Cadejo
by Chaz Lilly
Author’s note: “Cadejo” follows two men who scheme, sell drugs, gamble and lie in pursuit of a better life. Like Eagle Pennell’s work, it’s interested in male friendship and the ways economic pressure can turn a man into something he never intended to become. At its heart, this is a story about quiet desperation and bad decisions.
This story first appeared in Understory: Volume II (Loblolly Press, 2026).
The dumpster behind the pawn shop spills rot and stench into the parking lot. Flies feast on the waste, filling the air with a hum of wings. A green bug, translucent at its tips, lands on Hank’s skin, rubs its arms together in a twitchy prayer and stares with a thousand eyes. Hank flicks it away.
Slumped against the shop’s back wall, two men sit with Hank. The leader of the two, an old gringo missing most his teeth, spits tobacco through the hole where his incisors once were. Despite the heat, the man is draped in a chore coat and shivers in the shade. His amigo, who speaks un poco inglés, digs black fingernails into his skin, scratching from elbow to wrist to fix some scab.
“Cadejo,” the Mexican says.
“Ain’t no damn Cadejo,” the other spits back.
Hank worries whether Riley will show.
Past the dumpster and through the parking lot is an abandoned shopping mall, a strip of concrete squares scarred by ochre sediment. Traces of old shop signs stain the mall front with their memory. Beside the buildings, a carwash, empty, but for one shabby green sedan that collects cobwebs under the last stall. Four blocks from the carwash is a one-bedroom apartment where Meg rests in a rocking chair beside the sputter of a struggling window unit, mopping her brow with a baby bib, her belly swollen like a squeezed melon ready to spill its seed into the hot hot world. And, beyond Meg stretches the red of Wichita Falls and then the expanse of Oklahoma burnt by iron oxide and oxblood. Hank doesn’t know if anything lives on the other side of all that.
Usually, Riley doesn’t take this long with his little scam. Usually, he’s in and out.
Here’s the scam: Riley wears his nice jeans, a pair of ostrich boots he swiped from a blacked-out cowpoke, slicks his hair thick with pomade, hides his ink beneath pearl snaps, and moseys into Walmart. Cart in hand, he grabs a thirteen-gallon trashcan with a swinging lid. Once, before, he tried using an industrial-sized can, but it was too bulky and awkward in the buggy, it drew eyes. The smaller can fits square in the basket.
He strolls the aisles, maybe looks at linens, runs his hand across their thread count. Contemplates if he needs a new Italian espresso maker. He drops something innocuous in the cart, too, like a family-sized pack of toilet paper. Eventually, he finds the tool section and without hesitation slips three Hyper Tough power drills through the can’s swinging lid. The trick, Riley says, is to never hurry. Never look over your shoulder. The cameras are trained on guilt.
Once the tools are in, he tests the Zebcos and smells the stink bait in the fishing section. He chats up the boy at the firearm register: Riley is looking for a new bolt action .270, but Walmart doesn't carry that rifle, at least not right now, the boy says. Damn, Riley responds. Thanks anyhow. At self-checkout, he scans only the trash can and toilet paper. The machine spits a receipt. Then, waiting, the last obstacle: Ms. Shirley. Seventy and widowed, she hides the small tremor of her left hand behind her back and checks Riley’s receipt with her right. In that moment, Riley is at his best. The charm drips from his mouth. He adds an extra vowel in the yes ma’am, sweetens and stretches the sound like his teeth are full of honey. He compliments Shirley’s frames. Says his momma wore a pair just like hers before she passed. God bless. Shirley hands the receipt back with a smile.
“Your boy ain’t doing too hot,” Hank says.
“Dopesick,” the gringo says. He sweats and shivers, spits and turns to his partner. “You’s just sick.”
“Es un hijo de puta,” the Mexican says. “Big eyes.”
“Can’t you bum him a cigarette?” the toothless man asks.
Hank fishes a smoke from his pack and lights it in his mouth. He walks over to the Mexican, squats and sets the cigarette on the man’s lips. The Mexican swallows smoke and whispers gracias through exhale.
“What’s your name?” Hank asks. “Nombre?”
Riley’s Ford Ranger rattles into the back lot and Hank stands from the two men. Riley hops out still slicked and shined.
“What’s up, donkey?” Riley asks, lifting the trashcan from the truck bed.
“What took so long?” Hank goes to the truck.
“I got a cheeseburger. And then I went to see your mom.”
“You know my momma’s dead.”
“I don’t discriminate.”
Riley catches sight of the two men in the shade.
“Hell, they beat me here,” he says.
“Been waitin a while,” Hank replies.
“They know where to find me.” Riley reaches in the cab. “Y’all come on.”
The two men pull themselves into the sun. The Mexican forces his legs to work underneath him. Riley opens a backpack, revealing a cache of orange pill bottles, small baggies stuffed with all sorts of powder, a ziplock of pot, a roll of money. The gringo pulls a twenty from somewhere inside his giant coat. Riley unscrews one of the pill tops and shakes two pink tablets loose before passing them off.
