May wipes her face and walks to her room, closing the door. She turns on the radio and flops down on her bed. Pillow over her face, safe from her mother, May lets herself cry until she falls asleep.
There’s a letter in the mail, messy handwriting and wrinkled paper. She reads it repeatedly, feeling the paper for any hint of him, taking in the way it smells. Not wanting her mother to see, she hides it between her mattress and box spring.
May spends her allowance on pink paper with little flowers. She starts and stops writing so many times, nervous that she appears too eager or too sad. Still wondering if she wrote it just right, May drops it in the mailbox two blocks from home, on her way to school.
Another letter from Ben arrives. Four pages of everything that is wrong with Tinker, everything that is wrong with his family and school. Feeling only a little guilty, May is relieved, grateful that he hasn’t moved on. She carries the note back and forth to school, reading it when she’s lonely. Finally, she tucks it with the other. He sends another, it is short, he asks how she is and how school is going. He doesn’t send any more.
She reads his notes again. Not understanding, thinking she is not trying hard enough, she writes more letters on the pink paper and hopes he writes back, soon.
“Hello.” A woman answers, groggy, as if she just woke up. The line is faint, a fragile connection.
“Mrs. Parrish?” Ben had given her this number in one of his letters. “Hi. It’s May.” Silence. “I was wondering if Ben is around.”
“May?” Mrs. Parish asks, taking far too long to think. “From Shreveport?”
“Yes, ma’am.” There’s a long silence. May starts to feel embarrassed. Girls shouldn’t call boys.
“I’m sorry, May. He’s out right now.” The woman pauses, confused. “I don’t expect him back for a while, Friday night and all.”
“I see.”
“What’s your number? I’ll get him to call you.”
“Sure.” May gives her information, even though Ben had it written down. She twists the telephone cord. “Bye,” she says but Mrs. Parrish is already off the line.
Click here to learn more about May by Marietta Miles.
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Here is a preview from Slaughterhouse Blues, the second Love & Bullets Hookup by Nick Kolakowski:
PART ONE
GOOD DEATHS ALL AROUND
I
JAMES DYZEK PUSHED A THIN blade through the Wehrmacht lieutenant’s eye-socket until the brainpan cracked and the man trembled and went still. Everybody knew the war was ending and that anyone taken prisoner today would walk away free in a month or two and so James took the time to kill every Nazi he met. He had watched too many friends die to leave any of the enemy alive in good conscience.
Four decades later James would read a history book that described Americans in those last days of the European War as tired of killing. No such folks existed in his platoon. They bayoneted every Nazi they saw, raided every house they passed, pocketed every coin or trinket they could find. Once he tied a screaming German lady to the hood of his jeep, thinking it would make even a Nazi hesitate before taking a shot, only to change his mind after a sniper pumped two bullets into her spine. He carried a pearl-handled pistol like his idol George S. Patton but preferred the knife for close work. Years later he would use the same blade to cut meat at the neighborhood barbeques he hosted at his home in Queens and nothing about that fact struck him as odd or sacrilegious.
James pulled the blade from the German’s eye-socket and wiped the brains on the grass. He shook some of the splatter off his boots. That evening he soaped his pits and crotch and submitted to the icy field shower, the blood on his skin mixing with the mud. After showering, he made sure the small bag retrieved from the lieutenant’s pocket was safely tucked away in his pack.
In his old age James would view the War as the finest time of his life.
Later he would challenge his sons to push-up contests, laughing every time the kids collapsed while he pumped on and on and on. Later he would leave his respectable house in the middle of the night and drive to the unrespectable parts of town and throw a burning bottle through a random window and speed away as the flames licked the black sky. Later he would inherit his father’s bar and preside over endless nights of wild debauchery.
