Jackson shrugged his shoulders and bit the scab on his lip.
“We’s all in the middle o’ this here bind, and I’m hear ta tell ya it cain’t end well for all of us.”
“Why not?”
“Cuz it cain’t.”
Jerry Dean turned and walked back outside and climbed in his truck and started the engine and backed out of the driveway.
Fish drove to a hunting cabin out at Brown Shanty and parked his truck beneath a hackberry tree with a smiley face painted on the side that faced the river. It was a visual landmark that told boaters they were close to Held’s Island.
He entered the cabin with a key that hung above the doorframe, to the right; it was far out of reach unless you knew where to find it, which he did, having seen Buck Ramsey use it when they’d cooked meth last fall. The key’s location had been insignificant at the time—but a guy like Fish had taken note of a thing like that. Never knew when an empty hideout by the river might come in handy.
Fish stepped inside with a Walmart bag that held his belongings and set the bag on the table. Removed a bottle of water and walked to the bathroom and prepared for the night to come. Found a sink and a used razor and shaved his face clean of scruff.
Decided he should rest.
Fish lay on a worn-out couch in the corner and finished the joint and slept until late evening. And he dreamed of Raylene. Dreamed he’d carried her body in his arms for a long journey. Into the deep woods.
He’d climbed the face of a rock-strewn bluff and held her above his head, then slammed her to the ground and broke her back across the boulders.
In the dream, she wore a red dress and she screamed when her backbones shattered.
Fish was aroused when he opened his eyes, but angry. Angry at the thought of being alone, but aroused at the thought of killing her.
He stood and dressed and stumbled in the darkness until he stood before the fireplace. Reached up to the mantel and found a candle. Once it was lit, he held it in front of him and walked toward the bathroom and pissed in the sink. Set the candle on the shelf and searched his reflection in the shadows. The mirror was dirty. He rubbed his crotch and bit his lip.
Fish adjusted the candle so he could see, then reached in his pocket and found it—the fix he’d been waiting for. The whore he had resisted for ten thousand nights.
An electric sensation gripped him as he held the needle. It was a powerful moment.
He looked down, arms in gooseflesh, thoughts of poison kisses in his veins.
Fish clutched the needle between his teeth and opened and closed his hands. Slowed his breathing and watched strips of lean muscle twist under thin skin.
His reflection: black and flamed and nonexistent.
Fish repositioned the candle, then pulled the baggie from his pocket and held it toward the flame and removed the twisty tie and dropped it on the floor and opened the bottle of water he set on the sink before his nap and poured just a drop in the lid and mixed in some crank and removed the syringe from between his teeth and took off the lid and stirred it and worked the plunger a time or two, then pushed it forward and purged the air from the tube and drew up a little meth inside the needle and held it up to his neck and pinched the skin with his free hand and slid the tip of the needle into the thin blue vein that ran across his collar bone.
And then he was free. He closed his eyes and felt the world detonate. It was warm and black and slow. Both terrifying and beautiful. It was everything he’d ever felt, all at once, and at that moment, no one else on earth had ever felt as good as him. There was an explosion inside his body that melted everything within him and charred his guts and his soul and whatever heart he had left. Numbness excavated a once shallow burrow to a now gaping depth.
Fish felt his body against the wall, behind him, slide to the worn linoleum. Feet straightforward in the darkness. Above him, high on the shelf: the candle. So small. Lonesome and burning, its flame flickering, caught in the mirror’s translucent glow. The light, so far away, like he was sitting on top of the earth and that flame was the sun. Its distance was immeasurable, yet close enough to dream of touching.
Every part of his body was hot and bendy, almost liquid. Like he would melt and run down the air vent in the floor like hot candle wax and coat the dusted patch of concrete below the crawl space in a warm human stain.
Fish left Brown Shanty in darkness. It was cold with the window down. He felt the crank inside his veins, loving him. Warm velvet that peppered his soul like a whirlwind of bug bites. His skin was more aware of sensation than it had ever been. Damp hairs on his arms felt like melting ice penetrating his flesh, cutting to the bone.
