by Joe Meno
* * *
Both of them got out at a roadside Arby’s, built beside the exit ramp of the highway; the boy was near starving, or so he claimed, and the grandfather needed to change the bandages again. The latrine was a dismal fluorescent crypt. Jim tossed the bloodied bandage in the garbage and replaced it with harsh brown paper towels.
When he returned from the washroom, the grandfather took a seat across from the boy, who was busy wolfing down his sandwich. Jim stared at the greasy potato cakes like they were some puzzle to behold, flicking at them with his thumb and forefinger, before fixing his glare over the edge of the plastic booth, through the bug-specked windows at the traffic flying past. They were getting close now; in less than an hour they’d be in Lexington. All he wanted was to see the horse again and get back home; to rest, standing beside his grandson along the snake-rail fence.
The boy finished his sandwich quickly and then spoke up, interrupting the old man’s thoughts. “Grandpa?”
“Hm.”
“Shouldn’t we keep driving? I mean, if we want to get there in time?”
“That girl said the bus is supposed to pull in at six. We’ll be there in an hour. Besides, we got to rest awhile so we keep our wits. That’s one thing the army taught me. Something old Stan Mutter used to say. Anybody can go about waving a gun or pulling a knife. If you keep your smarts about you, you can be in charge of any situation. You remember that now. You’re smart enough as it is. You just got to learn to keep your wits.”
“Did you like the army? When you were in it?”
The grandfather smiled tightly. “I don’t know. When I was in it, no one ever bothered to ask me.”
“Do you think I should join? When I’m old enough?”
“Well, I don’t know if you’d like it but I think you should do something. Be good to get out of town. No place for young folks anymore.”
“They’ve got computer specialists now. Doing radar and missiles and things. And they pay for college.”
“Well sure.”
“I was going to join last year. When I ran away.”
“What?” The grandfather stared at the boy sitting before him. “When was this?”
“Last year. I ran away. I was going to go join the hunt for Sasquatch. Or enlist in the army. Either one, I guess.”
“When did you run off?”
“When all those chickens had blackhead.”
“Last October?”
“I left you a note but nobody saw it.”
“Where’d you go?” the grandfather asked.
“At first, I was going to head up to Canada. Remember? We saw that show about the Sasquatch up there. So I just took some things and left. I borrowed one of your knives. The fishing one. The silver one. In case I had to stab something. I ended up just staying in the Kellers’ barn.”
“Whose barn?”
“The Kellers. Across the way.”
“Well, that’s not running off. They’re right down the road there.”
“But I didn’t tell anyone where I was.”
“Did they know you were there? The Kellers, I mean.”
“After the first day, I guess. Mrs. Keller brought me some food and told me I oughta call you.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Hm. Did you thank her when you got back?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll tell you—we didn’t have running away when I sixteen. We called it becoming a man. You should think about it sometime.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s the truth. I was your age, I couldn’t wait to buck free.”
“When I get back, I’m gonna see about the army.”
“Well, you do what you think is best for you. There’s plenty of other things besides the army. The army ain’t for everyone.”
“I’d like to see the world.”
“Oh, you would?”
“I’d like to see different sorts of girls. British ones. And German ones. I’d like to go to Germany. See famous things. I’m not gonna live here the rest of my life.”
“Where? Mount Holly?”
“No. America.”
“Hm.”
It suddenly saddened Jim to think that the boy would one day be somewhere he was not, somewhere he could not call or shout and expect to see the boy’s face appearing in the near distance. He flicked at the larded ends of his potato cakes and said, “We can go talk to the fella together. From the army, I mean, if that’s what you decide. All right?”
