[CalArts Portfolio 2015]
Out here in Walker County is where the days take me. Where, apart from the dope trade and the bloodshed it brings, the countryside is something to be admired. Especially this time of year, when colors fall off the trees and turn the earth to some sort of expressionist masterpiece. Course this beauty was temporary. Same with anything around these parts worth having a good look at.
It’s Thanksgiving weekend. The final whistle of the Iron Bowl carries through the radio. Alabama won handily, 35-16. The Tigers showed more holes in their defense than a horse-trader’s mule. I pull up to an intersection. Can’t see anyone for miles in any direction. A small mirror sits on the passenger seat. On that mirror is a small pile of blue powder – a few roxies pulverized to something you could snort. All this empty scenery calls out for a quick one. I set the mirror in my lap and even out a couple lines with a Piggly Wiggly discount card. Without having a last look in the rearview, I take them both up my good nostril and set the mirror back down beside me. Out here it’s common to come up on folks passed out at the crossroads. Even the sheriff is likely to flip his turn signal and keep on around them.
I throw it in P and let the first rush of warmth reach out through my toes. Beneath the STOP on the sign to my right someone has spray-painted one-two. The letters are hardly legible, but I know what it means without reading it. It says: stay out or turn around and get the fuck out if you know what’s good for you. The only folks that understand this belong within its borders and the people who know no better will soon find out and let’s just hope they know how to drive fast, real fast.
I’m out past it now. Past the event horizon. But I’m a familiar face and folks knows if they do me wrong they’ll be getting a knock on their door late one night from the bossman. In exchange for this protection I offer him my services: mostly drops and pickups with the occasional strong-arming if some kid comes up short. I beat on them pretty good. Not because I get anything out of it, but for fear of what bossman’ll do to the poor mutts for coming short a couple hundred. My thinking is I give them a good scare, maybe break a finger or two, then send them off to make right. Most times this works out all right but there were always a couple guys that were just plain bullheaded and they probably weren’t going to make it very far like that anyways.
Bossman’s real name is Jimmy Little but only a few of us know this. He likes to remind us of what’s his every chance that comes to him. Sometimes it’s a kick in the ass, if you are lucky. Most the time it’s a hefty hospital bill you will wind up with. His place sets out on some land in the middle of Walker. The average person will drive right by it without looking twice. Place is probably held up by a single rusty nail in a couple rotten two-by’s in the foundation. Everyone parks out back so from the main road it looks like another abandon house rotting away with the rest of the people and things in this void spreading blacker and growing deeper with each drifting soul that finds his way here.
I round his place in my beat-to-shit sedan and find a space in the mix of at least twelve cars. The backyard is down to dirt from visitors coming and going in the types of vehicles you could only find at a backwoods dope house in this part of the country. Here amongst them, the old sedan fits in just fine.
A couple guys smoke on the back porch. Looks like they been running on fumes for weeks now. One looks like his head weighs a hundred pounds the way it’d like to roll right off like a newborn’s. The other fella is far from asleep. Black rings hollow owl eyes for days. Some excuse for security, no doubt. Of the two, it’s the sparky fella that’s got me a little anxious. The type to pull a trigger when they didn’t mean to.
“Hey man, wh-where-you-been-at? Jimmy, he pissed and-and Vicky—oh shit man she really done lost it this time, been raisin’ hell all damn day,” says the man in a string of words that all run together.
“I know you?” I reply.
“Sure man, it‘s Jud. Jimmy’s cousin. You was there at that barbeque when--”
“Uh-huh.” I shove on past him.
Just inside I’m damn near dropped by the stench in the air. Something like lighter fluid and cat piss. I pass a door to the basement where a man wearing a plastic apron and surgical mask and goggles stirs a liquid with a paddle in a thirty-gallon drum. Clockwise once, counterclockwise twice and repeat.
Unnerving sounds fill the house. A man and woman snarl at each other up the stairs. Six TV’s play different programs and movies in a room to the right, further sedating sunken faces beneath the blue glow. In the kitchen, a woman with teeth like fangs guards an oven that’s letting off a sweet aroma. Hate beams from her eyes and emanates all around her. I doubt she’ll be sharing whatever’s cooking. Hard to believe anbody’d be baking a pie in a place like this. The pantries are empty and I’m surprised someone’s paid the gas on time. Guess it ain’t hard to imagine one of these tweakers getting on a good one and whipping up some cobbler - maybe something his meemaw taught him - but then who’s going to be hungry enough to eat the thing?
