Alabama Noir

Exhaustion by Anita Miller Garner

Florence

It’s late, even for young guys like me and Ray and DC. So late, it’s early. The rest of the bars done closed down and we the only ones left just outside the city limits at the Hollywood where life don’t start till after midnight. People been stopped playing pool and gone. Ol’ Skunk — tired ol’ black man, walks slow, got a big white streak in the hair on top of his head — Skunk’s getting tired, shuffling back to where we’re shooting nine-ball and cut-throat. White folks other than me call him Edsel. They slap him on the back, shake his hand, talk like they’re black for about thirty seconds. Hey, Edsel. Man. What up? they say, think they cool. I call him Skunk just like Ray and DC do. We all call him Skunk. I can tell he’s tired of asking us if we need more beers. He’s too busy slow-mopping behind the bar, stacking chairs one by one on the table, making a little bit of noise so we get the message, but not so much noise that Ray gets mad. Skunk wants us to leave, but he’s too scared to say nothing.

We done hustled three drunk dudes for most they paychecks. Don’t nobody look us in the eye or give us lip when we take the money. The men leave us alone and the few chicks all sit on the far side of the bar, far away from us as they can get. But they’re looking, the chicks are. I catch the chicks looking at me sideways-like, acting like they’re not looking. Me and Ray and DC, we’re just what they want. We just what they need, baby. Hard ride. Hard six-pack ride with our big shoulders. Some nights I walk over and pick one out. Like that last white girl I had with the sweet face like she loves me. She wants me bad like I’m G-Eazy/Yelawolf. Tonight ain’t that kinda night, though. Tonight’s a business night. A player’s gonna play when he wants to play.

Ol’ Skunk finally rattles over our way, dragging a nasty sour mop and bucket on wheels. Sun comin’ up, he says. Watch out for the sheriff deputy down by the bridge, he says, like talkin’ is gonna get us to leave. They catch you they put you under the jail till you cough up the big bucks. Which is bullshit. We walked here. Didn’t nobody drive. Walked to the Hollywood through the woods from where Ray’s girlfriend Yolanda stays. Cold weather like this, you see them green and orange outside lights of the Hollywood from Yolanda’s front porch. Just walk down a steep hill and don’t get caught up in no raggedy saw brier vines in the dark, cross over a footbridge, then walk back up a hill and you’ll be right at the Hollywood’s back door. Nobody see you coming. Nobody see you going. We way too smart for that fat cracker sheriff deputy.

Ol’ Skunk’s still talking. Y’all go on over to Poochie’s. He open all the time for whoever show up whenever. Poochie a good man.

Poochie serves whoever shows up all right, but Poochie’s just a bootleg man. Last time we were sitting in Poochie’s front room, some man nobody ever seen before come up to DC and knocked DC out cold with a chair. Man never seen DC before.

Ol’ Skunk’s getting braver now, looking us in the eye, smiling. I seen you boys back here scammin’, he says, like he’s up on us. Then he stands there like he’s ’bout to stick his hand out like maybe he wants a piece of the action just because he thinks he knows something. That Raeburn boy you took for a hunderd, his cousin work down at the jail, Skunk says.

I don’t know where this motha thinks he’s going with this line, but before he can put together his own low deal, Ray’s up off his stool and got this motha choked up against the wall, Ray holding his chalky pool stick with both hands across Ol’ Skunk’s throat so Skunk can’t breathe/talk/nothing. Ol’ Skunk’s right eye pretty much popping out of his head.

Most of the time Ray’s easygoing, but when the money-man comes after Ray, Ray gets nervous. I need to say something to soothe Ray down. “Hey.” I start talking and think fast since I need a plan to get us out of this fast. “Hey man,” I say, “we’re a team. Me and you and DC makes three. Ain’t that right?”

But what I’m thinking is this: money from Skunk’s cash box ain’t enough to help. Ray baby needs more than the skanky jingle in Ol’ Skunk’s cash box. Ray’s in deep to the money-man this time. Way deep. Not even Ray’s fault, but that don’t matter.

Skunk is light-skinned enough that his face turns red. Other eye looks like it’s about to pop too. I can tell Skunk wants to ask something, but that’s hard to do with your throat mashed against a wall so hard your jaw’s hanging loose.

Ray speaks up, talking low and regular, like he’s at the Dairy Queen down on Court Street, trying to decide what flavor Blizzard he wants. “I’m gonna let you down nice and easy like, and you gonna tell me what I want to know.”

And I’m thinking: What the shit? Ray’s not even asked Skunk nothing I can hear, so how is Skunk gonna tell Ray what Ray wants to know? What’s that shit mean? Ray keeps Skunk held up pretty much slammed against the wall, letting him down slow, letting that chalky stick fall, bouncing off the floor. Skunk’s not fighting back, either. He’s just held up by Ray’s big arms, blue skull and flower on top of muscle, the name of Ray’s dead Texas friend in black on the other arm on Ray’s light skin. Almost as light as my skin. Ink looking good on Ray.

Ol’ Skunk tries to talk. Just air comes out. Then he says, like a whisper, I got no part in that deal.

Skunk’s right hand moving and Ray is holding Skunk’s collar with his right and reaching for what Skunk’s reaching for with his left. Metal flashes back up on Skunk’s throat.

Ray talks easy: “You gonna tell me what I wanna know?”

Skunk’s talk is still full of air: I got no part of that deal, man.

Ray takes the knife edge and nicks Skunk’s throat like shaving. “You gonna tell me what I wanna know.” But Ray is telling this time, not asking.

DC looks at me like he’s thinking: What the shit? Ol’ Skunk give us Orange Crush when we kids. Skunk opened up the Hollywood during Handy Fest Week and paid that famous Muscle Shoals trumpet man to teach kids like us how to blow without spitting. DC says out loud, “Hey man, Skunk got no money. Just chump change over in the cash box.”

But Ray pays DC no mind and cuts Skunk’s cheek — not deep, just enough to make it bleed.

Skunk never pisses his pants or nothing. Looking sad, he says, Boy, what you lookin’ at is being dead, ain’t it?

Ray takes the point of Skunk’s own knife and makes like to stick Skunk’s ribs. “You see this on my arm?” he says right in Skunk’s face, breathing the man’s nasty breath. “I’m already dead, man.”

The way Ray says it, Skunk’s gotta know Ray means it. Ray lets him go, and me and Ray and DC leaving slow. Because we want to leave. Not because we struck out. Ray and me and DC make three, picking up our shit real slow while Skunk doubles over and rubs his face.

We’re almost out the door when Skunk gets his voice back enough to yell out at us: You wanna die, just go past that sheriff deputy and take the trail that starts at the willow!

Ray doesn’t even act like he hears. We out the door, and me and DC go back down the hill. We’re headed back to Ray’s girl’s place, back to chill and catch a buzz, hanging, maybe Ray and Yo knock it in the next room and me and DC turn up the tunes loud ’fore my own stick gets hard just listening. Whatever it takes to chill Ray down.

“Hold up,” Ray says.

“What?” DC says. “What you wanna go hustle Ol’ Skunk for?”

“I’m goin’ back to Yolanda’s house,” I say, heading to that big bottle of cognac mostly full we left sitting on YoGirl’s table.

But Ray don’t move. “You wi’ me or not?” He’s serious. Not the same Ray played tight end last year Friday nights hoping somebody see his excellent shit and give him a ticket out.

DC done had enough. “Look, man, whatever shit you in, count me out.” He starts on up the hill toward the cognac.

“Don’t work that way,” Ray call to him. “If I go down, all go down.”

DC starts back down the hill. Me and DC are all ears.

“Won’t waste me first,” Ray says.

And then we see the scam. Ray don’t pay up, his friends and fam be the first to get whacked. And he ain’t got no family ’cept his mama that nobody know of. That’s the money-man’s way to let folks know the money-man means business. Dead dude can’t pay like a scared dude can. A scared dude is what you call motivated.

So me and DC follow Ray through the edge the woods by the road, Ray walking like a ghost he’s so quiet, me and DC stepping on sticks and dry-ass leaves and all kinda shit making racket. When we see the sheriff deputy car hid behind brush down low on the side road, Ray motions us to get down and we squat there till the gray daylight is enough for the sheriff deputy to think night is over and he takes his dumb-ass self back to his office. Sheriff deputy thinks he knows what’s going on. Sheriff deputy don’t know squat.

Ray starts up the willow path just like Skunk says not to do unless we wanna die, and we’re right behind. Light’s coming fast now. Before we know it, we’re standing on the edge of this big-ass rock, looking way down on Buzzard Creek below. Real name is Cypress Creek, runs right into the Tennessee River, but we all call it Buzzard Creek since the old garbage dump and the new garbage dump both right on the creek so that on and off you can see fifty or more buzzards in the trees here, right here at this rock where the trail ends. Me and DC looking at each other, studying what’s next. Ray sits down in the beat-down dead yellow grass under a big pine. I sit down myself and lean up ’gainst the pine. When my eyes shut, my head spins, so I open them quick-like again.

“What we looking for?” I ask. I’m thinking: kilos, cash money. Maybe ice, Oxy.

Ray’s not saying nothing for a minute. Then: “Maybe we lookin’ for the shit got ripped off me. Or maybe we lookin’ for cash-money.”

DC’s making water off the rock edge, seeing how far he can shoot his stream in the creek way down below. He’s looking around, looking across the creek, looking up in the air, as he makes water. “What’s that?” he asks.

“What’s what?” I ask.

“That,” he says, and points up in the pine tree.

So that’s how me and Ray and DC come to be hunkered down behind some needle-ass-stabbing green bush on the coldest day of the year, feet numb, snot running out my nose, hungover, waiting to kill somebody I ain’t never seen before when they come back to get their black L.L.Bean backpack stacked full of hundred-dollar bills. Ray had taken it down, looked at it, then grabbed the black plastic rope and pulled it back up there, back up in that tall ol’ pine tree.

First off, Ray says it could be a trap by the police trying to sucker some poor unsuspectings like us to take the money so’s they would have somebody to put in jail and make the police look good, pretend like they’re making the world safe. Nothing in the world makes rich folk feel better than to read in the paper that people like me/Ray/DC been caught doing some something and headed for jail. Even if it’s something made up, like DC’s uncle that paid his child support but they claim it ain’t been paid and he’s got no paper says he did pay it so he’s back in jail. Always some piece of paper, somewhere, with words saying you messed up. Ray says it’s all fixed, it’s all a trap.

Then, after ’bout an hour of talking that shit, Ray up and changes his mind and says, “Maybe this is the money due to me, the money made off what got stole from me. Maybe I’m the rightful owner of this money.”

“One thing for sure,” says DC, “you not the one throwed that prep-ass backpack up in that pine tree with that rope tied to it. Whoever did that, they comin’ back for it.”

Even Ray can’t deny that. “This is life or death. Our life or death. We have to watch who comes back for this.” He starts coughing like he’s about to cough out a lung.

I let him catch his breath. “And when we see ’em?” I ask.

“Then we find out if they on the up-and-up. See if it’s one dude or a crew. My guess is one dude. Alone. Us three find out easy from one dude what we need to know. That cash money gonna be ours. Pay off the money-man and let the rest sit around just waitin’ till the time is right. Then we invest. In product.”

DC speaks up: “Somebody talks. Somebody gonna know it’s us. Then payback come knockin’.”

Ray laughs. Then he’s quiet, talking low: “Nobody will be in no shape to talk.”

“But Ol’ Skunk’s the one told us to come here. Ol’ Skunk knows,” DC says.

Ray looks at me and DC and raises up his left eyebrow and I know he means Skunk, too, will be in no shape to talk when Ray finishes with him.

I feel sick enough to puke, and DC don’t look no better. Ray’s eyes are leaking water. And when Ray’s feeling sick, he only gets meaner.

Then Ray starts in on the money: “How much you think is in that pack?”

We take turns guessing just before we take turns telling what all we gonna do and buy with all that money. I think: Ray’s gonna tell how he will be the man for Yo, provide for her and all. But all he says is: Yo’s just a trick and he’s gonna leave her ass, maybe go to LA where he’s got cousins. Take me and DC with him. “We gonna make so much money scammin’,” he says, “that this money in this pack will look like chump change.”

The sun is full up now, not that we can see it. The gray just got lighter is all. “Lord,” DC says, “I’m tired. I’m past tired. Exhausted.”

I, too, feel like sleeping. Just too cold and hungry and in pain.

Ray is coughing more, seems to be comin’ down with a bad cough.

