Special thanks to Bekka Sartwell,
Steve Cannon, and Joseph Keckler.
Copyright © 2017 by Chavisa Woods
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com
Notes on previous publication:
“Things To Do When You’re Goth in the Country.” Published in the Cobalt Review, 2014. Winner of the 2014 Cobalt Fiction Prize.
“How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-Seven Seconds, Usama.” Published in Sensitive Skin Magazine, 2013.
“A New Mohawk.” Published in Jadaliyya magazine, 2012.
“What’s Happening on the News?” Published in Quaint Magazine, 2016.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Woods, Chavisa, author.
Title: Things to do when you’re goth in the country / Chavisa Woods.
Description: New York ; Oakland : Seven Stories Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043180 (print) | LCCN 2016050227 (ebook) | ISBN
9781609807450 (hardback) | ISBN 9781609807467 (E-book)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author).
Classification: LCC PS3623.O6753 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3623.O6753 (ebook) |
DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043180
Printed in the USA.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather,
Douglas James (Jim) Woods, whose love was unparalleled.
CONTENTS
How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen Thousand Two
Hundred and Eighty-Seven Seconds, Usama
Zombie
Take the Way Home That Leads Back to Sullivan Street
What’s Happening on the News?
A Little Aside
A New Mohawk
Revelations
Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country
HOW TO STOP
SMOKING IN
NINETEEN
THOUSAND
TWO HUNDRED
AND EIGHTY-
SEVEN SECONDS,
USAMA
I asked no questions about anything. I just wanted to smoke cigarettes. Lots and lots of cigarettes.
I come back once a year to visit. I only stay a few days. I try not to ask too many questions. There’s nothing I can do about the answers, anyway. I’m only here five days a year. I smoke a ton of cigarettes. I give some to my brothers. They can’t always afford them. I can do that. I can almost always afford cigarettes and I can smoke cigarettes with my brothers.
I can also drink beer with them, and I can usually afford to buy them one dinner or one new outfit, depending on the mood of things.
This visit, I bought them dinner at a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall: El Rancherito. Even though it was in a strip mall across the street from the Super Walmart, and even though El Rancherito is to Spanish what Green Day is to punk rock (people who don’t know better think it is), it was owned and run by real Mexicans, and the food was very good. The restaurant provided endless chips, which my brothers liked, as well as ninety-ninecent beer pitchers, also a big plus. My little-little and I polished off these ninety-nine-cent pitchers with no help from my big-little.
I have two little brothers. My little little brother is smaller than my older little brother. He is my little little brother. My older little brother is big. He is my big little brother. It was six o’clock. We’d just finished the authentic Mexican strip-mall food and two ninety-nine-cent beer pitchers, and I was getting ready to head to the car and take them back to Big-little’s place, when Big-little got a phone call from his cousin. My big little brother has a cousin who’s neither related to me nor my little little brother. His cousin is somewhere in between their two sizes. Big-little’s midsized cousin is only related to Big-little and not related to me or Little-little on account of us all three having different fathers. I don’t know who is the father of this midsized not-cousin of mine, but he sure looked like a kid who could use a dad when I met him.
The phone call consisted of Big-little looking ponderous and saying “uh-huh” three times, after which he hung up and informed Little-little that he wasn’t going back to his own place because this cousin of his was there. Big-little was going to get his average-sized girlfriend to come take him somewhere else for the night.
My little little brother had been planning on staying at my big little brother’s place that night, since he had no place else to stay, so he said he was going to need to be dropped off there anyway, Not-cousin or no Not-cousin. Little-little’s stuff was at Big-little’s and he had nowhere else to stay. What could he do?
We stood on the sidewalk of the strip mall waiting for Big-little’s girlfriend. I took out three cigarettes. We smoked them. I didn’t ask any questions. It was raining. We smoked under the awning until Big-little’s girlfriend pulled up. He got in her midsized car. Little-little and I finished our cigarettes. We got into the car I was driving. Little-little took off his shirt and tossed it in the backseat with his other shirt. We drove on to Big-little’s house, where his, not our, cousin apparently was going to be, which made Big-little not want to be there, and I didn’t know why, not that I had asked.
It was dark. Dark in the country is really very dark. The stars are bright. Big-little’s house is not really a house, but a long, skinny trailer resting lopsided off a dirt road that comes off an old-route highway out on the edge of the woods. On the way there, Little-little told me that behind the trailer, through the woods, was a cornfield where this whacked-out kid is living in an abandoned shack, cooking meth. He knows this because he and his friend were riding bikes through the field the week before, and the kid came out and started shooting at them. Little-little said he could smell the meth chemicals cooking even from several yards away. He knows what it smells like because he used to cook meth years ago before he realized just how bad of an idea that was.