The two men don’t speak but shuffle back to the shade to down the medicine.
“What’s your deal?” Riley asks and zips the bag. “You look like the last biscuit in the basket.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Riley lights a cigarette and leans against his truck. He studies the flies around the dumpster. “I know why you’re sad.”
“I ain’t sad.”
“Mopey mother fucker. You aint getting none. How much longer you gotta wait?”
Hank counts on his fingers. “Five weeks.”
“I do not envy you.”
Riley digs into the trashcan and unpacks the tools from their boxes. He throws the drills in the dirt and kicks them around.
“Don’t take less than a hundred,” Riley says, lifting the tools from the ground.
Around the corner, the glass storefront is spotted with signs: we buy gold, we cash checks, 30 days same as cash. Hank’s reflection weaves distorted and too skinny between the signs; his face hangs haggard in the glass. He tries to ignore the image.
Inside the air is cold and sweat cools against his skin. The flutter of fluorescent lights illuminates the sad shape of a man glued to a chair. Hank drops the tools on the counter. The chair groans as the man leans forward. He inspects the drills, checks to see if the batteries can be dislodged, gives each a pull of the trigger.
“You wanna sell em or pawn em?” Hank can now see the desperate state of the man: his beard folds over neck fat and a stained t-shirt pools at the armpit and neck and belly.
“What’ll you give me cash? I got a baby on the way.”
The man can tell he means it. He spins to the computer and types, the screen lights his pockmarked face. Waiting, Hank studies the glass case of fake diamond bracelets shining under white sheen. Emerald earrings dangle like treasure and glow in the corner of the case. Forty dollars.
Hank knows what Meg would say.
Months back, before the positive test, the two blue lines, Hank had brought home a glittery necklace he got for twenty bucks at a flea market outside Archer City. He talked an old lady down from fifty for it, and he was proud as hell of himself. He kept it hid until after supper.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “I got a surprise.”
Meg laughed. “I ain’t a child, what is it?”
“Just do it.”
Meg closed her eyes, squinting, and Hank laid the necklace in her palm.
She forced a smile when her eyes opened. “Where’d you get this?”
“I bought it.”
“For how much?”
“I got a deal,” Hank said, still proud.
Meg reached across the table and took Hank’s hand.
“It’s really pretty, but we still owe the propane man.”
“I thought it would look nice on you.”
“It would,” she said.
Meg wore it until bedtime, but she hadn’t fished it out of the nightstand since.
If she were here, she’d say buy burgers or beer or literally anything that isn’t all shine.
“I can do one twenty for all of em, or one forty store credit,” the man says from his screen.
“How about one twenty and you throw in these earrings.” Hank taps the top of the case.
The chair threatens to collapse as the man pushes himself from its clasp. Waddling over, he unlocks the case and lifts the gems toward Hank. The emeralds glow with an air of elegance. Set against the filthy hands of the man, they hang delicate, dainty.
“I’ll do eighty cash and the earrings.”
“A hundred and the earrings?” Hank begs.
The man, exhausted from this small ordeal, the waddling, the haggling – from Hank’s distressed plea – scratches beneath his beard and sighs, studies the empty showroom. The man’s jaw works like he’s chewing the number. “Eighty and the earrings. Final offer,” he says.
Hank caves without further argument.
Outside, he slides the earrings in his pocket, and the sharp hooks of the jewels dig into his leg. He wants to go home and give them to Meg, sit there by the window unit and place his hand on her stomach. But he knows that stomach and the body brewing under its skin need food. You sure can’t eat earrings, Meg would say.
Hank turns toward Riley’s truck, but something makes him look back. Under the shade of the shop, the gringo lies folded into sleep. The Mexican is suddenly awake. He smiles at something. Hank glances over his shoulder. Nothing. Just an empty stretch of parking lot shimmering in the heat.
Hank thumbs the bills. With his cut there’s enough for groceries. Enough for diapers.
Riley whistles from the truck.
Hank lingers outside. Home is west. Comanche is north. One road ends at the apartment, and the other goes on. Hank folds the money once, then again, and climbs inside the truck.
*
The road north from Wichita Falls into Oklahoma is empty as the sun shifts west and orange. The Red River has surrendered all its water to summer’s oven and sits bare, exposing the orange peel of riverbed hollowed, round and rotten. Windmills grudgingly dance their laggard pirouettes in the flat plains of cattle country. Nothing interrupts this grassland but a giant setting star. All the world is orange.
Riley lights a joint and cracks his window. “Are you scared?” he asks.
“Of what?” Hank is watching the silhouette of a cow bird circle pasture.
“Being somebody’s daddy.”
Hank hits the joint and the cab smells of stale beer, tobacco and skunk weed. The bird dips gracefully into the darkening horizon. Meg’s emeralds press against his thigh, sharp as a needle. “Not yet,” he says.
Riley takes the joint and flicks ash into the wind. “I’d be fucking terrified. Hell, I’d be in Tennessee by now. Adios.”
