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A Swollen Red Sun

Page 4

by Matthew McBride


  Olen spat and climbed back atop the Allis-Chalmers and set the plow down in the lower forty and started cutting earth. Let his mind wander. These moments were the best he had left. Every field he plowed could be his last.

  Olen knew that and respected it. Things you acquire on this earth are meaningless once you’re alone, and memories become the currency of choice.

  Growing old is the most painful thing in the world.

  Jerry Dean could not sleep with the sounds of doors slamming and kids yelling and babies crying. He stumbled from the bedroom and told his cousin’s wife she ought to show those crumb-snatchers a little belt leather every once in a while.

  “I should, huh?”

  “Best thing you could do.”

  She flicked ashes into an ashtray that had started overflowing six months ago and everyone in the trailer had decided they’d grow the pile.

  “Ever think about cleanin’ up around here, Darlene?”

  Darlene was married to his second cousin, Ronnie. She was in her mid-thirties with a thick, corpulent body, cantaloupes for tits, and four kids who ran around the trailer unsupervised while she sat in her recliner and ate and chain-smoked and dreamed of all the places she could be but there.

  “Well, ain’t you just an expert on child raisin’?”

  “I know I got thumped on plenty by my mama.”

  “Yeah, and look at all the good it done.”

  Jerry Dean stood there covered in a dripping gleam of sweat.

  “Nobody likes a smart-ass, Darlene.”

  “Well, nobody asked you to come to my house and sleep in my bed now then, did they, Jerry Dean?”

  He shook his head. “Where’s that brother of yours? I need to see him.”

  Darlene had a brother named Ray who was twice her size. He was a guard at Algoa, and the key to another one of Jerry Dean’s business ventures, the middleman who smuggled in product for Wade Brandt to distribute.

  Wade Brandt was getting out soon, and that was something they should talk about.

  “I ain’t seen him,” Darlene said.

  “What about Ronnie? He out playin’ chef or gatherin’ pills?”

  “How the hell should I know? Ain’t seen him, neither.”

  “Cut the shit, Darlene. You always know his whereabouts, so don’t play ta me like you don’t.”

  “You’re so smart, why don’t you figure it out.”

  Jerry Dean rolled his eyes. “Woman, how that cousin of mine puts up with you I’ll never know.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Oh, you’d like that now, wouldn’t ya, darlin’?” He stepped toward her and reached down and squeezed one of her big, sloppy tits.

  Darlene slapped his hand away. Told him to get out before she told Ronnie what he’d done.

  Jerry Dean walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge. “You be sure ’n’ do that, sweetheart. You tell him what mean old Jerry Dean gone ’n’ done.” He grumbled and gagged, then hacked up something from deep down and spit yellow in the trashcan. “Got anything ta drink in this shit hole?”

  The bottom of her broken-down recliner slapped shut, and Darlene jumped to her feet, a GPC cigarette clenched tight between her teeth. The floor shook as she stomped from the living room. “You get the hell outta my kitchen.”

  Jerry Dean held up a finger and nodded his head. He drank milk from the carton, and his sweat ran down the side.

  Darlene started laughing when Jerry Dean realized the milk he was drinking had gone to sour and he spewed white chunks into the sink and dropped the plastic jug on the floor.

  Darlene stopped laughing. “That milk went bad two weeks ago when the power got shut off. That serves you right, you dumbass. Now get out!”

  Jerry Dean nodded and pulled his long, greasy hair from his mouth. “I’m goin’.”

  “And don’t come back.”

  One of Darlene’s brats sat on the arm of a second broken-down recliner, and Jerry Dean shoved him off backward and he made a thump on the floor.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, and walked out the door.

  Jerry Dean looked up to an indigo sky filled with mushroom clouds while he motored down the Gasconade River and burned a joint. He did not care if the cops were waiting at his place or not. He’d had four hours of sleep. He was as good as gold.

  Jerry Dean secured the boat and smoked his roach down to nothing and pitched it in the river. He weaved through a maze of debris and car parts until he got to the front door and stepped inside. The place smelled like cat shit.

