Cowboy Jamboree Magazine
Good grit lit.
Good grit lit.
Cowboy Jamboree Press has released its first book of CNF, and it's a doozy. UPPERCUT by Mark Rogers now available. |
THE PATRON SAINT OF BIRDS by Steve Lambert. CJ's second dynamite collection of the Fall. Grab your copy now! |
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Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to announce that we will be the exclusive publishing home for all future Sheldon Lee Compton fiction and creative nonfiction.
“Sheldon Lee Compton is a hillbilly Bukowski, one of the grittiest writers to come down the pike since Larry Brown.” - Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time
"Sheldon Lee Compton is the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet." - David Joy, author of The Weight of This World
"Sheldon Lee Compton is like a living, breathing John Cougar Mellencamp song (minus guitars and hand claps) but with much better stories." - Brian Alan Ellis, author of Something Good, Something Bad, Something Dirty
“Sheldon Lee Compton is a hillbilly Bukowski, one of the grittiest writers to come down the pike since Larry Brown.” - Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time
"Sheldon Lee Compton is the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet." - David Joy, author of The Weight of This World
"Sheldon Lee Compton is like a living, breathing John Cougar Mellencamp song (minus guitars and hand claps) but with much better stories." - Brian Alan Ellis, author of Something Good, Something Bad, Something Dirty
Fall Issue Submissions: Buried Child
Over the years we've used many of our favorite artists as inspiration for issue themes: our special Harry Crews issue, our Larry Brown inspired "My Dog Died" issue, "Grotesque to Art" in the vein of Donald Ray Pollock, the Bukowski tinged issue "Henry Chinaski is a Friend of of Mine," and the Fall 2020 John Prine inspired issue. We continue that in Fall 2021 with "Buried Child," inspired by Sam Shepard. Your grit lit submission can be similar in theme or content to the tragedy of a broken rural Midwestern family with a dark secret that is Buried Child, or simply nod in some way to the great writing of Shepard. Think True West, think Cowboy Mouth, think Curse of the Starving Class, think Fool for Love. Feel free to send a short play, though we'll of course still consider our usual mix of fiction, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction to boot. Deadline: September 1, 2021
Over the years we've used many of our favorite artists as inspiration for issue themes: our special Harry Crews issue, our Larry Brown inspired "My Dog Died" issue, "Grotesque to Art" in the vein of Donald Ray Pollock, the Bukowski tinged issue "Henry Chinaski is a Friend of of Mine," and the Fall 2020 John Prine inspired issue. We continue that in Fall 2021 with "Buried Child," inspired by Sam Shepard. Your grit lit submission can be similar in theme or content to the tragedy of a broken rural Midwestern family with a dark secret that is Buried Child, or simply nod in some way to the great writing of Shepard. Think True West, think Cowboy Mouth, think Curse of the Starving Class, think Fool for Love. Feel free to send a short play, though we'll of course still consider our usual mix of fiction, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction to boot. Deadline: September 1, 2021
Whether you do it here or there, support indie. Shop CJ tees, hoodies, mugs, pins, etc. and support good grit lit. CJ Book designs, grit sketches, and CJ Jobbers retro wrestling pop art by Adam Van Winkle.
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Sneak Peek: a preview from I Have Always Been Here Before out now from CJ Press
"The Hand-Me-Downs"
by Joey R. Poole
July, 1985
Simon found the body floating in a puddle behind the pump house. The girl’s arm was broken, twisted behind her head, and yellowed stuffing leaked from the smiling slit in her throat. He tossed her back into the gathering water and turned her face-down with his toe before he shut off the spigot. He wondered whether it mattered that he’d found her with the water still running, if Ricky was trying to tell him something. For a second Simon marveled at how far Ricky had carried the game the two of them had played all summer, ever since they’d found the box of stuffed animals and rag dolls the dead girl’s family left in the attic.
The game worked like this: Ricky was always the killer and Simon the detective. Simon had to wait exactly twelve minutes—about the amount of time it took him to play a couple levels of Space Invaders or to squash out all three of his amphibious lives trying to cross the road in Frogger. During this time, his older brother would select a stuffed animal or a doll from the box to be the body. Ricky would leave the body somewhere that Simon could find it and then he’d run away and hide. Ricky said that all killers subconsciously wanted to get caught, and he left obvious clues to his whereabouts. Both of them were armed with air rifles, and the game inevitably ended in a shootout when Simon followed the trail of clues to Ricky’s hiding place.
The goal was to kill the other by scoring a hit to the torso. The game seemed unfair to Simon because Ricky always had the advantage of surprise and camouflage, but they’d never discussed switching roles, and Simon accepted the doomed hunt as his lot in life.
Ricky always left easy clues—an open gate, his shoe hung from a tree branch, once even a detailed note signed with a bloody thumbprint and taped to the severed paw of a stuffed Tigger. Lately, though, he’d grown more sophisticated. He’d begun leaving false evidence, springing traps, leading Simon farther and farther away from the backyard.
Simon was tired of the game. The BB embedded in his forearm from a week before still throbbed like a toothache and he’d begun to give up hope that it would work its way out so that his mother would never see it. The shiny metal crown of it showed through his skin, and the flesh around it had grown crusty and smelled like the underside of a garden hose.
The game was Ricky’s invention, and he always won. In the beginning, he would simply hide the bodies. Lately he had taken to mutilating them as well. He’d used one of the hanging basket hooks on the front porch like a meat hook to hang a teddy bear wearing a Santa hat, and had burned a stuffed Miss Piggy after stabbing her through the heart with a tomato stake. He’d apparently twisted this one—a rag doll with straw-colored hair and a checkerboard bonnet that wouldn’t stay on her head—violently enough to nearly tear her button-eyed face off. Simon wondered if Ricky had wrung the imaginary life out of her before or after he drowned her in the flooded grass. Ricky said those things mattered. When they found the bodies it was important to find out exactly what the killer had done to them. Simon could never understand why.
Simon scanned the yard for clues. The gate in the chain-link fence between their house and the overgrown backyard of the abandoned house next door was open; Ricky had gone that way. Simon didn’t bother to duck low or conceal himself as he walked through the jungle of knee-high crabgrass and mimosa bushes, for it had been weeks since Ricky had holed up this close to the backyard. He guessed that he’d find another clue there, and he was right. On the other side of the yard, he saw a piece of the doll’s tattered bonnet hanging from the top of the fence. The location of the clue seemed to indicate that Ricky had gone down a trail that Simon had never walked but which Ricky swore led to an abandoned rock quarry where he’d once watched a bunch of girls from school go swimming with their tops off.
Simon took up the chase, trudging through the briars a few yards off to the side of the trail. It made for slow going, and he was sure Ricky would hear him coming a mile away as he hacked and stomped his way through the underbrush, but it was better than waltzing nakedly into danger out on the open trail. A summer of learning the chase and getting stung with BBs had honed his senses, and he froze like a startled fawn when he heard a branch cracking somewhere ahead of him. Instinctively, he dove into the bushes lining the trail and waited. There was nothing else to be heard except the rustling of tiny creatures in the dead leaves. A rivulet of sweat rolled down the back of his thigh and he felt swampy inside his jeans. He wanted to be anywhere else but here, sweating through a futile chase, waiting for inevitable pain and stinging failure to fly at him from out of nowhere. Suddenly it dawned on him that he could simply give up. He could refuse to play the game at all. He could walk up the path back to the house, make himself a jelly sandwich, and spend the afternoon dodging the bombs dripping from orderly rows of Invaders.
He was about to do just that when suddenly his quarry was right in front of him holding the drowned doll’s bonnet. He hadn’t even heard Ricky walking up the path until the grinning, blank-eyed skull of his Misfits tee shirt was framed by a gap in the jessamine bush behind which Simon cowered. His heart leapt into his throat and he steeled himself for the stinging before he realized that Ricky didn’t see him.
“Come on, faggot,” Ricky yelled back toward the house, the way he did when he grew bored with waiting for Simon to find him. “I’m in the woods.”
Simon thought about the silver BB sunk in the flesh of his arm and wondered if his own shot would bury itself in the soft flesh of Ricky’s belly. He raised his rifle slowly and squinted down the barrel, holding his breath just the way his father had shown him, and sighted on one of the skull’s ragged teeth, one he figured would be just to the left of Ricky’s belly button. He felt for a moment as if he’d lose his Fruit Loops, but he managed to squeeze the trigger.
* * * *
Simon did not know that his bedroom had once belonged to a dead girl until a bucktoothed boy who spent his recess running up to smaller kids and rabbit-punching them in the arm had told him. “Her name was Sherri,” the boy had said. “She was in the sixth grade, but she had big tits. She got, like, raped and murdered. They never caught the guy.”
That night, at the supper table with a mouth full of fish sticks, Simon informed his mother about the dead girl and asked her what rape was. Ricky drooled mashed potatoes he laughed so hard. “You might better ask your dad that when he gets home,” his mother said.
Simon waited for him to get home from work and eat supper before springing the question, but his father was no help. He seemed embarrassed by the question, and just said that it was something that bad men did to women before he descended into the basement where he’d sequestered himself pretty much every evening since they’d moved into the house. Simon sat in his room and played Asteroids with the sound turned off so his mother would think he was doing homework. He heard pool balls clicking together from down in the basement, a steel guitar from the old, lonely-sounding records his father played moaning away softly. Just as a tiny shard of asteroid destroyed Simon’s last ship, insistent drums began thumping through the wall from Ricky’s stereo, and it wasn’t long before his father was beating on the ceiling with his cue stick, yelling for Ricky to shut off the goddamn noise.
Ricky either didn’t hear the yelling over the music or he pretended he didn’t, and Simon winced when he heard footsteps stomping up the basement steps. He went into the hall, wanting to run far away from the scene he knew was coming, but it was too late. Ricky’s room door was open, and he saw his father rearing back to kick the stereo, aiming for the speaker closest to him. His foot got caught in the speaker box and he fell to the floor, the screaming vocals and guitar suddenly silenced but the drums and the rolling bass still pouring out of the other speaker. Ricky sat on the edge of the bed and almost laughed while their father worked his foot out of its trap. When he finally got back on his feet, the tiny bald spot at the crown of his head had gone pink and he lunged at Ricky. Simon had never realized how much bigger than their father Ricky had gotten, but he was a full head taller when their father grabbed him by the hair and snatched him off the bed. “You think it’s funny, big boy?” the man asked, looking up into Ricky’s face. “Huh? Huh? You think it’s funny?”
He gave a little tug on Ricky’s hair and Ricky whimpered “no” before correcting himself and saying “no, sir.”
Their father let go of Ricky’s hair and looked up at Ricky, who still towered over him despite his slumped shoulders. “I didn’t think so,” their father hissed. “You’re big but you ain’t shit. And I will pop you in the mouth next time you want to laugh at me.” He opened his mouth to say something else but seemed to deflate suddenly, and he turned to leave. “And turn that shit down,” he said, almost politely, before descending once again to his hermitage in the basement.
Simon fell asleep that night thinking about the dead girl in whose room he now slept and dreamed that the paint peeled off the wall in his bedroom, revealing pink-striped wallpaper festooned with prancing unicorns. A month later, already bored with summer, he explored the attic while his parents were at work. The loose insulation itched his eyes and stuck to his face. The family who’d moved out hadn’t left much of interest up there: a fake Christmas tree in a box, melted candles, a set of encyclopedias, an Easy-Bake oven. Off in the corner, Simon saw a blue arm sticking out of a huge box. It was filled with stuffed animals, rag dolls, and molded plastic infants. When he dragged the box down stairs and showed it to his older brother, Ricky’s eyes seemed to light up. Later, Simon often wondered if the terrible game that was seemingly Ricky’s one true calling in life was the first thing that occurred to him when he saw the box of forgotten dolls.
