by Joe Meno
Then there was a loud ringing bell and the green gates flung open.
Jim watched the animal and the jockey take off, a bolt of white horseflesh followed by a cloud of dust, a spray of dirt. The horse bounded across the track in a phantasmagoric blur, all steady whiteness and steam, its coat shiny, hurling itself like a muscled locomotive. The report of the mare’s hooves against the dry earth rang out like thunder, whoom, whoom, whoom, the hooves hitting the dirt with their specific, tremendous explosivity, the sound of horses running unlike any other sound in the world, a sound suggesting tireless movement, joy, an escape from the past, from the present, from the uncertainty of the future. Seeing the mare go, the grandfather imagined the sound of its hooves against the clotted dirt was his own heart racing to meet its end. He felt something well up inside his chest and forgot what it was, the word for it. Then he turned and glanced at the boy and saw the same expression on his rounded gray face. What if? the grandfather began to think again, turning to watch his animal pull three lengths ahead, then four. The horse and rider flew past the finish line, coming in at twenty-one seconds on the nose. Evens looked at Jim, bug-eyed, wet cigar sloping from his mouth. Jim refused to give him the satisfaction of being surprised. As the dust settled, Evens opened his wallet and snorted. They collected on five-to-one odds, returning to the blue pickup with a billfold padded roundly with cash.
* * *
In bed later that Sunday night, Jim flipped through his wife’s Bible. He stopped on a page near the middle and read:
When the daughter of Herodias herself came in and danced, she pleased Herod and those sitting with him. The king said to the young lady, “Ask me whatever you want, and I will give it to you.” He swore to her, “Whatever you shall ask of me, I will give you, up to half of my kingdom.” She went out, and said to her mother, “What shall I ask?” She said, “The head of John the Baptizer.” She came in immediately with haste to the king, and asked, “I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptizer on a platter.” The king was exceedingly sorry, but for the sake of his oaths, and of his dinner guests, he didn’t wish to refuse her. Immediately the king sent out a soldier of his guard, and commanded to bring John’s head, and he went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the young lady; and the young lady gave it to her mother.
_________________
Before the sun had made its way over the tree line on that last Saturday of August, they mucked the horse’s quarters, fed it, and curried it as best as they knew how. The grandfather broke a carrot in half and handed one part to the animal, who gobbled it down. The other part he handed to the boy.
“Watch this,” the boy said. Quentin took a bite and then leaned over, holding the carrot in his mouth, laughing as the horse carefully took it from his teeth.
The grandfather smiled and said, “It’s good to see you two are friends again.”
“We are,” the boy said. “We’ll be friends, even after our deaths.”
The grandfather shook his head, unsure what the words actually meant, though for some reason he was pleased.
Next they counted out the peeps—checking their beaks, their fluffy stomachs, their reptilian feet—for any sign of infection. The boy squatted beside his grandfather, petting the head of a round chick, letting it nip at his finger. Then he looked up.
“Sir?”
“Hm.”
“Nothing.” The boy glanced back down at the peeps.
“Go on,” the grandfather said.
“Did you . . .” But the boy paused again.
“Go on.”
“Did ever you hear from my mom?”
Jim frowned, unable to hide his disappointment. “Not yet.”
“Do you think she’s coming back?”
Jim itched his nose and gave a short nod. “Like as not. But she’s got a lot to figure out first.”
“Did she tell you where she’s staying?”
The grandfather stood up, setting the peep back into the brooder, and shook his head. “I bet she’s with friends though. I’m sure she’s all right. How come you’re asking?”
“I dunno,” the boy said, scratching at a scab on his arm. “I guess I’d like to call her.”
Jim gave a slow smile. “Of course you would. It’s nice, a boy thinking of his mother like that.”
“I’d like to tell her about the horse. I think it would make her happy.”
“Sure it would,” Jim said.
“I’d like to tell her.”
Jim tilted his hat a little and put a hand on the boy’s head, feeling the coarse, fine hair, and mussed it gently. “Anything is possible,” the grandfather said.
* * *
The boy rode with his grandfather into town to get supplies that Saturday. As they drove, the grandfather glanced over from the rubberized steering wheel and asked the kind of question he always seemed to propose during these sorts of trips. “What would you do with a million dollars?”
The boy answered without thinking: “I’d try to breed a rattlesnake with a water moccasin. Or a cobra.”
Jim smiled. “Breed a what? You’d spend all your money on that?”
“I’d sell their offspring and then I’d be even richer.”
The grandfather nodded, though with an undisguised air of doubt.
On his lap in the passenger seat, the boy held a small shoe box with holes in the top, which had been jabbed with the rounded edge of a butter knife. There was a sound, an indefinable, nearly indescribable movement, a kind of gentle scraping, coming from inside the box. The boy turned and faced his grandfather with a curious expression.
“Sir?”
“Hm.”
“Are we gonna race her again?” he asked. “The horse, I mean.”
“Hope to.”
