by CS DeWildt
***
Neil wandered the aisles of Jenkins’ Pharmacy, pant legs stiff with dried glue. His shirt was spotted rusty red with the spray of blood he’d caught from Hoon’s sniffer the night before. Neil wandered into the office supply aisle, an empty man floating balloon like under the fluorescent glow and the elevator version of Burnin’ for You. He put his fingers on the name brand rubber cement before seeing the store brand was “buy one get one.” He grabbed two bottles and took them to the cash register opposite the pharmacy side of the store.
“Your boss in?” he asked the girl in the green, store-issue vest. She looked up from her celebrity rag and Neil could see her thoughts as she wondered if she need speak or if a shake of the head would suffice. She went through the follow ups in her head and sighed.
“Nah. Pharmacy don’t open till nine. I don’t have a key. I can’t get your scrip.” Her fingers danced over the register keys, controlled by bored muscle memory. “Two-eleven,” she said, nodding at the glue. “You want a bag?”
“Yeah,” Neil said. “Plastic. And you got a restroom?” Face back in the magazine and out of words she waved a hand, flapping like a living rag doll toward the back of the store.
Neil locked himself in the restroom, sat on the can and unrolled a wad of toilet tissue, drenched it with glue and put it in the plastic bag. He put the unopened bottle in his jacket pocket and brought the bag to his face, inhaling deeply as he pondered what to do, if anything, about the Hoon situation. He didn’t ponder for long. The entire room began to fall, elevator slow, the Muzak muffled, warped, wrapping around him and holding him tight as he sank deeper and deeper, lowering himself breath by breath into his pit, taking him someplace he knew he didn’t want to be, but couldn’t stay away from. He wondered what that place would look like when the elevator doors opened. Maybe they wouldn’t. And Neil remembered thinking that that might be just fine.
CHAPTER SIX
Neil followed his daddy through the hills and hollers, down steep limestone embankments of clacking rocks that served as the path for the heavy rain that would spill out into the flood plains below. He followed the man through patches of paw-paws and young birch, past old hollow oaks that vibrated with huddled bats in wait of dusk, up the next rise where their heavy breath flattened the land again, leading them among primordial ferns and moss-pillowed stone.
Daddy carried the .22 rifle in his giant mitts. Breath came like smoke and the man chewed the end of his home-rolled cigar. Neil watched him move like a silver-haired bear. The man would often stop and talk of the plants, to Neil, but also to the air itself, spilling the words for the forest to gather unto itself, as if educating the very place on its true nature.
“These here are wild onions,” he said squatting, knees popping. He pulled up the thin scallion and chewed the bulbous root. Neil did the same and sucked the flavor from the green fiber. He chewed the sprout, letting it dangle from his lips like his daddy’s cigar.
“These here ye can eat,” Daddy said. “I don’t care for them myself, bitter. But in a pinch.” He plucked two berries from the small bush and popped them as if to prove the point. Neil did the same and yes, they were bitter, but they complemented the onion flavor and Neil memorized the look of the bush, the stubborn give of the berries’ skin between his molars.
It was cold and the ground spouted forth smoky steam from the pockets and caverns below. Neil pointed out each breathing hole he saw and his daddy marked its location on the topographical map.
“Most of these are connected. Or will be,” his daddy said. “Might just open up into some great chamber. A place untouched.”
Neil noted the marks on the map, simple red exes laid out over the paper landscape, each one a ghost of the vents pocking the land around them.
His daddy paused and Neil knew he’d spotted a squirrel by the change of his breathing, a feeling in the air as if the man had sucked up all the oxygen in some great ecological communication as master of the world. Neil massaged the canvas bag between his fingers, wanting the moment to remain with him in all its manifestations, tactile and olfactory. He smelled the cigar on the onion on the berry on the cold morning. He saw the man take a knee, another pop of the joint, a click of the safety next to the trigger, the pop and soft echo from thick greenery. It fell from the tree, hobbled, bounced and flopped, became a gray mass.
