by CS DeWildt
Chapter 17
Lloyd stood in the pit area leaning on the chain link fence surrounding the derby field. He rolled a cigarette and mixed in a little of the Bohls’ marijuana. He smoked and sipped the pint the twins had left him to hold. Arms draped over the top of the fence, he rested his head upon them and listened to the smashing rumble. A little Chevy Celebrity got its front end hung up on one of the telephone poles that set the boundary of action. Lloyd watched the car; the driver’s door was painted with a red Mr. Horsepower, and the bird’s cigar made Lloyd want to smoke. He smiled as he remembered the lit smoke in his hand. The Celebrity’s driver shifted into reverse, caught the pole with the minimum of front wheel drive tread and pulled itself back into the derby mud. Lloyd’s head turned left as the crowd of 100 or so went wild over the unlikely escape. Lloyd saw her in the front row. They’d gone to high school together. At first, Lloyd made nothing of it. Faces from long ago were commonplace. He hadn’t thought of her in ten years, but her face, almost the same now as then, brought back a montage of passings, vivid details of petty kindnesses. She met his stare. She smiled, waved politely and then didn’t look at him again.
Lloyd watched the twin Caddy El Dorados painted up with childlike flames as they smashed the Mr. Horsepower Celebrity into stalled submission. The car was towed and only two remained. The Bohl brothers circled the field in their grumbling Frankensteins and were at each other’s throats again. Metal scraped metal, and plumes of exhaust floated up into the sky, disappearing as they passed through the umbrella of the stadium lamps. From the right distance, the event was a tiny spot of light in the darkness, a dying star giving off the last of its worth to the cold universe. Lloyd looked back to the stands, but the girl was hidden away amid the pool of faces. Lloyd washed her away with a long pull from the bottle, draining it and promising himself he would never think of her again.
Chapter 18
Chief sat in the cruiser among the trees, hiding in an oak-sheltered- speed trap along 45. He ignored the blurred infractions displayed by the radar as he sobbed like a bear, face in his claws. He screamed and willed the tears to stop, his face hot rage, red with Rosacea. He bit into his bottom lip and tasted blood, gnawed until it was running down his chin. He struck himself with a closed hammer fist in the cheekbone. Another. One more.
His eyes drifted to the radar display as the Olds/Hurst blazed by, screaming. Quick as his fit started, it stopped, and Chief pulled out of hiding. He caught up to Terry and Zeke about a mile from the trap. They stopped, car idling.
“Turn it off, Terry,” Chief said. The car went still and quiet.
“What’s up, Chief?”
“What you boys do today?”
“Us? Shit, we been drinkin’ all day so is kinda hard to remember.”
“Seen Lloyd Bizbang?”
“Nope,” Zeke said opening a beer.
“He’s looking for you. Says you roughed him up.”
“He’s a fucking baby killin’ liar,” Zeke said.
“I’m gonna beat his ass now. He don’t ever need to be talkin’ on us.”
“Don’t you mess with him tonight. I mean it. You steer clear of him.”
“Alright. We’ll give that crazy fucker a head kickin’ though when we find him tomorrow.”
“Alright then.” Chief didn’t break his gaze as he flipped out a little citation book. “You were speeding. You want to pay 50 now or 100 later?”
“For real?”
“For real.”
Zeke handed Terry three twenties, and Terry passed the bills to Chief.
“Happened to your mouth, Chief? You’re bleedin’.”
He didn’t answer. He tucked the cash into his shirt pocket. He didn’t make change. Terry and Zeke watched him go, half wondering if he was coming back, until they watched the cruiser pass them by and disappear beyond a curve.
“You owe me sixty now,” Zeke said.
“Fuck you, I do.” The scrape of churning gravel became a scream as tires caught pavement, and the car was gone from sight before the sound faded.