* * * * *
The wound on Ricky’s belly did not bleed until Simon dug the tweezers into it to retrieve the BB that had lodged itself inside. Simon felt the pellet and thought he’d grabbed hold of it, but the tweezers held only a lump of greasy, yellow-white fat that looked like margarine. He wondered for a second if Ricky had no innards, no living organs, if he was filled with this stuff like the doll bodies and teddy bears they mutilated were stuffed with cotton wads and straw.
Simon could feel the muscles beneath Ricky’s stomach tense and heard him gritting his teeth as he went back in with the tweezers. He was repulsed by the wiry black hairs that he had never noticed before around Ricky’s belly button more than he was by the blood and the ooze from the wound, which he found fascinating. This time he felt the tweezers scrape against something metal and he retrieved the pellet, tearing the hole a little as he pulled it out. He watched intently as the peroxide Ricky poured into it fizzed out like a tiny volcano. He’d hoped Ricky’s fervor for the game would be dulled by his injury, but it was only intensified. This time, though, Ricky insisted that Simon play the killer for the first time ever.
Simon did not possess the same flair for the game, the same violence of invention that was Ricky’s hallmark, and so he found himself plucking one shiny black eye from a rag doll that already leaked stuffing from its armpit and dropping it in the same pool in which Ricky had drowned its sister. Reluctantly, he trudged down the same path through the woods, wanting only for the game to end with the sting of a BB on his chest so that he could retire into the air-conditioned safety of the house and immerse himself in killing marching hordes of ever-advancing aliens. He wedged himself in the crotch of a dogwood tree a few feet off the path and listened for footsteps. The woods were quiet, like the heat had smothered the birds and baked the insects into a silent stupor. Just as he settled himself into the tree, not even bothering to ready his rifle, a jet droned overhead, raising a white welt on the sky. The empty roar of it was punctured by a plinking noise near Simon’s head. Ricky had cheated. No more than five minutes had passed since Simon had abandoned the doll. He looked down to see Ricky standing on the path, squinting down the barrel of his rifle, the mangled doll hanging by one limp leg from his pocket.
Simon tried to shimmy down the tree, but his foot got trapped in a crook and he fell into the briars. He looked back to Ricky, who stepped forward until he was about two body lengths away and fired. Simon heard the pop of the rifle before he felt the fire in his cheek, just below the eye. His first thought was that he should not cry. And he did not, not until Ricky knelt over him and put his hand on Simon’s hair.
“Oh, shit,” Ricky said. “I meant to hit you in the chest. It’s okay, though. It’s not your eye, okay? It’s just your cheek. It’s okay. It’s not your eye. Okay?” Ricky brushed Simon’s cheek with his fingers, leaning close, his breath smelling like Slim Jims, then covered his mouth with his hand like he was thinking hard. There was blood under his nails, smearing in sweaty smudges on his chin. “It’s just—come on, let’s go inside and clean it up. The BB ain’t even in there. It’s nothing.”
Simon had never said fuck you to anyone before, and only a choking, girlish sob came when he tried to say it to Ricky. He tasted blood and snot and leaned forward to hide his embarrassment in the dead leaves.
“Come on, get up,” Ricky said, a little rougher this time, the tone of his voice betrayed a little by the tenderness of his hand kneading Simon’s back. “Come on. We have to clean that up before Mom gets home, figure out what we’re going to say happened to you and all.”
Simon sat up abruptly, and his gaze pushed Ricky’s eyes away. “I’m not playing this stupid game anymore,” he said simply.
“Okay, okay, you don’t…”
“And I’m going to tell Mom you shot me.” It was the last thing he wanted to say, but there it was. He felt like a crybaby, so he puffed out his chest and stood up and said it again. “I’m going to tell her you shot me and that you go around…whatever it is…raping those doll things.”
“You don’t even know what that fucking means.” All the tenderness was gone from Ricky’s voice now. “You just—well, I guess we could say you were doing something stupid like looking down the barrel or something, and it just, like, went off somehow...”
Simon laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it, laughed until he snorted, the snot running onto his lips. Ricky swung the doll by the arm and hit Simon in the face. He swung it again, hard enough to knock Simon down, and stood straddling him, pummeling him with doll until its arm broke off. Then he kicked Simon in the gut and picked the doll up by its head, rubbing it into Simon’s face.
“Play with your fucking doll, pussy,” Ricky said, “and figure out what the fuck you’re going to tell her because if you tell her I shot you I swear to God I’m going to…” he trailed off, never finishing his threat, and kicked again at the dead leaves before turning to run back toward the house. Simon thought he was dying. There was bile in his mouth and an aching emptiness in his lungs and he tried in vain to suck air back into his chest.
Finally he caught his breath and sat up, blinking in the blinding brightness of the sun. The rag doll winked at him one-eyed and seemed to laugh at some joke that only she understood. He picked her up by the yarn of her hair and dug his fingers into her chest until the fabric tore and then he began to pull out her matted cotton guts.
"The Hand-Me-Downs"
by Joey R. Poole
July, 1985
Simon found the body floating in a puddle behind the pump house. The girl’s arm was broken, twisted behind her head, and yellowed stuffing leaked from the smiling slit in her throat. He tossed her back into the gathering water and turned her face-down with his toe before he shut off the spigot. He wondered whether it mattered that he’d found her with the water still running, if Ricky was trying to tell him something. For a second Simon marveled at how far Ricky had carried the game the two of them had played all summer, ever since they’d found the box of stuffed animals and rag dolls the dead girl’s family left in the attic.
The game worked like this: Ricky was always the killer and Simon the detective. Simon had to wait exactly twelve minutes—about the amount of time it took him to play a couple levels of Space Invaders or to squash out all three of his amphibious lives trying to cross the road in Frogger. During this time, his older brother would select a stuffed animal or a doll from the box to be the body. Ricky would leave the body somewhere that Simon could find it and then he’d run away and hide. Ricky said that all killers subconsciously wanted to get caught, and he left obvious clues to his whereabouts. Both of them were armed with air rifles, and the game inevitably ended in a shootout when Simon followed the trail of clues to Ricky’s hiding place.
The goal was to kill the other by scoring a hit to the torso. The game seemed unfair to Simon because Ricky always had the advantage of surprise and camouflage, but they’d never discussed switching roles, and Simon accepted the doomed hunt as his lot in life.
Ricky always left easy clues—an open gate, his shoe hung from a tree branch, once even a detailed note signed with a bloody thumbprint and taped to the severed paw of a stuffed Tigger. Lately, though, he’d grown more sophisticated. He’d begun leaving false evidence, springing traps, leading Simon farther and farther away from the backyard.
Simon was tired of the game. The BB embedded in his forearm from a week before still throbbed like a toothache and he’d begun to give up hope that it would work its way out so that his mother would never see it. The shiny metal crown of it showed through his skin, and the flesh around it had grown crusty and smelled like the underside of a garden hose.
The game was Ricky’s invention, and he always won. In the beginning, he would simply hide the bodies. Lately he had taken to mutilating them as well. He’d used one of the hanging basket hooks on the front porch like a meat hook to hang a teddy bear wearing a Santa hat, and had burned a stuffed Miss Piggy after stabbing her through the heart with a tomato stake. He’d apparently twisted this one—a rag doll with straw-colored hair and a checkerboard bonnet that wouldn’t stay on her head—violently enough to nearly tear her button-eyed face off. Simon wondered if Ricky had wrung the imaginary life out of her before or after he drowned her in the flooded grass. Ricky said those things mattered. When they found the bodies it was important to find out exactly what the killer had done to them. Simon could never understand why.
Simon scanned the yard for clues. The gate in the chain-link fence between their house and the overgrown backyard of the abandoned house next door was open; Ricky had gone that way. Simon didn’t bother to duck low or conceal himself as he walked through the jungle of knee-high crabgrass and mimosa bushes, for it had been weeks since Ricky had holed up this close to the backyard. He guessed that he’d find another clue there, and he was right. On the other side of the yard, he saw a piece of the doll’s tattered bonnet hanging from the top of the fence. The location of the clue seemed to indicate that Ricky had gone down a trail that Simon had never walked but which Ricky swore led to an abandoned rock quarry where he’d once watched a bunch of girls from school go swimming with their tops off.
Simon took up the chase, trudging through the briars a few yards off to the side of the trail. It made for slow going, and he was sure Ricky would hear him coming a mile away as he hacked and stomped his way through the underbrush, but it was better than waltzing nakedly into danger out on the open trail. A summer of learning the chase and getting stung with BBs had honed his senses, and he froze like a startled fawn when he heard a branch cracking somewhere ahead of him. Instinctively, he dove into the bushes lining the trail and waited. There was nothing else to be heard except the rustling of tiny creatures in the dead leaves. A rivulet of sweat rolled down the back of his thigh and he felt swampy inside his jeans. He wanted to be anywhere else but here, sweating through a futile chase, waiting for inevitable pain and stinging failure to fly at him from out of nowhere. Suddenly it dawned on him that he could simply give up. He could refuse to play the game at all. He could walk up the path back to the house, make himself a jelly sandwich, and spend the afternoon dodging the bombs dripping from orderly rows of Invaders.
He was about to do just that when suddenly his quarry was right in front of him holding the drowned doll’s bonnet. He hadn’t even heard Ricky walking up the path until the grinning, blank-eyed skull of his Misfits tee shirt was framed by a gap in the jessamine bush behind which Simon cowered. His heart leapt into his throat and he steeled himself for the stinging before he realized that Ricky didn’t see him.
“Come on, faggot,” Ricky yelled back toward the house, the way he did when he grew bored with waiting for Simon to find him. “I’m in the woods.”
Simon thought about the silver BB sunk in the flesh of his arm and wondered if his own shot would bury itself in the soft flesh of Ricky’s belly. He raised his rifle slowly and squinted down the barrel, holding his breath just the way his father had shown him, and sighted on one of the skull’s ragged teeth, one he figured would be just to the left of Ricky’s belly button. He felt for a moment as if he’d lose his Fruit Loops, but he managed to squeeze the trigger.
* * * *
Simon did not know that his bedroom had once belonged to a dead girl until a bucktoothed boy who spent his recess running up to smaller kids and rabbit-punching them in the arm had told him. “Her name was Sherri,” the boy had said. “She was in the sixth grade, but she had big tits. She got, like, raped and murdered. They never caught the guy.”
That night, at the supper table with a mouth full of fish sticks, Simon informed his mother about the dead girl and asked her what rape was. Ricky drooled mashed potatoes he laughed so hard. “You might better ask your dad that when he gets home,” his mother said.
Simon waited for him to get home from work and eat supper before springing the question, but his father was no help. He seemed embarrassed by the question, and just said that it was something that bad men did to women before he descended into the basement where he’d sequestered himself pretty much every evening since they’d moved into the house. Simon sat in his room and played Asteroids with the sound turned off so his mother would think he was doing homework. He heard pool balls clicking together from down in the basement, a steel guitar from the old, lonely-sounding records his father played moaning away softly. Just as a tiny shard of asteroid destroyed Simon’s last ship, insistent drums began thumping through the wall from Ricky’s stereo, and it wasn’t long before his father was beating on the ceiling with his cue stick, yelling for Ricky to shut off the goddamn noise.
Ricky either didn’t hear the yelling over the music or he pretended he didn’t, and Simon winced when he heard footsteps stomping up the basement steps. He went into the hall, wanting to run far away from the scene he knew was coming, but it was too late. Ricky’s room door was open, and he saw his father rearing back to kick the stereo, aiming for the speaker closest to him. His foot got caught in the speaker box and he fell to the floor, the screaming vocals and guitar suddenly silenced but the drums and the rolling bass still pouring out of the other speaker. Ricky sat on the edge of the bed and almost laughed while their father worked his foot out of its trap. When he finally got back on his feet, the tiny bald spot at the crown of his head had gone pink and he lunged at Ricky. Simon had never realized how much bigger than their father Ricky had gotten, but he was a full head taller when their father grabbed him by the hair and snatched him off the bed. “You think it’s funny, big boy?” the man asked, looking up into Ricky’s face. “Huh? Huh? You think it’s funny?”
