Haints Stay

by Colin Winnette

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Beginning

  Acknowledge

  Also published by Two Dollar Radio

  Cover End

  TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry.

  We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.

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  Copyright © 2015 by Colin Winnette

  All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or part in any form.

  ISBN : 978-1-937512-32-3

  Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

  Author photograph : Stacia Torborg

  Cover : The Vanishing Race - Navaho, Edward S. Curtis, circa 1907-1930.

  Book design and layout by Two Dollar Radio.

  No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is for bug.

  BROOKE AND SUGAR WERE ON A BRIDGE between a field and a crowded wood. They had lost their horses days ago and had been walking for miles on end. The bridge was where they decided to break. Out in the open. A kind of celebration.

  Sugar unpacked a few slices of bread and a brick of old cheese. He tore chunks loose with his nails and set them on the open face of the bread at his side. Brooke spat between his knees and took pleasure in the smacking sound as his saliva met the water below.

  They had finished a job. They were emptied of bullets and powder. They were satisfied men. They were on their way to collect the next few months’ security. To be cleaned and taken care of. They would be treated well again, their shoulders and their genitals rubbed. They would smoke and bathe at the same time. Sugar would buy dinners and drinks and comb his hair with scented oils. Brooke would gamble and win and lose, but no one would be after him. He would buy a new knife. They were victorious and cheerful as ever they could be.

  It was another day or two before they reached the town. They camped out in the open, unsheltered. Sugar smoked on his back with a strip of fabric covering his eyes. Each night, Brooke counted the stars until he fell asleep and woke blinded by the one.

  As they neared the town, they smelled smoke. Not the welcoming kind, the tin-chimney and clay-pot kind, but an acrid, overwhelming kind of smoke. They continued. It was only a few minutes before they noticed the thin gray funnels rising up and opening out to the clouds above them.

  In essence the town remained, but its landscape had changed. Jenny’s had been razed. People moved past the bar as if it were nothing to see at all. And there wasn’t much. What remained of the walls was blackened and halved. A streaked set of spiraling stairs near the center of the lot wound upward to nothing. The pole at the banister’s base supported the charred head of an eagle.

  The bathhouse stood fine as it ever had, only a man now hunched at the doorway. They didn’t know him. He had the clean, fat look of an out-of-towner. He wore a thin-brimmed hat and a charcoal vest.

  “I’m Brooke,” said Brooke, “and this is my brother Sugar.”

  Sugar nodded, put out his hand.

  The clean, fat stranger nodded and opened the door to them.

  Sugar lowered his hand, slid it into his pocket. They were used to disrespect. They did not take it personally.

  Brooke followed his brother into the lobby of the bathhouse. It was cleaner than usual and bustling. They positioned themselves in line behind an elderly man hunched against a thin cane. He smiled at them and Sugar smiled brightly back.

  “Good afternoon,” he said. “Was there an accident at the

  bar ?”

  The elderly man shook his head. He stuck out a nub where his tongue should have been. He turned from them and arranged himself against the cane again.

  Sugar tapped Brooke’s elbow, stuck out his tongue, and pointed at what the elderly man had been missing. Brooke nodded. He saw what Sugar saw, just the same as Sugar saw it, but Sugar insisted on telling it back to him.

  “You’re the two boys without a father,” said a very thin man, suddenly at their side. He too wore a vest and a thin-brimmed hat.

  They nodded. It was how people chose to see them. The truth was they had plenty of fathers, but that wasn’t what people meant when they said father. They had that kind of father too, the kind that gave Sugar his thick hair and Brooke his crooked nose. There was a single man responsible for the husks of both brothers, only no one knew which man he was or had been and Brooke and Sugar did not care for them to.

  “Come with me, then,” said the man at their side.

  They followed. With the bar gone and their payment delayed, at the very least, they were willing to investigate whatever new opportunities were presented them. Things changed in town. They changed often. There was no use fighting it. What they did was, they found a way and worked it until they found a new one.

  They were seated before an oak desk and the tiny man behind it.

  “You see the bar ?” said the tiny man. “Do you know who burned it ?”

  Brooke and Sugar watched the tiny man smile and lean back in his desk chair.

  “Me,” said the tiny man, “and the women inside and the men inside. Your man inside. Your woman inside.”

  The tiny man pointed at Sugar. He had soft eyes, the tiny man behind the desk. Soft and black, like pencil lead.

  Sugar shifted in his seat. He brought a strip of fabric out from the front pocket of his tattered suit and wiped his brow theatrically. A signal to the man that he meant no harm, that he was willing to appear intimidated. It wasn’t their show, and they knew it.

  Brooke examined the desk : a jar of pens, an ivory letter opener atop a stack of papers, an ashtray containing one smoldering cigarillo.

  “You think I’ve got ideas I don’t,” said the tiny man. “I know this won’t stick. I’m not here to stay. I’m a link in a chain of things I’ve got no idea how to stop or predict.”

