V.
Swerve across black eddies of the cosmos. Your flurry of matter to find its form in the polluted womb of a woman in rural Appalachia. Your sculpting of features obscured by narcotic wash, your father’s blows assuaged by the morphine flood. On occasion, hold your breath and close your lungs to feel the full force of his blows, grow accustomed to this violence as you will know it for seventeen waking years. For this duration you will learn to evade him and others and all thought and every emotion. Time will grow as it shrinks into an unthinkable, unknowable thing. Submit yourself to the stench of your mother’s interior, for you will know it on her outsides and those things passed on from within her to you without in violent bursts of language. A two-wheeled tricycle screams fuck you you little shit from inside the shade of the double wide. Your surroundings will smell of rotten things—things born and grown, living and dying in constant decay—and your sense of smell will grow keen for sweet and benign things. Upon exit, retreat to this familiar darkness in small closets, windowless rooms, sleep that extends through the day-night cycle, and loss of consciousness: relief to be found in the timelessness of sleep and intoxication; comfort to be found in fantasy and imagination. Induction of this phantasmagoric darkness at all costs: at $12.99 for 750 milliliters of Old Grandad, $90 for three 30 milligram Roxicet, and $35 for five 2 milligram Alprazolam tablets—this warmth beyond your present knowing, this darkness deeper than inside her fickle cocoon. Wake from it on the couch after your 17th year to the far away pain of a kitchen knife in your abdomen and laugh at those feathered fists once heavy as stones. Laugh when you drive the knife into the side of his neck and continue to laugh 90mph in his Mitsubishi all the way to Shannon’s house where, from the cushioning of her hands against her thighs, the fan overhead and the light in center will whirl the world with you inside a swallow, howling maniacal in a perfect swan dive for the infinite darkness of cosmos.
***
“The shit-heeled side of him’s the only goddamn side he’s got.”
Jud busts out laughing, chokes on some phlegm and hocks it into the fire. It is almost 9am. “Wh--wait, what the hell’s that s’pose to mean?
Henry Burton, the only Black man allowed on this side of The Mountain, doubles over the fire pit not so much to get warm but to give ease to one of the slipped discs in his spinal column misaligned from untold decades of tree fellin’, fallen tree hauling, and root-ball removal as the sole arborist trusted enough, or crazy enough, to keep the roads and driveways clear for all the “damn lunatic rednecks” in Calhoun County.
“Old Henry…enigmatic as always. Can I get a swig of that?” Henry, swaying with the weight of a fresh quart of Rye in his right hand, looks at the bottle then raises an obstinate eyebrow at Jud.
“Hey now, just how many late nights have you come banging on my door when your cup was dry,” says Jud. Henry shrugs his shoulders and looks down at a Brittany Spears CD melting all phosphorescent at the edge of the burn pit. The shine of all those bubbling colors puts him deep down in a trance which Jud respects by shutting up and letting his old friend have his moment. A minute passes. Henry stands up and leans on to the balls of his feet, leaning further then headfirst for the flames, sending Jud shooting off the cooler top to wrap his arms around Henry’s burly old frame and pull him back onto his heels dug deep inches in the dirt to support his weight. Henry, eyes all glazed over, keeps falling forward, gaining momentum with a mass twice that of Jud’s. For something of a second, Jud just about loses his stance. He feels his colors flush within and without, but with his breakneck reflexes—witnessed to catch multiple dropped objects before they hit the ground (or objects thrown at him by his buddies trying to win a bet at his expense)—Jud pivots their collective falling weight onto his left foot and, in midair, shoves Henry’s body away from a rock that his head is falling for. A cloud of dust billows out from the thud of their bodies. Jud rolls to the side of his face looking away from Henry and stares through the busted thatches lining the bottom of the Miller’s trailer into the glowing red eyes of some varmint who saw this strange scene unfold and now retreats into the darkness, reconsidering his or her understandings of human kinesiology. Jud wipes the dirt off his cheek and rolls onto his back. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the bottle of Rye clenched in Henry’s fist high and proud above the earth like the torch of Liberty…liberty of alleviation—the alleviation of intoxication that only folks forced into such dark corners of the world can benefit from. They cough through laughter as Henry hands over the bottle.
“His cup runneth over,” says Jud, neither of them seeing how this applies, both of them liking how it sounds.