He gave a little tug on Ricky’s hair and Ricky whimpered “no” before correcting himself and saying “no, sir.”
Their father let go of Ricky’s hair and looked up at Ricky, who still towered over him despite his slumped shoulders. “I didn’t think so,” their father hissed. “You’re big but you ain’t shit. And I will pop you in the mouth next time you want to laugh at me.” He opened his mouth to say something else but seemed to deflate suddenly, and he turned to leave. “And turn that shit down,” he said, almost politely, before descending once again to his hermitage in the basement.
Simon fell asleep that night thinking about the dead girl in whose room he now slept and dreamed that the paint peeled off the wall in his bedroom, revealing pink-striped wallpaper festooned with prancing unicorns. A month later, already bored with summer, he explored the attic while his parents were at work. The loose insulation itched his eyes and stuck to his face. The family who’d moved out hadn’t left much of interest up there: a fake Christmas tree in a box, melted candles, a set of encyclopedias, an Easy-Bake oven. Off in the corner, Simon saw a blue arm sticking out of a huge box. It was filled with stuffed animals, rag dolls, and molded plastic infants. When he dragged the box down stairs and showed it to his older brother, Ricky’s eyes seemed to light up. Later, Simon often wondered if the terrible game that was seemingly Ricky’s one true calling in life was the first thing that occurred to him when he saw the box of forgotten dolls.
* * * * *
The wound on Ricky’s belly did not bleed until Simon dug the tweezers into it to retrieve the BB that had lodged itself inside. Simon felt the pellet and thought he’d grabbed hold of it, but the tweezers held only a lump of greasy, yellow-white fat that looked like margarine. He wondered for a second if Ricky had no innards, no living organs, if he was filled with this stuff like the doll bodies and teddy bears they mutilated were stuffed with cotton wads and straw.
Simon could feel the muscles beneath Ricky’s stomach tense and heard him gritting his teeth as he went back in with the tweezers. He was repulsed by the wiry black hairs that he had never noticed before around Ricky’s belly button more than he was by the blood and the ooze from the wound, which he found fascinating. This time he felt the tweezers scrape against something metal and he retrieved the pellet, tearing the hole a little as he pulled it out. He watched intently as the peroxide Ricky poured into it fizzed out like a tiny volcano. He’d hoped Ricky’s fervor for the game would be dulled by his injury, but it was only intensified. This time, though, Ricky insisted that Simon play the killer for the first time ever.
Simon did not possess the same flair for the game, the same violence of invention that was Ricky’s hallmark, and so he found himself plucking one shiny black eye from a rag doll that already leaked stuffing from its armpit and dropping it in the same pool in which Ricky had drowned its sister. Reluctantly, he trudged down the same path through the woods, wanting only for the game to end with the sting of a BB on his chest so that he could retire into the air-conditioned safety of the house and immerse himself in killing marching hordes of ever-advancing aliens. He wedged himself in the crotch of a dogwood tree a few feet off the path and listened for footsteps. The woods were quiet, like the heat had smothered the birds and baked the insects into a silent stupor. Just as he settled himself into the tree, not even bothering to ready his rifle, a jet droned overhead, raising a white welt on the sky. The empty roar of it was punctured by a plinking noise near Simon’s head. Ricky had cheated. No more than five minutes had passed since Simon had abandoned the doll. He looked down to see Ricky standing on the path, squinting down the barrel of his rifle, the mangled doll hanging by one limp leg from his pocket.
Simon tried to shimmy down the tree, but his foot got trapped in a crook and he fell into the briars. He looked back to Ricky, who stepped forward until he was about two body lengths away and fired. Simon heard the pop of the rifle before he felt the fire in his cheek, just below the eye. His first thought was that he should not cry. And he did not, not until Ricky knelt over him and put his hand on Simon’s hair.
“Oh, shit,” Ricky said. “I meant to hit you in the chest. It’s okay, though. It’s not your eye, okay? It’s just your cheek. It’s okay. It’s not your eye. Okay?” Ricky brushed Simon’s cheek with his fingers, leaning close, his breath smelling like Slim Jims, then covered his mouth with his hand like he was thinking hard. There was blood under his nails, smearing in sweaty smudges on his chin. “It’s just—come on, let’s go inside and clean it up. The BB ain’t even in there. It’s nothing.”
Simon had never said fuck you to anyone before, and only a choking, girlish sob came when he tried to say it to Ricky. He tasted blood and snot and leaned forward to hide his embarrassment in the dead leaves.
“Come on, get up,” Ricky said, a little rougher this time, the tone of his voice betrayed a little by the tenderness of his hand kneading Simon’s back. “Come on. We have to clean that up before Mom gets home, figure out what we’re going to say happened to you and all.”
Simon sat up abruptly, and his gaze pushed Ricky’s eyes away. “I’m not playing this stupid game anymore,” he said simply.
“Okay, okay, you don’t…”
“And I’m going to tell Mom you shot me.” It was the last thing he wanted to say, but there it was. He felt like a crybaby, so he puffed out his chest and stood up and said it again. “I’m going to tell her you shot me and that you go around…whatever it is…raping those doll things.”
“You don’t even know what that fucking means.” All the tenderness was gone from Ricky’s voice now. “You just—well, I guess we could say you were doing something stupid like looking down the barrel or something, and it just, like, went off somehow...”
Simon laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it, laughed until he snorted, the snot running onto his lips. Ricky swung the doll by the arm and hit Simon in the face. He swung it again, hard enough to knock Simon down, and stood straddling him, pummeling him with doll until its arm broke off. Then he kicked Simon in the gut and picked the doll up by its head, rubbing it into Simon’s face.
“Play with your fucking doll, pussy,” Ricky said, “and figure out what the fuck you’re going to tell her because if you tell her I shot you I swear to God I’m going to…” he trailed off, never finishing his threat, and kicked again at the dead leaves before turning to run back toward the house. Simon thought he was dying. There was bile in his mouth and an aching emptiness in his lungs and he tried in vain to suck air back into his chest.
Finally he caught his breath and sat up, blinking in the blinding brightness of the sun. The rag doll winked at him one-eyed and seemed to laugh at some joke that only she understood. He picked her up by the yarn of her hair and dug his fingers into her chest until the fabric tore and then he began to pull out her matted cotton guts.
excerpted from I'll Still Be Here Long After You're Gone by DAREN DEAN, out in NOW from Cowboy Jamboree Press!
THE NIGHT SWIMMER
by Daren Dean
So I was eleven years old, and still hadn't learned how to swim. Despite my terror of the water, swimming was all I could think about because I lived with my mom and her trucker boyfriend in the Blue Star Motel and there was a pool not more than twenty feet from our room. Mom said, it was so much more than a motel! She was right too. It was a restaurant on one end and had a bar in the back. People came and went at the Blue Star, eating, drinking, sleeping, and whatever—if you know what I mean. I was old enough to know about men and women, but what I really wanted to learn how to do was dive into the deep end of the pool, swim underwater, and open my eyes and see in the pure chlorine where the world would slow down and let me catch my breath as the saying goes. I know it might sound crazy, but I had this idea in my head that I would swim underwater at night for the first time and see the world in slow motion with the lights around the pool flickering off the water and somehow I would discover how to breathe down there and then I’d never have to hold my breath again.
The owner, Tom Kline, had even allowed us to move the generic-looking motel furniture out for heavy flea market furniture that didn't necessarily look any better, but it felt like our own. I thought it was a pretty sweet deal since I had a room all to myself. Mom worked at the Blue Star as a waitress, bartender in the lounge, and maid. She'd sign people in too when necessary, take their money when Rita was out nursing a hangover, and hand them the key on an orange diamond-shaped chain that said, if anything, "This place is not what you think it is, or on second thought ..."
I'd been a mostly silent witness as my mom left a trail of men across the Show Me State and out west too. She couldn't seem to hold onto a man and I began to wonder if it was some inability of hers to be head-over-heels about a man even after they'd made it. I wasn't like one of those little shit-for-brains kids who sat around with his thumb up his ass wondering if his mommy and daddy got divorced because of him. Hell, I knew it wasn't my goddamn fault. I couldn't even remember my mom and real dad being married, but there was a double-exposed picture of us sitting on a bright blue and red blanket with my mentally handicapped, half-sister, the picture as fractured as everything our family was soon to become. The world out of focus and nonsensical like time itself had dropped a hit of acid and gotten seriously baked.
I'd watch her and Bear with a sense of dread waiting for the big ass breakup, but just when it started to seem imminent Bear would have to haul a load of bricks or something to New York or Ohio for J.T. Harris Trucking. He'd take off in his blue Kenworth with his 8-tracks of Waylon Jennings, Easy Rider magazines, and a fresh supply of speed. Looking back on it now, him leaving on such a regular basis probably extended their relationship by months. He was wearing a pair of Wrangler jeans with his name stenciled on his belt, cowboy boots, a western-style shirt with snaps, and a floppy hillbilly hat when he hit the road that day. I waved and gave him the universal sign for Trucker, honk your horn and he obliged. I shot him the bird but he smiled because he knew I didn't mean it. Fuck you too, good buddy!
When the men came to clean out the pool and prepare it for the summer guests, I went out there to watch. I didn't know how yet, but this was the summer I was going to learn to swim if it killed me. I was excited and terrified by the prospect all at once. It was the twin Anderson brothers with red hair down to their asses that were "commissioned" (as Tom Kline liked to put it) to do the work like some kind of fucking horror show. Those feral Andersons reminded me of animals that ran out of the woods in front of your screeching tires on Route HH. They had pale, freckled hides, and even after they took their shirts off their pasty Alfred Hitchcock skin refused to burn.
It was hard to imagine the pool would ever look halfway decent. There was a foot of mud down there clogging the drain but it didn't deter the Andersons. And, yes, they had names beginning with the same letter of the alphabet. I don't why or what it is but a special brand of madness overtakes parents who are about to have twins and makes them name their twin boys Jesse and James Anderson. I didn't know which was which, but it didn't seem to matter since they were found under the same cabbage leaf. One of them jumped down into the pool with a white bucket and a rope attached to the handle. One of them red-headed sons-of-bitches scooped, a Marlboro red drooped out the side of his face, and the other Anderson tugged out the bucket and dumped it in a wheel barrel. They went on this way for quite some time.
"Hey, why don't you go pull your pud?" one of the Andersons snickered to the other one.
"I already did that," I shouted back at them from behind the relative safety of the fence. I hadn't been riding with a trucker and hanging out, during the day anyway, at a bar for nothing. "I was thinking about your sister the whole time." I knew this would piss them off because their sister Angie was the only good person to ever come out of their family even counting their old granny.
"Go ahead and take that picture then," one of them said.
"What picture?"
"The picture that lasts longer," the other one grimaced and started coughing from smoking too much.
"I'm going to learn to swim this year," I said, changing the subject with what I hoped was panache.
"You gotta be all of nine years old and still don't know how to swim! Now that's a damn shame. What are you? Some kind of pussy?"
They looked at each other and laughed and I swear it was like that Stephen King movie with the little girls on the trikes coming down the hall.
"I'm eleven," I informed them. "I know that's kind of old for not knowing how to swin, but Dennis Smith promised to teach me."
"That piece of shit," the ugliest Anderson said. "Why he'll drown you before he teaches you to swim."
"Damn straight," James said. "You listen to Jesse here. That tub of goo will kill you."
"I thought you were Jesse?" I said.
