you’re not losing a friend
you are dear

but of those middle-aged verbs
I’m interested in
we’re marching along
 
i make my declaration
from near empty family home

mother no longer mothering
mate without a mate

asking myself if the blue flame rising
in me is instinct or the want of you

your painful corns
fear of the dentist
patterned nightly call

i reject them all
tarnish of my age
strike out

to traverse a coast
commune with spirit cultures
camp, canoe my misty lake

find clarity
unencumbered.

I’m trying to quit right now, which makes writing this all the more difficult.  If you’ve never been a smoker, I find it almost entirely pointless to appeal to you.  Imagine that simple pleasure you love most about life, then multiply that by a sizable number and try to imagine what it would feel like to have that thing readily available to run through your veins from now until eternity (excluding, of course, time spent on public transportation, in movie theaters, at any restaurant, or spent with your family who doesn’t know you have such a filthy addiction).  You still don’t get it, and you should be happy about that.  I’ve been told that it’s harder to quit smoking cigarettes than it is to quit shooting heroin.  That’s just stupid, but I guess I believe it.  In the dozen or so times I’ve quit, I’ve fared about a week or two on average before I find myself back at the gas station counter, asking for a pack of Camel Turkish Silver and hearing, “where have you been?  We haven’t seen you in awhile.”

It is very easy to quit.  What’s hard is trying to make that resolve last. My most recent decision to quit smoking came this summer when, upon landing in England on my way back from Germany, I heard the announcement, “and do remember, there is no smoking anywhere inside London Heathrow Airport.”  My nerves, already frazzled from riding in an ancient and cramped Fokker F70 for the past two hours, shot into instant panic as the fasten seatbelts sign switched off and the sound of forty cell phones coming to life chirped throughout the cabin.  I had a choice:  I could tough it out, and spend my layover and the subsequent ten-hour flight to Dallas in foul-mouthed, jittery daze, or I could pull out my passport and enter a foreign country, alone, only for the chance to spend ten minutes polluting its atmosphere.  It really wasn’t much of a decision.  I gave my wife a kiss on the cheek, told her I’d meet her at the next plane, and dashed off towards customs with my right hand supporting the shoulder strap of my backpack and my left hand resting reassuringly on the pack of Dunhill I’d bought earlier that morning in Stuttgart.

Behind a line of some two-hundred international travelers, I filled in my landing card with all the pertinent information about my recent travels.  Under “Duration of Stay in the U.K.,” I entered “two cigarettes.”  I waited for half an hour in line, dreaming of the foul-scented smoke that would soon fill my lungs, swirl around in my bloodstream, and leave me light-headed to the point that I’d have to try really hard to navigate the terminals successfully.  It was going to be worth it.  But half an hour turned slowly into forty-five minutes, and at almost an hour into my line I had to give it up.  At that rate, I wouldn’t have enough time to enter the country, find someone to lend me a light, suck down two cigs, and then come back through security and find my way to the right plane.  I ducked past Dutch and Indian travelers, found myself scooting under blue ropes, and headed back into the heart of the smokeless beast.  As I searched the crowds in the main terminal for my wife’s head, all I could think about was how I needed to give it up.  And it would begin that instant.  I’d give myself a crash course in quitting on my long flight back to the U.S., and the fact that I’d had to surrender my only lighter in St. Louis a month earlier would, hopefully, keep me in line.  It was a foolproof plan, and one I laughed at mightily when, after one minute of standing outside the arrival gate at Lambert International, I was already using one lit cigarette to bring a second to life.

Yes, quitting sucks. I like to think I have pretty good resolve, but one of my campaigns to quit smoking was actually called to a halt because a server at the Canton Inn handed me the wrong to-go order, and I didn’t discover it until I got home.

So where does one turn in the absence of real self-control? In my case, the first step was Nicotine Polacrilex gum.  You can get it in 2mg or 4mg packets, depending on how many packs you smoke in a day, and if you can get past the abrasive texture and the way it smothers you as you chew it—like you just took in a big whiff of mace at close range—you might just be able to quit for good.  But you’re not going to be able to do it by yourself.  What you really want when you’re trying to break a rough habit is someone who is going through the same exact thing—not a coach, but a desperate soul like yourself who, when you say, “I wish I could un-clinch my fists right now,” will nod sympathetically and respond with, “yeah, this fucking sucks.”  But that wasn’t going to happen.

See, all my friends who are smokers plan on being smokers until the day they die—an event they don’t seem to fear.  Ken said he was going to quit, for his kids and his wife; he even got a prescription from his doctor for Chantix.  We were going to go through it together.  But after a month of going it alone, waiting for an angry, jumpy buddy to join in my misery, I began to realize that I had scornful exes who gave me more sympathetic looks that the one Ken paid to that box of Chantix.  He’d be more likely to open a box of spiders.  So I was going to have to find someone else—someone who couldn’t continue to smoke until death.  That’s where the vampires come in.

I don’t want to give a bad impression of myself, but I probably hate most of the things you like.  It’s just how I am.  While you’re having a good time with your friends at a bar, I’ll be that creep in the back, lit only by the glow from my ever-present cigarette (in my more fond memories), and frowning at anyone who might be too excited about that newest trend.  One habit seems to go with the other, and I’m not too proud of either.  So you can imagine my surprise when my wife, having snuck secretly onto our Netflix account in the midst of my great nicotine preoccupation, decided we were going to start watching HBO’s trendiest: True Blood.  She’d been planning it for a long time, and for every protest I gave, she had already devised a decent way to shut me down.  There was no fighting it:  giant snob though I might be, I was going to have to sit through that show that I’d often told my soul we’d never have to watch.  Then—dammit!—I liked it.  Not because this show is exceedingly well-written, or because the acting is superb by any means (if half of your cast can’t pull off a convincing Louisiana accent, it may be time to rethink your setting), but because I found my cessation buddy:  “Vampire Bill” Compton.

Bill, played by actor Stephen Moyer, is a vampire who is nearly two hundred years old, and who wants nothing but to integrate with the human society he has never stopped missing.  In the True Blood universe, this isn’t as big of a deal as you would think.  Vampires have recently allowed themselves to be known to the human population, and, in an effort to curb their appetites for human blood and help the two species get along, a Canadian company has come up with a blood-substitute called “TruBlood.”  Whether you buy it at a gas station or order it at a bar, TruBlood is best when microwaved to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and comes in every different blood-type in an effort to cater to those with discerning tastes.  Bill prefers 0-, which happens to be my blood-type.

As remarkable as TruBlood sounds, it nevertheless offers up one major flaw to the vampires who imbibe it: it’s awful.  Apparently, synthetic blood is absolutely appalling to the vampires who have decided to drink it for nourishment instead of real human blood, and so the only ones who actually purchase it are the ones who care about trying to fit in with “mainstream society.”  They’re understood to be the “good” vampires, and Bill Compton is their moody representative.

While my wife watches True Blood with careful attention to the romantic plot between Bill and protagonist Sookie Stackhouse, I watch the show for the romance between Bill and blood.  It doesn’t take a good actor to convince you that they’re in the midst of serious withdrawal when you’re jonesin’ for a cigarette, and to this end I found a comforting ally in “Vampire Bill.”  The similarities between us are endless:  angry, handsome, brooding.  We both suffer for our addictions, and are most comfortable and productive at night.  There’s an element of loneliness to each of us, and this is largely a product of the cravings we hold.  Bill, as a vampire, is still shunned by most mortals.  I can’t smoke a cigarette outside a movie theater without getting mean stares.  This falls apart a bit when you consider the gravity of the vampire life (and the athleticism that goes along with being undead) but the most comforting point of comparison for me is that, sometimes, Bill and I fall off the wagon.

Yeah, sometimes I suck at not smoking, but when I come home at night, I can take in an episode of True Blood, watch Bill Compton get pressured by his peers into sucking the life out of some jerk who had it coming (he rarely kills the good ones, again like me), and feel the sympathy well up in each of us.  He inevitably hides it from Sookie, who my wife should find more in common with than she’ll ever know, and I feel justified in having taken a relaxing smoke break to bring me back down to earth.  Then Bill goes back to his TruBlood, and I pop open another blister-pack of Polacrilex gum.

