No Magic For Luke Peters Ch. 5

Lowell rolled by in washed-out grays and creeping, litter strewn lawns. The houses were marked with swoops of graffiti and narrow alleyways that Luke subconsciously kept an eye on. Luke’s hands shook mildly on the stirring wheel and he worked a fine layer of sweat into the cracked leather that encircled the wheel. His wrist hurt, but he didn’t want to say anything to the old man riding next to him. The day hadn’t been exactly normal, but it had gotten a whole lot more weird since Luke had met Perkins. Now, he was driving down back roads in the old man’s truck; keeping one eye out for the police who would stop him for having a smashed in tail light and keeping the other one open for the young man who Luke had to knock stupid with a frying pan.

Perkins kept quiet in the passenger seat; his head bowed and his hands splayed open in his lap. Luke had the thought that he was driving around with a crazy, old man but that crazy, old man had nearly been killed helping Luke. There was something going on and Luke thought his best chance of figuring it all out was that old man. Perkins was muttering softly to himself and occasionally he’d make a sudden jerk in one direction or the other. Periodically, he would breathe hard and hotly, sounding more like a wolf’s snarl. Luke didn’t know what Perkins was doing but it had something to do with the dog. Perkins would snarl and jerk in his seat and then Cesar would whine and yelp from the backseat. Beads of sweat rolled down Perkins’s temples and Luke thought he saw flashes of something from the corner of his eye.

Luke couldn’t have been sure, but he thought he might have seen the old man’s gun-metal gray eyes turn a fiery yellow. Luke thought he saw the old man’s hands hook into claws. He thought he saw the old man’s jaw jut out, showing little white fangs. Honestly, Luke didn’t know what he saw, but he didn’t quite believe Perkins was a crazy, old man. Cesar’s yelping grew softer in the backseat and after long, the German Shepherd fell asleep on the bench of the old Ford.

When Cesar’s breaths were long and deep, Perkins stopped his muttering, suddenly grasped his side and winced. His breathing grew irregular and he leaned forward, pressing his head up against the dashboard. Luke pulled to the side of the road and stared at the old man.

“Where do you want me to go?” Luke asked after allowing Perkins’s ragged breath to fill the cabin.

“You got a cell phone?” Perkins asked, sounding tired and raw. Luke did have one, which he had left hooked to its charger back at his house.

“No.” Luke said, turning his head back to the road.

“What type of teenager are you? Find a pay phone or a gas station or something. I got to make a call.” Perkins said.

“What did you just do?” Luke asked after another long pause.

“Something stupid. It’s sort of a specialty of mine. Just drive, damn it.” Perkins said and Luke pulled back onto the road.

Luke had experience driving a truck because he had learned on his father’s Chevy, but the Ford was still unwieldy. The wheel would buck and jerk in Luke’s grasp and the it’d shutter and gasp like wound animal seizing before death. Even still, Luke kept it on the road, driving slow down the narrow car-lined streets. Luke had a convenience store in mind. The aptly named On the Run. There’d be a yellow and red pay phone out front. Typically, the receiver would be dangling from its chord rather than properly hung up. The average users of said phone commonly had a temper and on more than one occasion the pay phone had to be replaced due to ripping out the receiver or the entire works and spilling it all out into the parking lot. Luke pulled into the sparsely occupied parking lot of the On The Run and put the truck into park.

There was more graffiti etched in permanent marker to the left of the pay phone and the entrance to the store and the likely other of the graffiti stood to the far right of the door with one hand in his pocket and another holding a cigarette. He was a tall, thin, scarecrow-like man in his thirties or forties, but he wore tight blue jeans and a black hoodie with the hood drawn up over a Boston Red Sox cap. In short, he was dressed to look a few decades year younger than he actually was. The man eyed the truck as it puttered to a stop.

“There’s a phone right there.” Luke said, pointing a finger out the window.

“Yeah and I’m going to need you to go over there and make a call. You might’ve gathered that I’m a little banged up.” Perkins said, sounding annoyed. Perkins opened up the truck’s glove compartment which housed random fast food napkins and pieces of paper. He rooted through the paper until he found a red-inked plastic pen. He then selected a crumpled, yellow napkin and jotted down a phone number.

“Take this. You’ll probably get a girl on the line. Her name’s Sadie. Tell her to tell Sheila that I’m coming and I’ve got somebody with me. Got it?” Perkins said, handing the napkin to Luke.