  He barely occupied his chair. He was like a cat in the lap of a giant. He was sweating too, and Sugar thought to pass the fabric to him in a gesture of brotherly goodwill.

  “But I’m here for now,” said the tiny man. “And you’re the first problem I can see coming.”

  “Because we’re owed by the bar,” said Brooke.

  “There isn’t a bar,” said the tiny man. “Not anymore.” He laughed and tilted back in his chair and laughed some more, his hand at his belly. Darkness and rot freckled the inside of his mouth. His teeth and gums were lit by the room’s light as he laughed and held his mouth open like an offering.

  Sugar smiled. Brooke examined a nearby shelf, the spines of the books there and the dust that had long ago settled on them. The dust of another man’s body, another man’s toil and time.

  After a moment the tiny man regained his composure and opened the drawer to his left. He slid the letter opener from the exposed desktop down into the drawer.

  “Money,” said the tiny man, “or some other thing that will make you resentful of the bar going down. Maybe you two like to drink. Maybe you two like women. Maybe you’re sentimental. I can’t have two thorns wandering the streets, looking for a reason to stick in my side.”

  The tiny man seemed to relax then.

  �
�So,” he said, settling back into the enormous-looking chair and letting his thin arms dangle from either side, “how can I trust you two to keep your heads about you ?”

  “Do you read history ?” said Sugar.

  “Yes and no,” said the tiny man, a smile creeping back into his lips. “I don’t read much, but I know a few things. History, as you put it, it’s slippery.”

  “Well I’m a student of history,” said Sugar, “and any observant man can see that power is like a gold coin. Some men squander it, throw it away on nothing worth noticing. Others simply lose it to a world that’s much hungrier for it than they are. Others still dedicate their lives to holding onto it. And some die, coin in hand, surrendering it only to the men who bury them.”

  The tiny man inched forward in his seat, eyed Sugar for a point.

  “My brother and I,” said Sugar, “it makes no difference to us what the world does with its money.”

  “You’re too… uh, historically read, huh,” said the tiny man, “to get hung up on something like an unpaid debt ? Or an ignorant, rot-mouthed cunt taking the reins ?”

  “No,” said Brooke, “but we’d settle for a modest homecoming of sorts. We’d like a bath each. We’d like the promise of a bed or two with a window, at least temporarily. The peace of mind to rest. We’ve been traveling for days. We lost our beloved horses with many miles still between us and here. Give us the opportunity to get fresh, to adjust. We’ll keep our pampered heads about us.”

  Sugar placed the fabric back into his front pocket. He crossed his legs and eyed the tiny man, who looked at Brooke as if he were still speaking. Finally, the tiny man nodded and a hand set itself on Brooke’s shoulder.

  Brooke had the ashtray from the desk in his hand then and was already withdrawing the blow he’d spent on the broken-nosed thug behind him. Blood spilled from the thug’s nose. He clutched his face as if trying to collect the blood that gathered there.

  Brooke set the ashtray back on the desk and Sugar settled himself into his chair.

  “Okay,” said the tiny man, with a grin. “A bath it is.”

  The baths were crowded. Men of indeterminate age, but none of them young, lined the edges. A mix of tobacco smoke and steam crowded the air. Sagging wooden guardrails led down a row of steps into the water of the communal bath. The floor and walls wore a yellowing tile.

  The heat pressed against Brooke’s and Sugar’s lungs as they moved along the bath’s perimeter to hang their towels from a row of silver hooks lining the far wall.

  Someone whistled. Others coughed, shifted, and began to whisper.

  “I think they like you,” said Brooke.

  Sugar smiled and Brooke stepped into the water. The blood on his left hand lifted and dispersed. He bent at the knees and submerged himself up to his shoulders. He shut his eyes, listened to the sounds of the other men as they examined his brother.

  “You don’t even smell like a woman,” said a longhaired man sitting alone in the corner of the large square, now shared by nearly twenty men.

  Sugar had seated himself on the bench lining the edge of the bath. He crossed his legs, then thought again and uncrossed them. He parted his knees just slightly. He nodded at the longhaired man sitting a foot or so from him.

  “It’s because I’m not a woman,” said Sugar. He snapped his fingers at a passing boy in white. The boy paused and removed a thin cigarette from a pack on the silver tray he carried before him. Sugar gripped it with his lip and the boy lit it with a smile.

  “Your charge number, sir ?”

  “It’s on your man,” said Sugar, and the boy nodded. He made a mark in a small notebook beside the cigarette pack on the tray and began again to circle the bath’s perimeter.

  “You’ve got the finer parts,” said the longhaired man. “I don’t mean at all to pry or stare. I just haven’t seen a woman’s parts… in years, and… well you don’t expect to come across them in a place like this.”

  “Is he bothering you, Sugar ?” Brooke rose from the water before them. He was lean and cruel looking. He looked as if he should have been covered in scars, but all of the wounds he bore were fresh. His muscles were mottled with age and effort.

