by Steve Vernon
Damn. Damn. Damn. He thought it, rather than speaking it, clenching his teeth against the pain as the letters ate him up, cell by cell, bit by bit, collating and collecting him, breaking him down. The Q’s whirring like tiny spurred buzzsaws, the k’s kicking like a team of hopped up soccer addicts, the o’s puckering and sucking him in small leechable kisses.
He clawed at the pages, scraping them down beneath his fingernails, skittering across the slick waxy covers, tangling in the mesh of the interwoven binding. The g’s gulped and the n’s nuzzled and the t’s hammered him like an army of crucified sinners. Chewing and mulching him down into a nothing of amnesia and respite.
His last few words, not a curse, but a muttering of his real name.
“Wilbur...,” he whispered.
At the last he felt a small warm glow like a burning butterfly nestling against his dying remains. His wedding photo, somehow escaped from the confines of the album, fluttering closer.
He gripped it, soft, tight, pulled it closer to his heart.
A spark flared up and a lifetime of petrified existence roared into flame.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
And so passed Texas Jack Page, legend among legends and a pretty damn good accountant when he put his mind to it.
Take my word for it, the man really counted.
Gin Bottle Heaven
There is a hell of a lot of ways for a man to pray. I generally do my best praying over a bottle, empty or full. It’s a kind of ritual for me, the tarnished penny of hope spinning around in the bottom of the barrel of my emptied out heart. If I’m holding a full bottle I concentrate on emptying it until I’m filled up again, a little more green in the stem and a little more gentle oblivion.
Both hands. You don’t want to drop it. Unscrew the cap, tiny tight circles, the tin lid scraping against the glass of the bottle, making a soft tight whittling sound that wears against the edges of a man’s soul until nothing is left. If he’s lucky. Then, for the sake of bravado and gamble you run the snake of your tongue around your lips, just once before poking the open mouth of the bottle into your own and tipping it back.
That’s how I do it.
It takes a little longer if the bottle is empty. Then you end up praying to find another and another until you’ve accumulated enough empty bottles to cash them in for a full bottle to re-begin the process.
Life is a lonely bicycle wheel, creaking slowly on a hot summer day. A hungry gray hound pants patiently as the spokes catch the light and make bright razor slices in the on looking rain clouds. Today, the maker of all good things has sent me another penny ante miracle. He turned his burning glass on me and let it cinder down a little kindness.
I’m grateful, I guess.
There I was on the corner of Fifth and Bottomed Out, leaning on a shopping cart full of scavenged empties. I looked up and all I could see was that big neon Bombay Sapphire sign that someone had hung up here in a part of town where folks could only dream about such a high priced liquor. You know the one with the giant bottle standing poked up there like a blue phallic tower. Some ad man thought it up, I suppose. Hang it up there, a giant blue gin bottle. Give them something to believe in.
“Send a miracle, God,” I said to the big blue bottle. “You did it for Moses. Why not me?”
The big blue bottle just stood there in midair, twenty feet high and two hundred feet above my head. A taunt, a dream or an empty promise. The holy trinity, three in one, it might just as well be a get-out-of-jail gateway to paradise and beyond.
I stood there, looking about me for any sign of the remains of my fallen dignity. That’s when my miracle happened. That’s when I spotted a whole case of empty beer bottles just lying there on the sidewalk. Like a hawk I stooped and snatched the case up, making a quick mid-leap calculation of possible worth. I figured that beer case coupled with what I’d already found would offer enough of a return to pay for a pint of cheap cold gin, my favorite brand.
There was no way I’d ever afford the expensive stuff. Not all of the miracles in the world could make that a reality. It was as beyond my reach as that twenty foot tall Bombay bottle high above my head.
I hefted the beer case up, giving the whole thing a little shake to make certain that none of the bottles were broken. That’s when I noticed the blue gin bottle lying in the dirt behind the beer case. I didn’t recognize the brand because it didn’t have a label. I’m not even certain how I knew that it was a gin bottle. Some voice inside my head whispered gin. Maybe God just dealt himself a pretty good hand.
