by Steve Vernon
Sins of omission.
Things being left out.
Things never meant to be said.
Thelma does all my talking for me.
“I’ve never seen the like.”
I smile and nod.
“All those chickens.”
There were a lot of chickens. Chickens all across the highway. A big red Peterbilt tipped hilly-nilly onto its side. Maybe a couple of hundred bright red plastic chicken crates strewn like building blocks after a long tantrum. It didn't look real. Like a joke in the middle of a sermon. Like we'd driven off the road and into the twilight zone. A gap in reality. There were chickens as far as my eyes could see. Feathers floating like angel dandruff. Pussy willow season and a high pollen warning in effect.
“Did you ever?”
And that’s about when I did it.
That’s when I filled the gap.
The first time out I used my hatchet.
Then my Swiss army knife.
The third time was a chunk of Nova Scotian granite.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Hitching the trailer in front of the tractor, as it were. It all began with the chickens. A whole truckload of them. No, that’s not right. I’m leaving something out.
It all began with Thelma. Thelma’s my wife. She’s everything in the world to me, except for all the parts that I’ve left out.
*
Thelma used to be the object of my desire. Ever since I knew her I hankered to squeeze her sweet caboose. Am I being too crude? Well excuse me for farting out loud but twenty three years of wedlock will piss the illusions out of anyone.
Wedlock. Funny how much that word sounds like headlock. You just can’t say it without tasting the cold clanking taste of nickle coated handcuffs. The old ball and chain. The ring, tight around the useless finger of the ignorant hand. An eternity of one night custer stands wrapped like a Christmas goose in one unbreakable golden band.
And all that empty space in between.
It was love, at first. A taste of the honey before the kill stick hit home. I met her in a church social. She was twenty one and I was back in from serving two years in the Canadian air force, swallowing Sahara dust, shitting grit and chewing peanut brickle.
I’d come with a date that a buddy of mine who should have known better had set up. I took one look at Thelma and I was blinded by the shithouse lights, a miller moth playing kamikaze with a candle’s flicker. I just never saw it coming.
Just one blink and she was all I could see. Dutch girl pretty, with a generous handful of bazoomas, a butt built for rocking and a mouth made for anything but talking. It was want at first sight, you understand. I just saw her and I had to have her. I wooed her with words. That always works best. Women like to know their men can talk. Not that this was any kind of hardship, you understand. I can talk until the cows come home.
Or the chickens come to roost.
But even a mouth gets tired and sooner or later you just run out of things to say. The next thing I knew I was staring at the business end of a bible, mouthing the last two words of freedom that I can remember – I do. After that I didn’t say much.
*
Hell. This ain’t working out. Let me tell it to you just like the good lord laid the bible out. Let me start at the beginning. Let me roll it back, just like a film. Memory is easy like that. So are a lot of things, come to think of it.
“Roll the window down, Harold. It’s hotter than the puckered nuts of Satan himself in here."
That’s Thelma talking. She’s in one of her moods. I can tell it was going to be on long as perdition sort of day. Thelma’s mood ring was souring from black to blacker to blacker-than-black. I rolled the window down, because it was easier than arguing.
“Not so far, damn it. I spent all morning trying to get this hair right.”
I knew. I’d spent the better half of two hours waiting outside the bathroom door while she monopolized the facilities. She only came out after I’d got tired of gritting my teeth and was unzipping in front of our kitchen sink.
“Harold! We’ve got to eat out of there.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten out of a kitchen sink but I didn’t have the nerve to tell her that. Too chicken, I guess. I just shut it off in midflow, dutifully zipped up and headed for the can.
“I’m not done in there. Don’t you be stinking it up.”
I closed the door just before I burst. I nearly ruined my favorite pair of trousers. You ever get that way? So full that you think your bladder’s going to pop like a water bubble? Let me tell you the pressure sure can build. I zipped back up, toted the baggage to the car trunk and we headed off for our annual summer vacation.
