Hunger

                                                                       

It was summoned to pass judgment--either to bless or destroy. The mechanism, woven from a web of primordial chemicals and an Egyptian spell that was inscribed on the tomb wall of a lesser ruler--a subjugant in the Valley of the Kings. Enslavement is the progeny of progress. 

“Don’t go out there, Ev!” Jack was frantic. 

Condensation formed on the inside of the oak door and was slippery to the touch.

“What are we supposed to do? Sit here?”

Jack turned and looked at the window. The plastic shade was pulled and its white outline created a low-lit portal away from the door opposite.

“Maybe we could--” He paused and turned back to her.

“Maybe we could go through the window.”

Ev felt goosebumps rise on her arms and legs as the atmosphere of the room cooled. The air seemed to ripple at the base of the door like a highway mirage--but she was in her bedroom, next to Jack, her fiance, who she thought was the man of her dreams.

Her dad always said she had grit but when she was growing up it didn’t seem like a compliment. It seemed like something boys should have. Girls should have something else. What that was she didn’t discover until she met Jack. 

They met at O’Shay’s where she’d waitressed in college. She was attracted to his charm and big smile when he was embarrassed. He held her in his arms after they made love and she felt safe in a way that she always longed for. But Jack had never been tested, never been asked to dig deep and find something he didn’t even know was there.

“Jack, what is that under the door?” As she asked the question the air thickened, rolled and twisted like smoke but became thicker--it seemed to gather mass.

“Jack!” 

She turned to look at him as he released the shade and it retracted with a shriek. He looked at her then and she saw the thing just on the other side of the glass--its eyes concentrated on the back of Jack’s head, swiveled up and caught Ev’s.

“Jack! Look out!”

Just then a thin, red, ropey cable pierced the window and Jack’s belly. It was lined with veins and writhed like a snapped powerline, and just as quickly, pulled back through the entry hole and sucked out the other side. Jack dropped to the floor, blackness at the window.

The cold materializing under the door continued to roll into the room and had now wrapped itself around Ev’s ankles, freezing her skin. She stepped out of it and rushed the remaining distance to Jack, whose eyes were wide and vacant while the contents of his body leaked from the hole that must have severed his spine.

“I love you, Baby,” she whispered in a rush before pulling the shade back down and breaking the rest of the glass out of the window and crawled out onto the porch roof. It’s work done, the miasma at the door thinned and dissolved into the air.

An hour earlier Ev had stood in the doorway of the bedroom, thick wool socks bunched around her ankles. Jack admired the curve of her hips and the wildness of her pubic hair, her breasts were small and erect, although her arms were crossed over them at that moment.

“Your mother’s friends are not going to be the priority here, Jack.”

“Ev, you know how she is. What’s the big deal? We won’t even know they’re there.”

“I’ll know. She’ll know. You don’t see it, but she manipulates you.”

Jack knew she was right. His own father shared a bungalow in Kingman with Janice, a widower that dotted on him. 

Em looked at Jack, lying on the bed, partially covered with the sheet. His modesty felt prudish sometimes. He smiled at her then. She let it go.

“Come over here, Babe.”

He lay on his back and she settled on top of him and pushed her palms into his chest and began to rock back and forth. Economy and precision brought her to orgasm just as Jack came quietly with a muffled release of breath like a rabbit in the brush.

Brunch that morning was a belated introduction to her parents. It went well even though they were spent from their trip to Egypt. “Cruise the Nile! Luxor to Aswan! See where civilization began!” They ate pigeon and baba ganoush. Her mother always lost herself in the cuisine when they returned from a trip. Her father, unusually silent, seemed distant. Jack was a good sport though and she thought they liked him.  

From atop the porch roof she looked down on the silent front yard, a breeze shifted the dry leaves in the trees and she could smell the animal rank coming from Jack’s body.  A slice of moon was a bright gash in the dark sky. She was hungry. The grinding in her gut caused her back to arch. Unaccountably, Ev longed for the sinewy tearing of muscle with her teeth. The idea of the fibrous sound thrilled her. 

She thought of Jack again and that first smile at O’Shays and how her interest, coaxed into existence like a gentle breeze on a flame, turned to desire. The memory was enough.  Forgive me Father, she thought without the slightest idea from where it came. 

 

 

 

Plastic Shutters

Ken

“You made the wrong choice.” He knew he would too, and by giving him the opportunity to make the wrong choice something irretrievable was put on display for the principal, who was observing him for the third time this semester. The boy refused to be embraced by his laid back teaching style.

“Fuck this.” The boy muttered. It was just audible, and everyone knew it. With Principal Stanley looking from the back, Ken couldn’t choose to ignore it.

He tried to maintain his composure, but he could feel the earth opening beneath his feet.

He blurted out, “Go to the office!”

“Is that because the principal’s here?” Disdain oozed from the boy’s mouth.

The bastard, he thought. He didn’t dare.

“That’s enough.” Ken tried to staunch the flow, but he knew the kid wasn’t ready to leave. now Principal Stanley was turned sideways in his desk like he was getting set to intervene.

