By staff writer Nick Gaudio
November 14, 2007
« The Summer Slaughter, Part I
5
Junior was fired a few weeks later for stealing shit from the storage room to feed his dog. Or, I joked with the other men, to feed himself. At least, that's what I heard from Tony, another college guy who helped me man the slicer on Saturday mornings. Tony was a short, hairy greaseball with a pierced ear and tattoos of shamrocks up his forearms. He liked to talk and I appreciated his company more than most of the guys, who talked mostly about the weather and NASCAR and their arthritis.
“You see this book?” He tossed a teal and red hardcover on the counter beside the slicer.
“The books we keep in the window? Yeah. I thought it was pretty fucking strange we got books to sell here.”
“Rich's brother. He's an economics teacher at the college. Comes in and gets those whole hocks of capicola all the time.”
“Jesus. That guy writes fiction?”
“Yeah. That guy. Creepy fucking loser if you ask me.”
“The liquor made living at home more than tolerable; it made existence downright agreeable.”
I liked to rib Tony because he got genuinely pissed when he was insulted. “I didn't ask you. If I wanted an opinion like yours, I'd go out and ask the cows,” I said.
This time, Tony wasn't mad, he just picked up the book and flipped through it. “You write books, right? That's why they call you College.” He seemed hurt. I suppose that's because I was College and he was Tone-Tone, the Magical Italian Leprechaun. At least, that was his full nickname.
“I try. I haven't gotten anything published yet.”
“Yet?”
“Yeah. Yet.”
“Well then, aren't you a hopeful one, huh?” he said, still flipping through the book.
“Shut the fuck up and let me see that thing.” I snatched the book from his gloved hands and noticed a little marginalia.
“This yours?” I pointed to a line he had scribbled the shorthand for an editor's “new paragraph” mark.
“Yeah, but I don't read much. It's pretty fucking dull and poorly written if you ask me.”
“I didn't ask you,” I said, and Tony placed the book, rather violently, upon the left side of my face.
6
“I fucking hate crows.”
I picked my eyes up from a shot glass, half-filled with whiskey, “What did I tell you about that shit, boy?”
“I’m sorry,” Hunter said. He had a tendency to apologize as though his wrongs were my responsibility. He stomped the patio’s pavement. “I just hate crows.”
“You keep it up and I’m going to let Dad know you’ve been cussing.”
I looked back down at the shot glass and finished it. It was bad whiskey but the sting was thin and I had had enough on my tongue that I couldn‘t quite taste it.
When I opened my eyes from the shot, I saw that my little brother was gone. He would disappear into the heavy twines of wood behind our house for hours at a time and somehow come back with a story about large rocks or foxes or old bee hives each time. It wasn’t my job, I thought, to keep him from all the fun I had as a kid.
I went back in the house to fill the glass. It was an old country home, brick from foundation to roof. In the summer it was filled with framed pictures of flowers and littered by fine eatery faced by roosters and other barnyard-related beasts. My mother had spent her nights after work cleaning, and I couldn’t tell if the gleaming, lemon-scented atmosphere was a result of an industrious psychosis or just a pride in nice things. Still, the house was constantly clean and that consistency made living at home much more tolerable.
And then, among those many steadfast fixtures, was my father’s liquor cabinet. The long, oak door was set on a polished steel frame my father built himself. It looked more like a warden‘s hiding safe than something that protected whiskey, gin, vodka and the like. It was usually locked, but one Christmas Eve I noticed my Uncle Tom turn the combination and decided it was beneficial to memorize the numbers. It was the liquor that made living at home more than tolerable; it made existence downright agreeable.
Earlier that night, I saw that my father had finally developed his suspicions of thievery. On each bottle, a line of permanent marker was drawn across the glass at different intervals, each marking the volume of the liquor. I took it as a minor inconvenience and filled the bottles to their respective bottom lines with water. As even more deterrence, my father had said he could taste the difference between regular and diluted liquor, but I still didn’t particularly care.