  “Goddammit, Little Buddy,” he said to the runt of a cat.

  Jerry Dean saw the litter box turned upside down before he even closed the door. “No!” he yelled, and stomped down the hall.

  His money was gone. Not that all of it was his—it was to be split between himself and his associates. Jerry Dean had just been holding it, waiting until the man he took orders from told him what to do.

  “You crooked sons-o’-cocksuckers.”

  Jerry Dean kicked Little Buddy when he walked up to rub and sent him airborne across the trailer. “You motherfuckers!”

  He punched a hole through the cheap wall and his fist came out the other side. Buried his arm to the elbow in pink insulation.

  It was all gone. Fifty-two thousand.

  Jerry Dean hollered and cussed and punched more holes. He’d been robbed by the cops. The two from yesterday. Jerry Dean paced and swore. His partners would never believe him.

  The fat cop had been Banks. Jerry Dean knew of Banks. A Southern Baptist shithead, but no thief. It must have been the young one who found it, the cowboy.

  Jerry Dean walked back to the box and crawled through the litter for a second time, and his heart sank. He would not survive without the money. It was the bulk of their profits from a drug-smuggling operation that funneled meth inside Algoa. They were depending on it. Everyone was. If Jerry Dean had lost their money, then he was as good as dead.

  Fish followed his wife from afar, in Jackson’s minivan, thinking she wouldn’t recognize them if they got too close—which they had on occasion—but Raylene broke speed laws with reckless abandon and swerved from lane to lane. Failed to use her turn signals and talked on the phone.

  Fish was angry. He complained about the windshield. Shattered in the middle with a thousand cracks and no glass on the driver’s side.

  “You could fix this with a scrap of plastic,” he said.

  Fish badmouthed Jackson for his laziness. The wind in his face through the missing window was hot for the moment, but sure to drop toward frost-level by midnight.

  Jackson kept quiet. Which made things worse.

  Fish, overflowing with nervousness and uncertainty, grew a sick feeling inside his stomach.

  Jackson, in the passenger seat, held the pipe in his palm tightly, content with his thoughts as he looked out the window at the fields of cut cornstalks on dirt slabs of earth. Windshield full of dust.

  Jackson’s mind was slow from years of crank and he was easily misled. Jerry Dean knew this. So did Fish. But Jackson was a gatherer; he was resourceful. He knew where to find things no one else could.

  When he’d hooked up with Fish, they’d met at a pharmacy where they’d both been buying pills. There’d been a mutual curiosity between them. How each knew exactly what the other was buying, and why. How, within minutes, they would be in their own cars, pulling bent sheets of tin foil from under the seat. Lighting it and smoking it. Needing just one hit before they drove to the next store.

  They were slaves to crank, powerless to its illusions, and before Jackson knew it, they were smoking crank together. And then they were cooking it and selling it. Running with a hard-hitting crowd of convicts and bikers, caught up in a scheme delivering crank to Algoa, to a crowd that scared Jackson more than he let on.

  But he just wanted dope and was quick to follow their lead, with little regard where it took him.

  Raylene took Highway A to Highway Y, but she never did go to Walmart. Sh
e turned past Hog Trough Road instead, and crossed a washed-out section of driveway toward the brand-new double-wide of his cousin, Earl Lee.

  “Oh, God, that whore,” Fish said. Tight-jawed, teeth gritted. Knuckles bone white under clear pink skin.

  Jackson, in his own small world, kept silent, with an indistinct awareness of his surroundings.

  Fish found the prospect of his cousin and his wife outlandish. Earl Lee Ramsey was a car salesman who drove a six-cylinder Mustang with a siren glued to the dash. It belonged to the dealership, but he said it was his. He thought nobody knew.

  But Fish knew. Knew his cousin Earl Lee was without credit, and whatever credit he did have was bad. Early, as they called him, was a volunteer firefighter when he wasn’t selling Fords, and though he did live on his own patch of land, in a brand-new double-wide, Early mostly lived off the government—and if his wife had been fool enough to run to him, well, then, fuck her. Early could have her.

