by CS DeWildt
Chapter 10
Terry and Zeke stood in the back of Al’s, waiting for a line to build up. When Al was distracted, they each grabbed a twelve-pack of beer and got into the Olds. The engine grumbled, and the pair cracked their beers.
“Let’s get some snatch tonight, boy,” Terry said.
The 307 screamed, and the tires grabbed pavement, squealed in reverse and didn’t stop when Terry slammed the lightning rod shifter into first. The car fishtailed into the empty street, and the motor grinded that car out of sight, tires still screaming through the next two gears. Mindless, angry, sick, dangerous: pure fucking muscle.
Chapter 11
Lloyd left the Bohl twins on the bridge. He managed to get two more beers off them and was feeling pretty good. The cold wind stole the blood from his nose, numbed it so Lloyd felt no pain there. His torso ached with bruised tissue, but that’s what the beer was for.
Lloyd paid the two-dollar admission at the fairgrounds. The carnival was full on in the dwindling twilight. Sans clouds, the stars would be bursting through the dying daytime canopy, torching the skies with their fire, but the clouds were the truth and to look beyond them was not an option, no matter what great secret rested above them in the thin, freezing upper reaches of the atmosphere.
Lloyd wandered through the livestock barns. He patted a Holstein on the snout. It snorted and stared at Lloyd with big, black cow-eyes, licked the side of its face, and Lloyd smelled the wad of festering cud she had regurgitated. At the end of the cattle barn was a 4-H display. A pretty girl sat on a hay bale behind a homemade poster project. The four-leaf clover was cut from construction paper, the four H’s: head, heart, hands, and health were spelled out in green marker. The girl’s hair was in a practical ponytail. Her face was dusted with color, a perpetual flush brought on by work. It dampened and held her beauty to its undertones, like dust in rain.
“Cute,” Lloyd said. The girl looked up from the sleeping calf she was stroking. “What’s his name?”
“We don’t name them. He’s getting slaughtered after he wins first prize next year. Aren’t you, baby?” The girl accented her speech with a series of hard pats that woke the calf. The black eyes looked at Lloyd before they closed, and the head settled to the girl’s lap again.
“Oh,” Lloyd said. “He always that tired?”
“No. He stands most the time. He’s just sore. I castrated him today.”
“You did?”
“Well, my brother and daddy held him down. I did the cutting though.”
The girl smoothed her hair with a leather-gloved hand and looked about the small hay-covered stall. “You see a hat?” She looked up for a response, but Lloyd was gone. The castrated calf mooed. He stretched his head back to lick his wound but could not quite reach.
Chapter 12
Chief sat in the dump drinking from the jug of palm wine. He passed it Davies, who took a long pull.
“It was an accident?” Davies said, hoping.
Chief waited for the bottle to come back. He drank and swished. The fermented juice burned in his mouth. He swallowed the poison. It flowed like familiar, old anger.
“Nope,” Chief said. Davies had led him to the opossum, and it was as described, death by blue and pink paint. It bled from the mouth, black eyes dried out and dull. It smelled of scent glands and sweet excrement.
A crime scene van from the county rumbled up the dirt path to the dump. Chief and Davies stared into the open refrigerator. Inside, the boy was blue and dead, pants around his ankles. Chief stood and looked to the large setting sun, pink and muted orange as it peaked over the neighborhood, through a cloud gap, beyond the field and creek; it burned his retinas. He looked at the boy again with his irises at their lowest aperture. Chief saw blackness.
“Davies. You best get the fuck out of my sight.”
“Mr. Chief?”
“I’m getting drunk tonight, and I think you should get the fuck out of my sight. This is a crime scene, you nigger shiner!”
Davies looked at Chief and searched his face for humor. The eyes were deep set and impossible to read.
“Quit smiling at me and get the fuck out of my sight!”
Davies stepped away to his home, tiny steps through mangled dandelion heads, unable to understand what had happened. Chief watched the county boys do his work as he drank from the jug.