What should be a major flaw in my clever little comparison is that Bill’s commitment to TruBlood is kind of a long-term thing.  He needs blood to survive, so if he chooses to do the honorable thing, he’s pretty much stuck with the synthetic stuff forever.  My dependence on the gum should be temporary, but I worry more and more each day that it won’t be.  The more I wean myself from nicotine, the more I miss the simple pastime of the act itself, and the more I miss the oral fixation.  After my latest box of gum ran out, I knew immediately that the trick was not done.  It was either back to the gum – which, having the consistency of a shoe sole, tends to make your jaw hurt like hell – or onto something new.  Patches wouldn’t give me something to do with my mouth.  The lozenges seemed like they’d facilitate long-term use even more than the gum.  Chantix can cause suicidal thoughts, and quitting makes me depressed enough.  In an effort to make myself acceptable to the world once again, I turned to something that seemed too fun to pass up – the electronic cigarette.  Now my comparison to TruBlood was even more concrete – both Bill and I relied on synthetic shit that looked very much like what we were used to, and that was allowed anywhere without too many scornful looks from the mainstream population.  My e-cig was cheaper, greener, and far less harmful than the real thing.  Plus it had the promise of being hip—like an iPod for your lungs.

The e-cigarette is smokeless—it is in fact a small battery that heats a nicotine-heavy liquid into water vapor when air is passed through it. It is the cigarette of the future. It’s in your favorite restaurants, your local theater, and is even allowed on airplanes.  It’s what the astronauts smoke.

The problem is that it’s not like smoking—it’s like sucking on a humidifier through a straw.  You inhale, the tip of the battery glows in imitation of a real ember, and then you exhale a very convincing cloud of water vapor that can’t offend anybody.  For a week I sat at home every night, watching True Blood, and taking dainty little puffs on my fake metal cigarette.  It worked, in the sense that it put an end to my wife’s complaints.  With no smell and no adverse health effects, she told me I could smoke my e-cig for as long as I wanted.  But that was the only sense in which it worked – I spent most of my time trying to keep one of the two batteries charged, and when I realized that I was fighting the damn thing more than I was being satisfied by it, I also realized that it was making me crave the real thing all the more.  At the end of a week of frustration, I crammed my e-cig back into its shipping container and sent it back to its maker.

In a moment of tobacco-scented reflection, I came to terms with my inability to keep up with my quitting buddy.  It was an ending that seemed perfectly plausible when I was casting actual people, but the failure to keep up with a trendy fictional character had stung a bit.  I was ready to chalk the whole thing up to another flaw in True Blood’s writing, and yet this failed campaign weighed larger on my mind than any I’d experienced before.

Around this time a friend offered a line from The Shawshank Redemption as inspiration:  “Get busy living or get busy dying.”  He said it in tragic seriousness, and once I’d stifled my desire to rearrange his non-smoking face, I realized the painful inadequacy of the idea—what I wanted was to get busy doing both at one time, sort of like that bastard vampire and his gap-toothed girlfriend.  You see, once you take away the legitimate fear of death—allowing yourself to become in some way “undead”—there’s still a life to find appealing: the social life.  “Vampire Bill” had figured out a way to manage both of Andy Dufrense’s imperatives when he found a way to keep his deathly addiction from interfering with his social acceptance.  I hadn’t realized it, but that acceptance just wasn’t what I was after.  Your friends can ask you to quit as many times as they like, and they may even try to distance themselves from you when you persist, but if “living” to you isn’t living socially, then even the best intentions of your inner pop-culture opportunist (see: “screenwriter”) aren’t going to save you.

If you grant me this ridiculous analogy, what brought me into alliance with vampirism wasn’t actually the synthetic thrills at all—it was a separation from the mainstream.  “Vampire Bill” couldn’t take it.  I’m afraid that I can.  I’ll always be the guy who doesn’t mind lighting up alone in a foreign country, or watching you breath clean air through the window of any restaurant.  I can’t run faster or jump higher—quite the opposite, really—but I find comfort in the shadows, and can suck the life out of a pack of smokes with alarming efficiency.

Perhaps this is why I prefer the old vampire stories the best—the ones where an angry mob invariably ends up chasing the antagonist out of town with pitchforks and torches, or storming his solitary castle at midnight.  There’s no tweeny romance to it—just a bunch of mainstreamers running their own hard-headed legislation through the woods.  I respect that, because there’s unity in those pitchforks.  But I’ve always been the lonely-castle-type guy, and I don’t suppose I’m going to quit any time soon.

"Rocks II" by Peter Scacco.

1975

It wore Mary-Alice slam out that she was actually raising her son inside a barn. “It’s a loft,” her boyfriend—not husband—Hank always said. “A loft inside of a barn,” she would argue. It was bad enough to be still unmarried and with a three year-old but to live in an upstairs apartment of the Pickford’s old feed barn was absolutely for shame.

She stood on the balcony overlooking Hank’s pride and joy red Chevrolet. Sometimes it was all she could do not to beat in the windshield with a baseball bat. One of these days she would buy one. If she had any money.

Tommy, their miracle-son—some miracle; he nearly ate them broke on a regular basis. Mary-Alice could not believe how much that child could eat—was busying himself jerking the slats off the stairwell going up to the apartment. All that food went immediately as fuel for him to perform some near superhuman feat of property damage and Hank had long forbade the child from getting near the car. She was hell getting him stopped tearing up the steps when Hank came sprinting into the barn to his car and hopping inside in a panic.

“What in hell has got into you now?” Mary-Alice said.

“County done got ’em a motorcycle cop. We seen him ride past the store. Ain’t got time to gab. Austin’s probly done beat me to him, the shitass.”

Hank shot his pipes and tore out of the barn leaving Mary-Alice nearly in tears from the racket and worried to death for the baby’s eardrums. But, of course, rather than being one ounce concerned, he was just sitting there giggling like it was the best thing in the whole world, which added fire to her greatest fear that he would turn out just like his daddy.

It wasn’t so much that Mary-Alice didn’t like Hank or even that she didn’t love him. She did love Hank. She loved him to death. There was just no knowing Hank’s mind for her. One moment he was the sweetest boy in the world and the next twenty minutes he was awfullest son-of-a-bitch who ever walked. No doubt at that particular minute him and that cracked Austin Grantham were trying to see who couldn’t wreck that poor man just trying to do his job. He’d probably wind up thrown off into a ditch and maybe crippled and those two having a laugh about the whole deal. One of these days they’d catch those two and likely kill them if they could.

Directly, Tommy was tugging at her dress again which meant it was time to eat some more.

Willy and Maggie Smith had given her a crate of eggs just the other day. Seeing her barn was just down the way from their store, she often had little else to do and walked over and swept up or did other jobs and took pay in the form of vegetables and milk. Sometimes Willy might slaughter a hog and have fresh sausage. Willy didn’t like to sell any food out of the store that he didn’t know exactly who and where it come from. Austin usually brought in two or three dozen eggs to trade for his day’s gasoline.

Willy wouldn’t take anything from up in Jasperville. Not one thing. Poor luck for those people, Mary-Alice always thought. But they had their own store, she reckoned.

It didn’t take too long to fill the boy up with scrambled eggs and milk and Mary-Alice pointed him up the quarter mile driveway covered nearly over with drooping pine limbs. The boy went off like a shot and she tried her damnedest to keep up with him. It irritated the fire out of her how she could not have him fed five minutes and him already running so hard he was hungry again.

And fast. By god, could that boy beat a trail. It was all the exercise she needed staying next to him at a run and this time he’d long left her behind. Mary-Alice had not been too often around other toddlers before but believed a great deal about her son was not very normal and she feared the day he got so big she flat out couldn’t handle him, a day she expected probably some time in the next year at the rate he went.

Before she could get close to catching up he was nearly to the highway and she screaming for him to stop to no purpose. He dusted straight across the road and smack into some scraggly-haired old man in a porkpie and toting a Jap army sword on his shoulder.

“I say there, now, do you know who I am?” the man shot at little Tom, who most certainly did not know who the man was, but clearly the man neither knew who Thomas Waylon Grady was. Memorizing the three parts of his own name was one of the very first conscious acts of his life. He very much enjoyed repeating just those three words at every occasion he deemed suitable, which was most, this being one of them.

“I’m Tom Waylon Grady,” the spud shot at the man, with fists balled and back bowed out for a fight.

“I say, but you ain’t kneehigh to a gumstump, you little squirt, and say now, what’s the matter with yore skin?” the man asked, looking down now at the boy’s physique which appeared to be rippled with tiny muscles and little else of note.

“I apologize, mister, but he just gets away from me sometimes. I hope you weren’t scuffed terrible when he tripped you. I can mend or wash any tears to your clothes if need be,” Mary Alice spat out as best she could, being out of breath from her jog.

“Me? Scuffed terrible? Woman, do you know who I am?” he asked with even more force. “I am Wild Bill Scanlon and this here,” holding out his sheathed sword. “is Mr. Kujiko.”