They pass the bottle a few times, still lying there in the dirt, then moan and groan their ways up to their feet and for the nearest objects they can sit on. “So,” says Jud picking pine needles from his flannel, “what’s this ‘shit-heeled’ side of Bob you was talkin’ about?”
Henry clears his throat to light another cigarette. “It’s the one that’s stinkin’ someone up wherever they go. Like that time you stepped in dog shit then climbed in my truck ‘fore we went down to Betty’s for some brisket…couple weeks ago now I think it was.”
“Hell Henry you still got that in yer craw? I didn’t know!”
“Shit no son, I’m getting at something here. But you right, you didn’t know, not at first. Then that shit-heel of yours got to stinkin’ up the truck and we both knew what was foulin’ it up. Now, since that day have you gone steppin’ in any dog shit?”
“No.”
“Horse shit?”
“Nope.”
“Chicken shit, bull shit?”
“No and no.”
“That’s right you haven’t, ‘cause you don’t like walkin’ round with that shit stank on your heel! Even more, you don’t like bothering other folks with it.”
“Well yeah but what—what exactly are you—”
“I’ll tell you what I’m getting at if you’ll close that damn smartass mouth for a minute.”
Jud turns a smile to Henry, thinking he’s giving him a hard time, but there is no fooling around in his expression.
“There are some people out there, people like your low-down uncle, who go around steppin’ in shit everyday ‘cause they like the stink of it and they like putting it on other people’s carpets and floorboards and sidewalks. That’s the ways of a wicked man. That’s evil right there son.”
“I see…it’s like someone who—”
“Umm-hm,” interjects Henry looking down his nose at the tip of his Winston gathering embers from a long pull. Jud can’t figure why he cut him off. Henry flips his eyes up at a window in Bob’s trailer where Bob’s pale, sickly face looms like a malevolent spirit against the black of the bedroom behind him. Jud follows Henry’s eyes to the window and sees Bob blur from the frame toward the front door with heavy clunking footsteps.
“Oh shit…” mutters Jud as both him and Henry divert their attention into the trash fire and away from a crazed, half-naked Bob kicking the front door of his mobile home off its hinges. A tourniquet dangles from his forearm and he has a crazed look in his eye, a look that turns even more unsettling when it lands on a scattered pile of wood at Jud’s feet.
“What the fuck is that shit?”
“That? It’s our wood, Bob.”
“Don’t you fuckin’ Bob me boy, you know what I’m talkin’ bout.”
Jud looks down at the wood, then back up at his uncle: once, then twice, and still can’t figure what the hell he is getting at.
“Ummm…”
Bob’s head jerks in a swivel to some shadowy figure Linda Blair crawling laps up and down the trunk of a Virginia Pine.
“Goddamnit Lenny! Could you give that shit a rest for two fuckin’ minutes… I’m tryin’ to talk some sense into this good-for-nothin-but-breathin nephew of mine!”
Henry and Jud twist their heads for the tree, then back at each other, acknowledging that whomever Bob is berating exists in his mind alone with a nod.
“I said stack that shit, I said it last night. Now make it tidy,” Bob yells at Jud while keeping watch on his imaginary friend/enemy out the corner of his eye.
“Wait, who? Me?” replies Jud, craning his neck to make impossible eye contact with Bob.”
Bob throws his whole face back at his nephew, all foaming and steaming from its outlets. Jud studies over all the wood strewn around the fire pit and has a vague recollection from the hazy debauchery of the night before of Bob screaming at him to do something with it. Given his uncle’s current state—which is worse off than it usually is on these god-forsaken Mountain mornings—Jud knows he better tread lightly with his tongue and not at all with his feet.
“You right Bob, I was just getting on that.” Jud gathers up a few small logs that make his arms look even skinnier as he cradles them. Henry holds on to his busted back with one arm, gathers up a log with the other, and limps over to Jud to hand it to him. As he bends over to repeat this process, Bob comes tearing across the yard and swats the log out of his hand, carrying with him a foul and toxic odor seeping from his pores—the stench of a strictly chemical diet. Bob puts his deranged face a couple of inches from Henry’s. Henry’s face diverts its eyes and wrinkles its nose from the burn of Bob’s body breath. Jud’s face floats in to separate them.
“What’d you do that for,” Jud’s looking right at Bob whose crazed, unholy eyes stay fixed on Henry.
“You do it yourself boy,” says Bob to Jud while staring at Henry.