The air feels warmer now, but the wind when it kicks up cuts like a knife. My belly growls loud as a man talking, and I could use something to drink. DC looks sleepy. A squirrel rustles the dry grass and leaves, and Ray jerks, like he’s scared by the racket. He smiles a mean rusty saw-blade smile.

“I’m hungry,” DC whines too loud.

Ray’s face is dark.

“How you sure somebody gonna come?” DC asks.

Ray looks like he wants to waste DC now.

Finally DC says he’s cold and hungry and can’t sit out under no bush with stickers on it no more.

“What we need,” Ray whispers, “is somethin’ to eat and drink, somethin’ to warm us up.” Only his mouth is smiling. Eyes not smiling. Then he says to me, “Get down to the creek and follow it back to Yolanda. Can’t use no path. And don’t let nobody see you. Bring back some good stuff.”

“What if somebody comes while I’m gone?”

“Me and DC handle it.” Still, just his mouth smiling.

So I pick my way down the hill, almost falling it’s so steep, and walk alongside the creek, under the bridge, back up to where I know good the way up the hill to find Yo’s place. I knock and knock before she comes to the door. She’s sleepy-eyed in a big soft pink thing wrapped around her, nothing under that, far as I can tell. Just the pink thing wrapped around Yo’s smooth skin. She’s sweet like a sleeping baby, her voice tiny.

“Where’s Ray?” she asks.

I come in and tell her no more than she makes me tell. She’s been with Ray long enough to know better than to ask too much. I go in Yo’s kitchen and start looking in the fridge and in the cabinets. “Ray needs this,” I say, grabbing a plastic bag and throwing shit in it like crackers, cheese, meat.

She sits down in a raggedy-ass chair and puts her head in her hands. When she looks up at me, one big tear rolls down her cheek.

“He’s in trouble?” she asks in that tiny voice.

“Naw,” I say, “we just hungry.”

“So why did he not come himself?”

“He’s busy. Comin’ by later. Just to see you.” And no sooner I say it I know it’s a lie. Soon as that money is Ray’s and he thinks nobody can trace him, he leaves town and never sees Yo again. Truth is, Ray’s not taking me or DC to LA either. Then who is left around for the money-man to whack? Everbody — Yo, police, everbody — will think me and DC are responsible for whatever’s stole, whoever’s dead. And we’ll be too dead to stand up for ourself.

I grab the cognac off the table, pull out the cork, and take a big two-gulp swallow that burns like fire. Yo is still sitting at the table when I go into the bathroom and sit the cognac on the sink and close the door and put up the seat to be nice-like. I’m feeling gray and dirty, and I smell my own self. I’m not looking in the mirror because there’s nothing there I want to see. That ol’ cognac bottle sits on the sink, right below the medicine shelf, so when I zip up, I open up that mirror door and look inside. Cough stuff, rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, a bottle of stuff YoGirl takes off her fake nails with, deodorant. Usual stuff. I’m just standing there with both hands on the sink, leaning and thinking, when it comes to me. I take the cork out the cognac, drink down a whole bunch more, and then I take the top off the rubbing alcohol and pour some in that cognac bottle. Then I take the cough stuff bottle, open it up, pour some of it down the sink to make room, and then pour some of that nasty-smelling nail-remover shit in there with the cough stuff.

I shake it all up real good.

When I come back out, I can see more of Yo’s tears streaking down her face. I hold up the bottle of cough stuff. “I’m takin’ this to Ray,” I say.

“He sick?” she asks in that sweet little voice.

“Naw. Just coughing a little,” I say. Then I find in the fridge a blue Pepsi can for DC. Me and DC go way back to when we played Little League down at McFarland Bottoms, then middle school, then high school. Him pitcher, me catcher, but we could only do that when the rich coach’s own son got too tired to pitch. When I get back to that pine tree and hand DC that blue Pepsi can and look him in the eye a certain way, I tell you this much: he’ll know just what I mean. If DC don’t see me drink no cognac, he won’t be drinking no cognac neither. We read each other minds, me and DC. That’s my plan. First get Ray to drink a bunch of that cough stuff that probably tastes like poison anyway. When he says it tastes bad, I’ll tell him he must be coming down with a cold, and that’s when I hand him the bottle and tell him the best thing to do for a cold is to drink a big swig of cognac. Soon after that, he’ll be so sick we’ll have to take him to the hospital. He’ll be safe there. And me and DC can figure out what to do.

I didn’t even know I’d warmed up at YoGirl’s till I hit the outside again and the cold air slaps my face still too numb from cognac to hurt too bad. Air racing around with what my grandma call hominy snow in it, like little-bitty sleet but not enough to stick or pile up white on the ground. Bits of hominy snow caught in the dead leaves my boots push around trying not to fall down in the creek on the way back. Dead leaves covering the rocks make me stumble once and make a big racket, but I slow down and wait and listen. Sky still gray and the wind slows down. Creek runs slow, just a tinkle. Everything nice and quiet. I pick my way soft-like back to DC and Ray. Maybe the man has done come back for his prep-ass pack and is lying there dead, Ray and DC gone already. God knows what I’ll be walking up on, so I think I’d best be easing up that hill, one step, another step. I take so long and am so careful the wind starts back up, rattling all the dead leaves again, so I get off the trail and walk below the big rock DC pissed off of before. Then I start crawling up the side the hill, hanging that plastic bag on one wrist. When I get near the top, I look up and it is still there, that black backpack up in the tree, so I ease on up, thinking Ray and DC are still squatted back behind that prickly bush.

But what I see: DC lying there in a lump behind the prickly bush, not looking like he’s asleep but something worse, one leg twisted up under him. A cold clear feeling runs through me like I’m in a bad dream and I’m just now waking up to something worse. The backpack man has done sneaked up, I’m thinking. The backpack man might be two men. Somebody sure laid DC out like this.

I throw down the plastic bag and head to DC as quick as I can. I need to straighten him out, see if he’s still breathing, thinking I myself might be jumped any second, when Ray scares the shit out me, runs up from where the trail starts.

“What happened?” I ask.

“DC fell. Hit his head. I went lookin’ for you.”

About this time I see a big rock in Ray’s hand. I look down and feel the lump on the side of DC’s head and too much blood. When I start to move DC, blood is all under him. Then Ray comes at me. My head goes boom and my neck cracks, and I fall down hard over DC.

I try to get up and my head gets whacked again. I try to get up but my arms and legs are not doing what I say. My head hurts hot like part of it’s gone. I’m trying to tell my hand to feel my head but mostly my arm goes limp. I pass out and then a loud noise wakes me up and I know again that I’m lying on DC, which don’t seem right. Something tells me DC is dead and then me too if I can’t drag my ass up from here. But I can’t even pick my head up. My one eye is open, though. My one eye is seeing it all.

Ol’ Skunk standing by Ray, and Ray down on the ground. Half of Ray’s head gone. Skunk holding a pistol like it’s a snake. Skunk looking over to me.

Then another voice. Right behind me. “Come on over here, Edsel, and put that pistol in this white boy’s hand here. This boy ought to knowed not to hang out with these others.”

My one eye sees a shiny deputy boot toe-tap my hand, showing Skunk where to put it.

“Use this,” the voice behind me says. Voice throws a white rag over to Skunk. “Wipe it clean.”

The white rag and pistol now in Skunk’s hand. White top of Skunk’s head in my face when he bends down.

And then I’m light and free. Rising in the air, slow. Like I’m caught in some cold rising breeze. First I’m circling low just looking around, looking down at myself on the ground on top of DC, watching the sheriff deputy reach a hand down to his pocket, take out his radio, hear him say, “Derrick, you my backup, ain’t you?” before he says, “Well, get your ass on up here then.”

And Ol’ Skunk edging down the creek bank, whispering to himself, whispering low but I hear him. I hear it all now, from the loud right on down to the tiny sound every ripple in the creek makes. I hear Skunk whispering stuff makes no sense, like another language, and then: Don’t mess wi’ me. Don’t mess wi’ me. Don’t mess wi’ me. I’m OG. OG. I seen they kind. I seen they kind.

And then I’m higher and higher, higher and higher, watching Ol’ Skunk’s white head-top moving down the creek, crossing the footbridge, heading back to the Hollywood, hominy snow falling harder and hitting all the dry leaves, sounding loud now, flakes getting bigger and fluffy, and then me higher still, like a balloon somebody let go of, rising in the open sky where the flakes are falling thick now, sky soft and full of it. I look down and there the creek flows into the Tennessee River, and there are the miles and miles of cotton fields out Gunwaleford Road all frozen but with raggedy cotton lint like more snow. Higher still now, soft snow, flakes like cotton. Till the whole world’s looking exactly like nothing at all but white.

Deepwater, Dark Horizons by Suzanne Hudson

Fish River

Gary Wright, in his expert, know-it-all way, insisted that what was happening on Turkey Branch was a crime. “A goddamned crime, you stubborn old coot. You can get fined for it. I’ve done googled it. The county site says five hundred dollars a day for every day you let them turds roll down in the branch yonder.” The man jabbed his pointer finger with every few syllables.

Yoder Everett ran his fingers through thinning hair, hair that had once upon a time been a thick home to the ladies’ painted fingernails that combed through it, now gone limp and thin as he traversed his sixties, alone but for this one pathetic friend. “You’re always so goddamned sure of yourself, Gary.”

It had finally come to a head, after months of back and forth, after Gary first noticed the oozing fissures in the grass, soil becoming a sloosh of fetid, foul stink. Yoder, tight with a dollar and loath to spend from the thousands he had hoarded over the years, managed to deny, pretend, and scoff his way out of taking any action, until Gary drilled down into something like research. Any fool could find out what was what, it seemed, on the Internet.

Now the two men stood beneath one of the massive live oaks that thrust their mossy arms to the summer sky across Yoder’s six acres of waterfront on a branch of the Fish River, studying the patch of yard gone to shit swamp. When breezes lifted, along with the undeniable stench, a chorus of clatters and clacks and tinklings and knockings rose and fell from the scores of wind chimes hanging from branches, from hooks on porches, from posts on the wharf and the pier, from the trash-can corral Gary had built to keep away the raccoons, armadillos, and possums. Gary was handy that way.

The noisy mobiles, though, were all fashioned by Yoder’s own hands, inspired by a fragmenting mind, that willy-nilly mishmash of chimes, along with paintings on plywood, palettes of muddy browns, reds, oranges; even murals painted onto the asbestos-shingled sides of his river house. His gnarled but nimble fingers strung together the cacophonous orchestra of objects tied onto lengths of fishing lines, knotted through the boards of driftwood or stripped sapling limbs or guitar necks or whatever, from which the lines dangled. He used all sorts of materials too, for the chimes themselves: old costume jewelry, a deconstructed clarinet, wooden kitchenware, beer cans, women’s stilettos, anything at all. “I make art out of junk,” he liked to boast. “I’m environmentally friendly that way.”

But here was Gary Wright’s dumb ass claiming Yoder was a major polluter, right up there with the goddam BP criminals who had ruined the gulf this past spring. Now into full-bore summer, the beaches from NOLA to Apalachicola were so gummed up with the crude that business owners along the coast were yelling bloody murder.

“It’s right there in black and white, son,” Gary went on. “It’s right there on the damn website. You know, that branch runs out to the river and the river runs to the bay and the bay—”

“Hell, Gary, don’t you think I know about geography and watersheds and currents and all? And don’t call me son.”

“And the bay goes to the Gulf of Mexico and then out to the whole goddamned world. You’re polluting the world with that rusted-out old septic system.”

“I told you I’ve fixed it. I worked on it all day yesterday, down in the bowels of it. Ha!”

“Naw, crawling down in the empty old thing and squirting a hosepipe through it ain’t fixed a damn thing about it. You’ve done broke so many laws I can’t count ’em.”

“Why don’t you google them up, then, the laws?” Yoder shot back. “Google is God now, I guess. Google is the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg looking down on the Valley of Ashes.”

“What the hell?”

“Forget it. Why read a book when you have the Google machine to impart life’s truths to your stupid ass.”

“It’s the law, that’s all I’m talking about. You can’t let a steady stream of turds and piss-water keep rolling down that hill and into that branch. You’ve got to call a septic service or I’m gonna have to turn you in to the county. You’re the property owner. It’s your responsibility.”

Yoder, clench-fisted, tight-toothed, gritted out, “Get off my property, then. I’ve a good mind to evict you.”

But they both knew it was an empty threat. They had a long history of disputes, even fistfights, going back to when they were young, potent warriors of the gridiron, back when women liked their looks and a loop around the town of Foley, Alabama, from drive-in diners to picture shows in a Ford Mustang, when a make-out chick in the front seat was the pinnacle of a life promising to be all downhill from there.

