Our Blood in Its Blind Circuit

by J David Osborne

  “I’m hungry and it looks like food, smells somethin’ rotten so I pull it away from the little albino’s breast. Takes me a second to realize that it’s what’s left of a heart. Whether it was human or not, I do not know. All’s I knew was that I was starving and dinner was in order. Cooked it best I could. Horrible taste, but more horrible to be dead, son. I go to bed that night, that boy latchin’ on to me outta sheer loneliness, I suppose, and my dream comes to me somethin’ fierce. Places I ain’t never been and folks I ain’t never had the inclination nor the means to speak to, my dream tells me I’ve not only spoken to, but have loved and killed and carried on with. It’s like I’m more than me, kind of two sides to a coin. I wake up, and I know what happened. I thought back on what that doc long dead done said, and I realized that it just might be true.”

  Hackett’s eyes are a watered-down blue now, lips pursed tightly together. He lifts the bottle to pour, but can’t get the neck to the glass without swaying. He burps. Raises a finger.

  “What that doc said about them native bone-wearin’ niggers far down south... about eatin’ folks’ hearts and them people bein’ your slaves, I figured that was true. But that would make me the master. And the way I see it, they ain’t gotta be my slaves. They could be my friends. Hell ain’t gotta be a bad time, long’s you got a man like me willin’ to pour you a fuckin’ drink worth a fuckin’ damn. By God.”

  Hackett pushes the pinewood box to the middle of the table. “I’m gonna need all the company I can get, Mr. Jim.”

  Jim stares at the box and begins to shake uncontrollably.

  “Lemme tell you what I’m willing to do for you, Mr. Jim. Since I can tell by the way you hold that head that you truly did love this woman. And I think that’s beautiful. Just wonderful. My pa loved my ma somethin’ fierce and I respect that kind of love. Truly do.” A hiccup. He pats his chest, breathes out through his nose. “Also, you served under Donaldson, the bravest and fiercest Union man ever walked the earth who let me live and made sure I was cared for when that yellow bellied cunt suckin’ filth Sibley turned tail and run back to Jefferson.”

  He pats the box. “I’m gonna give you her soul, Jim. Maybe I’m goin’ a bit soft, and this here is a one time only offer, but, here.”

  He opens up the box and smacks the heart in front of Jim.

  Jim can neither faint nor vomit anymore. He feels drained. He doesn’t notice the spit swaying from his lip. He has his broken arm wrapped around Annabelle’s head, the other stroking her hair.

  “The truth is Mr. Jim, I like the fact that you loved her enough to not die. Now I was sure I’d put down every man in that caravan but goddamn if you didn’t come back. And goddamn if we didn’t break your arm and goddamn if you didn’t still sit there and demand your wife.” Hackett looks at the ceiling. “If that ain’t a sign from God himself, also considering Reynolds being dead and whatnot, then I don’t know what is. Maybe this is a chance to make up for what I done.” That brings him a laugh. His teeth nearly touch his crow’s feet. “To let you and your wife live together in the next world.”

  He pulls his revolver from his belt.

  “I’m gonna need you to reunite with your dearest wife, Mr. Jim. You best stop beatin’ that devil round the stump and eat that heart.”

  Jim stares at the organ. There is a growth on one side that smells sharp and fungal. The flies love it.

  He stares at Annabelle. Her skin is rubbery. Her teeth feel brittle beneath his probing thumb. He places her on the table, looking at him. Her hair lights up and her face absorbs the soft orange of the sun nearly dead. For a second, he doubts if he can.

  “Course, unless you want me to.”

  And it’s that thought that seals it. The thought of him taking everything, every last piece of her dignity, makes Jim pick up the heart. Grabbing it tentatively at first, Jim holds his breath and shoves the heart in his mouth. It is still somewhat tough, but breaks easily enough beneath his teeth. It wriggles down his throat and the aftertaste makes him gag.

  No, he tells himself. You’re going to eat it all.

  The meat gets tough in places, but he tears through. The fungus is soft and ripe, squishing between his teeth like cottage cheese.

  He is tearing, eating, consuming. Hackett watches with his arms crossed. Proud.