“Alright…just chill.” Jud gathers up the rest of the wood and sets it down nice and tidy by the fire pit. Henry breaks away from Bob, but Bob keeps after him with his ugly mug. Jud’s seen his uncle toss 50-inch flatscreens across the front yard as effortlessly as frisbees; watched him kick steel doors clean open, and shove women weighing as much as him through layers of sheet rock and framing; but from the looks of his busted and brittle frame these days, none of those feats seem believable.
Jud often wondered what sort of wicked past lives he must have lived to land him here on this miserable mountain. And in the past of this life, he cannot recall a specific event that left him in the care of Bob Bedford who has now, due to his rapidly deteriorating health and sanity, left Jud more and more often under the supervision of The Mountain and its mostly deranged Redneck community—mostly except for the likes of Henry and a wise old banjo picking hermit named Cotton who lived year-round in plywood shack in the constant shade of the holler. Jud knew Bob was his Dad’s biological and “blood” brother and so he could deduce that his absentee father, or likely deceased father, was a real sunnuvabitch through and through. Mid-bender, Bob was fond of recounting proud tales of robberies, assaults and hate crimes pulled off with Jud’s Dad in their heyday like normal folk would boast about a three-pound crappie or a son that got a full-ride to Vandy. Jud filled the void of memory where his father’s life was missing with villainous narratives not far from the truth; in fact, if anything, they were undershot and much too generous. He was forced to animate this void with those phantasms ladled from the dark and dreary well of his imagination because to ask his uncle Bob direct—mid-bender, buzzed, or sober—would invite a certain violent response such as a bottle of Bud smashed against the back of his head followed by a screaming: “What the fuck done I told you about bringin’ that up boy!” But he liked to think that his mother must have been a different kind of person, nicer maybe. Jud was as smart as he needed to be to survive the constant perils his environments posed, and while he struggled to summon the energy and concentration required to study his text books and pass his classes, he could speed-read people out on the streets, and he had a good grip on who he was as a person. That said, Jud knew there was something inside him that set him apart from Bob and his cronies—his unwanted “uncles”—and, surely, his own father. He recognized this part of him as good—the last flickering lantern in a crumbling coal mine—and he never could shake the feeling that his mother is, or was, the source of this goodness.
“Hey Jud! Whatcha doin’?” The warm tone of Henry’s voice leads Jud out from the abysmal caverns of his imagination. He had been staring off into space for God knows how long.
“Nothin’—just thought I saw a buck,” Jud replies, hustling to pick up the rest of the wood.
“Buck, schmuck, cluck, you dumb fuck. You was doin’ it again: starin’ out at nothin’ like a house cat lookin’ at wallpaper all damn day,” Bob hollers, slapping his boney knee with amusement.
At least I’m staring at something real, you fucking tweaker, Jud thinks to say, but thinks it only. He looks over at Henry, halfway expecting him to say something in his defense, but the old man’s sad eyes do all the talking, saying, with a little hangdog shake of the head, I’m sorry son, I can’t…
A cold wind slashes over the ridge, sobering Bob long enough for him to realize that the only decent covering he’s wearing is his hand over his balls. The raging red currents of blood slow to stagnant purple and bluish hues in his capillaries, giving him a corpselike appearance and spooking him enough to forget his ongoing browbeating of Jud. Bob shudders: “This place is a fucking mess, better have all this shit cleaned up ‘fore we run that errand later on.”
“Uh-huh,” says Jud surveying the sorry state of the yard.
Now someone who is lost enough, or foolish enough to ‘just pass through’ this side of The Mountain, can measure the sanity present, or, more often lacking, in its residents—without so much as a glimpse of their paranoid eyes splitting the broken blinds of their trailer windows—by taking stock of their front yards. Right now, Bob’s animal like presence pawing at the busted door on his front steps says all there is to know about the kind of person he is here and now, but with a closer look at the state of his property you’ll get a deeper look into the deplorable depths of his entire shit-heeled existence.