*
Vacations are supposed to be relaxing, aren’t they? They’re supposed to be the time when you can kick your feet back, stop holding your gut in and let it all run to seed.
Not mine. Thelma always had plans. Usually involving her parents.
This year it was a trip to their cottage. I hated that more than I hated projectile vomitting. Did you ever do that? Hurl it up so hard it feels like you’re puking up your ringhole? I did it once, in Cairo. I ate something I shouldn’t have. It just kept coming back and coming back like a year of repeating cucumbers, over and over again in the mother of all pukes.
That’s the same way I feel about Thelma’s parents. We have to see them more times than I care to imagine. It’s always the same. Worse than soap opera reruns. The same talk, the same fucking rants, over and over. I’ve got to hear about what every uncle and aunt and twice removed cousin has been up to since I last heard from them. And it’s always the same. We always end up eating the same grub, always telling the same jokes.
Thelma liked it and I was too chicken to tell her any different. Me - the big war hero. The toughest pilot on the Suez and yet too fucking chickenshit to tell his wife no.
“You sure we’re heading in the direction? I know I’ve seen that barn before.”
Only the last hundred times we rode this way. Every second weekend in the summer we traveled out to Thelma’s parent’s cottage. It was my own fault. If I’d had a bit more money, if I’d made a bit more of a success for my self than I’d be able to afford our own cottage. As it was I was working a dead end job in a dead end industry, waiting for retirement or the grave to end it all.
Then came the chickens.
*
It keeps coming back to this one thing. That long slow country curve. Thelma talking and I’m doing my best to stare myself to death out the front windshield.
I never saw it coming.
First thing we saw was that truck rolled over on its side and all of those chickens. I squeezed the wheel, fighting for control as we slid under the rear axle of that eighteen wheeler hooked out of its cradle and hung straight across the lane like the world’s ugliest roadblock, as we slid straight under and the Chevy’s roof collapsed like a hand had reached out and flattened it.
It happened fast, the world getting smaller, the gaps shoving in that bayonet of windshield wiper snapping into Thelma’s left eye, the top of her skull opening up like the top end of a boiled egg. I tried to reach out to her. My arms couldn’t seem to move. For some damn reason the steering wheel was shoved up against my chin.
I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t feel any pain. It was like I’d fallen in to one of those gaps in the conversation, was going straight down through like a rock down a long hollow wished-out well. I heard a man’s voice above me, crying out to Jesus or somebody like that and I wondered if that meant my car-crashed soul would be saved.
Then I felt a pair of hands catching at me and pulling. I felt pieces of myself giving way, hanging on to the chunks of steering wheel and dashboard crammed into my chest, the world spun red and black and gone.
*
I awoke covered in chicken blood. There was a big old chicken sitting on the top of my skull, staring down, his beady eyes like curious black pellets, head tilted or maybe that was me.
>
I sat up and the chicken squawked away.
It felt like it was raining and the teenagers I loved to hate were throwing some kind of rap rave in my skull-bone. I looked up. There was a black man standing over me, waving a throat slit chicken, its cut-through gullet guggling out the last few spurts of a chicken stinking arterial spray like a wineskin running dry.
He kept shouting something about damn ballers and I felt a wash of cool red peppermint freckles, like I was getting ready to faint to death all over again. Then I stood up, like my head didn’t want to but my legs weren’t in the mood to argue.
“Praise him,” the black man shouted. “Praise him.”
Only to me it sounded like he was saying “Raise him.”
“Praise him. Praise that dark snake lord, praise his endless eternal skin, praise the flaking and the shaking and the regrowing of his dickbone, praise that damn baller, praise him high and low.”
I almost sat back down. I tried to catch my breath only there wasn’t much left to catch on account of I wasn’t breathing.
“Praise him.”
I tried real hard to take a breath. I could feel my lungs stretching, feel the muscles in my chest moving, only it was like making a muscle that you knew couldn’t stand up.
