by Rex Miller
Life had not been especially rewarding to Sissy Selkirk. People had told her she was pretty, she was this, she was that. But nothing had ever come of it. Only more of the same boredom and let downs and hand-me-downs. She had failed at school. A boy had taken her virginity. She had gone out into the workplace pregnant and been taken advantage of by an employer who saw in her only the easy sex and vulnerability, paid her minimum wage, abused her, and when she was big with child, abandoned her as her teenaged lover had. She had not picked her men well. She had given birth to a little boy. Guy, named after her unknown father, and she had failed at mothering. Her ways were “unconventional,” and they had taken Guy away from her, and called her unfit to be a mother and put Guy into a foster home somewhere.
This was the first time in years that it looked like something good could happen to her. So when Daniel came in from a hard day of work out in the fields, she was quite content to feed him and watch him leave again “on business” as he often did, with no more dialogue than “You can watch TV or read, okay?” To which she would nod and smile and say, “Sure.” She knew enough not to ask when he was coming back. And then late that night she would hear the rumbling engine of the black Caprice, which he now parked beside the old sharecropper's house.
This night he was heading on a northeast course, driving to Varney, tired from the day's work and his stomach a shrinking, aching tub that growled at him as he drove, putting him in an even darker, more violent mood.
Jesse Keys had been tossin’ down a couple in there makin’ eyes at ole Caroline and tryin’ to wind down after a hellarious week working for the Brewster outfit up at Hubbard City. He had swallered just about enough happy juice and looked at that little ole gal long enough he was ready to put the pork to a dead Mexican, an’ then he decided he better just cat on home and pork the ole lady instead, and he goes outside and gets a big whiffa that nasty fresh air and his sore, tired feet hit that concrete and he was right back where he started. In a bad-ass ornery mood.
The job at Brewster's was a bitch. He was breakin’ a new kid in who wouldn’ listen to shit, doin’ ever'thing his own way, and he figgured, Hell, about another day of that an’ I'm gonna cut him loose. He'd druther work by himself. Fuck up his own job. If that's all there was to it.
He'd be up at five a.m. and at seven he'd be on the job, and they'd be pourin’ if the weather held. Christ on a crutch, he hated concrete. He wished the devil'd never thought of it. It hurt your feet, he thought, even in new metal-toed, cleated ostrich kicks from Hubbard Western Wear, damn stuff wasn't fit to walk on.
All those years at McCullough's on that fuckin’ hard shit, that's what had really done him in. Hell, he blamed concrete for nearly every bad thing that ever happened to him. It got him so steamed, he made himself quit thinkin’ about it and started thinkin’ about the way that ole gal was comin’ on to him. Ooooooooooweeeeeeeeeee.
Damn! That little ole’ gal Caroline could start lookin’ good toward the end of the night when you was gettin’ about three sheets to the wind on that there bourbon and branch water. Why was it just as soon as he'd get about half-drunk them little ole’ fillies would all start up lookin’ like Dolly Parton to him? Shit he'd be damned if he wouldn't fuck a bush if he thought there was a snake in it. He was so horny right now he'd learn to play golf just so he could fuck the holes.
It was the story of his whole damn life and if THAT wasn't a soap opera—well, hot damn, nobody ever writ one. His tallywhacker had got him in a shitpot of trouble and he couldn't do nothing about it either. That was sad. Plum pitiful. If you cain't learn by your mistakes, you jes’ ain't worth whippin'.
He'd been with little Jane and then he'd met Darla Palmer and that stuff was all he could think about. Crap. Ole Darla could just squeeze a man to death with them big, hard-muscled legs of hers. First time he ever climbed up onner he started goin’ limp like a damn fairy. It was like you was puttin’ it to another man. HARD legs. She'd been a dancer, and ole’ Darla had them long, hard legs. Hot damn! She could wrap them around a man, and she knew other tricks too, that little bitch. Darla could fuck your brains out. And so he ended up puttin’ everything on a single toss of them ivories and crappin’ halfway out and him and Jane got into this big-ass courtroom battle and he swore, he said, “God, now I don't pray to you, as you know. But I'm jes’ asking this ONE favor, Lordy, oh yes, sir, I beg ya, jus’ give me Darla and them two boys and PC never take a drink nor fornicate outside my marriage bed again.” But the Lord punished him and only gave him one of them boys and that was better'n nothing, and he got Darla, but shit, it waddn't two months before he was out drunk ‘n tom-cattin’ but hell that was jes’ men, he reckoned. He couldn't help it none that he had certain desires. And they'd give him a big, stiff cock between his legs like tonight with little Caroline in there showin’ him everything she had, and what was a man to do?