  “No,” said Sugar. He let the smoke drift between his vaguely parted lips. “He’s just admiring my parts.”

  The longhaired man smiled and shifted and put his hands up. “No,” he said, “I’m just noticing is all. I don’t mean either of you any discomfort or trouble.” He slunk away to a far corner of the bath and settled between two older men who were leaning against the bath’s edge, eyes closed, either sleeping or dead.

  Brooke took his spot there in the corner near his brother.

  “You should cross your knees,” he said. “In a place like this.”

  “You should avoid giving advice,” said Sugar. “You haven’t got the face for it.”

  “Did you notice our friend ?” said Brooke. He ran his palms along the surface of the water, examined the edges of his scabs as they softened.

  “How long do you think we’ve got ?” said Sugar.

  “Get your hair wet,” said Brooke. “Then we should go.”

  The broke-nosed thug was bleeding between two gangly men in the bath adjacent Brooke and Sugar. His eyes had not lifted from their movements.

  Sugar crab-walked out from the bench and lowered himself under the water. He ran his hands back and forth through his hair and could feel the grit coming away in sleeves. He opened his eyes to see the water had yellowed around him. He picked at the pieces that clung directly to his scalp. He felt a shiver in his shoulders, the rare delight of a long-awaited bath. He admired his brother’s legs through the chalky water. The pressure in Sugar’s lungs grew more intense with each passing moment. He exhaled and Brooke’s legs lifted suddenly up and out of the bath. Sugar kicked himself toward the far edge of the bath and rose up and out as well.

  Brooke was on top of the naked, broke-nosed thug, pounding his chest and stomach and face. The sound was that of a cow collapsing into mud, again and again and again.

  Brooke broke the skin of the broke-nosed thug in various patches about his body. Brooke rose only when the reach of the blood surpassed his wrists. He rose naked and bloody and examined the room. Some looked angry, put out. Others were frightened and without a plan. The longhaired man who had been talking to Sugar sank between the two old men at either side of him, until the water reached his ears. He eyed the brothers across the surface of the water, bubbling air from his slender nose.

  Sugar gathered their towels from the hooks and Brooke backed slowly into his as Sugar opened it to greet him.

  They left the bath together, dressed hurriedly in the adjoining room where they had left their clothes, and sped toward the front door with the air of practiced men.

  They were back in the woods only a few minutes later. They had slid out of town, uninterrupted. It wasn’t a hard thing to do, to disappear when they needed to. It just wasn’t what they’d been hoping for.

  “I can’t do another night of this,” said Sugar. He was standing, pacing, looking between the trees.

  “At least we got the bath.” Brooke set his head on a small rock at the base of a tree. It was sundown. The woods were cooling around them.

  No one was after them. They’d been given no chase. They were gone and that was all that mattered. In a place like that, in a time like this, people had more immediate concerns. All the better if he’d killed the pummeled thug. He was the only one who might have taken the whole thing personally.

  “Have we got another plan ?” said Sugar.

  Brooke set his hands palm down where his ribs met his belly. “Perhaps we’ll live and die in the woods,” he said.

  Finally, Sugar sat. The night grew dark. They talked on as their eyes adjusted. They got along well when there were empty hours ahead. They’d been out for so long already, it was almost easier for them to talk like they still were, like they’d never been back. Only things were soured now. They hadn’t the same
tolerance they’d had when headed home.

  “We’ll just wait a few days,” said Brooke. “No one’s going to care in a week.”

  “So we’ll wait a week, or a few days ?” said Sugar.

  “We’ll just wait,” said Brooke, “until it feels right.”

  “Here’s what’s eating me,” said Sugar. “The man you nearly killed. What was he hoping to get out of approaching us in the bath ?”

  “What do you mean ?” Brooke rolled on to his side to examine his bedded-down brother.

  “I mean, was he after you for breaking his nose, or to finish what he’d started ?”

  “The difference being ?”

  “The difference being, one agenda is personal. The other was a task assigned him by the same tiny man who sent us to enjoy his newly acquired facilities, only moments after you broke the nose of a man in his employ.”

  “Okay,” said Brooke, “it’s a question that warrants asking. And yet I don’t think the answer makes much of a difference. Either way we’ll be in the woods tonight. We’ll listen for the approach of a man, and if we don’t hear it, we’ll wait a day or two and then go home. We’ll find a bed and a private shower. We’ll stay out of anyone’s hair until they need us or come looking.”

  “And what if they no longer need us ?”

  “We’ve never been without work.”

  “Times are lean. You saw the people back there. Not a lot of children. Not a lot of fat.”

  “You’ve got a quality perceptive mind, Sugar. I could listen to you for days on end.”

  “What purpose do killers serve in a town that’s already dying ?”

  “And poetic too.”

  “People aren’t living like they used to, Brooke.” Sugar sat up to face his brother.

  “They never have,” said Brooke. Then, “The door man.”

  “The door man,” said Sugar.

  “He was fat.”

  “He was muscular, maybe, but…”