There’s a hallway getting darker the further down I go. At the end, there’s a door with purple light spilling out underneath. Bass thunders from the room on the other side. It rattles straight through the drywall.
I’m not feeling all too hopeful about the situation waiting for me behind this door but I know it beats what’ll happen if I take off now. It’s all about the risk management. Plus I’ve been dodging Jimmy for a few days now. That’s a few days too long. He’d called me about a job. Called me telling me about it, not asking if I’d do it.
***
About fifteen years back I was a foreman for Sofolk, a railroad company out of Virginia. They manufactured all the turn-outs that were laid on new track. One day they had me moving cars onto the yard from the main tracks. I was directing traffic, making sure everything was where it should be when the job was done. We got all but three cars backed in before we hit a snag. See, if everything was going how it should, the guy in the driver car’d just nudge one car into the next and they’d line up so all we had to do was drop a lever and twist a crank and wham bam we was on to the next. Problem was these last cars weren’t seeing eye to eye. I went and got myself between the two and tried to work things out, smooth the waters. Next I know there’s a screeching and a squealing so god-awful I knew nothing good could come of it. Turns out the screeching was the two cars being forced together against their will. The squealing was coming from me when I looked down and saw I was pinched between them. Somehow, I wiggled free before the fuckers cut me in two, but I didn’t get off that easy. Crushed a few vertebrae – an injury that meant I’d never work for them again, or any other line of work that’d have me lifting more than about twenty pounds. Good hand work. The only type of work I was ever any good at.
You might could guess how the rest of the story goes. Dude starts taking more of those painkiller’s than they prescribed. Dude finds another doctor who’ll give him more than he needs. Dude loses one decent job after another till he finds himself in Walker County with a real wild woman named Vicky. I never had any intentions of winding up at a place like this. Sometimes life takes you on a detour where you’ll come off a rather cordial type highway and see that big orange and black sign pointing you in this direction, then over that ways, then back in the direction you came from for just a mile or so, and now you’re hauling-ass down some hill that makes you feel like you’re about to roll head first. Maybe a few miles later, or maybe whole states later, you find your way back on course. Now here I am ten feet from Jimmy’s door and he’s going to ask me to do something that could probably get me locked up for a decade or more and I tell you that easy-rolling highway I veered off is miles away. Whole countries worth of miles.
I knock on the door gently. This is not the kind of guy you want to startle.
“What?” A gnarly voice barks on the other side.
“It’s Leland. Come to talk to you.”
“It’s about time goddamnit! Get in here.”
I open the door and black light washes over me. The bulbs illuminate devilish posters of metal bands. Skulls, demons, skulls of demons and even Beelzebub himself look down on me, grinning. A little light, a little joy was not to be found in a place like this.
Jimmy and his 300+ pound muscle cackle at something out the window. The room smells like a pile of burning computers. Torched glass litters the table. Orange caps from hypodermic needles and forgotten pills are buried down in the wooly fibers of the carpet.
“Come here and look at this.” Jimmy demands.
I cross the room, careful not to make any sudden movements. Out across the back yard, Vicky is frantically plunging a shovel into the ground and heaving the dirt over her shoulder. She is covered in dirt. There is a madness in the way she moves that I’m all-too-familiar with. Possessed by dope.
“That’s sum wild bitch you got there Lee. Said you buried her phone out back. Now I told her you ain’t been by in a week or so, but by god she just keeps on at it. After we talk how bouchu go handle that?”
“All right then.”
“Sit.” He motions for the sofa across the coffee table from him in his corduroy recliner. I wonder how many people have had hot lead pumped in their guts right here where I sit. Jimmy roasts a pookie and takes a rip.
“Got somethin’ special for you,” exhaling and impressive plume of smoke, “it’s right up yer alley.”
“What’s that?”
“Pharmacy. Remember Leroy’s cousin, Gus?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Fuck it, all you need to know is the guy owes me and just so happens he works over at Griffin’s there in Anniston. You know that place off 21st by the Taco Bell?”
“Reckon so.”
“Good. Gus’ll make sure you get what I need without a fuss. Go straight for the lockbox and clean the fucker out. He’ll have the key on him when you come in so all you got to do is nut up and make it so no one thinks the both of you is working together. Hell, it’s like half a robbery if you think on it.”
The sonofabitch thinks he’s real slick.
“Ahh shit Jimmy… I appreciate you bringin’ me in on this but I been tryin’ to keep off the radar lately. ‘Sides, that’s the place right there on Quintard aint it?”
“What’s that matter?”
Jimmy isn’t the brightest boss that’s laid claim to Walker County.