I got back outside sipping on the mildly whiskey and noticed Hunter’s BB gun on the patio. I knew, with a little more relief, that he hadn’t gone far.
I sat down and began sipping again. The sky above was a gradient of orange to navy blue, and a single star had poked through the lighter blue region, a strip of the heavens that lined just above the trees.
“Get over here!” I heard from around the house.
The immediacy of Hunter’s voice was something to be expected. He was rarely ever unconcerned. I walked around the house lighting a cigarette and saw in the grass Hunter hunched over a pile of black feathers.
“I got him!”
I walked over and hunched down beside Hunter and what was obviously a crow.
“He was sitting here. Right here. Cawing at something. And I got him,” he said, out of breath.
I sat for a minute or two and finished the cigarette. Hunter sat quiet while I was quiet, but began plucking out plumes from the crow’s wing and sticking them in his pockets.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” he finally asked, angry. “I pumped that gun 20 times! It took 20 fucking times to kill him.”
“Boy, I thought I told you to stop with the swearing,” I said.
“Yeah but…”
“No. Get your ass inside now.” He turned back to the porch with a look of objection and stomped inside, still swearing under his breath. A few feathers slipped from his pockets and peacefully swayed down to the ground.
I went back to the porch and grabbed a shovel my dad had always left leaning against the brick wall beside the backdoor. I shot the whiskey with my free hand and walked over to the bird. Dead birds always look so contorted, I thought, and then sighed and tossed the pile of feathers and blood into a drainage ditch.
7
I'd been racking the ham a few days later when Rich's brother came in and placed his order. He was a thin, balding man with jutting, squarish eyes. He looked like his brother in chin and cheekbones.
“Can you cut it a little thicker this time?”
“What's that?” I asked, looking up to make sure he knew I now noticed him and was ready for his order.
“My order,” he said, and pointed to the slip he had always wrote it on. This was insulting because no other customer wrote their orders; they did the sociable thing and spoke.
“Yeah.”
I stepped back to the slicer, locked in the hock on the plate and shoved the automatic lever on.
“So that's your book?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“I'm,” I said, knowing I'd feel awkward after I finished my sentence, “a bit of a writer myself.”
“That so?” His eyebrows didn't raise like they had when I asked him about his order; I could tell he wasn't interested, so I turned back to watch the slabs fall from the blade. I picked two up slices and held them in front of his face. “Enough?”
“A little more.”
“Okay.” I readjusted the dial on the slicer from 30 to 45 and thought, That better be thick enough you fuck-face.
“Are you in college?”
“Your brother calls me College. So, yeah, I'm in college.” There was a strange sense of competitiveness in the room, and after I said what I said, I could tell I got to him. “I go to WVU.”
“Ah, good school.”
I felt like saying, “Better than Frostburg,” but I held it in and asked him if I could borrow a copy of the book and get back to him about my thoughts.
“Yeah, sure. Go on.”
He went to the front of the store, grabbed the teal and red book and tossed it at me across the cooler's glass. The title, I finally read, was Forever, and I smiled at him. “Forever?”
“Yep. It's about a young woman's struggle to find herself in a new city much like Frostburg here.”
“Interesting.” I laughed a little and returned to the slicer to see if things were going well.
“Look, College.”
I looked up and then got pissed for reacting to the nickname so readily. “In all honesty, you can just keep the book. I don't need your feedback. You won't be able to help me.”
What an officious prick, I thought, and handed him the slabs of capicola in glossy wax paper. I asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean that writing takes experience and you can't possibly have enough to write at your age.”
“James Joyce was younger than me when he—”
“You aren't James Joyce.”
If it wasn't for my keeping my job—which I needed—and the fact that I would've probably killed him, sliced him on 45, and got jail time (or, at the very least, have to clean the damned slicer again), I would've reached over and beat the living shit out of Rich's older brother. I mean, I would’ve beaten the living shit out of him and then rubbed it in. I would've kicked him in the chest and recited Keats. I would've smashed his face with the hock of capicola and told him, “How about that for experience, prick?” I would’ve, but I didn’t. I let him leave and then I ran to Rich's desk to find a red pen.