Chapter 13
Lloyd missed Grandma’s funeral. No one advocated for Lloyd to stay home. Grandpa didn’t say much since he’d found his wife, broken at the bottom of the basement stairs. He signed the paperwork Chief put in front of him.
When Lloyd arrived in the desert, two-thousand miles from anything he knew, his mop of white hair was shaved down, and he traded his clothes for used fatigues. He was not oriented to the place except for the one piece of advice: Do what everyone else does.
They exercised the boys until near collapse. They occupied minds with schooling and order. They took none of the shit you were slinging around at home. A kid died the day Lloyd arrived, hanged himself from the bunk, silently in the night. Lloyd woke the next morning, opened his eyes to find the blue face of his bunkmate and then feigned sleep until revelry.
Some boys resisted at first, but it didn’t take long for most to submit to the program. The favorite motivational tool concerning difficult cases was the withholding of water. It usually worked, brought the desired submission, but when it didn’t, they had to escalate to the “dirt sandwich.” The last time Lloyd saw it happen was when a new kid collapsed on August afternoon run. He’d begged for water, writhing, crying. The instructors gave in and gave him a sun-warmed canteen. After drinking, the kid answered the commands to continue running with: “Eat a dick.” He was about 110 pounds, a wiry, little, red-haired shit. A twist of the wrist and a pressure point squeeze put the kid on his back with all 320 pounds of the instructor straddling his chest. The kid gasped as the dirt was dropped and ground into his open mouth, forced through pursed lips. He turned his head to avoid it, his baked eyeballs screamed and couldn’t produce tears fast enough to rinse away the earth. A second instructor aided the scene by holding the kid’s head prone. The kid finally gave in, and when the instructors released him, he didn’t get up.
“Oh my Jesus,” the big instructor said. He was pink all over, puffing, dripping sweat. The boys broke rank, gathered, watched the situation spin away from the drill instructors. The boys slipped back into their old slang and mannerisms.
“Shut up! Shut up!” An instructor yelled, but no one heard or cared. The adults talked to one another quickly, loudly, tones accusatory. They shook the boy. Neither knew CPR, and the red-freckled corpse baked in the sun, its lungs and stomach full of ants and silt and pebbles. A fight broke out over a grade-school code infraction; a snitch bitch Mexican chollo was punished.
Lloyd could not watch any of it, but the activity would not escape his periphery vision; it lingered like the knowledge he would soon be home after the smoothest patch of life he could remember. The camp had come easy to him; he’d adapted properly. For almost a year, it had been order and peace. Now as Lloyd free-fell, he heard the wolves below. He saw a mythos forming, a clay slab being worked and shaped and beginning to resemble the artist’s heart. Lloyd saw flaming, wooden torches soaked in oil, burning, and the zenith of technology, the pitchfork. The hungry overworked serfs rallied to destroy a beast and took comfort in a common enemy, a tangible evil providing a glimpse into the stochastic malevolence of God.
CPS collected the boys, American Indian gang members and the chollos and one white-headed killer from back east. Lloyd fought his way through foster homes. He survived by the hardness he’d acquired in the camp, was made even harder. He took beatings. He gave them when he had to.
When he returned to the custody of Grandpa, the old man was on the oxygen and his mind was going quickly. He spoke often, but the words were nonsensical memories, accusations, and the occasional lucid request for candy and cigarettes. There was no context to contain his ra
mblings, and there was no one left to care for him. Lloyd’s parents were gone to a place no one knew, an island paradise, a death camp. Lloyd was cut from the system, a kid saved. Grandpa would have died alone within a month had Lloyd not come back, but then, that might have been the preferable option had the old man been able to voice a preference.
Chapter 14
Chief found Lloyd at the fairgrounds, under the squeaking grand stands, smoking some scored weed with the Bohls. The pre-derby tractor pulls roared behind them. Chief crept up and grabbed Lloyd by the shoulder and turned him, slapped the freshly lit cigarette out of his mouth. Lloyd dropped his tallboy. He looked at the wounded vessel as it bled its nourishment into the butt-covered soil. If only the ground would sprout a cigarette bush or beer tree. The Bohls ran off with the weed. Lloyd hoped Chief might go after them but knew better. Chief slapped his face again.