“Praise him.”
And then it all sank away. Not a whisper of breath to tickle my dried scabby lips, not a god given breeze to conjure my faith.
“Don’t sit down,” the black man ordered. “You’re in the presence of dark majesty, you got to show your thankfulness, praise him, praise him, praise damn baller.”
“Hallelujah,” I muttered, not really meaning it.
I looked over at him. He was the blackest man I ever seen. Black like tar on a hot southern road. Black like the pit of midnight and forgotten dreams. All long boned and wiry, like he was too busy to bother carrying an ounce of fat. He had a pair of jaws like steel springs, teeth that looked like they’d been borrowed from an alligator and eyes that shined like black agate.
And then I looked at myself. I saw the bone in my left leg shoved out from my shin like the stub of a wind splintered tree branch. My head tilted sideways and I had to concentrate to straighten it. I felt swollen and dangerously loose inside.
Damn it. There ain't no way I can be standing like this.
I ought to be dead.
And then I put the pieces together, as many of them as I could. There was no other answer for it. I’d seen the movies. I was dead and he had raised me up and turned me into a zombie.
Hell.
“I’m a zombie, ain’t I?”
“That’s right,” the old black man said. “You been raised up by the power of Dhamballa, praise him, praise him high and low.”
Damn baller. It figured.
“I suppose I got to work your will, do I?”
The old black man smiled.
“Now where you hear a thing like that, hey? I raised you up because I knocked you down. It was my truck that tipped over and killed you dead outright. I couldn’t just leave you and your woman out here to fester. I’ll radio in for the police and you just a witness. You don’t even have to stay.”
“I’m going to heal up, am I?”
“Heal up? Hell no. But you’re alive, sort of. Ain’t that better than being dead?”
I thought about it for a minute.
“You bring back Thelma?”
“Your woman? I was just about to. You want I should? Or were you in a mood for a back bumper divorce? We could bury her, right off the roadside. There’s a swamp in back there, I can smell it. It wouldn’t take no time at all.”
He sounded awfully persuasive for a zombie-making truck driver. I thought about that, leaving Thelma dead. It’d sure be peaceful.
Hell.
That wasn’t what I wanted.
“How am I going to live this way?” I asked.
“Find a trailer park. There are all kinds of zombies living in trailer parks these days. Low rent, no nosey neighbors, a man can fester away in peace and contentment, and nobody knows the difference.”
I thought about spending my days in a trailer park, me and the rest of the zombies, maybe having a cook out every second Saturday.
“What do I need to eat?”
“Brains,” the old man said.
Then he started laughing. He was just having me on.
“That’s just the movies,” he said. “Raw pork’ll do. Or dog, if you ain’t fussy. Then there’s tinned meat if you really get desperate.”
I could picture it now. A trailer park full of zombies, chowing down on barbecued Spam. That didn’t sound that bad to me, strangely enough. Maybe it was just my new way of looking at things. Being dead and not dead sure as hell resurrected a fellow’s perspective.
“Raise her up,” I said, making up mind on what to do.
So he raised her and I watched closely while he went and did it.
He said his chants and slaughtered the chicken with a little hatchet he’d taken from his truck cab and then Thelma stood up. She only had a good two thirds of her skull left. She was nothing but chum from her eyebrows on up.
I suppose I could have left her like that. We might have been happy, the two of us together, her dead and mindless and me gumming barbecued Spam.
Then she tried to speak and I just acted out of reflex. I caught up the hatchet and cleaved her skull in two. I had to hit her two or three more times, before she finally stayed down. The old man stared at me. He couldn’t believe I’d undone his careful work.
“Raise her back up,” I said.
He waited too long to give me an answer. I hit him with the hatchet and before he stopped kicking I reached for another chicken. I opened the chicken's neck with my Swiss army knife and rained it red down over Thelma's carcass.
When she stood up, I used the knife on her.