  Halfway through and a memory comes. The classroom smells of pulp and sweat and Mrs. DuPont makes the chalk sound funny. Sitting at the edge of a row of desks across from the boys. Blonde boy freckle faced goes psst and looks over and he’s trying to hand something over. Grab it before Mrs. DuPont turns around and unfold it quietly and it says “I think you’re pretty.”

  More come. All flashes lasting less then a second, all fully realized. Jim looks at Annabelle and feels that he truly knows her.

  Jim swallows the last of the heart. He can feel it churning in his belly. He thinks of when they’d lay together, back east, the candles dying slowly and the sun rising, both drenched in a loving sweat and he’d feel that heart beat through her breast. She’d grab the back of his head and kiss him, and put his head where he could hear it. His stomach growls. His mouth is red. He reaches for Annabelle’s face. Brings her close to his chest. He feels his heart beat through her.

  Hackett nods. Cocks his peacemaker.

  “That was beautiful,” he says. Jim smiles and holds Annabelle close.

  Jim tells him, “Fuck you.”

  He whispers “I love you” into Annabelle’s ear.

  “Maybe we’ll meet in heaven,” Hackett says, and his bullet tears through Annabelle’s skull and punches the million shattered fragments of Jim’s heart through his back and onto the dusty floor.

  THREE THEORIES ON THE MURDER OF JOHN WILY

  There were three fights, two broken plates, a miscarriage and a bathtub full of moonshine at the wake of John Wily. They didn’t call it a “wake”. They weren’t really sure what to call it, so they just called it a “reception”, like it should have had invitations printed in cursive on whalebone.

  John’s dad took it the worst. Started just after the funeral, at the beginning of the reception. He’d dusted off a slide projector he’d found wedged between a four wheeler and a toolbox in the garage and set it in the living room. Projected on a tarp that his father had stretched to cover the bay windows, the red-faced and snuffling crowd had been subjected to photos of the recently departed as a child: smiling and squinting under the sun, in a bathing suit, by the pool. Sitting in his underwear, enraptured by the television. Holding a fish. Holding a deer. On the four wheeler now gathering dust.

  The police had closed the book on John’s case, not officially, of course, because officially it was only three days after the murder, after an unknown gunman torched John’s car and left him in a clearing in the middle of Pocahontas, Oklahoma with a belly full of buckshot. But it was as good as closed: tire tracks had been analyzed, the clearing had been combed by latex-gloved hands, and witnesses, most of them floating in and out of a haze of methamphetamines, had been questioned. Nothing turned up. No one was going to pay for John’s murder. When John’s dad came around the station for the next few weeks, around five every day after he got off work (because you can’t just stop, can you?), the detective, a balding man with a paunch and an affinity for Japanese-themed tattoos, would roll up his sleeves, revealing bright orange koi and white-faced geisha girls, and he’d thumb through a coffee-stained manila folder, turning the pages, humoring the weathered man holding his leather face in his hands. Then he’d set the folder down and shake his head and listen as the old man rambled and cursed.

  Time passed and so did John’s dad.

  Though no one was ever officially indicted for the murder, John Wily was from a small town, and small towns talk. His death wormed its way into every conversation, between talk of the weather and whether or not the Pocahontas Bulls had any shot at state and what Mrs. Rita thought about the lawn ornaments crowding her next door neighbor’s lawn (she hated them). By the time the talk had reach
ed folks like that, though, the reality of the situation had dwindled, and the conversation was usually short, something like, “Did you hear about the Wily boy,” followed by a “Yep” followed by “It was drugs, they say,” followed by a “Yep.”

  You’d find the good gossip downtown, where the streets stop having names or numbers, where grass and power lines fight for dominance, and where every person takes fifteen minutes to answer the door. If you were to sit down with them, in their living rooms, with their grooved couches and scratched endtables, if you were to offer them something and they were to put it in a pipe or tinfoil or a lightbulb and inhale and you had the patience to sit back and wait for their brains to come back from Shangri La, they might give you a few theories on what happened to “Little” John Wily. Theories might be different, sure, but they’d all start out the same:

  “John Wily was a fucking asshole.”