“Go to the office right now!” Ken spat the words at the kid.

“Quit being a dick, Ken.” This last, a rotted vestige of Ken’s early attempt to have a student centered classroom. The rest of the class sat in rapt attention.

Principal Stanley finally got up.

“Come with me, Alec.” The principal said it so calmly. As Stanley made his way to the door, Alec got up and followed him.

The kids counted off by sevens and worked on their discussion questions. Ken focused everything he had left on finding a reasonably priced record player on Craigslist.

That spring Principal Stanley placed Ken on unrequested leave. He had intended to implement a new classroom management plan and retype and revise those worksheets next year, but now he wouldn’t have the chance.

Last night he waited in bed for his wife to finish reading, but when she turned her lamp off she stayed there--facing the wall. He didn’t think he asked for much, just something to get him through the night. There was a time, he often thought, when he could guide her into an orgasm like landing an F-16 onto the bucking deck of an aircraft carrier, but now he didn’t know what she wanted and had given up trying to read her mind.

It’s a hellish circle once he’d got caught in it and impossible to reach the exit or even recognize the need for change. Ken felt like he was being pulled into a vortex that had gathered speed and was beginning to shake violently. He always had a weakness for the attention of a woman and lately he’d been making eyes at the girl behind the counter at the smoothie store. 

Lila Kujawski. He had her little sister in class. They had the same jawline. Lila was probably twenty with fierce eyes chipped in blue, hair the color of crime scene tape and a body that shifted beneath her clothes every time she reached for the cups.

As a work in progress, she electrified him.

“Lila.” He loved saying it out loud. Two slippery syllables in a row. An electric shock snapped across his forehead now whenever he uttered her name. 

Platonic though--strictly platonic. But when she pushed that steel hoop through her lip in a circle with her tongue and clicked it on her teeth. God. The sound made was like ice on glass. She was the tonic. He couldn’t stop. Just what I need, he thought--a girl; no, a woman, who understands me without all the baggage of time.

Before long, he knew Monday, Wednesday and Saturday were Lila’s regularly scheduled days.

He understood their appointment in the woods could have implications for getting his teaching job back. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted that job back, but he thought he might get himself back.  

It was already late in the afternoon, so he called Shelly and left a message, turned the T.V. to the cartoon channel and walked out the door.

Across the street, his neighbor Diane came out of the house. He waved to her. She was obese and dwarfish and he couldn’t help but wonder if she ever felt as he did right now. Maybe she simply chose to ignore it and repress the basic human survival instincts that force an individual off their dead ass just before they begin the somnambulistic slide to indifference.

“Don’t you have any shame?” he mumbled to himself as he watched her climb into her SUV.

The wind bit into his back now and he cursed the decision to wear his rough hewn great coat rather than the down parka.

Baby steps, he thought.

I have set a goal. 

I have recognized a need for change. 

He thought by saying it that it would become true.

I need to find the answers to assuage my wretched soul.

There’s the tone he’d been looking for. 

Wretched soul.

What he really wanted to find out here was some Wiccan goddess and beg forgiveness while she looked on like a baby-blue clad Virgin Mary with a snake wrapped around her feet. She could endow him with certain inalienable rights and an everlasting peace that would protect him until his last silent sleeping breath in an air conditioned bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac in Phoenix.

Diane

The door of the SUV closed with the hermetic shump of the hatch on a spaceship. Her husband’s promotion to Chief Quality Control Officer was the best thing that ever happened to her marriage. With a French manicured nail, she carefully pushed seek, searching for some music to which she could affix her mood. Exhilarated, she watched that enormous coat billowing behind him like an Italian count, as he walked up the hill. Her ass felt warmed and cupped in the leather hands of the heated seat beneath her. She imagined they were his hands.

Slow. Tempered, steady, open-handed waves with no motion in the wrist or fingers was all she allowed herself so far. Slow. She’d seen him look at her--from the corner of her eye--five minutes before. The intensity in those eyes as he nodded to her and the wild abandon of his hair falling from a widow’s peak excited her. Her thighs grew warm and she experimented with the smooth edge of her cell phone as she pushed it between her legs.

She would watch his yard from her kitchen window and see the two little boys play in the sandbox for hours. The little one would begin to cry and he was always right there with something to pacify him.

The tenderness of that man--not like his wife. She was never home. But when she was, the sharp scowl that furrowed her cheeks punctuated the hardness of her personality. She’d seen them from behind her window. The mouthed expletives and distant body language steadily chipped away at the marital sham that could have only been maintained for the sake of the kids. He would do that--for his boys.

She liked how that sounded. “The boys,” she said aloud to herself. She imagined approaching him --make the first move. Men are turned on by a confident woman.

In the rear view mirror she saw his wife driving up the street.

Here comes that bitch now.

Shelly

You’re thirty-four years old, have breasts with stretch marks and you’re working Oil of Olay into the crow’s feet at the corners of your eyes as if you were trying to rub life back into a heart. This futile action brings tears to your eyes that you blink away in front of the bathroom mirror every other night. There is no such thing as making love and what your husband does to you doesn’t rise to the level of getting laid. It is just what you have decided you have to do so you can get through an extra chapter of Nora Roberts. You firmly believe that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You pray to God that’s all he wants. Maybe he’ll ask you a question. Maybe it will be something about your day. 