Chapter 19
Al lay behind the counter of his store. He was stabbed through the lung, and it was filling with blood quickly. He was stabbed in the belly and his arms were red with defensive blood spill. The last wound was in his middle back, through the spine. Al gasped alone, tried to find his legs.
“Help…help.”
He lay among visions of wicked decoration. He hoped that maybe he wasn’t dying, not already dead, just freezing cold. Inside the quiet station, he watched his fingers skate in the blood that flowed from him, but his mind’s eye watched everything horrible thing he’d ever done. He felt remorse that swelled and burst his guts and emptied him of everything else. As a boy, he had killed a dog once, for fun, beat it to death with a shovel. He had stolen repeatedly from an old invalid woman left in his family’s care. He remembered her feeble attempts to secure her property, rubber banding her bedroom door shut and switching her hiding places. He bought her silence with cold eyes and promises.
A string of jingle bells slapped the glass door. The girls were very young and very pretty. Both raven-haired with eyes lined black as men’s sins. One was slim with large, round breasts. The other was covered in the perfect amount of soft curve, equally endowed. Both were perfection, and there was nary a man alive whose thoughts would not stray to darkness in the presence of their form. The girls stood before the candy, tucked away between high shelves, protected from death. They fingered the sweets, checking the calories and looking for words like “juicy” and “long-lasting.”
“What kind of cigarettes do you want?” The taller girl said. Each had chosen a variety of suckers and powdered sweets to be sucked and licked from compressed sugar sticks.
“I don’t care. No menthols, though. Gross.”
Behind the counter, Al lay weak and listening. His eyes flew about their sockets as he begged for the girls’ attentions. From some forgotten reserve, he forced a violent pull by his starved muscles, a wrenching twist that baptized each of his wounds in new fire. Then down again, sweating, motionless.
The girls eyed one another and moved with their candy to the counter. They stood atop green painted toes to where they could both see Al on the floor.
Al watched the girls from below, and with their heads haloed in the fluorescent convenience store light, they looked like angels, come to fetch him away and tell him everything was fine now.
“Can we get some cigarettes, please?” the older looking of the babies asked, smiling, bending over to show cleavage. The friend took notice and followed suite. Al’s last energies were spent trying to elevate himself, to serve them. He would have given them whatever they wanted. He just wanted inside them. The circumstances could not retrain him.
“You are queens,” he said. The girls looked at each other, tried to decipher what royal quality Al had seen in them. They laughed, silly man. “Please help me.”
“Okay.” one said. And then, as an old hat in quid pro quo and barter, she added, “The cigarettes?”
Al could not find words, only his head moved, motioned to the giant shelf containing the cartons of tobacco. The taller, slim girl pulled out her cell phone, dialed 911. Her mate began removing cartons from the shelf.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“I said no menthols!” she shouted into the phone.
Chapter 20
Lloyd walked alone in the waist-deep pool of children and the crashing waves of their escorts. Lloyd stopped to watch The Zipper flip and fling and rotate its tiny cages, whipping them around its tracks, forty feet above the midway. A gas generator grumbled behind the ride like a dying old man remembering the vigor he’d once possessed. The shaggy, one-eyed operator had a bucket of lost and found items at his feet. A rattling clink descended from the sky and a pocketful of change landed hard on the trampled grass below the ride. The operator used a small plastic rake to pull in the booty, and into the bucket it went, coins and chewing gum joining
the plastic lighters, cheap jewelry, and miscellaneous junk. The patrons lost much. They found nothing.
Lloyd wondered if any of the cages had ever snapped off of the ride, been sent spinning over the grounds and landing in the parking lot or on top of the merry-go-round. He felt it was a night something of that sort should happen. He watched and rolled another cigarette, let it dangle from his lips, unlit. He moved on, his hypothetical grief flanked by true boredom and disappointment. He fired his cigarette, while behind him, the lost coins continued to rain down.
He stopped to eye a crowd of teenage boys stand around the strength tester. The tester was a large, metal amusement with a hanging punching bag that retracted upon impact, providing a quantitative power score and an irreverent verbal analysis of strength. A kid smashed the bag, the arrow spun wildly before setting on a score of 300 out of a thousand.