They were an odd couple, all right: Yoder, well-educated, creative, once-charming-now-cautious, carrying several DSM-referenced labels; and Gary, low of IQ, naive, spur-of-the-moment. Yoder taught art education in a community college before the mental meltdown that had him on disability by the time he was forty. Gary, no hope of a deferment, found himself, straight out of high school, chasing Charlie in the jungles of Vietnam. He spoke of it from time to time, though not with enough depth or detail to satisfy the curiosity Yoder kept in check.

“I seen some shit there, over yonder, in itty-bitty-titty land. Nobody ought to see them things.” He would fall silent for several beats, then, “I seen nothing BUT shit all my life,” he would repeat, to the air, to the nights, to anybody or nobody, “and shit don’t cool for folks like me.”

“You think you’re the only one that had it so damn bad?” Yoder would toss out, as a challenge, their routine one-upmanship of misery, on twilit evenings when they sat on the dock, working their way through a case of Budweiser. “Hell, my stepmother was cold and wicked and hated my guts,” and he would recount tales about how his real mama took the cancer when he was only six, went downhill fast, and how it was clear to everyone that his daddy had “Miss Dinah” waiting in the wings long before the cancer ever even hit.

His memories of his real mama, Janine, were warm and conjured something like reassurance, despite the odd quirks she had, the rituals, a prominent one being the taking of the castor oil, every single Friday evening of every single week. “Folks just believed in it back then, believed it kept you regular, like it was good for you. Mama was the queen of poop.”

Yoder couldn’t remember a time in his life, post — potty training, when his mother did not insist on inspecting his bowel movements, to see if his excrement was healthy or if it demanded more attention. He and Gary sometimes had a good laugh about Yoder’s fecal foundation. “No sir, I wasn’t allowed to flush, not until Mama checked — and she’d say things like, Oh, that one looks real good, Yodie, or, No wiggle worms to be found, or, That one’s a pretty picture of health. I didn’t think anything about it — that was just how our routines went along, until she got the cancer.”

When Miss Dinah took over, her two brats in tow, she showed no inclination to study Yoder’s bowel movements. In fact, when, all of seven years old and eager to please his new parent, he finally offered to show her what he had landed in the toilet bowl, she scrunched up her face, shuddered, and said, “Why on God’s green earth would I want to look at anybody’s BM? Let alone yours.” And it was the way she said it, yours, that planted her hatred of him in his mind, hardening him to her, young though he was, and by adolescence the reciprocal disdain was set in his soul.

“She was my ruination,” he would lament, blaming her for his bad luck with women. “And yeah, I had to call the bitch Miss Dinah, just like my daddy did. He was one goddamned pussy-whipped somebitch. But she sure did pretend-dote on him, waiting on him, baking seven-layer cakes and all,” and Yoder would recount how the chocolate confections were locked in the china cabinet, locked away from him in particular, locked away in such a way as he would have to see the sheen of the chocolate each time he passed by, lust after it, wish for it, but he never, ever gave her the satisfaction of doing something as brazen or pathetic as, say, asking for a piece of it. Even when she brought it out as an after-school treat for her own two children, his “steps,” Yoder refused to ever ask to be included.

“Don’t you want a little bit, baby?” she would singsong, if his daddy was there, and sometimes Yoder would accept a piece, sometimes not.

The two men shared a bottle of Jim Beam down at the dock that evening, to chase behind the beer, as they typically did of a dusky sunset, having sprayed down with deet, thrown their feet up on footstools, spending hours swapping memories and disagreements, flicking cigarettes hissing into the low tide, the high tide, the ebb and the flow.

“I’ll get some prices, then,” Yoder said, finally, his way of acquiescing to his foe in the great septic dispute of 2010. “But you have to kick in something. You gonna take that panhandle gig? The one that gal Sissy or Missy or somebody told you about? Because I’ll be wanting you to throw in on the new septic tank. It handles your shit just as much as it handles mine.”

“It’s Misty,” Gary said. “Like the song. Like that Clint Eastwood movie, Play Misty for Me. And she says disaster money is almost like free money, depending.”

Depending on what? Yoder wondered, thinking Gary might need a good lookout on this Misty person.

Gary and Misty had reconnected via the Internet, a landscape he had only begun exploring around 2007, when Yoder was threatening to put his desktop out with the trash. Yoder had bought the thing as he entered the twenty-first century in a feeble attempt at technology — an attempt that turned into his certainty and fear that the government was spying on him.

“There’s a camera on the things, you know,” he said, disengaging all manner of cables. “Ever since 9/11 they’ve been watching us all.”

“Why don’t they just watch them Islams?” Gary pushed back. “It’s them Islams that’s bombing themselves and all.”

“Muslims,” Yoder sighed. “Islam is the religion. Muslims are the practitioners of Islam.”

“I don’t understand. Baptist is Baptist, Cath’lic is Cath’lic, what the fuck?”

“Never mind.”

“Okay. Never-minding.”

But Gary took on the surfing of the Net with uncharacteristic vigor, networking his way through Classmates.com, navigating over to the high schools of some of his old army buddies, reconnecting, flirting his way past a few former girlfriends, before finding Misty again, just after the explosion in the gulf. She talked him through the skyping process and schooled him on the larger landscape of the Internet. He boasted to her about his artist friend Yoder Everett, embellishing, “Yeah, he’s a big deal around here. He gets big money for his wind chimes — well, he ought to be getting more.”

“Is there a website where I can look at them?” Misty asked.

“Hell no — Yoder hardly never touches no computer. He thinks they’re taking over the world.”

“Ridiculous,” Misty said. “You have to have a website these days, to advertise, to promote, to sell — you two boys need me. I can do all of that.”

And that was the springboard for their planned reunion. After they rendezvoused in Florida, after the work for BP played out, they would haul her trailer back to Turkey Branch, and she would barter her promotional work on Yoder’s art for something like rent.

Yoder, however, was skeptical. “Normal people don’t do that, just pull up stakes, drive off to meet a stranger and start up a new life.”

“Aw, she’s a good ol’ gal,” Gary countered, filling Yoder in on how he had dated her briefly when he returned from ’Nam, during a short, drug-fueled stay on the West Coast. “She was one of them hippie chicks — you know, titties flapping and bouncing, hairy pits, the whole deal. Which I ain’t minded no hairy pits at all — all I needed was that one little particular patch of hairs, you know? I was fresh out of the army, son. Horny as hell. And she was a wild thing, always into something. Hell, man, she wants to help you sell your wind chimes.”

“What the hell? And don’t call me son.”

“Yeah, she’s gonna make you a website. Says nobody can’t do no kind of business without no website. Says she has real experience in all kinds of business doings, advertising and whatnot.”

“Then what’s she doing in a double-wide in Arkansas?”

“She’s been hiding out from an ex-boyfriend, a mean one, a stalker type. She ran off from him in Portland, changed her looks and all — you know, like that movie, like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy.”

“That’s even worse,” Yoder said. “All we need is some stalker nutcase to come around here. Hell, somebody’s likely to get killed.”

“Naw, man, you got it all wrong. Her guy can’t leave Portland, his job — and last Misty heard, he’s done took up with a whole ’nother woman. It’s cool.”

“I don’t know.”

“Shit, man, think of her like the business manager you never had. Remember you always said the business side of art makes you want to puke? Well, Misty’s a pro, knows computers, says she’s a real, for sure, people person. Which you ain’t, right?”

“Right.”

“So let her manage the crap you hate — the crap you suck at — and see if your income gets better. Come on, man.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Yoder mumbled, seeing a few dollar signs gathering in his future. He did, indeed, hate hauling the chimes around to all the fru-fru and chi-chi and cutesy-cute little galleries and shops in the Foley — Gulf Shores — Orange Beach area, making fake-nice with all the managers and artsy-arts folks. Even though his pieces were popular, unique, and sold quite well, he thought some of those “fancy ladies and gay boys,” as he called them, the ones running the shops, might be overpricing and skimming their own special kind of slick off the top of his profits.

It was his mind-set, to be wary. The older he got, the less he trusted folks, even old friends. He had just about stripped away anyone who ever mattered to him, stripped away with suspicion, always, of ulterior motives. His two children were long estranged, radio silent for over a decade, and the ex-wives did not even bother to try anymore. Gary was all he had. And Gary, like him, had alienated his own set of friends and family, not with paranoia but with his scattershot approach to living, his sheer and utter unreliability.

Gary and Misty had skyped throughout May, June, and into July’s haze, becoming more and more familiar, gestating the plans that would culminate in their reunion, in mere weeks, the revival of a long-ago hot second of a romance — all while the Deepwater Horizon vomited its ominous cloud of crude into the cesspit of the Gulf of Mexico, in ever-mounting numbers of gallons per day. It seemed like CNN had a picture of it on TV 24-7, the live, real-time movie of the slow murder of the gulf. And the numbers, the volume of the disaster, forever ticked upward.

“It’s an awful thing,” Gary told Misty’s image on the computer screen, “a terrible thing — not just the folks killed but no telling what all else is gonna die. They say it’ll kill the coral, even. Hell, I didn’t know coral was alive to begin with.”

“Well, that’s what a lot of the free money is for, to help with that, so I’m going to get there as quick as I can — no later than July’s end. Can’t wait to see you in the real flesh, sweetie,” she cooed.

Gary allowed that she had held up pretty well. She laid claim to the age of fifty-four but looked light of it, with long hair streaked blond, animated green eyes, and the distinctive laugh he remembered from all those years ago, “kind of a hoarse, horsey laugh,” he always called it. And the once — braless teenybopper showed him her relatively new fake boobs. “I was dating a plastic surgeon in San Francisco for a while,” she said, spreading her top open, unhooking her bra from the front, spilling them on out, right in his face, giving him the kinds of sexual itches he had not scratched in years. “The doc gave me these, plus an eye job, and a slight nose job — just got rid of that little bump. You remember that little bump on my nose?”

He did not. He was preoccupied with the not-little boobs.

“What do you think, daddy? Nice, huh? It’s a D-cup size.”

Gary was done for.

They spent more and more hours skyping, which soon became elaborate cyber-sexcapades full of dirty talk and all manner of autoeroticism the likes of which Gary had never imagined himself doing. “She sure does know about some variety,” he confided to Yoder one humid evening. “But hell,” and he took a long pull from the bottle, “why jerk off to a nudie mag when you can see everything right there, just a-writhin’ along with you?”

“Can’t argue with that,” Yoder exhaled his cheap cigarette. “Just seems kind of weird to me, having romantic doings like that.”

“You’re being old-fashioned, man. This is how it’s done these days — everything’s on the Internet line.”

“Can’t argue,” Yoder said again.

Elite Septic Systems sent a “technician” to Turkey Branch the day after Gary headed out for Blountstown, to his new, big-boobed love, and the cleanup job, armed with booze and Viagra.

“This one’s a doozey, one of the worst I ever seen. Gonna need new field lines too,” Ronny, the self-proclaimed turd wrestler, insisted. “This thing is a dinosaur, that’s all there is to it. We got to put in all new. Run you a few thousand dollars.”

“Nothing here to work with at all?” Yoder responded.

“Zero. Zip. You’re lucky you ain’t had the EPA and the Corps of Engineers and any government regulator you can think of out here. The money you’ll save in fines could install a boatload of septic systems.”

Yoder seethed and silently vowed to garnish Gary’s British Petroleum wages or government money or whatever. And he didn’t have to wait long. After only three weeks on the job, sans Turkey Branch commute, not a trailer but a pop-up camper on the back of a Toyota pickup following Gary’s own truck came rolling up to his property, which one Misty Smith hit with the force of Hurricane Katrina.

“I’m moving in with Gary,” she squealed. “My man. My destiny.”

Gary blushed. “If it’s no never mind to you, that is,” nodding at Yoder.

“Of course he doesn’t mind!” Misty was possessed of grand movements, physically — large swoops of arms, long strides of legs, and she had a booming voice to match, a voice she exercised with the looseness of one who was possessed of few boundaries. “The only way I can get the work done is to set up office space. Not going to happen in a camper, that’s for sure. And Yoder, I promise, I guarantee you, that I’ll get you noticed, get the bucks rolling in. As your agent, I’ll negotiate for higher prices, and as your advertiser and website administrator I’ll handle it all. My sweetie here explained your dilemma in detail. And it’s so typical of artist types. You just need to be left alone to do the art. You deserve to be known, and I’m making your fame my mission in life, along with loving up this guy,” nudging Gary, who blushed again, with her elbow. “Oh! Where’s my camera? Look on the front passenger seat, honey, and grab it for me.” But she strode her long legs past Gary, arms flailing a pricey digital camera out of her vehicle and commenced striding, bounding all over the property snapping pictures of individual wind chimes, studying them, making a show of her professional eye. It wore Yoder out already, her energy, but, he told himself, she obviously was a worker bee, and it was, after all, for him.