“I think it’s silly, you men naming things that ain’t alive. And I don’t guess I care if you’re Wild Bill Hickock Jesse James the Kid, neither. I’ve had it to here,” she said lifting her hand above her head, “with you overgrown boys and your reputations and your toys.”

And at that, Mary-Alice tugged little Tom by the arm and began to drag him toward the store where she would now need to buy herself a pack of cigarettes.

“Well, but you’ve sass, that’s sure,” Bill said. “Now, don’t get riled at me, too hard, now. I just feel I should mention the name as I intend to be your next supervisor. Do you vote?”

“Not usually,” she said, continuing on her way.

“Well, now that just beat all. I swear, you women are the damnedest creatures that ever was. That riles me to no end y’all hollering and fightin’ them years to vote and then don’t care to do such once you’re able. That‘s just flat irritating”

“Well, if you’re my best option, I’d just as soon not care. Now, I apologize again for my son hitting you, but I must say good day, Mr. Wild Bill.”

Bill was clearly at a loss. He could not remember the last time anyone had talked to him with as much sass, never a woman, and surely what man it must have been had quickly regretted it to be sure. Not that he had any mind to lay out a woman in any way, but some understanding ought be reached, else it would shortly get round the holler and soon the whole county that Wild Bill Scanlon had been talked tall to by a skinny, black-haired girl.

“Now, see here, again. I believe we’ve got this thing back end frontwards. How’s about I walk you out to Willy and Mrs. Maggie’s here and we’ll set down and have us a cup of coffee and some ice cream and talk it out?” he asked, then pointed his glance at the boy. “What about you, son, what’s your opinion about ice cream?”

At that, Tommy took off in a sprint toward the store. That’s where ice cream, he knew, came from and so he intended not to lose a minute in getting his share.

“Well, he’s a cooking little son of a gun, ain’t he?” Bill said and as he thought a minute, added, “Who’s his daddy?”

Wild Bill flung the door to Smith’s Farm Supply open with his free hand and pounded into the main meeting area. Willy had designed the front of the store to include two long benches with a small table toward one side and had the spot pretty well filled most every morning with idle chatters sucking on five cent coffee and telling big lies. Bill was what you might call an irregular. He only swung through once in a while when he was down in this part of the county. He was a walking man and a rambler.

“Put on a fresh pot of coffee, Willy,” Bill hollered as he set his sword beside the bench and took his seat next to Charlie Ford. “I’m here to do a little politicking.”

Mary-Alice slipped in behind Bill with Tommy holding her hand. He would run straight up to the front door of the store but would never go inside it without an escort. There was a fat man named Rodney who hung about often enough inside who had a tendency to knuckle-rub his head, which severely irritated Tommy, and he fully intended to box the fellow as quick as he could muster the height to perform the chore. In the meantime, Tommy had to content himself with hiding behind his mother’s skirt which was a shameful act of cowardice, he knew, but his only recourse for the moment.

“Bill, you do as you please, but no roughhousing inside and you keep that dern blade to yourself,” Willy said with Maggie looking on. Maggie liked Wild Bill just a hair less even than other folks because she firmly believed he’d drug Willy off to see a slant-eyed whore during the war. And even though she hadn’t even met her husband before then, she still considered it a vile act of infidelity on his part.

“Willy, I can’t help it if you’re now jealous of my butcher knife since you hocked yours up immediately. Besides, this here‘s what they call one of them aphro-disiacs,” Bill said winking at Mary-Alice and her trying her best not to laugh. She wondered if anyone else knew that word. “That’s one of them new ten dollar words. Means it makes you randy, though, what it has to do with colored people, I have no idea.”

Maggie hmphed to herself and turned back to do some chore back toward her filing cabinet near where she kept the cigarettes. She didn’t care for any word, regardless of price, that had anything at all to do with folks being randy. It was only a short road from such topics to discussions of whores and she intended to have no talk of whores in her presence.

“Bill,” Willy started, “a silly silver-studded dress up knife don’t do me a lick of good whereas eighty acres and a solvent seed business does me plenty.”

“Yeah, well, I get this supervisor office this time, we’ll all be doing good and plenty. Time’s a changing, Willy. Yankees tearing up the country. Charlie, you going out to the polls?”

“Well, Bill,” Charlie began.

“‘Well, Bill’ nothing. You want to keep this country for country folk, you’d best make your mark next to old Bill Scanlon. Yessir. Good Old Bill Scanlon for Good Old Country Folk!”

Mary-Alice had laid twenty five cents on the counter for her a 7up and the boy an ice cream sandwich. Tommy was good about not making a mess with it. He hated to lose even a drop. Waste not want not was one of his many mottoes. Turn the other fellow’s cheek was another.

Maggie shot glances two or three times at Mary-Alice when she wasn’t frowning at Bill’s gab. Mary-Alice knew some folks around judged her pretty black for having taken up with Hank. It was bad enough he never got called up to the fight, but that way he carried on and brought shame down on his good father’s name put a sour taste in many a mouth. And then them yet unmarried. A just as sour note for Mary-Alice herself.

Fact was, Mary-Alice’s own people had told her not to bother coming back home ’til that man put a ring on her finger and the two took on an honest lifestyle. From her time so far with Hank, she knew full well that was not likely to happen any time soon. Tommy hadn’t even helped it along even a bit. That had been a shoddy gambit on her part, for sure, though she now doted on the boy, messed up as he was.

She had at least taken to wearing skirts and sun dresses most days she went out for her walks through the country. Unwed mothers were bad enough without sporting jeanpants on top of it. There, she and Hank at least agreed that certain ideas ought to be changed. She liked her jeans, when she got to pick them.

Sucking down the last of his ice cream, Tommy was recharged and bolted toward the back of the store where he knew there were hammers and other tools for him to mess about with. Tommy loved tools, hammers in particular. He liked the way it made his arms and back feel when he lifted them and swung them around his head. He had got in trouble one time when he had the big hammer Willy used to fix folks’ tires with and was slamming it down on the floor and making an awful racket.

As Wild Bill continued on his filibustering concerning the dangers of unchecked northern aggression, Mary-Alice heard again the unmistakable bawl of Hank’s Killafella teamed up with whatever Austin Grantham was racing these days. The two kept up a pretty mean rivalry and while Hank just wasted money on new and even more useless parts for his existing vehicle–because spending the money on milk and eggs would be just foolish–Austin had the even odder tendency to just trade for a whole different car every year or so. But, Austin didn’t yet have any kids to feed. At least none in this country.

“No, it’s because you’re a cheating ass,” Hank said cruising through the door and straight over to the RC cooler for a root beer and pack of nabs–his standard lunch. Willy and Maggie both harrumphed at the sight of Hank’s flared-out jeans and his old gaudy hat flopping atop his head. While it had been mildly cute in high school, Mary-Alice only found it laughable now. It seemed as though Hank had drawn up the cartoon version of himself long ago and was dead set for sticking to it.

“Losers always weep, Hank,” Austin said, grabbing his own victuals and signaling to Mrs. Maggie that Hank–apparently being the loser of whatever competition they’d just had–should cover his tab. “Howdy, Bill, what you know good?” Austin continued.

Hank shot a look over toward the benches and saw the unmistakable wild hair and trademark long blade leaning against the seat and was already quick losing his characteristic studied detachment.

“Bill?”

Wild Bill Scanlon looked up to acknowledge Austin and saw Hank from the corner of his eye.

“I say, but it’s old sally jeans. How do, boy? Had any homemade get-up-and-go juice of late? My sister’s grandbaby, she still asks after you quite a bit,” Bill said with a chuckle, though most others just passed it off.

Hank winced and flinched at the same time and then looked toward the door. “Sugar-babe, I’ll see you back at the house,” he said and laid a dollar on the counter and was out the door. Within seconds they all heard the sound of his engine barking and tearing down the road.

Mary-Alice wondered what must have passed between Hank and Bill for Hank to be so out of sorts with the man. Of course, she had heard the usual tales about Wild Bill Scanlon being the terror of Culloden County, but all that was before the war and now that she’d met him he just appeared to her another worn out old hick just all like all the others in this part of the country. In some ways she thought, as she looked on at the wild silver-haired man with the thick mustache drooping down beneath his chin, she saw the future of Hank himself–an old silly cartoon man hanging on desperately to some idea of what he thought he once was. Silly men.

Still, the fact that Bill, old and crotchety as he was, could rankle Hank so bad was an amusing thought. There was a great deal about Hank that the man intentionally kept secret from her. She’d heard snatches through the years about this and that, never sure what was remotely true and what a total fabrication. She’d been told of traveling rocket salesmen to flying tigers to atomic mutant militia gangs. Somewhere, she guessed, Wild Bill and Hank must have had dealings. And none to Hank’s favor, it would appear. The man suddenly seemed all the more interesting.