Each night, standing in front of the kitchen sink, beneath the fluorescent light, the refrigerator hums in the darkness at your back--while through the window to your front, the night reveals nothing. Under the warm, gray water you finger the spoons and forks and knives. There is a butcher knife in there, and you feel for the blade’s edge. Sooner or later you’ll run your pruned finger over its sharpness.

You’re two blocks away now. The urgency of your husband’s message forced you to cancel your afternoon appointments. He said he had to go. I have to go. Go where? What about the boys?

From here it could be anyone’s house--even a home. White plastic shutters screwed to the surface--props. Entombed in the old slate siding, you can see the Asbestos fibers under the microscope in your head. You can feel them embedding themselves in the soft alveoli of your lungs and their poison seeps into you. Closer. The garage doors are open. The opener is long broken--wheels off the track. The garage doors are always open. This isn’t what you envisioned when you were seventeen. When you were seventeen.

Your six year old is sitting on the lazy boy in front of the TV--transfixed by a man in a mask fashioned from human flesh hacking at a body. The machete, rhythmic and mesmerizing, sounds like it is striking a block of wood. You don’t say anything except “let’s go baby,” as you push the power button.

Shit. Hanging on every molecule--inhaled into your nose. Your two year old is in the playpen squeezing his own shit through his fingers like Play-Doh. A scream builds in your skull, but it is a full minute before it works its way out of your mouth. Frightened, snot strings and crusty fingers--both children snap inside too. It’s communal. You load a bag with clothes, diapers, baby wipes and animal crackers. Your parent’s house is two hours away.

Diane

Taking a pull off her Diet Coke and releasing pressure from the brake, she carefully pulled the SUV out of the driveway.

Tomorrow would be Friday and it was always the same.

“Where do you wanna eat?”

It was always his question when he got home from work. Just once she wanted to stay in. She’d actually feigned a headache so they could stay in once.

Her husband was large--big and tall store large, with an enormous trunk from which hung a generous amount of meat and potatoes without making him look fat. He was just a big man.

“I don’t care, but let’s go somewhere with good salads.”

She continued to massage her insecurities with this focus on salads--salads loaded with hard boiled eggs drenched in sweet dressing and sprinkled with bacon bits and sunflower seeds.

Dan always ordered the prime rib with mushrooms and fried onions sitting in a pool of bloody au jus. After he was promoted, he moved from queen cut to king.

When she would recall what she’d seen on the morning news shows she’d put her hands over his wrist and physically restrain him from eating another bite.

“What else’d you do?” He’d ask and continue to cut into his meat. 

After supper they’d drive back home in silence, choose a movie from Netflix, usually an action film with vaguely familiar looking actors.

Her French manicure was a virginal white half moon bordering precisely the end of her nails and there was a matching set encased in her tiny Reebok running shoes. She thought of them with a twinge of dissatisfaction derived from unavoidable defeat. Her neighbor always brought it out.

Knobby cysts had formed amid the dark and labyrinthine warmth of her reproductive organs--forever reducing her to a spectator of the children of others. This public blessing was a secret source of despair--permanent as a page torn from a book. I don’t have time for kids she’d pretended to believe-- she’d even said it out loud to others, including her husband, who seemed indifferent to the loss. Sometimes the sight of a child in a cart at the grocery store pulled at her chest while she made tight smiles to their mothers, and she ached. The envy and longing burned and pulled her insides into a tender hollow only she knew about.

She pulled into the Gas-n-Go and went inside.

“Do you release ‘em back after you catch ‘em?”

“No, you can’t release pond raised trout; they’re too fragile. Gotta eat ‘em” A mangy teenager with an American flag plastered across his T-shirt carried on with a man in a blue suit and tie at the counter as he scratched the soft silver film off the top of his five dollar lottery ticket.

“Well--lookit that, I won my five dollars back.”

She stared out the window behind the cashier’s head as her neighbor’s car went by. Out the side window a little boy in the back seat stared straight at her, and she felt the hollow behind her ribs.

Shelly

In the rearview mirror your six year old is looking out the side window and the baby’s face is pressed up against the headrest of his car seat. He is fast asleep. The street leading from your house is narrower than you remember. The tidy three bedroom rambler next door has a double attached garage, utility shed and a chain link fence in the back for their golden retriever. It’s beige with white trim--the house number in black wrought iron running at an angle alongside the garage. Every Friday night they leave for a date and the husband opens the car door for his wife, she delicately steps in and he closes the door behind her. They were doing something right. She was doing something right.

Diane, you think her name is, or maybe Debbie. Her kind eyes looked through you daily, pleading you to take action. You too can have what I have. The clean lines of the vinyl siding and white trim around the windows make your lungs feel soft and smooth on the inside. Your throat widens and air rushes in and out as it should.