“Running won’t do nothing.”
“How’s that?”
Hank watches until the bird is gone. “Guess you carry shit with you no matter where you are.”
Riley takes the exit and soon they are alone on a two-lane farm road as the last light drains from land. Out of the dark sprouts a buzz of streetlights and electric neon. A squat stone building grows out of the black, red-light bleeds across the parking lot. The Comanche Red River Casino is the only life for miles. It burns red like a tent revival that’s traded Jesus for jackpots. The parking lot is full. The faithful have come.
Riley kills the engine and the radio fiddles on. Hank watches people drift toward the entrance: old women with oxygen tanks, young couples holding hands, roughnecks in stained boots, retirees feeding cigarettes to the night. The casino swallows them one by one.
Riley unearths his backpack from beneath the seat, digs out a baggie of coke and his bankroll, peels off bills and gives Hank a hundred.
“Same deal as always. You hit it, I get half,” Riley says and breaks the coke from its bag.
Hank can’t remember when Riley became the answer to every bad idea. He tucks the hundred in with his cut from the pawn shop.
The two take turns doing lines off the middle console.
“Make it happen,” Riley says and rubs his gums with the leftover powder.
From the still Oklahoma dark, from the trumpet of cicadas, Hank and Riley leave the symphony of summer and cross into a frenzy of manmade noise. The whirl of slot machines plays disjointed techno while oxygen pours clean and cold from rafters. Hank is alive. He is more than alive. Shit grade cocaine cut with speed and unholy chemicals races in his brain. He can taste the drip of the room’s vivid promise.
“I’m hitting the tables,” Riley says and disappears into the mass of gamblers.
Riley grinds it out at blackjack, but Hank always hopes for a homerun at the slots.
First, whiskey.
Hank heads to the bar and orders the well, a double. The free drinks will come, but he needs to balance the coke with the smooth reassurance of bourbon.
“Good luck,” the bartender says with a smile.
The drink is warm and his mind quiets, and now he feels perfectly sharp, attuned to the ritual. Hank knows a bad machine will devour you whole – eat your two hundred dollars in five minutes, and then you’re left begging Riley for more money, for another chance. So, Hank performs his sacred hunt for the right machine. It’s all about feel, connection. Cartoon games are out. Hank doesn’t trust leprechauns or sea nymphs to bring him fortune. There are traditional games with lucky sevens and the ace of spades, the upside-down horseshoe, but they don’t pay out, aren’t programmed like the new, digital machines. Hank hovers around the room, letting his instincts steer.
There are blue-haired ladies dressed for a night out. The meth-stained skeletons stir alongside. A pack of boys, too young to be here, are learning how to bet. The high-cheekboned and hollowed eyes of Cherokee and Choctaw and Apache litter the floor and the hapless, helpless poor shift between.
Hank circles machines, lets his hands slide smooth over their buttons. He rejects the sterile touch of cold video poker and walks away from loud temptations of fire-breathing dragons, the exotic flair and promise of quick hits.
From across the room, Hank hears the call of the buffalo gold. He feels the pull of its stampede. The game is new; its massive screen hovers over a leather chair, which Hank nestles into. There are all kinds of animals on the screen, and all Hank must do is match some of them with each spin. He feeds the machine a hundred and hits the button. He bets a dollar. Elk, mountain lion, buffalo, eagles and wild wolves reel across the screen. The chair rumbles with each new spin. When three mountain lions match on the line, he wins forty. And, there’s the waitress with a free beer. Hank tips her a dollar and asks for another.
The beers keep coming and Hank keeps drinking. The screen blazes with wild buffalo. He presses the button over and over and the earrings press into his leg. He is maintaining. He is still alive, but the wins are small and sparse. The buffalo run and dust fills the screen. Hank smells the dirt. He slaps the button again. Animals thunder under his chair. An eagle screams in the air above. He can feel the herd passing through his ribs. He can sense every footfall.
The money is up and down and dwindling, but Hank trusts the machine. He trusts his gut. This is the one. He offers another forty to the animals. He knows it will hit, so he bets five dollars a spin.
Three elk line up. Fifty bucks, the credits grow.
Hank nods. “See.”
The machine understands him. Hank spins again.
Eagles fly across the screen and land one by one; he needs another.
“Please,” Hank asks.
Only buffalo arrive and Hank laughs.
“I thought you had it,” a lady says from the next chair.
“It’s coming,” Hank says. “It has to.”
One hundred sinks to sixty, forty, twenty. Hank feels in his pocket for more money but there are only the emeralds. Aloud, Hank prays to the buffalos. Curses them, too. You chose me, you sonofabitch, he screams and stands and pounds the spin button. With every punch, Hank splashes beer onto the machine. Gamblers gather to watch him unravel. He feels the eyes.
Mountain lions growl uneasy from the machine. Come on damnit, Hank growls back.
