Cicada

by Eric, Laing, J.

  By his mid-twenties, John Sayre was a man admired, looked upon with countless approving nods as a man’s man. He was at once quiet and strong, of steadfast character and no-nonsense to the core. Who among them did not envy his character and wish that if not they, then perhaps their sons, might be more like him? The truth was, however, all of those admirable traits were sown from a ground of shame and guilt. At his foundation he was a coward with his horrible lie tucked away and buried beneath a façade. And this was undeniable because in his heart that was how he perceived himself. Not one but John Sayre knew that he was the saddest excuse for a man that most men would ever meet.

  The truth of the matter was that John Sayre wasn’t dealing with the mere guilt of a hunting accident. He had loved his brother, yes, but he also at times had despised him; upon occasion he’d fallen bitterly jealous of him. John was forever in his brother’s shadow and knew he forever would be. The little brother. Their father swelled when he talked of Walter. There seemed none of that left over for John. The little brother. Girls looked past John. He was invisible behind the handsome and dashing Walter Sayre; he was lost in his big brother’s shadow. Walter, the one who could do no wrong. Walter, who had died in such a senseless, tragic accident.

  But, no, not an accidently entirely.

  For John knew the whole story regarding his brother’s death. The whole truth. He had never admitted that he had shoved his brother. No, he’d not come that far clean. Even worse, he’d spent years lying to himself, agreeing with the others…what a senseless, tragic accident. But in a far corner of his heart and the dark recesses of his mind the truth was always there.

  The truth was John had seen those yellow jackets first, all along. The truth was he knew Walter was allergic to them. The truth was he had shoved his brother Walter into them…on purpose.

  ...

  Fifty-two miles east of Melby—along a state road that saw very little traffic except for tourists—there nestled together a small conglomeration of businesses, two small motels, a gas station, and a greasy spoon diner. It was all the commerce that could be supported by the diehard Civil War enthusiasts who visited there to tramp over the several hundred nondescript acres of state park dedicated in memoriam to a skirmish that had taken place there nearly a century before.

  The two motels were The Blue Motel, on the south side of the road, and The Gray Motel, on the north. At least once a month the desk clerk at one or the other was suffered to explain to would-be lodgers, busy-bodies, or know-it-alls, that the names were not in error, but that those were the directions from which the two armies had once clashed for two bitter winter days.

  While that was true, an even greater truth was that the two opposing motel signs had indeed been erected in error, but at too great an expense to do anything but concoct the battlefield-clash excuse to remedy the blunder.

  Invariably, even though the two nearly identical motels were situated in the Deep South, The Blue Motel faired a bit better in taking in guests since most that came to see the memorial traveled from one of the Northern states to do so. The Confederates had lost this particular confrontation and it seemed most self-respecting Southerners weren’t interested in such a reminder. So, in their own small way, even after the passage of so many years, the two little motels seemed to keep the great conflict alive. Or at least, so their patrons were led to believe.

  Actually, if The Gray Motel was having a bad week, it was quite common for the desk clerk at The Blue to ignite the neon “No Vacancy” sign even when it still had rooms to spare, since what the staff of both motels knew—and what was never to be disclosed to the guests—was that the two establishments were owned by the same man, Hammond Marshall. Hammond didn’t like to think that the employees at The Gray had it easier on any given day, and further, he liked disappointing the occasional Yankee by sending them across the street to stay at The Gray Motel.

  “I think the rooms over at The Blue are better. Don’t you?” Cicada said, sprawling out between the thin cotton sheets of the room’s queen bed. She was damp with perspiration and the linens clung wherever they met with her otherwise naked skin.

  The air of the small room was stale from the uncomfortable odor of others, the endless nights of drunken conversations punctuated by cigarettes and spilt drinks. Cicada thought for a second time about throwing the single window open, only to remember that their one lonely pane was not only painted, but also nailed shut.

  “I think I know now why they call this one ‘The Gray,’” she bemoaned with a snicker of disdain. “Like mildewed soot…or worse,” she went on chatting to herself while her companion in the bathroom either didn’t hear or chose not to reply.

  The ceiling fan droned on, revolving in its one slow speed as it barely circulated the unpleasant air.

  “Sorry, water was runnin’. What’s that then?” John Sayre said as his nude frame suddenly took up the open bathroom doorway.

  Chapter Ten

  “Everything alright?” Cicada asked.

  She’d walked alone down the road, coming up from behind and unnoticed by John, who was seated alone in his truck. Now she was standing near the faded and cracked dividing line of a lonely county road. She normally wouldn’t have bothered to stop—especially out in the middle of nowhere as they were—but the truck wasn’t nearly off the road and was more askew than perpendicular. As she’d approached, she thought that perhaps the driver might have suffered some medical emergency that’d left the vehicle so peculiarly pulled to the side. The real explanation was that John had hoped to be found quickly following his suicide, before the heat and the passage of time disfigured him; the last of many odd considerations from a man intent on blowing out the back of his head.

  For the rest of her life, when she thought of John Sayre—which she was compelled by the world about her to do from time to time—Cicada would usually begin by recalling that first meeting when she initially thought she must have surprised the stranger in the middle of some indecent act.