"Well," he said. "I might be." Then they started passing a roach between the two of them and making a big to-do about taking a hit off of it. Ever so often they'd stop what they were doing and take a snort off a little brown bottle of Rush as the traffic whizzed by on Highway 54. I knew Dennis wouldn't try to kill me, but then I started to wonder maybe they were right.
"Here," Jesse held out the brown bottle to me. "Try this kid. It will knock your dick in the dirt. It gots airplane glue beat all to hell."
I shrugged and took a big show-off hit off it. I thought I went to heaven for a minute and shook hands with Saint Peter. The next thing I know those freaks were laughing and handed me their joint. I was surprised to find myself down in the pool with them.
"How was Jesus?" They both started giggling again and coughing up lungs.
"Man, I got to get out of here." I struggled out of the pool, climbing the aluminum ladder, the sound of their laughter chasing me all the way up into the world again. "Next time I come by this pool I want to see it looking good and ready for business."
"Kiss my ass, kid."
I went down to the lounge called "The Attic" or "Attica" as some had started to call it lately. It was on the ground floor so I never knew why it was called that. Irony, I guess, but Tom didn't seem like the irony type if you know what I mean. He was part business man and part professional wrestler. He had a tattoo on his forearm that said in loopy prose, "I don't give a shit!" It was his favorite saying that might mean he just didn't want to hear what you were saying. The weekend bartender, Linda, offered me a Graveyard as soon as I hit the door. She was six feet tall with her oxblood, knee-high boots on but there was something about her I always thought was pretty special. She knew my drink for one, but bartenders always know that before they know your name. It was the afternoon so nobody gave three shits if I was in there playing Space Invaders or pinball. Besides learning to swim, I was going to beat Billy Boy's pinball record.
"Dennis here?"
"He's at AA today, Sweetie," Linda said. "He's trying to clean up his act."
"You're messing with me," I said.
"I'm just telling you what God knows," Linda winked.
Tugboat, another drunk at the bar, snorted at the idea Dennis could ever straighten up.
"I'm looking for him," I said. "He's going to teach me to swim this summer."
"Yeah?" she said. "I wouldn't count on it." The way she said it made me wonder about the disappointment of adults although I couldn't have put it like that exactly. Why did she stay with someone who couldn't get his act together? It didn't make sense to me until I got older and knew more about men and women first hand.
I sat on my stool knocking my glass back and forth between my hands as it hydroplaned on the bar like I'd seen Wiener do a thousand times when he was deep in thought. He spent every free minute he could find in the bar and now that he was laid off from the brick factory that was pretty much from open 'til close. Every time a pretty woman walked by the bar he dug at his crotch, but either didn't know he was doing it or just plain didn't care. He just looked like a wiener.
"This one's going to break a lot of hearts one day," Linda said over my shoulder. I turned to look and it was Mom dressed in jeans and an embarrasing multi-colored shirt that said in fat, bloopy letters THE ATTIC LOUNGE.
"Yep," she said. "Probably so. You know you ain't supposed to be in here."
"I'm just drinking this Graveyard Linda gave me," I said.
"I told you he had a huge crush on you," Mom sat down a round tray of clean glasses on the bar.
"Mom!" I said. I'd never said it out loud, but I guess it wasn't much of a secret.
A couple of truckers walked in and went straight for the shuffle board game against the wall. One of them whistled with his fingers at Linda to let her know they wanted two PBRs.
Linda had long chestnut hair and stood about six feet tall in her high heels. All the men loved her. Dennis was her boyfriend and he was about four inches shorter than her but he wasn't exactly a little guy. He liked to say her legs were so long they went clean up and made an ass of themselves. I'd never seen Dennis sober for extended periods of time. I wasn't sure how a guy who worked at a bar was supposed to kick the drinking habit. I knew it wasn't going to take this time either. He'd tried AA before, hypnotism, jogging, disco dancing, and even being a Born Again Jesus-loving Christian which lasted all of two weeks, but he told me one day that the reason nothing worked was that he just plain and simple loved drinking. At the same time, he had to make Linda happy so she wouldn't leave his fat ass. Dennis didn't want to choose between Linda and alcohol so he did both. Bear called him the Heartbreak Kid because everything he did turned to shit.
"Goddamn jerk," Dennis walked in. His blonde hair hit at about his shoulders and there was something kind of like a young lion about him that was just about to get his full mane. He had a lazy eye and again I wondered how it was Linda and him got together.
"What happened, baby?" Linda asked.
"I ran into that cock-knocker Bobby Ray Claymore at the Take-A-Break," he growled and sat down on the stool next to mine. "How you doing, Killer? Get any today?" He ruffled my hair. "I was just coming out here from AA. Bobby Ray's enough to start me drinking again."
"What did he want?" Linda asked.
"Guess."
"Shit," Linda whispered as she poured another draft for Tugboat.
Bobby Ray Claymore and Linda were married for seven years. I'd heard the story so many times before I could tell like it was one of my own. It was typical small town bullshit story. They were happy the first year or so, but then Bobby Ray started hitting the bottle hard, followed by hitting Linda harder . . . and he was even taller than her. He was a big dude like a professional wrestler. He had his own bail bond business. If one of his customers tried to skip out of town on him he'd go down to the Projects and pickup Boogie and together they'd go find this young Moses who made off for the promised land, throw him in the trunk of his Plymouth Fury III, drive the future Defendant back to Audrain county and throw him in the pokey to stand trial. Bobby Ray was a bad ass. Dennis was tough but he wasn't even in the same league by comparison. If Dennis was regular guy tough, Bobby Ray was horrorshow evil.
The light from the daylight banged through the doors of the lounge and blinded everyone for a second. It was none other than Bobby Ray and Boogie looking like pissed-off zombies out for bad brains. I saw Dennis spin around like he might go for a gun if he'd had one.
"Well, well, well . . ." Bobby Ray patted the bulge in his jacket under his left armpit like he had a little angry midget riding shotgun up there. Dennis jutted his jaw toward Bobby Ray who always looked bigger in person than I remembered him. Instead of saying anything else Bobby Ray took a seat by the pool table with Boogie. The two men talked quietly between themselves and Boogie smiling the whole time like he was starring in a commercial for Ultrabrite toothpaste. I could see a dark gothic shadow spreading over Dennis and his future headstone. They got up and left just like that after staring holes into the back of Dennis's head. When he got up to take a piss, and Linda was busy with Wiener, I swiped his pack of Kools and a green Bic lighter. I was becoming a regular clepto. I'd already stolen his shark's tooth necklace. I don't know why. It was really cool and he had left it out at the pool. I could never hope to be as cool as Dennis so I thought his shark tooth might give me some luck.
A few days past and I was at the pool by myself in the shallow end. I knew Dennis would show up because he was always working for Tom Kline just like my mom. Other guests, mostly mom types and their little kids, would come to the pool. Some of the kids had ear plugs or flippers and other pieces of diving gear even though they stayed in the shallow end. I waited until everyone had come and gone just shivering well into the evening hours. Mom appeared at the lip of the pool with a towel and a change of clothes.
"Why don't you dry off and put these on? It’s dark out here. You ain’t allowed to swim at night."
"I'm waiting for Dennis," I said. "He promised to teach me to swim."
It's not that I was a total idiot, but I knew somehow if someone was going to teach me it would be Dennis. I knew he had problems what with Linda and Bobby Ray and his drinking. He had been in and out of jail to for first one dumb thing and then another, but I considered him a good friend all the same.
"Come down to the kitchen and Harry Lee will fix you a tenderloin sandwich for Christ's sake," Mom stumbled a bit unsteadily back to the room.
I was in the pool for the next four days in a row. Dennis had disappeared. Bear even came back and asked me if I thought Dennis was Aquaman. Until one day he did show up in a pair of red swim trunks with white stripes going down the sides. He lit a Kool and drank an Olympia until he jumped in feet first without spilling a drop of beer. I could almost taste the menthol. He was big-boned and a likeable guy but he was known to take advantage of people. Since I didn't have any money or older sisters I didn't hold none of that against him. Besides Mom had loaned him money and he kind of thought of her as an older sister.
"What's up, Killer?" his cigarette flopping when he talked. He held up the line that separated the shallow from the deep end and stood there squinting at the blue smoke. "You ready to learn to swim today?" He was walking on the little ledge around the deep end.
"I've been trying," I said.
"Don't look so guilty," Dennis sucked hard on the Kool and then gave it an expert flick over the fence. "I had a pack of Kools that just up and disappeared. Would you believe it?"
"I don't know" I said. "It's just embarrassing not being able to swim yet."
"Don't sweat it."
"You hiding out from Bobby Ray and Boogie?"
"No," Dennis said. "Who the hell told you that? I ain't afraid of them two . . . but on the other hand I ain't looking for them either." He nodded at me. "You know what I'm saying?"
"I like the way you talk to me," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"Like I'm a grownup instead of a kid," I said. "I hate it when people talk to me like I'm a stupid kid."
"Well," he sipped his beer. "You're smarter than most people twice your age here at the ole Blue Star. Now, I'm going to teach you to swim. It's the easiest thing in the world."
"You going to hold onto me and dunk me like they all do?"
"Why would I want to touch your ugly ass?" he said. "I'm just going to tell you how to do it and let you swim or drown like my dad taught me. He took me fishing in his bass boat out on Missouri river by Jeff City one summer. When we got out to the middle of the river I could see the bridge and the capitol up on the bluffs. He made like we run out of gas and told me it was time to swim or die. Then, he picked my husky ass up by the scruff of the neck and threw me out in the river. Swim or drown, Dennis! SWIM OR DIE!"
"Bullshit," I said.
He pretended not to notice I said bullshit. "I started flailing around and went under the water and do you know what I saw?"
I shook my head.
"The biggest fucking catfish you ever seen," he said. "He was as big as a Volkswagon! He started talking to me. What are you doing down here? Why are you bothering me? Son of Adam, you belong up above the water and not down below. Just swim on my back and I will take your husky ass to safety."
"And then what happened?"
"Wrong question," Dennis said.
"What do you mean?" I said.
"I learned to swim," he laughed. "I'm right here in front of you so obviously I learned to swim. But what I never told anyone about was talking to that fucking catfish. It was really talking to me, you know?"
"Uh uh," I said. “Right.”
"It was the Devil talking to me!"
"You mean, Jesus," I said.
"Don't tell me what I mean," Dennis said. "It was the goddamn Devil. He turned himself into a giant catfsih and saved me so I could grow up and know some happiness and sadness in life before he royally fucked me over. The Devil is such a sick bastard."
The mimosa tree by the side of the pool caught my attention as a hot summer breeze shook it. It's weird pink flowers looking like something out of a science fiction movie. A cowbird was sitting in it like he was listening in on us and making that weird water dripping sound like they do.
Dennis told me to swim like a dog. He cupped his hands and told me to try it and, low and behold, he was right. I couldn't believe how easy it was. Dennis told me to try it on the deep end side. He said he wouldn't touch me or save me either because he didn't want to waste a good beer. So I kind of pushed off into the deep end and I swam across like Mark Spitz. Okay, so it was really just a dog paddle but I did it by myself. I doggy paddled over to Dennis and he splashed me in the face but I didn't let it bother me because I could save myself now.
"Good job, Killer," Dennis finished his beer and crushed it in his hand before tossing it toward the trash can against the chainlink fence. It clattered near the trash can. "You want to hear something funny?"
"What is it?"
"I really don't know how to swim," he said.
"What?" I flipped my hair back and the excess water flew from it.
"No shit," he said. "I've never been able to swim. I'm afraid of the water too, but I wanted to see you learn since it was eating you up so bad."
"What the hell? What if I'd gone under? You mean I would have drowned?"
"You might of," he said. "Yeah, I guess so." He laughed and hauled himself out of the water. It dripped off him like a waterfall when he got out. I was speechless, but at the same time it was funny. I'd learned how to swim from someone who didn't know the first thing about it. "I knew you could do it."