“That’s the main drag Jimmy, there’s always lots of folks around, lots of cops too.”
His face changes. Suddenly looks like it came straight off one of those posters on the wall. His laidback demeanor is snuffed out faster than I care for. He hasn’t taken the pharmacy’s location into account and me pointing it out like that made him feel about as dumb as he really is. No one likes to feel as stupid or as ugly or as desperate as they really are and it’s usually another person who will show you what’s what.
“That’s why we got you this fella workin’ on the inside. It’ll be quick and quiet.”
Jimmy cocks back the hammer on a .38 and levels it at my chest.
“He’s even gonna fake like he’s calling the cops after you leave so anyone else that’s workin’ there don’t get to it first.
Should give you a nice little head start, shouldn’t it?”
You’ll always get the answer you want if you point a gun at the person you’re asking.
“Sure would.”
“You know, they told me you was a chicken shit. I didn’t wanna hear ‘em. You seemed like the kind of dude who didn’t give a damn ‘bout nothin’ no more. Not about living… dying. If you don’t care about them things then you sure as shit don’t give a damn about nothin’ in between. Anyways, I figured time will tell the motherfuckers. Time will tell. Well Lee… that time has come.”
It’s a funny kind of silence when someone’s about to kill a man. Sort of like that ringing you start to hear when you’ve been sitting alone in your room for a while. Not like you’re going deaf or something, not that kind of buzzing. I’m talking about that little hum you start hearing when there’s nothing else around. Seems to get louder the more you let it bug you. Right here and now it’s gone past that static drone. Like I’m trapped in black space, in some hole so far underground that no noise can get to it. Tiny eternities pass before Vicky’s wailing breaks through it.
“Is that Lee’s car? Ohhh shit I’ll show that sorry sunnuvabitch.”
The behemoth peaks outside. When he turns back to Jimmy his eyes are as big as the bottom of coke bottles.
“Uh boss… she headed for the cars… with the shovel.”
Jimmy lowers the pistol.
“Get yer woman under control or there won’t be no offer.”
I crash out of that house and make it to Vicky just before she can bring that shovel down on my car. It’s not like I would have noticed with all the dints and dings the old thing had collected over the years. Still, given this volatile situation I’ve found myself in, this would not have looked good.
I strip the shovel off her and take a few steps back. Then a few more for good measure. No telling what sort of cocktail she has going.
“Leland?”
Vicky grew up in a sea cornfields. Some speck of a town in rural Indiana. She is long and thin with big brown eyes and fibrous red-brown hair down her back. We’d been getting along together for a few years now. I won’t call her my woman, but she’s not exactly a friend neither. More like a partner in crime with the occasional romance to keep us from getting bored. We’d both lost all hopes of living normal, respectable lives and I suppose it’s easier getting along like that when you’re living with someone who cares as little as you do.
“Vicky?”
She liked to go up one day and down the next. Course some days she’d go both ways at the same time. I can always tell it in her eyes. She speaks through them, lies through them, loves with them. Now they’re peeled back further than they ought to go and that’s the only indication I need to know that today she chose up.
“You ok?”
Her voice is softer, a tender whisper now.
“I’m fine. What the hell you doin’?”
“Looking for you.”
“Well here I am, you found me honey. Now can you go just a few more minutes without getting us killed and I’ll take us home?”
“That’s what I’m doin’… tryin’ to keep you here with me.”
Tears bunch up in the corners of her eyes. She never cries. Vicky is typically barren of most emotions. All the sudden it feels like I swallowed a jarful of wasps.
“What is it you aim to accomplish here?”
“I meant to find you ‘fore Jimmy did, I knew he’d been lookin’ for you.”
“That’s why I’m here. We’re just talking, it’s all right.”
Now my fears are confirmed in the tears rolling off her chin. Something about that little chin of hers has always drove me crazy.
“I didn’t want to tell you at first cause I didn’t think it was a thing, but Jimmy been coming on to me. Sayin’ some crazy shit. Sayin’ he ought to marry me and all. He… he says you’d be the only thing keeping him from doin’ so.”
Well I’ll be damned. The bastard is shiftier than I figured him for. My first thought is GO… anywhere, it don’t matter long as I get there fast and put this place in the rearview. But then I got to wonder what happens when they can’t find me. All the family I got left has a way of disappearing just like I do. Haven’t spoke to any of them in years. Same goes for friends. All the signs are pointing to one person.
“Fuck.” Is all I can manage.
“What baby?”