“What happened to the cleanup job?”

“Aw, man, it was bullshit — walking up and down the beach scooping up tar balls, wearing these dinky, cheap-ass rubber gloves and neon vests. All Misty had to do was hand out water all the livelong day; said she was definitely overqualified for that.”

“Can’t disagree.”

“But after I got hit with that fog a few times, I was thinking I had enough.”

“Fog?”

“Yeah, man, that shit they been spraying all out over the water from planes. To bust up the oil.”

“Dispersant? I saw something about that on the news, I think. Breaks up the oil and sinks it to the bottom of the gulf.” Yoder tapped out a cigarette and lit it. “You say you got hit with it?”

“Lots of folks got hit with it — anybody on the beach — ’cause the damn planes would be maybe a hundred, two hundred yards out, and that gulf wind blowed it all up on the beach, in the air, smelling like a bitch, burning our eyes and all. Nasty stuff. It ate clean through them cheap-ass gloves they gave us. And them stupid lawn-mowin’ masks ain’t no kinda protection.”

“Damn, Gary, that can’t be good. It’s bound to have had some kinds of physical effects on you. Did you get nauseous or light-headed?”

“Not really. It was just a nasty stink, mostly — my eyes got okay. It’s just those damn ate-up gloves, man. That’s some toxic shit. Poison.”

Gary’s utter lack of concern beyond the stupid gloves frustrated Yoder to no end. Gary had taken the same blasé attitude when Yoder had questioned him about Agent Orange, years earlier. It wasn’t no big deal, Gary had said, they used it all the time.

“It was a big deal,” Yoder said now, under his breath.

That afternoon, while Misty flitted about the place clicking chime images and Gary lazed on the hanging bed in one of the screened-in porches on the outbuilding, Yoder drove into Foley, to the public library, and began sifting through the reference section.

The septic system was to be installed on October 1, but the existing tank and lines had to be yanked before that. Due to scheduling there would be lag time, so they would have to make do with a porta-potty in between. Ironically, the Elite Septic System folks scheduled the euthanasia of the tank for September 19, the very same date that the Deepwater Horizon well was declared “effectively dead” by the national incident commander, some admiral or other. And it was on that exact date that Yoder began to move from suspicion to decision about one Misty Smith.

She had, indeed, created a website, an attractive one, featuring pictures of the wind chimes and some of the paintings on plywood, inflating prices, “just to see if they’ll bite,” she said. And even though Yoder couldn’t argue with that, he was incrementally taking more and more offense to her intrusive, bossy ways. “You need to at least post something personal on your page,” was one of the many you-need-to remarks he got from her.

“That’s your job, isn’t it? You’re the administrator.”

“Yes, but if you personalize it more, cultivate some fans, we’ll add a Facebook page. The Facebook page is really where you’ll find your numbers.”

“Fans? Facebook? What the hell? Sounds like you want me to be somebody that doesn’t even resemble me. Back off.”

“Sure, I’m a pit bull,” she allowed, “but you need a pit bull, somebody who will lock their jaws down hard for you — it’s for you, after all!”

And Yoder would let it be. Gary seemed happy enough, though over the weeks his demeanor gradually became tinged with apathy. “She ain’t so easy to live with,” he conceded. “Kinda high strung, you know. But she’s driven. Them kinds of folks — folks that’s driven — tend to be high strung is what I think.”

“So is it worth it, the sex?”

Gary smirked. “Always, man.”

In the meantime, Yoder’s library research into the benzene component of oil, and into the Corexit 9500 and Corexit 9527 used in the cleanup, was causing him to filter government conspiracies through his brain. The toxic brew of Corexit was banned in the United Kingdom, he discovered, and health professionals in general were definitely not fans. Why would the US be willing to put such a chemical into the already-poisonous soup that was the Gulf of Mexico? Did President Obama give the okay? If not, then who? Was it not enough to sacrifice the marine flora and fauna on the altar of tourism? Shouldn’t someone calculate how many human lives were worth the salvaging of the sugar-white sands? It gave him a headache, the mulling of it.

Then, on the day of the septic tank killing, Misty rolled out some cockamamie idea about making Turkey Branch an incorporated entity, a move that would require a shared bank account, for business purposes, of course. “I can make this work,” she insisted. “I’ve done it time after time!”

“Like when? Like where?” Yoder pressed.

“What the hell?” she shrieked. “Are you questioning my legitimacy? Do you hear him, Gary? Nobody appreciates a goddamn thing I’m doing around here! You two are a couple of witless idiots — you wouldn’t even have a website if it wasn’t for me!” And she strode off into the afternoon. By now both men knew that the snit would last for a few hours, possibly a day, with plenty of passive-aggressive behavior to dish out until said snit subsided.

But this day, Yoder pushed back: “Exactly what do you actually know about this chick?”

“Man, I know she’s a great piece of ass. Which, I gotta tell you, I’m not looking to miss out on no nookie. What’s with you?”

“I’m not looking to have her putting her paws all over my money, that’s what.”

“She ain’t no thief. Come on, this is the first pussy I’ve had in years.”

“Jesus.”

“We’ll work it out, man,” Gary said. “I’ll talk to her.”

But for someone who was living it up with a great piece of tail, Yoder thought his friend didn’t have much fight in him. No, not much fight at all.

It made him wonder: Why had Misty insisted on meeting up with Gary over in Blountstown? Why had she pushed so hard for him to sign on for cleanup? What the hell was her angle?

October blew in and so did a flatbed truck carrying the brand-new, sure enough state-of-the-art septic system that turd wrestler Ronny was so excited to sell him. Forget a rusting metal tank; this concrete one would last at least forty years, probably much longer, long past Yoder’s life span.

Yoder set a folding lawn chair out near the work site, brought along a cooler of beer, plenty of smokes, and settled in. He was loath to allow any repairman of any stripe — electrical, carpentry, refrigerator, whatever — to work without being under his supervisory gaze; he trusted no one to do the job “right.”

He hollered at Gary, laid out on the hanging bed, to come out and join him.

“Naw, man,” came a faint response.

“Why the hell not? Nookie time?” he joked, expecting a laugh he didn’t get.

“No, Yodie — I’m lying down.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, man. Just feeling a little tired, like I’m running out of gas, that’s all.”

Misty joined him, though. She dragged an outdoor lounge chair up to his, and he offered her a beer. She declined, as she usually did. She rarely drank and never smoked and seemed to like the high moral ground it gave her, though she was never overt or verbal in her self-righteousness. Hell, Yoder thought, she was a goddamn braless, LSD-taking, marijuana-smoking hippie back in the seventies, when she first fucked Gary.

She didn’t waste a second. “I wish you wouldn’t be so stubborn about forming a real business. You need to look into it. Do some,” she enunciated, “research.”

“Not real thrilled with anybody who uses the words you need with me. You need to cut that shit out.”

“Well, I know what I know. And I know you love some research.”

“Just like Gary,” he said automatically, “a goddamn know-it-all,” certain she had just smugly tossed him some bait. He was baffled, but knew enough that he refused to take the minnow.

She pounced. “I have a limit, you know. I’ll only go so far for people who have no appreciation for me.”

“Does it count that you’re living at my place?”

“Fuck you!” she cried out, catching the attention of the septic crew. “Tell you what. You like to do stupid fucking research. The old-school kind of research. So why don’t you research this, for your friend, who’s not doing so great. Yeah, research this: black, tarry stool. Goddamn research that!” She executed her dramatic stride to her camper truck and gravel-slung her way down the driveway.

Yoder took a sip of beer, narrowed his eyes, wondering how she knew so much about his doings, making leapfrogging connections in his head, noting dark and tarry. “Hey, Ronny! You say that concrete tank’s going to outlast me?”

“Damn right.”

“It’ll handle the waste?”

“Sure thing. ’Course, you got to treat it right. But you’d be surprised what folks put in these things that they ain’t supposed to. Hell, tampons, paper towels, dead goldfish, even rodents.”

“But it eventually breaks down, huh?”

“Long as it don’t get too cluttered. I mean, the solids is gonna go to the bottom, the scum to the top, the liquid to the field lines. It all breaks down if it don’t get backed up.”

“You’re a damn septic savant, Ronny. Not going to argue with that.”

Yoder watched in fascination over Gary’s shoulder as his computer-savvy buddy mouse-clicked through a series of websites, a virtual wizard at private investigation. Talk about a savant. He was a little surprised that Gary put up no resistance when Yoder, having abandoned his monitoring of the septic installation, shook him out of the hanging bed, demanding, “Get on that damn computer right now, asshole, and show me how to find out about this bitch you’ve hauled into our lives.”

What they found, pretty quickly, was that there was no residence in Portland, ever, as far as they could tell. There was a series of marriages, even one to a plastic surgeon, but in Boulder, Colorado, not California. There were hefty divorce settlements, some unimaginative aliases, a few restraining orders against her, a couple of arrests, one for theft of property and another for harassment described as hacking into a cell phone. She moved often, every year or two at least. Employment records were nonexistent.

“Phone hacking, huh?”

“Yeah, you can track a person’s whole life, where they are, what they’re saying even, just by hacking in their phone. Misty told me she does it all the time.”

“Well, that explains that.”

“What?”

“Never mind, Gary.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “Never-minding.”

The reality of the whole sorry business settled in on Yoder. “Holy crap, she’s a bullshit artist,” he said, “only without much artfulness to speak of. She played you, big-time. Sorry, Gary.”

“Hell, I figured it was too good to last.” Gary was pale, haggard, and Yoder only now realized just how hollowed-out he was, how that succubus of a criminal bitch had sucked the endangered life right out of him.

“What I don’t understand is why you didn’t check her out, research her, before you let her come here. I mean, you obviously know how.”

Gary sighed, picked up a glass of whiskey. “Age-old story, ain’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, I had me some pussy for a little while.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I reckon we’re gonna have a knock-down drag-out when she gets back.” Gary looked down at his hands. “I ain’t got much use for that. Outta gas. Damnedest thing.”

Yoder studied his friend’s profile, the slump of his shoulders, the drop of his chin, his obvious fragility. “Don’t worry, buddy. Don’t you worry. You go lie down. I’ll take care of it.”

“I know. Thanks.”

Gary slept fitfully that night, images of billowing clouds of smoke in thick jungles, huts ablaze, the screams of women as the planes came in low, misting the vegetation, aiming to strip away Charlie’s cover. He half woke a few times, and reached to see if she was there, but he was alone with these fever dreams racing, like the spirits of dolphins chasing across the waves.

He caught a sleep-soaked glimpse of the moon, hanging like the blade of a scythe in the clouds. It reminded him of the Vincent Price movie The Pit and the Pendulum, of the last, chilling scene, the torture dungeon being locked, the door shut forever on the evil Elizabeth, trapped, all alone yet still alive, in an “iron maiden.” Then the dark closed over him, pushing through his consciousness, force-flashing images of dead baby dolphins washing up on the black-blotted sands of the gulf, seagulls stained slick with poison, and watercolors of pastel children picking at the tar balls between their toes. And he wondered, in his stormy dreams, if the coral really could die.

Bubba and Romy’s Platonic Bender by Kirk Curnutt

Pike County

Romy’s elbow was in Bubba’s rhomboid when she said the name: Otis Owen. Dr. Otis Owen, she actually said, no s on the end. She started to add that even though she’d banged Dr. O when he taught her basic microcomputing her one semester of college, they were only friends now — no sex, no kissing, all touches strictly business. Before Romy could say that, though, Bubba, bare-bellied on her massage table, looked up with a hurt face.

“Otis Owen? You hang with that creep?”

“Dr. O comes here to work out the same kinks you do.” She pushed Bubba’s head into the table’s fleece-lined face cradle. “I feel sorry for him. I’m the age he was when he’d fuck me in his office ten minutes before class. He was a god to me then, but not anymore — he’s putty. I’ve never known a guy to go so squishy.”

“What you do for him out of pity you won’t do for me out of friendship?”

“I give you both what you want. Rejuvenation through humiliation.”