"How did you know?"
"I'm just telling you what God knows," he slipped his feet into flip flops and made off to his old Dodge pickup.
It was the last time I ever saw Dennis alive.
A couple of weeks later he was found floating in the Blue Star pool by an old couple who were staying overnight. My mom and aunt decided I needed Jesus and they sent me on a camping trip with the Royal Rangers at the Assemblies of God church so I was gone when it happened. We prayed away a retarded boy's deaf and dumb spirit and a bunch of them boys spoke in tongues. I’d never heard anything like it, but I wanted to learn more about the Holy Ghost. Maybe I could learn how to walk on water next! We built a big bonfire and the preacher stood on the embers of the fire as he preached to us at night. Us boys kept thinking he might catch on fire so we couldn’t help but pay attention to all of his talk about Jesus coming back in the sky just in the nick of time to save us from the fiery death of Revelation. I heard all about Dennis when I came back. He was just floating in the pool as dead as could be they said. Some said it was suicide, but Linda and the barflies in Attica thought Bobby Ray and Boogie just made it look like an accident. The cops didn't look into it because Dennis had a history of being on the bad side of the law. It was just like he said about the Devil coming back for him.
I snuck out of the room one night and sat down on a lounge chair looking into the black water. Nobody wanted to swim after what had happened and I couldn’t blame them either. The stars reflecting off the surface like a mirror for the universe. I wondered if maybe Dennis hadn't just gotten too tight one night and went to talking to that giant catfish about life and how it wasn’t always so perfect. Maybe he took the Devil's advice one too many times. I kept picturing him trying to learn to dog paddle in the deep end at midnight. The cowbirds making that dripping sound while he thrashed around. Him drowning and nobody hearing it over the loud music at the bar. Maybe we were alike and he had the same idea I’d had about slowing the world down underwater and breathing deep breaths of pure chlorine like holy water for the people who drove up and down Highway 54 looking for something they couldn’t quite name and never expecting to find the meanness that was just under the surface where you least expected it. I took out the pack of Kools and green Bic lighter I'd swiped from Dennis, smoked his last cigarette, and flicked the dead butt into the deep end. I figured it was the Devil called him home and I wondered if I wasn’t heading for the sort of fate. We were both afraid of the deep water and drawn to it at the same time.
THE NIGHT SWIMMER
by Daren Dean
So I was eleven years old, and still hadn't learned how to swim. Despite my terror of the water, swimming was all I could think about because I lived with my mom and her trucker boyfriend in the Blue Star Motel and there was a pool not more than twenty feet from our room. Mom said, it was so much more than a motel! She was right too. It was a restaurant on one end and had a bar in the back. People came and went at the Blue Star, eating, drinking, sleeping, and whatever—if you know what I mean. I was old enough to know about men and women, but what I really wanted to learn how to do was dive into the deep end of the pool, swim underwater, and open my eyes and see in the pure chlorine where the world would slow down and let me catch my breath as the saying goes. I know it might sound crazy, but I had this idea in my head that I would swim underwater at night for the first time and see the world in slow motion with the lights around the pool flickering off the water and somehow I would discover how to breathe down there and then I’d never have to hold my breath again.
The owner, Tom Kline, had even allowed us to move the generic-looking motel furniture out for heavy flea market furniture that didn't necessarily look any better, but it felt like our own. I thought it was a pretty sweet deal since I had a room all to myself. Mom worked at the Blue Star as a waitress, bartender in the lounge, and maid. She'd sign people in too when necessary, take their money when Rita was out nursing a hangover, and hand them the key on an orange diamond-shaped chain that said, if anything, "This place is not what you think it is, or on second thought ..."
I'd been a mostly silent witness as my mom left a trail of men across the Show Me State and out west too. She couldn't seem to hold onto a man and I began to wonder if it was some inability of hers to be head-over-heels about a man even after they'd made it. I wasn't like one of those little shit-for-brains kids who sat around with his thumb up his ass wondering if his mommy and daddy got divorced because of him. Hell, I knew it wasn't my goddamn fault. I couldn't even remember my mom and real dad being married, but there was a double-exposed picture of us sitting on a bright blue and red blanket with my mentally handicapped, half-sister, the picture as fractured as everything our family was soon to become. The world out of focus and nonsensical like time itself had dropped a hit of acid and gotten seriously baked.
I'd watch her and Bear with a sense of dread waiting for the big ass breakup, but just when it started to seem imminent Bear would have to haul a load of bricks or something to New York or Ohio for J.T. Harris Trucking. He'd take off in his blue Kenworth with his 8-tracks of Waylon Jennings, Easy Rider magazines, and a fresh supply of speed. Looking back on it now, him leaving on such a regular basis probably extended their relationship by months. He was wearing a pair of Wrangler jeans with his name stenciled on his belt, cowboy boots, a western-style shirt with snaps, and a floppy hillbilly hat when he hit the road that day. I waved and gave him the universal sign for Trucker, honk your horn and he obliged. I shot him the bird but he smiled because he knew I didn't mean it. Fuck you too, good buddy!
When the men came to clean out the pool and prepare it for the summer guests, I went out there to watch. I didn't know how yet, but this was the summer I was going to learn to swim if it killed me. I was excited and terrified by the prospect all at once. It was the twin Anderson brothers with red hair down to their asses that were "commissioned" (as Tom Kline liked to put it) to do the work like some kind of fucking horror show. Those feral Andersons reminded me of animals that ran out of the woods in front of your screeching tires on Route HH. They had pale, freckled hides, and even after they took their shirts off their pasty Alfred Hitchcock skin refused to burn.
It was hard to imagine the pool would ever look halfway decent. There was a foot of mud down there clogging the drain but it didn't deter the Andersons. And, yes, they had names beginning with the same letter of the alphabet. I don't why or what it is but a special brand of madness overtakes parents who are about to have twins and makes them name their twin boys Jesse and James Anderson. I didn't know which was which, but it didn't seem to matter since they were found under the same cabbage leaf. One of them jumped down into the pool with a white bucket and a rope attached to the handle. One of them red-headed sons-of-bitches scooped, a Marlboro red drooped out the side of his face, and the other Anderson tugged out the bucket and dumped it in a wheel barrel. They went on this way for quite some time.
"Hey, why don't you go pull your pud?" one of the Andersons snickered to the other one.
"I already did that," I shouted back at them from behind the relative safety of the fence. I hadn't been riding with a trucker and hanging out, during the day anyway, at a bar for nothing. "I was thinking about your sister the whole time." I knew this would piss them off because their sister Angie was the only good person to ever come out of their family even counting their old granny.
"Go ahead and take that picture then," one of them said.
"What picture?"
"The picture that lasts longer," the other one grimaced and started coughing from smoking too much.
"I'm going to learn to swim this year," I said, changing the subject with what I hoped was panache.
"You gotta be all of nine years old and still don't know how to swim! Now that's a damn shame. What are you? Some kind of pussy?"
They looked at each other and laughed and I swear it was like that Stephen King movie with the little girls on the trikes coming down the hall.
"I'm eleven," I informed them. "I know that's kind of old for not knowing how to swin, but Dennis Smith promised to teach me."
"That piece of shit," the ugliest Anderson said. "Why he'll drown you before he teaches you to swim."
"Damn straight," James said. "You listen to Jesse here. That tub of goo will kill you."
"I thought you were Jesse?" I said.
"Well," he said. "I might be." Then they started passing a roach between the two of them and making a big to-do about taking a hit off of it. Ever so often they'd stop what they were doing and take a snort off a little brown bottle of Rush as the traffic whizzed by on Highway 54. I knew Dennis wouldn't try to kill me, but then I started to wonder maybe they were right.
"Here," Jesse held out the brown bottle to me. "Try this kid. It will knock your dick in the dirt. It gots airplane glue beat all to hell."
I shrugged and took a big show-off hit off it. I thought I went to heaven for a minute and shook hands with Saint Peter. The next thing I know those freaks were laughing and handed me their joint. I was surprised to find myself down in the pool with them.
"How was Jesus?" They both started giggling again and coughing up lungs.
"Man, I got to get out of here." I struggled out of the pool, climbing the aluminum ladder, the sound of their laughter chasing me all the way up into the world again. "Next time I come by this pool I want to see it looking good and ready for business."
"Kiss my ass, kid."
I went down to the lounge called "The Attic" or "Attica" as some had started to call it lately. It was on the ground floor so I never knew why it was called that. Irony, I guess, but Tom didn't seem like the irony type if you know what I mean. He was part business man and part professional wrestler. He had a tattoo on his forearm that said in loopy prose, "I don't give a shit!" It was his favorite saying that might mean he just didn't want to hear what you were saying. The weekend bartender, Linda, offered me a Graveyard as soon as I hit the door. She was six feet tall with her oxblood, knee-high boots on but there was something about her I always thought was pretty special. She knew my drink for one, but bartenders always know that before they know your name. It was the afternoon so nobody gave three shits if I was in there playing Space Invaders or pinball. Besides learning to swim, I was going to beat Billy Boy's pinball record.
"Dennis here?"
"He's at AA today, Sweetie," Linda said. "He's trying to clean up his act."
"You're messing with me," I said.
"I'm just telling you what God knows," Linda winked.
Tugboat, another drunk at the bar, snorted at the idea Dennis could ever straighten up.
"I'm looking for him," I said. "He's going to teach me to swim this summer."
"Yeah?" she said. "I wouldn't count on it." The way she said it made me wonder about the disappointment of adults although I couldn't have put it like that exactly. Why did she stay with someone who couldn't get his act together? It didn't make sense to me until I got older and knew more about men and women first hand.
I sat on my stool knocking my glass back and forth between my hands as it hydroplaned on the bar like I'd seen Wiener do a thousand times when he was deep in thought. He spent every free minute he could find in the bar and now that he was laid off from the brick factory that was pretty much from open 'til close. Every time a pretty woman walked by the bar he dug at his crotch, but either didn't know he was doing it or just plain didn't care. He just looked like a wiener.
"This one's going to break a lot of hearts one day," Linda said over my shoulder. I turned to look and it was Mom dressed in jeans and an embarrasing multi-colored shirt that said in fat, bloopy letters THE ATTIC LOUNGE.
"Yep," she said. "Probably so. You know you ain't supposed to be in here."
"I'm just drinking this Graveyard Linda gave me," I said.
"I told you he had a huge crush on you," Mom sat down a round tray of clean glasses on the bar.
"Mom!" I said. I'd never said it out loud, but I guess it wasn't much of a secret.
A couple of truckers walked in and went straight for the shuffle board game against the wall. One of them whistled with his fingers at Linda to let her know they wanted two PBRs.
Linda had long chestnut hair and stood about six feet tall in her high heels. All the men loved her. Dennis was her boyfriend and he was about four inches shorter than her but he wasn't exactly a little guy. He liked to say her legs were so long they went clean up and made an ass of themselves. I'd never seen Dennis sober for extended periods of time. I wasn't sure how a guy who worked at a bar was supposed to kick the drinking habit. I knew it wasn't going to take this time either. He'd tried AA before, hypnotism, jogging, disco dancing, and even being a Born Again Jesus-loving Christian which lasted all of two weeks, but he told me one day that the reason nothing worked was that he just plain and simple loved drinking. At the same time, he had to make Linda happy so she wouldn't leave his fat ass. Dennis didn't want to choose between Linda and alcohol so he did both. Bear called him the Heartbreak Kid because everything he did turned to shit.
"Goddamn jerk," Dennis walked in. His blonde hair hit at about his shoulders and there was something kind of like a young lion about him that was just about to get his full mane. He had a lazy eye and again I wondered how it was Linda and him got together.
"What happened, baby?" Linda asked.
