by Del Howison
Uneeda Ralston got old enough for the draft, and they took him off for basic training. I’d been using him from time to time when I needed somebody to give me a hand, so I made sure to see him when he came back for his final leave before being sent overseas. Turned out I didn’t have to go looking for him, because he came to see me on his last day at home.
He looked mighty trim and clean and military, which was good, but he also looked pretty upset.
“Come sit down, Uneeda,” I said, leading him to the bench on the porch. “You bothered about somethin’?”
“Mistah Cal, I think I done seen a ghost.” His voice shook, and I could see he figured I wouldn’t believe him, but I knew that boy well, and I knew he wouldn’t lie to me.
I put my arm around his shoulder and felt him shaking. “Tell me about it,” I said.
He straightened up and took off his cap. “You know my mama lives nearest of anybody to Mister Dennis Pindar’s place. We kin see their backyard from our cow lot. I went out to milk old Daisy for one last time, just after daylight. I got settled and was milkin’ away when I realized I was lookin’ at somethin’ tall and skinny that I could see clean through. Not only that, but after a little it begun to moan, like as if it was hurtin’. Sounded plumb pitiful.”
Uneeda looked into my eyes and spoke carefully. “My mama says she ain’t seen Mr. Pindar for months, though she used to wave at him sometimes when he was workin’ in their garden or fixin’ fence. Mama thinks …” He seemed to be gathering his nerve, but then he went on, “Mama thinks Miz Pindar has kilt him and put him down that there septic tank she’s so proud of.”
I must have jerked, because he nodded slowly. “She thinks so, Mistah Cal, and you know my mama ain’t one to holler before she’s hit. Kin you do somethin’ to check up on it and see? Mama is pretty upset over this thing. She’s goin’ to do enough worryin’ about me, once I get over to Yurrup and the war. She don’t need no extra to worry her.”
All the while we said our good-byes and I called the kids to shake his hand, I was thinking about the problem he’d brought to me. I’d been constable, by now, for eight years, and I’d never had a murder to handle. Killings, yes, over fences or stray cattle or wives caught with the wrong man. Many hunting accidents, of course. But no deliberate murder—I shivered at the thought.
As I waved to Uneeda, and his uncle Ned’s car carried him away toward Templeton, I was still thinking about the Pindars. How in hell was I going to find out what, besides crap, was down in that tank?
Then, of course, things got busy for me. Old Man Ellison went deer hunting to get his family some winter meat and found a body in the woods. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but that body turned out to belong to a federal agent who had been on some assignment for the government—they wouldn’t give even a hint as to what that might be, and that got the sheriff and the Texas Rangers (one of them, anyway) and even some men from Washington down here getting in my hair and making a lot of unnecessary trouble. Except for the ranger, a little guy about shoulder high to me, none of them had any idea how to get around in the woods without getting snakebit or stuck in briar patches.
Even worse, the fellow had been dead for a couple of months, so the chance of finding who killed him was pretty slim. If he’d been local, it would’ve been different, but this man was from Wisconsin, of all places, and nobody here had ever seen or heard of him. I believed that too. What in tunket could be a reason for one of our folks to shoot somebody from Wisconsin, anyway? Most likely he got killed by whatever outfit he was investigating, and that was finally what everybody decided after wasting most of the winter with useless messing around in the woods.
By the time that was over, I’d just about forgot about Uneeda’s ma and her ghost. That boy surprised the tar out of me, though. He wrote me a letter! To find a colored kid who could write wasn’t all that common, because the school for Negroes was pretty sorry back then. He’d managed it, though, and once I figured out his spelling, I realized that the boy was really concerned about his ma, who’d evidently written him letters of her own since he left.
I decided that I ought to do some quiet investigating of my own, since nobody in this part of the county would want to run afoul of Gladys Pindar. I talked it over with Mattie and even asked my ma what she thought. Ma is a mighty clearheaded lady, and she said, straight out, “I’ve knowed Minty Ralston since she was little, and I never knowed her to tell a lie. If she says she’s seein’ somethin’ over there, she sure enough thinks she’s seein’ it. But be careful, Cal. I figure you might hide out someplace close enough to see good but hid enough so Gladys won’t know you’re there. I s’pose the deputy out of Templeton wouldn’t give any help?”