A man comes and says son please calm down. Hank pushes the man away and slams the button. Let’s go bub, the man says, now grabbing Hank’s arm. Hank punches the button again. Get the fuck off me, he says. Buffaloes run and beer spills. That’s it the man says and wraps his arm around Hank’s neck, pulling him from the machine.
“You chose me,” Hank yells.
The forearm tightens under his chin and air shrinks. The earrings press harder into his leg. As the room goes grey and distant, as a wolf bellows lonesome and far from the machine, Hank strains to breathe and turns, digs his teeth into the man’s arm, digs through flesh. Hot iron floods his tongue. He bites harder. The man roars and releases his hold. Hank’s mouth drips sweet cherry red. He slams the button again.
Then, there are wolves.
Wolves and wolves and wolves.
They stack on top of each other. The screen fills with them.
The wolves howl and Hank howls, too, and the mass of onlookers watch a skinny cowboy, disheveled and dirty, a hayseed in handmedowns yipping like a bloody, feral dog.
When the wolves scatter, there is a number across the screen Hank can’t comprehend. He hits a new button: cash out. The wolves present their gift in the form of a ticket with a number printed across the top: one thousand and one hundred dollars. Hank stares at the ticket. It doesn’t make sense.
Someone from the crowd says holy shit he bit that guy and another says congratulations. Most just stare. On the floor, the bitten man nurses his arm.
“It’s what it wanted. I had to,” Hank says to no one.
Nobody moves. Hank needs to escape before someone decides what to do with him. Jumping over his chair, he speeds from the slots, ducks behind the gyration of roulette wheels, runs through the drunken bar and the rotary maze of two-step dancefloor, down a dim hall and into the bathroom. He slams the stall and spits red into the toilet. He had to. He trembles and howls and pukes.
*
Hank waits an hour hunkered over the toilet until his stomach settles. His teeth hurt and all he tastes is plasma and vomit, but the foul flavor is erased by the ticket. This is enough. It has to be enough. A thousand dollars feels like forever.
Outside the stall, he catches himself smiling in the mirror. His face is flush with another man’s blood. He pours cool water over his head and through his hair, scrubs his face with soap. He turns the sink ruby and merlot.
Hank hides his face as he leaves the bathroom and goes to trade the ticket for real money. The girl at the window is unimpressed with the win and slaps the cash down sternly as she counts aloud; she slides the money over. A security officer in a black polo scans the room with flat, tired eyes, never stopping on Hank. The bills fan out in Hank’s hands. It is the most cash he’s ever held. He shoves the fistful of money in his pocket and keeps a tight grip.
Carefully, he makes for the door, half expecting to be tackled with each step. Passing the slots, someone else is already in his chair, a woman in a windbreaker playing slow, like she has the rest of her life. The same animals run for her. The elk, wolves and buffalo give her nothing. She expects nothing. Hank watches her too long until someone yells, a win from another row of machines.
Outside, the heat still holds even this late. Moths beat themselves stupid against floodlights. Red light bounces off windshields like a hundred eyes reflecting a neon god. Hank finds Riley’s truck, but the doors are locked. In the shadows, he stuffs a thousand dollars into his boot, into his sock, and pulls the jeans back over his ropers. He keeps a hundred in his pocket opposite from the earrings. He checks to see if anyone has seen his secret as he moves to the tailgate and lights a smoke. The nicotine settles his head back into his body. Blood still sticks in his teeth. He watches the door from a distance as more go to worship; he watches to see if anyone has followed.
For a long time, there is only the sound of a small wind pushing through the plains. Across from the casino is scrub and mesquite, dead wheat stalks and black nothing, no glint of moonlight. Hank lets go of a long-held breath.
He talks to the dark without wanting to. Not out loud, not really, though his lips move some.
Let her still be up when I get there. Let the baby wait its five weeks. Let the window unit hold a little longer. Let this money be enough and let there be more where it came from and let me never come back here again, not next week, not the week after, let this be the last time I have to pray to a machine for anything.
It embarrasses him even alone in the dark, even with no one to hear. He almost laughs. He does not laugh.
Let the thing that bit that man not know my name.
He doesn’t know where that one came from.
He watches the dark fields as a car leaves the parking lot and headlights catch a shape that is only ever the shape of a fence post, or a low bush, or nothing. The wind picks up, warm and full of the smell of rain that still hasn’t found its way here. Somewhere behind the building, wheels grind gravel, a horn taps once, halfhearted. Hank lights another cigarette off the end of the first and lets it burn.
He keeps watch on the door, half-expecting someone, some particular someone, to come looking for him. But only Riley finally does, stumbling.
“What the hell happened to you?” Riley says. “You lose your ass?”
“Nah, I broke even. This is yours,” Hank says, handing Riley his hundred back.
Riley snorts. “Shit, not your night bucko.”
“Not my night,” Hank says. He flicks his cigarette toward the casino and climbs in the truck.