He was riding bikes out there because he goes around the woods and all the surrounding areas tearing apart abandoned houses for scrap metal he sells at junkyards. He makes between eighty and two hundred dollars a week this way, depending. But he hurts himself a lot. He was showing me a wound on his finger he had all wrapped up with duct tape from where he cut himself scrapping a few days before, as we pulled in alongside the muddy drive of the dark, now nearly invisible trailer. I flipped the key off. He flipped the interior car light on and displayed for me a long, jagged scar that ran along the inside of his forearm. This happened two months ago when a copper pipe he was prying out of a wall sprung the wrong way and tore him open from just above his wrist to the inside of his elbow. He showed me this scar with the emblematic wiry enthusiasm of my little-little, now twenty-four and still peachy keen, scrappy, scrapping his life away. When it happened, he told me proudly, he just stapled it together with superglue, then wrapped it tight with duct tape and kept on scrapping. He’s a scrapper. The wound had done something that sort of resembled healing, so he figured it was all right. He turned the light off, rolled up a pair of shoes inside his two shirts, and asked if I wanted to come in for a second. I did want to come in. I wanted to smoke and I couldn’t smoke in the car I was driving and it was raining outside.
We clopped up the wilting porch of the trai
ler where rotting furniture was rotting in the rain on the drooping, decaying wood. The porch was threatening to metamorphose into an organic lifeform, or perhaps just mold itself back into the wet ground. Maybe the porch would liquefy and become a moat around the trailer and you’d have to float on the couch to get across. Maybe even, the couch would become an organic life-form and give you a guided speaking tour of the trailer moat as it floated you up to the door.
For months, my brothers had been telling me about these green floating gaseous orbs they see coming out of the woods that they think are coming from UFOs landing out there. But I think it’s more of a combination of mold, the meth kid cooking out in the field, and also, last year the EPA cleaned off about fifteen miles’ worth of toxic topsoil from this area. This was a prime county for asbestos factories in the seventies. The land is flat. It rains a lot. The toxic water seeps and sits. Oh well. Green, glowing orbs are a lot more fun to think of as alien life-forms than all that other crap, especially if you’re living with them. Especially if there’s nothing you can do about them. What are you going to do? Try and communicate.
Little-little opened the door. Inside, the trailer was pitch-black and smelled of mold. I stepped into the wet blackness. During the five-second count before the light was switched on, I noted that we were not alone in a painful way. In the not-so-distant darkness, I made out a small red light and someone breathing uncomfortably next to it. From the red light, sounds were coming out, static broken by broken voices announcing numbers and positions.
Little-little turned on a lamp. A few feet away, sitting next to the TV, was who I assumed to be Big-little’s cousin. He was a doughy boy of about twenty-one, dressed in a stretched-out white T-shirt and blue jeans. His face was as white as his shirt and his eyes were swollen and glowed almost as red as the red light on the police scanner he held in his left hand. His right hand was holding on to the handle of a silver pistol, which he had pulled halfway out of his side pocket. “You guys scared the fuck out of me,” he told us.
Little-little shook his head and hissed, then tossed his shirt-shoes bundle across the room like a Frisbee. “This is my sister,” he said, pointing me out. I sat down on the damp couch, not the one on the porch, but the one inside the trailer, and lit a cigarette. I asked my midsized not-cousin if he wanted one. He didn’t want one. He shoved the pistol all the way back into his pocket and went over to the window, peeking through the slitted plastic blinds out into the total darkness of the muddy road and surrounding woods. He kept flipping the blinds open and closed. They made a clinking sound like plastic change, worthless and desperate to accomplish some impossible purchase, his freedom.
“No one’s out there,” Little-little told him as he rummaged through a pile of clothing on the floor and tried out about five different shirts, a couple of T-shirts and two long johns, one green and brown camouflage patterned. I smoked my cigarette.
Not-cousin held the scanner up to his ear and listened to the sound of static and clicking. “It was you guys sitting out there with your lights on?” he asked, his red eyes dancing. I nodded and puffed. Little-little wanted a cigarette. I gave him a cigarette. He started smoking it. None of those shirts had worked, I guess. He was still shirtless. Those shirts were back on the floor, utter failures.
Little-little perched beside me on the arm of the damp couch, shirtless, barefooted and puffing. Not-cousin started pacing slowly. “Whatcha got?” Little-little asked him. He pulled the pistol out of his pocket and handed it over. Little-little flipped it around and made inspecting noises. The police scanner crackled. We all looked at it. Not-cousin waited and listened, then shook his head no. Little-little tossed the gun spinning in the air, then caught it three times. “I had one better than this just three weeks ago, a semiautomatic hand gun,” he told me. “It was an amazing weapon, but I had to bury it. Put ’er down!” he boomed. I smoked. Not-cousin paced.
“You buried it,” I said, trying to make it more of an affirmation than a question. Questions couldn’t be a good thing. I’ve learned this over the years.
He handed the silver pistol back to Not-cousin. “Yeah, had to bury it back there.”
“Ah, the gun’s buried in the backyard here,” I said, as a statement.
Not-cousin took his seat by the TV again. He was struggling very hard not to cry, so his face, instead of twitching or doing stuff people’s faces do when they’re upset, was unnaturally unmoving, pale around his red, dancing eyes. He watched us talk, his head tilted sideways, swallowing hard between every few breaths, cupping the police scanner like a sick bird in his left hand.
