by Frank Bill
The waitress offers a confused stare and says, “No, sir.”
“I’m a veteran of W. W. Two. I didn’t fight in a world war so incompetent slugs such as yourself could offer shit like this. Know what’d happen if I’d fought a war like this, like you grill and serve food here? We’d be speaking German or Japanese.”
The waitress’s eyes bubble up. Her body shivers.
“Have to excuse me, Frank, but the way people treat others in this country pisses me off. Tired of it.”
His words go through Frank as he chews his last piece of shrimp. The Old Mechanic tells him, “Let’s go.”
In his Dodge truck, the Old Mechanic’s either taking an alternate route to Frank’s house or kidnapping him. Frank knows he’s been planning this for years. This is it. He’s taking Frank on an unannounced hostage vacation.
Frank grips his only defense. The switchblade in his pocket. The Old Mechanic tells him, “Going by my house, got something for you.”
The compound. The Old Mechanic has picked out Frank’s plot, where he’ll push up daisies in an unmarked grave in his backyard. Frank’s stomach churns with an expanding sickness of nerves and one too many shrimp. Churns with thoughts of all the things he’s yet to do. Accomplish or encounter. Like sports. Prom. Booze. Girls and cleavage.
Tightening the grip on the knife in his pocket. Eyeing the hands on the wheel. He could stab him in one of those strong voice-box-breaking hands. The Old Mechanic asked, what if he had to use it on someone. Is this what he meant? But that could cause a wreck. Frank could die. He doesn’t wanna die. The Old Mechanic slows the truck down. Turns down a gravel road. Frank’s starting to shake, glancing at the Old Mechanic, who navigates the wheel to a stop. There’s no brick wall or razor wire. No compound. Just an old graying cabin with a tin roof on a dead-end road. The Old Mechanic tells Frank, “This is it.”
His hand still holding the switchblade in his pocket, Frank sits on a musty brown corduroy couch, his nerves rattled by the unknown of the house his mother grew up in. He takes in the scenes of timelines past. Old yellowing newspapers stacked on a worn blue and rarely vacuumed carpet. The log walls are lined by black-framed graying photos of soldiers smiling. Giving the thumbs-up. There are portraits of Frank’s mother and aunt as kids with gapped buckteeth. Frank watches the Old Mechanic come from the narrow shotgun hallway out of what he’s guessing is a bedroom. He’s holding an Army green rectangular metal box. The Old Mechanic sinks into the couch beside Frank. Pulls his knit cap off. Frank’s heart pounds red lines as he keeps a tight grip on the switchblade, wondering what’s in the box.
The Old Mechanic clears his throat, says, “Guess you know I served in W. W. Two?” Fearing what’s in the box, what’s gonna happen, Frank tells him, “No, mother never talked about you serving in no war, just the other.”
Giving Frank an odd-eyed glance, he says, “The other?”
Frank glances at those hands and says, “The beatings.”
The Old Mechanic shakes his head. Runs his dry eighty-grit tongue over his lips.
“Times change just like people, that’s my reasoning for bringing you here.”
Staring at the green box, Frank tells himself he’s gonna stab those hands until they’re no longer functional if he lays a finger on him.
And the Old Mechanic says, “War’d been hell for me, Frank. Things I did and seen. Coming home, I didn’t know how to talk about it. Didn’t know how to behave.”
Frank’s grip is sweating on the knife in his pocket and the Old Mechanic says, “Stored it my head. All those images boiled my temperament into a violence I couldn’t contain toward other people. I became a boozer and a beater with a short fuse. It felt good to smash someone.” Frank imagines those chicken-skin hands around his neck, and the Old Mechanic says, “I can only imagine what your mother, your aunt, your grandmother have told you about me. Things I done to them.”
Frank’s insides are an unanswered voice in a deep black well. His thumb rubs on the button, ready to eject the blade. He wants out of here. Away from this disturbed old mechanic opening a metal box. He could stab the old man and run off, but he doesn’t know where he is. What if he just injures him and the old man chases him down? It will only be worse.
As he reaches into the box, the grooves of the Old Mechanic’s acne-scarred face draw tight and he grits his coffee-stained teeth. He’s obviously planning something. Tells Frank, “Maybe someday you can understand all that I’ve done, bad and good.”