Chaz Lilly is a writer who has rambled from Georgia to Texas, down through the Louisiana Delta, and into the mountains of western North Carolina. He is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Arkansas. His work has appeared in Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and The Tulane Review.
by Chaz Lilly
Author’s note: “Cadejo” follows two men who scheme, sell drugs, gamble and lie in pursuit of a better life. Like Eagle Pennell’s work, it’s interested in male friendship and the ways economic pressure can turn a man into something he never intended to become. At its heart, this is a story about quiet desperation and bad decisions.
This story first appeared in Understory: Volume II (Loblolly Press, 2026).
The dumpster behind the pawn shop spills rot and stench into the parking lot. Flies feast on the waste, filling the air with a hum of wings. A green bug, translucent at its tips, lands on Hank’s skin, rubs its arms together in a twitchy prayer and stares with a thousand eyes. Hank flicks it away.
Slumped against the shop’s back wall, two men sit with Hank. The leader of the two, an old gringo missing most his teeth, spits tobacco through the hole where his incisors once were. Despite the heat, the man is draped in a chore coat and shivers in the shade. His amigo, who speaks un poco inglés, digs black fingernails into his skin, scratching from elbow to wrist to fix some scab.
“Cadejo,” the Mexican says.
“Ain’t no damn Cadejo,” the other spits back.
Hank worries whether Riley will show.
Past the dumpster and through the parking lot is an abandoned shopping mall, a strip of concrete squares scarred by ochre sediment. Traces of old shop signs stain the mall front with their memory. Beside the buildings, a carwash, empty, but for one shabby green sedan that collects cobwebs under the last stall. Four blocks from the carwash is a one-bedroom apartment where Meg rests in a rocking chair beside the sputter of a struggling window unit, mopping her brow with a baby bib, her belly swollen like a squeezed melon ready to spill its seed into the hot hot world. And, beyond Meg stretches the red of Wichita Falls and then the expanse of Oklahoma burnt by iron oxide and oxblood. Hank doesn’t know if anything lives on the other side of all that.
Usually, Riley doesn’t take this long with his little scam. Usually, he’s in and out.
Here’s the scam: Riley wears his nice jeans, a pair of ostrich boots he swiped from a blacked-out cowpoke, slicks his hair thick with pomade, hides his ink beneath pearl snaps, and moseys into Walmart. Cart in hand, he grabs a thirteen-gallon trashcan with a swinging lid. Once, before, he tried using an industrial-sized can, but it was too bulky and awkward in the buggy, it drew eyes. The smaller can fits square in the basket.
He strolls the aisles, maybe looks at linens, runs his hand across their thread count. Contemplates if he needs a new Italian espresso maker. He drops something innocuous in the cart, too, like a family-sized pack of toilet paper. Eventually, he finds the tool section and without hesitation slips three Hyper Tough power drills through the can’s swinging lid. The trick, Riley says, is to never hurry. Never look over your shoulder. The cameras are trained on guilt.
Once the tools are in, he tests the Zebcos and smells the stink bait in the fishing section. He chats up the boy at the firearm register: Riley is looking for a new bolt action .270, but Walmart doesn't carry that rifle, at least not right now, the boy says. Damn, Riley responds. Thanks anyhow. At self-checkout, he scans only the trash can and toilet paper. The machine spits a receipt. Then, waiting, the last obstacle: Ms. Shirley. Seventy and widowed, she hides the small tremor of her left hand behind her back and checks Riley’s receipt with her right. In that moment, Riley is at his best. The charm drips from his mouth. He adds an extra vowel in the yes ma’am, sweetens and stretches the sound like his teeth are full of honey. He compliments Shirley’s frames. Says his momma wore a pair just like hers before she passed. God bless. Shirley hands the receipt back with a smile.
“Your boy ain’t doing too hot,” Hank says.
“Dopesick,” the gringo says. He sweats and shivers, spits and turns to his partner. “You’s just sick.”
“Es un hijo de puta,” the Mexican says. “Big eyes.”
“Can’t you bum him a cigarette?” the toothless man asks.
Hank fishes a smoke from his pack and lights it in his mouth. He walks over to the Mexican, squats and sets the cigarette on the man’s lips. The Mexican swallows smoke and whispers gracias through exhale.
“What’s your name?” Hank asks. “Nombre?”
Riley’s Ford Ranger rattles into the back lot and Hank stands from the two men. Riley hops out still slicked and shined.
“What’s up, donkey?” Riley asks, lifting the trashcan from the truck bed.
“What took so long?” Hank goes to the truck.
“I got a cheeseburger. And then I went to see your mom.”
“You know my momma’s dead.”
“I don’t discriminate.”
Riley catches sight of the two men in the shade.
“Hell, they beat me here,” he says.
“Been waitin a while,” Hank replies.
“They know where to find me.” Riley reaches in the cab. “Y’all come on.”
The two men pull themselves into the sun. The Mexican forces his legs to work underneath him. Riley opens a backpack, revealing a cache of orange pill bottles, small baggies stuffed with all sorts of powder, a ziplock of pot, a roll of money. The gringo pulls a twenty from somewhere inside his giant coat. Riley unscrews one of the pill tops and shakes two pink tablets loose before passing them off.
