by Rich Balling
Sandeep has definitely seen the kid hanging around the neighborhood. He doesn’t know whose kid he is, but Sandeep doesn’t like how he looks. He guesses the kid doesn’t like him either, his brown skin, a lot of them don’t. It could have been this kid yelling out the window of that car the other night, “sand Nigger!” That one’s not in the puzzles.
The kid puts the Forty on the counter.
Sandeep glares down at him. “You got I.D.?” he asks.
The kid just stares back, his arms crossed. His hands shake a little.
Sandeep leans forward on the counter. “No I.D., no beer,” he says. “Got it?”
Blasting a Latin pop song out of an open window, a car passes by Howland and Mrs. Tilson as they stand on the sidewalk. Howland knows that Bill was some sort of carpenter, or construction worker. He was a little younger than Howland, a big guy, but in shape, and he had some sort of tattoo on his bicep, a fading black and green symbol, but Howland can’t remember exactly. Howland can see Mrs. Tilson’s dark roots, her real hair, about an inch or so before the red starts. She has to be thirty-five, thirty-six.
“Well, hey,” she says. “I gotta get back. Thanks for the smoke.”
“O.K. No problem. I’ll see you around then.”
“Right. Have a good one.”
She edges past him on the sidewalk. Howland watches as she goes by, her thighs white and smooth in the bright sun. She’s all right, he thinks. He tries to remember the last time he got laid, but he can’t.
The kid reaches into his sweatshirt. He pulls out a pistol and jams it into Sandeep’s neck. The silver of the gun contrasts with his smooth brown skin. Sandeep half expects the kid to say something clever, like in a movie. How’s this for I.D.? But he says nothing. Sandeep longs for his own gun, which is sitting next to the safe at knee level. I never should have leaned forward, he thinks. That was a stupid, stupid mistake. The kid pushes the gun harder into Sandeep’s neck, forcing his head to the side, and grabs him by the hair.
“The register,” he says.
“Hey Anne!” Howland calls.
Mrs. Tilson stops and turns to look at him.
Howland has no memories of her before the night her husband left. Surely, he’s had some sort of interaction with her—a nod in the street, a hello at the corner store. He had known Bill, at least in passing. They would always stop and talk Red Sox when they bumped into each other. But the first memory he has is of her standing there, yelling as the car drives away.
“What?” she asks. She holds the six-pack on her slightly cocked hip.
“We should get a drink sometime,” he says. “If you feel like it.”
Mrs. Tilson shrugs. “Yeah, maybe. I’ll see you.” She turns and continues walking down the sidewalk. Howland scratches his belly. He wishes he were wearing a shirt. He needs some beer to get him through the worst of the heat, and then later he’ll need something a bit stronger. He shuts his eyes tight and tilts his head toward the sky. The sun burns bright yellow through his closed lids, and it feels very heavy and makes him very tired. It’s hard to do things when it’s like this, he thinks. It saps your strength.
“The register,” the kid says again. He pulls Sandeep’s hair tighter in his fist.
Sandeep reaches over awkwardly. The kid is pulling his head in one direction and the register is in the other. Sandeep’s fingers glide over the buttons, knowing each and every one by size and position, like Braille. Then he finds the right one, hits it, and the drawer pops open. He pulls bills out of their slots, first the ones, then the fives, then the tens, and places them on the counter. But no twenties. Sandeep puts the twenties through the slit in the time-release safe underneath the register. He takes no chances.
The kid releases his hair and regards the money. The gun is still pressed into Sandeep’s neck. The kid grabs a handful of cash and shows it to Sandeep. “What the fuck is this?” He drops the money and takes Sandeep by the hair again, this time pulling his head down, across the counter, until they are face to face. The kid’s eyes are drab and brown, and his pupils are huge, blown way out of proportion as if he were trying to see in a dark room. His breath smells of what? Corn flakes? Sandeep wonders if the kid can smell his breath, and if he can recognize the yogurt he has eaten earlier, if it is sweet, or foul, or not remarkable at all. He’s surprised he’s not shaking.
“Is this all?” asks the kid. “Is this it?”
Sandeep nods. The safe won’t open for hours, there’s nothing he can do. He’s going to die at the hands of a stupid kid, a fucking white kid, probably too stupid to hold down a job. So stupid that he robs a liquor store in own neighborhood where lots of people are sure to know who he is.
“They’ll know it was you,” says Sandeep. For a second, Sandeep thinks he sees understanding in the kid’s expression.
“shut up,” says the kid. He brings the pistol up and then swings it hard down on Sandeep’s head.
Sandeep slides to the floor behind the register, catching a blurred view of the kid picking up the small bills and stuffing them in his pants pocket. O.K., thinks Sandeep. That’s O.K. He sees his own gun sitting there next to the safe, resting beside his crossword. How about that gun? That’s going to be big surprise, I bet. He reaches for it, but his arm feels too heavy. It must weigh as much as that safe, he thinks. Instead he picks up the crossword, about half-filled in. “stagnant” intersects with “Misapprehend.”