It wasn’t long after Hank’s car had squealed off that Tommy reappeared from the back of the store toting a ten pound tire hammer on his shoulder and asking about his ‘papa.’ Mary-Alice was in a constant state of shock at the boy’s strength level. There he was, shaggy red hair in his face and carrying a piece of steel heavy enough she’d never want to mess with it for any reason and him barely three years old. One day she wanted to save the money to take him out to Mobile or New Orleans or somewhere and see some kind of special doctor just to make sure nothing wasn’t wrong with the child. He was healthy enough. Damn healthy, in fact. But she just knew that something was off about him. The way his muscles got so big so fast and the way he ate constantly. He was a chore, that boy. A full time job just from cooking alone.

Mary-Alice stayed on until closing time, sweeping out the back room that held the farm tools and the fertilizer and helping out with the restocking. She fed Tommy another ice cream and two potted meat sandwiches before time to go and in the end, took pay in the form of two loaves of bread and several bags of rice and beans. With that, she thought she could feed the boy indefinitely and just learn to tolerate the consequences.

Wild Bill stuck around through closing time himself, steadily sucking down coffee and burning tobacco while going on and on about this and that he intended to do for the county as supervisor. Mary-Alice wondered but the man must not be serious. Surely he could not genuinely think good people would elect a sword carrying wild-eyed hillbilly with such a colored history as his. But then, this was Culloden County and she knew a certain man in a red and yellow racecar who practically got a standing ovation half the places he went. People here seemed to enjoy their outlaws and badmen.

“Would you care for an escort home this fair evening, ma’am?” Bill asked offering his arm to her and twisting his mustache ends with the other before jerking up his sword. “I’m a fair guard against the dangers of the wild if I say so myself.”

When the man smiled, she thought, he actually looked a little charming. He was probably fine looking when a little younger. He was tall enough. Wouldn’t that just eat Hank’s dinner? If she took an evening walk with old Wild Bill?

“A fine idea, Mr. Scanlon.” she said hooking her arm in his. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Smith.”

“That goes for me, Willy,” Bill said as they started out the door.

“Watch out for Old Blue,” Willy said.

“I reckon he’ll watch out for me as he always has. But, I’ll get him,” Bill said tapping his weapon.

Mary-Alice called for Tommy who charged from the back straight at the door and sent it nearly crashing to the other side. He had just devised a plan for a perfect formation of blocks and could waste no time in getting home to test his theories.

All the way back to the driveway leading to the barn, Wild Bill was the perfect gentleman. He told Mary-Alice old stories of the whisky runners before the war and what it was like growing up eating cornbread and onions three meals a day. It seemed to her a reasonable enough cause for anyone to turn to criminal behaviors. Hank had long done so and with far less provocation than that. In fact, she’d never been quite sure what Hank’s reason was for turning so bad as he had. He still had a mean on about that business with the bomb up in Jasperville, but that was all over and done with. The government people had said it was completely safe.

As they got to the drive, Mary-Alice took her leave of Bill, assuring him that the boy would be escort enough from here on out. Surely the only peril she could face then would be nothing more than a stray cat or jackrabbit which would be sorry the day it met with little Thomas Waylon Grady.

“Well then I assure you it’s been my great pleasure to have made acquaintance with you miss Mary-Alice MacGregor,” Bill said and leaned down to kiss her just barely on her right cheek, near enough to her neck she felt his breath.

And with that, Wild Bill took his leave and went on down his way, sword in hand and humming a Dixie tune.

Back home, Mary-Alice noticed the absence of the car and saw Hank had pinned a note to the door explaining he’d took an evening job and should be back later–with cash money. Or shot to death finally, she thought. She sent the boy off to his few toys–mostly homemade or hand-me-down–while she stood on the balcony with the last bit of sun sliding through the barn and pulling on one more cigarette before the hot bath she knew she needed.

Mary-Alice stewed on that peck all through her bath, going back over it time and again. What it was about that old man, she couldn’t guess. But he had witched her, as they say, for sure. Climbing out of her tub and dropping the boy in with his wooden ship and toweling off, she still had it on her mind.

Finally, Mary-Alice decided she was in the mood for sex so she put on Hank’s clothes. Theoretically, they were her clothes too. Hank just loved the fact they were both so similar in height they could wear the same jeans. “We can save money by sharing,“ he always said. It sometimes made her feel a little fat but then, of course, Hank had the skinniest butt of any man in the whole county, so maybe it was fair after all.

It was also a bother that the man near about wouldn’t touch her unless she sported jeans and a pair of boots, a rodeo shirt and her hair combed back–basically when she looked exactly like him. Hank was a strange man and didn’t seem too often to like being touched by women, even herself. But, she did at least have the matter down to a science and it was an easy enough task to perform in order to obtain what she wanted and any other time could well expect to be left be. So, she didn’t make all that many complaints.

When Hank finally pulled in and started up the stairs, Mary-Alice leaned in the lamplight against the right side post with her silhouette facing him and tugging on a cigarette. She eased a glance down at Hank and spat smoke out the side of her face and looked calmly at him, almost as if she didn’t even see him. That was all it took. As usual.

The next day Bill was back at the store shooting his gab about the election. This time more people made a point to swing by and listen to him go on. Whether out of genuine interest in his politics or just for the sake of gaudy spectacle, Mary-Alice could not be quite sure. But spectacle was the word for it. At one point the man was standing on the bench in front prattling out his tirade.

“We’re all at the turning point here, boys. You see what them Fed’rals done back in ‘67 when they had their way. You seen what they think of us plain folk down here in God’s country. See, they jealous of us. Jealous of what we got going for us down here. Boys, I can recall the day in this country when all a feller had to do was walk out his front doorstep and go not three yards and trip over a gang of fat rabbits or a hog or buckdeer or even an old buffaler.

“I recall when a man could head out to the river with a decent line in his hand and just start jerking fish out of the water so fast your arm was sore after half an hour. I can tell you that was the way it was for a fact. I lived it, sons. Me and plenty others. Well it was ruined slow and sure by northern aggression. These outsiders steady coming in with they paper mills and they textile plants and this and that and all the people running out to ‘em like they sent from heaven above. And what for? A dollar an hour wages and broke back? Sons, that ain’t a way to live. Not nohow. We got to stand up and take back our ways else they die out completely.

“You fellers know it won’t be long ’til they’ve got us all chained down. They’ll have our numbers, boys. They’ll say ‘you owe such and such dollars down and we’ll have it or you go work it off on the farm.’ Sons, it’ll be just like them old days before we took this country out from under them English. They’ll have our number, by god, and they’ll have us working ourselves to death for their interests. Well, what about our’n? By heaven, boys, a man ought not have to work that hard in his life just to get by. Not with a country that’s just spitting grain and groceries. By heaven, boys, working ourselves to death ain’t the way. A vote for Bill is a vote for the way home!”

Mary-Alice stood and watched the old man nearly yell himself hoarse in the middle of the general store to a crowd of maybe eleven people. In this county, maybe that was enough. Maybe they would each tell a cousin or two who would tell a cousin or two and that’d be pretty much everybody.

Bill had such a fire in his eyes when he spoke that Mary-Alice could almost see the history in his face. She wondered what it must have been like to see those islands out in that Pacific Ocean, to fight toe to toe with those mean Japanese who she’d heard had rather gut their own selves than lose a fight. She wondered how it could be to see things change so in a single lifetime. Already in her own she’d seen the shift over from raising crops and hogs to working at the mill or the plant. Every month a new road was being paved with blacktop and now nearly everybody had a telephone number. Bill, she then realized had seen it all from horse and buggy through to a man jumping around on the moon. She just couldn’t imagine such a sequence of shock and change. Already, her own life seemed too much to bear some days.

Bill walked her and Tommy home again that day and for many days thereafter. Each day in the store was much the same, him clamoring on and on about this and that offense from the people running the industry and making the laws, with people standing or sitting sipping coffee and half listening. Even Maggie Smith started taking interest in what the man had to say about cutting tax for the farmer. Mrs. Maggie had always said she’d sooner be tending her peas and corn than tending store.

In Bill, Mary-Alice decided, she saw what Hank Grady might be some day if he could ever settle down and make a run at something worth a damn. It was what she saw in him from the first day senior year. She remembered it well, the way he looked walking in with those jeans and that hair like he owned the world and didn’t care about a thing–like he had it all figured out. He had been a great boyfriend through it all. He was never short of something fun to do. Liquor was in no short supply with him around. But, now they were well in their twenties and with a boy to raise and Hank didn’t seem to notice that time had moved at all. He was still the fine-looking boy with the fine-looking car out to cut up and get in as much trouble as he felt he could get away with. It had long lost its luster for Mary-Alice. She wanted a husband for herself, a father for her son. She wanted a man.  Not a boy in girls’ jeans.