  But then Fish got to thinking. About the way Early had looked at her when they’d been together. Not that he didn’t look at all of them—at every woman—but the way he looked at her was different. There was something about the way his eyes hadn’t left her. How they followed her from room to room.

  At the time, Fish hadn’t noticed, but now it was apparent. There’d been a hunger in the both of them that only the bonding of flesh could gratify.

  Fish loosened his grip on the wheel, which was bending. Kept thinking. About the way she’d looked at him back. She’d smiled. Laughed at his jokes—and then there was Thanksgiving. They’d been drinking and snorting lines, and for one reason or another, his wife and the girl his cousin brought with him had flashed their tits.

  It was a very good night, which they had all enjoyed. An evening filled with yard bird and crank. Holiday memories they would always cherish.

  But the way Fish now remembered it was different. His wife had been behind it. He knew it. She had orchestrated all of it just for him. For Early. And the more Fish thought about that night, the more he thought about everything.

  He smoked crank out of Jackson’s pipe and thought, until finally, Fish had come up with a plan to fix them both—especially the cousin. You don’t steal from kin, and his cousin should have known that. Some things weren’t worth the price you had to pay in the end—and this price was a bit on the steep side. Even if she was a whore.

  Fish fell apart inside as he drove. He would be alone without her. His parents were gone. Everyone who had ever loved him was gone. Except Raylene. And by the looks of it, she was gone, too, though Fish was bound and determined to prevent that from happening.

  Kenny Duane Fisher had gone by Fish for as long as he could remember. His mom called him Fish. Even his dad, when Fish was around, though Fish was sure he used worse names when he wasn’t.

  They’d lived on the edge of town, by the county line. His mom cleaned houses, and his dad sold tires. His parents did their best to provide, but his old man had a way with the back of his hand that would find Fish beside his jaw.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t love him, but that he didn’t know how to love him. That’s what his mom had said. But his mother said a lot of things, and Fish learned long ago what to believe and whatnot to, though it was not her fault and he knew it.

  It was his father’s fault. Or it was God’s fault.

  To this day, he didn’t know which. He didn’t know what to think or who to blame. But a part of him died in a hayfield back when they were kids. It was the last good year of his family’s life—because the Fishers shared a burden that was hard to let go of.

  It was easier to forget.

  Fish had a sister who died when she was six, but the family never talked about that. Some things were best unsaid; at least that’s what his mom had claimed—though for weeks after the funeral, she set Karla’s plate at the table, until Big Fish set her straight.

  “She’s done in the ground, Mary Ann. What you’re doin’s just makin’ things worse.”

  “But I miss her.”

  Big Fish grunted with a nod of understanding and forked a load of beans in his mouth. Big Fish got to drinking after that, even more than he had before, and then the bottle became his family, and any quality of life they had previously known was gone.

  Fish returned to his driveway. Lost in thought. Filled with pain and wired from meth. He would not permit Raylene to leave him. Or take his sons or their home—assuming the bank didn’t take it first. They were a half-year behind, and Bay Bank was threatening to reclaim. Fish swore he’d catch up, but Ms. Dixie made a habit of following through.

  Fish would smoke crank and think about the ways he could turn things around. For weeks, he’d had a cooler full of product to sell, but that never happened. Now it was too late.

  He thought about his wife and his cousin, and those thoughts birthed hurt, the deepest he had ever felt. It metastasized within him, until the hurt that became anger had become cancer, and it surged through his body like electricity, killing everything that lived inside.

  Fish had known a lifetime of pain, but this cut was the deepest. The perfect end to a miserable life. He could hear his father say. When he closed his eyes, he could see his dad, working on their farm. Pall Mall between his lips and a cold one in his hand.

  It was summertime. Dad was cutting hay on his old John Deere tractor. In the fields, making rounds. It was noon, and it was very hot. Wind a blanket of searing moisture.

  Mom sent Little Sister to the field to fetch him. But Dad hadn’t seen her walking.

  That year had been a good year for red clover. It grew freely and abundantly along the hillside. Pecan trees lined the field to the north and beyond. To the west, a wall of oak stood proudly. It gave shade that covered half the field, but not until late evening.