I picked up the gin bottle and held it up like a looking glass. One more empty and one more refund. Payday in Paradise, brother. I could have cashed in right there and gone on home to my bottle and a little tender amnesia. Only I didn’t. That’s how it goes sometimes. There’s something a little relentless in hunger and hangovers. Even when you’ve got enough to fill your needs there’s a lonely wind that whistles through an empty belly, telling you that you always need a little more.
So I leaned on that cart and pushed it, resting my weight on my forearms and letting momentum and gravity take me. The cart was one of those bastardly square wheeled contraptions that the grocer was probably glad to see liberated. It banged and squealed at every rotation of the wheel, sending a telegraph of shake-rattle-and-roll right up the bones of my wrists, around my elbows and cutting through my shoulder blades. My missing dentures ached and little gristle knots of tension puckered at my cheekbones threatening to burst at every cheap chromed bounce. I kept telling myself that maybe there’d be tax on top of the price tag and maybe I’d be a dollar short if I didn’t pick up a few more empties; or maybe I’d have enough for the gin but I’d want a little more for a fresh pack of cigarettes. You can’t have fire without a little smoke.
Bang! Squeal. Push.
I liked pushing the cart. I liked the sound it made. You could hear it roaring maybe ten blocks away. People got out of my way like they were afraid they’d catch rust from the cart or maybe from me. I liked that and hated that both at the same damn time. Fear, respect and privacy were a set of inbred triplets who dressed an awful lot alike.
I kept on pushing.
Bang! Squeal.
I don’t like people. Did that make me antisocial? Autonomous? Or just atrophied? Who the fuck knew? I had long grown used to living without answers. God hung the world on a question mark and who was I to tell him any different?
Do you want to know what I really wished for? I wished that the world that dizzied around like a love-sick moth about the billion watt light bulb of the sun was nothing more than a drain plug in the bottom of a four hundred year old septic pond. I wished that I could reach out and pull that plug out of the hole it had fucked itself into and let everything on this world just drain away. I wished I could make this planet a world full of empty, where sex was a drink you bought at the Kool-Aid stand and the clouds were made out of unfiltered cancer-free nicotine smoke.
“Hey Easter,” Some voice shouted from off to the left of my personal world of vision. That’s my name, in case you weren’t listening. Easter, like in the season. I think my mother wanted to give me up for Lent.
“Hey Easter, it’s me.”
Oh hell, it was Larabee. I knew damn well what he’d want. He’d want a bit of my bottle. What ever I had to eat. My ears and my cognition and my chewed off toe nail clippings. Some people were just built that way, with a little lamprey and fungus for blood. They’d suck off you and not in a good kind of way. God hadn’t given them enough legs to stand on, they needed to borrow yours.
I wished I could close my eyes and make him vanish.
“What you got?” He asked.
“A ticket for true enlightenment, a dead snail, and the dream of a mad bull who has finally found a slow enough toreador,” I answered. “God sends me bouquets of delicately scented angel’s panties to sniff over and he giggles when I cum in my pants.”
“Hunh?” Larabee asked.
“Nothing,” I said
. “What are you up to?”
He was staring at my shopping cart full of emptied bottles, trying not to lick his lips. He wanted a little of the action my empty bottles promised but his balls were far too atrophied for him to attempt a direct confrontation.
So I did it for him.
“You want a bottle, don’t you?”
“Well, now that you mention it,” Larabee said, still sidling around the question like a housefly edging around the brink of a hungry Venus Fly Trap.
“Pick any of them you want,” I said, cradling the empty blue gin bottle. “But you can’t have this one.”
Sometimes you just don’t have to wiggle the bait all that much. Larabee eyed that blue gin bottle like it was the Holy Grail, fresh picked out of Galahad’s unguarded pocket.
“What’s so special about that one?” He asked.
“Oh I bet you’d like to know,” I said. “Like I’d ever tell you.”