II
JAMES’S FATHER OPENED THE BAR near Union Square in 1938, and spent forty years collecting coins and crumpled dollars from half of New York City in exchange for glasses of foamy beer and whiskey shots. James’s father kept an oversized American flag pinned to the wall beside the front door, and liked to proclaim to anyone who would listen—and they all listened, thinking he might pour them a free drink—that his bar functioned as the world’s last true democracy: that anyone, whether a greengrocer or a tailor from the Garment District or a Wall Street trader, could slap down a quarter for a boilermaker and take a seat on one of the chipped stools and voice an opinion.
When James came back from Europe he would spend his afternoons sitting beneath the flag, listening to the dried-out old men talk about horrors they witnessed in the First World War. He understood that they wanted to relate to him. In those years James worked for a butcher off Cooper Square and walked around the neighborhood in his bloody apron, and when he sat beneath the flag it was usually with a couple handfuls of peanuts, which he would shell and eat while nodding at those recollections of Belleau Wood and Blanc Mont Ridge and Hamel and the Second Battle of the Marne, mud and gangrene and artillery.
Before he met his wife and moved to Queens, James would use the bar’s dingy closet of a bathroom to shave in the mornings, and oftentimes sleep atop the bar. He wanted to stay close to the valuables he had brought back from Germany, which he kept in a locked steel box on the bottom shelf of his father’s safe in the back room. When his father started asking too many questions about the box, James hid it beneath the floorboards.
III
AFTER HIS FATHER LOST HIS MIND, James had to shave him twice a week. His father’s skin had gone slack with age and James needed to pinch him beneath the jaw in order to smooth his cheeks enough for the razor. His father’s pupils staring into him the whole time, deep and merciless as black holes. Although his father could still dress himself, sometimes James would come over to the house and find the old man sitting in his own piss, his thighs red and raw.
The woman paid to watch his father was good at preventing him from leaving the stove on, or tumbling down the stairs, or torturing the cat, but sometimes he fought when she tried to change him, and she would call James, who always spent the drive to his father’s house yelling about how much time and money this all cost him, this refusal to die. Yet every time he came through the door with his fists balled and his face twisted in anger, his father adopted a look of such childlike contrition that it sent guilt slamming like a nail through James’s guts, and he wasted hours doing the laundry, the dishes, and all the other chores his father would never notice.
That guilt never lasted. His father wandered around the house looking for his long-dead brother, or pissed into bottles that he left in the fridge. His father placed the radio in the stove and turned on the heat. On those bad days James would contemplate his famous knife, and whether the time had come for a long drive, just the two of them, into the forests upstate. James had killed a couple dozen men in Europe but ending your father’s life is something else, even if your father has a head of broken clockwork.
One winter afternoon, on the woman’s day off, James came over with groceries and found his father stiff and dead on the couch, and that was okay, it was better than shipping the old man off to a hospital to wind down his last months under the bored watch of nurses. James put the paper sacks on the table and sat on the couch and held his father’s cold hand, rubbing his thumb over skin translucent as parchment. Outside the snow dissolved the world in white.
IV
AFTER HIS FATHER DIED, James refused to change much about the bar, besides replacing the long maple stick beneath the
register with a baseball bat. Every morning he opened the rear door to the dogs skulking in the alley and fed them organ meat donated by his old friends in the butcher business. When a health inspector tried to lecture him about the presence of canines in an establishment serving food and drink, James made a great show of taking the baseball bat from behind the bar and thwacking its barrel into his palm until the man left.
James quit drinking the day he inherited the bar, preferring to nurse a soda water while the men around him downed gallons of beer and harder stuff. To anyone who asked, James said he had no intention of slurping away his margins. He let undercover cops rub shoulders with the butchers and salesmen and artists, because he believed in law and order and the city around them roughened by the day. His sons were cowards and so he made them run drinks and break up fights in order to toughen them up for a hard world.
No matter how often people suggested he update the furniture, or at least vacuum the floor, James left the interior untouched. Portraits of John Brown and Theodore Roosevelt glowered from ornate frames above the liquor shelves, and the rococo mirror beside the bathroom door miraculously survived every brawl. Before he opened the bar to the day’s drinkers, James would always head into the back room and unscrew the three floorboards nearest the north wall and peek into the space beneath, where that battered metal box contained his riches from overseas.