8
The book was awful. And I'm not just saying that because Rich's brother was, and probably still is, an elitist fuckface. He had no sense of character and no sense of plot. The dialogue fell off the page and the fucker put an adverb after nearly every verb. So, to make sure I wasn't being harsh for the sake of being harsh, I gave the book to friends to read. They all said the same thing: “How did this thing get published?”
“I don't know,” I said, and felt angry at the literary world for supporting such shit.
Shaun, probably the most supportive of my writing, was enraged. He said, “You oughta give him this copy. With all the red marks. That'd be funny as hell.”
“Yeah, but Rich would fire me.”
“Fuck him.”
“No, fuck me if I don't get enough money to go back to WVU next semester.”
“Doesn't Rich like you? Didn't he say you were the most sensitive guy he knows or something?”
“I'm not sure what that meant.”
“Yeah, me either.”
9
It was Friday and my little brother and I were throwing the baseball across a plot of backyard at dusk. The fire flies were popping over a hill in the distance, where a field and an airplane warning tower both swayed a little with the wind.
“How's that?” he asked and smiled.
He had been improving and it hurt my hand when I didn't catch the ball right. “It's a heater, for sure.”
“When you're at school, I come out here and throw and throw and throw to practice for games and stuff.”
“I can tell, Bud. It's really starting to sting.” I tossed it back.
He smiled more broadly but after a few more pitches, he faded into a decided frown. “It sucks you're leaving Sunday.”
“Yeah it does Bud. I'll be back to visit though.”
“Yeah. But still. That's better in theory.”
Mr. Right
10
It took me what felt like ten minutes to find it, but when I got back with the rope, I saw that the guys had been hiding behind a fence of cardboard boxes of Gordon‘s Vodka, stacked higher than the concrete wall. They were peering at every so often into the street.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Shut the fuck up!” Andy whispered, and made the most exhausted face he could as he waved me over to the boxes. He had revived the roach and was still puffing on it maniacally as he explained in another whisper, “John Law.”
Sure enough, a cop had pulled in to our little, concrete parking lot below. We watched as he checked Emily, James’ girlfriend, and the puddle of blood that had oozed out from her leg and shoulder. When he grabbed her leg and she didn’t react, we heard him ask, “How can you not feel this?” and “Why were you up there?”
We knew as soon as he asked why about anything, we were fucked. Aside from her dancing sprees, Emily was an angry, vindictive woman and there was no way around her narking us out; we left through the Bundy’s Liquor’s back door while Emily chatted with old John Law.
11
We’d been drinking warm butterscotch schnapps on the roof of James’ work—Bundy’s Liquor—in late September. James, Andy, Tom and I were playing poker and Emily was circling her skinny hips near our faces, dancing around the table, making sexy and otherwise distracting gestures while we played. She sang, “Don’t you want me baby? Don’t you want me? Ohhhhhh,” spinning slow with each phrase.
“Would you stop that shit?” I asked.
“Nice pair of eights!” she said, still dancing.
I threw down the cards, exhausted. The hand was dealt again.
Andy, who would’ve won the hand had not Emily broken the ethical code of poker, was pissed. He lit a cigarette and snuffed it out after two or three puffs. This was usual business for Andy and though he was a coworker of James and a friend of mine (if you want to call him that), he was gruff-looking.
Tonight, however, his pony-tailed hair was woven through a bright pink baseball cap and he donned a damp, yellow polo shirt that made him look like a pastel clown. Though, this didn’t stop him from talking shit about taking Emily out early in the game.
“Hey bitch,” he asked, “where’s your money?”
“Shut the fuck up you dickhead,” she said.
They were in a constant state of dispute and this made James unnerved. A few months back, he had told me that arguing with women is a sure-fire way to fuck them, and James knew that Andy had heard this piece of advice too.