“Yeah. Tell Sadie to let Sheila know you’re coming and that I’m with you.” Luke said, popping the driver’s side door open.

“Good. You’re not as simple as you look. Hurry on, Pecker-wood.” Perkins said. Luke stepped across the parking lot, digging his hands into his pockets, searching for loose change. He’d failed to clean out his pockets more often than not and that proved fortunate. He found fourteen dollar bills and eight-six cents in change. He deposited two quarters into the pay phone and stole a glance at the man standing to the far right of the door. He’d been staring at Luke, bouncing his heel off the storefront’s wall. Luke punched in the phone number and put the receiver to his ear.

The man in the hoodie flicked the cigarette out into the parking lot and then stepped toward Luke, shoving both his hands into his jean pockets. Luke could see the man had a pencil thin, blonde mustache and had greasy blonde hair creeping out form underneath his baseball cap.

“Yeah?” A girl’s voice said from the other side of the line. She sounded tired and raspy, but also young like she might have been his age or maybe a year younger.

“Sadie?” Luke asked.

“Uh…Yeah.” Sadie said.

“Excuse me, man. You got a dollar?” The man had asked Luke.

“No.” Luke said to the man.

“No what?” Sadie asked Luke.

“Nothing. Let Sheila know that Perkins is coming and I’m coming with him.” Luke said to Sadie.

“How about fifty cents?” Then man asked Luke. The man had yellowed fingertips and he stank of nicotine.

“I don’t” Luke said, lying to the man.

“You don’t what?” Sadie asked, sounding mildly amazed.

“Nothing. Can you tell her that we’re coming?” Luke asked Sadie.

“Yeah. How’s Perkins? How’s Cesar? I haven’t seen that old dog in so long.” Sadie asked.

“Uh…Perkins is…I think he’s hurt. Something happened, but it probably can wait until we get there.” Luke said to Sadie.

“A quarter. You got to have a quarter. I’m just trying to get some money together to get something to eat.” The man said to Luke. Luke decided to ignore the man in favor of the girl on the line.

“Sure. How long until you’re here?” Sadie asked.

“I don’t know. I’m just driving. Perkins will know. I should be going. We’ll get there soon.” Luke hung up the phone.

“Come on. A quarter? Got a quarter.” The man asked.

“I really don’t.” Luke lied, starting back towards the truck.

“I can tell you your future.” The man said.

“No, thank you.” Luke said.

“Luke, it’s something you’ll want to hear.” Luke stopped and turned. His morning was only getting weirder it seemed. This man knew his name.

“How do you know my name?” Luke asked.

“Got your attention.” The man said. He cracked a yellow toothed smile and took his hands out of his pockets, placing them on his narrow hips.

“How do you know my name?” Luke asked again.

“Calm. Calm. I have my ways. You wanna hear the future or not?” The man asked, beginning  to rock on his heels.

“What are you talking about?” Luke asked.

“That Perkins, he told you that you’d cause more damage dead than alive. That sound weird?” The man asked.

“Yeah.”

“Luke, you’re smart. Think about who you’re with and what’s happening around you. You might just survive this.”

“What do you mean? Are you saying that Perkins is a danger to me?” Luke asked.

“That’s some thing for you to decide. The future is nothing, if not uncertain.” The man said.

“Then, why did you offer to tell it to me?” Luke asked.

“Well. The future could’ve been made more certain for somebody with a dollar. Too late now. Keep your eyes open, Luke.” The man smirked and cocked his head. With that, the man swaggered away, turning the corner of the On The Run.

“Luke. How’s your stomach feeling?” The man yelled as he disappeared around a corner and he was gone. Luke touched his stomach, remembering how Perkins had struck him there. Luke considered following him, but something told him that the man wouldn’t be around the corner when Luke turned it. The man would be gone like a puff of smoke. He started towards the truck, spying Perkins leaning his head up against the dashboard. Luke opened the driver’s side door and climbed inside.

“You talk to Sadie or Sheila?” Perkins asked.

“Yeah.” Luke said.

“What took you so long?” Perkins asked.

“You didn’t see the man?” Luke asked.

“What man?” Perkins asked.

“There was…” Luke started. Are you  saying that Perkins is a danger to me? Suddenly, Luke wasn’t sure if he should say anything about the random, greasy man.

 “There was a bum hassling me for change.” Luke said. Luke started up the truck  and moved it back onto the street, rolling on toward the rising sun. 

