End Of The Year Collection - 2014

by Spain, Laura

  Inez had been lucky. For three solid days, no one stopped to camp. Bikers zipped right by the campsite. When she took brakes from the digging and the Tetris-style burial, she sat outside and watched the large fluffy white clouds drift by or the cows in the field. There was one cow that seemed too interested in what Inez was doing. It paced around the camp’s fence despite the grass having been chewed to ground. It would snort and moo, and it would turn around and walk the perimeter. However, on the third night, a group of guys on riding mostly fixed-gear bikes stopped, intending to spend the night.

  Ines watched the dozen riders lock their bikes together and unpack two bike trailers that the non-fixies were hauling from one of the tent’s small windows. It was starting to get dark and with no light in the tent, she was confidante that they could not see her.

  The bikers joked and pushed each other as they erected small tents like the one Inez hauled on her bike. A few of them started working on a fire while drinking beer. Most of them wore neat beards or mustaches, but a couple of them were clean-shaven. All of them possessed at least one visible tattoo. Under different circumstances, Inez would have welcomed their company. They were her type of people. Right now, however, they stood in her way.

  Once the tents were up and the fire was started, they opened up several more coolers of beer. They all drank. A few howled at the moon, while a few were content to sit around the fire and watch dinner cook. The aroma of fresh bread, vegetables, and stake on the air brought Inez out from the tent.

  Hunger driving her forward, she had forgot then that she was wearing Heidi’s tight fitting white racing outfit, which was covered in dirt and sweat. To the bikers who all stopped to stare, she must have looked like a barefoot fallen angle with blue hair, as she hobbled toward the fire, because they all stopped to stare.

  One of the guys, he had a long red beard that was braded with wooden beads, slowly approached her. “Are you alright?” he asked.

  Inez shook her head and fell to her knees.

  Immediately, several of guys dropped their beer and rushed forward to help her. They helped her to the fire and put water into her hand. The jokes stopped. Side conversations stopped. Everyone’s attention was now on Inez as she drank a bottle of water. She started with a few sips and then up-ended the bottle. When she came up for air, another bottle was put into one hand and a plate of food in the other. She ate the corn, potatoes, and bread, but she left the stake. Then she drank the second bottle of water. All the while, the bikers waited quietly, perhaps even a bit expectantly.

  Inez looked up. “Thanks!”

  A slim guy in with a stubble beard and think black framed glasses stepped out of the darkness into the fire light. He wore tight Speedo shorts and nothing else. He was fit without being thick. His chest was clean-shaven to allow for the full effect of his tattoo. It covered his chest from shoulder to shoulder and from his collarbone down into the abs without covering them. The design began in the center as a Long Horn bull with a ring in its nose, but the rest morphed into gears and pedals and other bike parts, finishing with what looked a like a monkey wielding a crescent wrench on the back of the bull-bike machine. The rest of his body was dotted with ink, but nothing as mosaic as his chest piece.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked.

  Inez took another drink. “I was on my way to Lincoln for a short spell, but I got sick and needed to rest. Then, I ran out of food.” She held up a carrot. “So, thanks!” She smiled.

  He took a step forward and put out his hand. Inez took it. They shook. He said, “Nick.” He let go of her hand. “I’ll be honest. I don’t care that you are a sharing our food and our fire, but that story you just told was pure shit.”

  Inez stood. She wobbled a bit. “Nick,” she spat in the dirt at his feet, “you don’t have the balls for what went down here three days go, so believe the story I told you, pack up in the morning, and ride off happy.” She took another piece of bread and a beer before hobbling back toward the tent.

  Nick took hold of Inez’s arm at the elbow. Inez took his hand at the wrist, crossing her arm in front of her body. Inez said, “I don’t want trouble. Do you?”

  Nick laughed. “What kind of trouble are you?” he asked.

  Inez took a slow and deep breath. “You don’t want to know.” She pulled at his hand, which he did not move from her elbow. “I’m going to be very cliché and count to five. If you have not removed your arm, I’m going to break it.” She paused.

  Nick started, “You think that…”

  “Five.” Inez spun inside his arm, taking it in her armpit. She dropped to the ground, pulling Nick down with her at such an angel that his arm was under both their bodies. Nick’s arm made a sharp cracking sound just like a wooden baseball bat when it splinters before a home run hit.

  Nick cried out.

  Inez rolled to standing, and she took up a defensive posture. “Anyone else want to touch me?”

  While nick screamed the other bikers circled. The tallest, with the longest beard of the bunch, stepped forward. “Please, let us help him,” he tossed his chin towards Nick, “to a hospital.” Another of the bikers pulled out a cell phone. He was giving their GPS location to the emergency responders. The tall guy spoke again, “The highway is only just over the hill. Help and the police will be here soon.”

  Inez said, “Then I don’t have much time.” She ran back to the tent. Once inside, she zipped it closed. Her gear was still packed, because she had been using Heidi and Jason’s things. She filled in the last section of the grass to cover the pit. When she stepped back and took a good look at her work, she was not pleased. It would have to do, but in places a clear seam was noticeable and in others the grass still looked trampled. In a month, no one would notice. The grass would have stood tall by the end of the first day of sunlight and grown the earth back together in less than a month.

