Don't Bother

by Jeremy Martin

  She woke to the wagon’s screeching stop. Then the creatures – women, the girl supposed – shoving each other into the crates of rattling jars. They swung misshapen hands, their fingers fused and curled to claws.

  “Whoa there,” a voice called, or seemed to call. The girl wasn’t positive she hadn’t only thought it. “I’m authorized to accept all deliveries for the boys below.”

  “Now hold on,” Mr. Blanketyblank said, out loud. He’d heard it too, then. “I don’t believe I recognize you, sir.”

  “You sure about that? Why don’t you take a good look at my face, right around the eyes?”

  “No, can’t say as I…”

  “You see that fleck of illuminated silver in this pupil right here? Look careful at it now. Don’t it look just like…”

  It got real quiet then. The women stood silent, not even trembling. The girl forgot how to breathe.

  “You can come out now, little girl,” said the voice she no longer thought she’d thought. “No use.”

  She stepped over the donkey and shimmied past the two women. An extended hand awaited her just outside the flap, but she hopped down without it. She wouldn’t lift her eyes past the man’s pointed boots, their bottoms caked in the unmistakable gray flaking of dried shit.

  “Smart girl,” he said, though not aloud, she was pretty sure. “You’ll ride shotgun.”

  The horses needed no signal to start once she’d climbed into the seat. She smelt the stranger sitting next to her, a scent like stagnant sweet tea. They moved toward the entrance to the abandoned mine. Its entrance, buttressed by warped wooden beams, gaped black ahead. She felt a slight weight now resting in her lap and looked down to see a lit lamp.

  “Take it,” the stranger said. “Though you’ll soon be sorry you’ve got it, I suspect.”

  The wagon rolled to the mine’s entrance, and she thrust the lamp out in front of her, casting a weak halo around them. They continued, and the light soon glowed against nothing. The darkness swelled. The entrance eclipsed to a pinhole, became only an idea.

  Shapes shifted ahead, forever moving just outside her lamplight’s reach. The floor sloped below them, forcing the horses to trot, then gallop, just to keep ahead of the wagon. The stranger reached down to unhitch them. “Ahead lies the chasm.”

  Free of the wagon’s weight, the horses sped into the darkness. The wagon continued to roll, though the ground beneath it soon leveled, and the wagon rolled to a slow stop against a wall of hard packed dirt. She could smell the dead earth not a foot from her face. Too many tiny legs, grouped too close together, bearing too much weight, scuttled across the dirt floor. In the distant dark the horses shrieked for an impossible number of seconds before crashing far below.

  Realizing the stranger no longer sat next to her, the girl discerned her lantern’s true purpose and opened the small glass door to blow out its flame. The women behind her renewed their muffled weeping. Something began rattling the jars, too deliberate for the work of recently mangled hands. The girl hopped down and began inching along the wall at her back.

  “Men,” exclaimed a forceful drawl from somewhere far too nearby. “I believe this shipment is incomplete. “I smell the donkey somewhere hereabout, but we were promised a third female.”

  The girl held her hand to the wall and began scooting faster until she worried she could hear her bare feet dragging in the dirt. She crept forward, but, soon, her hand no longer felt the wall behind her. She stood for a moment considering the cold air on her calves, unsure whether she’d found a tunnel or the abyss the horses had thrown themselves into. She turned and stepped into the opening, figuring either possibility preferable to meeting those gathering voices. Some conversed in a guarded hush, while others squealed and guffawed. Jars shattered on the ground, tiny throats voiced shrill protests. She began to run. She ran until her heart jerked hard, just once, in her chest, then bent over wheezing. The girl realized she still held the lamp. She figured she’d do just about anything for a match.

  “Just about anything?” a familiar voice asked. She felt a tug on her hair. “Or anything at all?”

  […]

  Lamp relit, she continued walking. The ground grew damp, then muddy, squishing between her toes. Ahead, it was wet enough to shine in her faint lantern light. A rat chirped and splashed, sending ripples through the water. The water was soon up to her ankles, numbing her feet. Every step sloshed. The rat went quiet then floated motionless. Next to its body, the girl thought she spotted a tiny hat floating, then noticed the rat’s legs were much too long and slender.