There are:
A rusted trampoline frame bent in half and dissolving into the dirt with busted legs clawing up at the air, gesturing escape from their inevitable fate of corrosion,
At least ten useless five-gallon buckets,
The guts of a couple cannibalized HVAC units stolen off the roof of the K-Mart in Oxford at 2am shortly after Uncle Bob was caught shooting speed in a bathroom stall and fired from his stocking job after 11 days of employment,
1 plastic pastel-colored Barbie Edition Fischer Price Big Wheel (you guess how many wheels were missing) and about a dozen Barbie dolls with their limbs and accessories scattered about the lawn,
2 inflatable pools: one deflated and disintegrating in the grass, the other inflated and filled with piss, rainwater, engine oil, gasoline, puke, a thin film of drowned flies and mosquitoes, sunken liquor bottles that would tell more terrifying tales than the wreckage of Shackleton’s Endurance, a few hundred cigarette butts, and, ironically, a children’s book titled “Once Upon A Potty”,
A wheelbarrow full of dud grenades and empty brass shell casings—mostly shotgun and small caliber—worth $72.30 at Brothers’ Recycling down the hill,
3 empty wheelless wheelbarrows,
1shiny zinc-plated flagpole flying one confederate flag at full mast 24/7/365, both pole and flag tended to twice a week by Bob ceremoniously.
Feeling pretty low-down for not having the young man’s strength and courage needed to step in and tell Bob Bedford just where he could shove all the shit he’d left strewn about his yard, Henry Burton starts picking up the despoiled Barbie dolls and tossing them in the burn pile. Jud backs up the old 4x4 Ram that was left on the premises and starts loading it up with scrap for the recycling yard. He can’t remember how many truck loads of shit he’s dumped down the hill at Brothers’ Recycling, nor can he remember how much money it was all worth, because he rarely saw any of it. Bob always told Jud to keep enough for himself to fill up the truck and get himself a couple cheeseburgers at McDonald’s, and Jud knew Bob would count every penny of the earnings upon his return to see if he’d tried to sneak a Big Mac meal. Point being, he’s done this more than a hundred times, so he has little trouble being as drunk as he is on this morning while using his reciprocating saw and grinder—with one last chipped cutoff wheel—to break down the HVAC units and trampoline frame. In all this time, he’s never lost a finger or needed a single stitch from drunkenly mishandling such tools. They’ve become extensions of his body and he handles them with the same cool, distant regard that he handles a Marlboro cigarette or a spoon for his mornings’ bowl of Lucky Charms. One night, Jud woke in a sweat after dreaming about a couple mad scientist type dudes fusing various power tools to his stubby appendages. Upon deconstructing the dream, he decided that he could probably get along alright with a tig welder and dremel for hands, but he’d get nowhere with a hammer drill and circular saw in place of his feet.
Jud makes quick work of all the scrap. Just inside an hour he’s got it all broke down and organized in tidy piles in the bed of the Ram, making it easy for him to separate when he pulls into Brothers. This was one of his favorite chores, leaving him in a meditative, trance-like state, so much so that he’s forgotten all about his good friend Henry. With a hot flash of anxiety, Jud wheels around and is relieved to find that he’s not wriggling on the ground towards the fire from sudden cardiac arrest or seizure. Instead, it appears that Henry lost his energy after bending over to toss all those Barbies in the fire—effectively putting them out of their misery—and now he’s plopped himself down in the passenger seat of the Barbie Mobile with his legs sprawled out over the hood and the bottle of Rye hoisted straight up in the air with its contents freely pouring down his gullet. Jud laughs as loud as he can without stirring Bob out from some darkened corner of his tweaker trailer and into another psychotic frenzy on the front lawn.
“You havin’ fun over there old man?”
“Who the hell you callin old? See—see you never done seen an old man with a pimp-mobile like this,” slurs Henry, handing the hooch to Jud as he approaches.
“Can’t say I have,” Jud smiles back, shaking his head.
“And I betchu ain’t never seen an old man with this many bitches,” continues Henry, tossing up a handful of disfigured Barbie dolls, taking one and bending its leg to sit on his shoulder.
With this, Jud can’t contain an outpouring of laughter that rattles Bob loose from some psychosis and sends him back to the cracks in the blinds.
“Heyurfator! Y-y’all shut the-sh-shut the fuck up out there!”
The mood is stifled. Henry sighs, “Maaaan someone ought to shove a hot poker straight up his ass…” Jud sees himself taking a red-hot poker from the flames of the burn pit. Watches himself march into the trailer where Henry has Bob bent over and tied up and gagged with his spoiled britches down around his ankles. But that him of his imagination can deliver the enema-by-fire, he turns away.
“Where the hell all these damn dolls come from anyway? I never seen any little girls runnin’ round these parts… thank God,” asks Henry.