  John startled, his cheeks a bloom of crimson, and his hands fidgeted wildly, concealed from view by the truck door.

  “Oh, hey,” he blurted.

  The sound of something heavy falling onto the floorboard was made even more curious by his lack of acknowledging it.

  Drunk, Cicada concluded silently to herself, imagining it was a bottle that’d fallen from his lap.

  “I’m sorry...I thought...sorry,” she said, holding out a palm to stay him as she cautiously started to walk away.

  Why he decided to suddenly get out of his truck he never knew, but when he looked back later on that first meeting, he considered it was mostly because even those who court death almost always grasp for any excuse to stay among the living.

  “No, no…really…no, it’s okay,” John said, shielding his eyes as he stepped out and squinted about at the bright day. “Jesus, but ain’t it hot, huh?”

  Cicada might have been more startled if he hadn’t been so handsome. But he was, and she was naïve and still sure in her innocence that no one so attractive could mean trouble. Instead of moving away—as such an encounter warranted—she not only stopped and turned to face him, but even took a tentative step in his direction. So then, from that very beginning they were drawn to one another.

  She offered to break their awkward moment when he didn’t speak further after several long seconds. “You break down?” she asked.

  “Break down?” he parroted her dumbly, before catching himself. “Um, no. I just was…. Say, you sure are out here a ways.”

  “Not really. We have a place just around yonder.” The young woman barely motioned with an index finger to indicate some place unknown to John that lay farther up the road. “I was checking in on a neighbor,” she added. “She’s elderly. You know…with the heat and such as it’s been.”

  “Yeah. No…that’s right Christian of ya. So y’all moved into those, um…yeah.”

  “Yeah, that’s us,” she said with a shake of her head and a bit of laughter. “
You’re the one out a ways. Lost?”

  “Lost? No. I’ve lived around these parts my whole life. Couldn’t lose myself if I wanted to.” As he spoke he tasted the gun oil again. It seemed to be the only thing keeping his cottonmouth at bay. “Name’s John. John Sayre.”

  Cicada considered his hand as he held it out to her. They were the calloused hands of a farmer. Beneath the nails were the traces of diesel, grease, and earth, the skin of his knuckles cracked and pink from toil. She paused just long enough to make him uncomfortable, but then stepped forward shyly and shook his hand just when he thought she might not.

  “Hello, John Sayre. I’m Cicada.”

  She expected some sort of ridiculous remark at her introduction, the kind that she’d become all too used to. To her surprise, however, John only returned her coy smile and said, “Nice to make your acquaintance, Cicada.”

  John teased a loose stone on the macadam at his feet with the toe of his work boot. Cicada watched him closely, not sure herself of how they were to proceed, and that was when fate intervened.

  A truck—nearly as rust brown in color as the dried mud that spackled almost the whole of it—suddenly hurtled around the curve in the road less than a quarter of a mile behind them. It slid crazily off the hardtop and then back on again, snaking and spitting up gravel and earth as it did. Cicada turned to face it, but stood fast at her place in the middle of the road, momentarily dumbstruck by the unexpected intrusion. Fortunately, John had the presence of mind to reach out and pull her to him. The truck sped by in a matter of seconds with a blast of wind and noise. The radio blared out static-laced country music that was all but incomprehensible amongst the roar of the engine and the rumble of massive tires. In its wake the truck carried along a foul mix of dust and exhaust, with the latter pouring out thick from its sick, oil-burning engine. The filth on the windshield and the glare of the sun had concealed the occupants until the last moment, but as it passed, the passenger, a gap-toothed man that John knew, but would’ve rather not, leered over a dangling sun-burnt arm.

  John and Cicada just had time to look to one another and then back to the barreling truck before it shuddered to a skidding halt a few hundred yards up the road. Neither John nor Cicada could hear its radio anymore, but the over-throttled engine shook the chassis with a rumbling idle that sounded something like an angry animal. The tailgate was the vehicle’s most remarkable feature now. The stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag painted over its entirety. Even from the distance, it was clear that it wasn’t a professional job. The colors were accurate enough, but the two crossing bars weren’t the same thickness, with some stars along them unequal and uneven in spacing and dimensions. Furthermore, those stars along the upper right hand portion of the flag were squished together so tightly that the last two looked like a dividing amoeba.

  Three pounds of stupid in a two pound sack, John had remarked once to his wife when they’d first seen the truck some years earlier.

  Above the flag, through the haze of exhaust, heat, and more dirty glass, the head and shoulders of the three occupants—as tightly squeezed together as the stars of the tailgate’s flag—could just be made out bobbing about excitedly inside the cab.

  “You need a ride somewheres?” John offered to Cicada without taking his eyes off of the idling truck.

  “Sure, yeah. Thanks.”

  Normally John would have opened the door for a woman, but on this occasion he stood motionless as she stepped around to let herself in. It was only when he remembered the pistol on the floorboard that he moved quickly to get in before she could. In one swift motion he leapt up into the cab, and, as he leaned over to open her door, he used his heel to kick the gun up under the seat.

