THUGLIT Issue Ten

by Ed Kurtz

  THUGLIT

  Issue Ten

  Edited by Todd Robinson

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in the works are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  THUGLIT: Issue Ten

  ISBN-13: 978-1496117915

  ISBN-10: 1496117913

  Stories by the authors: ©Aaron Fox-Lerner, ©Benjamin Nadler, ©S.A. Cosby, ©Terrence McCauley, ©Ed Hagelstein, ©Eryk Pruitt, © Mark Mellon, ©Ed Kurtz

  Published by THUGLIT Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the Author(s).

  Table of Contents

  A Message from Big Daddy Thug

  Houston by Eryk Pruitt

  Walk Up by Ben Nadler

  Our Lady of Mercy by Edward Hagelstein

  Death Of A One-Percenter by Mark Mellon

  Nothing You Can Do by Ed Kurtz

  For Whom No Bells Toll by Terrence McCauley

  The Rat and the Cobra by S.A. Cosby

  Traces of a Name by Aaron Fox-Lerner

  Author Bios

  A Message from Big Daddy Thug

  Big Daddy Thug here, digging my way out of another brutal New York winter to warm your cockles (and vaginkles, respectively) into spring with eight new tales of the nasty. The neck-deep snow is starting to melt, and…

  …is that a foot sticking out of that snow bank? Nah. Just an old shoe.

  Anyway, the temperature might be creeping above the freezing point as you read this, but the chill will stick with you long after you’ve turned the last page of…

  …why is that old shoe attached to a pair of jeans? Nah. Somebody’s Halloween scarecrow got caught up in Old Man Winter’s hissy fit. That has to be it.

  Where was I? Oh yeah. Dig yourselves out of the snow, and dig into some Thuglit, kittens! I’m gonna go see if that scarecrow has a wallet.

  IN THIS ISSUE OF THUGLIT:

  A bad night in Germany?!? Whoever heard of a bad night in Germany?

  Dead men spray no tags.

  Invite Skunk into your home, you’re gonna be left with a stink.

  The pen may be mightier than the sword, but I’m betting on the sword in a bar fight.

  No good deed goes unpunished.

  Trusting the idiot makes for two idiots.

  The neighborhood might have changed, but you don’t have to.

  1% income, 99% shenanigans.

  SEE YOU IN 60, FUCKOS!!!

  Todd Robinson (Big Daddy Thug)

  2/26/14

  Houston

  by Eryk Pruitt

  Kate didn't take five minutes fooling around down there before my rocks were good and gotten off. She sat up, adjusted her shirt and hollered at the window to Bunk to let him know she was done, he could come back to the car. I'd barely gotten myself back into my pants and zipped up before the interior light came on and Bunk slipped into the back seat where he didn't say a word, just stared down at the floorboard.

  If it was me, I'd have been grinning and making jokes about the whole thing. We'd still be having a laugh about it. I'd have never let it go. But it wasn't me and I'd never been in that situation, and therefore, had no idea what I was talking about.

  It was my first time in a lot of situations.

  "Sorry I yelled at you like that," I told Bunk. I watched him through the rearview. He didn't look up. "I was just a little stressed out. I had no right."

  Bunk mumbled something, but he still wouldn't look up.

  "Promise me you ain't sore no more," I said.

  Bunk nodded, then looked at the window.

  I said, "Tell me it's all good and we don't have to think no more about it." Bunk only nodded, so I said, more firmly, "Say the words, Bunk."

  He did. I started the car and merged back into midnight traffic. The roads from Houston to East Texas grew more and more wooded, fewer and fewer cars, the further we rode. It wasn't for a while before Bunk said: "You ain't been yourself lately, Deke."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Maybe we change the subject," said Kate. She messed with the buttons on the radio and could only find talk stations and shit classic rock.

  "No, let him talk," I said. "What do you mean I ain't been myself, Bunk."

  "You just ain't the same person," he said.

  Kate turned in her seat. "Bunk, why don't you take a nap? It's getting past your bedtime."

  He was older than she was, but she could put him in his place. He hung around us for drugs, sure, but he was also waiting for me to be finished with Kate. Everybody knew it. When I was done, his plan was to be there to swoop her up…and then what? I wondered what his plan was when that happened. Did he even have a plan? Would that I could get him to explain that to me because I was long due a good belly laugh, but I had matters more pressing.

  For instance: "I'd really like to hear what you have to say, Bunk. I ain't the same person? What do you mean by that?"

  I didn't have to look at her to know Kate was giving him the stink-eye—glaring him into submission—but I did anyway. She spun in her seat and watched the road. Arms folded across her chest. She'd done all that work to calm me down, bless her heart, and here was Bunk, stirring the pot. Not leaving well enough alone.

  "Forget it," he said.

  "I'd like to hear it, Floor-Boy," I said. Floor-Boy is what we called him because there were never enough seats for him. No matter where we went, it seemed he was always taking the carpet. Calling him Floor-Boy was a sure-fire way to get him riled up.

