Sip

by Brian Allen Carr

  Upstairs, in his room, the hermit heard the bloodcurdling gasp of a child in distress. He clutched his foul-stenched, severed leg to his body like a baby with a blanket.

  Morning

  Mira, Murk, and Bale woke dew glazed. Their fire was down to hot ashes. Mira stirred them, threw in some kindling. Smoke fussed toward the sky. She had corn batter in a container that she poured into her Dutch oven and set it in the coals. She sat over the vessel, watching their breakfast cook. Bale and Murk packed up and Mira divvied up hunks of hot bread onto pieces of parchment that she passed to the boys, and they sat and ate in silence, the early morning quiet. Only a few birds cooed.

  “We’ll leave the Dutch oven here. It’s too hot to carry and we should be back this way.”

  “Should?” There was corn pone in Murk’s teeth.

  “Well, hopefully not you.”

  Murk fingered out the pone, said, “You’ll regret that if it’s true.”

  “How much farther is it?” Bale asked.

  “A few hours. We might could’ve walked all the way last night, but we’d’ve gotten there dead tired.”

  Bale stretched and yawned. “I’m dead tired right now.”

  When they were all packed up, and about to make way, they heard voices from the trees. Bickering of sorts. Cuss words.

  Later, Bale would say he thought for certain they were about to die.

  Morning at the Inn

  When light touched the window of his room, our leg holder sagged awake. He sniffed a bit, the turning stench of leg thick about him, and he stood, letting the thing fall away from his grip. Flies buzzed about. Elsewhere in the inn, the faint grumbling of others’ affairs—vomitus hacking and grousing and rustling. He arranged himself as well as he was able, clutched up his leg and exited the room.

  Descending the stairs, his eyes awed at the catastrophe. Broken chairs and busted bottles. Limp humans strewn much like fallen cushions. Passed out or dead, he wasn’t certain. Behind the bar, a young boy sloshed a rag in a bucket of gray water, plucked it out and wrung it near dry before wiping the surfaces around him.

  “Is it like this every morning?”

  “Nah,” the boy said, wiping. “Usually worse.”

  The hermit left the inn, moved through the town with reservation. He wanted to head home, but he felt the need to unload this second leg first.

  He stopped a grubby woman who busied herself setting out trinkets to sell. She had a cart that she worked from, but he couldn’t see common traits to the things she sold. There were lightbulbs and pocketknives and eyeglasses and measuring cups, so perhaps she was kindred to him somehow, and he wondered about his own diversified possessions back home, and he wished he had them so he could set up a stand to rival her own. “Think there’d be a market for this?” He showed her the leg.

  “Dear God,” she said. “It’s too turned for the machine.”

  “Tried the machine yesterday, but they didn’t want it.”

  “Well,” she polished up some of her wares, “I can’t think a use for it beyond that, but who knows, you might get lucky.”

  The streets were ghost-town run down, morning-after ill. “When’s the town get going?”

  “When it does,” the woman said.

  The hermit walked the lonely place, his only company the rotting leg’s foulness.

  Suggestion

  Jilly and Mole deliberated while Baby Boo kept Murk, Bale, and Mira at gunpoint.

  “I mean,” said Jilly, “if he’s behind a train, we kill him. If he’s running away from a train we’re attacking, we kill him.”

  “Yeah, but if they throw him out. Is he technically still a domer?”

  “If that little redheaded fucker did what he was told, we wouldn’t even have to deal with this shit.”

  “When we find him, I’m gonna ask for a different position.”

  Murk, Mira, and Bale communicated with their eyes and Murk made to change the topic. “How long ago he go missing? This redhead? Maybe we can help.”

  “None your fucking business,” said Jilly.

  “Y’all try the town?”

  “I ain’t going to that rat-shit place to hobnob with miscreants like you. That boy went there he can stay there as far as I’m concerned.”

  “We could go look for you.” Murk wriggled a bit where he sat. “We’re headed that way.”