  THEORY 1:

  THE ANGRY FATHER-IN-LAW

  John Wily met his wife Angela at the Shady Pines apartment complex pool. He had just dived into the water with his cell phone in his pocket. He cursed the dead thing and threw it in a trash can by the Coke machine and put a dollar in and that’s when he saw her. He pressed the wrong button but didn’t care. He sat in the pool chair and smacked his best friend Tamer Reynolds in the arm and pointed. They said “damn” under their breath and watched her take her shirt off and rub the oil around her sunflower bikini, over her fishbelly skin.

  Tamer jumped in the pool and John skipped over the hot white concrete to where Angela either was or wasn’t looking at him from behind big insectoid sunglasses. He opened his mouth, the words spinning like a slot machine in his head, each one slowly coming to a halt to form the perfect first phrase, that pickup line that would set the alarm off and all the red lights and have him lugging his big bucket of quarters up to the change girl, but before he could muster the oxygen, Angela said:

  “I’m gay.”

  And this forced him to regroup. He played with the strings on his swim trunks. He ran his hand through his buzzed hair. He fingered the cross on his neck. Then it came to him, bright and clear like it was from God. He got closer, till he could count the rivulets of sweat squeezing around the faint hairs on her belly, and said, “Why are you gay? I could lick it better than any dyke, swear it.”

  Had she chosen to hit him, or mace him, it would not have been John Wily’s first time. He spent the better part of sixteen spraying himself with mace, every day, usually just after breakfast, with the intention of immunizing himself. Though it didn’t make him immune to mace, it did force him to wear glasses, which he refused to do most days, instead choosing to squint and fumble and nearly kill himself on the highway. Still, when he said things like what he said to Angela, and when he was inevitably maced, he insisted that it didn’t hurt too bad, that he was used to it.

  Angela, however, had a rather fucked up background. She was from a family whose claim to fame was two appearances on national television, first as contestants on Family Feud (they lost) and second on Cops (her uncle asked an undercover cop to “beat his bishop”). Her father, a bearded construction worker with six teeth and about as many IQ points, beat her and worse on the regular, and her mother was too busy collecting Star Trek memorabilia to care. So whether it was the permissive environment or the years of incest, Angela found John Wily to be cute rather than creepy, interesting rather than radioactive.

  Angela’s father was not happy with the two dating. John, for all his pervy talk, turned out to be a fairly traditional courter, taking Angela out for dinner and ice cream and for rides in his dad’s canoe. His dad, for his part, loved Angela almost immediately, and set about to showing embarrassing home movies which John smiled and sat through because even though he wanted to run away from the grainy footage of him putting macaroni in his pants the magnetism of Angela’s off-white smile and the smell of her cherry blossom perfume kept him firmly rooted to the vinyl of his father’s couch, staring at her, watching the blue reflect in the wetness of her eyes and wanting to kiss her and be alone.

  The first time John Wily met Angela’s father he offered John a beer, which John accepted. The two cracked their tabs and talked for a few moments, back and forth, John looking at the pictures of Angela and her siblings as children on the wall, and once Angela’s dad had the information he needed, i.e. that John didn’t have a job and didn’t plan on getting one, the judgement was passed, and he showed John Wily his shotgun and told him not to see his daughter anymore.

  The threat was not taken lightly. Angela’s uncle, the same one caught on film asking for a handjob, had gone to jail for life recently for shooting his own son in the back of the head. Spilled his brains all over a box of Cheerios, the kid face down in his breakfast, for what, once again, no one is sure.

  Assuming that crazy ran in the family, John went to the pawn shop with the painting of the frog on the bricks and pointed through the smudged glass at a tiny twenty-five nestled in a coffin of foam. He failed his background check and the hairy man of indeterminate origin behind the counter told him “Congratulations, you passed,” and took his crumpled dollar bills. John left the pawn shop and called Angela and told her to pack her bags.