Still, as each day was similar, so were the nights. Mary-Alice found herself to have such an appetite as she could not readily remember. Every afternoon in the store she stole glances at the man they say had killed not less than thirty white people, and more than one time she caught him stealing glances at her–parts of her, at least. She didn’t know why but it stayed with her and she did her best to work it out on Hank, who, admittedly, was being rather a sport about it all. It was usually a once or twice every few weeks sort of ordeal with that man, which, ordinarily, was plenty for herself.

Mary-Alice had always liked the way Hank looked once she got him out of her clothes, but now she focused her glances only on him from the neck down. She’d now developed her habit of putting her hands down on top of his face while she worked. Hank would puff and sniff and do all he could to pry her hands at least enough apart to get his nose free and manage to not die from lack of breath. Mary-Alice, somewhere deep inside, tried to tell herself to ease up, but she just couldn’t–not ’til it was over. And she didn’t want to see Hank during the affair. She didn’t even want him to touch her.

It was all well and good for her most nights until she finally, one evening, took it just the last bit further and sent Hank into a terrified frenzy. She’d been carrying on in the same way as usual, only this time, when he’d got a little excited himself and tried to grab her behind to brace himself, she jerked his hands off her and pinned them down. The man struggled for a minute to try to get himself loose, but she was having fun with him now and was strong enough it would not be easy for him to get free. She even giggled a bit at the fact she could make him jerk so.

That was when the screaming started. Hank shot out the most terrifying howls and ripped her hands from himself and flew out of the bed. Mary-Alice had snapped out of her trance and saw the look of horror on his face. Now Hank was the one long gone from the room. His eyes twitched and nearly sank all the way back in his head. He teetered and she thought he would pass out for a moment and jumped up to try and grab him. He flew back from her. He grabbed a pair of jeans and boots turned for the door. There was little Tom, staring at the whole scene and trying to make sense of who was doing what bad thing to who.

Hank stole out of the apartment and down the stairs to the car, Tom calling after his ‘papa’ all the while. The car squalled out of the barn that night coupled with the cries of the child and Mary-Alice sat dumbfounded on her bed. She’d only tried to play a little game with the man. Here again, she saw she’d never truly know him. But, now she at least had an idea why. He had made himself the creature he was to hide this thing about him away, to mask it in his silly hat and his glasses and foolish jeans and the outlandish vehicle. He had to show everyone he was something pretty, something flashy, something fast and tall and strong. All so they wouldn’t see this ugly thing, this sad and weak little thing that lived inside him. Now she’d seen it. Now she had seen enough of him to find him just close enough to human she could care about him again.

And now that he was real again to her, he was gone. For no telling how long.

It was three days before Hank showed back up. People knew he’d left, too. There had been an incident with Bill the night before where he finally worked up his nerve to offer his consoling shoulders to her for the evening.

“I do hate to see a fine woman distressed so, and alone of a night. There’s foul dealings can often happen to good women these hot nights,” Bill had said.

Mary-Alice had chuckled inside herself beside her driveway and mused for a moment on the irony that a week earlier she might have actually considered such an offer. But, of course, the very circumstances that enabled the offer consequently prohibited it from being accepted. She could by no means betray her man now that she finally wanted him again. And she did want him back.

Mary-Alice smiled at Wild Bill Scanlon–the last real outlaw in this county: one who’d had no other choice but be who he was. Maybe the man could pull off his election. She wasn’t sure about how all those things worked anyway. She’d spent the majority of her senior civics classes staring at a particular boy. But, she decided she would go vote for Bill. She hugged him again and sent him on his way.

At the store the next morning, Bill was absent. Presumably he had moved on down the road to the Pine Ridge area where he would no doubt repeat his wild rants for those good people there.

Mary-Alice was straightening the soaps down the far aisle of the store when she heard the bawling of Tommy.

“Papa! Papa!” he yelled as she heard his feet slapping across the floor.

Mary-Alice walked up front to see him standing tall, shielded in full regalia. Like a statue, he stood with the light from the hot southern sun bleeding in from the door behind him.

“Mrs. Maggie,” he said, “Put that diesel on Chauncy Pickering’s ticket. And two cokes for the road, please, ma’am.”

Mary-Alice couldn’t even know if the man was looking at her from behind those black glasses but she felt sure he wasn’t. From out the front window she spied a big rig truck parked at the diesel pump, trailer hitched and ready for the highway.

“Trucking out with Chauncy,” he said still not seeing her. “Taking on some bigger work.”

“Real work?” Mary-Alice was in such a mood she didn’t at all mind calling him out on his dealings in the midst of Willy’s store. Eyes from the bullpen stuck to Hank and Mary-Alice. People always did love to catch sight at others’ business any chance that presented itself.

“Real as any, I reckon,” Hank said without a beat and turned out the door.

“Coming back?” She shot at him.

“I could never leave my sweetheart,” Hank said turning back to smile his fakest smile yet, and only Mary-Alice knew what he really meant. He was wise that day to leave it parked elsewhere.

Hank left and Mary-Alice worked out the rest of the day with her jaw set hard as it would go. She tried well as she could keep the blame off herself and all onto Hank where she felt it surely belonged. But maybe he would really start something decent for a change. Maybe he’d straighten up and fly right and stop tearing about so much. And maybe next week she’d fly jet planes.

It was later that afternoon the handful of people inside were rocked by what sounded like explosions coming from outside the store. There were several all right in a row, loud as thunder nearly. In a moment of terror, Mary-Alice realized Tommy was nowhere in sight and she just knew he’d finally found something to destroy himself with.

She ran outside along with Willy, Maggie and Billy Parker.

There, they all saw the sight they couldn’t quite grasp. Tommy was standing up on a trailer with Billy’s little girl, Lacy, watching on. Somebody had come up with a bucket full of 5 pound steel ball bearings, and Tommy was hurling them up over his head and slamming them down onto the blacktop parking lot, sending sparks flying like little bolts of lightning with each one. Billy ran and grabbed him off the trailer before he could toss another one. Tommy and Lacy were just laughing wild as they could. It was all just their little game. Maggie stared at the boy like he might as well be the third cousin of the devil or John Brown.

That was when it all finally hit home for Mary-Alice. All she’d ever wanted was to have a plain and decent life. Live in a house. Plant a garden. Take her children to school. Go dancing with her husband on Friday night. Instead, she found herself constantly surrounded by ridiculousness. She had a duded-up rogue boyfriend who literally spat all over the law trying everyday hard as he could to get himself jailed or killed chasing down his own made up legend. She had an old ghost of an even wilder time dead and gone offering her use of his “sword” and wandering through the countryside living in the fading memories of purported exploits. And now, she had a little boy pushing three years and hurling boulders off a truck like they were baseballs. Nothing about her life, she knew, would ever be plain.

“Say, y’all,” Charlie Ford called out, coming in from behind them. “Y’all hear about Wild Bill? He just gutted a big fat panther down by the old burnt bridge. Sure and he did, split it wide open with that blade of his. Telling you what right now, but that man’s got my vote in a hurry. Ain’t lost a beat. Cut it clean near in half. Old Bill. What you reckon he makes a new hat from it? I bet I would.”

"Town I" by Peter Scacco.

Three weeks after the untimely death of her parents, run over on a San Francisco sidewalk by a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl with no driver’s license, Samantha went on a blind date arranged by Match.com.

Always cold lately, she drove with gloves on now, and the linings were soaked through by the time she found the house. She drove the block over and over, trying to think of a good reason not to go in.

Since the accident, since the loss, every moment before something happened had become unbearable. The moment before it was her turn at the grocery store, the moment before a television show started, the moment before she could hear who was on the other end of the phone filled her with an incredible void of emotion coupled with a crippling anxiety. This was the granddaddy of before moments and the quick knock on the door, with a still gloved hand, was the equivalent of being thrown into ice water. The moment after, however, was somehow worse. Mickey shook her hand, introduced himself, kissed her cheek, and she entered the living room.

Stewart was large and sudden, without any real form. As she took him in, aware she was staring, it was his grin that threw her the most. Was he smiling? His tongue jumped in and out of his mouth, making gasping, silly noises and his head, complete with helmet, lolled from one side of his neck to the other.