He'd go home now and bomb the old lady. Make Jane so sorry she hadn't held on to him she'd faint, make Darla claw the damn walls. Put it to the woman till she flat out begged for mercy. Plum get some for serious and do the cowboy two-step till you drop, ladybug. He did a little shuffle in his Saturday-night boots.
Damn! He jes’ hated concrete with a passion. Jesse Keys thought how much he hated the son of a buck as he walked across the darkened expanse of parking lot, metal-cleated boots ringing on the hard surface. He wished right then that he had his nice soft work shoes on. Them earth shoes or whatever you call ‘em that Jane always bought him. Big, thick, soft-rubber soles between you and the hard world. Every step galled him in the boots. He wished he could turn the clock back sometimes. Shit.
He'd spent sixteen years standing on them damn feet eight hours a day and overtime on the main line at McCullough's, sixteen damn years less vacation and sick leave, standing in front of that big drill press and if he wasn't so bumfuzzled right now he could do that math in his head; sixteen times fifty, let's say, was shit how many weeks. Let's call her eight hundred. Okay, then take and multiply by forty hours plus. That's 3,200 or 32,000 hours he'd stood there, he couldn't make up his mind where the fackin’ zero was. He suspected it was 32,000 anyway. Call her 40,000 hours in front of those big fucks.
Oh, that concrete would get hard after six or seven hours. Stood there 40,000 hours with his young life sappin’ down through the soles of his feet. For what?—for some piddly-ass $474.15 when he left. Shit the damn punch-drunk shift foreman who done good to even read or write his name, he was draggin’ forty large a year plus on the side. Once in a while his boys'd steal somethin’ off the loading docks or outta the warehouse and kick it back partly to him. Only way Jesse never moved up the sumbitch threatened to kill him if he put in for promotion and the little bastard meant it. His shift boss had been a pug. Fought welterweight. He'd look at you real hard and you would go on and quit whatever you was doin’ and move along. Jesse'd seen him hit this one old boy, lifted him plum off'n his feet and he kicked the dude right in the fist with his foot as he went down and that's no lie. He'd never seen anybody get hit that hard.
But it wasn't a bad job. Man could work there blind or forever. Go in floatin’ on pills and wine at eight a.m., drink a couple beers, hit that morning break and him and Eddie Lawson and Slater and ole Joe Bob would go kill a pint between them and come back and coast. You could hold a job at McCullough's if you could crawl. Stand there on the big line—concrete as far as you could see—noisy ole machines a-goin'. Not that computerized shit. Hands on. You did it all, two-fisted. Had a Hammond when he quit. Couldn't remember what them other two had been. Sixteen fucking years. Him and Eddie had quit the same day; Eddie got himself a job driving for United Parcel, and Jesse started pouring the shit. Fucking concrete. His entire life had been fucked over by concrete and he hated the stuff.
He should have stayed at McCullough's. You never worried ‘bout shit. Never took nothin’ home with you at the end of the day. You could stand there and smoke even. Mellow out while you ran your press. If the bosses came you'd see
‘em a mile away and nobody could smell shit in there so everybody knew it was cool and they smoked pot and parried and hell's bells it wasn't like it was a damn death sentence or anything except that it killed your feet standing there like that.
He thought maybe he'd come back tomorrow night about an hour before they closed ‘er down and see if Caroline would like to go out and turkey-trot a little with this ole cowboy and he was moving across the hated concrete when the thing wrapped around him and sort of pulled his head like you'd wrap a string around a yo-yo or a top and as the string or in the case of this particular moment in the life and death of Jesse Keys the chain is pulled, the top is spun, and Jesse went a-spinning out in a violent centrifugation his head seeing a blur of lights in this spinning, blinding whirlwind that cracked out and spun him into a parked truck. It was the last thing he saw, the flashing lights of the spinning horizon, right before the intense pain and the sudden death.