Her elbow descended into Bubba’s latissimus dorsi, grinding until his pancreas threatened to burst. He tried to ignore the discomfort, but her turquoise-painted toes entered his peripheral vision, along with the familiar smell of verbena and lavender, Romy’s favorite lotion, and Bubba knew his aches and pangs were inescapable.

“Listen, I know things about Otis Owen. It’s intel you should have, but intel’s not free. Humor me, and afterward I’ll not only pay your rip-off $85-per-hour rate, but I’ll take you out for drinks. What you should know about Otis goes down better with tequila.”

“No more humoring, Bubs. You’re just hurting yourself, and I’ve got a license to lose if anybody ever peeked in my window.”

She started to step back, but the only reliable man she’d ever known clutched her wrist. Lifting his torso, Bubba stared into her eyes, firm in need but weak with want.

“I had a manicure today,” she pleaded. “You’ll ruin it.”

“We’ve been friends twenty-five years, Romy. You’ve always needed me as a big brother, maybe a dad. I care for you enough that unlike Dr. O I’ve never taken advantage of that. Never even tried. That’s how much I respect our friendship. Otis Owen’s pulled some snaky shit; I’m not protecting you if I don’t tell you. But I need you first.” Bubba released her arm. “I’ll rest better too,” he added, “if you lose those cutoffs.”

Romy grunted at the obligation as Bubba recradled his face. He didn’t want to watch her wriggle down her shorts, didn’t want to know what she wore under them, two more tokens of respect for their friendship. He just liked the warmth of her — that part of Romy Bubba knew he was too good of a friend to ever get to experience — as she straddled his tailbone, her butt atop his. As her weight settled on his glutes she sank her nails into his skin, and he tensed in expectation. Then Romy raked her fingers along his spine in a long, euphoric scratch.

“Deeper,” Bubba told her.

“The oil’s getting scooped under my nails. Like ice cream. The skin’s too slick to break.”

“You’ve managed every time.”

The second scrape was shorter but more intense. Bubba whinnied softly. Romy reached back and swatted a flank.

“Don’t buck me, Seabiscuit. You do and no oats for you in the stable.”

On the fourth try she drew blood. On the fifth Bubba gripped the table legs and chewed his lips. Romy clawed until her friend lost count of how many times she stopped to crack her knuckles and stretch her fingers. Perspiring, Bubba felt furrowed, carved, whittled.

“I’m all nubs.” Romy lasted as long as she usually did, twenty minutes. “You’re done too. Any more and you’ll scar.”

“How’s it look?”

“Like you’ve been crosshatched.”

“Then you’re right. I’m done.”

He jounced hard enough to pop Romy off his sacrum. She landed on one foot and had to slide the other across Bubba’s greased thighs, holding his towel in place, he knew, so she didn’t have to see his hairy rump. She told him to get dressed while she washed him out from under her manicure, then left. Bubba rolled off the table, dropping the towel, half hoping she’d walk in on him, fully knowing she wouldn’t. He looked around the studio, spotting what he was after on the sideboard, tucked among flickering candles: a little Ganesha statue, new to the room since his last visit. Sure enough, when Bubba shook the porcelain figure, something inside rattled. He pried out the statue’s rubber stopper and tipped its contents into his palm. “Got it,” he said aloud, sliding an object into a front pocket of the jeans he pulled from the floor. He was adjusting the pen clipped to his shirt placket when Romy reappeared. Her blond shag was fashionably mussed and she wore a red shift with suede boots. She looked funky, like when she’d been jailbait.

“Sure,” Bubba chuckled, “let’s play dress-up, like tonight’s a night at the opera.” Blood driblets skied down his lumbar region. One rode over his coccyx and cascaded into his ass crack. “Because this fuckery Otis’s pulled is straight-up operatic...”

They drove from the bohemian district where Bubba had bartended for thirty-three years to a lounge in Montgomery’s black half. Exactly where black Montgomery began nobody could really say; it tended to start wherever white people started feeling uncomfortable. But Bubba liked black joints. He could name all the legendary ones from Montgomery’s past: Club 400, the Ty-Juanna on Highland Avenue, Laicos. In a booth at G’s he ordered four Agave Locos and shot two before an unamused Romy reminded him he still had to drive.

“And still a story to tell,” Bubba noted. “Two things about Otis Owen: he’s a bad drunk and a worse gambler. In two years he’s lost $80,000 to Biloxi casinos, every cent he ever saved.”

“He still has my $85-an-hour,” shrugged Romy.

“I didn’t say he’s broke. I said he’s blown his savings. To feed his beast he’s had to cook up a profitable scam...”

Romy hiked her brows. “I gotta beg for deets?”

“I’ll detail it — after you shoot that Loco. That’s how this story unfolds. We come to a plot twist, you gotta drink to learn the next chapter.”

Romy reluctantly drained a tequila and chewed the lime. Before she stopped puckering, Bubba flagged down a hostess and ordered another round — though not straight Agave Loco this time. This time the hostess brought three firecrackers: tequila with Goldschläger and Rumple Minze.

“Why you trying to get me drunk, Bubs?”

“Because it’s the only way you’ll believe this story.”

He set his third empty down. The shot glasses on the tablecloth began resembling chess pieces.

“Bitcoins,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Cryptocurrency, the fool’s gold of the Internet. Other types exist — Monero, Ether, Ripple. Computer dorks pay real dollars in online exchanges for this ‘money.’ It’s legal tender on the Darknet because transactions are untraceable. The problem is cryptocurrencies are easy to steal. Cryptopickpocketing’s a billion-dollar industry.”

“You’re telling me Dr. O’s an Internet safecracker?”

“Even Luddites like us can learn to five-finger Bitcoins. Websites galore teach how to hack into the virtual wallets where investors store this funny money, how to phish for log-ins to trading accounts.”

“I’ve heard of phishing,” Romy admitted. “But I thought only developed nations like Nigeria did it, not third world countries like Alabama.”

Bubba grinned before pointing at her remaining shots. “You’re behind three to one.”

Romy knocked back her second Agave. “You drink too much, Bubs.”

He ignored her. “Dr. O didn’t plan on hacking on his lonesome. He aimed to start a big-time operation, maybe forty hackers mining cryptocurrency side by side. He couldn’t post a Help Wanted ad for entry-level cryptocrooks, though. He needed a Fagin with a labor pool of Artful Dodgers — and that, my friend, is how Dr. Otis Owen ended up in business with Iv’ry Cole.”

Romy flinched.

“So Otis’s mentioned Iv’ry Cole to you,” Bubba realized. “I wish he hadn’t.”

“His last appointment, he got a call. Clients usually ignore their phones, but Dr. O said he had to take it. He downplayed the call, claiming he was helping a former student — Iv’ry was all he said, no Cole — set up a computer network. But the conversation upset him. The rest of his hour he was twitchy.”

“Former student? Maybe Dr. O taught Iv’ry Cole basic microcomputing like he taught you. Probably didn’t fuck Iv’ry like he fucked you, however.”

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you, Bubs.”

“Nothing does anymore, honestly. But about Iv’ry: he runs black Montgomery. Loansharking, coke, punani. All are big moneymakers, but nothing close to Darknet profits. Iv’ry’s wanted into cyber-scamming for a while, but he lacked technical know-how until Otis the computer wiz came calling... You buy this story so far, Romy?”

She shrugged. “I buy that Iv’ry Cole’s real, but only because I heard the name from Dr. O, not from you. Your motives remain suspect. Part of me thinks you’re slandering Otis to make yourself look good.”

Bubba raised his final firecracker in a mock toast. “I’m just the storyteller,” he assured her, downing the shot. “Now finish yours so we can roll.”

“Why? I like it here.”

“Because Club G’s is Iv’ry Cole’s front. He owns this place like he owns Dr. O’s ass. The first time Iv’ry heard of Bitcoins was in this room. Dr. O pitched his scheme two tables from where we sit. For all we know, Iv’ry and Otis are here now, watching our every move.”

They drove to Highway 231, where Bubba hit a RaceWay for vodka and OJ. He mixed screwdrivers in a jug and traded sips with Romy while an Emmylou Harris CD played. Three songs in Bubba realized he was lit. Five songs in Romy fell asleep, temple to the window. The farther south they drove and the drunker Bubba grew, the less he watched his rearview for headlights. Occasionally he plucked the pen off his shirt and pressed it against the dashboard speaker. Mostly his attention lingered over the landmarks along the two-lane blacktop. Highway 231 was littered with detritus from every Southern motel chain, service station, and diner to ever go bust. Bubba passed a collapsed Ponderosa, a demolished Gibson’s Gas, skeletal remains of fruit and firecracker stands whose weather-warped planks looked like rib cages from rotted carcasses.

“Where are we?” Romy asked when he woke her. Bubba’s truck idled in a cul-de-sac of sparkling new McMansions.

“In Troy.”

“What the fuck for? I’m an hour from home now!”

Bubba circled the cul-de-sac, popping his high beams to spotlight each yard’s freshly laid sod. In every verdant ocean bobbed the same customized landscaper flag. Meisel’s Lawn Care, the flags read. Tim “Tiny” Meisel, Proprietor. Let Us Do Your Dirty Work.

“You gotta be blotto.” Romy held the jug to the moonlight. According to the translucence, the vodka was three-quarters gone. “We get pulled over, you’ll blow a 0.15. That’s mandatory jail.”

“I’m already doing hard time.”

He took them to a bar called the Double Branch Lounge. Its wood exterior and checkered awning made it look more country-western than it was. Once upon a time Hank Williams commanded its stage, but nowadays the DB was a Top 40 dive for students at a nearby university. In the lot the wobbly bartender searched for his sea legs before retrieving a throw pillow and belt from his truck bed.

“Thirty-three years hoisting kegs...” Bubba stuffed the cushion into his back waistband. “Insurance covers steroid injections in my sacroiliac joints, only I don’t have insurance. I treat sciatica with a goddamn pillow.”

He made Romy embrace him from behind and guided her hands tightening the belt under his shirt around the cushion. Then, as onlookers gawked, he wrapped her arms across his chest, hoarding the rub of her body.

“That part about never taking advantage,” Romy whispered. “You won’t forget it, however shitfaced you get? I’m an hour from home without my own ride.”

“Naw. This bender’s entirely platonic.”

Inside the Double Branch, Bubba ordered tomahawks — amaretto with cinnamon schnapps.

“Where were we? Oh yeah... so Iv’ry installed Otis in a warehouse to train two dozen budding hackers, mostly high school dropouts. In time the operation loots maybe $30,000, but that’s nothing compared to the millions newspapers tell Iv’ry cryptokleptos are heisting. Meanwhile, Otis’s reading about Bitcoin thieves pulling ten-year sentences. Otis starts stressing. Ulcers, insomnia. For all I know his sacroiliac joints lock up. Eventually he begs Iv’ry to pull the plug, but Iv’ry’s got an investment to recoup. You want out, Iv’ry tells Otis, pay me $100,000. Dr. O’s already blown $80k gambling. No way he — what’s wrong?”

Romy was slumped in her chair, sullenly watching a band soundcheck. “If you don’t get to the point, when the music starts I’ll be dancing, not listening.”

“This part’s the best. The love story starts now... Has Otis talked lately about a woman?”

“He’s mentioned in passing he’s seeing someone. Her name’s weird: Marcella.”

“That’s her — Marcella Meisel.”

Romy turned toward Bubba. “Meisel? That’s the name on those landscaper flags...”

“So you are paying attention!” He scooted a tomahawk at her. They had to sip these shots because their stomachs felt oily. The vague nausea didn’t keep Bubba from ordering kamikazes — vodka with triple sec and lime juice.

“The Double Branch is Otis and Marcella’s personal love shack. She first landed on him like a heat-seeking missile up in Montgomery, but she’s from Troy, so once Otis’s smitten he’s burning rubber to Pike County every night. They party hard — Marcella’s got a nose for coke. They fuck hard too. Otis hasn’t made love in a long time. He’s forgotten how wonderful women’s bodies are, forgotten the pleasures of hands and holes, napes and crannies...”

“You’re scaring the sorority girls.”

“Dr. O’s in love, but he’s still Iv’ry Cole’s bitch. Marcella can tell he’s plagued. Takes her some time to coax the sad shebang from him. Then, in bed, right after a hot rut, she proposes a solution. Her ex-husband, this landscaper Tiny Meisel, inherited a coin collection worth $200k. Marcella won half in their divorce, but Tiny staged a bogus theft to avoid paying. He’s buried the coins somewhere on his family’s two-hundred-acre cotton farm. Marcella’s bought a souped-up metal detector to find them. The thing’s built like a rocket launcher, too heavy for her to lug. But if Otis can locate the coins, Marcella’s willing to split the sale and buy his freedom from Iv’ry.”