I shook my head. It would take a lot more than a letter from a black boy, soldier or not, and the word of his ma to get official help, particularly now that the law was so shorthanded and wore out from thrashing through the woods for weeks. I knew I’d have to do this by myself, with maybe some help from Minty Ralston.
It’s funny how different it feels to sit in the early dawn chill waiting for a deer or a flight of ducks and doing the same thing waiting to see if there is a ghost dancing around on the top of a septic tank. By now I was familiar with the things…. Since moving into Hackberry my family had used one, and even my folks had put one in and were surprised at how nice it was not to have to trudge out to the privy in the dark and cold on a winter night. I knew the old man who had dug the pit for the Pindars, and I looked him up and got a clear notion of where the thing was and what kind of lid it had on it. He promised not to mention my visit to anybody, and I trusted him.
So there I was, crouched behind a clump of yaupon bushes, trying to see through the dimness. After a little I heard Minty going out to her cow lot to milk Daisy, and I took a deep breath and came to attention. Now was the time, if it was going to happen today.
But it didn’t. Nor the day after either. Not until the fourth morning did I hear, over the squirt of milk into Minty’s bucket, the sad wail coming from the Pindar place. I stood up to look over the yaupons, and there was a drifty sort of shape out in the backyard of the Pindar house, directly over the spot where the old fellow had told me he’d dug that pit.
I slipped off toward the cow shed and hissed at Minty, “Is Ned able to come out and be a witness for me? It’s there, and I need another person to testify to it.”
“He’s not feelin’ too swift, but he’ll go with you. I’ll get him.” She took her bucket of milk into the house, and soon old Ned came limping out, walking stick in hand, and waited for orders.
I took up the bag holding my shovel and pick, and together we went quietly toward the Pindars’ back gate, slipped inside the yard, and stopped. The figure was still drifting above the septic tank, moaning very softly. It didn’t seem to care that we were watching it, and I asked, “Dennis Pindar? You in there?” I nodded toward the dirt-covered lid of the tank.
He went out like a bubble popping, and I knew he had to be there. “You sit down, Ned, while I dig. I know your heart won’t stand hard work, but you can swear to whatever I find in there … if I find anything, of course.”
It was easy to get to the tank lid, though it should have had thirty years of washed-in dirt on top of it. The lid had been a sheet of corrugated iron, and it was rusted almost into brown lace. The smell was unbelievable when the shovel blade punched through it and let the accumulated stink out. That had strong hints of privy in it, but overriding even that was the overripe smell of dead flesh. That’s something you never could mistake for anything else.
I sent Ned home to alert Minty, while I took down a washline pole and dredged the tank with it. With a bloop of released gases, the body came up to the surface, and it was nothing you’d ever want to see. Made that body old Ellison found in the woods look almost good, by contrast. And the smell was beyond anything I’d ever known before.
About that time, the back door of the house flapped open and Gladys came boiling out like a
whole nest of wasps. “What do you think you’re doing in my yard, digging up my—” Her voice stopped abruptly when she saw what I was doing.
“Miz Pindar, you’re under arrest. One of Minta Ralston’s children is on his way to town right now to telephone to Templeton for the sheriff. I just found your husband’s body in your septic tank, and nobody could ever convince anyone that a man would open the thing up, jump in—and then close it after him.”
She didn’t say a word. Even when the sheriff showed up, sweating thumbtacks over bothering the Pindars, she kept her thin lips shut like a trap. But nobody could deny what was in that hole, and there was no one else on earth who had anything against Dennis Pindar. I was able to write Uneeda Ralston that his mama’s problem was solved, because even the jury couldn’t find any way to figure Gladys Pindar was anything but guilty as sin.
Now I’ve retired from being constable, the war is long over, and Uneeda has come home to take care of his mama and his uncle Ned. I can go to prayer meeting on Wednesday nights without worrying about poor old Dennis getting beaten like a rug by that skinny little wife of his. When they passed out mean, that woman went through the line twice. Maybe three times. I often wonder how she fares in prison, but not enough to inquire about her.