Leaving town, the Hansen Motor Company billboard fills your rear view mirror. You lean forward and peer up into a twilight sky and see a star--the first star of the night. His tan leather satchel sits on the floor of the passenger side and a grocery list is fastened by a rubber band to the handle. The road ahead is obscured by your tears and you try to blink them away.

You know you’re going to turn around soon. The guilt, weighing less than the anger, surfaces and the anger again sinks to the bottom briefly unsettling the inexplicable love you have for your husband.

Cafeteria Style

Fats sat at the kitchen table silent and serene as a lanky Buddha except for the dry snips of the fingernail clipper dexterously managed by his slim fingers. The clippings snapped off in random directions sometimes hitting the gray formica table top and bouncing across the surface. He appreciated the way he could get a real itch out of them, but before long, his repugnance won out and he had to cut them back. The trimming satisfied him, made him feel clean and neat in a way he rarely felt outside of the kitchen. Momentarily mesmerized, the white clippings, mingled with the darker flecks floating in the formica, reminded him of neutrinos, the building blocks of life; which was how he saw himself, as a builder of life--one child at a time. Oh, he didn’t do it alone; he was part of a team of crack servers that fed lunch to six hundred children and staff per day. He had been a student there himself once, and, in fact, it was his science teacher that taught him of the neutrino. He pulled himself from his reverie, unbent his long, naked legs slowly, stretched them and splayed his toes like a cat. He dumped the remains of his instant coffee in the sink and headed for the shower.

 

Mr. Jenner pinned Fats to the wall of the cafeteria one afternoon and bemoaned the teenagers of today. 

“It’s soul sucking to stand in front of a classroom and work on my whiz bangs and whipper snappers. An essay, a story, a novel! No! A novella! Longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. Some pathetic act of salesmanship. How can I compare to a meme or some bot farmed click bait?” He hesitated and waited for Fats to answer. “They don’t read!” he continued in one final gasp.

All Fats could summon was, “I’ve gotta run to the store and get some mayo.” But Mr. Jenner insisted.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Jenner said exasperatedly.  “The spectrum of customers in a classroom is exactly like the grocery store--from produce aisle to the accounting office. Chapped fingered stock boys and oily faced girls sliding our purchases across a scanner, to the doctor dropping in to pick up some milk or the octogenarian in a three wheeled electric cart searching for instant folgers or the undead in flannel pajama pants, filthy fuzzy slippers and a jacket in search of Code Red and Jacked Doritos.”

His whole face was red now. “Those are my students! It’s the perfect metaphor.” Mr. Jenner loosened his tie and sat on the round stool of the cafeteria table and rested his head in his hands.

Fats pushed his ball cap back on his head and gave his former English teacher a pat on the shoulder. “I still love to read, Mr. J.”

“I’m sorry, Norman. I’ve been at this for too long.”

“Alright, I gotta get to the store.”

He’d seen the chink in Jenner’s armor more and more lately. This wasn’t the first time his ear had been bent. It had started after Jenner’s divorce. The change was like a sharp pain in the bowels that you never got checked. It forebode something dark, evil in its intent, something that couldn’t be undone. He suspected it was too late for Jenner.

Not Fats though. He imagined himself a cog on a wheel--a part of a vital piece of machinery that never needed to be replaced, would always need to exist, was just expected, not overlooked or looked through. He wasn’t perfect, but Fats didn’t consider himself a bad guy. Sure, he’d skimmed a little here and there just for some walking around money. It was possible once the system became automated and it was never too much to notice. And really, he was just getting it from the state. That money was reimbursed by the government and the government was a thief. Everybody knew that. He was stealing from thieves.  

The mayo bottles filled, he prepared to take his place in the serving line. The dark faced girl who sat in the corner when he arrived at school in the morning was in line now. Her hat low over her eyes and bangs lower than that. He’d seen Jenner sitting across the lunch table from her one morning last week while she drew on her art pad. Then yesterday Fats had been gassing up and there she was again sitting at one of the wooden picnic tables near the shelter in the park and Jenner’s car sat in the lot by the swing sets. Fats had a feeling about Jenner but attributed it to the gulf he imagined between their social set points. The proximity had him thinking though.

He was fundamentally an analog guy. For the most part the digital world was superfluous to his needs. Like most people, he neither knew or was interested in what was happening outside of his experience. His curiosity only extended to the logistics of preparing meals for 550 students, elaborate Trudy-inspired fantasies--the beautician that lived beneath him, and cat fishing, which he decided to do after he had finished at the cafeteria. 

He sat in his camp chair, ate licorice and worked his way into his third beer of a six pack he’d purchased for the occasion. A deep contentment overwhelmed him. The close pungency of the mud and heat of the sun on his back, the feel of the gentle wind on his face all added up like a math problem whose solution was this moment right now.

This mid-May air was new--like it’d all been replaced overnight with something warm and soft and aromatic. The river was still high and Fats was impaling an enormous night crawler on a #6 hook.  The split shot he’d bit down on was still tingling his molars. As he made his cast, Fats imagined a giant catfish hugging the muddy river bottom weeds, suspended in the brown water of the Willow just waiting for the moment a juicy piece of bait was dropped down in front of its nose.