  "I'm just saying you've turned into an asshole is all," he said. Riled up. "When I first met you I thought you were cool. You liked comic books. You liked baseball. But look at you. Look at what happened to you."

  "And what happened to me?"

  "You turned into this, is what."

  "And what's this?"

  "The kind of guy who does shit like this," he said. "The kind of guy I can't stand."

  I wanted to remind him that I knew why he hung around my girl. That he wasn't so stand-up either. It was Kate that suggested we pull the car over. It was Kate that told him to take a walk around the woods off the highway while she did what she felt needed to be done. I felt we needed to get back to Lufkin in a hurry, the quicker the better. I wanted to tell him he had no right putting a bug up my ass over the little inconvenience.

  So I did.

  Then he said, "That's not anywhere near the top of my list. That's not even what I'm talking about."

  "And what are you talking about?"

  "Shut up, Bunk," growled Kate. But I wanted to hear it.

  "I'm talking about the guy in the trunk," he said.

  Oh yeah, I thought. And then there's that.

  And we rode the rest of the way to Lufkin in silence.

  Only hours earlier, I had given Kyle Karver one specific instruction: "Do not take your eyes off the money until you have the weed."

  "You're being paranoid," is what he told me. "These guys are cool. Trust me."

  "I don't care," I said. "You are to be with either the weed or the money at all times. Nod if you understand." He laughed it off, so I repeated myself while putting my hands on both his shoulders. I let him know I wouldn't let go until I was satisfied.

  "Fine," he said. "I understand."

  And with
that, I gave him the money and he disappeared out the door. I went back to the table where Kate and Bunk waited for me. The waitress had just popped over with another order of mozzarella sticks and I asked if she would bring me another cup of coffee.

  "Refills ain't free," she said. "This is a sports bar, it ain't Waffle House."

  I told her I didn't care, just bring me the fucking coffee. I sat down to wait. Kate tried to tell some funny story and Bunk did what he could to distract me, but in no time my leg got to shaking and I wasn't hearing nothing they said. A million different thoughts rattled around my head, each and every one of them starting with, "I shouldn't have let Kyle out the door with all that money."

  It wasn't that Kyle was particularly or not particularly shady. But what Kyle was, was an idiot. Kyle once quit his job because a co-worker gave him a map to a mysterious field of kind bud hidden deep in the East Texas thicket. He needed to focus on finding the weed, he said when he came home from his pizza job, freshly unemployed. He promised to cut us all in when he found it. Day after day, he marched out into the Piney Woods of Angelina county, armed with a map, a machete, and a box of trash bags. Every day he came back home, dirty, sweaty and smelling quite the fright and saying how he'll find it tomorrow—oh, he'll get the weed tomorrow.

  You could count on Kyle to take too much acid and paint his room and furniture purple. You could count on Kyle to pick a fight with the biggest or most connected guy in the room, then disappear after his friends got involved. Kyle was the kind of guy who got girls pregnant and never went in more than half on the abortion.

  Kyle was not the guy you could give three thousand dollars to buy drugs and expect everything to go right.

  The panic started in my leg, shaking it so much that it rocked the tabletop and eventually knocked the salt shaker to the floor. Started in my leg and worked its way up to my stomach where I reckoned I could puke, then up to my eyes which twitch when I get antsy. Panic rocking me so hard that I couldn't hear, see, think, or smell anything but regret. I was on the verge of exploding after only three minutes of letting Kyle out the door when he came walking back in, grin more than shit-eating and lumbering our way.

  "What are you doing?" was all I could say and could say no more.

  "I haven't seen you guys in over two months," he said, "and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend it riding around in a car with five other guys. Fuck that, I'm having a beer with you three so I can catch up."

  "But the money—"

  "Don't worry about the money," said Kyle. "They'll be back in forty-five minutes tops. They only have to go a few blocks."

  I couldn't speak. My entire body broke into fever. My knuckles tensed so much I heard them cracking. Kate must have seen the warning signs because she jumped into action. She was firm, much more than I was used to her being.

  "Kyle," she said, "where is the money?"

  "I gave it to the guys. They'll be back in forty-five minutes."

  "You gave them all the money?" she said.

  "What did I tell you?" I growled. "I gave you one fucking instruction. What was it?"

  Kate said, "Where did they go? Who are these guys? How well do you know them?"

  Kyle laughed it off. No big deal. "I just met them, but don't worry. They're straight up. They're fine. Besides, I have their pager number. If they were going to rip us off, they wouldn't have given us their pager number."

  And I knew, deep down inside, he believed that. I knew he hadn't meant any ill will. I could see it in his face. But I also knew that it wasn't me he needed to convince. That he'd have to communicate that with Gumm and Little John himself—how innocent he was, that it wasn't a big fucking deal that he just let thirty-four hundred dollars disappear with five guys he barely knew. And I also knew he had no intention of leaving Houston to do so.

  So I insisted he ride back to Lufkin in the trunk.

  If you liked to party, Little John and Gumm ran things in East Texas. Who knows how that got started. They could get weed, which meant at one time or another, they saw damn near everyone in town who liked to smoke it.