“You think she’ll win?”
“It’d be nice,” he said, turning back to face the road.
* * *
They parked the pickup in its usual spot near the closed-down café. Opening the driver’s-side door before the street of similar-looking, redbrick, two-story buildings, Jim pulled his cattleman hat down to shade his eyes and said, “All right, I’ll meet you back here around five o’clock. Mind you’re not late. We still have some other work to do when we get back.”
“We’re not gonna eat in town?”
“No sir. I got to get home and give them hens their medicine.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you in a couple hours.”
“Okay.”
Quentin heaved his backpack over his shoulder, took hold of the small shoe box, and walked off. A rusted-out Camaro with a Confederate flag license-plate holder rattled past. The boy took notice of the faded plastic stars and bars and inwardly felt aggrieved, though no actual sign showed on his face. He was used to it by now. He walked on. In a strip mall around the corner was the exotic pet store, located right between a Chinese takeout place and a you-wash-it laundry. The sign above the pet shop was fading white—a painting of a lizard above the words, Exotic Reptiles, all spelled out in blue, though Mr. Peel, the store’s owner, had been smart enough to branch out into other kinds of pets—a few odd mammals like chinchillas, all types of snakes and lizards, some of which were legal, some of which weren’t, and a tortoise which the store claimed was more than a hundred years old.
The boy stopped by the store whenever he could; he had an interest in getting rich, specifically through the illegal and sometimes forcible breeding of a random selection of exotic pets. He considered himself a regular amateur herpetologist, though no one in the boy’s life but the pet store owner Mr. Peel or Gilby—the distracted, ill-kept, twenty-two-year-old pet store clerk—had any sense of what that particular word meant. The boy had said it once, by accident, as a means of introduction, to a group of girls at a church picnic a few years before, and had spent the rest of the day off in the woods alone, itching mosquito bites on his arm, watching various strangers squint at him and laugh. He thought of tha
t now, that embarrassing moment, two or three years removed, and muttered, “A herpetologist is someone who studies reptiles,” to the empty town, to the sound of the abandoned buildings staring back.
A little bell rang as Quentin entered the pet store; he walked up to the counter where the clerk, Gilby, was busy inspecting a nudie magazine. The periodical was open to a two-page spread and featured a pair of Asian girls, bound up with silken white ropes. There was no freckle or flaw on the flesh of either one of them, which gave them a phantomed look.
“What you got today?” Gilby asked without having to look up.
“Pinkies.”
“How many?”
“Three dozen.”
“You want cash or trade?”
“Cash.”
Gilby nodded, still staring down at the slick magazine pages, walked over to the cash register, rang the transaction up, hit the sale button, and stood back as the drawer whirred open. He got three dollars from the till and placed them in Quentin’s hand, eyes still on the entwined women.
“I don’t usually go for Asian girls, but these two . . .” Gilby confided. “I only wish there was a war over there so I’d be inclined to go visit.”
“I guess,” the boy said, looking away, then glancing up at Gilby’s face. “What happened to your eye?”
Gilby sniffed, his long nose twitching, as he placed two fingers below his left eye. It was swollen black and purple, and some of the white of the eye was pink with burst blood vessels. The rest of his face looked equally disheveled; his narrow upper lip was marked with what appeared to be a cold sore of some kind; his pointy chin and sallow cheeks looked like they had not been shaved in days. “Somebody I know doesn’t understand the meaning of a joke.”
“Who was that?”
“No one,” he sighed, and then, “My brother.”
“Walt?”
“Walt? Shit. Walt’s still in high school. And he ain’t brave enough anyway. No, my older brother, the cocksucker, he’s back in town.”
“Who’s that?”
“Edward. Everybody calls him Cocksucker. He’s the oldest.”
“You got an older brother?”
“Yeah. He just got back yesterday.”
“Where was he?”
“I don’t know. Jail. In California. Then he was in Chicago for a while.”
“How long was he gone for?”
“I don’t know. Three or four years, I guess.”
“I didn’t even know you had an older brother.”
“He comes and goes. My mother don’t let him stay too long. He usually gets himself thrown out after a week or two.”
“And he’s the one who gave you the black eye?”
Gilby glanced back down at the two girls forced together, their pale bodies crashing upon each other like some kind of mysterious sea foam. “He don’t look like he’s tough, but he’s mean. You think he’s got a sense of humor but then you find out he don’t. I always end up saying something I wish I hadn’t. And then I get one of these.” He tapped his two fingers below the eye again. “It’s a goddamn shame because we used to have fun when we were kids. Now he takes himself too seriously. Which is a problem if you don’t happen to think he’s kingshit of everything.”
Quentin nodded then, though he did not know why.
“Hey,” Gilby said, remembering something. “We’re trying to get rid of that old reticulated python back there. He’s an albino . . . Nobody wants an albino. They all want the tiger kind now. You got any interest in it?”