  When Inez pushed her bike out of the tent, she saw that most of the bikers were either talking on their phones to emergency responders or seeing to Nick’s arm. A couple of them were back at their fire pit drinking, seemingly as if nothing had happened. They did not seem to interested in what she was doing, so she quickly took down the tent, moved it to the far corner of the camp from the bikers, and poured what was left of Heidi and Jason’s Kerosene on it. Tents are usually made from a fire resistant material, even the canvas ones like this. But, Ines was hopping that with enough incentive, the tent would at least smolder, removing any trace evidence that she had been here.

  She struck a match and dropped it on the tent. The Kerosene ignited in a flash and a whooshing sound as oxygen fed the fire caught everyone’s attention. Even Nick paused his bitching for a moment to watch the tent turn into a fireball. The light from the fire’s burst caused the biker’s eyes to dilate, so that as the flames started to die down, they had to readjust for the darkness of the camp. Inez had looked away and shielded her eyes. She was fine, and she used the cover of darkness and the sound of the fire to push her bike out of the camp’s gate and onto the limestone path.

  Without waiting to see what would happen next, Inez took off down the path towards Lincoln. She pedaled hard for a few minutes, relishing the wind in her face and through her hair. She always felt freest while on her bike. There was something unique about the fusion of woman and bike: the way her legs ached as she peddled; the way she used her arms, pulling up on the handle bars for leverage; the way the seat’s friction felt between her legs – it was better than sex – well, at least more fulfilling. Riding by the light of her lamp, she was able to forget the last few days, for at least a little while.

  The limestone path opened into the well-lit street of some small town. The way to the connecting path was marked with street signs that took her through the heart of town. It looked almost like every other small town that she had rode through in the last few months with two exceptions. Each of the small businesses had signs listing specials for bikers and there were three locally owned bike shops, one of which was ope
n despite the early hour.

  Inez stopped in front of the open shop, “Night Owl Cycles.” The sign on the door listed the shop’s hours: M – Sat., 9pm to 7am. Another sign in the window said, “Trail Rations.” The bike rack that she used to secure her bike was bent into the shape of a large cup of coffee, steam and all. From the outside, it looked like a million other shops she’d seen. It had two large windows that allowed a clear view of a few select bikes without obscuring the rest of shop. Besides the aforementioned signs and rack, the windows had the typical stickers for major bike brands and distributors. Through the window, however, the bike shop looked different – open. The few mechanics were working on bikes lifted on stands out in the open. It did not look like the shop had a back room.

  She shook her head. She was hungry and tired, but she knew she could not stop here. This town was too close to the campsite. Cops and the bikers would surely know about the shop. Perhaps, some one had called already asking for a heads up. No, she needed to push on. She needed to get to Lincoln. There was a shop in Lincoln.

  Inez, despite her fatigue, got back on her bike and peddled the well-lit streets. She almost missed her turn back on the path. The path entrance was no more than an alley between a Happy Wok and Taco Bell. A flood light from each fast food joint pointed the way, but the sign at the curb was small: a bike and an arrow. She took the path between buildings.

  When she exited, she spotted an informational sign, which included a map of the entire trail. She found the white dot and arrow labeled, “You Are Here.” She was close to Lincoln. Perhaps, another five hours if she pushed hard. There were no more towns or rest areas. This was the last leg into Lincoln. She was about to get back on her bike when she heard a group of cyclers pushing hard.

  The cyclers were behind her, coming down the street. They had not turned onto the trail entrance, but would any second. Inez looked for a place to hide. The trail was wide open. The limestone gravel looked like a scar racing into the night. She could it by moonlight for quiet some distance. She felt trapped until she saw a large dumpster behind Taco Bell. She quickly dumped her bike in, but there was no room for her, so she ran across the trail and found the Happy Wok dumpster and crawled in just as the bikers pulled up to the sign and stopped.

  One said, “You think that she is that fast.” He pointed to Lincoln.

  “No.” said another.

  It was the bikers from the campsite. They had come after her. “I bet we catch her here.” He pointed a few miles up the trail. “If we don’t see by the next major trail marker, we turn around.” They mounted up and the sound of gravel under bike tires echoed in the night.

  Inez, now smelling like rotten take out, pulled her self out of the Happy Wok dumpster and got her bike. She studied the map for a few more minutes. The map included major and minor highways. It would take a day longer, but she needed to get off The MoPac Trail. She tapped a large dark line on the trail map and said, “Cornhusker Highway.”

  Battlefield, Indiana

  by Fred McGavran

  If I were to choose a place for a memorial, I would not choose Battlefield, Indiana. Something about it isn’t right: maybe all the killing; maybe because anything they killed for died so long ago. The place makes you feel like you entered the lock unit of a psych ward or the sanctuary of an abandoned church. William Henry Harrison hyped the Battle of Tippecanoe to become President of the United States and then died a month after his inauguration. Tenskwatawa, the great Prophet of the Shawnee whom Harrison tried so hard to kill, died in exile like Jeremiah. Nearly 200 years after his death, his darkest prophecy came true.