Neil came upon it first, went to his knees and spread the frosted ferns that wet his fingers numb. The squirrel did not appear. Neil cocked his head like a robin searching out the slow crawl of a worm, and in doing so the gray mass popped from the rocky background, burning itself upon his retinas. He felt the squirrel and the warm radiating death soothed his cold fingers. The tick, a young instar, was slightly swollen behind the squirrel’s ear. Neil plucked it free, a small tag of flesh still in its mouthparts. He rolled it in his fingers before crushing it, slicing it in two between his thumbnail and the hardened bed of his index finger. It bled squirrel blood and fell to the ground, left to new purpose among the miraculous and unseen perpetuators of the cycle.
The squirrel moved, barely, and Neil thought it still alive. There was a hole in its midsection and Neil realized the pulsing was not due to the animal’s blood flow or breath, but to squirming life within its womb. The bullet had opened up the placenta and among the messy potpourri of innards and fluids, a small wet pup was exposed to the world prematurely. Neil watched it move and take life upon itself the best it was able, the cold invasive air, light and sound. It searched for the comfort that had been stripped away with the layers of tissue.
He felt his daddy over his shoulder, smelled the cigar and felt his breath. It warmed his neck and Neil said, “Will it live?”
“No,” his daddy said. “It won’t.”
Neil took the squirrel by the bush of its tail and dropped it into the bag among the others. His daddy marked the map with another double stroke of red and Neil scanned the landscape, searching for the place his father had just created.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He felt the pounding on the restroom door before he heard it.
“Hello?” he said. His vision returned and he heard the sound, but couldn’t make sense of the garbled animal speech.
“Neil. You come the hell out of there! C’mon now. Marty Addison’s ’bout to wet hisself out here.”
“Hello?” Neil said again.
“Neil? Are you stupid or something? I said ‘come on out’!”
“Rinthy?”
“What the hell’s a ‘rinthy?’ It’s Helen Jenkins. Hoon told me you was looking for me. You can stop since I found you.”
“Helen?”
“Oh Jesus Christ! You drunk? Yes, it’s me. My daddy sicced you on me. Remember?”
And it began to click again, the tiny pieces of reality were falling back into place, Helen Jenkins. Helen Jenkins. She saw Hoon?
“When’d you see Hoon?”
“Last night late. This morning. We saw you too, passed out in your car. You’re some detective.”
“Anybody else there? His kids?”
“They were. I ran them back to their mama’s this morning.”
“Anybody else there? At Hoon’s.”
“Don’t you think we should have this conversation face to face? Now I mean it. Marty’s a-dancin’ like it’s the dogwood festival.”
Neil pulled himself to his feet, put away the glue and opened the door. Old Marty squeezed past, nearly knocked wobbling Neil back to the floor then used the door to push Neil out of the restroom.
“You saw Hoon this morning?” Neil asked.
“Are you sniffing that glue in there? I wanted to take a picture last night, but Hoon said ‘uh uh.’ Said you’d bust his head again. What’d you mess up his pretty face like that for? It’s his best feature, lord knows it ain’t his brain. Or his dick.”
“Helen, listen to me. When’s the last you saw Hoon; this morning, yeah, what time?”
“I took his kids to their mama’s at about six I guess. Th
ey’re gettin’ their picture made today. No wait, it was a little earlier. I took them to the Park City McDonald’s for a breakfast and we had to wait for that mongoloid kid to open up.”
“And you haven’t been back?”
“No, I’m meeting Hoon back there later. We’re leaving.” She stopped talking, looked at Neil. He could see behind her eyes, where the questions began to be more than just the nosy queries of a glue-sniffing private dick doing a job for her daddy. “Why you so concerned with Hoon? He okay?”
