by Joe Meno
“Wait,” he mumbled. “Oh, Jesus, just wait.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I need to go back. I need to go to the hotel.” “The hotel? What the hell are you talking about?”
His big round face shined with grease.
“I need that photograph. I need to get it back.”
“Photograph?”
“My photograph.”
“Dammit, Junior. You go back there, those men are going to kill you. It’s just a goddamn picture. You have to let it go.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
His big blue eyes shined deeply.
“Jesus, pal, can’t you get another goddamn picture somewhere else?”
“No,” he muttered. “This is the only one. The only one.”
“Jesus.” I shook my head.
“She’s dead, Luce. Dead and gone.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. She’s dead. By my own hand. I sent her down a river on a raft.”
“Christ,” I whispered. I felt like I was about to vomit. The sun began to spin above my head. Everything else faded to red.
“She was fourteen years old and got pregnant from the man down the road. He had a wife and two kids and she kept being pregnant a secret. I did what I thought would save her.”
“Christ Jesus. Jesus.”
“I put her out of reach. I took those two lives to keep her pure. Now I only got one to give back to her.”
“No, no, Junior. Don’t think like that. We have to leave town. Right now. We can’t go back.”
“That’s all I have left. That’s the only sign that she ever was. That photograph. I need to go get it and then I’ll meet you at the bus depot.”
“Junior, don’t. Junior, no!!” But he was already down the road, limping along. I watched his thick form cross the road into town and disappear behind a line of trees. I stood there for a minute more. I don’t know. I guess I was waiting for him to turn around, to turn back, but he didn’t. He just disappeared right behind those thick green elm trees and faded right away.
I turned and began walking fast. The sun was beginning to peak and it was hot as hell on my back. No one was around. No cars passed. Most of the entire town was at church right about now. My face felt sore. My teeth began to chatter again. I took a deep breath to try to keep myself together and took a step ahead.
I made it to the bus depot and bought myself a ticket from a man with a long thin mustache. He stared at me for a long moment as if considering whether he should sell me the ticket or not. I sat down and waited. Two minutes went by. Then something spurred me beneath my skin. I was sure Junior had run into trouble. I ran right out of the depot and back into town, right past the gray town hall and the little antique shop and the church steps and the bingo hall. I didn’t care who saw me now. I wanted to die or be sure Junior was OK. The church bells began to ring hard in my ears. They burned deep in my brain with solemn golden tones as I turned and headed toward the hotel.
I ran down the street holding my breath, sure any sound I made would tell the whole town where I was. I made it a block away from the hotel and looked around. The street was empty. I kept my breath in and walked quickly toward the hotel, toward the front porch. It was all quiet and faded white.
A shot rang out.
BOOM!!!
I ran the rest of the way down the block and pulled the front door open hard and ran down the hall to the front stairs and started up, feeling my whole head fill with blood. Someone passed me on the stairs, some tenant whose face was unlit and dark and headed on their way down. I was on the second-floor landing, then up on the third floor and down the hall, and then there it was, his open door, wide and parted, a kind of perfectly rectangular dark space. Less than a minute had gone by. Less than a minute had burned out. I stared at that blank open doorway. Some light poured on out. Some dust hung about, dancing like tiny angels in the wake. I ran right inside and caught sight of his big gray body gathered in a lump on his belly on the floor. His head laid right against the closet door. His sideburns looked thick and gray and covered in sweat. His big left hand was outstretched and reaching ahead. The other was draped beside his round white cheek.
There was his blood spread across the room. Cold and silent and still.
There were two small words left beside his chubby white face, spelled out in perfect red letters left by his tender white digits, still and perfect beside where his right hand was laid.
“to forgive”
That was it. All he could say. Written perfectly in his own blood. Written perfectly and left for no one to see.
It was all done. It was all gone.
There was a halo of maroon that rose from the back of his head. He had been shot with his back turned by some unknown man, a coward, a man who didn’t even have the courage to stare poor Junior in the face.
I was trembling. I was falling down. I was holding the wall to stand up as Old Lady St. Francis came running up the stairs. I began to back away and run down the stairs and out the door just as that old woman’s scream filled my ears.
I ran fast as I could down to the middle of town, following the church bells until I was standing on the chapel steps. I put my hand to the big gold handle and then stopped myself. I could hear the organist’s soft-keyed hymn and that town’s lowly golden song. Then the church went still. Everyone was quiet, listening to the words coming from the pulpit.
A good man, I thought to myself, standing on the steps. A very penitent man must have shot him in the head.
I turned from that church and walked on out and waited for a single shot to knock me out of my body and down the cold white stone steps of the chapel. But it never came. The organist’s hymn resumed, and the congregation all took voice in a low, sullen kind of tune, singing softly as I limped down the street, keeping my eyes nearly closed, still waiting, still waiting for that single shot to the back of my head. I made it all the way to the bus depot and sat there in a dirty blue seat. No one came after me.