His retirement, as he thought of it.
His treasure.
Click here to learn more about Slaughterhouse Blues by Nick Kolakowski.
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Here is a preview from Texas Two-Step, a Russ Kirkpatrick novel by Michael Pool…
CHAPTER ONE
“What the hell we gonna do with it now, Coop?” Davis asked. They were sitting around the basement trimming table in the biggest of Cooper’s three Denver grow houses, the one he actually lived in when he wasn’t crashing at his girlfriend Josie’s high-rise condo in Lodo. Davis was trimming up a fist-sized cola and giving Cooper that same look he’d been giving him since they were kids back in Southeast Texas, the one that said “You got us in this mess, now how you gonna get us out?”
Cooper frowned, tried to shrug it off. This was gonna throw his entire life into something resembling chaos, but it could have been worse. If that Chicago drug taskforce had waited a week to kick down his boy Nelson’s door, they’d have snagged Cooper’s entire new crop of Bruce Banner with it.
Though now he needed to find a new place to sell thirty pounds of absolute head-stash Colorado dope, and pronto. Shit, somebody somewhere had to want it. Time to work the dwindling, all-but-dead network a little harder, maybe cut one of the other growers a flat fee to set up a one-time deal, though no one ever seemed to want to do it. He could figure out what to do with the next crop later. If there was a later. Things would work out because they always worked out. Cooper Daniels was just lucky like that, and he knew it.
“Coop?” Davis’s annoyed tone brought Cooper back into the moment.
Cooper brushed his shaggy hair back out of his face and said, “Yeah, man, all right, no sweat. I’ll make some calls. Could have been worse.”
“I know it,” Davis replied, “but that don’t make it good, either. Even if you find someone to take it, who’s gonna drive it?”
“We’ll figure it out. Might have to get a little creative, is all. Everything will be fine, trust me.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what you mean by ‘figure it out.’ How many more times do we need to end up in this position before you see the writing on the wall?”
“I’ll let you know when I get there.” Cooper went back to trimming, finished the bud in his hand and dropped it into the big red ice chest at his side, which was three quarters full. He’d been using the coolers to cure his crops for years, so long that the white interior was stained amber from the resin.
Davis stayed on him. “Dammit, take this serious. We ain’t getting half the price per pound we could three years ago. Keep sending it farther and farther away, too. Network’s getting smaller all the time. Seems like just about everyone we run with besides us has wised up and gone straight. We’ve had a good run, right? Saw more Panic than anyone I can think of, just about. Been up to our knees in good times since. Might be time to move on to something else, same as the rest.”
Cooper stopped trimming again and looked up. “Lemme ask you something. You see me hitting the nine-to-five circuit? Some asshole in a suit telling me when to eat lunch like he’s my daddy? This is what we moved up here to do, and we been doing it, right?”
“We were kids when we started. Weed’s legal now. Things change. I know Josie is ready to see you do something else, too.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Cooper asked.
“It don’t have to mean anything. Blind fool could see how bad that girl wants you to clean up and put a ring on her finger, is all.”
“Yeah? And then what? Quit going to shows, get me a job like Josie’s up at Mile High Sports corporate? Set up a 401(k) and start shooting the shit around the water cooler on the cigarette break they don’t even let you have? I’d piss off everyone in the building five minutes after I got hired. Besides, she’s getting laid off in a couple months. They’re going belly-up.”
Davis sighed. “Have it your way,” he said. “Ignore me and her and everyone else if that’s what it takes to convince yourself. You know I’m with you either way. But we’re gettin’ the squeeze from every which one, and it’s only gonna get worse. There’s a retail shop on every corner selling eighths for twenty-five bucks. Same thing’s gonna happen across the country, sooner or later. We can’t exactly send it to China, so where’s it gonna go?”