He heard the purr of an engine from the parking lot behind him. Shit. He had hoped the place would be all his. A tangle of alders separated him from the parking lot and their leaves didn’t quite fill the gaps yet. He stood up and leaned into the brush and looked into the windshield of a car. There was the dark faced girl looking straight ahead. Her head was still but her eyes caught his and Fats nodded acknowledgment. The driver flipped up the visor that concealed his face and Mr. Jenner’s eyes widened. Fats swore he mouthed the word, Norman. Suddenly, it felt like someone grabbed the end of his pole and pulled it toward the water. Fats spun around and pulled the rod tip to the sky and reeled. It was like dragging a log up from the bottom of the river. The line was taut and rod tip bent. He knew he needed to be gentle and consistent or he risked snapping the line. A small wake formed as he pulled it into shallower water where he could see what he had. Then, with a sudden shudder of the rod tip, a tangle of loose line blew in the breeze and the fish was gone.

“That was a big one.” It was Jenner as he walked towards him. Fats noticed a change in Jenner’s voice.

“Yeah, they’re down there.” 

“I didn’t know you were a fisherman, Norman.”

Fats’ anxiety got the best of him. “What’s going on with that girl? Isn’t she one of the students?”

Jenner paused for a beat.

“Yes, Norman, she is and I’m hoping you’ll keep this between you and I.”

“Keep what?” He couldn’t believe Jenner would be fiddling around with a kid. He’d heard of teachers like that when he was a kid, but never more than rumors.

Jenner looked across the river. “Do you remember Ms. Gilmer? She was a science teacher here fifteen years ago.”

“Sure. She was one of the good ones. Real pretty. We all had a crush on her. She wasn’t here long.” He was reminded of the neutrinos, again. Jenner stepped back and looked over at the car and then turned to Fats.

“She and I had a relationship. A brief relationship.” He looked at Fats expectantly. “She got pregnant. I was married. And wanted to stay that way.”

“So that’s why she left?”

“Yes. We agreed it was for the best.”

“And the kid?” Fats nodded towards the vehicle.

Jenner exhaled slowly. “She’s my daughter.

“Holy shit, Mr. J!” The paradigm shift was too much for Fats to contain. “What about the mom? Why is she here?”

“That’s all I’m going to say on the matter, Norman, and I don’t want you saying anything either.”

“But how will you--”

“That’s my concern, Norman.” There was a maleviolence in his voice. “You won’t say a word.”

“Of course not, Mr.J. It’s our secret.”

“Yes it is.” He turned and walked back through the opening in the brush and then stopped.

“Norman?” He was using his teacher-voice now. “I know about your stealing.” 

 

 

No Blood, No Foul

                                                                  

Couple things: Chuck was there for me when I needed someone to shoot my dog. I guess that’s just one thing, but at the time I really needed his help. A census worker was walking up my driveway one Thursday afternoon and my German Shepard took a nip at her leg. It was more of a bite, really. I stepped out in time to call the dog back, but the worker turned and ran frantically back to her car. I raised my arm in a kind of pathetic wave keeping my hand in the air as if the woman should stay but she put her Kia in reverse and sped back out of the driveway. 

It really bummed me out. Anybody can just die out of the blue and they don’t know they're gonna die. Like Connie. I’d fed her that morning. Played fetch. Scratched behind her ears. Sure, Connie would growl sometimes when there were strangers around or you got too close when she was eating, but she never bit. Until that day. I’d always thought to myself that there was nothing more worthless than a mean dog. So when Connie bit that census worker, I knew she had to go. 

On Sunday afternoons Chuck and I had often been over to the gravel pit shooting his 44 Magnum, or, as he liked to say, “The most powerful handgun in the world.” I’m not sure that’s true anymore but I don’t really know much about guns. When I told him I needed his help and to bring his gun he didn’t ask any questions. Just drove right over. 

Connie was tied to a maple tree in the backyard. I made sure my wife was gone and then I explained to Chuck what needed to be done. The sense of purpose on his face and somber apprehension of this responsibility moved me. 

I always felt I owed him for that, so when he and his wife hit a rough patch, I wanted to be there for him. I pulled into his driveway swerving around a small red bicycle and then a plastic basketball hoop and pulled up to a little red wagon filled with toy construction equipment. It was unseasonably cool in a way that disappoints when you’ve been planning a canoe paddle for the last week. I waited and gave the horn a quick tap. 

Chuck was a cement guy--laid block and poured basement walls. He worked hard and I knew he was looking forward to this trip. I even helped him with a few garage floors some Saturdays for extra cash.

As I looked around the yard I heard muffled calls and then saw Chuck back out of the house gripping his backpack and scowling.

“Let’s go.” He said as he threw his pack into the backseat and slammed the door. 

“Everything alright?”

“No.”

I backed out slow and careful as a grandma and then headed for the landing up near the headwaters of the Mississippi. The tie down straps holding the canoe on the roof hummed noisily in the wind. 

It took about seventy-five miles before Chuck spoke. 