It was slower than the hatchet.
Slower, and a lot more fun.
It took her a while, but she finally went down.
Until I raised her up again.
Then I dropped a chunk of roadside granite on her head. The granite opened up a gap in her skull that looked like a little like a winter pothole.
Then I went and raised her back up again.
Why not?
There were a hell of a lot of chickens out here.
Enough to do me for the rest of the day and then some.
I found the tire iron in my trunk.
Let's see what kind of gap this'll make.
Under the Skin, Under the Bones
You can tell an old soldier from the way he carries himself. There’s a stoop in his shoulders and an iron slammed straight down his spinal column that spend a lot of time arguing with each other. You can tell him from the reek of gunpowder on his breath and the manner in which he bears up beneath a load. And you can tell him from his adaptability. A soldier can get used to anything.
We learned that in Russia.
In the spring of 1941 our Wermacht were victorious gods of the battlefield, yet we’d hardly been blooded. We’d gutted Poland and France as easily as a bullet parting baby flesh. Resistance had been nonexistent and its absence taught us nothing. We were an army of callow youths, strangers to the realities of blood and sacrifice. We were riding out an unstoppable drum roll across the continent of Europe but when we reached Russia our beautiful blitzkrieg ground to a torpid halt in the mud and the snow of the steppe. That was 1942. It taught us a thing or two about defeat. Only the hell of it was we weren’t defeated by the Russians. We weren’t even defeated by the winter’s bitter onslaught.
We did it to ourselves.
But now it was 1943 and the Russians are beating us.
My name has never been important. I’d just been promoted to Oberfeldwebel of my platoon, what the Americans might call a First Sergeant. I earned the promotion because I’d been standing next to Oberfeldwebel Gutheimer when a Russian bullet opened his throat. I tried to hold the wound closed with my hand while I shouted for a medic but
I might as well have been trying to drown rain. Since then, when I sleep I keep my hands close to my sides. Six months later they still stink of his blood.
The only other man I shared a common bond with was Gerhardt. He wasn’t much of a soldier, always looking for a way to shirk his responsibility while wheedling an extra portion of supper.
“It tastes better the second time around, sir. The grub grows on you, if you give it a chance.”
Gerhardt was a clown but you couldn’t want a better man in a fight. Of all the men in the unit I respected Gerhardt best of all. We’d served together a long time and there was no one I would rather stand with against hopeless odds than that disrespectful bastard. Our platoon in theory was forty men but in fact we usually stood a double apostle strong. We weren’t the toughest troops in this war but we held together. There was a bond that drew us. We trusted each other to watch each other’s back when we battled.
That was back before the dark church, and that damned red nun.
*
We were to take the village. There was no real reason for it. The village wasn’t anything special. Just a few houses surrounded by a ramshackle stockade and gate. The village didn’t even have a name as far as our maps were concerned. Some Berlin chess master decided that this bit of filth was sacred and we had to take it with our blood.
It was one of those tiny clusters of shelter that hump up unexpectedly, a rabble of huts that looked to have sprouted like mushrooms from the dirt. Nothing but a collection of shacks cluttered about an enormous black church. The church shot up like black broken glass, all angles and unbelievable architecture as if it had been blown up and reconstructed at least once a week by an army of blind mad architects.
“Ha,” Gerhardt joked. “Figure those Ivans to build themselves a church that’s bigger than the whole godless town.”
I laughed, then.
*
This is what we learn from war. We go through it. We take it into ourselves until it becomes a part of us that we learn to grow beyond. This is how we learn to live in the darkness. This is how we learn to live with fear.
We were part of a so-called battalion, a half a dozen companies thrown together because they didn’t know what else to do with us. It was the way things were done at this time of the war. We advanced through a forest that was marked with a bright red letter B on our map. Such an innocuous letter, fat and pregnant and helpful. I don’t know what the B actually stood for. Perhaps it didn’t stand for anything at all.