But I’ll never forget the stink rising from that hole in the ground or the wispy shape of poor Dennis hovering over his dead body. We put him away real nice, once we got things sorted out, and he lies in the cemetery beside his daddy. If I have anything to do with it, Gladys can be buried in the Huntsville prison graveyard with the rest of the unclaimed murderers. I just wish I could stick her in her own septic tank!
THE FLINCH
MICHAEL BOATMAN
SONNY TROUBADOUR WAS waiting to cash what passed for his paycheck when Scrape Rifkin’s Cadillac Escalade pounded up to the curb and disgorged three hundred pounds of human sewage.
Sonny’s guts convulsed as he watched the rest of his day slide down the toilet.
Just what I goddamn need, he thought.
Sonny pocketed his check and cracked his knuckles.
The chronically discouraged patrons of the Windy City Cash-Rite Currency Exchange dropped to the floor as Norman Morris, aka Nomo, and L’Dondrell Witherspoon, aka O-gazm, burst into their midst.
“That’s right,” Nomo said. “I want every one of you ugly bastards to lick this dirty-ass linoleum. Keep your asses horizontal and I won’t have to shoot nobody today.”
Sonny remained vertical. Nomo noticed.
“You got a problem with yo’ knees, motherfucker?”
Sonny shrugged. “Knees are fine,” he said. “Just not goin’ down today.”
Nomo’s brow crinkled. “You ain’t what?” he said.
“What did he say?” O-gazm said.
“Big man say he ain’t gon’ eat no linoleum today,” Nomo said.
O-gazm gaped.
“Watch the heifer,” Nomo said, pointing to the manager, a big black blonde who peered out from behind her bulletproof plastic window. “She moves, kill somebody.”
Nomo pointed his Sig Sauer 9mm at Sonny’s forehead.
“Look like we got us a bad man here,” he said.
Sonny stared down the barrel of Nomo’s gun.
No kinda life for a man anyhow, he thought.
“He don’t look so bad,” O-gazm said over his shoulder.
Nomo’s gold teeth bounced pellets of ghetto sunlight off Sonny’s retinas. Notorious for spending other people’s money on his smile, Nomo sported the kind of dental retrofit that makes racist South African gold exporters sing “God Bless America”
“Who you supposed to be?” he said. “Black Superman?”
“No,” Sonny said. “But if you don’t shoot me in the next ten seconds I’m gonna take that gun and whip your ass with it.”
“Lord have mercy,” the manager moaned.
Nomo shook his head as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard right. His gaze flicked over Sonny’s shoulder to where the Scrape’s SUV sat rumbling at the curb.
“Five seconds,” Sonny said.
“I’m gonna …” Nomo stuttered. The tip of his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth, moistened his lips, and darted back into its golden cave. “I’m gonna—”
Then Sonny rushed him.
Nomo fired high and wide over Sonny’s left shoulder, blasting a hole through the front window and setting off the burglar alarm. Then Sonny bitch-slapped the 9mm out of his hand.
“Hey! Hey, man—”
And that was all Nomo said, because his mouth was abruptly filled with Sonny’s fist.
“Yo! Yo! Yo!” O-gazm said.
Sonny grabbed Nomo by the collar and swung him around in a wide, staggering circle. The barrel of O-gazm’s Saturday night special jerked back and forth.
“Stand still, goddammit!” he said.
Sonny launched Nomo across the room like an Olympic shot-putter. Nomo slammed into O-gazm, and they both went down in a flurry of flailing limbs.
Sonny bent and picked up Nomo’s gun.
Sensing the ass-mangling trucking their way, the would-be bandits rose to the challenge, each according to his gifts: Nomo assumed a classic “Crane style” kung fu pose while O-gazm pissed his pants. Fifteen seconds later they resembled a half-assed reproduction of a lesser-known Picasso pencil sketch.
Sonny hauled the brigands outside and speed-plowed his right foot, size 16½, up their backsides. Nomo and O-gazm hit the Cadillac and crumpled, having been literally kicked to the curb. A second later, the street-side back door opened and the Scrape stepped out.
“Jesus,” Sonny said. “You look like shit.”