The machine laughed, spoke in a bad British accent “Go take some vitt-amins!” The boys took the cue, laughed and taunted the puncher as another took his place. The challenger inserted his dollar. The hydraulic guts hissed and dropped the bag into position. He meditated briefly and threw his arm, twisting his hips into the bag, using the vibrating energy of the earth.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s the way to do it,” the machine said.
“Pay up, bitch!” the second puncher said. The first handed over a ten-spot. He did his best to hide his embarrassment, but it began to spill from him, ready to slop on an easy target.
The man walking by wore cut off jean shorts, too short, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a red bandana wound tightly and tied around his gray head, over the Willie Nelson pigtails.
“Hey man. How’s the ’70s?” the kid asked.
“They sucked, but if you’re trying to insult my style, man, it’s more indicative of the ’60s.”
“Well peace, faggot. You want to go?”
“Where, man?” He smiled, eyed the crowd for a little support. He found none among the mob of boys.
“Right here, bitch. I’ll knock you the fuck out!”
“I’m a pacifist, brother.”
“Pussy-fist, more like.” The puncher laughed at his own wit; no one joined. “I ain’t your brother neither.”
“I won’t fight you.”
“Huh, well…” as he trailed off, the kid feigned retreat and then stepped back to the man and threw his fist into the man’s face, at least a 350. The man stumbled back, the kid pounced, and the crowd engulfed the fray.
Lloyd stepped up to free machine and fed it a dollar. He squared up and slugged the bag, got a score of 800.
“Watch out for this one now,” the machine said. Lloyd fed the machine again while security tried to get to the center of the crowd. Inside the screaming perimeter, the hippie lay limp, taking a protest-worthy beating.
Lloyd punched the bag again. He watched the needle spin. The noise, the lights, the screams, the smells, none of it touched him as he stared into the spinning dial. It rested at 950. Lloyd did hope the hippie got a shot or two in, but he knew that was unlikely. If a fight could be examined mathematically, first punches were affixed with a multiplier that tended to affect the confidence variable of the punchee. Lloyd forgot it all with a long nip from the pint of Kessler’s.
The hanging colored lanterns and yellow lights flamed out down the midway in a domino effect that wrapped around the curve of the chain-link border of the fairgrounds. The rides died as the generators rumbled to a click-clack of metallic rest. At the darkened Tilt-a-Whirl, Terry and Zeke’s eyes shone like animals. They watched Bizbang drink and walk.
“There’s the mother fucker,” Zeke said.
“Hey,” Terry pointed. Zeke followed the invisible line from Terry’s finger to the girl, walking alone, swimming up the stream of those in exit. She looked good, probably seventeen or eighteen. She also looked like a stuck-up bitch to Terry and Zeke. She smelled like a free meal. Without a word, the boys pursued her, fighting their way through the crowd, keeping her bobbing ponytail in sight.
Chapter 21
Lloyd was released from the boot camp and returned to a life of strange familiarities. The old house was a photo negative of itself, dark and neglected. There was no central gas heat, only a kerosene heater moved from room to room of the house. The rooms were sparse save for trash. Grandma’s presence had held the place together and her absence left a haunted home.
Lloyd was thirteen. He tried school again. He was remembered, a spook in the halls, the white ghost boy who’d done nasty things. Avoidance and hostility were the only responses to his return to Horton.
Lloyd soon stopped carrying school books save for one, Space Science, thick and dense. The single book was not as easily knocked from his grasp in the halls. It also served as a weapon when the need arose. Each day was a battle in which he was outmanned. He claimed victories when he could, but left his share of blood for the dogs.
“Child molester” was repainted onto his locker until even the janitor’s pity was replaced by resentment. Those who hadn’t known traded stories with those who did: Lloyd had done some things. Criminal things. Someone should get the fucker.