  The last night in her room, toeing the crumpled McDonalds wrappers and tissues and magazines across the sticky hardwood floor, Angela hugged her yellow pillow and cried. She touched faded Polaroids she’d taped to her wall. She opened old toy boxes and board games and read through old diaries. She stood over her father’s snoring body for seventeen minutes, playing with her hands and eyeing the K-bar he kept on his endtable. After she stuffed her last pair of jeans into a pink backpack she closed her door and took a deep breath. Her hand inches from the door, she turned back into the foyer and marched into her father’s room and threw her arms around the old man’s neck. She hugged him and cried and in his sleep he patted her on the back and told her to go back to bed.

  When he woke up that morning her father tried to call her, once or twice, but she wouldn’t pick up her cell phone. He called AT&T and had her removed from his phone plan. He went to work and tuned cars. He went to the range and unloaded. He drove to John Wily’s apartment complex and drank malt liquor from a brown bag. He watched the young man drive up, walk to his door, disappear. He repeated this routine for several weeks. He was fuming with an odd mixture of confusion, hatred, and jealousy that is usually reserved for young lovers. And we all know how impetuous young lovers can be.

  THEORY 2:

  THE COLD-BLOODED KILLER

  Tamer and Little John started selling meth as soon as they dropped out of high school. The money was good and they made a pact with themselves, lying in the back of Tamer’s green pickup, droning and mumbling in a cloud of potsmoke, never to use the stuff, to become victims, flunkies. And they didn’t. They sold a lot, Tamer more so than John, and they became the most popular folks in “that” part of town, but they never once touched their lips to a pipe. Once, after selling to a particularly eager group of addicts, John was not able to escape before the tweakers lit up, the smoke swirling in the glass of the lightbulb like magic in a crystal ball, their eyeballs white with ecstasy. The smoke floated and the room became hazy, and he ran out the door and sucked in the night air, the smell of wet dirt and diesel, and his head was spinning and he was sure that he’d gotten a contact high. He ran full speed down the road to Tamer’s house, where his best friend cooked him pierogies and calmed him down and convinced him to keep selling, that they were partners and he needed him.

  There was one thing that John could not be convinced of, and that was selling to black people. He wouldn’t speak to them, barely even look at them. He approached Tamer one sunny day, fingering the cross on his neck, and nodded his head at the two black children handing his friend two twenties stained with blue ink:

  “What are you doing?”

  “Selling.”

  He squinted his mace-induced squint and said, “Meth is a white man’s drug.”

  T
amer sighed. “With that attitude, it always will be.” He patted the kids on the back. “Enjoy, guys.”

  They pedaled away on their bicycles.

  Little John Wily’s racism potentially got him killed on a cool day in late autumn. He was at the convenience store picking up the usual: Red Bull for him and water for Angela, who was coming down off of a wicked meth binge (she had no equivalent abstinence pact re: meth, a habit that was a holdover from her other, slightly more fucked-up existence pre-John).

  He got distracted in the candy aisle, trying desperately to decide whether he wanted the peanut butter cups or the almond bar, and when he looked up at the counter, his place had been taken by a muscular young black man in a white T-shirt and jeans. The young man was listening to his CD player and halfheartedly making conversation with the clerk when John Wily reached him, the candy bar dilemma forgotten, and shoved the pack of gum and the Dr. Pepper off of the galvanized metal counter. The soda bounced and fizzed wickedly inside the plastic. The gum clattered into the corner. John Wily looked deeply into the black man’s eyes and said, through clenched teeth. “Always me before you. Always.”

  The young man plucked the headphone buds from his ears and inclined his head towards Wily’s mouth. “Come again?”

  Wily reiterated his maxim.

  Now, in the great karmic wheel, the magic forces of comeuppance occasionally work in our favor. We all want to see shit like this punished, but the sad fact of the matter is that a good man calls the police, leaving it up to a bad man to lay down a righteous ass whipping. Such was the case with John Wily: Tom Miles was not a good man. At that moment, in fact, he had a whore in his car, a raven haired former video-store clerk named Mary, upon whom he had bestowed a wicked purple shiner hours earlier, for running down the street, banging on doors, attempting to stop cars, begging someone, anyone, to save her. He would kill her later in cold blood, pinning her down and injecting her with enough heroin to flatten a moose. But that day, through no fault of his own, Tom Miles did the right thing: he dragged John Wily to the back of the store, which doubled as a bait shop, and began drowning him in the minnow tank.