Jimmy having eyes for Vicky wasn’t news to me, I’d seen it… anyone could see it. But I know Vicky wants nothing to do with that pieceashit. It’s not just his demeanor, which is as subtle as a horny hound dog in a pen full of heat-ridden bitches, but the conversation, that’s what is lacking and that’s the only thing that could bring Vicky to shack up with a guy like Jimmy. That woman loves to talk, and not only when she’s up on something. Hell, she knows more than I do about most anything. She never made it past tenth grade but she probably could of been teaching eleventh at that point.
***
Vicky’s momma went to the grocery one afternoon and never came back. She was fifteen and Beth, her toe-headed little sister, was twelve years old. There was no father or any family worth the phone call. The year before, Vicky spent 182 days in juvie for burglary. She knew how the system worked. Long days of waiting for bad news or waiting to be told to come back and wait a little longer for your bad news. She knew that a group home or a foster home wouldn’t be much different, so she hunkered down with little Beth in that house and made it work.
There was no TV in that house. Not much of anything to entertain a couple of teenage girls. They were forced to get creative, to think as adults when considering how to occupy their free time. And most days in that house, free time was all they had.
Grandgraw gave them an entire Encyclopedia set years back that’d been collecting dust ever since. Those were the only books in the house besides a few bibles that momma kept around for good luck. Vicky dropped out to wait tables fulltime at The Circle H but soon as she’d get home from a shift her and Beth went straight to the lengthy tome. They read every page of every volume. It took a couple of years, or the length of time it took for momma to come back around with a quiet man named Daryl.
***
Like most things, Vicky didn’t seem to feel one way or another about her childhood. Just is what it is, she’d say. But here in front of me I see a softer side of her. It makes me think about her as a child, before this place had its way with her.
Course Jimmy’s got eyes for Vicky. But business trumps sex every time for a guy like him. There’s no room for complex thought or emotion in that man. Even if he don’t worry over me taking off, Vicky will still be stuck here with him. Stuck slogging through more misery than she’s used to dealing with. The weight of this rut I’ve found myself in crashes down all around. if I run, it’s on her and if I take the job and get locked up it’s still on her.
“Where’d you get that shirt?”
It’s a baby blue tank top with sunflower print. The stems of the flowers twist up her torso. The petals reach for her face.
“Found it at Starky’s a while back, you like it?”
“Hell yeah.”
Something over my shoulder spooks her.
“Shit… They’re watching us. Play along with it.”
“What?”
She comes clawing for my face. I step to the side, shove her to the ground and bring the handle of the shovel across her throat.
“You gotta handle this.” She says.
“I know honey.”
“Everyone’ll thank you for it.”
She launches a knee up at my crotch, sends me rolling across the gravel.
I take my time sitting up against a tree, waiting for the pain to fade. All the sudden, hundreds of little shimmering specks crawl over the ground, like a morning dew got up and started shifting across the earth. I watch one of them climb up my finger. I go to shake it loose but it pinches down hard. Hell with pinchin’, thing just bit me. I bring him up for a closer look. Those shinning things are eyes, spider eyes. That’s what they all are, big eyes glistening something eerie. All beaming at me. All coming straight for me.
I dust off and storm over to Vicky.
“I don’t want their thanks. I don’t want nothing to do with these people. This place is a shithole. Nobody gives a damn about you or me or anybody else.”
“Then let’s get out of here. Just me and you, we’ll start fresh somewhere…”
There’s plenty of things I’d like to say to this, but now’s just not the time.
“…but you gotta smack me good first. Quick, just put me out.”
Jimmy’s still watching from the window, but I’m through with this little charade. Sick and tired of putting on for this two-bit, backwoods kingpin. Just go 30 miles in any direction and ask someone if they heard of Jimmy Little. None of them have.
“Hell no, no way, not gonna happen.”
She comes for my face again so I stick a leg out and she falls hard, forcing some tears. Now I’m sure this all looked pretty funny, even to a dude as thick as Jimmy, so I hustle off to my car. My sterling .45 mag is under the spare wheel in the trunk. She’s the nicest thing I own. You don’t go to the bargain bin when you’re shopping for a pistol. You find the biggest, most expensive piece on the rack and you go with that. It should scare the sonofabitch you’re pointing it at enough so you don’t have to use it. If you do, it should be as reliable as your neighborhood postman.
“When you hear shots get the car running.”
I toss my keys beside her and make way to the house.
“Be safe baby.”
The same two security guards are standing watch inside the back door. Maybe not standing exactly. The one is still drooling on himself, but sparky grabs me by the arm when I try pushing past him.
“Gonna have to pat you down bud.”
“Go ahead.”