No Magic For Luke Peters: Ch. 4

Chapter Four: Look At Your Boy Now

There were too many voices swimming around in Bobby Bland’s head. He’d been bashed in the face, both with a wooden cane and a metal frying pan, but neither pain had been as concerning as the lack of vision in his left eye. Bobby didn’t think the vision loss would be permanent or at least he hoped so. He could make out little, white snakes of light rising and sinking into a sea of black. The white snakes grew dull and harder to make out. He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. The entire left side of his face throbbed. His throat felt like it was swelling shut, trying to choke him alive.  He thought there were tiny, hard-shelled things crawling beneath his skin and that the ground, beneath him, was rolling like a washing machine set on its agitation cycle.

The dark man demanded that he stand, that he pursue the two that had injured him and Bobby was trying, but his body was too heavy. He thought that the hard-shelled things were connected to hooks cemented into the ground. They dug into his skin whenever Bobby tried to pick himself up. He’d get to his knees, a Herculean effort, and then he’d come crashing back down to the dry, cold grass, his muscles protesting and misfiring. It was a small, vague thought like a tiny bird flitting through the forest. He might be dying. He could have some severe internal bleeding from the cane strike or the frying smashing into his skull. There was another fear. The dark man might not let him die. That might imply that Bobby wanted death. In reality, Bobby actually wanted an end to pain.  

That want was illusive because there were voices like little bees stinging away at his mind. There was the dark man who was like a blaring horn in his head, cracking and shattering his skull. Then there was his father. His father was dead. Bobby knew that, but his father was also somewhere close, looming with a pair of closed fists. After his father, there was his mother who wasn’t dead, just long gone. She was a whisper, begging him to stop, to lay down, and to give in to the urge to sleep. There was a fourth voice that was outside his head, but it also hummed like a phantom passing through the foggy, purpled-leafed forest inside his mind.

“Dude…are you okay?” The voice asked over the shuttering pulse pounding away in his head. The things ferreting beneath his skin were slowing, but he couldn’t see any bulges underneath his skin. They weren’t real. Telling himself that they weren’t real helped. The weights slid from his back and the vision in his left eye was clearing. Pinpoints of scummy, red light bled in through the darkness. The pain in his head hadn’t let up and neither had the voices.

Up, Bobby. Get up, Bobby. Now, Bobby. The dark man said. Each one was accompanied by a bolt of pain. The dark man was trying to drive him like a stubborn mule.

“Dude…you’re bleeding a lot.” The phantom voice said to him, somewhere above his head.

Bobby. Baby, stay down. You’re hurt, You could die. Lay down. His mother told him.

That’s right, boy. Stay down. Take a knee like you always have. Your mother left me with you and I can’t stand the sight of you. I tried my best to make you hard, but you’re soft. Stay down, boy. Bobby just heard the voice, but he saw the image that would have accompanied it. He saw his father; sitting in his easy chair, clutching a cold, sweating Coors. His voice wafted over the tuned down sound of football announcer rattling off statistics. The lights were off in the living room while his father told him how weak he was. Bobby’s hands landed on either side of him and Bobby found his feet.

“Dude… No. No. You probably shouldn’t get up. You’re hurt, man.” Bobby was looking down at a skinny, green eyed boy and it took him a small while to place him. Concentrating on who the boy was, detracted from his balance, but he caught the memory and his balance at roughly the same time. He was a little, black-haired skater boy Bobby had sent to pound on the front door of the Peters house. The boy had been happy to help, flashing Bobby a dark smile before disappearing around the side of the house.

The boy doesn’t matter. The dark man whispered in Bobby’s ear.

“Yeah.” Bobby said into the morning air. Bobby was noticing more and more that his face was sopping wet and his lips tasted coppery when he ran his tongue along them.

“What were you trying to do, man?” The skater boy asked, looking up to Bobby with his wide green eyes. Bobby ignored the boy, moving past him and gathering up his baseball bat. The ground was still swaying beneath his feet and Bobby adopted a drunken sailor’s stagger.

Lay down, Bobby. You’ll hurt yourself. Bobby’s mother cooed in his ear, but Bobby shook the sound away like it was an annoying mosquito. Where was she now? His mother was on the other side of the country. She’d left Bobby with his father. How much could she have really cared? Bobby stumbled into the lonesome street, preventing himself from crashing into the middle of the road by catching hold of the tall, knotted gofer wood fence.