"I ran into that cock-knocker Bobby Ray Claymore at the Take-A-Break," he growled and sat down on the stool next to mine. "How you doing, Killer? Get any today?" He ruffled my hair. "I was just coming out here from AA. Bobby Ray's enough to start me drinking again."
"What did he want?" Linda asked.
"Guess."
"Shit," Linda whispered as she poured another draft for Tugboat.
Bobby Ray Claymore and Linda were married for seven years. I'd heard the story so many times before I could tell like it was one of my own. It was typical small town bullshit story. They were happy the first year or so, but then Bobby Ray started hitting the bottle hard, followed by hitting Linda harder . . . and he was even taller than her. He was a big dude like a professional wrestler. He had his own bail bond business. If one of his customers tried to skip out of town on him he'd go down to the Projects and pickup Boogie and together they'd go find this young Moses who made off for the promised land, throw him in the trunk of his Plymouth Fury III, drive the future Defendant back to Audrain county and throw him in the pokey to stand trial. Bobby Ray was a bad ass. Dennis was tough but he wasn't even in the same league by comparison. If Dennis was regular guy tough, Bobby Ray was horrorshow evil.
The light from the daylight banged through the doors of the lounge and blinded everyone for a second. It was none other than Bobby Ray and Boogie looking like pissed-off zombies out for bad brains. I saw Dennis spin around like he might go for a gun if he'd had one.
"Well, well, well . . ." Bobby Ray patted the bulge in his jacket under his left armpit like he had a little angry midget riding shotgun up there. Dennis jutted his jaw toward Bobby Ray who always looked bigger in person than I remembered him. Instead of saying anything else Bobby Ray took a seat by the pool table with Boogie. The two men talked quietly between themselves and Boogie smiling the whole time like he was starring in a commercial for Ultrabrite toothpaste. I could see a dark gothic shadow spreading over Dennis and his future headstone. They got up and left just like that after staring holes into the back of Dennis's head. When he got up to take a piss, and Linda was busy with Wiener, I swiped his pack of Kools and a green Bic lighter. I was becoming a regular clepto. I'd already stolen his shark's tooth necklace. I don't know why. It was really cool and he had left it out at the pool. I could never hope to be as cool as Dennis so I thought his shark tooth might give me some luck.
A few days past and I was at the pool by myself in the shallow end. I knew Dennis would show up because he was always working for Tom Kline just like my mom. Other guests, mostly mom types and their little kids, would come to the pool. Some of the kids had ear plugs or flippers and other pieces of diving gear even though they stayed in the shallow end. I waited until everyone had come and gone just shivering well into the evening hours. Mom appeared at the lip of the pool with a towel and a change of clothes.
"Why don't you dry off and put these on? It’s dark out here. You ain’t allowed to swim at night."
"I'm waiting for Dennis," I said. "He promised to teach me to swim."
It's not that I was a total idiot, but I knew somehow if someone was going to teach me it would be Dennis. I knew he had problems what with Linda and Bobby Ray and his drinking. He had been in and out of jail to for first one dumb thing and then another, but I considered him a good friend all the same.
"Come down to the kitchen and Harry Lee will fix you a tenderloin sandwich for Christ's sake," Mom stumbled a bit unsteadily back to the room.
I was in the pool for the next four days in a row. Dennis had disappeared. Bear even came back and asked me if I thought Dennis was Aquaman. Until one day he did show up in a pair of red swim trunks with white stripes going down the sides. He lit a Kool and drank an Olympia until he jumped in feet first without spilling a drop of beer. I could almost taste the menthol. He was big-boned and a likeable guy but he was known to take advantage of people. Since I didn't have any money or older sisters I didn't hold none of that against him. Besides Mom had loaned him money and he kind of thought of her as an older sister.
"What's up, Killer?" his cigarette flopping when he talked. He held up the line that separated the shallow from the deep end and stood there squinting at the blue smoke. "You ready to learn to swim today?" He was walking on the little ledge around the deep end.
"I've been trying," I said.
"Don't look so guilty," Dennis sucked hard on the Kool and then gave it an expert flick over the fence. "I had a pack of Kools that just up and disappeared. Would you believe it?"
"I don't know" I said. "It's just embarrassing not being able to swim yet."
"Don't sweat it."
"You hiding out from Bobby Ray and Boogie?"
"No," Dennis said. "Who the hell told you that? I ain't afraid of them two . . . but on the other hand I ain't looking for them either." He nodded at me. "You know what I'm saying?"
"I like the way you talk to me," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"Like I'm a grownup instead of a kid," I said. "I hate it when people talk to me like I'm a stupid kid."
"Well," he sipped his beer. "You're smarter than most people twice your age here at the ole Blue Star. Now, I'm going to teach you to swim. It's the easiest thing in the world."
"You going to hold onto me and dunk me like they all do?"
"Why would I want to touch your ugly ass?" he said. "I'm just going to tell you how to do it and let you swim or drown like my dad taught me. He took me fishing in his bass boat out on Missouri river by Jeff City one summer. When we got out to the middle of the river I could see the bridge and the capitol up on the bluffs. He made like we run out of gas and told me it was time to swim or die. Then, he picked my husky ass up by the scruff of the neck and threw me out in the river. Swim or drown, Dennis! SWIM OR DIE!"
"Bullshit," I said.
He pretended not to notice I said bullshit. "I started flailing around and went under the water and do you know what I saw?"
I shook my head.
"The biggest fucking catfish you ever seen," he said. "He was as big as a Volkswagon! He started talking to me. What are you doing down here? Why are you bothering me? Son of Adam, you belong up above the water and not down below. Just swim on my back and I will take your husky ass to safety."
"And then what happened?"
"Wrong question," Dennis said.
"What do you mean?" I said.
"I learned to swim," he laughed. "I'm right here in front of you so obviously I learned to swim. But what I never told anyone about was talking to that fucking catfish. It was really talking to me, you know?"
"Uh uh," I said. “Right.”
"It was the Devil talking to me!"
"You mean, Jesus," I said.
"Don't tell me what I mean," Dennis said. "It was the goddamn Devil. He turned himself into a giant catfsih and saved me so I could grow up and know some happiness and sadness in life before he royally fucked me over. The Devil is such a sick bastard."
The mimosa tree by the side of the pool caught my attention as a hot summer breeze shook it. It's weird pink flowers looking like something out of a science fiction movie. A cowbird was sitting in it like he was listening in on us and making that weird water dripping sound like they do.
Dennis told me to swim like a dog. He cupped his hands and told me to try it and, low and behold, he was right. I couldn't believe how easy it was. Dennis told me to try it on the deep end side. He said he wouldn't touch me or save me either because he didn't want to waste a good beer. So I kind of pushed off into the deep end and I swam across like Mark Spitz. Okay, so it was really just a dog paddle but I did it by myself. I doggy paddled over to Dennis and he splashed me in the face but I didn't let it bother me because I could save myself now.
"Good job, Killer," Dennis finished his beer and crushed it in his hand before tossing it toward the trash can against the chainlink fence. It clattered near the trash can. "You want to hear something funny?"
"What is it?"
"I really don't know how to swim," he said.
"What?" I flipped my hair back and the excess water flew from it.
"No shit," he said. "I've never been able to swim. I'm afraid of the water too, but I wanted to see you learn since it was eating you up so bad."
"What the hell? What if I'd gone under? You mean I would have drowned?"
"You might of," he said. "Yeah, I guess so." He laughed and hauled himself out of the water. It dripped off him like a waterfall when he got out. I was speechless, but at the same time it was funny. I'd learned how to swim from someone who didn't know the first thing about it. "I knew you could do it."
"How did you know?"
"I'm just telling you what God knows," he slipped his feet into flip flops and made off to his old Dodge pickup.
It was the last time I ever saw Dennis alive.
A couple of weeks later he was found floating in the Blue Star pool by an old couple who were staying overnight. My mom and aunt decided I needed Jesus and they sent me on a camping trip with the Royal Rangers at the Assemblies of God church so I was gone when it happened. We prayed away a retarded boy's deaf and dumb spirit and a bunch of them boys spoke in tongues. I’d never heard anything like it, but I wanted to learn more about the Holy Ghost. Maybe I could learn how to walk on water next! We built a big bonfire and the preacher stood on the embers of the fire as he preached to us at night. Us boys kept thinking he might catch on fire so we couldn’t help but pay attention to all of his talk about Jesus coming back in the sky just in the nick of time to save us from the fiery death of Revelation. I heard all about Dennis when I came back. He was just floating in the pool as dead as could be they said. Some said it was suicide, but Linda and the barflies in Attica thought Bobby Ray and Boogie just made it look like an accident. The cops didn't look into it because Dennis had a history of being on the bad side of the law. It was just like he said about the Devil coming back for him.
I snuck out of the room one night and sat down on a lounge chair looking into the black water. Nobody wanted to swim after what had happened and I couldn’t blame them either. The stars reflecting off the surface like a mirror for the universe. I wondered if maybe Dennis hadn't just gotten too tight one night and went to talking to that giant catfish about life and how it wasn’t always so perfect. Maybe he took the Devil's advice one too many times. I kept picturing him trying to learn to dog paddle in the deep end at midnight. The cowbirds making that dripping sound while he thrashed around. Him drowning and nobody hearing it over the loud music at the bar. Maybe we were alike and he had the same idea I’d had about slowing the world down underwater and breathing deep breaths of pure chlorine like holy water for the people who drove up and down Highway 54 looking for something they couldn’t quite name and never expecting to find the meanness that was just under the surface where you least expected it. I took out the pack of Kools and green Bic lighter I'd swiped from Dennis, smoked his last cigarette, and flicked the dead butt into the deep end. I figured it was the Devil called him home and I wondered if I wasn’t heading for the sort of fate. We were both afraid of the deep water and drawn to it at the same time.
excerpted from INA-BABY, a Love Story in Reverse by BENJAMIN DREVLOW, out now from Cowboy Jamboree Press
SOMETIMES MY BABY LOVES ME SO HARD
Back in the early years, the years before it stopped being the early years, my baby, she’d come home two, three times a week drunk and horny for tussle. She’d toss my sleeping ass out of bed. What I mean is my baby’d hoist the mattress up like a human forklift (she’s got some killer thighs, boy) until—me, already on the edge—I’d take a tumble. A rude fucking awakening is what I’m saying.
This one night I end up catch my head on the corner of the nightstand on the way down. And then I’m spritzing blood like shook-up champagne and sprawled out on the floor, gushing all over my grandma’s afghan and my mother’s quilt. Trying to disentangle myself from all that while cursing my lungs out: Owie-Jesus-Christ-What-the-Fuck, Baby?
But there she goes—letting loose those fists of hers, pounding and pounding on my afghan head like she’s drumming out the intro to Eye of the Tiger.
Wake up, asshole. I love you!
One more knuckle rap to my afghan mouth—leaving me with a nice little split lip to throw in with the shiner, and it’s, I’m home, motherfucker. I. Told. You. To. Wakethefuckup!
My baby gets to loving me sometimes like that and she can’t even help herself. There ain’t much else for me to do but tuck in my elbows, curl up, and ride out my ass whooping like a man. Or until she turns on herself.
Or sometimes, I’ll be so fucking tired that I’ll end up bucking her off my back without knowing what I’m doing. Toss off the covers. And there I am pouncing on her before she has time to land one more ever-loving right hook to the back of my head. Honestly, things are all kind of fuzzy and fucked up, me still shaking off sleep spots and all the while pinning her flailing wrists and torso to the carpet. What am I even doing? I’m thinking. What’s going through my goddamn mind?
This isn’t going to end well. That’s what’s going through my goddamn mind. Not for her, what I’m saying. It’s not going to end well for me, what I’m trying to say.