The Scrape looked … squeezed, like a half-eaten Florida grapefruit with its innards scooped out, leaving behind an empty bit of skin and a whiff of rotten produce.
I’m looking at the rind, Sonny thought. Man’s been sucked dry.
Looking at the Scrape made Sonny’s head hurt.
The Scrape squinted up at the sun like a groundhog that was shaky on the terms of its contract. Then he pulled a pair of designer shades out of the pocket of his imitation tiger-skin jacket.
“Fuck you,” he said. “You look like you could use some scratch, brah. You want a job?”
Sonny scowled. But then he remembered the daily spine-grind that was his post office gig, surrounded by gibbering sistahs who treated him like an adopted teddy bear one minute and a complete chowderhead the next, all under the watchful eye of his supervisor, Bobbi-with-an-i.
Bobbi-with-an-i was a Jamaican ballet instructor moonlighting with the USPS until Baryshnikov died. The day before, he’d invited Sonny up to his place in Boy’s Town for “cocktails and career counseling.” Sonny was beginning to have serious questions about Bobbi-with-an-i.
Finally, Sonny remembered the disconnect notices piling up in his kitchen trash bin. His car, a brown Ford Fiesta with a death wish, was squatting in an impound lot on Randolph Street, banked for a D.U.I. he’d picked up a week earlier.
“Yeah,” Sonny said. “What do you need?”
By the time he was fifteen, Tommy “the Scrape” Rifkin had amassed a small fortune selling black market ordnance. By his twenty-first birthday, he’d taken over the local crack/Ecstasy/crystal meth trade, all while managing to evade select representatives of Chicago’s Finest.
This talent for skullduggery—plus an obsession with all things NASCAR that brought new meaning to the word autoerotic—had secured Rifkin’s induction into the South Chicago White Trash Hall of Fame.
The Scrape’s nasal whine complemented his lair: half trailer park chic, half ghetto-fabulous. A black leather La-Z-Boy sat between a framed poster of Malcolm X and a life-sized standup of Dale Earnhardt Jr.
“I need you to find my girl and bring her back,” Rifkin said. “It’s worth five large if you bring her back.”
Rifkin swiped at his forehead with a paper towel while Sonny picked his jaw up off the table.
Five large, he thought, trying not to drool.<
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“Yo,” Rifkin said. “You was almost the champ, right?”
Sonny tensed: people still recognized him three or four times a day, and it chapped his ass.
“Yeah,” Rifkin said. “I saw your style back at the Cash-Rite. You was a contender, bro. Don King called your right cross ‘an extinction-level cosmic smackdown from the Devil Hisself.’”
“That was a long time ago,” Sonny said.
“Bro, I remember the Champ chewin’ on your ear like it was yesterday,” Rifkin said. “Vegas o-six, right? Dude, that shit was disgusting.”
“Five years ago,” Sonny said. “Past is past.”
It was during Sonny’s last shot at the title that the reigning champ, a semihuman piledriver named Baron Flake, laid him low with a left-handed uppercut to the occipital that detached his right cornea. Sonny woke up to find Flake gnawing on his left earlobe, his demolished eye spitting blood, while faerie lights popped and fizzled along his optic nerve like a paparazzi assault from hell.
The hospital stay sucked and blew at the same time.
Afterward, Sonny attempted a comeback, but every time he heard the bell clang he would rush to the side and puke over the ropes. Finally, Sonny’s trainer, the inimitable Sharkey Washington, took him aside.
“My three-legged Pekingese got a better shot at a title bout than you do, boy,” Sharkey growled. “It’s over.”
Then Sharkey, who was the closest thing to a father Sonny would ever know, wiped his protégé’s secondhand breakfast off his polyester warm-ups and dropped dead from congestive heart failure.
“Ahem,” Rifkin said. “Yo, Troub, you with me?”
Sonny shoved his memories aside to consider the matter at hand: Rifkin looked wobbly as Commander-in-Thief of this shitty little outfit. His focus fluttered around the room like a fruit bat on steroids.
Why won’t he look me in the eye? Sonny wondered.
Rifkin noticed Sonny noticing him and—flinched. Nomo and O-gazm grumbled. Post–pistol whipping, the brigands looked surlier than ever.