  “I’m just up the road here a piece,” she said as she slid in.

  John stared at the truck still waiting in the middle of the road in front of them and then he looked across to Cicada who didn’t take her eyes off the crooked flag.

  “You got a little time for a ride?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I was thinking of driving over the Little Wassee Bridge to see if the old boys are catching anything,” he said, pointing a thumb back over his shoulder.

  Cicada glanced behind them following John’s gesture and then looked back ahead to the truck barring their way. “Sure. Why not? That’d be…fun,” she said. It sounded more like she was admitting to having a stomachache.

  “Great.”

  John turned the engine over and began backing up quickly, both of them silently thankful that the other truck stayed in place. As John sharply swung his truck around back onto the road, pointing it in the other direction all in one swift motion, they both couldn’t help but notice as the handgun slid free from where moments ago he’d kicked it into concealment up under his seat. John looked down at it and then back up in time to see the young woman do the same.

  With the heel of his boot John slid the gun back into the dark beneath him and so they drove on in silence.

  Chapter Eleven

  “How long you been a farmer?” Buckshot inquired. It was his seventh or eighth question in half as many minutes.

  “I don’t know…long time,” Ben answered from somewhere beneath the weathered, once-bright-green John Deere tractor. Only his lower half, soiled blue jeans and scuffed work boots, had been visible for the whole of this, their first conversation. Above Ben’s head, the otherwise quiet engine was still clicking and ticking, radiating off the heat it had accumulated before malfunction had silenced it. The man and the boy were well out in the far, freshly-tilled fields of the Sayre farm, and so other than the engine’s small sounds and their brief conversation, the world was quiet.

  “You must be fierce hot up under there, huh?” Buckshot prodded. He was straddling the frame of his bicycle with his arms folded over the handlebars.

  “Mm-hmm,” Ben agreed.

  Even if the little white boy didn’t know it, he’d made a good point. Ben didn’t possess much in know-how in the ways of mechanics, certainly not enough to spend fifteen minutes staring dumbly at the underside of a tractor in search of the elusive cause of the damnable thing’s cantankerous sputtering and repeated stalling. He slid out. He wiped his sweaty hands on his trousers and unclasped the engine hood and peered once more at the mysterious collection of metal innards within. Unfortunately for Ben there was still no obviously loose wire, dangling hose or broken belt offering a ready and quick solution.

  “Where are your tools? Can’t see how ya can fix no tractor engine without tools. If ya had some, I could help. I’m real good at help on account of I know the names of most tools and so when ya ask I could hand ‘em to ya.”

  With a look that conveyed as much as words could have, Ben burned with frustration over his shoulder down onto the boy who’d eased ever-closer on his bicycle. The big man’s stare made Buckshot nervous, and he realized he was probably running off at the mouth again, as his father, John, sometimes scolded. Nonetheless, Buckshot was for the moment bored, and forever persistent, so he held his ground.

  “I like to help,” he said, kicking a clump of tilled earth.

  “I can see that.”

  Buckshot squinted as he looked up again at Ben, who seemed, Buckshot thought at that moment, almost big enough to block out the whole bright sky of that summer’s incredible sun. Ben finally shook his head and chuckled, a sound that the boy appreciated greatly. The farmhand carefully secured the hood and with a grunt he clamored back up into the driver’s seat.

  “I don’t think your ol’ man would appreciate it none too much if I run his tractor into the ground way out here in the field, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  He considered the boy more closely for a moment more before a friendly smile came to the big man, and then the farmhand suddenly called out as if he were directing a fellow cowboy in a cattle drive.

  “You ride on ahead and get that barn door open for me, ya hear. We’re taking her in!” And then he added under his breath,
“If the damned thing can make it that far.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  As the old tractor coughed and startled to life once more, Buckshot took the lead, racing down a rut in the field, happy to help, just as he’d made claim.

  Back in the utility barn—the smaller of three on the property where the tractor stayed parked when not in use—the air was almost cool in comparison. Cooler, but still far from comfortable. Buckshot stood at the open doorway waving madly as if Ben needed his direction to successfully navigate the tractor into its place.

  “Clear way now!” Ben yelled as he passed. His direction was just as superfluous; Buckshot had already scurried away.

  As if seeming to somehow know that it was where it belonged and sensing no more was required of it, the tractor coughed and stalled even as Ben was reaching forward to cut the ignition, just managing to roll into the indentions in the earth where it was kept.

  “We made it!” Buckshot over-dramatically proclaimed. His was the breathless relief of a bomber co-pilot to his comrade after the safe landing of their badly-crippled flying fortress, managed home against all odds on little more than prayer and favorable winds.

  “Yeah, mighty, we just did at that,” the pilot acknowledged.

  Ben stayed seated atop the old tractor looking over it with a mother’s concern as his eyes adjusted to the shadows of the barn. After a moment he reached over his head with both of his massive arms and pulled off his soiled cotton t-shirt. There in the half-light, the sweat that glistened off his skin gave him a ghostly sheen along his otherwise darkened form.