“I got all these chips here, College,” Andy said, and started counting them, one by one. He had called me College since he made a drop-off at the Slaughterhouse and heard somebody say it. It was more mockery because we all were in college. “Ten dollars. Eleven dollars. Twelve dollars.”
“Yeah, well…,” I said, “don’t count your chips before…they hatch?” I shook my head.
“That’s the most retarded joke I’ve ever heard,” James said, and put in double. He got angry when he wasn’t winning and risked more as a result. His chips tossed in blue and green and I folded to look around the roof for something more interesting. I had been losing money, fast, and the prospect of losing more money that I didn’t have didn’t exactly motivate me to pay attention.
12
It was a flat roof, about fifty feet by forty feet and concrete. Trash—particularly bottles of old liquor and cigarette butts—littered around the roof but not to a point where I’d call the roof as a whole “unclean.” It had a three foot wall of darker concrete blocks encircling it—a barrier effective enough to hide us from any onlookers from the street. Though, Emily’s dancing on and around the walls would’ve given us away had not the Homecoming parade been on the other side of town that night. A few people walked by 2nd Street in bright red Fort Hill sweatshirts, a few less in blue Allegany wear; some of the boys would shout up at Emily. This was no surprise to us. Her dancing was sexy.
Sitting with his back against the wall under Emily, Tom was rooting around in his jacket pockets and trying to distance himself from the girl‘s movements. “I left a blunt around here somewhere.”
The soft thumps of bass drums pumped in the distance while everybody watched him in complete anticipation.
“I think you smoked it already,” Andy finally said.
“Did I?” Tom said. “Oh yeah.”
Disheartened, we all lit cigarettes.
13
That’s when Emily fell off the roof. Her body hit the concrete below and sounded like the snapping of wood or fragile plastic. We jumped up from the cards, peeked over the wall with each of our hands pushed against the coarse blocks, smoke rising up from the walls. I saw that she was conscious and said it; this surprised everybody.
“Baby?” James asked.
“What the fuck….” Emily pulled her head up just enough to show us that she hadn’t died. The fall from the roof of Bundy’s Liquor Store was a particularly long one—twenty feet or so; she had to have at least broken her leg.
“I’m not going down there, man,” Tom said, looking down at the girl and either smiling or wincing. I couldn’t tell because of the dark sunglasses he always wore during poker.
“I’m not either,” I said.
“It’s your fucking girlfriend,” Andy said, and after a few failed matches, I saw he was lighting a clipped roach with James’ Zippo.
“That’s my fucking joint!” Tom said.
“Would you two shut the fuck up?” James thought for a moment.
His girl was throwing her limp arms and hands up from the ground shrieking, “Help!”
“Shut up, Baby. Just shut up. Just let me think.” In a few more minutes he snapped his fingers and called down to her, “We’re going to throw a rope down.”
“Yeah,” Andy said. The roach dangled from his lips. “Mission Impossible shit!”
“I dig,” I said, and grabbed the clip.
“There’s a long yellow rope over by the ventilation duct inside.” James tossed the keys to the roof’s door at me. I dropped the roach.
As I opened the door, I heard “My—I mean Tom’s—weed!” From Andy, “Fuck you, Andy.” from Tom as the door closed behind me.
14
After we left we played The Cult and The Stones in James’ Eclipse and Tom and Andy cut some lines on a mirror in the back. It was a nice car that James had put most of his paycheck from the liquor store into; there was new upholstery, tinted windows, a tachometer. Most things a Carhead gets into.
“You think she’s going to tell that fat fuck anything?” James asked. He had turned down his expensive face unit as “Angie” came on.
Andy lurched forward and put his elbows on the seats. He slapped himself with both hands, keeping them on his cheeks. He said, “Fuck no. She’s as shitty as we are right…. now.” He blew a line, contorted his face into a canvass of wrinkles and laughed.
I grabbed a felt-tipped pen from my jacket’s wet inner pocket and started drawing pseudo-tattoos of cartoon penguins and pigs on my hands and wrists. I said, “I concur.” The snout of the pig leached down my wrist until it reached my palm.
I was still a little damp from the sweat.