Because, shit, I’m mostly a pussy and a crybaby when it comes right down to things. Man or woman—I’ve never swung on anybody in my entire life. Hell, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to an S & M fantasy, and all this tussling under the covers ain’t even sexual.
But it is.
Get off me, she yells between bucking and squirming. Like a big sea swordfish you and about three paid fishing pros managed to wrestle onto the boat. But she ain’t quite ready to be your dinner yet.
She hawks up snot and saliva all over my face, which I must admit, the taste of whiskey and tobacco along with the rubbing of her hips struggling to buck free this all tickles my loins in ways I’m not proud to admit to. A pang, an itch you try your best not to itch, but you can’t not itch it. I shudder for a second, I take a breath, and try to wake myself up, shake the thought from my head. But it won’t shake and it doesn’t make me stop or let go of her wrists.
It’s her head-butt that makes me let go. Get the fuck off me, she hollers and spits in my face once more for good measure.
Then it’s her turn.
You want me? she says and starts slapping her face with both palms of her hands. I’m yours.
Give her a little booze and get her riled up—my baby can do one heck of a Mike Tyson impersonation.
I try to tell her to quit messing around. To go sleep it off before she wakes up everybody in the neighborhood. But she’s in it to stay.
Stop yelling at me, she says, and the palm slaps turn to clenched fists. Somebody’s gonna call the cops and I’m gonna start in on the crying.
Going after her own face like Iron Mike on the speed bag—one dull girlie smack after another: Thwap…Thwap…Thwap….
You wanna kill yourself, now? she asks me and stops for a second to shake it off. How about now? Pow! Right uppercut to the kisser—mine this time, not hers.
Whew boy, I’ll tell you this much—thick, dark tufts of hair tossed all over her face, fists a flailing, and still time to throw one my way. This is why I love my baby—how she goes straight for the kill. No dicking around with petty youdon’tlovemes. No IhateyouIhateyous. No jabs, no hooks. Nothing but the haymakers, windmills, and uppercuts.
How about now? she asks, almost snarling, and grabs a stolen restaurant fork out of her purse and starts in on puncturing her inner thigh.
Goddamn her thighs! Like Goodyears—over inflated by a minimum 10 psi.
But that’s my cue, and now it’s my turn to dance.
I grab her giant red purse from off the carpet next to her and make a big show of dumping it out high in the air for her to see like I’m six years old again and fittin to build me my Lego-Land masterpiece. And through the small pile of change, tampons, lighters, cigarettes, and girlie pills, I find just what I’m looking for. Aha! I whip out that box cutter she stole from me last month and hold it up in front of my face (my light-saber!). Click, click, click goes the box cutter. Flash my pearly whites just a bit and let my eyes go cross in the dark reflection off the blade.
Ha! I can play this little game, too! I’m not even bothering with the wrists. I’m going straight for the brachial—like a pro. I’m up in my armpit and I’m sawing me some skin and bone. I don’t even flinch when her fork comes zinging past, an inch away from my nose, and embeds in the drywall behind me—doinggg! She could whip out a can of gasoline and a zippo for all I care. I’m in the zone, my blood’s a flowin’ and I’m a goin to the bone.
Except she doesn’t—doesn’t even pull out my pills or my noose. Not her style. Just body blows and head shots and the occasional foreign object—nothing illegal or lethal. And now she’s given up on that, too. She just stops it all. With a small whimper, she throws in the towel. Almost a whisper, she says, No… no… stop.
And because I’m always a sucker for my baby, I hesitate. I look down at the blood dripping from the inside of my arm onto my grandma’s afghan at my feet. Then up—I see her body go limp and in slow-mo, take a dive face first onto the mattress now lying on the floor.
What a woman, this one.
There she lies, my baby, just a crying her muffled cries, nearly inaudible into the mattress, saying over and over, It’s over, you win. It’s over, you win.
How do two people who love each other like crazy end up here? Well, shit, it happens the way it always happens.
My Ina-Baby, she’s fresh out of a long-term relationship, dumped him to come to school to learn to write with sad bastards like me. Then one day before you know it she’s sitting on the far end of the bench seat of my Bronco and she’s pouring all my SURGE! out the window—glug, glug, glug!—making a big old puddle of things out in the parking garage.
Why so sad, silly drunken bear? she wants to know.
I want to tell her my brother killed himself when I was kid. I burned my old man’s house down after that. I was trying to keep warm and whacking off all night to nudie mags, yadda yadda yadda. Cassic sad bastard story. You know the old country song, surely everybody knows that goddamn chorus by now.
But I don’t say any of that.
You just dumped out the last of my will to live, I say.
To which this one, she responds in kind—takes me by the hand, kisses each finger at the knuckle, plays the snake charmer with each bitten hangnail and bloodied cuticle on each swollen and infected finger tip, then smiles a vicious smile. I don’t want to be your mother, your father, your brother, your big sister. I’m not here to save you.
She puts both hands around my ears and pulls my face in for a hard kiss. But instead she goes straight for the lip of my left ear, clamps down on the tip for all she’s got, her chompers sharp and honed. She rips and pulls like a twenty-pound Beagle on a rubber Frisbee, then let’s out a grrrrrr. Tearing skin, then flesh.
She’s a powerful one, my baby.
She snarls once more, naughty and coy. Then it’s one more tug and one more rip, and there it goes—what feels like my entire ear—out of her mouth and out through the passenger window she hawks it—petooey, bleck, goo!—and there it splats out onto parking garage concrete, along with the puddle of SURGE!, every car freshener I’ve ever owned, and any other woman I’ve ever thought about loving. Any thought of going back to the miserable life I’ve lived til now. Everything I lived for in my Bronco—until this evening, this love-fiend beagle from hell.
Do what you want to your wrists and throat… she says, licking the blood from off my ear onto her index finger and then painting the blood on my arm and neck.
The same goes for your brain stem and frontal lobe…, she says. My path to suicide now anointed with my own blood.
Finally, she reaches out and snatches me by the nape of my neck like she’s about to scold me, her little puppy. I don’t want your love, she says, and kisses my bloody ear. I just want to love you.
And there you have it—the last drips of my bachelor life recycled down my tongue, tonsils, and throat. Dripping to the pit of my writhing, rumbling, bumbling, stumbling stomach, until eventually some months later, this hot young thing, now mine, passes out on that mattress still lying on the floor and snores her snotty, muffled snores the rest of the night until she wakes early the next morning to ask where all the blood came from, why my head’s pounding, and what on earth did you do to yourself this time?
This is where it begins.
SOMETIMES MY BABY LOVES ME SO HARD
Back in the early years, the years before it stopped being the early years, my baby, she’d come home two, three times a week drunk and horny for tussle. She’d toss my sleeping ass out of bed. What I mean is my baby’d hoist the mattress up like a human forklift (she’s got some killer thighs, boy) until—me, already on the edge—I’d take a tumble. A rude fucking awakening is what I’m saying.
This one night I end up catch my head on the corner of the nightstand on the way down. And then I’m spritzing blood like shook-up champagne and sprawled out on the floor, gushing all over my grandma’s afghan and my mother’s quilt. Trying to disentangle myself from all that while cursing my lungs out: Owie-Jesus-Christ-What-the-Fuck, Baby?
But there she goes—letting loose those fists of hers, pounding and pounding on my afghan head like she’s drumming out the intro to Eye of the Tiger.
Wake up, asshole. I love you!
One more knuckle rap to my afghan mouth—leaving me with a nice little split lip to throw in with the shiner, and it’s, I’m home, motherfucker. I. Told. You. To. Wakethefuckup!
My baby gets to loving me sometimes like that and she can’t even help herself. There ain’t much else for me to do but tuck in my elbows, curl up, and ride out my ass whooping like a man. Or until she turns on herself.
Or sometimes, I’ll be so fucking tired that I’ll end up bucking her off my back without knowing what I’m doing. Toss off the covers. And there I am pouncing on her before she has time to land one more ever-loving right hook to the back of my head. Honestly, things are all kind of fuzzy and fucked up, me still shaking off sleep spots and all the while pinning her flailing wrists and torso to the carpet. What am I even doing? I’m thinking. What’s going through my goddamn mind?
This isn’t going to end well. That’s what’s going through my goddamn mind. Not for her, what I’m saying. It’s not going to end well for me, what I’m trying to say.
Because, shit, I’m mostly a pussy and a crybaby when it comes right down to things. Man or woman—I’ve never swung on anybody in my entire life. Hell, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to an S & M fantasy, and all this tussling under the covers ain’t even sexual.
But it is.
Get off me, she yells between bucking and squirming. Like a big sea swordfish you and about three paid fishing pros managed to wrestle onto the boat. But she ain’t quite ready to be your dinner yet.
She hawks up snot and saliva all over my face, which I must admit, the taste of whiskey and tobacco along with the rubbing of her hips struggling to buck free this all tickles my loins in ways I’m not proud to admit to. A pang, an itch you try your best not to itch, but you can’t not itch it. I shudder for a second, I take a breath, and try to wake myself up, shake the thought from my head. But it won’t shake and it doesn’t make me stop or let go of her wrists.
It’s her head-butt that makes me let go. Get the fuck off me, she hollers and spits in my face once more for good measure.
Then it’s her turn.
You want me? she says and starts slapping her face with both palms of her hands. I’m yours.
Give her a little booze and get her riled up—my baby can do one heck of a Mike Tyson impersonation.
I try to tell her to quit messing around. To go sleep it off before she wakes up everybody in the neighborhood. But she’s in it to stay.
Stop yelling at me, she says, and the palm slaps turn to clenched fists. Somebody’s gonna call the cops and I’m gonna start in on the crying.
Going after her own face like Iron Mike on the speed bag—one dull girlie smack after another: Thwap…Thwap…Thwap….
You wanna kill yourself, now? she asks me and stops for a second to shake it off. How about now? Pow! Right uppercut to the kisser—mine this time, not hers.
Whew boy, I’ll tell you this much—thick, dark tufts of hair tossed all over her face, fists a flailing, and still time to throw one my way. This is why I love my baby—how she goes straight for the kill. No dicking around with petty youdon’tlovemes. No IhateyouIhateyous. No jabs, no hooks. Nothing but the haymakers, windmills, and uppercuts.
How about now? she asks, almost snarling, and grabs a stolen restaurant fork out of her purse and starts in on puncturing her inner thigh.
Goddamn her thighs! Like Goodyears—over inflated by a minimum 10 psi.
But that’s my cue, and now it’s my turn to dance.
I grab her giant red purse from off the carpet next to her and make a big show of dumping it out high in the air for her to see like I’m six years old again and fittin to build me my Lego-Land masterpiece. And through the small pile of change, tampons, lighters, cigarettes, and girlie pills, I find just what I’m looking for. Aha! I whip out that box cutter she stole from me last month and hold it up in front of my face (my light-saber!). Click, click, click goes the box cutter. Flash my pearly whites just a bit and let my eyes go cross in the dark reflection off the blade.
Ha! I can play this little game, too! I’m not even bothering with the wrists. I’m going straight for the brachial—like a pro. I’m up in my armpit and I’m sawing me some skin and bone. I don’t even flinch when her fork comes zinging past, an inch away from my nose, and embeds in the drywall behind me—doinggg! She could whip out a can of gasoline and a zippo for all I care. I’m in the zone, my blood’s a flowin’ and I’m a goin to the bone.
Except she doesn’t—doesn’t even pull out my pills or my noose. Not her style. Just body blows and head shots and the occasional foreign object—nothing illegal or lethal. And now she’s given up on that, too. She just stops it all. With a small whimper, she throws in the towel. Almost a whisper, she says, No… no… stop.
And because I’m always a sucker for my baby, I hesitate. I look down at the blood dripping from the inside of my arm onto my grandma’s afghan at my feet. Then up—I see her body go limp and in slow-mo, take a dive face first onto the mattress now lying on the floor.