  Her next step found no ground, and she pitched forward into the syrup-thick water. Having never learned to swim, she thrashed so fiercely the lamp slipped from her hand. She quickly sank beneath the surface, where she could see only the lamp’s flame, unextinguished, as it drifted ever deeper. Her hand scraped a muddy wall, and she thrust her fist further in until she was nearly elbow deep. Her hand closed around something like a tree root, though it began to writhe and pulsate in her grasp. She tugged to test its security. Satisfied, she began to climb, hand over hand, punching through the slimy wall at every grasp. Afterwards, when she dropped, face down, on the bank, her arms had gone so weak they could hardly hold her face away from the puddle below her.

  Crawling back toward dry ground, she became aware of the dim shapes of her own hands, just perceptible, groping for pebbles in the dirt. When she found one, she’d toss it out ahead and wait for it to land before moving forward, hoping now to avoid that horse-killing chasm. She became so fascinated with her hands, she failed to notice the speck flickering orange ahead until it’d grown to a sizable rectangle. She moved faster, more certain she’d found her way back to the exit with every step, though the opening soon took on an elongated shape she hadn’t remembered. More troubling were the sounds, which soon grew too loud to ignore. They became unmistakable: a banjo, fife, and fiddle, out of tune, playing at an arrhythmic, plodding pace. Men’s laughter, the kind that emanates from swung-open saloon doors, echoed; meat crackled over an open flame. Campers, she told herself, just outside the mines. Playing music and roasting rabbit, or maybe even, she prayed, chicken.

  But once she could see into the doorway, she could no longer pretend. Dozens of men, or something similar, had gathered in a deep interior chamber. Narrow rail tracks crisscrossed the floor. Metal carts sat spaced along the tracks in measured intervals, each loaded with burning kindling, a contained fire. A spit turned three tiny bodies to roast over one of these fires, and several jars, some of them opened and lying on their sides, sat nearby. The things like men stood grouped around them, many wearing regulation gray caps and matching jackets, splotched and torn, their brass buttons worn dull or altogether missing. Some wore overalls, shredded below the beltline to accommodate what kept their uniformed kindred pantsless – six broomstick-width legs apiece, multi-jointed and insectoid.

  A large wooden table, the kind used for community picnics, sat in the center of the room. Several deformed women crouched on top, back to back, afraid to step off the edge. A man wearing the markings of a corporal opened a jar and pulled out a tiny black boy, who kicked and punched the air while the corporal used a thumb and forefinger to grip the boy around the waist. The officer carried the boy over to one of the women and attempted to forcibly insert –

  The girl screamed, and they all turned toward her, their silver eyes like milk-clouded saucers.

  […]

  And the air smells artificially citrusy, like diaper wipes. You’re backed up against a small porcelain sink. Harsh fluorescent lights illuminate a small desk and a cot covered in thin brown padding. A woman in a pastel pantsuit thrusts a small stack of antiseptic towelettes in your face. The feeling of hot oatmeal in your pants and a smell you hope you don’t smell. You try to focus instead on the posters tacked on the wall behind the woman – an orangutan pouting, a thermometer protruding from its lower lip: “Mondays are not contagious,” says one. Another nearby seems to illustrate proper hand
-washing procedures. The woman in the pantsuit grabs one of your hands and tries to force the wipes into it. “Take them, for god’s sake,” she says. “Your daughter is outside, scared.”

  You examine the damp white things, think maybe the woman wants you to count them. The woman grabs the wipes from your hand and drops to her knees in a single motion. “This isn’t my job,” she says, and you feel the woman’s hand tugging at your waistband.

  Afterwards, the woman opens the door and pushes you outside. There, in a molded plastic chair, swinging her tiny tennis shoes a half a foot from the floor, she's waiting, and you know only to look away. The girl who sits on the shore, dipping her toes in the water.

  Interrupting Cow

  42.