  Baby Boo put the barrel of her rifle against Murk’s forehead.

  “Just a suggestion.” Murk backed off it all.

  The breakfast fire crackled and some dark sense of anticipation seemed tethered to its crackling. A notion of doom in the wood’s turning to embers.

  “Wait, there might be something to that,” said Mole. “I mean, the town’s probably filled with his kind of people. Scum draws scum to scum. Usually.”

  “Sure,” said Jilly, “but we just gonna let ’em waltz off with nothing but our trust to guide their way.”

  “We wouldn’t just be trusting them,” Mole said.

  Into Town

  “We shouldn’t’ve left him.” Mira said.

  “I don’t know we had a choice.”

  “Murk, what the hell are we doing?” She scanned his burnt-looking eyes.

  “Going to find Clover. Going to town.”

  “And then? Who knows what they’ll do to Bale when we come back empty-handed.”

  They moved from the brush into a field of sun-destroyed grass, the blades of it near ossified and yellow as plaque—a crunchy carpet of lifeless growth. Hundreds of yards off, the town stood. A shabby thing that sprang from charred buildings which slunk with decay, and graffitied walls stood lonesome and untethered. Here and there, roofs from old houses sat leveled on the ground. Telephone poles like ancient tombstones cocked this way and that in gangly fashion. A putrid reek of long-dead something.

  Murk snorted a deep breath of it. “Yeah, it’s a half-baked agenda we got, but what are the options? You said yourself the comet’s coming soon, so if this does work we gotta find out fast.”

  “Maybe we should just make camp a day, go back and say we didn’t see him. Just see what transpires.”

  “And not even try?” They both stood still, disregarding the town. “That would be a waste of so many steps. It’s fear you got.”

  “Probably.”

  Murk patted her shoulder. “I’ll go. You wait for me.”

  “Really? Think that would be better? Just me? Here? Alone?”

  Murk studied the area. “Yeah, probably not.”

  “Give me a second,” Mira said.

  Murk kneeled, drank what shadow he had.

  “When I say leave we leave.”

  “Of course,” said Murk.

  “And I want a kind of password.”

  “Password?”

  “Or a signal. Something only you know. So if I say it or do it, we’re out.”

  “Name it.”

  Mira thought. “A world with two suns,” she said. “I say that, and we go.”

  “I like it,” said Murk. “You could sing it, even.”

  “Fuck that,” said Mira. “I ain’t singing your song.”

  Then they made their way through the wasting field.

  Bale with the Women

  “You said they had to come back by tomorrow,” Bale said. “But what time tomorrow? Sunrise? Noon?”

  “You don’t need to know that,” Jilly said.

  Bale fought against his restraints a bit. “But I mean, if you’re gonna shoot me, it’d be nice to know how much time I’m looking at.”

  Jilly had revulsion in her eyes. “You think most people know when they’re gonna die? You think that’s a convenience the Lord should give us? That we are eternally aware of the events leading up to our perishing? Given some sort of parameters by which to verify the coming of our demise? You thin
k Mole and I should lay that out for you? That we should bless you with an understanding of your death beyond that which most receive? Because I assure you most people’s death comes as an absolute shock to them. Comes in the night while they sleep or from the brilliant who knows where in the form of a bullet. Strikes them down while they are deep in a state of unawares and doesn’t even give them time enough to make a brief amends to God or whoever they love, and they might die with sin in their mouths and hate in their soul. But we should treat you better? Why? So you can get right with whatever dome deity you swear to, lay it all out bare to them. Profess your sorrow internally that your lord might forgive all your malfeasances? Nope. I’ve known better people than you who never got that luxury, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna do better by you than them. Why would you even deserve that?”

  Bale clicked his pretty teeth. “Just making small talk, I guess.”

  Mole kneeled in the dirt. Mole tended the fire.

  Meeting Doc

  When they entered the town, folks looked up from their doings with suspicious eyes. A single wanderer, upon entering that township, might go relatively unnoticed, but for there to be two strangers emerging into the dawdling street seemed oddball, a near insurrection brewing.