“Bitch.” The kid is peering over the counter at Sandeep on the floor. He puts his gun back into his sweatshirt and picks up the forty of Old English. He turns and walks toward the exit.
Sandeep hears his footsteps on the linoleum. He can just see the fish-eye mirror from his spot on the floor, but he can’t find the kid in it. He sees rows of bottles distorted in the reflective surface, blown up like brown bowling pins, and the ghosts of colored lights from the neon signs on the windows of his store. I wish I had that gun, he thinks.
Howland kicks a Coke can as he walks through the liquor store parking lot. A couple of steps, kick. A few more steps, kick. What had Mrs. Tilson been yelling that time? Howland knows he’ll go to work that night, stand outside the Foodmaster, and everything will be quiet, and he’ll think, just as he always does. He’ll replay the day’s events in his mind, and he’ll wonder what his wife is doing, who she’s with, what’s going on in her head. Is she fucking that guy from work, that Rodney? Maybe some other guy in her office, some guy who had probably been sniffing around just waiting for Howland to leave, waiting for an opening, a chance to move in. He kicks the Coke can. Has Tina seen it? Does she know what’s going on?
A kid comes out of the liquor store with a forty-ounce beer. He’s skinny. He glances once at Howland and turning sharply to the right, hurries down the street. Howland watches him go; he looks familiar. That red hair, those camouflage pants—not a likely combination. A neighborhood kid. How could they be selling him beer?
Howland hurries to the entrance of the liquor store and shoves the door open. He sees no one, no customers, no one behind the register. The Pakistani guy who is always there—always—he’s missing. Howland pants in the air-conditioned store. His chest heaves. In the reflection of the cooler glass, in the fluorescent lights, his belly looks whiter, paler than ever.
“Hey!”
Nobody answers. Howland’s fists are clenched and raised.
“Hey! Somebody better answer me! You can’t sell beer to children!”
The liquor store is silent.
“Goddamn it! Somebody has to answer!” Howland pumps his arms helplessly.
In the fish-eye mirror the fat man looks funny, distorted. “Indistinct”? Wasn’t that a clue? Sandeep raises his head to look for his crossword and sees it in his hand, rolled up in a tube. Now, just give me a pencil, he thinks, and I will write it in.
CHRIS HAYNIE
From The Honey Ditch
VI. Dead Christmas
About a million years ago when I was in school and worrying about the ins and outs of
every little path to the promised land, I used to walk home with this girl for cookies and TV. It was so goddamned cold on those half miles home, and at the end of them warm doorways and rationed pop. But I guess you know how cold doesn’t matter a fucking bit when there’s someone like her.
That’s how it all works, falling in love with a million coincidences, hoping that you’re not just noticing these things now.
Praying for rainy days so her mom would invite you in “until it lets up,” and in her bedroom, grasping over damp clothes, saying things to her slow so they would sound eight times more profound and a million times brilliant.
I never believed in God and she never believed in showing up late to church. I respected her for believing in God the way she did. But Sundays could get lonely when there were only your own damp clothes hugging you.
I’d go out to the woods on those days, looking up to the treetops and shooting the shit with myself. Sneaking up slow behind bushes to keep from scaring deer. They heard me and kssh ksssh, away they went.
My grandpa took us out there a lot when I was young, but I had to take myself out there when I got older because he started spending afternoons with Jim Beam.
I took her out there on some Sunday, after much persuasion and hand grabbing, and showed her the same places he had shown me a million and half years before when I was ten.
We stumbled through the woods, slow-walking at first, then breaking into a full run to pretend-escape the rain, and fell down and we picked each other up, and the rain soaked through our clothes and we collapsed on the ground and looked up to the sky and watched the rain fall on us. We were a million and a half miles away from everything and stupid and naive and falling in love with each other and every second.
The weather was furious with us, and it let us know with a fresh torrent. We abandoned our clearing and made our way deeper into the woods as one last protest to Sunday deadlines.
I found the river a few hundred feet later and stopped at the ledge above it and I said: “say hello to the river, Carrie!”
“say ’hello’!”
We slid down the embankment and managed to make it about halfway across before the water was up to our pockets and we turned back. Climbing back up the hill, we saw something we hadn’t seen in the embankment on our way down; about 15 feet of box-shaped decaying planks enveloped by the mud.
It spurred something in my memory. And I remembered my grandpa taking me out there on a just terrible cold day, and the snow was beating down on us as we looked for dry wood. And it had gotten so rough, just so cold.
•
And he said, “It’ll clear up, just wait.”
So we did and it didn’t, and we spent more than a few hours gathering wood, waiting for it to finish up.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said.
He lit a cigarette and I remembered being out there with him and watching the smoke make its way past his face as we walked fast to nowhere, searching for a place to take some refuge from the snow, as it had gotten too bad to go back.
It was getting heavier and colder and the snow was keeping us from moving and I had never seen him so close to giving up on anything before.
“There it is…” he said, laughing to himself, “The goddamned honey ditch.”