It was as though he was floating above the truck, looking down and seeing the truck, while he was also inside the truck, behind the wheel, looking up—seeing him see himself watching himself driving.
Fish could feel a trail of fire climb up his spine and spread across his back with deep, scorching burns. It gave him beautiful thoughts and sensations with clarity he had never known.
But he would need another shot, and soon; he was going to lose this quick.
However long it had been since the last shot he didn’t know. But clearly it had been too long. He breathed. His fingers opened and closed and relaxed their grip on the wheel. His shirt was very wet with sweat, and he could smell his stench, suddenly and completely.
He had to do this before he lost his nerve.
It was well past midnight when Fish parked on Hog Trough Road and walked a mile to the trailer. He admired the setup Early had. The kind of place a man like Fish could only dream of. There was real siding and a shingled roof. Skylights in the kitchen.
There was a part of him that did not blame her. But a part of him that did.
He walked up and stood beside the AC unit and looked through the window. Saw his cousin on the couch, hand buried in his filthy boxers.
How that wife of his could let him inside her Fish would never know.
He walked to the back door and reached for the knob and turned it. When it clicked, Fish slowed his breathing and pushed the door open and heavy boots stomped down the hall.
Early looked up as Fish racked the gun.
“Holy shit, no—”
Fish shot him as he stood, and the window blew out behind him. His cousin fell to the couch, and it rocked. Stuffing filled the air where the body landed.
Early rolled off the cushion, then fell to the floor.
Fish, scared and nervous, sweating profusely, turned and walked to the bedroom and kicked open the door. It was dark. There were loud, sharp screams in the blackness.
Fish reached for the light switch because he wanted her to see him. Wanted her to know that he was the one who shot his cousin, her lover, and know that he was the one who was about to shoot her.
“No, Kenny,” she screamed as the lights went on. Like she had known it was him already. Like she had dreamed he was coming to see her.
She sat flat against the headboard, sleep in her eyes and hair full of tangles. A child beside her, his son. Screaming, eyes open. He called out for his dad.
Fish lowered the shotgun and turned from the room and ran—out the back door, down the steps. Inside, his wife was screaming—calling out his name.
Fear raced through his body, pounding his ears. Fish stopped and leaned against the rough bark of a shag hickory and puked.
He was shaking as he put the gun on safety. He stood and breathed deeply and ran to his truck in the blackness. So late it was early, with no light above him. A sky without stars.
Another second and he would have shot his son.
Fish talked to himself as he drove. Windows up, radio off. He thought about what he had done, and what he hadn’t. Fish closed his eyes and watched that fat bastard tumble to the floor—dumb look on his face with chunks of fat blown from his chest, dead with a hard-on in drawers with a skid mark.
Fish passed the bank and took Route W, turned right. Drove a mile and crossed a bridge and t
urned on Little Bay Road. Parked his truck behind a gravel pile.
Fish grabbed his bolt cutters and his ski mask and his shotgun and walked through the woods. To the bank. Through a dry creek bed that had not seen rain in months. He climbed a white picket fence that ran for two miles and cost more than his trailer.
He walked slowly, like a man unconcerned with traffic.
Fish got to the bank and circled around it. His shed waited where the repo man left it. He had pushed it off his rollback truck and let it drop onto the gravel.
Fish snapped the chain and stepped inside—but everything was missing: his tools and his workbench and the vise he’d mounted to it; his grinders and his welder and the cooler where he kept his crank—worth two thousand dollars—enough to get their trailer back.
Enough to get Raylene back since he hadn’t killed her.
Fish stumbled in the early light and tripped over debris in a futile attempt to find it. His Igloo cooler was the only thing in the world that mattered. Fish dropped to the floor and cried with his head in his hands. Sweated and swore. Laid down on the floor and slept.