Jud reaches for the Rye, takes as long of a chug of the hellfire he can bare and sputters: “There was a girl… once…”
***
It was a Sunday morning in mid-July and Jud had been awake since the sun had snuck through the gaps in the planks of wood on the roof of his bedroom—the shed in Bob’s backyard. He peels off his once-white undershirt, wrenches the sweat from it, and hangs it on a rusty nail to dry. His boxers are tattered and soaked through with sweat. He leans over between his knees and sniffs to see how long he’s got before its time to find him a clean pair somewhere. Another couple days, he thinks. The screaming started up from the trailer about an hour ago—vicious hollering from Jenny volleyed by murderous screaming from Bob. “Same old, same old,” Jud says to himself. Bob had met Jenny down at the Dollar General, where she was a cashier, over a few lines of coke and a few-minutes’ fuck in the bathroom, while her manager was passed out in the back. It only took a couple days, hell, maybe a couple hours, before Bob had convinced Jenny to start ripping the till so that they could get some “better stuff” and do some “other things”. The “better stuff” came in the form of green hexagonal pills, or OC 80’s, and the “other stuff” entailed 10+ hour sessions of depraved, unhinged junky sex; an overdose that landed Jenny in the psych ward over Thanksgiving, and a felony possession charge for Bob who was currently out on bail. Jud could tell the difference between the bestial howling and hollering that came with their sexcapades and this current commotion which always indicated them beating the shit out of each other. The guttural jungle bellows of their sex binges always troubled Jud much more than this sort of violent barking. He reasoned he would be better off if both of those whackos managed to shoot or stab each other in just the right place at the same time. The cops certainly wouldn’t give a shit, and they wouldn’t think twice about telling Jud he could keep the property instead of spending their unpaid overtime putting it all down on the books. Such scum wasn’t worthy of the time: not Jud’s, the cops’, or all the suits appointed to sort out the wreckage of the postmortem who were better off dead than alive.
The commotion gets louder. Death threats are lobbed back and forth so that this whole side of The Mountain can hear them. Nothing out of the ordinary for Jud, but something they say does catch his attention, something like: “I ain’t cleaning that goddamn pool and I ain’t wiping no more shitty asses, I tell you what I will do—I’ll leave her whining ass in that shitty pool next time I go get twisted at Robbies!’ At this early hour, Jud’s hungover head is all tied in bowline knots that take some time to untangle. He knows Bob isn’t talking about leaving Jenny in that pool, she wouldn’t let him out of her sight long enough to buy toilet paper without her. But if not her, then who?
“Jud!!! Getcher ass out here quick!!” Jenny pounds on the shed door. Jud unlatches and opens it, and, just as he expected, her face is all smashed to shit: nose crushed to cartilage, one eye bruised and swollen shut and the opposite cheekbone reduced to rubble—her whole ogreish expression in some god-awful diagonal tilt down to the left. Now her and Bob had plenty squabbles before this one, and some of them left Jenny with a shiner, cussin’ and hobblin’ all the way to her aunty Mandy’s, while others left Bob out cold and face down on their filthy carpet with a lump on the back of his head the size of Stone Mountain, GA; but it was clear to Jud right then and there, with one look at that busted woman’s equally busted face, that ol’ Bob Bedford had finally flown off his rocker and descended to all new depths of crazed-violence and depravity. Jud gathers all this in a matter of seconds, but there’s still one little four-foot-two piece of this fuckshow puzzle that he’s forgetting.
“It’s Carly!!!” cries Jenny.
Jud’s guts pull so taught he can’t steal a breath of air from inside.
“HE’S AFTER CARLY!”
What happens next is all slowed down for Jud—about 10 frames per second is how you would see him seeing it all unfold. If there was anything redeeming, anything positive, any one person that brought any light into Jud’s world it was that sweet little girl. She was all sundrenched and freckles with a big bucktooth smile too big for her and too big for any of the degenerates on Redneck Mountain to comprehend. Jud had seen how Bob and Jenny screamed at her. He’d stood by while they fed her nothing but Fruit-Loops for three days at a time—all those goddamn tummy aches, the constant neglect and abuse: if it was getting to her, she never showed it. He’d seen Bob stomp her old Barbie Jeep to pieces right in front of her after his drunk ass tripped over her toys in the living room, and he’d taken her hand when she reached for it afterwards to show him a ladybug infestation she discovered in a rotting pile of lumber by the Miller’s pond. She was skipping and singing a song of made-up words like nothing happened, dragging a bewildered Jud along behind her. Had she built up impenetrable emotional walls over her brief and timeless childhood years, deflecting all the evil imposed on her back out into this shitty world she was thrown into, or did some of it find its way in only to be repressed and gradually, silently putrefy the saintly purity of her soul? Jud hated to think of these things, but he did, daily, and it made him feel like a real shit-heel for not standing up for her, daily. He knew that to not protect or somehow shield Carly from the subhuman world that Bob and Jenny provided was a mortal sin that he would carry with him for the rest of his life unless… unless he was prepared to finally put his foot down across their emaciated throats.