“Come on,” He coaxed.
“I probably shouldn’t let you know,” I said. “It’s a kind of a secret.”
“You can tell me,” He said. “We’re buddies.”
Buddies my ass. But I just smiled.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you.”
He leaned closer. He was eager to hear what I had to say. It wasn’t that he was all that stupid, you understand. He was out of doors, same as me. We don’t have cable television out here. We don’t even have a radio. We’re as much in need of a good story as a parch of desert needs a good frog-drowning rainstorm.
“It’s a djinn bottle,” I said.
“I can see that,” He said. “So what? Gin’s just as good any other wallpaper tonic, if you’re looking to get plastered.”
“Not gin,” I said. “Djinn. Like a djinni. D-J-I-N-N.”
He looked at me like I had two heads. Of course looking through his eyes I very well might have.
“Did they change the spelling on me?” He asked. “This isn’t some kind of new age metric thing, is it?”
“It’s a djinni bottle,” I said. “You rub it while you pray and you get one wish.”
He gave me a pretty good look steeped in lie detectors, crossed hearts and sodium pentathol. Then he laughed out loud.
“Bullshit,” He said.
“It’s truth,” I said. “You know that old guy that sits across from the Chinese Grocery?”
“The one with the peg leg and moldy beard?”
“No, no,” I said. “The one with the eye patch and three teeth. He gave the bottle to me.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’re stuttering,” I told him. “And I’m telling you the truth.”
“Prove it,” He said. “Wish for something.”
“I already did,” I said. “I wished for this cartload of bottles.”
“Now I know its bullshit,” Larabee said. “Why didn’t you wish for money? A million dollars, tax free. Bill Gates as your private bum boy. Maybe even the key to Fort Knox with Tom Cruise waiting outside in a fire truck and a spandex petticoat to drive your gold on home for you.”
“You don’t understand me,” I said. “I’m above all that. Money means nothing to me when I’ve got friends like you.”
I was laying it on thick but I figured thick was the only way Larabee might buy it.
“You ought to go into the fertilizer business,” Larabee said. “There’s no way you’re talking straight.”
“All right,” I said, handing him the djinn bottle. “You wish for something.”
He took the bottle carefully like it was made out of egg shells and hand grenades. He still didn’t believe me but he was ready to be convinced.
“You’re kidding,” He said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“You’ve got the bottle now,” I said, with a carefully calculated shrug. “There’s only way to prove me wrong.”
He gave me one more look and then he took the bait.
“All right,” He said. “I wish for…”
“Uh-uh-uh,” I said. “You got to wish silently, like birthday candles, or else it won’t come true.”
He stood there staring at the bottle in his hand. I knew I had him hooked. He’d swallowed the whole story and it was just a matter of time. He’d make his wish and when it didn’t come true I’d laugh at him and he’d get pissed off and leave me be. Then I could haul my shopping cart full of empty bottles down to the exchange and turn them into a night’s peace.
The plan was perfect.
He licked his lips. He didn’t know what to wish for. He wanted to get the words right. Maybe he was just waiting for some sort of a sign. Even Moses needed to see a burning bush before he got his staff up.
“You got to believe,” I said, pointing to the blind heavens above our heads. “You got to have faith in the powers above us.”
Larabee looked up and he saw that twenty foot tall neon blue Bombay Sapphire gin bottle, shining two hundred feet above our heads.
“I believe,” He said with the fervency of a freshly converted born again bible thumping hardcore holy roller.
And then something happened.
I could feel it, pent up like a pregnant rain cloud, reeking of ozone and eager for a crack of lightning to wash it all down.
That’s when Larabee made his wish.
Don’t ask me how I knew he’d made it. Something changed, was all. I felt it. So did Larabee. A great blue searchlight shone down from the twenty foot tall Bombay bottle. It lit on Larabee and lifted him up like some kind of a UFO abduction. Any minute now, I thought, they’d have Larabee up there in their gin-bottle shaped spaceship poking his asshole with knitting needles and suction pipes, measuring his alcohol content and asking him about the mysteries of the universe.