“So now we’ve gone from Bitcoins to real coins?”

“Not just any coins. We’re talking Confederate half-dollars and nickels.”

“I feel like I read this in a book once.”

“For ten straight nights Otis humps this contraption over two hundred cotton acres. Guess what happens next.”

“Dr. O is abducted by aliens.”

Bubba laughed and celebrated by making Romy join him in shooting a kamikaze.

“What happens is the gizmo pings. Otis uncovers genuine Johnny Reb silver and copper. He can taste his freedom. He rushes to tell Marcella, only something awful’s happened to her—”

“She’s been abducted by aliens,” suggested Romy.

“This gets serious now. Otis finds Marcella beaten raw. Tiny Meisel’s been trailing his ex-wife, peeping through her blinds when she and Otis knock boots. He knows they’re stealing his coins, so he fractures Marcella’s jaw and blacks both eyes. Otis wants to go to the police, but Marcella refuses. Now that Otis found the coins, she’s got a better idea.”

“Take the money and run. Start a new life under a new name.”

“Nope... Marcella wants Otis to kill her ex.”

Romy pressed at her stomach. “I don’t feel good. I need to eat.”

Bubba agreed. It was time to move on anyway. He ordered his tab, but when the barkeep broke his hundred-dollar bill she had to make change with four rolls of quarters. The Double Branch was fresh out of dead presidents. There are no accidents, Bubba decided. Only opportunities. He squeezed a roll in each fist; the quarters felt like brass knuckles.

In the truck Romy asked if Bubba seriously expected her to believe that a prof she once banged would agree to kill somebody. “I have standards,” she insisted.

“And I don’t meet them,” Bubba replied. “But Otis did agree to shoot Tiny dead in his sleep. Marcella gave him a gun and a key to Tiny’s house.”

It’d happened less than twenty-four hours earlier, Bubba insisted. Otis emptied seventeen rounds from a 9mm Smith & Wesson M&P into Tiny’s bedroom until something thumped to the floor.

“Guess what Otis discovered when he flipped on the light?”

Romy played along, indifferently. “Tiny Meisel’s body.”

“Nope... He discovered Iv’ry Cole’s body.”

From the DB they retraced seventeen miles on 231 to a greasy spoon called the BBQ House. Bubba’s vision was fuzzy, but the shack couldn’t be missed. Its driveway was marked with a pink neon pig in sunglasses kicking out a can-can leg over two flaming slices of Texas toast. “Nice tits,” Romy said, observing the blinking ͼͽ on the sow’s chest. Beside the pig sat a portable billboard with plastic letters: In All Things Give God Your Gratitude.

“When Southerners finally admit the contradictions splitting us down the middle,” slurred Bubba, parking, “we won’t call our impulses hell and heaven, or the agony and the ecstasy even. We’ll call them pork and pray.”

“You’re gonna tell me Tiny Meisel loves this place,” Romy predicted.

“Indeed. Tiny can eat the motherfucking love out of some pork.”

Bubba ambled to the highway’s edge. There was no oncoming traffic, but the rolls of quarters in his pocket weighed him down anyway. “Bitcoin, Confederate coin,” he mumbled. “Always the coin of somebody’s realm. I want free of money and pain.” He hurled the quarters into the woods across the blacktop.

Inside he bought Romy a pulled pork platter and motioned her to a door that looked like a fire exit. “Not another one,” she groaned as she crossed the threshold into a secluded bar. Bubba bought two final shots, straight Jack Daniel’s.

“One drawback to this place,” he said when they found a table, “the can’s out back. Just in case you get sick.”

“Can I get a side order of silence, please? I’m starving, but I’m fed up with your tall tale.”

“It’s almost done... Here’s the deal: Otis didn’t kill Iv’ry. Grazed his temple, that’s all. The affair with Marcella was a setup to rob Iv’ry. Landscaping is Tiny Meisel’s front. He really deals coke for the Sinaloa cartel. The Sinaloa boys want Iv’ry out of business so they can take over the Montgomery trade. Tiny offs Iv’ry, he gets promoted out of Troy to run it. So Marcella seduced out of Otis the info Tiny needed about Iv’ry’s operation, and while Dr. O hunted buried Confederate treasure the Meisels were in Montgomery casing it. They stole Iv’ry’s blow and kidnapped him to that house, duping Otis into taking him out. The coin collection never existed, of course. During the Civil War the Confederacy minted exactly four silver half-dollars and twelve copper nickels total. Dr. O should’ve known that...”

“I’m not listening,” Romy said, tearing into her pulled pork.

“Iv’ry’s alive, but he’s out $250k in product. All he knows is his coke’s buried somewhere outside Troy until the Meisels can transport it out of Alabama. Iv’ry overheard Tiny and Marcella talking when they shanghaied him. The location of the coke’s marked with a GPS tracker. Won’t be easy for Iv’ry to get to that tracker. Tiny hides it in the knee socket of the prosthetic leg he’s worn since an IED blasted his off during the Iraq War.”

Romy looked up from her plate of food. “A fake leg? That’s it. Take me home. I can’t take another word. Get a dog if you need someone to talk to.”

Bubba’s sciatica was flaring. His discs and joints felt like tectonic plates firing off seismic jolts. “I know you wonder why I need you to scratch me till I bleed, Romy. Maybe you think I need pain so I don’t go numb from booze. But it’s not about feeling. Every time you scratch me I hope those scratches scar, that they don’t fade, even though they always do. You’re the closest my life’s had to a constant. We’re lucky we’ve had twenty-five years, but this friendship’ll get fucked up in the end. Everything does. I’d just like a permanent mark of what you’ve meant to me, something I can carry, after one of us inevitably fails the other.”

He shot both Jack Daniel’s and rose.

“I’m gonna take a leak, then drive you home.” He leaned over and stroked Romy’s cheek. “As for the story, I don’t believe half of it myself.”

Outside, crossing ten feet of asphalt to the bathrooms, Bubba adjusted the pillow still belted to his back. He entered a stall without latching the door and stopped two careful feet short of the toilet to clear his head. He was ready when someone followed. An arm wound around his neck. He felt a knife tear into the pillow, but it couldn’t penetrate the foam to more than nick his spine. He bent forward then launched backward, slamming his assailant into the stall pilaster, just like he’d imagined doing all night. He twisted and grabbed the man’s knife hand. His other arm went across the attacker’s throat, pressing his nape into the steel partition. He bent his knees until the man’s neck rode the pilaster to the metal strike that stopped the stall door from swinging outward. Rising and sinking on the balls of his feet, Bubba sawed the base of the man’s skull against the sharp protrusion. The skin ripped and blood splashed to the tile. The man screamed but was too stunned to fight. One punch and Bubba knocked him out.

“Get him out of here.”

Tiny Meisel, all bald head and leather, stood in the doorway. Two Mexicans in overalls dragged Iv’ry Cole to an idling Audi A7.

When Bubba stepped outside Tiny slapped him to the ground.

“You told that bitch about me and the Sinaloa boys!”

“I just told her a story... I had to tell her something to get her out to these bars!”

“You tell her she’s fine. You tell her you got money enough to treat her right. You tell her you gonna fuck her like no other man ever done. You don’t tell her Tiny Meisel’s taking over Iv’ry Cole’s territory!”

“I... I made the story so ridiculous that Romy doesn’t believe any of it... I could never say that ooh, baby shit to her! She’d never talk to me again...”

“’Ta repedo,” one of the Mexicans said. Tiny agreed.

“My friend believes you’re drunk. Drunk as a fart, he actually just said. I believe that in your intoxicated state you told that woman about Otis to make your own sorry ass look good.”

Bubba trembled. “I told you that if he hid that tracker anywhere it’d be at her studio. I did what you made me do. I brought Romy to their bars. I used her as bait to smoke out Otis and Iv’ry.”

“Honestly, I never would’a thought Dr. Otis Owen had it in him to turn double agent. Like your woman said, he seems squishy as putty. So we thank you, bartender, for smoking them out for us.”

Tiny yanked Bubba to his feet and motioned for the Mexicans to pop the Audi’s trunk. Two bodies lay inside, their gashed throats leaking red smiles.

“This one,” Tiny said, pointing at Otis Owen, “however Iv’ry convinced him to steal back that cocaine and bury it wherever he did — maybe money, maybe a threat — Otis should’a known better. But look at it this way, Bubba: I done you a favor. You don’t have to compete with Otis anymore for that woman’s attention.”

“You never said,” Bubba gasped, “you never said...”

“Now this one,” Tiny pointed at the body of Marcella Meisel, “I didn’t mind her screwing Otis. I just wished she hadn’t enjoyed it so much.”

Bubba’s legs went weak.

“You know what part of your story I liked best, bartender? That last bit, about the fake leg. That was over the top! Far-fetched! Well, guess what?” Tiny whipped out a Glock with a silencer and fired three bullets into Iv’ry Cole’s kneecap. “Now that part of the story’s true! This boy gonna need a new leg!”

The bullets brought Iv’ry roaring back to consciousness. He bolted upright and grabbed his spurting leg. What was left of his knee looked like spaghetti. As Iv’ry opened his mouth to scream Tiny shot him between the eyes. His dreadlocks fluttered as the bullet blew out the back of his head.

“Now give me that goddamn tracker,” Tiny said.

Bubba dug his hands into his empty pockets. Sobriety came over him like an instant eclipse. He remembered the rolls of quarters he’d heaved into the woods.

“I... I didn’t find it... I looked at Romy’s place, but the tracker wasn’t there.”

“What?” Tiny hurled Bubba against the Audi and pressed the silencer to his temple. “We heard you say, Got it!” He yanked the pen from Bubba’s placket. Hidden inside was a microphone and transmitter. “We heard every word you said tonight! We even heard you hold the bug up to your speaker, smart ass, trying to blast us out of our socks! Don’t lie: at the woman’s studio you said, Got it!”

“I said it, but you misheard... you misunderstood... Romy said she’d only come out for drinks if I didn’t hit on her, if I kept things platonic, and I said, Got it...”

The Mexicans began trading agitated whispers.

Tiny staggered back and leaned against a hickory tree. “You just let me kill the only ones who know where that cocaine’s buried...” He stiffened suddenly and aimed the Glock at Bubba, ordering him facedown.

“Do it,” the bartender begged. “Do me that favor.”

Tiny Meisel did something worse than shoot Bubba. With a knife he cut away the pillow strapped to his back. Then Tiny jumped up and down on Bubba’s lumbar region, a half dozen times.

“Three hours,” Tiny said as the bartender curled in agony. “If that GPS tracker’s not in my hand, three hours, you and I and probably these gentlemen, too, gonna sit that masseuse down, and she’s gonna hear a true story. She’s gonna hear why you ain’t the best friend she’s ever had, and why five dead bodies, not three, ended up in this trunk.”

After the Mexicans heaped Iv’ry’s body onto the other two and the Audi peeled away, Bubba limped like a hunchback across the highway, each step a detonation in his spine. At the woods’ edge he lurched onto all fours and threw his hands into the brush where he thought the quarters should’ve landed. If he could find one roll, just one roll, the tracker couldn’t be far.

The more frantically he searched, the more impossible finding the device seemed, until finally Bubba wasn’t searching at all. He was hobbling as fast as he could with his sciatica blazing, telling himself he wouldn’t stop until he reached an ocean, a different country, another world. Instead he quickly reached the woods’ end, where he tripped over a tree root and tumbled down a small hill, rolling upright in a subdivision of new McMansions. It wasn’t the same cul-de-sac he’d driven Romy through, but each yard was decorated with the same message: Let Us Do Your Dirty Work.

Romy was still at their table when a muddied Bubba lumbered into the BBQ House, one arm behind his back.

“I was starting to think you found another frien—”

“I need your help,” he told her. “I lost something. Probably won’t change the outcome even if we find it, but I’m apologizing in advance if we don’t. I brought you flowers.”

He handed her a bouquet of landscaper flags.

Custom Meats by Wendy Reed

West Jefferson County

Even over the deer’s intestines, Jimbo could smell her: green apple shampoo and Juicy Fruit. He felt himself harden. All those careful habits formed over the years like flossing every morning, keeping his knives on the magnet when not in use, washing with bleach between each kill, and doubling his condoms were suddenly in danger. Cassie DeBardelaiwin, he sensed, was that kind of girl.