The boy nodded, slurping on his soda, and in seeing him do so, it was hard not to imagine he was still just a kid. The grandfather glanced at the other customers in the restaurant, resuming his solemnity. A little boy dressed as an Indian chief—with freckled skin, eyes a fair shade of green, wearing a feathered headdress and fringed buckskin—entered the restaurant, holding his mother’s hand. Together they walked right past the booth where Jim and his grandson were sitting, Quentin fiddling with the remains of his fast food. The child—the Indian chief—seemed to study Quentin’s face for a moment; the little boy tugged on his mother’s wrist—the mother leaning over, the boy asking a rude question out loud before they ambled on toward the front of the establishment. In that moment, Jim had no reason to feel anger or shame, as he had asked that same question often enough—daily, sometimes in front of his own grandchild—and yet now he felt both. The boy did not even seem to notice he had been insulted, and if he had, he looked like he was accustomed to it—the vague finger-pointing, the dropped, muffled voice—as there was nothing in his face that betrayed any kind of resentment. This willingness to silently suffer—the boy’s calm, gray-toned complexion in the light of ignorance—caused, in the grandfather’s heart, an inexorable anger. He turned to his grandson and said, louder than he expected: “Quentin.”
“Hm?”
“You need to learn to say something.”
“Huh?”
“You need to learn to speak up for yourself.”
The grandson looked down, guilt-faced.
Jim shook his head and snatched his hat from the adjoining tabletop, wincing a little as he got to his feet. He strode across the tile floor to where the woman and her young boy were now sharing a meal. Hovering there, hamstrung by a feeling of unpronounceable rage, the grandfather swept the feathered headdress off the child’s head with the back of his hand, then muttered something indecipherable before he headed out the door in an angry blur. The mother put an arm around the child, who soon began to cry out. Quentin, still at the table, watched it all in shock, pausing in his mastication of a curly fry, setting it back down on the plastic tray before him, then started to his feet, still stunned, eyes open wide.
* * *
After they found their way to New Circle Road in Lexington, both the younger and older brother ignored the question of assault, of who or what may now be following them, and decided they had to find somewhere to eat. They pulled into the drive-through of the local Burger King, ordered a few Whoppers, and sat in the pickup’s cab, the engine still running. A song by Shania Twain was playing. At the end of the song, the older brother, uncomfortable in the passenger seat, lowered his head and began to moan a deep-bellied howl, the sound of which caused Gilby’s hair to stand on end.
“What is it? What is it?” Gilby asked, glancing out the window at the rearview mirror, sure they had just been pinched.
“It’s over. I’m finished,” the older brother moaned, folding his chin against his chest. “Whatever it is has got me. I’m going through some kind of motherfucking metamorphosis.”
“What are you talking about? What’s happening?” Gilby asked, still panicked.
“Look. Look at this shit . . .” Edward held out his dirty hand then, and in his palm Gilby saw a single, bloody tooth.
_________________
The grandfather told a story, trying to keep the boy awake at the wheel: “We were in the vice squad in Chuncheon. I told you before, it was a city in the north. Right by the thirty-
eighth parallel. We were in charge of keeping the infantrymen in line. There were these two brothers, they were from Mobile, Alabama, and they were trouble. Their name was Mooney. They happened to get sent over in the same company. A thing like that almost never happens. But there they were. The two of them. The older one was . . .” and here the old man paused, searching his memories, remembering the face, the cold eyes, pale skin, blond eyebrows, the expression altogether impossible to discharge from his recollections, but still having a hard time with the actual name. “It was either Beau or Billy. Bart. No, it was Billy. He was the older one. He was the brains of the operation. The younger one, he was the one . . . gosh, what was his name? Pig. Pug. Peg. Something like that. He was maybe two or three years younger. They were both privates. They worked for the Fifty-Fifth Trucking Company. Those kinds of fellas, they were always selling things off the back of their trucks. They had all kinds of side businesses going. They were in the black market. You know what that means?”
“Yeah,” the boy whispered, though it did not look like he understood, his eyes squinting at the road ahead, mouth slightly agape.