The two men don’t speak but shuffle back to the shade to down the medicine.
“What’s your deal?” Riley asks and zips the bag. “You look like the last biscuit in the basket.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Riley lights a cigarette and leans against his truck. He studies the flies around the dumpster. “I know why you’re sad.”
“I ain’t sad.”
“Mopey mother fucker. You aint getting none. How much longer you gotta wait?”
Hank counts on his fingers. “Five weeks.”
“I do not envy you.”
Riley digs into the trashcan and unpacks the tools from their boxes. He throws the drills in the dirt and kicks them around.
“Don’t take less than a hundred,” Riley says, lifting the tools from the ground.
Around the corner, the glass storefront is spotted with signs: we buy gold, we cash checks, 30 days same as cash. Hank’s reflection weaves distorted and too skinny between the signs; his face hangs haggard in the glass. He tries to ignore the image.
Inside the air is cold and sweat cools against his skin. The flutter of fluorescent lights illuminates the sad shape of a man glued to a chair. Hank drops the tools on the counter. The chair groans as the man leans forward. He inspects the drills, checks to see if the batteries can be dislodged, gives each a pull of the trigger.
“You wanna sell em or pawn em?” Hank can now see the desperate state of the man: his beard folds over neck fat and a stained t-shirt pools at the armpit and neck and belly.
“What’ll you give me cash? I got a baby on the way.”
The man can tell he means it. He spins to the computer and types, the screen lights his pockmarked face. Waiting, Hank studies the glass case of fake diamond bracelets shining under white sheen. Emerald earrings dangle like treasure and glow in the corner of the case. Forty dollars.
Hank knows what Meg would say.
Months back, before the positive test, the two blue lines, Hank had brought home a glittery necklace he got for twenty bucks at a flea market outside Archer City. He talked an old lady down from fifty for it, and he was proud as hell of himself. He kept it hid until after supper.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “I got a surprise.”
Meg laughed. “I ain’t a child, what is it?”
“Just do it.”
Meg closed her eyes, squinting, and Hank laid the necklace in her palm.
She forced a smile when her eyes opened. “Where’d you get this?”
“I bought it.”
“For how much?”
“I got a deal,” Hank said, still proud.
Meg reached across the table and took Hank’s hand.
“It’s really pretty, but we still owe the propane man.”
“I thought it would look nice on you.”
“It would,” she said.
Meg wore it until bedtime, but she hadn’t fished it out of the nightstand since.
If she were here, she’d say buy burgers or beer or literally anything that isn’t all shine.
“I can do one twenty for all of em, or one forty store credit,” the man says from his screen.
“How about one twenty and you throw in these earrings.” Hank taps the top of the case.
The chair threatens to collapse as the man pushes himself from its clasp. Waddling over, he unlocks the case and lifts the gems toward Hank. The emeralds glow with an air of elegance. Set against the filthy hands of the man, they hang delicate, dainty.
“I’ll do eighty cash and the earrings.”
“A hundred and the earrings?” Hank begs.
The man, exhausted from this small ordeal, the waddling, the haggling – from Hank’s distressed plea – scratches beneath his beard and sighs, studies the empty showroom. The man’s jaw works like he’s chewing the number. “Eighty and the earrings. Final offer,” he says.
Hank caves without further argument.
Outside, he slides the earrings in his pocket, and the sharp hooks of the jewels dig into his leg. He wants to go home and give them to Meg, sit there by the window unit and place his hand on her stomach. But he knows that stomach and the body brewing under its skin need food. You sure can’t eat earrings, Meg would say.
Hank turns toward Riley’s truck, but something makes him look back. Under the shade of the shop, the gringo lies folded into sleep. The Mexican is suddenly awake. He smiles at something. Hank glances over his shoulder. Nothing. Just an empty stretch of parking lot shimmering in the heat.
Hank thumbs the bills. With his cut there’s enough for groceries. Enough for diapers.
Riley whistles from the truck.
Hank lingers outside. Home is west. Comanche is north. One road ends at the apartment, and the other goes on. Hank folds the money once, then again, and climbs inside the truck.
*
The road north from Wichita Falls into Oklahoma is empty as the sun shifts west and orange. The Red River has surrendered all its water to summer’s oven and sits bare, exposing the orange peel of riverbed hollowed, round and rotten. Windmills grudgingly dance their laggard pirouettes in the flat plains of cattle country. Nothing interrupts this grassland but a giant setting star. All the world is orange.
Riley lights a joint and cracks his window. “Are you scared?” he asks.
“Of what?” Hank is watching the silhouette of a cow bird circle pasture.
“Being somebody’s daddy.”
Hank hits the joint and the cab smells of stale beer, tobacco and skunk weed. The bird dips gracefully into the darkening horizon. Meg’s emeralds press against his thigh, sharp as a needle. “Not yet,” he says.
Riley takes the joint and flicks ash into the wind. “I’d be fucking terrified. Hell, I’d be in Tennessee by now. Adios.”