G-U-I-L-T-Y
I carved that word in the blue plastic bus depot seat with my old room key so someone might see. When the bus pulled up, I took my seat on board and waited again. Everything seemed ready to fall apart. Everything seemed thin and frail and weak.
Then the bus door swung closed suddenly with a hush. And all at once, everything disappeared. There was no sound. There was no movement. There was nothing behind me now. There was only somewhere to go. Someplace to leave.
I settled into that empty red seat and stared out the window as the bus began to roll forward and the world rolled past.
Junior Breen was dead. It was written there in the lines upon my hands. Upon my own face. I leaned back in the seat. I laid my head against the window and began to cry.
There was no voice or word sent from him to see me off. But he was close. Everything I had ever held to me was now close. I began to cry some more and hold my face in my shirt-sleeve. It was covered with dirt and blood and mud. It was full of the heavy musk of water and sweat and dirt.
I cleared the tears out of my eyes and stared hard out the window.
Somewhere out there the truth was waiting. Somewhere out there, something had to be waiting for me. With my poor Charlene. It seemed like she was the only thing I could still imagine. The only thing I could still see as real.
Later, riding through the dark, crying to myself, alone on that bus, I thought about everything, about Charlene and the gas station and poor ol’ Junior and Clutch and Monte and L.B. and Old Lady St. Francis and all the other things I had tried to keep from myself. All the guilt and pity and shame that stretched out behind me dark as the road ahead. There was nothing out there but the blue-and-red-and-white spade-shaped sign that read “Interstate 80” and the low hum of the big silver wheels flying over the pavement, the quiet rumble of the engine and bus as it passed over another mile of blackness, slipping down along the thin yellow lines that divided the road from the twilight, and the night from t
he road below. There all alone I realized something. Maybe Charlene and I were already together. Maybe I was already beside her. There was the night right between us. It moved from me to her in silent black waves, whispering all the things I had been afraid to say. There was the darkness, and we had shared that together, too. Now there was nothing between us but space and time—space which fell silent under the quiet breath of the dark sky, and time that disappeared beneath the restraint of the black rubber wheels. There was nothing behind us now but the blackness in our dreams and nothing ahead of us either, not yet, there was only us and the hush of the cool blue night, playing on between us like a gentle little lullaby. It all made me wonder. It all made me think.
Junior was dead. He was gone and finally put to rest. But what kind of man deserved to be killed like that? What kind of man had the right to do such a goddamn wicked thing?
I closed my eyes and cried some more.
The darkness had already fallen above me with an answer to it all. It moved over everything, over good and evil, over impure and pious men just the same. Just the same. There was no difference between a saint and sinner in the skin, in the flesh. It all came from the sweet blood within. It all came from the tender truth hidden deep inside. The difference between the two was a thin, wavering gentle line. It might change in the heart with each lulling beat. It might change in the soft time it takes to breathe. I had done my best to be a good man. I had done my best to live a decent life, even if I had fallen short some of the time. I had tried to keep my heart pure and return the love I had felt, and it wasn’t until then, when I was on that bus alone, that I thought I might be all right. Maybe it’s not a thing that is easy to see or feel. Maybe it isn’t exactly clear how your heart beats, good or evil, dishonest or sweet, until it’s your time all alone in the dark, listening to the quiet whisper of your own lonely heart, the empty thump of your own fears shivering like an old kettle drum, bent and rusted and warped all wrong, or the distant murmur of all your hope, the lonely lullaby of a hula girl’s song.
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Excerpt from Marvel and a Wonder
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Marvel and a Wonder by Joe Meno
available September 2015 from Akashic Books
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The white mare appeared on a Monday. Neither the grandfather nor the grandson had any idea who’d sent it. At first there was only the violent agitation of the pickup as it rattled along the unmarked road, towing behind it a fancy silver trailer, all ten wheels upsetting the air with a cloud of dust high as a steeple. The grandfather raised his hand to his eyes to try to make out the shape of the thing coming. It was a late afternoon in mid-July and the sun had just begun to falter behind the hills and tree line. The black pickup with its out-of-town plates bounced through the gate then pulled to a stop near the corner of the bleachy henhouse. Every bird on the farm, all the Silver Sussex roosters, all the Maran hens, turned to face the commotion with a prehistoric silence, waiting for the grit to begin to settle. When a man with sunglasses like a state trooper pulled himself out from behind the truck’s wheel, stretching his legs from what appeared to have been a long trip, Jim asked him what it was about. The man had a clipboard and some papers which he asked Jim to sign, in triplicate, before leading him around to the back of the trailer. There he handed Jim a pink sheet of paper and pair of silver keys. The horse, sleek-looking even behind steel bars, huffed through its pink nostrils, disappearing back into the darkness.
“It’s yours,” the man said.
“Mine?”
“Yours.”
“But . . . but what for?” Jim asked.