“The fuck outta my way,” says Jud, emotionless, snatching a shovel off the wall with one hand and shoving Jenny out of the doorway, sending her sprawling into tall stalks of overgrown grass and weeds, with the other. He marches through the back door of Bob’s trailer cautiously, knowing damn well that his fucking nutcase uncle could have a gun pointed at Carly’s head, or, on second thought, that this whole scene is a sham meant to lure him into the trailer, unaware that the gun is aimed and waiting for him. The paranoia of the paranoid is contagious. But when he crosses the threshold there’s no one inside and the place is a mess of overturned furniture all busted up. There’s a soup of spilt Doritos all crushed and soaked in Mountain Dew and splattered across every surface of the room; a handle of Old Grandad minus its cap and down to the dregs; a shattered half handle of Old Crow stabbed and stuck in the wall; Carly’s pink Princess Barbie backpack stuffed into the freezer above the refrigerator which is open and sprayed with vomit. Swimming in the pool of runoff on the linoleum floor are razor blades, bullets and open rigs—the shipwrecked waste of a parental crew who lost their anchor in the seas of sanity long before they knew what an anchor actually was, or what a parent was for that matter. It’s the worst Jud’s ever seen the place, but even more terrifying is the silence—not a scream or holler from Jenny or Bob and not a peep from…
Splashing: struggled splashing out the front door. Jud rushes out to find out a scene so grizzly any decent-hearted man would slit his wrists to forget it. Bob’s got Carly by the shoulders, holding her head under the filthy water in the inflatable pool. Her arms thrash and flail about violently. Her furious little heels hammer Bob’s sides relentlessly. Bob feels none of it, never has and never will. Jud gives him one chance.
“Bob! BOB!!! Let her go man! GET THE FUCK OFF OF HER!!!”
Bob turns his head around real slow and stares straight through Jud with black eyes that sink down and in toward his nose. For as long as he’s been boozin’ and shootin’ dope, Bob’s been capable of doing something as heinous as this. Or maybe he always had this in him, and the drugs were just a catalyst—a way of leveling reality with the depths of his demented fantasies and mixing them all up till he couldn’t tell one from the other; till sobering moral and legal boundaries were erased and chaos was the new high order.
Jud crosses the lawn wearing nothing but his grimy boxer shorts and steel toe boots with shoelaces dangling. All fear in his heart is expelled by eagerness. As he comes up on his uncle and the man turns his head to face him, Jud’s got the head of the shovel cocked high above his shoulder, and when he brings it down on him he brings it down with every intention of smashing his skull to bits, driving the fragments so deep inside his brain that the fucker won’t even remember that the last thing he did with his worthless life was drown his own daughter. The blow busts Bob’s head wide open all right, loosening his grip on Carly, and sending him flopping and sucking at the filth of the pool. Jud tears Carly out of the water. Her arms fly around his neck. She’s sobbing--uncontrollable, scared-to-death bawling. Both of them are. Massive swells of guilt come crashing through his head: This’ll fuck her up for the rest of her life and I coulda--I should have done somethin’ about it a long time ago. . . you’re a coward…a fucking piece of shit coward no better than this—this…
“Don’t cry…It-it makes me cry…please don’t.”
Carly mashes her eyes into Jud’s bare shoulders, trying to dry her tears. The earth presses up against Jud’s knees cold and soaked from the fluids of this contaminated scene. He looks out through the tall grass, sees it come to life with bees navigating the stalks, hears it hum and vibrate with cricket and cicada song—a dull scream that carries across the road and past miles of patchwork fields. Some give life to corn and cotton, cattle and chicken; others lay barren and lunar under the waving heat. He wonders if other worlds exist beyond this one—beyond this world of violence and madness and suffocating heat that belongs to him. There are reflections from the paint of two cars parked just the other side of Friendship Road. There’s no telling how long they’ve been there, but they look nervous talking into their phone’s so he guesses they saw the whole show.
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