What a woman, this one.
There she lies, my baby, just a crying her muffled cries, nearly inaudible into the mattress, saying over and over, It’s over, you win. It’s over, you win.
How do two people who love each other like crazy end up here? Well, shit, it happens the way it always happens.
My Ina-Baby, she’s fresh out of a long-term relationship, dumped him to come to school to learn to write with sad bastards like me. Then one day before you know it she’s sitting on the far end of the bench seat of my Bronco and she’s pouring all my SURGE! out the window—glug, glug, glug!—making a big old puddle of things out in the parking garage.
Why so sad, silly drunken bear? she wants to know.
I want to tell her my brother killed himself when I was kid. I burned my old man’s house down after that. I was trying to keep warm and whacking off all night to nudie mags, yadda yadda yadda. Cassic sad bastard story. You know the old country song, surely everybody knows that goddamn chorus by now.
But I don’t say any of that.
You just dumped out the last of my will to live, I say.
To which this one, she responds in kind—takes me by the hand, kisses each finger at the knuckle, plays the snake charmer with each bitten hangnail and bloodied cuticle on each swollen and infected finger tip, then smiles a vicious smile. I don’t want to be your mother, your father, your brother, your big sister. I’m not here to save you.
She puts both hands around my ears and pulls my face in for a hard kiss. But instead she goes straight for the lip of my left ear, clamps down on the tip for all she’s got, her chompers sharp and honed. She rips and pulls like a twenty-pound Beagle on a rubber Frisbee, then let’s out a grrrrrr. Tearing skin, then flesh.
She’s a powerful one, my baby.
She snarls once more, naughty and coy. Then it’s one more tug and one more rip, and there it goes—what feels like my entire ear—out of her mouth and out through the passenger window she hawks it—petooey, bleck, goo!—and there it splats out onto parking garage concrete, along with the puddle of SURGE!, every car freshener I’ve ever owned, and any other woman I’ve ever thought about loving. Any thought of going back to the miserable life I’ve lived til now. Everything I lived for in my Bronco—until this evening, this love-fiend beagle from hell.
Do what you want to your wrists and throat… she says, licking the blood from off my ear onto her index finger and then painting the blood on my arm and neck.
The same goes for your brain stem and frontal lobe…, she says. My path to suicide now anointed with my own blood.
Finally, she reaches out and snatches me by the nape of my neck like she’s about to scold me, her little puppy. I don’t want your love, she says, and kisses my bloody ear. I just want to love you.
And there you have it—the last drips of my bachelor life recycled down my tongue, tonsils, and throat. Dripping to the pit of my writhing, rumbling, bumbling, stumbling stomach, until eventually some months later, this hot young thing, now mine, passes out on that mattress still lying on the floor and snores her snotty, muffled snores the rest of the night until she wakes early the next morning to ask where all the blood came from, why my head’s pounding, and what on earth did you do to yourself this time?
This is where it begins.
excerpted from Adam Van Winkle's Hardway Juice, a new novella from CJ Press! Out Now!
About the book: A local wrestling legend comes home as the independent circuit swings through a small Texas town one Saturday night in the Fall of 1997 in this novella. Paul wants to go to the matches if he can get past his drunk stepdad. Lisa wants to leave town altogether but her dad is dying to take her to the show. A week of anxiety and hope and despair and debauchery follows the teens, townsfolk, wrestlers and all to the high school gymnasium where worlds collide and there can only be blood.
“Gonna go to see the wrestling little queer says.” Paul’s stepdad was drunk and it wasn’t the watery-eyed stare into space beer drunk. It was the narrowed-pupil snake eyes whiskey drunk. When he picked on Paul the most. “Bet you never tried to put a move on that pretty little brunette.” He was talking about Lisa.
Paul’s cheeks were hot but he just couldn’t muster anything to say.
Fact was Lisa had asked him to kiss her. He had felt under her shirt when she placed his hands there. But just that once. When he tried to kiss Lisa the next day she stopped him. And she never asked him to again. Never mentioned it again. Paul felt that she liked it when they had, but she didn’t seem to want anymore.
Paul fantasized about it all the time. Masturbated to it regular. But he’d never say any of that to his stepdad. It wouldn’t shut him up and it might get Lisa in trouble if that prick told her dad.
“S’what I thought,” Paul’s stepdad said when Paul made no reply, and left it there.
In his room Paul turns on the TV. It was Monday and that meant wrestling on TV tonight. He could lose himself in some new prime time action.
When he wasn’t watching the weekly wrestling shows, he’d cycle through his payperview tapes. He’d bought them for ninety-nine cents a piece from the used rentals bin at All-Star Video Rental when he stayed with his dad the summer before. When he brought them home, Paul bought a used VCR from the church yard sale, the same place he bought his wood-consoled TV the year before. They’d been on constant loop since.
He knew all the matches. All the moves. He’d watch the tapes so much he started to see when the wrestlers talked to each other, working out moves during the match. He could see when wrestlers feigned good combat by rubbing their foreheads against taped fingers, razor blades hidden in the tape. He watched so much he was becoming a master of the craft, he imagined.
Tonight he could maybe wait for his stepdad to pass out and sneak out to the gas station to visit his mom for free food.
She’d give him some anytime she worked. Pizza pockets, burritos, fried potatoes, stuffed jalapeños—she could fry any of ‘em up for Paul when she worked. Problem was, if his stepdad knew what he was doing he’d stop Paul. Tell him not to go bothering his mama at work. She had money to make and didn’t need to feed Paul’s fat ass while she was doing it, he’d say. At least that was his reaction the first time he found out.
Paul knew his mom didn’t mind, but he didn’t like to push stuff with his stepdad, and if he pushed on this his mom might get in trouble too.
Paul knew he could wait his stepdad out. He never really bothered Paul when Paul stayed in his room watching TV, watching wrestling. Paul’s stepdad only worked three days a week at the most, doing part time construction. Days like this when he didn’t work, he started drinking in the morning. He’d be passed out by the time the Monday night show was over. Then Paul could ride his bike up the road to the gas station. Visit with his mom a little bit, and bring a couple of pizza pockets back to his room to rewatch Wrestlemania VII. It’d be a nice little night, and, on Saturday he’d get to see the Snake live.
Life was okay when Paul could think like this, just focus on his pleasure, things that made him feel happy like pizza pockets and wrestling, look past all the moments in between.
About the book: A local wrestling legend comes home as the independent circuit swings through a small Texas town one Saturday night in the Fall of 1997 in this novella. Paul wants to go to the matches if he can get past his drunk stepdad. Lisa wants to leave town altogether but her dad is dying to take her to the show. A week of anxiety and hope and despair and debauchery follows the teens, townsfolk, wrestlers and all to the high school gymnasium where worlds collide and there can only be blood.
“Gonna go to see the wrestling little queer says.” Paul’s stepdad was drunk and it wasn’t the watery-eyed stare into space beer drunk. It was the narrowed-pupil snake eyes whiskey drunk. When he picked on Paul the most. “Bet you never tried to put a move on that pretty little brunette.” He was talking about Lisa.
Paul’s cheeks were hot but he just couldn’t muster anything to say.
Fact was Lisa had asked him to kiss her. He had felt under her shirt when she placed his hands there. But just that once. When he tried to kiss Lisa the next day she stopped him. And she never asked him to again. Never mentioned it again. Paul felt that she liked it when they had, but she didn’t seem to want anymore.
Paul fantasized about it all the time. Masturbated to it regular. But he’d never say any of that to his stepdad. It wouldn’t shut him up and it might get Lisa in trouble if that prick told her dad.
“S’what I thought,” Paul’s stepdad said when Paul made no reply, and left it there.
In his room Paul turns on the TV. It was Monday and that meant wrestling on TV tonight. He could lose himself in some new prime time action.
When he wasn’t watching the weekly wrestling shows, he’d cycle through his payperview tapes. He’d bought them for ninety-nine cents a piece from the used rentals bin at All-Star Video Rental when he stayed with his dad the summer before. When he brought them home, Paul bought a used VCR from the church yard sale, the same place he bought his wood-consoled TV the year before. They’d been on constant loop since.
He knew all the matches. All the moves. He’d watch the tapes so much he started to see when the wrestlers talked to each other, working out moves during the match. He could see when wrestlers feigned good combat by rubbing their foreheads against taped fingers, razor blades hidden in the tape. He watched so much he was becoming a master of the craft, he imagined.
Tonight he could maybe wait for his stepdad to pass out and sneak out to the gas station to visit his mom for free food.
She’d give him some anytime she worked. Pizza pockets, burritos, fried potatoes, stuffed jalapeños—she could fry any of ‘em up for Paul when she worked. Problem was, if his stepdad knew what he was doing he’d stop Paul. Tell him not to go bothering his mama at work. She had money to make and didn’t need to feed Paul’s fat ass while she was doing it, he’d say. At least that was his reaction the first time he found out.
Paul knew his mom didn’t mind, but he didn’t like to push stuff with his stepdad, and if he pushed on this his mom might get in trouble too.
Paul knew he could wait his stepdad out. He never really bothered Paul when Paul stayed in his room watching TV, watching wrestling. Paul’s stepdad only worked three days a week at the most, doing part time construction. Days like this when he didn’t work, he started drinking in the morning. He’d be passed out by the time the Monday night show was over. Then Paul could ride his bike up the road to the gas station. Visit with his mom a little bit, and bring a couple of pizza pockets back to his room to rewatch Wrestlemania VII. It’d be a nice little night, and, on Saturday he’d get to see the Snake live.
Life was okay when Paul could think like this, just focus on his pleasure, things that made him feel happy like pizza pockets and wrestling, look past all the moments in between.
Introducing JOBBERS. It's our first rolling submission and acceptance publication a couple of tabs over. As of December 2018 we are open for submissions all the time. Here we want grit lit, fiction or non, about the carny world of wrestling. Jake the Snake, Bruiser Brody, Ricky Steamboat, the von Erich brothers, Rick Rude, Dusty Rhodes, ya know? We plan on creatively showcasing prose on the Jobbers tab, and if all goes to plan, we'll have material for a Jobbers anthology late in 2019.
Our 2019 PUSHCART NOMINEES.
Congratulations and Good Luck!
Dan Crawley
Daren Dean
Emily Grandy
Sheldon Lee Compton
Mark A. Nobles
Benjamin Drevlow
Congratulations and Good Luck!
Dan Crawley
Daren Dean
Emily Grandy
Sheldon Lee Compton
Mark A. Nobles
Benjamin Drevlow
Our Magazine Style and Purpose
It's in the title.
COWBOY [kou-boi] (def.)
1. American plains animal herder who tends cows
2. one who is reckless or ignores risk, i.e. "cowboy attitude"
3. tradesman with questionable or atypical practices, i.e. "cowboy plumbing"
4. fast or careless driver on the highway, i.e. "slow down, cowboy"
5. slang for "outlaw"
JAMBOREE [jam-buh-ree] (def.)
1. a large celebration or party, typically boisterous
2. a carousel of noisy merrymaking
Follow us on Twitter @CowboyJamboree @gritvanwinkle and like us on Facebook
All original art by Adam Van Winkle unless otherwise noted.
It's in the title.
COWBOY [kou-boi] (def.)
1. American plains animal herder who tends cows
2. one who is reckless or ignores risk, i.e. "cowboy attitude"
3. tradesman with questionable or atypical practices, i.e. "cowboy plumbing"
4. fast or careless driver on the highway, i.e. "slow down, cowboy"
5. slang for "outlaw"
JAMBOREE [jam-buh-ree] (def.)
1. a large celebration or party, typically boisterous
2. a carousel of noisy merrymaking
Follow us on Twitter @CowboyJamboree @gritvanwinkle and like us on Facebook
All original art by Adam Van Winkle unless otherwise noted.