“They stole stuff from their truck and sold it to the Koreans. Or other soldiers. Anything they could get their hands on. Clothes, food, supplies. Anything. The older one, Bill, he was the scary one. He didn’t care who you were. The first time I seen him he was kicking in some local’s head. They were having some argument about something, money as far as I could guess, and Bill Mooney was beating the hell out of him for it. We ended up arresting him and he got court-martialed and told the judge that the Korean was trying to rob his truck. Nobody believed him but we didn’t have any evidence. So they just fined him for the price of a new pair of dungarees.”
“How come they did that?”
“Because we didn’t have anything else to charge him with. And he got that poor fella’s blood all over his pants. So that’s all they could do. Charge him for ruining a pair of army-issue pants. This Mooney fella, well, there was a lot of guys like him. Criminals. That’s what they were. He had already been over in Korea once before; he tried to murder his first sergeant, tried to cut his throat. So they sent him back home to Leavenworth, and then a few years later, they gave him the choice to volunteer for a year in a rifle company back in Korea, and if he did it, then his slate would be wiped clean. They gave that choice to a lot of those guys. This Bill Mooney, he took it. He was a bad fella. One of the worst I ever met.”
“He’s the one who stabbed you?” the boy asked.
“He was the one.”
“What happened?”
The grandfather paused for a moment, wiping his runny nose, and then continued: “Well, this Bill Mooney, him and his brother, they’d try to make whole trucks disappear. They’d get away with it sometimes. It was up to me and my partner, Stan, to try to hunt them down. The CO from the Fifty-Fifth would call us up and say, I got two trucks missing this month, and we’d go through the registers and try to find a pattern, see if it was the same driver, or maybe a particular kind of shipment that kept getting stolen. But we couldn’t find nothing. Whoever was disappearing those trucks knew what they were doing. They were paying off the supply sergeant to change the logs, so we had no way of knowing what was missing or who it was.
“But then a few of the soldiers got real sick. The medical officers thought someone had tried to poison them, but it turned out they had got themselves drunk on Korean whiskey. The whiskey over there, it was part embalming fluid—we’d warn them not to drink it but they all did anyway. They were all far from home and scared of dying and there wasn’t much other recreation. Plus, it was cold a lot of the time. So sometimes they’d get ahold of a bad batch. The Koreans, you had to respect them, they’d go hunting for empty American whiskey bottles, fill them up with all sorts of stuff. It made one boy I met go blind. We guessed they had maybe put paint thinner in there that time.
“A week or two after a few of them fellas got sick, a body turned up. These fellas, they were supposed to stay on the compound, but some of them would sneak out. AWOL, it was called. This one AWOL fella, he wound up dead. A convoy of transport trucks drove past him one morning. They brought his body back and one sniff and you could tell what happened. It was the Korean whiskey. The commanding officer up there got nervous. He had never had so many cases of drunk-and-disorderly before, and now he had this dead one. He was afraid he was going to get court-martialed himself. So we did some snooping around and got to figuring there was some American over there who had to be bringing it onto the base. There was just too much of it going around.
“What we did was sit out on this supply road for about a week straight, stopping any truck heading in or out of the base, but still we didn’t turn up nothing. Finally, by dumb luck, we had set up a speed trap somewhere a few kilometers off—that was part of the job too, trying to catch these soldiers speeding—and we saw this truck flying down a little muddy road. It had to be going thirty, forty miles over what was posted. We tear off behind them with our blue light flashing and the truck gets stuck in some mud and the driver, he throws the door open and runs out. Stan is shouting, Halt, halt! and then the fella, he was a soldier, he’s got his own rifle—they were carbines back then mostly—he takes a shot at us. Now, Stan said no American soldier had ever taken a shot at him before. Here we are a thousand miles from home and one of our own takes a shot at us. Stan just stood there, stunned, I guess. It was starting to get dark and we were only a mile or two from the compound and the fella, he runs off through the jungle and the rice paddies—they were like swamps—to try to make it back. We call out for him to halt and he takes another shot at us, and then we know we are in for it with him. I follow Stan up to the truck and we throw open the tarp and there are three or four girls back there—Korean, but dressed up like American girls, with jeans and T-shirts, makeup, the whole thing—and Stan starts yelling at them and he tells me to stay put and runs off after the driver. They were prostitutes. It turns out whoever was running the black market up there had his hand in a lot more than just Korean whiskey.”