“Where are you now?” Bobby said to no one in particular. It had originally been intended for his mother, but he wasn’t thinking of her when he said it. That thought and every other thought was slippery like slimy fish in from the Merrimack. His father had a truck, a rusted out fishing truck. Ultimately, that truck was repossessed, but Bobby’s father had taken him fishing one summer afternoon. Bobby thought of it as fishing, but in reality it was Bobby’s father getting drunk in close proximity to fishing poles. Bobby had looked down into the cloudy brown water and could actually see the shiny scales on fish that his father was making no attempt to catch. Why was he thinking about that now? He was making a connection between his father’s repossessed fishing truck and a rusted Ford pickup parked far down the street. There was an old man and a young man. Both of them were climbing into the cab of the Ford. The young man had a frying pan and was climbing into the driver’s seat. The old man sparked his memory. The old man had a crimson colored cane. Luke and the Old man. The old man’s name didn’t really matter. Neither did Luke’s name. Bobby was supposed to kill them both. He didn’t know exactly why. Bobby started running. 

Somehow, running was easier for Bobby, charging down the uneven, cracked street with the metal bat clenched in his hand. Running, for Bobby, meant falling without ever hitting the ground. He just had to make sure one of his feet was under him. Even still, he would need to steady himself with his hands from time to time. The skater boy was yelling after him, but Bobby barreled forward. Jimmy, the neighborhood terrorist, looked down the street at the bleeding, abused Bobby Bland as he disappeared across the corner.

Possibly, the dark man was propping him up, but it was as likely that Bobby had his father’s imagined words burning in the back of his brain. His vision hadn’t fully come back and he could have been struck by a car and killed without ever knowing exactly why he died. The way he was running , he could have missed Luke and Perkins all together, but he hadn’t. The two of them were climbing into a rusted Ford pickup truck with a back bumper secured on with long strips of black duct tape. The German Shepherd, Cesar had already been loaded into the backseat of the pickup’s cab. The pickup puttered away as Bobby charged forth. He kept running, surging after the flashing tail lights. He managed to bash in the truck’s left tail light  before it disappeared over the horizon.

Sweat pearled back the length of Bobby’s back only to chill in the cool morning air. There was something fundamentally horrible about losing these two men he’d been set to kill. He hadn’t been aware of them prior to that day, but his stomach soured at the sight of the truck’s tail lights speeding away.

“What do I do now?” Bobby said shakily.

What we do is wait, Bobby. The night shall fall and bare its teeth. The dark man told him in a low whisper. Bobby nodded, balling his fists and trying to hold back the roving pain that carved its way through his skull.

 Bobby hadn’t known a few very important things and those things were more similarities between Luke and Bobby. Neither teenager understood the world they were thrown into. Neither teenager understood the men who thrusted them into that world. Neither teenager questioned why they hadn’t run away. Bobby failed to question the attempted murders of an old man he’d never met and a young man he’d only vaguely knew from the crowded hallways of their school because of the pain and the purple leafed forest. Bobby had a measurable reason, but what’s Luke’s problem?    

Excerpt: Beverly Wood

Beverly Wood had steel strings and he set himself to strum. His teacher had taught him not to grip the neck of his old, blue guitar, but he did anyway. His teacher had taught him that gripping the neck might interfere with his fretting and would slow it down if the interference didn’t get to it. His teacher was an old black woman named Martha Abigail and everything she did was slow with one exception. When she took the old, blue guitar from Beverly, she played like lightening struck. The first time Beverly saw her do it, he found himself split between two emotions, wide-eyed amazement at her towering talent and fear that the speed of her feverish picking would cause her fingers to work themselves apart. They hadn’t, of course. Martha just stopped playing and handed the guitar back to Beverly. Now Martha was gone and it was just Beverly, strumming as he walked down the empty streets of Ash Water, his hometown.

What had happened? Beverly had asked himself that again and again. Everyone was gone and all he had was his guitar to keep him company. He played it because he couldn’t stand the absolute silence that seemed to echo somehow. It felt like the silence was coming after him, eating up the sound his old, blue guitar made. Beverly would even have taken Todd Allen, who reminded Beverly that ‘Beverly’ was a girl’s name, almost daily. Beverly and Todd had gone through elementary and high school with Todd beating Beverly’s ass all the way. It had been the summer before college that the tables had been turned. His mother had called him a late-bloomer and he only began to believe when he found himself needing a whole new wardrobe. Everything he owned had become too tight. His pants choked at his meaty calves and his shirts exposed his flat belly button. He had transformed into a new man in time for his legal manhood. Todd Allen had recognized him and therefore didn’t understand why his nose had been broken.