“Running won’t do nothing.”
“How’s that?”
Hank watches until the bird is gone. “Guess you carry shit with you no matter where you are.”
Riley takes the exit and soon they are alone on a two-lane farm road as the last light drains from land. Out of the dark sprouts a buzz of streetlights and electric neon. A squat stone building grows out of the black, red-light bleeds across the parking lot. The Comanche Red River Casino is the only life for miles. It burns red like a tent revival that’s traded Jesus for jackpots. The parking lot is full. The faithful have come.
Riley kills the engine and the radio fiddles on. Hank watches people drift toward the entrance: old women with oxygen tanks, young couples holding hands, roughnecks in stained boots, retirees feeding cigarettes to the night. The casino swallows them one by one.
Riley unearths his backpack from beneath the seat, digs out a baggie of coke and his bankroll, peels off bills and gives Hank a hundred.
“Same deal as always. You hit it, I get half,” Riley says and breaks the coke from its bag.
Hank can’t remember when Riley became the answer to every bad idea. He tucks the hundred in with his cut from the pawn shop.
The two take turns doing lines off the middle console.
“Make it happen,” Riley says and rubs his gums with the leftover powder.
From the still Oklahoma dark, from the trumpet of cicadas, Hank and Riley leave the symphony of summer and cross into a frenzy of manmade noise. The whirl of slot machines plays disjointed techno while oxygen pours clean and cold from rafters. Hank is alive. He is more than alive. Shit grade cocaine cut with speed and unholy chemicals races in his brain. He can taste the drip of the room’s vivid promise.
“I’m hitting the tables,” Riley says and disappears into the mass of gamblers.
Riley grinds it out at blackjack, but Hank always hopes for a homerun at the slots.
First, whiskey.
Hank heads to the bar and orders the well, a double. The free drinks will come, but he needs to balance the coke with the smooth reassurance of bourbon.
“Good luck,” the bartender says with a smile.
The drink is warm and his mind quiets, and now he feels perfectly sharp, attuned to the ritual. Hank knows a bad machine will devour you whole – eat your two hundred dollars in five minutes, and then you’re left begging Riley for more money, for another chance. So, Hank performs his sacred hunt for the right machine. It’s all about feel, connection. Cartoon games are out. Hank doesn’t trust leprechauns or sea nymphs to bring him fortune. There are traditional games with lucky sevens and the ace of spades, the upside-down horseshoe, but they don’t pay out, aren’t programmed like the new, digital machines. Hank hovers around the room, letting his instincts steer.
There are blue-haired ladies dressed for a night out. The meth-stained skeletons stir alongside. A pack of boys, too young to be here, are learning how to bet. The high-cheekboned and hollowed eyes of Cherokee and Choctaw and Apache litter the floor and the hapless, helpless poor shift between.
Hank circles machines, lets his hands slide smooth over their buttons. He rejects the sterile touch of cold video poker and walks away from loud temptations of fire-breathing dragons, the exotic flair and promise of quick hits.
From across the room, Hank hears the call of the buffalo gold. He feels the pull of its stampede. The game is new; its massive screen hovers over a leather chair, which Hank nestles into. There are all kinds of animals on the screen, and all Hank must do is match some of them with each spin. He feeds the machine a hundred and hits the button. He bets a dollar. Elk, mountain lion, buffalo, eagles and wild wolves reel across the screen. The chair rumbles with each new spin. When three mountain lions match on the line, he wins forty. And, there’s the waitress with a free beer. Hank tips her a dollar and asks for another.
The beers keep coming and Hank keeps drinking. The screen blazes with wild buffalo. He presses the button over and over and the earrings press into his leg. He is maintaining. He is still alive, but the wins are small and sparse. The buffalo run and dust fills the screen. Hank smells the dirt. He slaps the button again. Animals thunder under his chair. An eagle screams in the air above. He can feel the herd passing through his ribs. He can sense every footfall.
The money is up and down and dwindling, but Hank trusts the machine. He trusts his gut. This is the one. He offers another forty to the animals. He knows it will hit, so he bets five dollars a spin.
Three elk line up. Fifty bucks, the credits grow.
Hank nods. “See.”
The machine understands him. Hank spins again.
Eagles fly across the screen and land one by one; he needs another.
“Please,” Hank asks.
Only buffalo arrive and Hank laughs.
“I thought you had it,” a lady says from the next chair.
“It’s coming,” Hank says. “It has to.”
One hundred sinks to sixty, forty, twenty. Hank feels in his pocket for more money but there are only the emeralds. Aloud, Hank prays to the buffalos. Curses them, too. You chose me, you sonofabitch, he screams and stands and pounds the spin button. With every punch, Hank splashes beer onto the machine. Gamblers gather to watch him unravel. He feels the eyes.
Mountain lions growl uneasy from the machine. Come on damnit, Hank growls back.