  Stet watched the drugs steam in the rust-stained sink, and tried to shake the idea that God wanted him to call the cops. He had no desire to be arrested, to be read his rights and forced to wait, handcuffed, while the bomb squad dismantled the double-wide. Sent off to jail, a thin white boy surrounded by bitter, weight-lifting minorities. But he could see himself doing it all the same: Stet walking back toward the trailer, not even bothering to close the shed door behind him, let alone lock it, because what’d be the point? He’d pick his cell phone up off the coffee table and hold down the nine key till they got the idea. Stet wondered if getting arrested was the type of event you ought to wear a shirt to. He laughed. The fumes were getting to his brain probably. He switched on the exhaust fan on his way out of the shed and closed the door behind him, double-checking the padlock just to make sure.

  Bricks, most of them broken, lined the short dirt path back to his trailer. He turned back toward the shed for a minute to watch the steam pouring, translucent and oily, through the roof’s stovepipe up into the sky.

  When he swung open the screen door, Stet caught the dog crouching on top of the laundry pile — clean clothes Stet hadn’t put away yet — pissing. It looked up at him, its eyes dull and bovine, too dumb to flinch. Light-beer-colored urine, hot and salty smelling, soaked into the underwear and balled-up socks, Star’s flannel pajama pants. Stet cursed and kicked. His bare foot caught the dog under the chin, and Stet stubbed a toe on its hairy jawbone. The dog, still pissing, fell backward into the refrigerator. Stet grabbed its collar and dragged it, claws skittering, across the linoleum. He kicked open the door and threw the dog out into the grass.

  “We make no-no in the yard, cocksucker,” he growled. He followed the dog outside and began to look for a large stick or a loose board, but he ended up punching himself in the thigh instead, hard enough to leave a bruise. The idiot had already forgot, probably. Stet unlocked the shed.

  He came back outside holding up a chunk of the new drug – a hardened reduction of extra-strength cough syrup and off-brand silverware polish – still hot enough to feel uncomfortable in his hand. The dog hunched its back and clamped its trembling tail between its hind legs when Stet came near, but it knew better than to run away. Stet pried open its mouth and shoved the drug inside. He clamped his hand over the dog’s snout until he saw its Adam’s apple bob. The dog snorted snot and whimpered once, short and sharp, but it did not throw up. Eventually, it lowered itself into the long-dead grass, and Stet went inside to watch TV.

  The laundry would have to be rewashed before Star’s shift ended, but lunch came first. They were out of beer and Kahlua, so Stet laced some powder-based chocolate milk with vodka he squeezed from a plastic bottle. He turned on the television and sat down on the couch. He’d come in on the middle of one of Star's shows. A female chef was making a cake for her ex's birthday party, her tears dripping into the butterscotch frosting she mixed. She removed the paper hat from her head and blew her nose into it. Stet checked the couch cushions for the remote control then wandered back outside.

  The dog was asleep but visibly breathing, so Stet went into the shed and broke off a chunk for himself.

  Back inside, Stet stepped over a yellowed white T-shirt and opened the refrigerator door. A nearly empty bottle of soy sauce stood alone on the top shelf, stuck solid in what appeared to be a pool of congealed cola, and he knew better than to open the carton of cottage cheese that sat inside the door. The carrots in the crisper were several inches shorter than they’d been when he’d bought them, and flecked with a fine white film. Stet added more vodka to his milk and went back to the couch. The hunk he held was insoluble, had the texture of a dirt clod; it hung in his throat like a rock in a python, and he finished off the whole glass of milk — an oversized gas-station-soda-fountain cup — getting it down. Once it hit his stomach though, he could feel it dissolving. It took root in his gut and branched out into his bloodstream, flowering once it reached his brain, petals pushing against his skull. A reptile clawing through its eggshell.

  6.