“I know one place it can still go,” Cooper said.
Davis stuck his palms out in front of him. “Don’t even say it,” he said. “I told you I knew what you were thinking. That time we beat the rap down in Dumas we swore never again, and you know it. You don’t fuck around with the universe like that.”
“Might be we don’t have a choice. Besides, we could send it through Kansas and Oklahoma, stay out of the litter box out there in the Texas Panhandle.”
“Or we could get rolled up like a clump of shit in some other litter box. They have a gang-load of state troopers sitting at the Kansas border, pulling over anything with Colorado plates. And anyway, Nelson was coming out and paying cash, up front. We need someone who can do that, it ain’t worth the risk driving it ourselves. Josie would flip out if you even tried. We don’t even know anybody still in the game down in Texas anyway.”
Cooper tossed another manicured bud into the cooler and said, “We still know one person.”
Davis raised his eyebrows and said, “Tell me you’re not thinking about calling Sancho.”
“You really want me to, I’ll tell you a bedtime story and kiss your teddy bear goodnight. But at the moment I can’t think of anyone else to sell it to. And before you get all worked up about it, I haven’t heard a word from Sancho in six months, so we might not even be that lucky.”
“Probably got locked up somewhere with his daddy working overtime to beat the case. If hooking in with Sancho again is lucky, we must be on the other end of the rainbow.”
“Maybe we are.”
“I can’t believe you’d even consider getting involved with that knucklehead again after what happened in Dumas.” Davis slapped the table for effect, and a couple of untrimmed branches toppled onto the concrete floor. He bent down and picked them back up, gave one a smell, and put them back on the pile.
Cooper finished another sparse branch, cut the buds off it, dropped them in the cooler, and stacked the stem on a big pile laid out on trash bags on the floor next to the table.
He said, “All right, look, man. Half the crop’s still hanging in the drying room anyway, so we’ve got a couple days to look for something else. Could probably sit on it for a month if I had to, but rent is coming due, and I about shot my load on that last stretch of shows. I’d need the money even
if we did decide to shut down.” Davis sighed again and said, “I guess just let me know what you come up with, and we’ll get it done. Everything’s cut down and packaged at my spot. Me and Sneaky Pete broke the whole setup down and tossed it in storage yesterday, so I’m officially shut for business after this. But, Coop?”
“Yeah?”
“I need you to tell me you’ll at least work on something better than dealing with Sancho Watts.”
“I’ll do what I can, that’s the best I can say.”
Davis nodded. He pulled his latex gloves off and dropped them in the trash on his way to the sink, where he cleaned the scissor blades by dabbing olive oil on them and using a razor blade to scrape off the resin. Cooper thought about how they would have collected the resin as scissor-hash back in the day, when they’d first started growing, but they’d stopped doing that once the volume got so high that they had weed coming out of their ears. Davis said goodbye and walked upstairs and out the front door.
Cooper was sick of trimming for now, so he picked up the razor and cleaned his own scissor blades over the basement’s industrial sink until he was satisfied they were clean enough to put away. He pulled off his own latex gloves on the way up the stairs, tossed them in the trash bin. He heard what must be Davis driving away as he crossed the kitchen. It was sunny, but he could already see clouds forming above the foothills to the west outside the window, meaning it would rain that afternoon.
With no cable and nothing else to do, it wasn’t five minutes before he found himself swiping through his phone and stopping on Sancho’s ranch house phone number. It had been six months since Sancho’s last burner number went dead. He hadn’t heard hide nor hair of Sancho since then, now that he thought about it. At the end of the day Cooper was running the show, and Davis knew it. Davis had always been content to follow his lead, so let him follow on this one. Cooper’s green thumb had been paying his best friend’s rent for almost a decade, and making him plenty of money to travel and party in the process. It was hard to deny that Sancho had a knack for getting into sketchy situations, but that didn’t mean this deal had to have problems.
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