“What the fuck, man?”
“What the hell you been into today Lloyd? I ain’t playin’ with you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s start with your face.”
“The Cutters got me.”
“Hm. Where?”
“On the highway.”
“You at the dump today?”
“No.”
“Not what I hear.”
“You heard wrong then.”
“I don’t believe that. You know exactly what I’m onto, and I know it was you. Death follows you, boy. Follows you closer than coincidence does.”
Lloyd looked into Chief’s grizzled face and thought about how people you see everyday don’t age, decided it was because you couldn’t tell the difference from one day to the next. Other people you see once in a while remind you of how much you must have changed, each wrinkle a reflection of your own shortened timeline. Chief was of the second type. He’d been a guest player in Lloyd’s life two times previously, and the meeting under the rickety grandstands made three. Lloyd updated Chief’s avatar. Chief was becoming an old man.
“I never killed my sister and what happened with Grandma was an accident.”
Chief cocked a fist. “I wanna put this so far through you.” He shook it, put it to Lloyd’s face, ground knuckles into his taped nose. Lloyd groaned and fought with the hand, breathed in stale palm wine and halitosis. Chief relented, backed up slowly, kept his eyes on Lloyd. He regained a semblance of restraint, smiled even. “Don’t go far,” he said. “I’m coming for you soon.”
Lloyd watched Chief go and then salvaged the dead can from the ground. He tipped the last few swallows into his mouth. He rolled another cigarette and went to see where those bitch Bohls went with the weed.
Chapter 15
Terry and Zeke walked straight to the beer case and grabbed a twelver each. These they planned to take to the counter. They were primed. The store was empty.
“I saw what you did to Lloyd today,” Al said.
“So,” Terry said over his shoulder, filling up a soda from the fountain, just halfway.
“Why are you boys so fucking nasty?”
“Look who’s talking, you criminal fuck,” Terry said.
“Fuck you and Bizbang,” Zeke said putting his own fountain drink and beer on the counter. “Gimme…two packs of Gold Coasts…the red ones…shorties. And a fifth of Maker’s Mark.”
“You’re not drinking and driving tonight are you?”
“Us?” Terry said, approaching the counter. “Never. Give me like you did him.” Both Cutters topped off their sodas with eight ounces of whiskey from the red-topped bottle.
Al pulled the items from the racks behind him and rang up the total. He took the cash, his fingers dancing over the buttons until the drawer popped open with a ding that carried through the hollow store. Al looked up from the contents of the drawer.
“What you got there?”
Chapter 16
Chief’s veins were a sewer flowing with the palm wine. The cruiser drifted over the yellow line, back and forth. His knuckles were tight on the wheel. His face was hidden away by shadow. He pulled the jug from the seat and into the darkness with him. He downed a mix of speed and opiate pills with the last of the sweet, white liquid and threw the empty jug out the window of the cruiser. He choked and gagged, fighting his body’s instincts, riding the poison bull. He thought about killing time. He needed to get loose. He needed to inflict justice.
Chief pulled a sharp U-turn and ran up the curb next to the entrance of the bowling alley. The cruiser bounced and settled, and Chief circled wide right around the perimeter of the full lot. League night. His headlights shone on the adjacent cornfield; he turned the wheel, and the cruiser clipped the outer row of corn. The light flowed back toward the bowling alley, then along the side, then toward the back.
The teenage boys and the few girls ran when they saw the headlights. Beer cans fell, abandoned like the bonds of friendship as fourteen or so bodies ran for the fence that stood between them and the monster Caprice, every person for themselves.
Inside the car, Chief flipped the siren on and squealed along. He tipped back his head and choked down more pills with a mouthful of collected saliva. Chief directed the cruiser side to side, herding the kids toward the dead end wall where the L-shaped building met the high, chain link separating it and the cornfield. Agile youth dodged the lights and hopped up the fence, scrambling, yelling, and cursing as the barbed summit teeth gnashed their fleshy palms and tore their clothes.