Before I feel those boney fingers down past my waist, I crack him on the forehead with the ass of the mag. He goes limp and crumbles to the porch. The other one looks up at me very slowly, then back inside the house. I bust him on the cheek and he collapses against the outside of the house.
I stop in the bathroom. Can’t remember the last time I looked in a mirror, I usually try to avoid it. What I see now doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The end of a man, the dregs, the rest of what’s left. I hadn’t been to the Gulf since I was a little boy, but I still wear this shirt from The Crab Shack. It’s a big seafood joint in Destin that Pawpaw used to take us to. This old Volunteer’s hat rarely leaves my head. Guess there’s something about a ballcap that makes people keep on their way without paying you mind. But hell, this ain’t who I want to be. I never wanted this. If dad saw me here like this and doing these things he’d whip my ass without saying a word. A crimson fury swells somewhere deep down.
I drift down the hall to Jimmy’s room. Feels like it’s stretching out for miles. There’s no doubt now, no fear. I will do what needs to be done and be through with this place. There’s still some life to be lived. May not be too late to meet a good girl. A woman with her wits about her. Never really thought about having kids, but I figure I’d make a good enough daddy.
I come to the room at the end of the hall and knock.
“It’s open.”
The music is turned down low now. I can’t even make out Jimmy bullshitting through the wall like he always is. My hand grips the door knob but stops before turning it. A bolt of clarity runs right through me. This little job of his is a setup, a way for him to get rid of me without Vicky thinking he’s got me buried out back. She always thought all her problems, all the bad things, are buried in the backyard. He’ll have this Gus fella call the cops soon as he sees me walk through the door. By the time I walk out to the street they’ll be about five squad cars there waiting to escort me straight to a ten-year bid.
Jimmy is a dumb bastard, but he’s got a spooky sort of intuition that’s never been wrong, long as I’ve been around at least. He may not know exactly what I know, but he knows I’m on to him. Bet he even knows I got the .45 cocked at my waist and leveled right for his scrawny ass. Bet he can see it right through the door. I know for damn sure he has something pointed right back at me.
I throw open the door and dive forward into the room, peeling off three shots at the King of Walker County on my way to the carpet. While I’m falling, Jimmy fires off five of a small caliber back at me. Fortunately, he didn’t foresee me making that kind of entrance and all that lead goes whistling by, piercing the drywall overhead. The room is still now. I am breathing, really breathing, and Jimmy is slumped over in his Laz-y-boy.
Big haus stands perfectly still, his trembling MAC-10 aimed right at me. That thing’ll turn me into swiss cheese with a flinch. Slow as I can, I slide the revolver in my waistline and hold my hands in the air.
“Look man… I don’t know you and I got no quarrels with you… so how ‘bout we just go our separate ways now, huh?”
I take one step toward the door and see his hand tense around the gun.
“Ok, ok now, take it easy. Look…”
I look at a safe in the corner. Big boy looks over at it too.
“Hey, how ‘bout this, you take that safe, it’s yours. Shit, take whatever you want, I don’t want it.”
I can hear him wheezing across the room. His bald head looks like a maraschino cherry. After about half a minute he drops the gun and goes for the safe. I hit the deck, waiting for the wild spray of bullets as the gun does dances across the floor. But I underestimated the guy, he had it on safety.
I raise the revolver on my way back out the house. Once motionless bodies rise to investigate all the commotion. When they see their half-assed leader collapsed in his black-lit room no one sheds a tear. No one says much of anything and everyone takes their turn looting the place.
Vicky’s waiting in the passenger side of the sedan with the engine running. I slide in behind the wheel. She’s smiling, but that’s cause she’s not the one who just killed a man. Course the world is better off without Jimmy Little, but smiling and celebrating right now just doesn’t seem right.
By the time we cross the county line I realize I don’t know where the hell I’m going. There’s enough money to last, but nowhere to go and no sort of plan. I start to wonder if heading in the wrong direction is still better than having no direction to go at all.
Vicky gives me a look that says she does have a plan for us, but I know if I bring her along she’ll only remind me of the place I’d just come from, the place I’d just crawled out of.
I pull off at a filling station and pop the trunk. Down by the .45 I keep my own little savings account. I count out five grand, bundle it up and bring it to Vicky through her window. She knows what I’m getting at so when I open her door and help her out there’s no fussing between us. I pull her body in against mine and hold it close. There is still heat between us.
I cruise out of there slow, keeping her framed in the rearview. Part of me hopes she’ll look my way or wave, but she stays looking down at the stack of bills, thumbing through them, counting how much she’s getting away with.
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