“Sometimes I just wish I could change everything--make it different so we can do things different.” He mumbled vaguely.

“You and Jess having trouble?” I’d been the best man at their wedding and we all graduated highschool together. “You know how she is sometimes.” I said trying to mollify him.

“I thought I did. I feel things changing--like it is out of my control or something.” He looked helpless all of a sudden. He sat there in his cut off shorts, camo t-shirt and flip flops.

“She just won’t listen.” He paused. “Hell, I don’t even know what to say half the time. I probably wouldn’t listen either.”

“She says it’s her life, too, that she has no choice.” That was the last thing she said when I left. Just like that. “Chuck, I love you, but I have no choice.”

I could imagine Jess saying that. She always loved Chuck, since we were kids, but who knows love when you're thirteen years old. I figured she was claiming her life now having never had one of her own. 

“So, what does she want to do?”

“I don’t know; I left. I said we’d talk tomorrow when I get back.”

The canoe was loaded and Chuck navigated from the back. We paddled for five hours and the top of my thighs and back of my hands were bright red and I cursed myself for not bringing sunscreen. Chuck pointed to the bend up ahead and said for the fourth time, “That looks like the spot, right there.” 

He’d stayed at a campsite along this route seven years before and had planned for us to spend the night there. It was an old Civilian Conservation Corp work site but was now just an open field with some campfire rings and a shelter and the only access was from the river. He said the landing was halfway between where we put in and the landing where our wives would pick us up Sunday morning.

The four beers each we’d brought were now empties rolling around in the bottom of the canoe and I could smell the stale beer smell. There was no wind and we were going with the current smooth and still, but after the initial thrill of anticipating what was around each corner wore off, it became kind of a slog. The river was still shallow here and long fluorescent green fronds of grass bent in the current alongside our canoe. 

We could have moved faster but about an hour into our paddle, Chuck had us drift to a stop for a 1.5 of rum for the 2 liter of diet Coke he had packed in his bag. It was a mom and pop resort at the edge of a small lake that flowed into the river. They sold ice cream treats, frozen pizzas, candy, soda, beer and liquor. 

We dragged the canoe up onto the gravel landing. There was a woman in the parking lot taking down a big vendor sign hung on the post near the road. Enter for a drawing to win a 20 gauge shotgun, a $75 dollar gas card or a deluxe inflatable Budweiser party barge (women in bikinis not included). When she saw us coming, she left it half hanging there and sold us the rum.

I guided the bow onto a muddy bank covered in gray and white wispy cottonwood down and duck prints. It had the translucent green look that gave a smell when you stepped into it.

We hauled out our packs and the cooler we brought along and lugged it up the pathless bank, a good one hundred feet. It took us about 45 minutes to make two trips each up from the canoe, locate the best spot for the tent, pitch it and started to unwind.

“There’s a chickadee up there.” I pointed to the top of the tree overhanging the shelter.

“She don’t give a shit, anyway--as long as she gets to go out on benders with her buddies.”

He’d been struggling since we arrived and now stared out through the ash limbs and across the river. “Wish we had some Coke for this shit.” Chuck’s 2 liter had leaked inside his back back and saturated everything.

“Hey, Chuck! Look where we are.” I said as I turned around with my arms in the air Mary Tyler Moore style. “We’re roughin’ it here.” He walked back and sat on the edge of the picnic shelter. 

“Yeah, I know. Jesus, isn’t this nice?” He too took the entire area in. “Fuckin’ nature, huh?”

While I’d already been through a midlife adjustment, I recognized the approach of Chuck’s. “How did you know this place was here? Seems kind of isolated. Is this river access the only way in?  

“Yeah, just from the river.” He took a long drink and we both turned towards a noise from brush.

A woman grunted and scrambled from the tangled brush at the top of the precipitous bank which dropped behind her the one hundred feet to the surface of the river. Incredulous, I looked at Chuck as if a goddamn alien from outer space had just appeared before our eyes, rather than a sloppy, fat female that now faced us in a loose fitting sundress hung over bovine shoulders on straining spaghetti straps with her left nipple poking around the hem.

“Hi!” She stepped towards the picnic table, tripped up slightly and continued on. 

“You guys camping here?”

“Uh, yeah.” Chuck looked over her shoulder to see if there were more.

“You tubing down the river?” I asked obviously, attempting to move her mentally and physically on before she established herself here at the top of the bluff. I could hear muffled conversation still down at the river bottom.

She looked around, unfocused, “You mind if we camp here?”

“There’s another shelter right over there.” I pointed across the clearing to a second fire ring and shelter near the edge of the woods, but her eyes roved over the contents of our picnic table.

“You guys have some food--a hotdog or something? I’m so hungry.”

Chuck offered her what was left of a bag of ruffles potato chips and I offered her some peanuts in the shell, which, after snatching the chip bag, she swerved towards me and began cracking shells and devouring peanuts with a ravenousness generally reserved for starving people.

“Our party barge is leaking air. I don’t know what happened. Fuckhead down there snagged us on some trees or something.” As she spoke she moved her lips awkwardly around four spindly front teeth in an otherwise empty cartoon mouth. “You sure you don’t have a hot dog or something?”