“Yep, had to bury it. No good now, I’ll bet. Probably full of mud.” My cigarette was done. There was no arguing with it. It was gone. I put it out in an ashy soda can on the coffee table. “Sucks too, ’cause it was expensive.”
“Well, yeah, semiautomatic,” I said as if knowingly.
Little-little hopped off the couch and began boxing the air. “When I bought it, I knew it was stolen, but I didn’t know how stolen.”
“How stolen,” I repeated, not as a question.
“I guess it was evidence for some shit that went down up in Chicago, and that’s why those dudes that sold it to me were getting rid of it,” he told me as he KO’d the invisible man. Number two came up to fight.
Not-cousin finally did something besides look desperate. He let out a moan and said, “That was dumb of you to buy that. They almost got you for that. They knew you had it. Came up here looking for it. It’s a good thing they didn’t have a warrant.”
Little-little let his head go yesing. Fuck it. I lit another cigarette. Little-little put his out. Not-cousin had his own hidden away, menthols. He took one out and started smoking it, his fleshy lips quivering all around the butt. “I gotta get out of here. They’ve been here too many times.”
“It’s hot here,” Little-little agreed. “But they never found nothing, and now I got my legal gun card, anyway.” He magically produced a tan, laminated card from his back pocket. He waved it around proudly between air-boxes, and low and behold, I saw the truth in the light. My scrappy, peachy keen little-little was now indeed the proud owner of a certified license stamped with approval by the very civilized government of the US of A and the great State of Illinois, attesting his god-given right to bear lethal firearms. Hallefallujah.
He shoved the card back in his pocket and hopped over to the other side of the room where a small hatchet lay next to the armchair. He picked up the hatchet and started hacking at the arm of the armchair. This obviously wasn’t the first time he’d hacked at the arm of the armchair. It had some notches already hacked out of it. “Damn thing’s falling apart,” he hollered as a joke. “I picked up Uncle Tiny’s ax the other day. I swear to god, sis, I just barely touched it. Damn thing fell apart. And that’s what Tiny said, ‘Put that down, boy,’ as soon as I touched it, but it was already too late. He said that thing’s been out there on that block for ten years, withstood wind and rain and storms, blood sweat and tears, I laid my little pinky on it and the wood handle crumbled right away.” He took one last satisfying hack at the arm of the armchair, then dropped the hatchet to the floor. My second cigarette was nearing the end, but I was already thinking about the third. Little-little’s eyes twinkled pain like a bad joke at me from across the room. “I guess I got the opposite of the golden touch. Everything I put my hands on crumbles to crap.”
“Maybe if you didn’t come at stuff with axes in your hand, it wouldn’t do that,” I said dryly. He grinned big at this and flopped into the lap of the armchair.
All this was making Not-cousin more nervous. I put out my second cigarette and tongued the infection I could already taste beginning to form in the back of my throat. My glands were rough, swollen, and had that metallic taste skin on the inside of your mouth gets when it’s sore. It made me cringe. I decided to wait a few minutes before I lit up a third smoke. But I didn’t know what to do in the time between. There was nothing in my hands. My mouth was empt
y. I had no reason to be there anymore. I started seriously wondering what Not-cousin was doing there with a police scanner and a gun. I mean, I knew he was hiding out from the police. But in the absence of smoking, I couldn’t help but think about things like why. Before I knew it, a question was coming out of my mouth. “What are you charged with?”
You know that look very young boys get when they are being punished severely for something, and they think it’s very unfair? You might see them, about nine years old, hiccuping on a playground, nose running, slobber all over, Wiffle bat at their feet, the teacher asking, “Did you hit Georgy with the bat?” Then they let out a too-loud, quivering, “Yes! I did it. But! But! But!”
Well, that’s pretty much what happened when I asked this question. He finally let his face go quivering and his eyes teared up and he blurted out his answer in that high, desperately pinched voice that one would expect to hear a kid use when he was admitting to hitting Georgy with a Wiffle bat. But what he said was, “Manslaughter two,” in that voice, so it all had a bit of a different feel than the playground scene.
“Mm-hmm. Second-degree manslaughter,” I repeated, trying to get back to statements.
“It’s a bunch of bullshit,” Little-little hollered from the lap of the hacked-up armchair. “They can’t prove anything. They don’t got proof of those texts. You threw your phone away, didn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Where?”
“In the pond back there.” Not-cousin pointed behind himself. He was referring to the small pond on the edge of Big-little’s property. I started adding things up in my head. At least we had one very stolen semiautomatic handgun wanted as evidence in connection with “some shit that went down in Chicago” buried in the backyard, and one cell phone wanted as evidence for a mans-laughter-two case sunk in the pond. The ground I was sitting on was fertile with evidence of crime. Crime Garden, I thought, and wondered what else one might be able to find beneath the toxic topsoil. I racked my brain for any incriminating paraphernalia I might have on my person, thinking this would be the best place ever to chuck it. I wanted to add something to the plot.
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