Helen was a true beauty. Neil could remember every county fair when she’d been crowned Tobacco Queen. He saw her riding in the back of whatever late model convertible that J.D. of J.D.’s Autos had loaned out for the parade, his logo affixed to the side, Helen waving to all the kids wanting her to throw candy at them, the grown men wanting to throw her something. But in the pharmacy, a crowd gathering, her face twisted as she waited for an answer about Hoon; it was the only time he’d seen her look anything less than perfect.
“Helen. He’s not okay. Not at all.”
She bit her lip, forced the words, “What does that mean?”
Neil listened to her breathe, could almost hear her heart speeding up as it delivered the panic through her veins. He thought about how to tell her, what he would have said to her if he was something more than a glue head hired on by her daddy.
“He’s dead Helen. He’s really dead.” She opened her mouth and the scream that came out of that little girl was enough to wake the dead. But of course, it didn’t.
The flies are probably really getting at the boy about now, was Neil’s thought as he wondered if he had closed the window when he left Hoon’s.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They sat in the dark vehicle and waited. The lights were on in the apartment and each time the silhouette passed by the glass, Neil’s daddy would shift in the driver’s seat, strain to catch a glimpse of something other than the shadow that lay spread out over her form. Neil, flush with sickness and fever, saw the shadow but could not even think to look beyond it—it wasn’t the absence of light, but a tangible entity, another barrier.
“That’s them,” his daddy said, passing him the bottle. Neil lifted his bad hand and grabbed the whiskey bottle, drank, and fought his own guts to hold it down. “That’s your whore mother in there,” Lester said. He grabbed the bottle, took a long pull and let the booze finish his thought. “Getting fucked.”
Neil played with the radio dial, listened for something to soothe him among the static and talk. The radio was broken and trapped in AM mode. Stuck in the cassette deck was a dubbed copy of Dark Side of the Moon, magnetic tape snapped long ago after hundreds of plays. Neil spun the dial, caught bits of fire and brimstone, oldies crackling with static, farm reports. Finally his daddy turned off the radio without a word and the two sat in silence, eyes on the brick façade and the dim window on the third floor. Neil saw the small dark outline of a thin vase and single flower as the curtains caught the wind, attempting a futile escape, tethered as they were. Lester passed him the bottle again. Neil tipped it back, easier.
Neil’s daddy shook the boy’s shoulder. “There he is. C’mon. C’mon!” And he was out of the car leaving Neil to retrieve his bearings as he trailed the man trailing the man.
“Hey you! Hey asshole!” Neil ran hard to catch up at the corner of the next block. Over the slapping beat of his feet he heard the argument, pieces anyway:
“Wife.”
“Drunk.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Easy bud.”
And Neil saw his daddy lift the length of pipe high before catching a heavy fist square in the chops. It sent him backward and he went down hard, his head hitting the pavement with the sound of a ripe pumpkin on Halloween night. The pipe bounced into the street with a song. Neil saw the man move forward. Daddy struggled to his feet. The man put a hand on Daddy’s shoulder, as if to help him. But as Daddy looked up, the man threw a knuckle into his windpipe. Neil’s daddy went down again and the man hovered over him. His daddy gasped and grunted as the blows fell. Neil continued forward, feet heavy with fear and rage as he grabbed the pipe from the pavement. He sidestepped up to the man and that man’s eyes found him just a bit late as Neil swung for the fences with a beautiful arcing form that caught the man in the middle of his face and sent him to the ground. Neil dropped the pipe and helped his coughing daddy to his feet. Neil wondered if his daddy would even be able drive given his state, but Daddy pulled Neil to the car. The boy looked back, licking salty sweat from his lip as his father pulled him along to the car. The figure rolled over with a moan and a light caught something shiny metallic on the man’s hip, something sleek and dangerous and just about as useless as the man attached to it.
“Stay here,” Lester said as the figure called out Neil’s mother’s name.