“Hey Man!” An emaciated creature clawed his way over the lip of the bank. He did not have a shirt on and his pants were a smooth, shiny and thin material, studded with zippers and little metal doodads here and there that were soaking wet and clung to his hips and legs. His feet were bleeding and impacted with dirt and mud all around his toe nails.

 “Hey…!” At that point he recognized that we were up there too. “Hi guys.” He softened his tone and changed his focus. “Sorry to interrupt, you two together...camping out. Listen, sorry to interrupt. Our raft is fucked.” His narrow little head and bewhiskered face worked as awkwardly as his female companions. “Hey guys, sorry to intrude on your shit here. What’s your name?” He extended his arm for a fist bump.

“Jim. What’s yours?” Tapping his fist.

“Jim?” He hesitated, tilting his head philosophically, “Where you from, Jim?” 

As he spoke he walked around the picnic table and took a seat on the edge of the shelter next to me. “You guys got anything to eat; we’re starved. Been on this river for like two hours and our raft is goin’ flat.” He scanned the contents of our site. “You guys camping here?” His sunken chest was pale and punctuated by two pale pink nipples that stuck out like a couple of studs.

“Yeah, we’re here for one night.”

“Sweeeet.” He drew the word out. “What’s your name?” He asked, again attended by the unanswered fist bump.

“Jim.” I answered his bump.

“Cool. I’m Fifi--I’m on facebook. You on facebook?” His eyes swerved in and out of my gaze.

I looked to Chuck who was watching the woman as she finished the bag of chips and was currently rubbing the salt from the bottom with her fingers and then licking it off--her hair hung in wet, limp clumps over her face and some strands stuck to her tongue as she licked at her greasy fingers.

“Freedom’s the lead singer in our band. Right, hon?”

“Aw, fuck you Feef. Hey, you guys got a hotdog or something--I’m starving?” Freedom then sat down hard on the edge of the picnic table and the other end lifted from the ground, tipping over some of our stuff. 

“Woah, baby, take it easy there. You’re fuckin’ with these dudes’ shit, now.” Fifi put his fist out. “So you guys camping here?” His short term memory seemed to have shorted out. 

“Yeah. Where are you headed?” Again, trying to move the party along. 

“County Road 8.” Feef clutched a handful of peanuts and worked one with his fingers. “Gonna call our buddy there.” As he said it, he looked off into the trees at the top of the bank. Chuck looked at me and then to the ground at Feef’s foot. 

“You’re bleeding a little there.” I pointed. 

“Ah, just a little blood, that never hurt no one, right hon? No blood, no foul.”  Freedom was still licking between her fingers and through the gaps in her teeth.

“Whatever, Feef.”

“Hey! Guys!” A third individual struggled up over the edge and while wet and his legs were muddy, he had kind of an honor student look about him that didn’t match up with his companions.

He stood at the edge of the bank rubbing mud from the front of his legs. He wore a small backpack that dripped water along with his clothing which consisted of a striped short sleeved shirt, denim shorts and slip on shoes with a checkerboard pattern on them.

“The raft is good. Let’s go.” He looked at us. “Sorry about my friends. They can be real jerks.”

“Tanner...we shouldna taken that thing out right away.” Feef spoke with some seriousness.

“You won it only because I was the reason we were at the liquor store in the first place.” Freedom waited a second. “I was the one.” She had moved to the center of the picnic table now and was snuffling through a tough peanut shell. “Shoulda known it would be shit.” She continued to poke through the bag of peanuts with her index finger, seeming to search for something specific. “You guys got anything else to eat?”

I was losing patience with this shitshow and turned to Chuck to see if he was ready to move them along. 

Feef wasn’t about to, though, when Freedom, in a voice wholly tempered from a minute ago, asked, “Tanner, you got your heater?” Chuck looked at me and I turned to Tanner, who looked like he’d been caught with his hand in a dish of fudge. “Ah, Freedom, you just shut the fuck up about that.” 

This was not the honor student I knew and, right then, Chuck knew it too.

“So, why don’t you all just head on back to your raft and keep going down the river.” The neutral tone he attempted to strike avoided the appearance of conflict but I knew Chuck and he was now on a mission.

“Tanner?” Freedom’s voice rose an octave as if mocking her boon companion. “Tanner? Are you going to let this guy push us out of our campsite?”

Then Feef broke in reasonably, “Boys, my woman here don’t have no patience, plus she’s pissed about our raft and we lost our weed in the water somewhere. As he spoke a red translucent husk from the inside of a peanut shell hung in the wispy strands of mustache at the corner of his mouth before breaking free and drifting down onto the picnic table top.

“We’re camped here. It’s been nice meeting you but I think it’s time you moved along.”

I tried to sound accommodating and firm at the same time. 

Chuck looked at me, “I’m going to get the fire starter out of my bag so we can make a fire later.” He flipped the flap of his pack over and dug into it for the fire starter.