“This…is Stewart.” Mickey said, placing his hand on the back of the wheelchair. Was it a wheelchair? Wheelchairs were what one got wheeled into hospitals in. They were just chairs, with wheels. This seemed different. It was bright blue, to begin with, and instead of two large wheels it had four small ones, like a grocery cart. The seat was set on top of a large, metal, frame, and seemed molded, Samantha guessed, to Stewart’s feeble body. His arms and legs were long, but splayed in all directions, and the urge Samantha’s mind inflicted on her was to pull a string, probably located in the child’s back, and pull him back together. Instead his feet, hands, and elbows seemed to be responding to Stewart’s impulses, which were to thrust and nudge the air randomly.

“Hello, Stewart,” said Samantha, and she felt as though she was saying “hello” to someone’s imaginary friend.

“I thought Stewart could sit with us while we eat. Rachel, my daughter, will be home later, but I don’t think she’ll be joining us.”

“Oh.” He had said in an email at one point, that he had children, but Samantha had assumed that he had sired children, and that they lived somewhere else, with their mother most likely.

Two children: one in a wheelchair, and one old enough to be out at seven at night by herself and willfully skipping dinner.

Huh.

“Can I help?” she offered, hopefully. Get me out of this room, she begged.

“Oh, no. No thank you. It’s all almost ready. Can I get you a drink? I’ve got to heat up Stewart’s dinner anyway.”

Stewart’s dinner?

“Sure. Do you have, like, a merlot?”

“I can do better than like a merlot. I think I can come up with the real thing.” Samantha felt like she had gotten huge in the last five minutes, and her tongue was the largest part of her. Mickey was the one who should be feeling self conscious, but he was gliding on air, not missing a beat, and if this was them sparring, he was winning.

“Thank you,” she admitted, and sat down on the couch. Now Stewart was across from her, as though the two of them had been left to get acquainted, and the sound he made was closest to clicking, with some groaning, and his foot seemed dangerously close to kicking the table. If Mickey hadn’t been in the next room Samantha would have made this a funny moment, the way she did when someone would thrust a newborn into her arms and leave her alone.

If it were a boy she’d comment on the size of his balls, still gigantic from his mother’s hormones. If it were a girl she’d tell her to watch out for boys with large balls. She didn’t even know if Stewart could understand her. Maybe he had, what was it? Not autism, but the other one. Palsy? Cerebral palsy? Weren’t kids with that still able to communicate? Did Stewart see and know? Would he try to talk? If she just kept looking toward the bookshelf everything would be all right. Where was that drink? The last time she had talked to her mother, she had been drunk on wine. The conversation remained a happy blur, and only spots of physical and emotional sensation remained when she tried to think about it, and she had the frustration of someone trying to remember a dream. She had been drinking red wine often for the three weeks after the accident, in hopes of triggering something and making it back to that cozy sleep-state.

There was a brief clatter from the kitchen, and then she could hear the microwave going off, a distant and distinct “swish…mmmmmmm” and with her foot she counted the beats it might take for the bell to go off, and surely after that Mickey would be back. Stewart struggled against the restraints in his chair. They were seat belt-like, crossing over his sunken chest and meeting at his crotch.

“Mmmaaaa. Maaaa,” he clicked and groaned. Samantha felt her face flinching and glancing towards him, and then away. Was he having a fit? If so, it would be bad to look. Was he talking? Did she need to listen? She looked, and then looked away. Jesus.

“Did you have any trouble finding the place?” Mickey called out, suddenly. Samantha tugged at her shirt sleeves, un-tucking the fabric from her soaked pits.

“Oh, no. Well, a little. It wasn’t clear if that was a white house or a church at the intersection. I get lost a lot, so it’s actually a miracle that I’m here at all.” Mickey re-appeared holding both a glass of red wine and a baby bottle, sans nipple, full of formula.

“Here you go. Just like a merlot.” He set the glass down and turned his attention to Stewart. “And here you go, buddy.”

He called him “Buddy” just like you would a normal ten year old, one with a little league cap and a collection of Transformers. Stewart chose that moment to coo, almost like a baby. Samantha felt relieved, because this was a sound she recognized. This was the sound of delight, of happiness. However, would Mickey now feed Stewart like he was an infant, suckling at the bottle, splayed in Mickey’s arms? That was a bit much, perhaps.

He didn’t. Instead he pulled an enormous syringe out of his pocket, comically large, like something Wile E. Coyote would order from Acme. There was no needle, just the medicine part, and this, apparently, got attached to a long, skinny, tube that snaked out of Stewart’s stomach.

Samantha regarded the books on the shelf.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? Is that about the writer?” She asked.

Mickey chuckled lightly as he plugged the end of the syringe in and began filling it with formula.

“No, it’s a play by Edward Albee. It’s a little heavy. Do you like Elizabeth Taylor?”

Samantha shrugged. She didn’t really watch old movies and Liz Taylor had become, as far as Samantha was concerned, not much more than a punch line about marriage as well as a strange old lady who sometimes appeared on Larry King Live.

“Well, she’s in the film version, along with Richard Burton. They were married in real life. It’s a play about marriage, about mutual destruction, and also about the need to create fantasy when everything else is lost.”

“Huh.” Her mind went, after this revelation, to the fourteen-year-old Mexican girl, terrified and driven, feeling the mighty machine direct itself against the traffic and then onto the sidewalk, and through the bodies of her parents. There was a long pause, and Mickey finally gave in.

“So, tell me, what’s it like working at Petco?” Samantha didn’t have much to say about her job. Her time at Petco, she’s told herself, is just a time of self reflection.

“It’s a job, that’s all. I stock things. I help the groomers. I clean. It’s really nothing. Like, you have a real job, with a real future. It’s not the same.”

“I worked odd jobs when I was getting my first Masters’ degree. It’s good experience. I figure if I could wait tables I could certainly stay up all night writing code for Microsoft or Google, right?”

“Do you work for Microsoft? Or Google?”

“No, but I’ve had offers, and sometimes do freelance work for them. Google has been offering me a job almost every year, but my ex-wife lives in this area, and I like having the kids with me.” He topped off Stewart’s syringe and then tucked it next to his shoulder, forcing it between Stewart’s body and his soft chair. That done, he stood and grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, turning the child away from Samantha and headed towards the door into the next room. Samantha took this as her cue to follow him, and the three of them entered the kitchen.

The tray of shish kabobs and two place settings, complete with napkin rings with matching napkins laid out, looked so much like home, like life, that Samantha was startled. Stewart was wheeled in-between the two chairs, and seemed to be holding court over the table, over the two players, settling across from each other. Mickey refilled Samantha’s glass, and put a napkin on his lap, inviting, with a single gesture, for her to start.

Trouble sounded at the front door, making the dishes jump just an inch.

“Shit. Hey, dad!?”

Mickey looked up, fork and wooden spear in hand, ready to scrape pork and green peppers onto his plate. Stewart seemed to Samantha also be a bit jogged. His arms flew out in opposite directions, almost hugging the air, slowly coming together, as his eyes rolled towards each other and then back. His grin trembled and then a line of drool fell from his chin onto his seat belt. Samantha knew she wouldn’t be able to clean that up, not ever. She swallowed twice.

“Dad?” A young woman appeared in the doorway, achingly beautiful in the way that young girls must be, however hard they try not to.

If only I had known, thought Samantha. If only I had known.

“Rachel. Hi. I thought you were staying out.”

“Sorry. I thought you were taking Stewart to that bubble thing.”

“No, that’s tomorrow afternoon. Do you want to join us for kabobs?”

Say no, thought Samantha. Say no and then go to your room and cut your skin or listen to your ipod or whatever it is teenagers do these days. Stewart’s body pushed and moved until there was a gurgle from his feeding tube, some of his dinner coming back into the syringe in a milkshake-like burst.

“Kabobs? Yeah, that’ll work.” Taking off her Wonder Woman hoodie, revealing several large, colorful tattoos, Rachel kicked her way into the seat, first hitting the chair, and then two of the table legs with her oversized boots.

Tattoos? Samantha did the math as fast as she could. Mickey claimed to be thirty-four, and if this girl was eighteen, which would mean he had her when he was…fifteen? Rachel scratched at her arm, parts of a leopard tattoo coming off on her fingernail. Samantha stared a little longer than she meant to, and Rachel caught her glance.

“I’m Rachel.” She stuck out her jelly bracelet adorned arm.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Rachel, this is Samantha.”

“Right.” Rachel swung her boot so that it hit the center pedestal, rattling the plates and making Stewart, yet again, hug the air with his sweeping, creepy limbs.

“Nice to meet you,” Samantha helped herself to a third glass of merlot. Rachel began emptying kabobs onto her plate with great enthusiasm.