  Whispers flittered, shoulders were touched. Folks went telling other folks, the way the curious do. “Come look,” they’d say to one another, and this curiosity was not lost on Mira and Murk.

  “I think it’s you that’s drawing their attention,” said Mira.

  “Shit, I might as well have been born on this street. Bet they all think they’ve seen me before.” Murk waved at one of the whisperers. Said simply, “Howdy.”

  The man he spoke at was a gritty little beast, his rat features tense and nervous, a coating on him like chalk dust. “The hell y’all from?” he asked, shooing toward Murk. He stood askance on a wooden walkway, a creaking sound coming from his footing as he gestured.

  “Around,” Murk said.

  From far enough away, perhaps there was an order to it, but slunk into the trimmings of it, the town was a chaotic contraption. Every action seemed accident driven.

  They turned up a street and were met by a small crowd carrying clubs. The man in front pointed at Murk, “You’re a peg legger,” he said.

  “Mighty astute of you,” said Murk.

  “Y’all gonna have to come with me.”

  “That’s a bit forward, ain’t it? I don’t even know your name.”

  “It’s Monroe,” Monroe said.

  “That don’t fit our plans.”

  “Adjust them then. Or we can adjust them for you.”

  Mira quickly counted about a dozen men clutching some manner of crude weaponry. “It’s okay,” she said. “We can make time for you.”

  Monroe led them through the belch-scented streets, in and out of catastrophic herds of black-eyed drudgers—limp and staggering, a dirge in the noise of their lowly to and fro. They worked their way to Doc and his machine, and Doc sat on his stool—the humble throne he held dominion from. “I like your jacket,” Doc said. He shook hands with Murk and Mira. “What brings you?”

  “To town?” Murk said. “Our steps. To you?” he continued. “These people.”

  “Monroe,” Doc said, “go relax somewhere.”

  “Close by, Doc?”

  “Close enough.” Doc had Murk and Mira follow him toward the machine. “Folks like you sometimes come to town for vengeance or something, so I intercept the legless and armless as they enter, bring ’em over to ascertain their intentions. Your leg’s not here.”

  “I’m not looking for it.”

  “But you’re looking for something.”

  “Just somebody,” Mira said. “It’s not important.”

  Doc pocketed his knuckles, leaned back a bit. “Well, if they’re here, I know it. Not much happens in this town I don’t know. Your eyes aren’t black.”

  “Neither are yours.”

  Doc fondled one of the hands that dangled from the machine. He fingered its fingers, and the hand seemed to pull away slightly, ball into a fist. “Never had the notion. Who is it you’re after?”

  “I’d rather not say.” The hands on the machine squirmed somewhat.

  “No harm in looking for someone.”

  “Listen,” said Mira. “We don’t want to end up on your machine.”

  “I don’t put whole people up there. Sorensen asks: When we shake hands, do our shadows become one?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We can shake on it. Tell me who you’re after, and I’ll promise you won’t end up on my machine. I’m curious is the thing. You have my attention.”

  Mira and Murk communed with their eyes.

  “Well?” said Doc.

  Mira stepped toward Doc, held out her hand. The two shook, but, on the earth, where Doc’s shadow fell, it was as if he shook hands with nothing.

  “Joe Clover,” Mira said.

  Doc chuckled at the sky, called out, “Monroe, they’ve come to town to find Clover.” And Monroe’s men broke into hoopla, some of them rolling—an over-exaggerated bemusement at the notion.

  “I don’t get it,” said Mira.

  “See this leg here,” Doc took up a leg, its flesh discoloring. “This came to me yesterday, and it’s not gonna take. You can tell right?” he ran the back of his finger down the limb. “Just looks unhealthy.” Doc grabbed the leg and snapped it from its housing and blood drooled off the end of it. “I pull ’em once I can tell.” He tossed it away to the dirt. “It’d be too hard on my machine to leave it up there decaying, and Joe Clover was kind of like that. A thing that was turning.” Doc caressed a few more feet, just sort of slightly touching the heels. “Y’all come with me,” he said.