Peter had a backpack of his own that he dropped off his back and swung around to his front. He looked at Freedom and then at Chuck and smiled. He pulled his arm from the pack and had a small silver pistol in his hand. “Alright fellas. It’s a shame we had to bump into you like this but as long as we’re here, why don’t you give us your wallets and packs. Then we’ll be on our way.

“I knew it!” Freedom shouted with joy. “Tanner, you’re the brains. That’s what Feef always tells me. Tanner is the brains here, Freedom.” She said this in a serious tone. 

“Wait a minute everybody. Chuck and I are just on a little camping trip. We don’t have any money.” I tried to keep calm but Chuck still had his arm in his bag searching for the firestarter.”

“You can just give that bag to me. Set it over there on the picnic table.”

Chuck looked at me and seemed to be trying to make up his mind when he stood up with his arm still in the bag and suddenly the front exploded and I could smell the rum dripping from it and the odor of gunpowder in the air. 

I looked over at Peter Brady. His blue and white striped shirt now had a growing patch of red in the center of it. Peter’s face seemed stunned for a second and I wasn’t sure why his shirt was red. Then he raised his arm with the pistol in it and before it became level, there was another giant Boom!. 

“Get the hell away from him!” Chuck yelled angrily and I complied. This time Peter’s shoulder was a mass of red tissue and he fell to the ground dropping the pistol as he did.

“What did you do!” Freedom was screaming now. “What the faack!” Feef had come to his senses and turned and ran towards the bank they had all just climbed. Chuck ran after him just as he dove headfirst into the brush over the edge. Freedom grabbed the hunting knife I’d used to cut the hotdog buns and covered the ground between her and I in a second.

“I’m going to kill you you goddamn bastard!” She held the knife up over her head and without thinking I rammed my shoulder into her chest and felt her large soft breasts bounce wildly into my stomach. I knocked her off balance and she fell to the side and hit her head on the rusty edge of the fire ring. At that moment I heard one more gunshot and then another. Freedom lay on her stomach with half of her swimsuit bottom lodged into the crack of her ass. The knife was caked with dirt next to an old bottle cap and some broken glass. I kicked it away and used my foot to push her in the side and get her to come to.

“Can you give me a hand over here!” I couldn’t see Chuck but he sounded close.

I walked around to the other side of Freedom and got down and looked at her face. The bone of her skull was visible just at the edge of her scalp and her eyes were wide open. Jesus. I thought. I heard twigs crack and muffled grunts.

“Over here! He’s too heavy!” I walked to the edge of the bank and saw Chuck bent over Feef trying to pull him up the hill by his wrists. The skinny arms looked like they might pull from their sockets and there were strands of weeds snagged in the zippers and doodads of his pants.

“Ah, Christ! What the fuck?”

I wasn’t about to let Chuck fall apart.

“Chuck, you had no choice. That guy was gonna shoot us sure as shit, but damn. I didn’t even know you had your .44 in there.”

“I thought we might have a chance to shoot like we do at the gravel pits.”

I looked at my watch and then at the sun, which was settled in the west. 

“He was going to shoot us. He looked crazy. Did you see that look on his face. He was going to shoot us.” I tried to keep my own emotions from slipping. “You had no choice.”

Chuck looked over to our camp and saw Freedom sprawled in the dirt by the fire ring. “What happened to her?”

“She came at me. I pushed her and she hit her head. She had a knife. She was out of her mind. It was self-defense.”

“It was self defense, mostly.” Chuck knew that Feef ran for his life and he took it. “I had no choice.”

Tanner was slumped over on his knees near Freedom with his arms hanging limply and his head turned sideways on the ground. His eyes were open. I knelt down and vomited. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah. It just came. What are we going to do now?” Chuck had that look on his face, like when he came over to shoot Connie.

“The last time I was here, there was an old building in the woods, a bunch of them actually, just off the edge of the clearing here. One of them had collapsed mostly but there was a basement, dirt floor, but I remember a hole in there, I think it was a cistern or something.” 

He scanned the woods behind us. “We could drop them in there. Cover them up with rocks from down by the river. Nobody would find them.”

It took until after dark to haul rocks up the bank from out in the river and drop them down the well over the top of the bodies. We didn’t sleep. In the morning we scanned the campsite one last time, loaded our canoe and the deflated party barge. We cut it up into pieces and stuffed it into our packs and anyplace we could.

The river moved steady and cold in the morning and was a shock to our legs as we pushed the canoe out into the current. We passed silently under county road 8 about 45 minutes in and then paddled hard the rest of the way. Jess and my wife were waiting at the landing when we arrived.

“Hey Bear.” Jess’s pet name for Chuck. She seemed sad but loving to him and I wondered what happened behind close doors, if it really was like Chuck said.

“Hey Babe.” 

I looked to my wife while she was scrolling through her phone in the passenger seat before looking up. 

“How was it?” she asked. “You cut your forehead.” 

I raised my hand to my head until I felt the cut. 

“Huh.” 

 I looked at Chuck and then back out into the current. She turned back to her phone.

“Will you give me a hand loading the canoe, Chuck?”

“You got it, buddy.”