It was the sounds of life that awoke him. Birds chirped on a telephone wire above the shed. A passing car blew its horn. There was a swing set in motion at the house next door and the voices of children playing.
Fish came to his feet and pissed in the corner. There were tools here and there. A yellow newspaper and old batteries and two broken fishing poles. A light beam pushed through the window and stirred dust in the air.
On the floor, he saw the ax that belonged to his dad. Thirty years old, with a chipped blade, a missing chunk from the handle where the old man hit a stump.
Fish picked up the ax and studied it. He thought about his life and his wife and his dead cousin. About the options he had left, which were few.
There were memories in his life that never existed, with a family that could have been. But everything went wrong. His sister died and his mother died and his dad became a monster.
“What in the hell’re you doin’ in here? What in God’s name, Kenny Fisher?”
She startled Fish and he jumped. Ms. Vivian Dixie: late seventies, white hair, never married. She owned the bank and the store, and she worked six days out of seven.
She had taken his trailer and his shed and his wife and his sons.
Fish stood, trembling. The shed smelling like warm piss behind him.
“You got no right to this stuff—it belongs to the bank—and I let that boy with the tow truck take what he wanted. That was his price for haulin’ it.”
She looked down at the lock that was dangling. “My God, Kenny Fisher, you’re trespassin’. I done called the law… . Now you owe me a new lock.”
Fish stepped forward and swung the ax. Used his shoulders and swung hard and sank the blade between her eyes.
Her face popped like a decaying log and she dropped to her knees, life exiting her body like a swoosh of foul wind.
He released the ax and she fell on her back—legs bent beneath her, face pushed in like a rotten pumpkin, ax jutting like a growth.
Fish stood motionless, looked down at his hands. Calloused and dirty and blood splattered. Then he looked at her. So small and so broken. A lifeless carcass, nothing more. It was grotesque—her body—the way it had contorted. Her age-spotted hand, reaching. Bent fingers. Like she tried to crawl out of her skin.
He stood there for the longest time and thought, watching the blood flow. It poured from her white hair and ran toward the lowest wall of the unleveled shed.
When Vivian Dixie had called the police, Scott Winkler was on duty. Ten minutes from Bay, he held his foot to the floor. If Kenny Fisher had come for his shed, then there’d be hell to pay. He was out of his mind with rage, and surely high on crank.
Winkler called for backup. Thought things might get tough. The bank had uprooted the trailer just as soon as Fish went to jail. It was a coordinated effort with the police, and they had kept Fish for as long as they could.
When Ms. Dixie saw her chance, she took it. Struck while the iron was hot. C & K Towing hooked up to the trailer and winched the shed onto a rollback.
Fish came home to a dead-end road littered with bags of trash. His worldly possessions were a truck with four bald tires and a pair of old Wranglers stuffed in a Walmart bag.
Winkler drove fast and the engine screamed, but he kept the sirens quiet. Didn’t want Fish to hear him coming and give himself away.
Deputy Winkler pulled into the lot and put the car in park. Sat there. He did not see Fish or Ms. Dixie or anything out of place. He opened the door and spun sideways and climbed out of the car.
When Fish heard gravel crunch under tires, the anger that never quite left him returned, overpowered him. As he stomped from the shed, Winkler climbed from his car and closed the door.
Fish raised the shotgun and squeezed the trigger but nothing happened.
Winkler, caught off guard, yelled and dove to the ground.
Fish, more surprised than anything, had never been more embarrassed. It stunned him to realize that after shooting his cousin he’d forgotten to cock the 12-gauge.
Winkler, flat on his belly, with a clear view of legs, fired four rounds into both cowboy boots and put Fish to the ground.
Winkler stood quickly and watched Fish. Rolling in the dirt and screaming.
He thought about shooting him again. Wanted to and still might.
Fish, climbing to his knees, slowly, and in considerable pain, looked down and saw one foot spun backward and both boots filled with meat.
“Put the gun down, you motherfucker,” Winkler yelled.
Fish saw only black and white. His whole body burned. His feet were gone.