  When you look out from the ridge where the battle was fought, all you can see is corn, mile after mile of it, genetically engineered to resist herbicides and insects. Every stalk is exactly 8 feet high, 22 leaves to a stalk, one ear to a stalk, 800 kernels to an ear, planted so close you have to walk sideways between the stalks. In the spring it looks like light green waves on a frozen sea where every wave is exactly the same. By summer it is so dense that it crowds out everything else like a cancer. No farmer dares enter his own corn field, because you can’t see where you came from or where you’re going.

  In October it’s harvested to feed millions of animals or crushed like pustules to make high fructose corn syrup for soft drinks to wash down the hamburgers made from the animals. Nearly a third of it is now used to make ethanol in the trade-off of food for mileage that pushed up commodity prices around the world. In the winter the land lies fallow until it is drenched with chemicals to begin the cycle again, like an exhausted patient animated by amphetamines, or a corpse preserved with formaldehyde for the funeral.

  Aside from the corn, the fields are lifeless: no weeds, no insects, no birds; hardly any animals. Battlefield, the little town a mile up the road, is half deserted, garroted by the corn. It’s as if someone spread a huge plastic sheet over a quarter of the continent, like a backyard gardener covering his seedlings to keep down weeds. Living in rural Indiana is like living in a well kept cemetery.

  I’ve worked at Tippecanoe Battlefield Park since I ran away from rehab. People used to look at me funny when I said I didn’t remember much after being discharged from the Army and waking up freezing cold on the ridge on November 6, 2006, the 195th anniversary of the battle. Now that more and more Iraq and Afghanistan vets are coming home without really knowing where they are, people understand me better.

  It was lucky for me that Gary Taumee found me that night before I froze to death. He could never figure how I got there from the VA Hospital in Danville, and neither could I. Somehow I had crawled up the ridge and across the railroad tracks and road in the storm. He dragged me into the tool shed and warmed me up beside the kerosene stove. Shaking from the cold and DTs, I saw his one black eye staring at me from a reddish brown face framed by straight black hair and thought it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to die.

  “You aren’t going to die,” he said.

  From the labels on my meds, he knew I was a veteran. Later he told me he had taken some of them himself, but that nothing the doctors ever gave him helped.

  “How did you find me?” I asked when I finally stopped shaking.

  “I could smell you.”

  At first I thought he was joking.

  “It’s that bad?”

  “I can smell the men who died here,” he said.

  Gary had been caretaker since the park opened in the early ’70s. Like me, he didn’t remember much about what happened to him after being shipped home from Vietnam with his right eye gone and headaches that only stopped on cold nights when he went out on the ridge. He said he could see what it was like the moment before the Shawnee came howling up from the river into Harrison’s half awake troops. When he talked about the battle, I thought he was remembering the North Vietnamese doing the same thing to his battalion in the Central Highlands in 1968.

  Most people thought he was a Mexican. When I look at the copy of the Prophet’s portrait by Charles Bird King in the museum, I see the same features and expression and moustache, even though the Prophet was wearing a feathered red turban and the silver gorget of a British officer. He, too, had lost his right eye.

  “Where do you come from, Gary?” I asked him after I had sobered up, and we were sitting at the kitchen table in his house.

  He was sipping this tea he made from herbs, and I was smoking some of the best pot I had ever had.

  “Oklahoma,” he said. “But they are not really my people.”

  “Who are not your people?”

  “The Shawnee there,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “They all have white blood.”

  “Are you the only pure blood Shawnee left?”

  “When the last Shawnee dies, the world will come to an end,” he replied, never really answering my question.

  After he died, I learned that the Prophet had said that, too.

  The County hired me to help him out because he was spending more and more time recovering
from his bad nights. He had given up drinking a year after he returned from Vietnam, after he had had his vision. A lot of people have bottoming out experiences, but his was different. It came to him in the night, something that looked at him but didn’t have a face. It told him to get ready.

  “Ready for what?” I asked him.

  “For the world to end.”

  Like Gary, I had VA disability and health coverage, so all they had to give me was a small salary and whatever I could get from tips. He told me not to count much on that. But I’m a talker, and I must have learned something about people by sitting around in all those VA therapy sessions before I ran away. With a clean shirt and jeans and a fresh shave, I was almost respectable. Just over six feet tall, I kept my hair cut short like the young guys, and if it weren’t for the scars on my arms, I might have come close to fitting in. A woman told me once that if I would ever relax, I might not be bad looking.

  Gary had a small house that backed up to Burnett Creek just outside the park, set back from the road on an acre of ground a farmer had sold him during a bad year. For $50 a month, he let me stay in the basement. He couldn’t stand the way farmers plant, everything alike in straight rows, like test tubes to siphon off the chemicals they spray every spring.

  “They cut down the trees and plowed everything under,” he said. “The grasses, the berries, the flowers, everything. We used to live on what we raised in our gardens and hunted for our meat. We didn’t need all that corn for livestock.”