I wondered what he’d tell them.
He raised up higher. I could see him up there like a Thanksgiving Parade float, the sole of one of his street worn boots wobbling loose like the tongue of a roadkilled dog. It was a miracle, Saint Larabee of the shopworn, patron saint of alcoholic depression and the dee-frigging-tee’s arising from the sidewalk in a blatant defiance of gravity and common sense.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, half cursing and half praying.
And then Larabee was hovering directly above the sky high neon blue Bombay Sapphire gin bottle. He bent over like he was reaching for a penny that had dropped upon the ground. He caught hold of the neon blue lid. Both hands. I could see him twist. I heard that unscrewing sound, tiny tight circles, the tin lid scraping against the glass of the bottle, making a soft tight whittling sound that wore against the edges of a man’s soul until nothing was left.
If he was lucky.
And then I watched as Larabee climbed down into the bottle, like a worm crawling down into a freshly dug grave. First his arms disappeared and then his head was gone and then he’d fallen right in. Fallen, was pushed or maybe he jumped.
And then he was gone.
I didn’t know what to feel. If this was a story in a magazine I might have felt sorry for him. I might have guilty for making this happen. But this isn’t a story. This is just one more truth that you can swallow or not.
I stood there, staring up at where he’d been. This wasn’t a UFO abduction. There was nothing up there but the neon blue sign. Had he drowned himself in a twenty foot bottle of transmutated gin? Was he in there now drinking eternally or just cheerfully pickling? Or had he transformed himself into the ethereal gin or paradise, to be kissed and tasted by a thousand drunken cherubic angels?
Or was he just gone?
I don’t know what had happened.
I looked down at the dirty sidewalk at my feet. There was the djinn bottle, just sitting there waiting for me.
Pilot to bombardier, open bomb bay.
I picked the bottle up.
I figured I could use it or just trade it in for a deposit.
I didn’t know if it was really magic or if I had just dreamed the whole thing up. Larabee was gone, that was for certain. I’d wished for a miracle and t
his was what God gave me.
I stood there thinking about it. Thinking about what I really wanted to wish for. Thinking for a very long time as the world kept on turning.
For as long as I let it.
Do-overs and Detours, Somewhere North of Bigfoot
Seeing that big black semi rolling along the side of a Texas goat path no wider than a tire tread was a little like finding a great white shark wallowing in a mule’s water trough. It just plain didn’t belong here.
“Well Judas,” I swore.
I got that curse from my grandfather. Old granddad never liked taking the Lord’s name in vain but anybody else in the good book was up for grabs. I can still hear him rolling it out as smooth as diesel, “Judas-holy-priest-by-the-gods-of-war-hoary-eyed-baldheaded-Moses-oh-crap”, all shoved together like there wasn’t a beginning or end.
The rig rolled closer. I stood there, thumb hooked into the wind, watching this coal black eighteen wheeler looming towards me like the second coming.
It had to be a mirage. I’d been out in the sun too long.
Well mirage or not, I was going to get myself a lift. The last tractor I’d hitched a ride with had been a big green John Deere, driven by a drunken Texas plowboy with all of the bubbling humor of a crucified leper, the patience of a boiling tea kettle and one hell of a misguided sense of direction. We argued and he got ticked off and I got kicked off, smack in the middle of nothing in particular with nowhere else to go but stop.
The rig got closer. It was a beast, the biggest I’d ever seen. Midnight black and twice as large as the national debt of Columbia. All slick and curved like something built by the god of crop circles. It didn’t look like anything that had ever crawled out of Detroit but it looked just like salvation to me as it geared itself down and pulled on over.
Give me credit. I had a half of a half second’s worth of second thoughts about how good an idea this might be. Hell who wouldn’t have? The truck was painted so black you could stick your hand into the paint job and lose it. In the coal cellar of my memory I heard my mother’s words of sagebrush wisdom on getting into cars with strangers.