  Stet sat on his father’s unmade bed, balancing a plate of food he couldn’t eat in his lap: either a breast or thigh of supermarket fried chicken, and a slice of green gelatin mold embedded with slivers of what he’d first assumed was coconut but later determined was carrots. All he could think, all he’d been thinking for the past three days was that this was what it was like. This is how it felt for his father to die. A paperback book was face down on the nightstand, propped open at about the halfway point. He’d never finish reading it now. But that wasn’t really true, was it, considering this was the only book Stet had ever seen his father read. It predated Stet by years. The glass of water next to book would remain mostly undrunk, but that was hard to get sentimental about. The bed would never be made again, and with the weird certainty of a memory, Stet could picture himself stripping the sheets from the mattress, leaving it and the box-spring, uninherited, leaning against the dumpster out back.

  His father’s wedding ring, a thin band of anemic yellow gold, sat wedged in the crack between the bed and nightstand.

  Your mother’s going to sell it, a voice that was his but somehow not warned, and not even from spite. She just won’t care, and he didn’t leave a will, so it’s all going to an estate buyer. Pocket it now, and she’ll never know.

  He reached down for the ring, let it sit in his open palm, feeling or telling himself he felt, its sleight weight in his hand. He put his hand inside his blazer and dropped the ring in his dress-shirt pocket. It felt reassuring pressed against his left nipple.

  But it had to mean something to her that he still kept the ring all these years later, he thought. Had his father continued to wear it, only removing it before bed, or had he just got it out once and misplaced it? Stet removed the ring from his breast pocket and slipped it on each of his fingers, one by one, until he’d determined the ring came closest to fitting on his right-hand thumb. He carried his plate into the kitchen and ran everything, chicken bones and all, through the garbage disposal. Somewhere else entirely, he became aware of a key slipping into a lock.

  23.

  Star opened the front door. “Are you napping?” she asked first thing, already disappointed by the answer. Stet sat up too quick, grabbed his forehead. He still wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  Star unbuttoned her knee-length black peacoat — its once-fuzzy finish worn second-hand shiny. A smell like high-school-football two-a-days filled the room. It was probably 90 degrees outside, and the club’s central air had been down all week. Star caught him crinkling his nose and flung her coat at him. He caught it, pretending this was playful, and draped it over the back of the couch.

  “That cheap-ass Gino needs to build you guys a locker room so you can change clothes at work.”

  “My lazy-ass boyfriend needs to get his piece of shit drug on the market so I can stop riding the bus in a G-string.” She was wearing a pair of his boxers as shorts. She slipped them down over her plastic high heels. Stet mimicked a sexy guitar riff and wound up with a face full of his own sweaty underwear.

  She slammed a handful of wet change and torn singles (Stet was pretty sure he spotted a fifty-cent piece in there) down on the coffee table on her way to the kitchen. “You know what the lunch shi
ft is like. No tips, no lap dances. It’s hard to eat a ten-dollar ribeye with tits in your face.” She squeezed herself for emphasis and disappeared through the doorway.

  Stet panicked and ran in after her. “I know,” he hollered too quick. “That’s why I been testing the new batch all afternoon. I just got to get you out, babe.“

  He came into the room in time to watch her pulling up her flannel pants — multicolored stars against a field of black-faded-gray. She’d taken that oversized white T-shirt from the top of the pile. It appeared unstained.

  “I wish you would’ve put these away like I asked,” she said, but didn’t seem all that upset.

  The laundry pile, completely dry, smelt like fabric softener. The dog lay outside in the shade of the shed its eyes closed, its breathing easy.

  “Where the hell’d you get that ring?” Star asked.

  38.

  Hitting the lottery, even after he’d figured out how to use the drug, took a couple of tries. The key, Stet soon realized, was not trying to remember back to a time before he'd taken the drug and realized what it could do. He failed at first, recalling a time about six months previous, just before the jackpot reached an all-time high. He’d been unable to convince himself to buy a ticket.

  But if it's at its all-time high this week, six-months-ago Stet wondered to himself while trying to decipher the shapeless, omnicolored forms that made up the scrambled fifty-dollar-pay-per-view wrestling championship on his TV, that means somebody is/was going to win it anyway. Otherwise, it'd just be higher next week. Wouldn't it have been better to win it last week when he wouldn't have to split the prize money?

  He leaned back on the couch and nodded to himself, satisfied he'd warded off a nasty flashback of some drug or other with indisputable logic.