  That was the summer red clover grew tall. Taller than the fences that sagged between old posts that ran up and down hillsides and through crooks and swags and fields and woodland. That hay was as tall as she was.

  And then she had tripped, and he did not see her. Sun in his eyes.

  The shriek could be heard clearly over the sound of the machinery.

  He’d smashed the brake pedal with his foot and turned the key back. Cut the power to the PTO. Wanted to believe it was a stump he’d hit, but her screams cut as sharp as any razor.

  Big Fish had jumped down and turned white. Could not move or breathe. He had run her small body through the haybine.

  She was still alive, but she was silent. He could not move her. She’d been cut to pieces, one arm slashed off. Blood poured from her handless wrist onto the dirt.

  Big Fish reached into the machine with his arms to hold her. He touched her and loved her and told her he was sorry.

  When his wife ran out the door, she was screaming. But she stopped when she reached the gate and projectile-vomited in the yard. She was not the same woman after that day, and Big Fish was not the same man.

  Once Little Sister became a memory, everything in their lives changed.

  Dale Everett Banks stood at the edge of the garden and watched his son and daughter pick tomatoes. They had row after row of Big Boy and beefsteak and heirloom, Brandywine and Black Cherry and Boxcar Willie—three hundred plants that took two hours to pick, four days a week, but it kept Jake and Steph busy. Even young Grace did her part.

  “Everyone has a job to do,” Jude said. It had been her mother’s saying, and the first time she’d used it had shocked her. I have become my mother, she told Banks, who laughed. Well, then, I guess I’ve become my father, he’d said. Then she laughed. Told Banks he’d been his father since the first day they’d met. She asked him if he still remembered.

  “How could I forget?” he’d said. They’d been at a bar called the Blue Star, where Banks’s dad played music. It was a small place with smoke-stained walls and a beer-stained floor. His father was a drunk named Everett Roy Banks, and he’d played a mean banjo when he was sober, and a piss-poor banjo when he wasn’t.

&nbs
p; But that night, he was abstemious and his playing was electric. It was a memorable performance if ever there had been one.

  Banks sat down in a lawn chair and opened a beer and thought about life. Watched his children and his dog and his wife. Jake picked each tomato and gave it to Steph, who took it and blew her hair out of her face and set it gently in the box she carried.

  Dale Banks was a family man—because that came first—and then he was a farmer and a deputy. But between those last two it was a close tie for second.

  Jude was beside the house, on her knees, pulling weeds that threatened the daylilies in her flowerbed. She made a large pile, and Grace, their angel, filled her pink bucket and set it in her wagon and pulled it to the edge of the yard.

  These were the moments Banks lived for. Moments that moved too quickly—and he knew it—so he watched these moments closely. Took the time to record those images in his mind. His kids had the life he’d always dreamed they would. They worked their small farm and had jobs to do and pets to feed. They had responsibilities. Something every kid that age should have, but didn’t.

  Meat cooked on the grill of the fire pit. He’d built it as a project with the boy. The whole family helped out. Scoured roadsides and creek beds. Built a solid pit with chunky rocks and mortar and a fat chimney that billowed sweet smoke when the cedar chips burned to embers.

  Banks walked to the pit and poured Natural Light on his steak. The meat seared and popped and deep fragrant whiffs blew from the chimney and filled the air with a succulent fog that engulfed the table.

  The steaks smoked and sizzled and the aroma was deeply pleasant. It was suppertime. Almost dark.

  Jake had homework to do and cows to feed.

  Steph would go inside, disappear behind her laptop. Banks knew this and accepted it. She was growing, and he could see it. Getting older, and filling out her curves, curves that troubled Banks. But what could he do?

  Banks just grinned and raised his can and took the final drink. His life was a blessing. His daughter would be in college soon, his son right behind her—or maybe he would go to tech school. Or maybe he would farm. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Banks. Jake still had a few more years. He was still just a pup, and still trying to talk Banks out of his Bronco. But, Dad, it’s perfect, he said. Though Banks was not convinced.

 

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