Lester ran across the street with renewed purpose, grabbed the pipe and lit into the fallen man, beating him past death. Neil watched his daddy pant for a moment before standing tall and entering the apartment building. Neil sat in the new silence, waiting, almost seeing through the brick walls as his father ascended the stairs, turning at each landing, a bounding beast nearly on fours. Neil looked away, turned on the radio and spun the dial again, searching for something to hear other than the muffled screams, the deep-throated yells of his daddy, the breaking glass. Neil turned the volume knob up all the way and went through the stations, up and down through prophecy and malt shop romances and the falling price of tobacco. Neil listened to it all as he flexed his aching right hand. He pulled off the dirty wrap and held his paw up to the window to catch the low light of the moon. The hand was festering at the sickly hole between his cracked knuckles. The wound refused to heal as it wept green pus. Neil tried to open his hand but it refused to cooperate. The palm was swollen and fleshy, but unnaturally hard to the touch. Neil looked behind the car, back to the corner where they’d left the figure lying. The man was nothing more than a thing now. Neil forced pressure to his swollen hand and it wept and screamed inside him. He found the tiny object and brought the hand to his mouth, sucked at the foul hole, tonguing the hard object back and forth until it was free. He spit the infected mix into his hand, delirious with fever and pain. There in the center of his palm was one of the man-child’s teeth and that was all he remembered before he woke up. He and Daddy were both in the hospital. Daddy had a concussion and Neil was laid up for a week with an IV drip of antibiotics that gave him the shits like nothing before. They had him in diapers.
The state boys came by and talked to Lester, but never pulled him in.
“I’m gonna tell you the same thing till you arrest me and then it’s going to be my lawyer telling you the same thing. I wasn’t there; I was home all night with this one,” Lester said, thumbing to his son, watching satellite TV, with a shit diaper standing in for conscience. The men looked at the boy.
“Happened to you?” one of the county dicks asked.
“Don’t open your mouth Neily,” Lester said.
“Afraid of what he’ll say?” the other detective said.
“Get fucked,” Lester said. He looked hard at the man who’d spoken to Neil, “Better yet, have one last go with my Mrs. They got her on ice in the basement I figure.” Lester lit the stub of his cigar with a match. “Won’t even charge you,” he added.
Neil pushed the talk away and put his attention on a talk/paternity test show. Soon he was off and dreaming on whatever it was made his hand not feel like it was on fire.
He was able to keep out most of that night– call it sickness, dreams—but he was damn sure not going to ask when she was coming home. Because, how fucking stupid is that?
CHAPTER NINE
When Neil got to the Porky Pig Diner, Helen was already sitting in the corner booth and eating a catfish plate with sides of tartar and cocktail sauce. He remembered seeing her in that same booth only a year earlier. He’d been sitting at the counter while Helen and Hoon sat in the back with some generic, acne-face
, football friend of the latter. Neil watched in the reflection of the glass pie carousel as that boy shredded up one white napkin after another while Helen and Hoon necked in front of him, focusing his pent-up energy into futile destruction, far from immune to the charms of the girl who belonged to his friend. At least that’s how Neil had seen it.
Neil slid into the booth across from Helen and she gave him her toothy smile before pulling it back to something more appropriate, as to suggest Neil was the only person she could smile at given the circumstances, given their shared reality.
“Your Daddy wants you home,” Neil said. Helen took a bite of fried fish between her teeth, held it taut and turned her head, ripping the white flesh like a feral cat with a vole in its paws.
“No way,” she said. “I told that son of a bitch I was leaving when I was grown, been tellin’ him that since I was thirteen, when Mama died. I told him I wasn’t gonna be the one to take care of him forever. He don’t really want me home anyway, not the way you think.”
“What do you mean?”
Helen bit her lip, the same twisting look she’d made when she’d learned about Hoon. “It’s the money. I got half the business and he can’t stand it. Figures if he can keep me close, that’s just as good as if it was his.”