“I was going to go to that fucking movie tonight, the one with the subtitles, over at the college, but Sandy was telling me her boyfriend was kicked out of the auditorium there for smoking? And I was like, that’s bullshit. Right? Like, what the fuck? Like, who goes to those fucking movies, anyway? Or whatever. Whatever, right? Anyway, so we’re driving past the campus, trying to decide whether to go, and Mom calls…” Mickey’s eyes darted between the two, between Samantha and Rachel, and his glass was all the way in front of his face, ready. “And she’s all talking about how she needs me to come over this weekend, and the backyard needs mowing, and the cat is out and all this shit. I’m like, ‘I’m at Dad’s house this weekend, and you can wait your fucking turn.’ And she’s like ‘I’m your mother.’ And then she starts talking about how the coffee maker is broken and that you need to buy her another one…”

“She needs to buy her own coffee maker, Rachel.” Mickey sounded tired, suddenly, and sadly began combing through his kabob, breaking green peppers into thirds and then into fourths.

“I know. Shit, dad. Anyway. So she’s talking about the coffee maker, and Sandy is calling her boyfriend, and then she tells him that she and I are coming over and then all of a sudden it’s like, an issue for him. Like me coming over is going to ruin everything. Like I’m not supposed to come over, or whatever.” A skull and cross boned embossed wrist shot past Samantha’s line of vision and came back with the half empty merlot bottle. Drinking? Was she drinking?

“One glass, Rachel,” Mickey murmured.

“I know. You don’t have to show off for your girlfriend, or whatever.” Instinctively Samantha turned toward Stewart for an out. Stewart was struggling, this time inside himself, with some sudden discomfort that made his face turn red and his eyes pop out. Did he eat a kabob when we weren’t looking? Samantha wondered.

“Shit,” Mickey cursed, throwing down his napkin, and grabbing for the syringe now full of rejected formula. “Rachel, you’re being too loud.”

“Fuck. He’s fine. Dad, he does that all the time. Anyway, I’m not supposed to come over to this guy’s house, and I tell Sandy that he’s acting like a retard, like seriously, and she tells me to shut up, that she’s on the phone, and mom starts seriously screaming at me…”

“You shouldn’t use that word, Rachel.” Mickey began wiping down Stewart, and the chair, both covered in…puke? Samantha doubted that’s actually what it was.

“Okay, he’s being stupid. Is that better?” Rachel sneered, her nose in her glass, tipping it back. The devil playing cards on her shoulder peaked out of her short sleeve.

“Did those hurt?” Samantha asked, weakly.

“She’s not allowed to get a real tattoo until she’s eighteen, and out of the house,” Mickey answered for his daughter from the sink. He then put both lips on the inside of the syringe and blew as hard as he could, causing the formula and whatever else there was, to shoot out of the tube into the drain.

“This is what I’m going to get, though,” Rachel turned up her sleeves to show Samantha the devil playing cards, the panther on her forearm, and a spider web on her elbow. “I also want to get, like, the world exploding on the back of my neck. Like, the end times. Oh, and also my name in Greek. I have a friend who knows Greek and he’s, like, designing a tattoo for me like that. I want it on my stomach.” She pulled up her shirt and showed Samantha. “And, maybe, get a garter tattooed on my thigh.”

Samantha nodded mutely. Mickey, after closing the tube in Stewart’s stomach offered Samantha more wine, posing the bottle over her glass, meeting her eyes.

“I’ve got to piss,” Rachel swung herself around in the chair, grabbed the back and hoisted herself towards the hallway. Samantha swallowed and looked up at Mickey, still standing with the wine bottle.

“You know, I have to go to the bathroom too. Is there another one?” Mickey, fumbling with the label, picking at it and pushing it back into place, nodded towards the stairs.

“It’s through the bedroom, which is the third door of the left.” Samantha climbed the stairs and knocked, in spite of herself, on the bedroom door. It was, of course, neat as a pin. The bed was made, and Stewart’s bed (crib?) was on the far side of the room. A machine on a pole stood next to it, and a light machine sat on the nightstand in between the two. It looked, to Samantha, like the bedroom in Leave it to Beaver, the two boys forced to grow and mature together, at different stages, in the same room.

In the bathroom, also neat, white, trim, orderly except for the feeding bag, drying out and hanging from the shower head, filling the room with the smell of watery milk. Samantha ran the water, flushed the toilet, and found the Clonazepam on the top shelf next to a red pill crusher. It must have to be made into powder, Samantha considered as she swallowed two, and then washed her hands, wondering about the size of the hole in her mother’s body, the size of the time it took before they both died, and what that must have done to the girl, who also spoke no English. She would have cried, and waved her hands in front of her face, trying to push the crowd away from her. She would have needed a moment, like Samantha was taking in the bathroom, to do some ill-gotten drugs and compose herself. The sun, making everything very hot, even for California, would have confused things and made it hard for her to explain that it was just a mistake, just a misstep, just something that happened too quickly.

"Flywheel" by Matt Gray

At ten, Brin found his teeth turning soft like his mom’s.

He wrapped himself in the front window curtains. Through the front window to the porch, to the driveway and beyond—brittle cold. Imagine someone out there in the cold, the mouth sucking in cold air. And imagine the mouth stops, frozen.

Brin put on his coat and hat, hugged a blanket, and walked outside. Against the porch, in the car, or on the hillside, Brin leaned over a dark form, and the puffs of breath surrounding them were white sky. Brin spread the blanket, tucking the corners awkwardly.

Brin began sneaking out of bed late at night, sliding his teeth out one by one, and left homecoming messages for his dad on the kitchen counter: “Smile!” or, “What’s up, Doc?” in gooey-whitish globs. In the morning, his mother made him rinse and stuff them back in his mouth immediately.

At fourteen, Brin got a job washing dishes at a diner, stacking firm, round plates. Brin insisted on getting braces once he’d saved the money, based upon a stubborn belief that his teeth would not slide through the wires, as the balking dentist warned. In fact, they did not. Brin’s teeth stiffened.

And then, as soon as he could get two days off in a row, Brin spent them working in the backyard, sculpting cement as his mother looked on. He worked twenty hours, brown back tinged a sunset pink, skinny limbs bending in concentration. At the end of the second day, a miniature, wrinkled cement igloo stood. Brin came inside the house and drank a full glass of milk. “Do you like my igloo?” he asked.

Brin’s mother nodded and smiled, close-mouthed, because at the moment her teeth were stuck shut from clenching. The next day Brin laid bricks in the backyard, and within a few weeks finished a border around its entire perimeter. Their neighbor wanted one, and soon others admired his work, so Brin quit his job at the diner and turned sixteen laying brick—for pathways, borders, dog houses, bomb shelters, tool sheds. When he turned seventeen, he bought a truck and two magnetic signs to slap on the truck’s doors advertising, “Bricklaying by Brin” and his phone number. By the time he was twenty, Brin had married his high school sweetheart, and was laying brick full-time.

At night, Brin’s wife stood at the kitchen window looking out over the few acres of their yard. She watched Brin in the distance, bricklaying, a six-pack at his side. Jenny tongued her back molar: had it come loose? Outside, Brin layered bricks like teeth. He wouldn’t come in at night: when Jenny went to bed, she left Brin laying brick, and when she awoke, he’d already gone to work.

Their yard grew borders and pathways like mossy molars and began to look odd to passersby. Jenny noticed her toothbrush left marks on her teeth, then found that she had to shape her teeth each morning to look normal, and that nevertheless they would slip around when her tongue touched them. Terrified, she stopped speaking so her teeth wouldn’t show, or move to lump beneath her gums.

One midnight Jenny awoke alone again and got up. The kitchen window framed Brin in the yard, asleep by a half-finished brick shed, wheelbarrow full of empties beside him. Jenny walked outside and shook his shoulder, but he slept like the hardening shed. She found her teeth stuck together from clenching them in her sleep, and she couldn’t speak.  She shook him until he swiped her leg and she fell against the shovel, cutting her lip and pushing her teeth back.

When Brin heard her, he woke up. Her back pressed the grass, her eyes to the stars, her insides floated darkly within her so that when Brin’s face appeared in place of the night sky and his fingers touched her lips and worked her mouth open, she watched as if hovering cloud-like over the moon, or inside a tiny moon placed behind his eyes. The world grew distant, with garden walks glowing in everyone’s yards, drunkards sleeping it off in the hills, and then the world grew close-up, smaller than the white underbelly of a thought. Brin’s fingers were inside her mouth, shaping her teeth and pressing them into her gums. His fingers smelled and tasted of sweat. Jenny didn’t gag.  She said, “No,” and her ears flooded.