Frank’s imagination tells him there’s probably a gun in that box. Handcuffs. Rags and rope. It’s his little torture kit. Frank wants to pull the knife from his pocket. Wants to eject the blade, wants to demand, “Don’t go getting all crazy on me. I already know things you done, just take me home!” But he sees his little knife isn’t going to help him now.
The Old Mechanic pulls the long black steel blade of a bayonet from the box and says, “Hold on.” It’s too late.
Frank takes in the dark stains that he guesses are blood from everyone who has ever crossed the man and says, “Why, so you can stab me with that machete?”
The Old Mechanic shakes his head, chuckles, and says, “I ain’t gonna stab you. And this ain’t no machete. It’s a bayonet. Belonged to Howard Case. Old boy I served with from Kentucky. Big as a barn. Pale as cream from the top of fresh-squeezed cow’s milk.”
Franks says, “You stole it?”
The Old Mechanic inhales deeply and exhales slowly. “No, Case and I was dropped out on a beach in Okinawa with other soldiers. Expected all hell to rain down. But the hell didn’t come until farther inland.” Lowering the bayonet, he pauses and says, “Was running for position, Case and me, the earth was smoke-holed explosions. Had a wooden crate of grenades strapped down on my back. Case was next to me, dodging swarms of lead. The earth opened up. Didn’t know enemy fire from our own. We hit the earth for cover. A round traveled through the crate. Missed every grenade. Come out the other side. Took Case’s face with it. I grabbed his rifle. Didn’t realize it until later. Seen his initials carved into the rifle’s wooden stock.” The Old Mechanic lift s the bayonet. Hands it to Frank, says, “It’s yours if you want it.”
Frank releases the switchblade in his pocket, pulls his hand free, and takes the bayonet. Feels the cold solid weight in his one hand while the finger of the other runs over the stains.
The Old Mechanic pulls something else from the box. A triangular piece of red cloth with a blue stripe down its center and a five-pointed tarnished brass star hanging from the cloth. Frank squints his eyes. “What’s that?”
The Old Mechanic’s lips tighten and his face draws tight with seriousness and he says, “Bronze Star. Army give it to me for fighting the Japanese in Okinawa. For killing men.”
Frank looks at the Old Mechanic’s scarred mitts and is reminded of the stories that surround them. “This your excuse for what you did to my grandmother?” The Old Mechanic lays the Bronze Star back in the box. “Look, I don’t got to justify anything I done, not to you, not to anyone. I got no excuses. Just what’s in this box. Wanted you to see and know who I was and how I earned these before I died.”
A bead of moisture travels down the Old Mechanic’s acne-scarred face. A warmth begins to build from within Frank.
The Old Mechanic points to the pictures on the wall.
“All I can say is I took my anger and resentment for life out on your grandmother. It wasn’t right. She suffered until she could suffer no more. I’s unable to adjust from what I’d seen and done. ’Cause once a man takes another man’s life, it’s the guilt of memory that haunts him and he will forever live in the shadow of the dead.”
The Old Mechanic bends his neck. Lowers his face into those hands Frank fears.
All that forward motion, that command and control, in the Old Mechanic’s voice is gone. Harmless.
Frank is torn between not knowing the Old Mechanic and wanting to know him. He places the stories he’s grown up with in the back of his mind, the
cinnamon candy and Tom and Jerry, the dead dog, and remembers what his mother told him: the Old Mechanic deserves a chance.
Frank stands up and faces the Old Mechanic, places a hand on his shoulder, knowing the Old Mechanic could just be tricking him. He’s not letting go of this bayonet. But he also wants to know. “Really, you really served in a real war, in World War Two? You really killed people?”
Rough Company
The August sun boiled through the Illinois farmhouse’s tin roof. An argument over an insurance scam festered into full-blown rage. Cooley, a mulatto-skinned Indian, backhanded Connie’s thin ivory face across the kitchen table, where her son, Pine Box, sat eating a plate of mashed eggs. Connie pulled Pine Box’s fork from his grip. Came off the table. Dug the fork deep into Cooley’s jugular.
Cooley pawed at the fork with red erupting like fresh-struck oil from the earth as his heart raced and he gritted out, “You bitch!”
Connie stormed from the kitchen, went down the hallway, grabbed a double-barrel .12-gauge from the bedroom. Back in the kitchen, she stood hefting the shotgun at Cooley’s head of Crazy Horse locks pigtailing down his bearlike shoulders.
