeps a blog, because who doesn't, and he's written about more crimes than he's personally committed.

  TRAVIS RICHARDSON (http://tsrichardson.com) was born in Germany, raised in Oklahoma, and currently lives in Los Angeles. He has worked over 20 jobs in fields ranging from secret bus rider to television postproduction to university fundraising. His novella Lost In Clover was listed in Spinetingler Magazine's Best Crime Fiction of 2012. His stories have been published in online zines including All Due Respect, Shotgun Honey, and Powder Flash Burns as well as the anthologies Scoundrels: Tales of Greed, Murder and Financial Crimes, Malfeasance Occasional: Girl Trouble, and All Due Respect—Issue #1. He edits Ransom Notes, the Sisters In Crime Los Angeles newsletter and sometimes shoots a short movie. His latest novella, Keeping The Record, concerns a disgraced steroid-maligned baseball player who will do anything to keep his tainted home run record.

  TODD ROBINSON (Editor) is the creator and Chief Editor of Thuglit. His writing has appeared in Blood & Tacos, Plots With Guns, Needle Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Strange, Weird, and Wonderful, Out of the Gutter, Pulp Pusher, Grift, Demolition Magazine, CrimeFactory, All Due Respect, and several anthologies. He has been nominated three times for the Derringer Award, short-listed for Best American Mystery Stories, selected for Writers Digest's Year's Best Writing 2003, lost the Anthony Award in 2013, and won the inaugural Bullet Award in June 2011. The first collection of his short stories, Dirty Words is now available and his debut novel The Hard Bounce is available from Tyrus Books.

  ALLISON GLASGOW (Editor) Ain't got time for dat.

  JULIE MCCARRON (Editor) is a celebrity ghostwriter with three New York Times bestsellers to her credit. Her books have appeared on every major entertainment and television talk show; they have been featured in Publishers Weekly and excerpted in numerous magazines including People. Prior to collaborating on celebrity bios, Julie was a book editor for many years. Julie started her career writing press releases and worked in the motion picture publicity department of Paramount Pictures and for Chasen & Company in Los Angeles. She also worked at General Publishing Group in Santa Monica and for the Dijkstra Literary Agency in Del Mar before turning to editing/writing full-time. She lives in Southern California.

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  "My favorite noir-infused books take ordinary people and put them in extraordinary circumstances, where one false move can prove deadly. That's exactly what Kevin Egan does with his thrilling novel Midnight. Forget sleep—this twisted tale will get your heart pounding right up until the last page."

  —Hilary Davidson, Anthony Award–winning author of Evil in all its Disguises

  Bert Shambles might not be the smartest guy in the world, but even he knows when his laundry is trying to kill him.

  THE HARD BOUNCE

  now nominated for the

  2014 ANTHONY AWARD for Best First Novel!!!

  Table of Contents

  A Message from Big Daddy Thug

  The Proxy

  Moses on the Hill, with Fire Following

  The Ice Cream Snatcher

  Selfie

  Thirty Dollars

  Joe the Terrorist

  Tommy, Who Loved to Laugh

  Funeral

  Author B
ios