The trapped boy, sixteen or seventeen, stood with his forearm to his face, shielding his eyes from the bright lights as the photons beat him back into the corner. Chief stepped out of the car and into the night. The kid tried to get a bead on Chief, but he was blind beyond his own sleeve. He heard the cruiser door slam and spoke toward the source.
“I don’t have anything. I’m just hanging out.” Chief was silent save for his footsteps. The justifications swirled in the boy’s head, and he became indignant. “Fuck you. I’m not breaking the law. I don’t have shit! You know who my dad is?”
“Nope.”
“Art Stojka.”
“You’re Artie’s kid?” Chief’s air brightened. “I know ol’ Artie.”
“Yeah,” the kid said. His racing heart downshifted a gear. His breathing slowed. His mind sank into in the drugs and alcohol he’d done.
“He sellin’ many cars?”
“Not too much lately. Some.”
“Too bad.”
“You need a car? We can give you a deal. I’ll tell him to let me handle it. He’s dying for me to get in there with him anyway.”
“That right?” Chief smiled.
The boy settled into his elation, spoke with a confidence planted in his genes. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“Sure could use a nice sport job.”
“Dad was just sayin’ how we got a bunch of new ‘Vettes he can’t move cause of fuel prices and the economy and everything. We’d get you in one for, hell, 500 over cost I bet.”
“What’s your name son?”
“Charlie.”
“I think you’re daddy might be right, Charlie. I think you’re a natural salesman.”
“Thank you.”
Chief pulled something from his belt in the dark. “But I don’t think I’m going to buy right now.”
“No?” Confusion came, faded, dread rose.
“Nope. Soon as the town gets annexed to the county, I’m out of a job. Can’t even take new cases. After tomorrow, I got to hand all the old ones over, too. Not a good time for me to be buyin’ much of anything.” Chief sighed, a man beaten. He looked at his feet for what seemed like too long, swayed. “But I am going to beat you silly for drinking and drugging back here tonight. See, I got a little problem with alcohol. Some people might say since I know it’s a problem, it might not really be a problem, but that’s not worth a sack of sand, the meaning of the words. Understand?”
“Truth is I got the cancer in my guts and a liver like a beach ball from all the drinking I’ve done. And the rub is that
the drinking and pills is the only thing makes it tolerable, even though I know that I might just lose control, and that when I do, I’m liable to beat on some second generation Gyp-Romanian American kid behind the bowling alley.” Chief smiled. “I am aware of my own faults.”
“You can’t do this. My dad. He’ll see you on your ass! He plays golf with the mayor!”
“Mayor left town, son. Gone. It’s just me, and this is happening whether you want it to or not. You may think it’s cruel, but I bet after tonight, I won’t find you here again.”
“No. You’ll be in fucking jail! You know what they do to cops in jail?”
“Can’t say I do. Never been.” Chief moved in the space left between his bumper and the building. He met the boy in the corner. He laid his hands on the boy, gripped his face with a callused palm. The boy’s eyes lost all dignity. “You ain’t saying nothing to no one, or I’m goin’ to pay your daddy a visit. I’m gonna bend him over his own desk in that Gyp dealership of his, and I’m going to ass fuck him with my piece till he’s begging me for it. And I’ll give it to him.” Chief smiled and then punctuated the warning with a hard fist to the kid’s soft gut. The kid spewed beer and hydrochloric acid on Chief’s shining shoes. Chief forced him back in the tight corner with a popping right hand to face. From inside the alley, a strike exploded, the noise deadened by concrete and the humming, clanking world behind the red-collared pins. The kid gripped at the bare brick and mortar. He imagined it had the same texture as Chief’s face. The kid heard a metallic snap as the baton grew. He watched it gleam, black and haloed by high beams. Chief raised the club and swung it until he was a puffing and red faced. He left the boy to moan and sing behind the building, his guttural song accenting the soft cacophonic symphony within the bowling alley’s humming guts.