Jimbo did, however, manage to decline her order. Some things could not be compromised. It didn’t matter if she wanted the Christmas sausage for her family’s millworkers or the queen of England, Jimbo Sutt did not process any animal that hadn’t been immediately field dressed and properly iced. No matter the season, Alabama heat advantages the maggots. Besides, Jimbo rarely took wild hogs because pork could be bought by the pound down at the Piggly Wiggly.

DeBardelaiwins weren’t used to hearing no, but Jimbo held firm.

“You see that sign out front? It says Custom Meats. Not spoiled. Not cheap. Custom. I don’t give customers anything I wouldn’t eat myself.”

Satisfied he’d made himself clear, he went back to finish the buck that had just been brought in. It was a beast of a specimen. Even with most of the blood drained out, it still felt warm to the touch. Large bucks required extra care around the neck, otherwise you could wind up having to quilt the hide together on the mount. Nothing ruined a trophy like patched trim. As a processor, he’d developed a reputation for the care he took, a trait seldom cultivated in an area now forced to survive through the short-sighted methods of strip-mining. Lately, though, Jimbo was achieving some renown for his white-tail testicle blend he sold in Mason jars that was said to be as potent as those little blue pills.

In the shop, Jimbo dressed and bled deer on a large slab of stainless steel surrounded by a drain his brother called The Moat and built right into the concrete floor. His new knife — the Jackal, according to the catalog from Zac Brown’s metal shop — had cost a small fortune, and the verdict was still out whether it was worth it. Before long it would feel like an old friend, but now, as he wrapped his fingers around the carved handle, it felt stiff and more than a little strange. Having a girl standing around in the shop also felt strange, but oddly tolerable, as long as she didn’t start up about the sausage again.

The scale read 212 pounds. This was what he called a jackpot buck because it would yield a twelve-point trophy plus a freezer full of quality venison. The girl gave no sign of leaving, so he steadied himself and tugged at the incision to widen it.

“You really set on giving out Christmas sausage?” he asked, tossing the question over his shoulder, wondering for the first time if she was jailbait.

She shrugged.

“Then I suggest Conecuh. It makes pretty good eating.”

“That so?” Cassie said.

Jimbo was imagining what she wore under her skirt. It was made of denim — the same color as her eyes — and had a zipper down the front. He didn’t respond to her question, if that’s what it was, nor did he notice the way her lips curled or how she strutted right up to him until she stopped with her crotch at his face.

“So what do you eat,” she asked, “besides meat?”

Jimbo pretended not to hear. He pretended to be engrossed in his work. He pretended not to wonder if her pubic hair also smelled like green apples. He pretended not to feel the jolt of electricity heating him up. Was she still trying to get him to take the hogs or was this something else? Was it some kind of game? Jimbo didn’t know chess but he’d played poker. He lifted the buck’s tail, revealing a thick stripe of white with a puckered hole of purplish skin in the center. He held the tail out of the way and suspended the Jackal’s serrated blade just above the anus. He let the overhead light bounce off the metal and reflect onto Cassie’s face. “It’s made from old sawmill blades.”

This was her chance to leave if she wanted to, before things got messy.

Cassie did not move.

Jimbo plunged the steel teeth about an inch deep and cut a circle around the anus. This was the point when most people left, or at least looked away. Cassie took a step back, but it was to get a better view. Jimbo pulled the rectum out a couple inches and closed it off with a rubber band. He reached into the belly — carefully, but firmly, so as not to puncture or damage anything — and pulled out the entrails with the intact rectum, like a magician with a scarf. Bowel leakage, like maggots, always ruins meat. With two fingers on either side of the blade, Jimbo reached inside, toward the deer’s throat, and threaded the lungs out from between the ribs, reading the bones like braille as he went. Even a single bump could signal TB. And with one case already reported this season by Fish and Wildlife, you couldn’t be too careful.

Cassie’d begun to breathe hard, but her color looked good. If she hadn’t fainted yet, he guessed she wasn’t going to.

“What’s next?” she asked.

Jimbo stood up and a couple strands of blood or something stuck to his forearm. Color bloomed across her cheeks — not the blush of embarrassment but the flush that comes from standing close to a fire. In heels, she’d be taller than him.

“Ice. Go roll that cooler over here,” he said. “It’s full.”

When she reached the Igloo, she hesitated and made sure he was watching, then she straddled the handle, slowly lifting it up until it disappeared beneath her skirt. Jimbo wasn’t sure whether to keep watching. She locked eyes and stared squarely at him, like she was lining up invisible crosshairs. It was impossible, at that moment, to tell who had whom in their sights. That her panties dropped to the floor without being touched or tugged didn’t strike Jimbo as anything other than good fortune.

“Maybe I need to cool off,” she said, and tossed her panties into the ice chest.

Her grin beat all he’d ever seen. And he’d seen his share of women. Having to raise his brother took certain sacrifices but it hadn’t turned him into a monk. Rather than wasting a whole evening on the rigamarole of dating, he preferred to buy off a menu, always glad they charged by the hour and not by the pound.

Cassie gave her hips a slow, final swivel, before she rolled the chest over to Jimbo. As she opened the lid, she bent over farther than Jimbo thought humanly possible and spread her legs. At that moment, it was Jimbo who was in danger of fainting. If Cassie’d asked him to reconsider making sausage for DeBardelaiwin Steel right then, he might have said yes.

The Jackal still lay beside the entrails. Not only did he neglect to put it up, he also didn’t wash his hands before he handled the ice. Contamination was the last thing on his mind, fear having vanished from his regular radar. In one seemingly fluid motion, Jimbo crammed the cavity full of ice and was done. It was the fastest he’d ever packed a deer, and probably the only time in the history of West Jefferson County that lingerie and ice had been thusly juxtaposed.

Jimbo hadn’t expected to see Cassie again. The DeBardelaiwins lived over the mountain. They did not associate with the likes of the Sutts. So when she kept coming back, he chalked it up to one of several flukes in a fluke-filled season: the albino doe with horns that Jimbo spotted on the way back from Medical West, where his brother Darrell took his regular treatments; the two-headed fawn found behind the sheriff’s woodpile; and Darrell graduating to the group home.

Cassie came around for about a month and a half and then without a word stopped. Jimbo wondered what he’d done but he hadn’t asked any questions while she was there, so he left it at that. He’d been half expecting not to see her again, every time she’d left, which he told himself was fine, for the best really, because Sutts didn’t do commitment. He’d heard the tales of his grandfather and bore the scars from his own father. He knew most men didn’t like playing house anyway. They just did it because.

The following autumn arrived like a bobcat in heat — hot and bothered, foretelling storms that would level a high school and suck up the steeple from Mud Creek Baptist, spitting it out over at the Black Diamond, right on top of the tipple. Cassie, Jimbo’d heard, had gone off up north, where the DeBardelaiwins were from. To discourage thinking about her, he kept a piece of bamboo in his pocket that he rammed under a fingernail when his thoughts got out of hand.

One evening, Darrell was in the shop listening to something he called music, while Jimbo sharpened his favorite blades. Having Darrell move back in might offer more distraction.

Even over the boom box, the long whine of a car horn out front was loud. It was Cassie. Her windows were down, and her eyes looked wild. A smear of blood on her cheek made visible by her dashboard light.

“I didn’t see it. Suddenly it was just there, right in front of the car. And then it was staring right at me. It didn’t move. Oh God, it was awful. Just awful.” Her voice broke but she didn’t slow down. “What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know what to do. What else could I do? I put it in my trunk.” She lowered her head but raised her eyes. “I couldn’t think.”

The trunk was up.

A doe. Probably a yearling. What a pity. It looked like it’d been healthy, but now it was mostly dead, its legs nothing but a tangled mess. Clearly, the doe was suffering.

Jimbo tried to feel sorry for it, but all he could think about was Cassie. It’d been how many months — six or seven? He’d lost count on purpose and still, his first reflex was to snatch her out of the car and bend her over the hood. He wanted to bury himself inside her so she could never leave again. He wanted to tell her everything he’d imagined doing to her during those long nights he spent waiting, wondering if he’d ever see her again.

But Darrell was there.

Probably best anyway.

“How long ago?” he asked, trying to sound matter-of-fact, trying to hide his real question: Where were you when you hit it?

Cassie belonged in a different world and could never stay in his. He knew it, but he didn’t have to like it.

Jimbo looked from the doe to Darrell and mouthed, Let’s get it inside. He grabbed the front legs, motioned for Darrell to get the back legs, and whispered, “On three.” As they lifted, Jimbo called from behind the car, “Happens all the time.”

Too wounded to struggle, the doe’s eyes rolled back in fear. How far did Cassie drive to bring me this deer? Was she already out this way? How long has she been back in Birmingham? Did she come to see me? The doe felt more awkward than heavy, and though nothing about Cassie should’ve surprised him, Jimbo couldn’t help being impressed that she’d wrangled the wounded doe into the trunk all by herself. Everything in Jimbo strained toward the driver’s side of the car. What harm could one whiff do? But he pushed Darrell and the doe in the opposite direction. “We’ve got it from here,” he said, adding, “It’s on the house,” so she wouldn’t come inside and try to pay.

If he was lucky, Cassie would drive off, out of his life for good. But luck wasn’t what he craved.

Too weak to put up much of a struggle, the doe merely twitched her ears when placed on the slab; Darrell, Jimbo noticed, had begun trembling.

“Why don’t you go close the trunk?” Jimbo said. “Tell her she can leave.”

Despite all Darrell’s medical treatment, he was still at risk of going berserk if he got upset. Their father had called him an idiot. The doctors couldn’t seem to decide what to call him and had created what Jimbo called the Darrell Alphabet inside a folder more than two inches thick, starting with autism and ending with a syndrome that sounded like zucchini. But Jimbo had always just thought of Darrell as different, as he always would.

It occurred to him that something about the doe was different too. When he sliced into the jugular, the fat layer felt thick. She’s pregnant. He wondered where Cassie had touched the doe. Maybe it still smelled like her. Does she still even use green apple shampoo? As he leaned down to sniff, he heard a car door close. If Cassie came in now, Darrell would follow her in and see the doe’s throat. He wouldn’t understand why Jimbo had cut it. Better take Darrell on back to the group home now. Let the doe bleed in the meantime.

But Darrell was not outside, and Cassie’s car was gone. Damn electric cars. Their silence gave Jimbo the creeps. Maybe Darrell went on into the house after Cassie left, but he checked and it was empty. Darrell wouldn’t have gone with Cassie, would he? He steered clear of strangers. Even ones with long blond hair. Maybe she’d won him over with Juicy Fruit, the only gum Jimbo had been able to get Darrell to chew.

Jimbo walked back to the shop. Ordinarily, he hung yearlings so their narrow bellies stretched before dressing, but on the off chance that this one was pregnant, he decided not to move it from the slab. As soon as he inserted the knife, there was a tiny burst of fluid and then a hoof popped out. Another followed. Of all the deer he’d processed, not a single one had ever been pregnant. Maybe he’d cut her throat too quickly. Too late now. He sliced through the skin and, for the first time in all the years, felt like he was trespassing. Half of him was appalled at what he was doing, but the other half was too curious to stop.

Out came a fawn that looked coated with plastic, like it’d been vacuum-packed for freshness. Two dark-pink balloon-looking things glistened with wetness. The placentomes. A hoof moved. It was alive.

Jimbo tried to think what to do next. He grabbed some shop towels, wet them, and began rubbing the fawn. How hard should he rub? He slid the fawn away from the doe and alternated between light and hard strokes. He’d had to pound hard on Darrell that time with the hot dog. When it finally popped out, it had been Jimbo who cried. Darrell had toddled off as if nothing had happened.

Jimbo tried not to think about those early days with Darrell.

“This is your brother — Darrell Sutt,” his father had said, like Jimbo might not remember his own last name. It was the first time Jimbo had seen his father that year, and as usual, James Sutt Sr. was drunk. Soon as he started sobering up, he was gone again. Jimbo’d practically raised himself and now he was saddled with raising someone else too. He’d tried to find out who Darrell’s mother was but hadn’t gotten far. If nothing else, Darrell’d been a good excuse to quit school. Most things, he learned the hard way. But they’d survived and because the woods were so full, not once had they gone hungry. Or taken charity, because Jimbo discovered hunters would pay good money for him to process their kill — enough for Darrell to get treatment at the hospital and eventually be admitted into the special school.

Maybe the fawn would turn out normal. With its blunt little button nose, tiny white hooves that hadn’t yet blacked, it looked so perfect. Tufts of hair and white spots scattered down the spine like pearls. It was startlingly beautiful and radiated a kind of luminescence that encircled the body like a halo. Could the fawn breathe? Did Jimbo need to peel the shiny stuff off?