Her hick tone ordered, “Pine Box, get us a Falls City from the fridge. Wait outside for Mama.”
Pine Box opened the fridge, grabbed two cans, crossed the kitchen. The boot-scuffed screen door bounced against the jamb behind him. Followed by both barrels exploding and the Indian who had stitched Pine Box’s mind with daily fists parted across the linoleum.
Connie took Pine Box and ran off with Cooley eight years ago from Indiana to Illinois after her father tried to drown Pine Box, believed he was a bastard child. Connie’d been raised to recognize attention and abuse as equal hands drawn from the same deck. What mattered to Connie was how the hand was played. Her boyfriend Cooley had played the one hand too many times.
Eight-year-old Pine Box sat with cheeks and fingernails plastered by dirt. Tire tracks of three-week-old chocolate milk and egg ringwormed around his lips. His lungs tasted a Pall Mall and his tongue shared a Falls City with his mother beneath an old hickory tree.
He asked Connie, “What we do now, Mama?”
Connie pushed her golden locks, with muffler-burned roots from a dime-store dye job, from her face, belched. “Now we pack up, make the two-hour haul over to Indiana, hook up with your uncle Lazarus, do that insurance scam with no Indian to drink up our cut.”
Tires flung gravel, leaving Pine Box at a dead-end turnoff encircled by thick oaks down in the southeast woods of Kentucky. He stood watching Connie and Lazarus disappear into the purple neon morning, remembering the unlocked windows he’d climbed through to steal jewelry. Working-class cash tucked between mattresses. Coffee cans of the same hidden in drawers. Freezers. Fridges. He knew all the hiding spots where Cooley and Connie had taught him to look. But he’d never helped to vandalize a car for insurance money before.
His uncle Lazarus explained, “Some people believe sweating their lives away in a factory is making a living. That dream died when Reagan became president couple years back. Scamming. Swindling. Stealing. It’s the only life your uncle Lazarus and mama know. And it’s all you’ll ever know, little man.”
Nicotine-stained fingers swung steel. On the left. Then the right. Shattering the front lights on the nipple-pink ’82 Cadillac with a sugarcoated top. Lazarus had driven to Hazard, Kentucky, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from New Amsterdam, Indiana, where he sometimes laid his head. He’d picked out the area because of its rural setting. Nothing but hills and people separated by miles and miles. Plus he didn’t have any acquaintances down this way. Nothing to connect him to suspicion when he reported the car stolen.
Lazarus had parked the Cadillac at this dead end surrounded by green-wooded mountainous lumps with houses unseen. Connie followed. Swapped Pine Box for Lazarus. Now he had five minutes until Lazarus and Connie came back in the Dodge Duster. They sat at the end of the road watching for cars, just in case someone came by. Lazarus had stressed to Pine Box that the Caddy had to be totaled, turned into junkyard scrap.
Pine Box’s boots climbed the mirrored bumper. He thundered his heels up and down on the hood. Six swings from the crowbar and the windshield was cracked ice. His boots trailed up to the sugarcoated top, doing the same heel-dent dance that he did on the hood. He slid down the back window. Over the trunk to the gravel. His heart flicked in his chicken-wing chest. He heaved the steel, shattered each taillight. Lifted the snake-tongued end above his head. Battered the trunk. Walked to the driver’s side, opened the door. Laid the steel across the white leather seat. Sweat burned his muddy-water eyes as he offered up a tiny Buck knife from his pocket. Thumbed open the blade and murdered the seat. Made it bleed foam.
From under the seat he pulled the book of matches and rubbing alcohol left by Lazarus. Bathed the interior until it made a wino smell clean in comparison. He grabbed the steel, cradled it in his armpit. Held the book of matches open. Felt a clawhammer hand dig into his jerky-tinted locks, skip him backwards across the gravel like flat flint across a pond’s surface. Steel clanked. Pine Box’s palms and knees bit gravel.
Tears bubbled up and turned into pissed off. Pine Box stood, taking in the old man with gray corn huskers hair. A tobacco-stained Hanes beneath bibbed overalls spitting black sludge.
“Think you’re doin’ on my property, you little son of a bitch?”
The old man glanced up the gravel road, listening to the Duster tear through the early morning air.