Brin interrupted, “You can’t wake me—” but she moaned and he stopped, tucking his lips in as if they were needed to hold his own teeth inside. He said, somewhat slurred, “Sorry.”

They stared at each other. She relaxed against the grass as he tried to mold her teeth back into place. “I’ll stay here,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

"Siege Machine" by Peter Scacco.

First the noise, then the wheel swerved, when they had high-fived each other in eye-shutting delight at the joke on radio. The roaring car, leaping at the sun all morning in a fool’s chase, seemed to catch one of those city-ripping gusts typhoons unleash, and briefly rose on its back and front wheels like something hinged, like a spectral door opening unto the grave.

As the windows went in a spin, the girls inside, not yet eighteen, saw the world as every catfish must see it on the chopping block—unforgiving, bitterly cruel, short and final.The girl who was driving fumbled her grip on the steering wheel, snapping her nails in the worn leather cover, screaming at all the breaking glass. Her companion in the other seat protected her face, hurled hands everywhere, trying for purchase on air, the seatbelt, anything, skirling her fright at the screeching, the thumping, the speeded up, altogether percussion of furious metal parts. The Toyota was in full, relentless, side-over-side somersault, blown along effortlessly like rolled up newspaper in a storm, or a die flashing sides in a lazy flick. There was a vicious energy in its tumble—teasing, deceptive, dream-like; the car seemed to be possessed by something alive—its impulses like an evil spirit’s; the torn front fender waved about like a bit of rag.

This prescient thing whipped the car round and round, maliciously, always to the right, and then in the path of a coming bus. Inebriated by speed the bus dizzied towards impact, a wingtip away when it managed, by gritty almost-wasn’t luck, to weave into the tall dusty grass that gave life to scenery along the road, escaping collision, before lurching back on firmer ground. Seeing that it had missed ramming the bus, the possessed car veered left with its human sacrifice, making reverse semi-circles, searching for another plinth to quench its fury, finally finding the motorway median and smashing its nose against the narrow waist-high concrete, sated.

Samaritans leapt from the lucky bus, which had stopped several yards in front by the safe shoulder, blinking hazard lights. Other passengers, twisting in their seats, in a fever of thanks to God and Jesus, watched the still Toyota through dust-washed windows.

Then, as everybody watched, disbelievingly, a light-skinned thigh flashed through the half open window of the battered car on the passenger side; a frantic face appeared, the limb lengthened (or maybe the limb lengthened before the face and the body appeared), and the nervous, wriggling girl forced her body—knee first—through the gap in the window like something pursued, hopped to the ground and raced for the median with quick skipping steps, bare soles flashing, as if landing on hot coals—with never a backward glance at the other person who might have been a sister or an affectionate friend—to nurse what remained of her life. She leaned her buttocks on the narrow ledge of the median, wrapping quivering arms around her tight shrimp-red blouse messed with yellow buttons, while she rocked—a mute tribute to the tenacity of our race.

Passing cars would not let bringers of help—people from the bus—cross the asphalt. Another bus, newer, slowed and stopped in front of the first one, but most vehicles slowed merely to gape, ghouls, and then went on their way. A beefy woman in a black SUV stopped on the side of the motorway that speared traffic back at Lagos. She opened her door as the Toyota’s driver freed herself from the seatbelt.

The slight girl staggered from the car with dazed eyes, disoriented. Her hair looked mutinous, as if she had snagged it in a turning fan. Bowing her head as though hurting under a shoulder-load, she treaded shoeless steps to the median, on the side of the car away from her window climbing neighbour, and leaned on the concrete, the pleats of her short flowered skirt bunched in the grip of her thighs. Both girls stood that way—their mutual world torn into separate maps—for what seemed several minutes but must have been no more than ten or fifteen seconds. Then the one who was driving saw that a rip in her scalp leaked blood into her dress breast and she began a furious shake, as in a cold or fever. She pressed the flat of one trembling palm into her bleeding head and, by weary degrees, folded her body to a squat, sobbing, realising now how close to flowing back to the Universal Whole she had come.

The Samaritans crossed at last, swollen with volunteers from the second bus. The men, attacked by the angry smell of burnt rubber, whistled at the state of the small car. The car looked mangled, crushed and twisted in places, the body riddled with huge boils, as if a horde of panel beaters in a marijuana haze went at it inside with crazy ballpeen hammers; the car looked to be shrinking too. The tires looked purposely ripped, the way a shirt or dress looks if it has been in a nasty fight. The front screen was dashed to fine crystals on the driver’s side—gaping now like the angry target of a wild mob, glistening cubes streaked a bright red powdered the section around the wheel. Under the seat, a brown shoe lay on its side so that the word aerosoft across its face was touched with shadows. Part of the screen protecting the passenger though split into myriad fractures had held back in its plastic skin, curling forward, as if in afterthought—fate in chrysalis.

The men were fussing over the girls now in gestures of first aid: checking for fractures and scratches, staunching cuts, peeking down breasts. Somebody was asking their names, the burly woman in the SUV, who had crossed over, was on the phone calling for a tow van. A man in a Chelsea jersey had collected the driver’s phone to inform her people. She could hear him saying in a rough voice, Hello, hello, is this Tolu, yes, your sister, your sister has been in an accident…at Odogbolu…O-DO-GBOLU…

The wounded girl buried herself under this warm gabble that came to her like wavering
voices on radio, thinking repeatedly to herself, out of a world with snapped circuits: We
were laughing when the tyre burst, we were laughing when the tyreburst, we were laughing whenthetyreburst, we werelaughingwhenthetyreburst…

“It’s in your blood, boy. It’s in your blood and it’s there to stay for good.” That’s
what my Grandad said, but by then the cancer was in his brain and real far gone, so who
knows what the hell he meant.

West Virginia #4

for Bianchi

Clayton T. liked to get a pint of Old Grandad and slide up the hill to High Street
on Saturday night to sit his ass on a bench and look at the college girls. Never said
nothing to them, just sipped and grinned while they walked on by to the bars. All the high
school girls knew they were just there for practice. Clay was smart. He probably
could’ve gotten into the big school, too, but he got Elly Martin all knocked up instead. He
couldn’t decide if that was irony or just dumb luck. So he waited for the next Saturday to
roll around, upped the proof to Grandad 101, and went out walking on the tracks until the
freight line came down from Pittsburgh.

West Virginia #9

for Trout

Old man Charlie would stand in his gravel driveway at night, squeezing his
pecker and peeping through the widow’s sheer doily curtains while she changed into her
coffee-stained flannel nighty. That is, until the old widow Maynard squinted out the
window into the square of light it threw because she thought she heard a hoot owl calling.
She jumped back so fast she had herself an embolism. Wasn’t really Charlie’s fault,
though. He never could help himself. Now-days, he just stands there all alone, staring at a
dark pane of glass and squirting on the rock dust.

Those were only dreams– the adolescent fumbling with the boy next door that led to a
trek in the woods where everything was supposed to represent your subconscious: the
trees and overgrowth that covered your guilt, that sack of doll parts in the clearing was
like the lemon that grew inside your mouth, that thing which pretended to burst.

Nights you wore the rooms of the damned lake house around your neck, let the windows
drip down like pendants. Turning over and over on an insomniac’s bed, you understood
that a stranger’s trapdoor was the easiest to fall in to. So, you finally caught them together
one night — your father and your mother’s nurse — through the keyhole in the study, how
they frantically made love while your mother lay dying in the other house, a bell tied to
her wrist so she could signal for help.

The fire was an accident. Your mother’s death was an accident. Your sister’s death was
an accident. How the anger came to be, an accident.

Two days passed. You were finally convinced that everything was an accident.

But the way the hag enunciated your name — it possessed an unnerving lilt to it.
Anna, your stepmother would say. Your father and I are happy you are home.
You look so skinny. My mission is to fatten you up. / Oh, she had sung long enough
for a woman with no throat. Your aging father, a love-stricken, cane-wielding carcass,
lolled behind her.

In private, your stepmother called you “the silent one.”

In public, she stained your lips and allowed you to wear her string of pearls. That gesture
bought her some time. It pleased you to feel the weight of stolen pearls around your neck.

But when you close your eyes, you can still make out your dead sister’s hand holding
your left arm. The knife is weightless on your right hand until you wield it. Slashing
across the hag’s breasts. Slashing across the hag’s face.

Your father came home at last, noticed the blood on your hand, noticed the remains of the
fallen hag on the driveway. You smiled at him when he, half-crying, frantically shook
you: “What have you done, Anna? What have you done?”