Todd noticed some similarities between Beverly and this new man and Todd wondered vaguely if Beverly had sent a cousin after him. It was after this new man dislocated Todd’s jaw that Todd thought to start defeating himself. Beverly had won that fight by many accounts but he got a broken hand and a few bruised ribs for his trouble. He also got arrested for assault and battery.

Beverly’s uncle had defended him in court, but Beverly’s nonexistent police record and his pronounced limp did most of the work. His uncle had recognized this and had rolled up Beverly’s shirt sleeve and jacket to show off the cast on Beverly’s arm.

“Don’t ham it up, but limp when you’re in there. Let them see you got as good as you gave.”

Even that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Of the twelve jurors, six were a few years older than Beverly and Todd and knew the both of them from school. They remembered the time that Todd had pushed Beverly on a nature hike led by Mr. Wilson, the science teacher, Mr. Nope, the gym teacher and Ms. Sadie, the Vice Principal. Beverly tumbled down a rocky slope, slashing his jaw open and breaking his arm. None of the three adults had seen Todd do it, but nearly all the students had. The six jurors remembered Mr. Nope spilling down the slope after Beverly and coming back up with the sobbing, bleeding Beverly in his arms. They remembered that and Beverly didn’t even get community service for beating Todd unconscious.

Now, he was playing his old, blue guitar while he walked the streets, wishing that a wind would kick up. He wished that the world would make some noise, but it didn’t. He working through the chords of B.B. King’s “No Sunshine When She’s Gone”  and the melody fell died like shot birds in the air. Beverly’s feet hurt, back he didn’t want to stop walking. He had a subconscious fear that something was coming for him and if he stopped to rest, it would pounce upon him. It would stand to reason that playing B.B. King’s old standard would attract the thing stalking him, but felt as though the thing was repelled by the thing. His fingers hurt from the vibration of the steel strings, but he played even still. He had a sub-subconscious fear about what would happen when his fingers were ran too raw to play.

         

“No Sunshine When She’s Gone” gave way to a somber, mournful “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” It sounded like the kind of song someone would play at a funeral. Beverly couldn’t play as fast as Martha had and he didn’t want to try.  He walked down Ash Water’s Main street, moving past darkened store windows and clay brick doorways. The Beatles love song never made it to the bricks to bounce or to the glass. His subconscious fear suddenly because a conscious one. The moment he realized that he was afraid of something following him, he heard a trashcan crash onto its side. Glass bottles clinked and broke and it sounded like something had clamped down on one of the bottles. He had feared the thing before he had any possible proof that it existed and he didn’t even have that. Not really. A few broken bottles didn’t make a monster. It did make something and Beverly was afraid that it made something awful.

When his subconscious fear rose to his conscious mind, his sub-subconscious fear rose up one level as well. His fingers started dancing across the steel strings, moving faster and faster. His footsteps started giving way to heavy footfalls. He wasn’t quite running, but he wasn’t walking anymore. It became difficult to play the guitar and hurry along at the same time, but he kept up with both of them. There were new sounds raining down from the gray stone, one-story buildings like hard stones and rotten vegetables from a jeering, hateful crowd. The world was suddenly noisy and Beverly wished for the silence that had terrified him before. Beverly remembered the old saying: ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

Something funny happened. A new fear flooded up to his vacant sub-subconscious. He didn’t know that he was thinking it, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if he saw Todd Allen looking to pay him back for the ass-kicking he had dealt. The two of them had gone to two different colleges, but Beverly had gotten word that Todd spent the first semester of his freshmen year passing notes instead of being able to speak. His jaw had been wired shut and the jaw had healed badly anyway. A year after college, Beverly walked into Mr. Walter’s general store and Todd was there, speaking with a lisp that must have been embarrassing for Todd. Beverly remembered thinking that Todd Allen had become the white Mike Tyson, big as hell with a ridiculous voice. Beverly walked back out the door and went to the seven /eleven door the street, knowing that he would laugh at the thought, Todd would know Beverly was laughing at him and then there would be a fight. Beverly had remained strong and didn’t fear Todd anymore, but he didn’t want a repeat of the arrest that had occurred six years prior.