You know how it is when you get hit real hard with a chain? Well, what happens is—nothing. See you don't feel anything right away but the impact of the blow just numbs you out. It's later, that second or two or ten seconds later when the feeling starts coming back that you start screaming and holding yourself and shitting all over your new $375 cowboy boots from the intensity and blinding shock of the unendurable agony because as you well know there is nothing quite like being hit by 21/[2] feet of taped tractor chain. It will flat out put your raggedy country-and-western ass in the big hurt locker. It was a good thing he died real soon thereafter as it spared him a lot of terrible pain.
Shows you there's a good side to almost everything.
It just ain't reasonable to expect you can two-step through life without kickin’ a little cow flop from time to time. It ain't nothin’ personal, it's just the way of the world. Once in a while you're gonna get them size 11 Justin Full Quill Ostrich jobs (regularly $495, special at Hubbard Western Wear only $375!), in the doo-doo. Life is not blue skies all the time. You got to be a philosopher about the thing. Into every life a little chain must fall.
BUCKHEAD
“A. C. Wiegrath, please,” the voice tells the woman over the telephone.
“May I tell him who's calling, please?"
“SAC Krug at the Bureau."
“Oh—yes, sir—just a moment, please.” The line goes click and there is a momentary pause and he hears the familiar voice answer.
“'Morning, Howard."
“Arthur."
“You get a chance to go to school on my memo?"
“Yeah, I did. I pretty much think we need to push on with this. I see what you're saying but we're getting boxed in with the investigation if we don't move."
“Well"—the man's raised eyebrows and shrug could be heard over the telephone in his tone and the sigh—"you know the sit-chee-ashun as well as I do. You're on eggshells. Something like this. I think you have to do what you think best. Buck stops with you."
“Yeah. Well, we got only three possibilities. First Mr. Fields hisself, which doesn't make much sense—guy can buy anything he wants now—Christ, djew look at his financial statement?"
“No, I didn't. He's got a few?"
“Yeah, you could say that.” They chuckled. “For a rainy day. You can say the boy Monroe put it in a cigar box and buried it. I guess we can't dismiss it."
“What'd the poly do?"
“Shit,” he said contemptuously.
“I figured."
“We took about forty man-hours combined with that damn videotape. He looks awful good for it. He's in there in a shot one minute, he's outta the shot the next minute."
“Christ almighty, I think...” He trailed off.
“Arthur, if there was ANYbody else looked ripe for it I wouldn't press it. I mean the girl. Shit there's no way. Just no opportunity. The video narrows it down by eliminating everybody else including the two uniform guys. I think we're lookin’ at Fields, John Monroe, and the investigating officer in charge. That's it."
“Detective Sergeant James Lee out of Buckhead Station."
“Yeah.” Long pause.
“I think we got to get a court order and the whole shootin’ match."
“Lee's telephone. Fields’ telephone. What else?"
“All the usual. For now. Then we'll just wait and see what drops out of the trees, I guess."
“Jesus. You know, for a measly damn twelve, insured at that, you know what I'd like to do with this one."
“Hey, really. Amen to that. It just don't work that way."
“I know, I know. Okay. I'll put it in the works."
“Thanks, Arthur."
“No problem. Get back to you after a while."
“Right,” Special Agent-in-Charge Krug said, hanging up the phone.
The man sitting on the other side of the desk from him anticipated what Krug was about to say and said, “I can appreciate how he feels. We don't like it much either."
“Right."
“But we both know we got a dirty cop here."
“Looks that way, I'll admit."
“Yep."
STOBAUGH COUNTY
He had always counted on his surprising quickness and it had never failed him. He was amazingly surefooted until he grew tired, and his unexpected speed and agility had surprised more than one adversary to death. Daniel had always been careful about revealing his secret quickness of movement, even in combat, and he regarded it as a special, delicious treasure quite rightfully.
But while he could sprint fifty, sixty, seventy-five feet with dazzling speed for his obvious corpulence he was then dead in the water. Running more than a few city blocks, even at a slow jog, was impossible and to him unthinkable. What would be the point? Stamina has its limits.