“What did you do?”
“Stan told the girls to stay where they were, then he went off after him.”
“Into the jungle?”
“Right into the dark.”
* * *
The brothers’ meet-up was an ignominious place on New Circle Road by the name of Rebel Lounge, though this was a misnomer, as it paid no tribute to the sacrifice the secessionists had made or functioned as any sort of place to socialize either. It was a strip club and a low-grade one at that. The yellow sign on its roof featured a silhouette of a buxom woman, though the figure’s proportions were slightly off, the head appearing insignificant in relationship to the tremendous hips and breasts. The overall effect was one of absolute grotesqueness. It was located a few hundred yards off Highway 75, in a strip mall, set between an all-night laundromat and an Asian “massage parlor,” and had, at one time, been a buffet restaurant, and before that a bait-and-tackle shop.
The two brothers parked the truck and trailer in the side lot and entered the establishment. The loud dance music—its heavy, digitized drums and pulsating, distorted bass—caused them both to grimace in discomfort. At this time of day, just around two in the afternoon, the place was mostly empty, though there were still a few patrons—truckers and out-of-town types—gathered in single tables around the canted stage.
The one they were looking for was the deejay, who was busy announcing the next dancer from behind a plexiglass booth. “And now let’s put your hands together for Misty,” he said, glancing over the top of his sunglasses at the stage-bound girl in a pair of green pasties and a G-string, her stomach bifurcated by a recent cesarean scar. Music by the band White Zombie began to play, the noise of which did little to arouse the clientele. The deejay switched off his mic and took a drag from a hand-rolled cigarette. He had his long brown hair tied in a ponytail, wore a ghastly purple argyle shirt, and had round-rimmed sunglasses perched in the middle of
his long nose. The sunglasses were meant to disguise his rather weak-looking face; he was a coward and a coke addict and hoped to conceal both by hiding his eyes. His left arm was wrapped in a plaster cast and his neck was supported by a foam brace.
The two brothers ignored a slim waitress and walked directly toward the plexiglass booth. The deejay looked up from his glittering stack of CDs and immediately frowned, eyes darting back and forth between the two men with nervy agitation.
“You Davey-boy?” the older brother asked.
“Fuck. What are you going to do to me now? You guys already wrecked my fucking arm. I mean, look at me. Look at this shit. I’m supposed to be a deejay, man. Do you see any other one-armed deejays around? I mean, well, Jesus. This is my place of business.”
“Are you Davey-boy or should we be talking to someone else?”
“Yeah, I’m him, Kojak. You fucking found me. But listen, man, you’re gonna have to tell Chandra I don’t got anything right now.”
“What?”
“If you’re all here to kick my ass, you can tell her I don’t get paid till next week.”
“We’re here about the horse!” Gilby shouted, since it was hard to hear above the synthesized music. Onstage, Misty, mother of three, had flung off her green G-string to a dearth of applause.
“Oh, yeah, good, good,” Davey said, wiping a sheen of sweat from his sloped forehead. “I thought you guys were gonna be here like a couple hours ago.”
“We got lost!” Gilby shouted.
“Well, shit, man, that’s no problem. I’m just glad you made it. Let’s go talk in my office.” He cued up another song for Misty, this one by Ministry, and motioned for the two brothers to follow him; together they traveled down a short hallway, past a kitchen that also served as a dressing room, and out a side entrance. The office, it turned out, was an unlit space beside a dumpster, littered with empty beer bottles and lint-specked detritus from the laundromat next door. He leaned against a wall and quickly lit up another hand-rolled cigarette, exhaling forcefully from his nose.