Despite knowing just about everything there was to know about killing and processing deer, he knew nothing about their birthing. With Darrell and the Sutt track record, the last thing Jimbo needed was to become a father. Nothing about Darrell had ever been normal. He hadn’t even come with a birthday. Jimbo’d made that up too.

Images flashed through his mind: Darrell screaming in that makeshift pen. Darrell covered in red bumps. Darrell slamming his head on the floor. Darrell turning blue. Darrell falling into the fire. Darrell’s chest not moving for such a long time. But he was about to turn nineteen; they’d both survived.

Beginning with the nose, Jimbo worked at the spider weblike covering, and was making his way toward the tail when he sensed someone watching. He hadn’t heard anyone drive up. Damn electric cars. In his peripheral vision stood a woman who looked like Cassie except she was too round.

“Darrell asked me to take him back, so I did. It was the least I could do.” Her voice sounded flat and sleepy, but it was the most beautiful music in the world.

He couldn’t take his eyes away from her swollen belly. It looked liked she’d swallowed a basketball. Cassie was staring at the fawn. “It was pregnant too?”

Pregnant.

“Here, let me help.” She kneeled down and took a towel. “Your brother is sweet. I’ve always heard he was crazy but he seems nothing but nice.” She wiped at the fawn’s eyes and nose.

Realizing she was pregnant had paused Jimbo’s brain. He couldn’t think. There were things he needed to say, but breathing was about all he could manage. The noise inside his ears grew into a roar. Talking hadn’t exactly been their thing, yet over the weeks they’d spent together, he’d confided a couple things about Darrell and their father. She hadn’t said much about her own father but Jimbo gathered that Josiah DeBardelaiwin kept Cassie in a gilded cage.

Jimbo grabbed her by the wrist.

“Let me go,” she said, pulling away and trying to stand, but he squeezed until she gave up. She dropped the towel.

“Is it mine?” He wasn’t sure which answer he wanted — for it to be his or someone else’s.

Instead of getting up, she lifted the fawn’s head between her hands. “It’s none of your business.”

“You saying it ain’t mine?” He suddenly knew which answer he wanted.

She blew into the fawn’s nose. “I’m saying it’s none of your business.” She took a deep breath and blew again. The fawn’s face twitched. “Did you see that? It moved. Now what do we do?”

“Then whose is it?” he said. “Tell me.”

She slipped off her sweater and wrapped it around the fawn. “Is there milk in the mother?”

“Who else’d you fuck?” Jimbo spat, and palmed her belly like he might steal it, might take the ball and run down the court. “It’s a girl, isn’t it?”

Cassie sat back on her heels and pulled the fawn to her, as if that was her answer.

“I sensed it. Some things you just know in your bones.”

“I didn’t say it was a girl.”

“You didn’t have to. Your face said it.”

“You had a 50/50 chance.”

“I knew it, same as I know it’s mine.”

Cassie kept stroking the fawn. It blinked but didn’t move. “Aren’t they born walking?” she asked. “Maybe I should put it down.”

He wanted to hear Cassie say it was his. Even if he had to make her, he wanted her to say it. It was beginning to dawn on him that their two worlds were no longer separate. We have something in common, something that’s ours.

Cassie swallowed hard. “Here,” she said, guiding his hand. “Feel that?”

How could he not? Her belly heaved beneath her shirt. He could see it and feel it. But he wanted to see more. He lifted her shirt and with his eyes traced the veins that spread beneath the translucence. A fragrance rose to his nose — not fruity, not apple — just clean. Soap. He expected to be sorry, to be angry that he hadn’t used condoms with her. But the only thing he felt was aroused.

“Look. The fawn’s trying to walk,” Cassie said. “We’ve got to do something.”

“When’s it due?”

“Next week.”

“What day? Darrell’s birthday’s the first.”

“The second.”

The fawn struggled to steady itself.

Her belly button stuck out like a turtle. Jimbo kissed it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Her belly heaved again. “They’re called Braxton Hicks contractions. They’re not the real ones,” she said, after slowly exhaling. “My father wouldn’t let me.”

Josiah DeBardelaiwin was a rich prick who thought he owned the entire state. He probably hated the idea that his blood had mixed with a Sutt.

“Say it. I want to hear it. Say it’s mine.”

“Look! It’s up.” The fawn was standing, each stick-thin leg quivering. As it wobbled, Cassie’s smile spread like a brush fire. Jimbo could drown in that smile; he’d die happy. That wild tongue. Those sharp teeth. Those pink lips. He wanted to put his tongue between her lips so badly that he grabbed her and pressed his mouth on hers so hard that her teeth cut his lip. When he tasted blood, he thought his heart had exploded.

“I love you,” he said. He opened his eyes.

She was still looking at the fawn.

“I’ll take care of the baby, I promise. I’ll be a good father. You’ll be surprised. Are you listening?” He’d do anything for his baby. He reached out and pulled the fawn to them. It weighed nothing, felt like grabbing air.

“How do hunters shoot anything with such wondrous eyes?” she said.

It was true about the eyes. Jimbo had learned not to look into them.

“I hope our daughter has your eyes,” he said, pressing lightly on the fawn’s back until it folded onto Cassie’s outstretched legs. It rested its nose on her belly. Jimbo stood and with a boot pushed the doe toward the drain. As he did, the incision tore, and he saw several ribs; one was covered with the telltale white bubbles of TB. If the doe was infected, so was her fawn.

So that Cassie could lean back, he rolled his work cart behind her and locked the wheels.

“Do you know how much I’ve thought about you? Do you have any idea? Don’t sit there and pretend like you didn’t think about me. You enjoyed it as much as I did.”

He remembered those weeks like they were yesterday. He could picture her coming through the overhead door, half-dressed, and wanting to play, like a little kid. One time she was buck naked. Several times she wore layers and, using antlers like a pole, she’d remove each layer in a striptease. If he was too busy to play, she’d pull up a stool and watch, the sound and smell of her breath driving him so crazy that he could hardly stand it. Most of what they did was her idea. Instead of hide-and-seek, she insisted they play hide-and-hunt, using an unloaded gun and a bow with sponge-tipped arrows. “Even vegetarians have to eat what they kill,” she’d said. Until Cassie, Jimbo had thought vegetarians, like zombies, were made up.

Cassie rubbed the fawn’s neck and cradled it in her arms. She closed her eyes.

“Damnit, Cassie. Do you hear what I’m saying? Look at me, goddamnit. I’ll marry you.” There. He’d said it. The first Sutt in no telling how many generations.

“Are you nuts?” Cassie kept her eyes closed and lowered her voice to a half squeak, half whisper. “My father would disown me.”

“He’ll come around. You’ll see. What does he know anyway? What did you tell him about us?”

“He thinks you raped me... said he would kill you. The sheriff talked him out of it.”

“Talked him out of it? What’d Turner say?” For years Jimbo and Sheriff Turner’d had an unspoken agreement about jurisdiction. Fish and Wildlife were from Washington and didn’t understand the way things worked around here.

Cassie opened her eyes and stared at her belly. “He said you’d been nothing but decent out here, quietly processing your deer and raising your brother alone. Said there wasn’t anybody to take care of Darrell if something happened to you. I let him feel the baby kick. Did you know the sheriff and I are the same age?” With a thumb, she began tracing the shiny purple veins and closed her eyes again.

“Darrell felt the baby? Or do you mean Sheriff Turner?”

“Getting the car fixed is going to be expensive. Daddy’s going to be pissed. He stays furious with me since I didn’t get an abortion. He said, Sired by a Sutt, there’s no telling what you’ll give birth to.” She pulled herself up against the table leg, her midriff bare and round, and leaned back. “I’d forgotten how things feel out here. All this death makes a body feel more alive.” She shifted the fawn in her lap and tucked the hem of her shirt under her arm to hold it in place. Through the thin cotton of her bra, Jimbo saw the complete outline of her nipple. Its roundness appeared to be straining against the material. “I feel free out here. I can let everything go.” She rubbed the fawn’s nose around her nipple and closed her eyes. As she arched her back, the center hardened to a point. She smiled. “I’ll have milk soon.”

Weak as it was, the fawn made a perfect rag doll. She lifted her breast over the top of the bra and rubbed it against the fawn’s nose. When she pushed her nipple into the fawn’s mouth, she started humming some song that sounded familiar.

“The fawn’s sick, Cassie. It has TB. Not your fault but it can’t live.” The smile disappeared from her face. “We’ll name our baby Fawna, though. It’s perfect, isn’t it?” he whispered, as he spread her legs and began rubbing the inside of her thighs. Now his brain spun; no longer paused — fast forward, rewind — it was playing and recording simultaneously, it was running at different speeds. Wasn’t he being gentle as he laid her on her side? Wasn’t he being careful as he pressed the fawn between them? If he could’ve, he would’ve crawled all the way inside Cassie to his baby, where he could touch and hold and kiss her, his perfect, perfect daughter, his Fawna. His. What would she smell like? He would stay there, inside, and be born with her. A perfect daughter deserved a perfect father, didn’t she? The kind always there to protect. He could not wait. He would never let Fawna out of his sight. Such warmth. Such softness. With the fawn still between them, he unzipped his pants. The warmth turned to heat.

Maybe when someone loses their mind, it’s like floating in space. Maybe there’s no gravity or weight. Or maybe it feels heavy, an anchoring secured by weight. Maybe it feels like finally finding home. Maybe it’s not crazy to discover for the first time as middle age nears what it’s like for something to belong inexplicably to you. Or maybe Jimbo Sutt didn’t lose or find a thing. Maybe he simply fell in love.

Maybe love is where things unravel.

He’d told her he’d talk to her father, hadn’t he? Had she heard? Or had she been listening to the fawn? Did she think death was silent? She’d seen how messy it was in the shop and liked it. That sound was just the lungs struggling. The fawn would quiet soon. He would bury it. He would not feed it to the dogs. He promised. He would do whatever she liked, whatever she wanted. They were going to be a real family. He was going to be a real father. DeBardelaiwin was a fine name. He didn’t care about names. Fawna Sutt or Fawna DeBardelaiwin. Blood was what mattered — his blood, his baby. Had Cassie started crying? Why? Why was she looking at him that way? Could she see how beautiful Fawna would be? God, how he’d missed her. Every night he’d dreamed of making love again. He’d never imagined her with his baby inside while they did it. Fawna was going to be perfect. Josiah would see what a perfect baby Jimbo made. Not like Darrell. Not like the fawn. Cassie didn’t need to listen to her father. It was Jimbo’s turn to make the decisions. He wanted to rock back and forth while Cassie sang all the lullabies in the world. Faster. Faster. He didn’t want slow. He didn’t want to wait. Was that Cassie singing? Was that the Jackal? Was it him? Hold still and shut up for one lousy goddamn moment. Fawna needs me. We need each other. You’ll see. Please God no. Not blood. Please no. I just want to hold her.

Jimbo replays it over and over in his mind, always rewinding, always fast-forwarding. Some things change, but the end is always the same: The knife is sharp. The blood is thick. And Jimbo’s left there, all alone.

When Jimbo visits Darrell at Medical West, he usually parks out front and takes the main elevator. Today, he takes the hospital stairs and walks the four flights to Darrell’s floor. “He’s asleep,” a nurse whispers behind Jimbo, as if he’s too stupid to notice. “Why don’t you come back later?” Jimbo knows it’s not a question.

Darrell looks grown, peaceful, so different than the little boy who haunts Jimbo’s memory. He would unmake every mistake if he could. He will not make the mistake now of waking him. Outside Darrell’s room, the maze of halls makes Jimbo feel like a rat. He knows what the people here think of Darrell, of him. He won’t ask for directions. The ones in the white coats are the worst — pity written all over their faces, thinking they’re better than the Sutts because they have education and big words. Jimbo’ll be damned before he asks them anything. This is where Cassie would’ve been taken to stop the bleeding. These are the people who would’ve taken Fawna.

At the end of the hall, Jimbo sees the automatic door to the parking deck and a sign he can’t read until he gets closer: NICU.

Alphabet code for everything. Just before the door is an alcove and another door with a large window. A pair of colored scrubs hurries down the hall, into a bathroom. There’s a metal cart by the door like the one Jimbo uses in the shop. This one has a plastic bin on top and is filled with pink-striped blankets. Everything around it smells sweet and clean. A sound rises that resonates somewhere deep in his bones. Jimbo reaches into the cart, scoops up the bundle, and walks through the automatic door.