  Before long, if you wanted your car fixed, you called Little John and Gumm to get your car fixed. They sold weed to a mechanic outside of town.

  If you got a DWI, call Little John and Gumm because a lawyer they knew could get it dropped down to Public Intoxication and a speeding ticket.

  Coke, pills, god forbid a gun... I never asked about it, but rumor had it that Little John and Gumm got a guy a kidney once. A kidney.

  One way or another, the weed you smoked in East Texas came from Little John and Gumm. Folks all over town would name it this shit or another. One guy will be selling something called Sky Caps—you get so high it's like you're in the mountains, man—while another guy sells the same shit to the hippies over in Nacogdoches and calls it Purple Haze. But all of it came out of Little John's apartment, and it got driven by guys like me up Highway 59 from Houston.

  Gumm took me the first time. He listened to shitty country music, smoked blunts, and drank tallboys from a paper sack. He introduced me to the guy, told him I'd be driving from now on—the guy a Mexican teenager, his grandmother watching television in the living room, a smattering of children in tow. On the way back, Gumm sat eleven pounds of marijuana in a backpack on the front seat of the pickup, between him and me.

  "You ain't going to hide that some?" I ask him.

  "Hell no," he said. "If I see the cops, I want to throw it out the window. I can't get rid of it if it's hidden somewhere. If they got me, they got me. But I'm getting it out of the truck."

  Who knew if that rationalization worked or not. I had a different approach. I bought a pup tent. When I picked up the shit, I stuffed it in the bag that was supposed to hold the stakes. Then I wrapped that up inside the tent. Then I stuffed the tent into the bag, and that bag into the tent's box. And the whole thing then went in my trunk underneath enough shit to discourage anyone from checking, which meant if they were checking, the gig was up and they already had me. Me and Gumm saw plenty things different, I reckoned.

  He didn't care where I stashed the shit. He didn't care how much I pinched because, as he explained, everybody pinches. He didn't even care if I took a girl down with me or not, so sometimes I brought Kate, sometimes I went alone. But he did have one rule and he wanted it never to be broken: "Never monkey with the supply."

  He said it enough times, he could have been punching me in the face while saying it.

  "Never monkey with the supply." Sometimes, I'd tell him I was running late to pick up the money from him. I'd catch an earful, him telling me I'm monkeying with the supply because I told the kid I'd be there at five and goddammit, I better be there at five. If someone went to the trouble of getting pounds upon pounds of Mexican skunk into their tiny Houston apartment, Gumm told me I better do everything I can to get it the hell out of there.

  "Never monkey with the supply."

  It was Kyle's idea to undercut the supply—in effect, to monkey with it. Kyle always had an angle. He'd up and left East Texas a few months before and fancied himself cosmopolitan and connected now that he lived in the big city. The mean streets of Houston, Texas. Every time he called back to Lufkin, it was this or that about some nightclub or another, or the greatest damn Indian food or a taco truck or something that presented Houston as the great paradise, the mecca to which all East Texans should aspire to migrate. In the same manner that folks moving to New York suddenly get extremely obnoxious, but on a scale more absurd.

  Imagine him: the wheeler and dealer, his mommy and daddy kicking him a couple of bucks so he could live in an apartment downtown. A shitty apartment. Not two steps up in decor from the shitty apartment we shared back in East Texas. Back in Lufkin. Back where he hadn't the decency or foresight to drop so much as seven days notice that he would be moving home, not to mention the thirty required by our landlord.

  This is the guy who suggested we go with the guys who had the better deal. The guys he just met in a bar a few
days earlier. The type of guys who slaver and salivate over guys like him. And apparently: me.

  I had big plans running about in my head. With the money I skimmed by going with the better deal, I could probably afford to chum in on a QP of my own, maybe even a whole pound. I could undersell Gumm and Little John, make a little profit maybe. Maybe even drive back down to the Mexican teenager and get another pound next time…maybe two. I thought back to how Gumm and Little John must have started their own empire and reckoned it was something just like this.

  As I drove back to Lufkin, my pipe dreams felt more along the line of Kyle Karver's as he trudged through East Texas swamps with a machete and a hand-drawn map.

  I was due back at Gumm and Little John's apartment sometime in the night. As the sun rose over the Angelina river, I imagined them pacing the floor, loading up on guns and powdering their rifles. Assembling a search team or, more likely, a posse. I circled the apartment three times, then parked down the street. One by one, the street lights faded to nothing and the sky went from purple to blue.

  "Do you care if I get out here?" asked Bunk. "I can walk to the highway and hitch a ride into town."

  I expected Kate to tell him no, that's ridiculous. I looked to her and found her studying my face. She put a hand to my elbow. My hands were still on the steering wheel and had been since we had parked and I'd shut off the car. Normally, I would have shrugged it off, but I didn't. I liked it just fine where it was. So many times I'd wanted to tell her it was over, that one of the other girls meant more to me, or at least that the possibility existed that they could mean more to me. But that wasn't right then and it wasn't that very moment. That very moment we could get married. Have babies. Grow old together, like some people do.