A man comes and says son please calm down. Hank pushes the man away and slams the button. Let’s go bub, the man says, now grabbing Hank’s arm. Hank punches the button again. Get the fuck off me, he says. Buffaloes run and beer spills. That’s it the man says and wraps his arm around Hank’s neck, pulling him from the machine.
“You chose me,” Hank yells.
The forearm tightens under his chin and air shrinks. The earrings press harder into his leg. As the room goes grey and distant, as a wolf bellows lonesome and far from the machine, Hank strains to breathe and turns, digs his teeth into the man’s arm, digs through flesh. Hot iron floods his tongue. He bites harder. The man roars and releases his hold. Hank’s mouth drips sweet cherry red. He slams the button again.
Then, there are wolves.
Wolves and wolves and wolves.
They stack on top of each other. The screen fills with them.
The wolves howl and Hank howls, too, and the mass of onlookers watch a skinny cowboy, disheveled and dirty, a hayseed in handmedowns yipping like a bloody, feral dog.
When the wolves scatter, there is a number across the screen Hank can’t comprehend. He hits a new button: cash out. The wolves present their gift in the form of a ticket with a number printed across the top: one thousand and one hundred dollars. Hank stares at the ticket. It doesn’t make sense.
Someone from the crowd says holy shit he bit that guy and another says congratulations. Most just stare. On the floor, the bitten man nurses his arm.
“It’s what it wanted. I had to,” Hank says to no one.
Nobody moves. Hank needs to escape before someone decides what to do with him. Jumping over his chair, he speeds from the slots, ducks behind the gyration of roulette wheels, runs through the drunken bar and the rotary maze of two-step dancefloor, down a dim hall and into the bathroom. He slams the stall and spits red into the toilet. He had to. He trembles and howls and pukes.
*
Hank waits an hour hunkered over the toilet until his stomach settles. His teeth hurt and all he tastes is plasma and vomit, but the foul flavor is erased by the ticket. This is enough. It has to be enough. A thousand dollars feels like forever.
Outside the stall, he catches himself smiling in the mirror. His face is flush with another man’s blood. He pours cool water over his head and through his hair, scrubs his face with soap. He turns the sink ruby and merlot.
Hank hides his face as he leaves the bathroom and goes to trade the ticket for real money. The girl at the window is unimpressed with the win and slaps the cash down sternly as she counts aloud; she slides the money over. A security officer in a black polo scans the room with flat, tired eyes, never stopping on Hank. The bills fan out in Hank’s hands. It is the most cash he’s ever held. He shoves the fistful of money in his pocket and keeps a tight grip.
Carefully, he makes for the door, half expecting to be tackled with each step. Passing the slots, someone else is already in his chair, a woman in a windbreaker playing slow, like she has the rest of her life. The same animals run for her. The elk, wolves and buffalo give her nothing. She expects nothing. Hank watches her too long until someone yells, a win from another row of machines.
Outside, the heat still holds even this late. Moths beat themselves stupid against floodlights. Red light bounces off windshields like a hundred eyes reflecting a neon god. Hank finds Riley’s truck, but the doors are locked. In the shadows, he stuffs a thousand dollars into his boot, into his sock, and pulls the jeans back over his ropers. He keeps a hundred in his pocket opposite from the earrings. He checks to see if anyone has seen his secret as he moves to the tailgate and lights a smoke. The nicotine settles his head back into his body. Blood still sticks in his teeth. He watches the door from a distance as more go to worship; he watches to see if anyone has followed.
For a long time, there is only the sound of a small wind pushing through the plains. Across from the casino is scrub and mesquite, dead wheat stalks and black nothing, no glint of moonlight. Hank lets go of a long-held breath.
He talks to the dark without wanting to. Not out loud, not really, though his lips move some.
Let her still be up when I get there. Let the baby wait its five weeks. Let the window unit hold a little longer. Let this money be enough and let there be more where it came from and let me never come back here again, not next week, not the week after, let this be the last time I have to pray to a machine for anything.
It embarrasses him even alone in the dark, even with no one to hear. He almost laughs. He does not laugh.
Let the thing that bit that man not know my name.
He doesn’t know where that one came from.
He watches the dark fields as a car leaves the parking lot and headlights catch a shape that is only ever the shape of a fence post, or a low bush, or nothing. The wind picks up, warm and full of the smell of rain that still hasn’t found its way here. Somewhere behind the building, wheels grind gravel, a horn taps once, halfhearted. Hank lights another cigarette off the end of the first and lets it burn.
He keeps watch on the door, half-expecting someone, some particular someone, to come looking for him. But only Riley finally does, stumbling.
“What the hell happened to you?” Riley says. “You lose your ass?”
“Nah, I broke even. This is yours,” Hank says, handing Riley his hundred back.
Riley snorts. “Shit, not your night bucko.”
“Not my night,” Hank says. He flicks his cigarette toward the casino and climbs in the truck.
Chaz Lilly is a writer who has rambled from Georgia to Texas, down through the Louisiana Delta, and into the mountains of western North Carolina. He is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Arkansas. His work has appeared in Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and The Tulane Review.