Quentin shrugged his shoulders and took a few steps down the aisle toward the glass tank. The python was fearsome-looking, long—almost a dozen feet, and curled up on itself in round, lazy loops. Its skin was a creamy white, with pale yellow and gray markings, its arrow-shaped head a yellow brighter than any kind of tropical flower.
“We tried to feed him a live rat but he wouldn’t touch it. We had to take the rat out because we were afraid it would scratch him up. I wanted to leave it in there and take bets but Mr. Peel said the snake wasn’t worth anything to us dead.”
Quentin tapped the glass. “He looks bored. You ever take him out at all?”
“Nope. He tried to bite me last time I did that. He’s got an attitude problem. He thinks he’s better than everyone else.” Gilby tapped the glass once, then again, the snake flicking its tongue in response. “But he ain’t. He’s the wrong color and so he ain’t shit.”
Quentin squinted a little. “What’s this?” he asked, staring at another glass tank. “When these come in?”
“Those are Chinese water dragons. They came in a couple days ago. They’re like iguanas pretty much. Except they like living in the water. Supposed to change their water every day because they shit in it and then try to drink it.”
“They’re terrific.”
“They’re all right.”
“You got a pair?” the boy asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I dunno.”
“You thinking of breeding them?”
Quentin nodded, pressing his hand up against the glass. “How much are they going for?”
“For the pair is thirty.”
“Thirty?”
“It’s an investment. You going to make money off them. As soon as you get some young ones, you can sell ’em back to Mr. Peel. The folks we bought them from said you can play this one cassette tape with Chinese music and then they’ll start breeding like crazy. You get the pair and I’m sure Mr. Peel will throw in that cassette tape too. Easy money.”
Quentin nodded once more, tapping the glass carefully with his fingertip, making as if he was touching the ridged neck and bumpy skin of the creature on the other side. “I’m gonna buy them. As soon as I save up enough. How long have they been here for?”
“A couple days. But Bobby Dare supposed to come in next weekend. He’s going to a trade show in Ohio and he usually cleans us out.”
Quentin tapped against the aquarium glass again and turned, glancing down at his watch. “I got to go. I’ll be back Monday. Or Tuesday. Don’t sell them until then if you can.”
Gilby nodded, once more returning to his spot behind the small glass counter. He stared down at the unfolded magazine. The boy gave the glass door a shove and stepped back outside into the distant glare of the sun.
* * *
Cocksucker was back in town. Mount Holly. There he was. On the go. A shadow in Mount Holly’s town square, the only shadow. It crossed over the birds on the bench. An omen, a bad cloud, scaring them all off. Flap-flap-flap. The dusty feathers, in summer, bird snow, made him cough. Lungs like asbestos, hack-hack-hack. He made his way past the feed store, trying not to have a coughing fit. Inside the feed store, civilians gathered around the counter, talking irrigation and drainage. Hayseeds in overalls. Mud on their boots. Not for him. Stopping at the corner now. Spitting at the side of the mailbox, taking his time to get the phlegm up, making a regular show of it. What came up was translucent and a little yellow, tinged with some pinkish blood. It was the consequence of smoking generic, unfiltered cigarettes and also doing a few lines of crystal cut with inferior cleaning products. He coughed and spat again. This one landed directly above the majestic outline of the blue post office eagle. Why an eagle? Who do you think you are? America. America. You ain’t nothing anymore. And he strode on, his boots rattling as he walked. His mother had chased him out of the house this morning, so he had not bothered to fasten the buckles. He tripped once, then again, before leaning over and hitching them. He looked up, out of breath.
Two boys, school-age, were playing with their yo-yos on the corner, sitting on the curb. Red-yellow, red-yellow, the yo-yo rearing up and down, the other silver-flecked like a comet, both of them spiral-like, spinning scientifically beside their knees. The sight of it made him dizzy. And then angry. He made a grab for one, yanking it from the boy’s hand. Boo. The kid screamed like a girl, the yo-yo rolling down the curb toward the sewer grate, lying faceup beside a soda pop bottle. The other kid dr
opped his, the two of them running off together. Two shadows disappearing down an alleyway. The sound of rubber soles on hot pavement.
On he strolled. The Band-Aid on his nose falling off. He stopped in front of the Bide-A-While and found the door to the saloon locked. He made a disappointed sound in his throat, and then coughed again. He squinted inside, the glass window coated with a black film that only reflected his unwashed face. His jawline was coated in blackheads and stubble. He looked like a charity case in need of a haircut. The hair was dark hanging over his ears. He tried the door again. Locked. He blinked up into the sun. Hot for August. Too hot. He turned to squint at the clock tower in the center of the square. One of its faces read 1:30, the other 2:15. The sign on the door read 4 p.m. Either way, it was still too early so he fumbled for the pack of smokes rolled up in his sleeve, lit one, then ambled back down the street. A semi pulling a trailer full of dairy cows crawled past. A song was blaring from its cab, I know it’s only rock ’n’ roll but I like it . . . He whistled along, traveling westward now.