“It’s over, Fisher. Now come on, man. Put down that gun.”
Fish was sweating and bleeding, but he had just enough strength to rack the 12-gauge and place it under his chin. Reach down with his thumb and push the trigger and take a shotgun blast to the face.
Winkler stood by the car in shock. Took a few steps forward and stopped.
Fish had blown the top of his skull off, and there were parts of it on the shed. The blast had removed his face and tore his head in half. There was nothing left but red bones and teeth and skin that looked like pizza once you scraped the meat off.
Winkler walked backward toward the car and collapsed in the seat and used his radio to call in. Told Gasconade County through code words what just happened. He couldn’t believe he’d almost died, and he couldn’t believe Fish killed himself. He’d just done it.
“Hurry up,” he told them.
“Sit tight,” they said.
Everyone was coming.
The air was cold when Bazooka opened his eyes. It was daylight. Mid-morning. Sun poured through the window and bathed him in warmth.
He rolled over. Tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Wide awake. He may as well go to town for supplies. Stop by the turkey farm and fill his gas can with water.
He walked unsteadily out the back door onto cinder-block steps and pissed into a patch of poison ivy. Already thinking of the tin and the weed, he stumbled inside and took a seat on the couch and fired up a doobie. Looked on in wonder at the plants drying inside his trailer, obsessed with potential profit and the derby car it would provide.
It had been a long road to the Firecracker 5000. Many years he had bought and saved and toiled—collecting cars and various parts: engines and radiators and transmissions—and now the time was upon him. There was a Lincoln Town Car beside his trailer with a roll cage, five-point harness, and a power plant under the hood—soon to be rebuilt by the best mechanic in the county.
With the new engine and his hunger and his raw determination, the potential for success was apparent and the possibilities for his future were endless.
The road to town was rough. Pigg Hollow was a buffet of potholes in a variety of depth and size. The front end of the truck lunged through a furrow and the windshield popped.
When he got
to the bottom of Hog Trough Road, he met Jerry Dean in his beat-up Chevrolet.
Bazooka pulled up next to the truck and turned off his engine.
“Was just on my way to see you,” Jerry Dean said. “We got us a serious problem.”
He told Bazooka what had happened. One of two cops had taken the money. Or maybe both cops had taken the money and split the jackpot. Either way, fifty-two grand was all they had. It was a green light to cook and sell and transport dope without being pulled over.
It was also his share of the profit. What Bazooka had been waiting for. The money for the 460 Big Block that would destroy its way to victory.
Bazooka punched the windshield of his truck and spiderwebbed the glass.
“Calm down, Red.”
“We gotta get that money, J.D. I gotta derby car ta build for the big spring smashup. Hell, it’s less than six months away—and this bein’ the Firecracker 5000 we’re talkin’ about. I been waitin’ all year for that one. Hell, I been waitin’ a lot longer’n that.”
“Yeah, Red. I know, I know.”
He looked up the hill. “And that old trailer I got’s just fallin’ apart. Got my whole future tied up with this deal.”
“Uh-huh. Mine too, Red. And don’t forget my trailer ain’t no better’n yours.”
Bazooka Kincaid stared at Jerry Dean. Asked what they should do. “This is some bad goddamn timing, you know that?”
“Surely, I do.”
“Not to mention we got more crops to pull. Sumbitch, it’s gonna frost next week—hell, it dropped down in the forties last night.”
“I know man, it’s gettin’ close. And once they frost, they’re done.”
Bazooka got loud and ejected a burst of spit out the window with his words. “So what in God’s name you suggest we do? Cuz you do not seem too worried.”
Jerry Dean shook his head like he understood. “I got this figured out. It’s a hell of a plan, trust me.”
“What’s that?”
Jerry Dean asked Bazooka Kincaid if he had any weed.
“Up yonder.”
“Let’s go ’n’ get high. We’ll talk about it.”
Bazooka Kincaid said OK and turned his truck around and followed Jerry Dean up the hill.
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