“Who in the shit?”
Pine Box’s hands stung with the violence he’d watched Connie and Cooley perform on each other like Saturday-morning cartoons. He gripped and swung the steel into the old man’s shin. Bone chipped into particles beneath denim. Dropped the old man to his knees. His vision ruptured with broken vessels. He spat. “Little shit! Know who you’re fuckin’ with?”
The old man backhanded Pine Box to the gravel. Pine Box hollered, “Dammit!”
Cooley had busted him until he spat and pissed red, making it hard to walk, talk, eat, or sleep. Pine Box swallowed the bitterness, eyed his target through watery sight. Stood up. Indented the old man’s flesh with a Hank Aaron swing. Rolled him backwards onto the gravel with both hands gripping his face and moaning.
Tears connected dirt dots across Pine Box’s cheeks like freckles on a redhead. Mucus seeped from his nose as he grabbed the book of matches from the gravel. Connie stomped the Duster’s brakes. Pine Box pressed a flame from the match. Lit and tossed the pack into the Cadillac’s front seat, which ignited like the hell Baptists preached every Sunday morning.
Lazarus opened the passenger’s side door and hollered, “Shit, boy, get in here!”
Pine Box limped to the Duster, sucking snot and spitting blood. Lazarus pulled him in and heaved the door shut. The old man made it to his feet with liver-spotted features coated by blood, his jaw gaping and unmoving, his throat gargling incoherent tones. His hands met the Duster’s fender on the passenger’s side. Connie stomped the gas, made the old man disappear. Lazarus yelled, “Stop so I can finish him.”
“Ain’t no time,” Connie told Lazarus as she cut the wheel back to the main road while Pine Box burrowed his tears into her lap. “We got a three-hour drive back to Indiana, dump Pine Box and me back at your place. Get him patched up pretty as a Methodist boy in Sunday school.” She drove with one hand on the wheel, the other caressing Pine Box’s greasy locks. Out the driver’s window trees and fenced pasture combined into a blur.
She cut the wheel out onto the chewed pavement. The rear tires barked. Black smoke bolted up like a violent summer storm from the oak trees at the dead-end turnaround.
An explosion swarmed the early morning air. The surrounding pasture and pavement rumbled, jarring the rear fender of the Dodge Duster. Connie kept the gas pedal floored. Rubbing the mucus-red mixture from Pine Box’s busted nose and warped lips, feeling the same pain she’d known since having sight of this hell that everyone called living.
&nb
sp; Before the uneven textures of his hand rattled the screen door he smelled the memory of charred bones on foreign soil. Gripped his nickel-plated .38 snub-nose from his waist. Thumbed the hammer back and opened the door.
Decomposed features spoiled the air inside the farmhouse’s kitchen, similar to the Commie skin he’d whittled, pliered, and burned in the jungles overseas.
Green flies hummed in the humidity while maggots burrowed and swam within particles of marrow and black-cherry blood that sketched across the linoleum.
Shell shot had peppered the rusted fridge and yellowed-wallpaper walls. But what stood out at first glance was the fork rooted in the neck. Hands mortared around it as if the male had planted a tiny pole for a surrender flag.
Kurt’s brows pushed wrinkles into his forehead. His bottom lip puckered into his top and in a deep gravel tone he muttered, “Twisted bitch.”
He wore a beaded belt, bracelets constructed from animal hide braided around each soup-can wrist. His skin was tattooed by shrapnel fragments from twelve months of recon jungle heat. The firefights that created what he was to this day. Something hollow.
He thumbed the hammer of his nickel-plated .38. Slid it into his waistband. He knew the female and her son were gone. Just like he knew what she and the male who was scattered across the vinyl had enjoyed.
Stepping over the male, Kurt admired the skull; misshapen like a cantaloupe attached to a neck and shoulders with its fruit busted and etched into crusty decay.
Kurt had kept company with their type since he could remember setting his bare feet in every hole-in-the-wall shack, trailer, backroom bar, or barn-lot cockfight. Seeing a male who abused a female and the female who craved it. Both types twisted his intestines, brought back memories of his mother, blue flame from a gas stove heating a paring knife. Taking turns singeing her privates, then his. Mixing with Mama, she’d laugh. Scarred is what he called it, shaking the memory from his head. It sickened him, imagining what the boy had already seen and done.