The man with the sunglasses shrugged, itched his nose, and said, “I just get paid to deliver it,” then he put away his ink pen and began to unhook the trailer from the pickup’s hitch. It seemed the trailer had also been bequeathed, though Jim still did not know from whom. The man with the sunglasses handed another pink piece of paper to Jim, stepped clear of a mud puddle, and climbed back inside the cab of the pickup.
“But there’s been some kind of mistake,” the grandfather said.
The man readjusted his dark sunglasses, lit a cigarette, exhaled—the smoke rising in twin, nearly invisible tendrils about his craggy face—and looked down at the clipboard and said, “This the right address?”
Jim nodded.
“You Jim Falls?”
The grandfather nodded again.
“No mistake.” The man scowled and gave the ignition a start. “By the way, it’s got a name. Right here,” the man said, pointing to the pink page. Then the black pickup was pulling away, was driving off, then was gone. Jim walked over to the rear of the trailer. The horse was turning back and forth before him with an air of expectancy, the old man and the horse like children then, hesitant at their parents’ ankles, waiting to meet. The grandfather had never been fond of horses; there had been a pair of mules his father had borrowed to plow furrows for the corn, but those days were long gone.
The hired hand, Rodrigo, had always claimed to have been raised on a horse ranch. Without so much as a word, he set down a Maran rooster, stepped up to the trailer, unlocked the bar, opened the gate, and slowly led the horse down the ramp. He whistled through his front teeth once the animal was standing there in the full sun where they could take in its shape.
“It’s a racehorse, Mister Jim,” Rodrigo grinned, patting its sleek flanks, then looking under, apprising its sex. “And a lady.”
Jim reached out a tentative hand in the horse’s direction, feeling the humid moistness of the animal’s nose, placing his palm against its neck. Its ears flicked, the blue-black eye staring back, expressionless. In its stoicism, in its stony quiet, the grandfather saw what he most often loved about the land, the country, the world. It was enough to say he had not nor would never have dreamt of standing this close to a horse on this day or any other, and the unexpectedness, the absolute un-reason of the animal’s arrival, is what gave the grandfather a sense of joy.
“What you going to call her, Mister Jim?” came Rodrigo’s voice.
The grandfather studied the animal’s shape, tried to take in its perfect, imperturbable appearance, and then, looking down at the pink paper, he said, “It says here her name’s John the Baptist.”
“John? For a lady?”
“Yes, John. For a lady. That’s what it says.”
“From the Bible?”
“I guess so.”
Rodrigo shrugged, and then searched inside the trailer and found an expensive eastern saddle and bridle. He whistled once again through his front teeth and then set to tack up, the horse remaining completely still as the blanket, then saddle was fit into place, then the bridle. It huffed once, not even a snort, and became silent again.
“You ride her, Mister Jim?”
Jim stared at the ghostly creature, at its formidable stature, and shook his head with a frown. “Not in this life, buster.”
Rodrigo shrugged his shoulders again, holding the leather reins in his hand, asking a serious question by raising his eyebrows slightly.
By then the boy—having heard the unfamiliar pickup rambling back down the gravel drive—walked out of the house and stared at the animal suspiciously. He stood a dozen feet away, pushing his glasses up against his face, trying to decide if this interruption was going to be worth his time. “Whose horse is that?” he asked.
“Fella said it’s ours.”
“Ours?”
“Mine, I guess.”
“But what for?”
“He didn’t say.”
The horse gave a soft whinny, which would have gone unheard if it wasn’t for the open air of the farm and the nearby highway—quiet at this time of day.
Rodrigo pulled lightly on the reins, turned to face Jim once again, a daring smile crossing the farmhand’s face, the question having already been answered, in his mind at least, awaiting a sign, which Jim gave without begrudgement, nodding
in a curt manner.
“Okay,” Rodrigo said, slipping his left boot into the silver stirrup, then pulling himself up and fitting in his right. The horse took no notice of the stranger upon its back, its nostrils flaring slightly, its tail alighting back and forth, until the lean-faced man gave a short, gentle kick and the horse, as if having heard some celestial trumpet, was off, bucking and rearing in a flash of dust and dirt, clearing the low wire chicken fence, wreaking havoc in the dry-looking field of corn. Before the man on its back could whisper, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the animal seemed to have made one full pass of the entire property, galloping breakneck alongside the culvert, its hide speckled with sunlight.
“Good God,” was all the grandfather could get out.
It was clear from the first that the horse had been bred as a racer; standing fifteen hands high, it was lean-muscled with long legs, the hindquarters a rig of fibrous muscle. Four years old, it looked as spry as a filly.
By the time Rodrigo had slowed the animal down to a canter, then a trot, then was heeling the horse before them, the farmhand’s face had lost none of its expression. There was a wide smile frozen below his black mustache, creeping from one ear to the other, his dark eyes runny with tears.
The boy hung behind the fence apprehensively, excited by the creature’s presence, but too frightened to get closer.