He knew himself the way you know a reliable machine, every tolerance, every interrelated movement within the system, and his capacities and limitations were known, calculated, and trusted. First his wind would give out, then if he kept going—his ankle would pain him—and soon he'd be moving like a wounded hippo, favoring the bad ankle and moving in a kind of half-lurching half-waddling plunge forward, almost out of control, and uncharacteristically vulnerable as he gulped in mighty lungfuls of air. It was worse than if he'd remained in place and fought, or hid, or whatever. So of course he never ran.
Now he had to run. He had to do it all—the whole aching, killing, hurt-filled, boring, lonely, frustrating, play-through-the-pain program designed to tire him to the point where he wouldn't eat. To make him sleep on a huge, screamingly hungry gut that demanded attention as it shrunk. What was his speed? Could he run the forty in 4.4? The hundred in 14.4? He hadn't a remote clue. He decided not to buy a stopwatch, as he could count up to sixty minutes by the second and not be more than four seconds off either way. Hell, he WAS a clock.
So he bit the bullet and did it. He'd pull off his huge shirt and, Ace bandage carefully wrapped around the right ankle, take off at a quick double-time toward the nearest ditch. At first he could only run one way—but slowly, day by day, he'd run a little farther before he gave out, exhausted, collapsing in a wheezing, beached-whale heap wherever he fell, gasping for air, his ankle throbbing with pain to which he would steel himself. His heart would be threatening to burst through the enormous, meaty-tittied chest, and he'd be angrier, at that moment, then he could ever remember being when the hot and red waves of kill fury were not present.
Finally he'd manage to get back to his feet, and—still fighting for air—he would gamely walk back to the shack, the soaked towel in his huge hands. It was then, on each of the trips back from the edge of Hora's property line, he would take the soaked bath towel and wring it. Jesus Christ wring it dry and then the hands would grip it like it was a human throat and they would wind the towel tighter and tighter, testing the strength of those mighty, powerful shoulders, back muscles, neck, upper arms, forearms, wrists, and killer hands as he pulled at the towel ripping the jawbone of a man loose or tearing the head from a woman or spear-thrusting into the solar plexus and comin
g up under the rib cage and forcing the fingers under the lower ribs and pulling with all his might. Do you know what power it takes to pull a human rib cage apart you spineless, pencil-necks in your safe, happy worlds of calm and poise and freedom? Do you know the will the concentration required to force the thumbs in behind the eyes and pop them out like so do you know the force it takes to rip a heart out with your hands?
Oh, he hated them all so. Hated their smiling faces and their foolish, sheep ways and their lives that seemed to mock him just by their mere existence.
Sissy knew instinctively that she must communicate something to this quiet and excitingly dangerous new man in her life. She wanted him to understand that his violent nature was quite acceptable to her. She was no stranger to violent men. She didn't mind a big, strong sugar daddy looking out for her. It was reassuring. So this became the hazy focus of her running commentary.
Chaingang hears fragments from a long, disjointed story about a guy she was with named Toby Something, and a rambling, pointless anecdote about a gun and his mind tunes in momentarily as she tells him, “...picked it up and pulled the trigger, and I didn't know, you know, it was loaded, and the gun went off. I was real close to him, you know, like from here to there"—gesturing—"and it went off right in his face and he got burns from the, uh, gun going off and...” She laughed at the memory of it. “And you should have seen the look on Toby's face when I pointed that gun at him and pulled the trigger. He looked so surprised when it went off, and for a second I thought I'd—” And back into the long, drawn-out, ridiculous story as he turned out.
And now he looks at her as she drifts back into the boring nothingness of her past, fascinated by herself, and he lets himself enjoy the lulling effect of her soft, childish voice, the voice of a little girl, and the not unpleasant singsong delivery of the unending, muted flow of verbiage. And to illustrate her point she aims a thin finger at Chaingang and cocks her hand like a gun. SHE IS POINTING AN IMAGINARY GUN AT HIS FACE. He has to beam a horrible smile at the irony of it and he is suddenly awash in the red tide that so frequently engulfs his mind and emotions and makes him do the bad things.