  Mira and Murk followed to a building’s door. A sign on the wall said jail house.

  “What’s in there?” asked Mira.

  Doc beamed at the sign. “What you’re after.”

  The smell of the place was noxious. Moist, human odors and rust.

  They heard stirring before their eyes adjusted to the dim light.

  “Who’s with you?” a voice asked.

  “Visitors,” said Doc.

  “I don’t know ’em.”

  “Well they know you.”

  “I like the look of the one. She a gift?” Clover stood there naked, started pawing his cock.

  “Knock it off,” said Doc.

  “Wanna be my creature?” he asked Mira.

  “I’ll call in Monroe.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Doc,” he said, “Just put her against the bars.” His voice raspy with lust.

  “Monroe!” hollered Doc, and Monroe came in, his eyes alert. “Restrain him,” Doc said pointing at Clover, and Monroe opened the cage, thumped Clover a few times with his fists, drove him to the ground and pulled an arm behind his back.

  “Fucking Monroe prick,” Clover hollered. “Put her in here, Doc. Just a little favor.” Clover leered up at Mira with his butchered hair and sickened eyes, and he grinded against the floor, sort of whispering, “Creature,” up at her.

  “Well,” said Doc, “hope y’all didn’t come far. That is about what he has to offer.”

  The sound of Clover’s struggle, his creaturing.

  “Mind if I kill him?” said Murk. There seemed no sense in lying.

  “I figured anybody looking for Clover would want to, but, no, I can’t let it happen. Don’t get me wrong, he deserves it. Probably deserves a million different deaths for a million different reasons, but as of now he is dying a death he deserves for tampering with me, and the death I have chosen for him is a prolonged one.”

  Clover’s face twitched, he gritted teeth, screeched, “Creature.” And Monroe thumped the back of his head a few times, and one shot must’ve got him good, because he quit fucking the floor, quit whisper
ing creature.

  Inside the small prison, that last bit of struggle reverberated. Somewhere, water slurped into a foul-smelling drain.

  “There’s no sun in here,” said Murk.

  “No sun, no joy, no laughter. Not for Clover.”

  Monroe got up, stepped out of the cell, turned and locked it.

  Silence owned the room.

  Mira watched Clover hunkered in his nakedness, his skin gray with filth. She looked to the other cell, brimming with treasures. “What’s all that?”

  “My things,” Doc told her. “Stuff I like.”

  Mira’s mouth hung open. Murk just shifted weight.

  “It’s not how you wanted it to go. I can tell just by looking, but it doesn’t have to be all bad. Stay. Enjoy yourself. Have a drink at the bar on me. You’ll be safe your whole stay, and that’s a better deal than most visitors get.” He put his thumbs in his vest pockets. “I mean, don’t do anything stupid. But by all means, enjoy yourselves.”

  Bale and the Women

  Baby Boo watched Bale as Jilly and Mole took naps.

  In the fire, a log cracked in half, the top end of it upsetting into the ashes below with a thud, and Jilly sat up, brought her rifle to her shoulder, aimed it at Bale. She surveyed the scene. Sat back assured that all was well.

  Then Mole sat up, shocked. “What is it?” she yelped.

  “Oh ain’t you a ninja,” Jilly said to her. “Or like a cowboy that sleeps with his eyes open watching the herd for fear of wolves.”

  “Shut up,” said Mole and she laid back on the grass.

  “Wait,” said Jilly. “Tell him your story.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just the way you told it to me. See if he likes it any better.”

  “Nah.”

  “C’mon, Mole, it’ll help me get back to sleep.”

  “Fine.” She sat up and faced Bale. “My uncle had a tiny dick,” she said. “And it had a funny flavor.”

  Jilly had a big old grin on, watching Bale to see his reaction.