•
We looked at the structure and she grabbed my hand. The building, a telling grey-green now from a hundred years of snow, barely resembled what it was when my grandfather built it. My grandfather was also a beekeeper, of all things.
“Keep yourself moving, Davie,” he told me on some dead Christmas.
“Keep yourself moving because there’s always someone catching up with you.”
How much gravity that might have had was negated by the aftershave of that coarse man, overpowering and skewing an eight-year-old’s conception of the future or its responsibilities.
We made our way to the foot of the embankment and scurried up the ledge, making our way to the mud-effaced structure.
I ran my hands over the decayed wood and it was a hundred years ago again.
•
My grandfather was telling me to tie the rest of the wood together while he looked for the door. I took off my gloves to tie rope around the bundle of wood and the cold burned me pretty bad and it was tough to concentrate and I kept looking up to see if he had managed to get in the door yet.
•
She crouched next to me and we looked at the door, frantically searching the same wood to cajole an opening. After a few minutes of digging mud away from flaking paint and pine, we found a boarded entrance and the nails gave way to our prying. I looked at her and motioned for her to go first and she smiled back at me and pushed me through the door.
•
He had found the door under snow and black leaves, and we crouched inside and managed to close the door behind us. He took a book of matches from the inside of his coat and the lights came on.
•
We searched the cabin, through old boxes where the bees were kept and found some matches and got an oil lamp going and talked about the rain and her life outside of the woods and she pinned me on the floor and kissed me, and a thread of light caught her hair and for a second all I could see was auburn sunshine.
•
“I’d bring your mother out here when she was a girl, for whole summers nearly, smoking these bees and jarring, and we’d wash out in the river afterward.”
He offered me a cigarette, and I took it because a feeling somewhere between diplomacy and longing told me to, and I stomached the smoke and coughed out choppy clouds in response to his drawn out inhales and graceful exhales.
•
I touched her hair and we rolled on the damp wood floor and fumbled for each other and the cold of the rain encased us in the room and she took off her shirt and I didn’t know what the hell to do so I took off mine and Christ we were only 15 and I kissed her a little longer and we put our jackets around us and slept.
We woke up and the one string of light creeping through the doorway had crept down to our feet and she saw me looking at the door and pulled my head back towards her face.
“I love you, Davie.”
“sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
John Gourley
Portugal. The Man
John Gourley
Portugal. The Man
John Gourley
Portugal. The Man
Chris Tsagakis
Rx Bandits
this is the DNA structure for a creature who would’ve existed had its DNA not been so complex and unorganized at the same time. Evolution weeded this creature out of existence, despite its potential for supreme intelligence.
Chris Tsagakis
Rx Bandits
Jason Cruz
Strung Out
Jason Cruz
Strung Out
Jason Cruz
Strung Out
Chris Hughes
Moneen
Chris Hughes
Moneen
ARTIST CONTACT / INFO:
DAN ARNOLD
www.astaticlullaby.com
THE AUTUMNS
www.theautumns.com
RICH BALLING
www.cowboycommunist.com
NATE BARCALOW
www.finchmusic.com
AARON BARRETT
www.reelbigfish.com
WILLIAM E. BECKETT
www.theacademyis.com
BRANDON BONDEHAGEN
www.chritiansenonline.com
JOHN BOWERS
www.nursesmusic.com
AJ BROWN
www.junerock.com
TRAVIS BRYANT
www.weareterminal.com
MIKE BURKETT
www.nofxofficialwebsite.com
JOEY CAPE
www.lagwagon.com
JAMISON COVINGTON
www.jamisonparker.com
JASON CRUZ
www.strung-out.co
m
BOBBY DARLING
www.gatsbyamericandream.com
JEFF DAVIS
www.boysnightout.com
JARED DRAUGHON
www.classiccase.net
MIKE ELLIOTT
[email protected]
TIM ELSEY
www.juniorrevolution.com
MATT EMBREE
www.rxbandits.com
ADAM FISCHER
www.marchofflames.com
COLIN FRANGICETTO
www.circasurvive.com
JASON GLEASON
www.theactionreactionwebsite.com
KEITH GOODWIN
www.daysaway.net
JOHN GOURLEY
www.waiteryouvultures.net
ANTHONY GREEN
www.circasurvive.com
SCOTT GROSS
www.fromautumntoashes.com
CHRIS HAYNIE
www.adastrabooks.com
ANDY HERMES
www.juniorrevolution.com
CHRISTOPHER HINDLEY
www.newatlanticrock.com
ALEX HOVIS
www.papermodelsmusic.com
CHRIS HUGHES
www.moneen.com
GREGORY ITZEN
www.likelions.com
EVAN JEWETT
www.maidaisaband.com
JOSEPH KARAM
www.thelocust.com
DEREK KIESGEN
www.bearvsshark.com
MARK THOMAS KLUEPFEL
www.action-action.com
JESSE KURVINK
www.hellogoodbye.net
ANDREW LOW
www.geocities.com/the_jazzjune/