On his sixteenth birthday, Lloyd was accosted in a dark, forgotten hall of the school, near the broken vending machine. A hard palm covered his mouth. Arms secured his limbs as he was hoisted, transported by the five pallbearers. He struggled and writhed with hot rage and fear as the light banks passed above in procession. The halls were quiet save for squeaking shoes and the violent rustle of fabric.
He was dumped hard onto the glossy wood floors of the school’s small, secondary gymnasium. The room was reserved for winter sports, and since none were in season, the boys would not be disturbed in their dark corner of the building. Lloyd scrambled backward in a crabwalk as the five boys surrounded him. He stood and his eyes cut through one boy and then the next, evaluating the odds, looking for an out. Terry and Zeke stood with three members of the football team, giant lineman with shining, acne-covered faces, broken copies of a wicked archetype.
“What the fuck, man?” Lloyd said.
“They should have never let you out. For any of it,” Terry said.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You were at that camp. You did something.”
“Killed your grandma,” Zeke added.
“No, no way! It was an accident!”
“Drownded that baby.”
“Fucked her, too.”
“That’s not what happened.” Lloyd felt the bodies coming closer. Zeke held a mop handle, cut to about two feet.
“Drop that stick and I’ll fight you,” Lloyd said.
“This? This ain’t for hurting. This is for lovin’, baby!” Zeke began slowly thrusting the handle toward Lloyd, out of his reach. Back and forth the stick went in simulated violation.
Lloyd stepped backward and fished his blade from his back pocket. He flicked the knife open with a snap of the wrist and slashed at faces, gouged at eyes. The hyenas jumped back, gave up position. Zeke, still with the mop handle, held a bit of ground. The others became spectators.
“Get him, Zeke. Fuck him up,” Terry said.
Lloyd and Terry circled one another, threw feint attacks, each trying to read the other. Zeke got the first shot in, a crack to the hand that almost took the knife. Lloyd waited for Zeke to swing again and charged in. He was caught by the backswing hard across the right eye, and he felt the warm mix of defensive tears and blood. The pain shook Lloyd and dropped him. From his knees, blinded by the strike, Lloyd lunged up with the knife and found something soft and weak to rip through. Lloyd stumbled backward, still half-blind. Through squinting slits, he saw the golden outline of sunshine behind the ill-fitted back exit. He hit the door and didn’t stop running until he reached Rush Creek, far beyond the football field. His split head was bleeding him out like a stuck pig. Lloyd watched the blood mix and dilute in the slow-moving creek. He tried to use the eye, but could see nothing for the swelling and bleeding. Lloyd listened for the vigilantes. He heard no one
, only breeze and birds.
Hand to his eye, he took the back way home, through fields and yards. He decided he would not go back to school. He had been considering it for some time. Situation solidified.
Zeke bled out from a long, jagged slit that separated his cheek from lips to ear. He had urinated in his pants. He was pale, damp, cold. Terry watched his brother. It was a nasty cut but nothing to get bent over. Looking at the wet pants, he knew he’d have to give Zeke plenty of shit for being such a little pussy.
Chapter 22
The cruiser cut the darkness as it moved through Horton. Chief sipped on the bottle of Hennessy while people in the dark houses on the maple-lined streets slept, fucked, fought and cried. He stared straight ahead, composed. His mouth was tight, and anyone who saw him would have said he looked focused. He was. He swallowed the last of his pills with a swig from a fresh whiskey bottle.
He’d come from Al’s old store, never got a call, just happened by, and the flashing county vehicles were already there. Chief parked his black and white away from the shining mass of county cars, on the periphery of the store. He wandered through the aisles like a ghoul, unnoticed. The latex-gloved crime scene investigators snapped photos behind the counter. The candy and cigarette girls were being interviewed down the shadowed hallway. They were bored, beautifully so, each more woman than girl. They longed to be home eating candy, smoking pot and cigarettes.