Beverly thought that Todd would come walking around a corner, his face twisted up in some crazed glee. He imagined Todd coming to settle up with him, possibly brandishing a wooden baseball bat, possibly the one he used back in high school  for baseball in the spring. Todd wasn’t exactly an athlete. He smoked too much in high school for that. If he didn’t hit the ball out of the park, he was almost always tagged out. He was a big, lumbering thing, but he was meant to hit. When he swung his bat, ball flew like bullets and god help any birds flying overhead. When Todd had broken Beverly’s nose in a bathroom, senior year, Todd had been kicked off the baseball team. The broken nose had been a large part of the reason why Beverly had gone off on Todd in the summertime before college.

Todd hadn’t turned a corner with a baseball bat, but Beverly kept hurrying along, sweating and breathing hard. He ran as though Todd Allen was chasing him, calling after him, reminding him that Beverly was a girl’s name. He had ultimately grown taller than Todd, but Beverly couldn’t help but remember a time when Todd was a juggernaut knocking him down a rocky slope. He couldn’t help but remember a time when Todd broke his nose, a time when Todd had kicked him in the balls and drove him into a wall headfirst, a time when Todd had pinned Beverly down and popped in the face, over and over again. Todd Allen had been a terrorist in Beverly’s life and Beverly couldn’t remember what exactly started it. As long as Beverly could remember, Todd beat the hell out of Beverly, until Beverly beat the hell out of Todd.

Beverly changed chords into “A Boy Named Sue” and he suddenly wondered where was his father.        

Excerpt: Lloyd's A Killer

“You can only hope to be happier. You’ll never be happy.” The alarm clock radio told Lloyd in the early hours of the morning. Gray sunlight spilled across his face and he grimaced at it. He slapped his hand down on the radio and rolled away from the sunlight. His feet found the floor, but the circulation in his long, thin legs was bad. All he could feel was random tingles and aches. He kept his eyes closed because his eyes felt like they were being compressed. Tears bled from his eyes and a shivering breath drained from his mouth.

He was a killer, not of men but that didn’t matter much. Soon enough, he’d be gone with a sledgehammer in his hands, off to knock in the skulls of cattle. Out west, they had special guns that fired a steel rod with compressed air, but Lloyd did it the old fashion way. On hammer. One skull. The cow goes down. His hand ran through his sweaty gray hair. It was thinning. His hands were stiff, rough like rawhide and Lloyd kept flexing them, kneading what little hair he still had. That stiffness didn’t go away. That stiffness turned to sour strain as it crept across his shoulders and down his back. One hand worked through his hair and the other rested on his potbelly. He had stomach troubles. He couldn’t move his bowls easy and he felt like he would be sick at any moment. Lloyd imagined that he would die with his sledgehammer in his hands, knocking out the brains of an old heifer standing in her own shit.

Lloyd gardened. That is, he tilled some soil behind his home, he made hollows in the ground and filled those hollows with seeds. He couldn’t get anything to grow right. He had planted flowers but the stocks bowed over and the pedals turned gray and brown. Most of them died without ever budding. The dead flowers rotted in the ground, putrefied and reeking. He tried for vegetables; celery, cabbage, cucumber, peas. All of it died or somehow became poisonous. Little, red veins etched throughout his plants and they might have been the beginning of his intestinal troubles. Lloyd was a killer. He had no business bringing up life.

He wore an ashen-gray jumpsuit when he smashed in cow skulls. His work was bloody work and his gray jumpsuit was permanently dotted with orange circles of poorly washed blood. He rolled his sleeves up around his elbows, exposing faded tattoos of Spanish slogans written in tight, black, blocked letters. He lit a damp cigarillo that smelt vaguely of spilt beer. He wasn’t a drunk, but he drank. He kept beer on hand and his breath normally smelt of it. He was a killer, but he needed not to think about it.

It was a gray day with streaks of black in the sky. It would rain but not before Lloyd slid his sledge into the passenger’s seat of his old, rusted Ford and then slid himself into the driver’s side. Raindrops dotted the windshield while he was on the road, puttering along while puffing on his last cigarillo. The rain crept on him slowly and his windshield was slick and sliding with the rain before he turned on the windshield wipers. He had been drifting out of his lane without knowing it, straddling the faded yellow lines that marked the middle of the road. Big, swaying trees jutted over the road, obscuring the edges and stealing away the light. Thunder rumbled over Lloyd’s head, sending more and more rain down upon the roof of his truck. The road was bucking him slightly, fighting the frustration between rubber and road.

Lloyd puffed on his cigarillo, biting on the unfiltered tip while his hand wrested with wheel, trying to keep his path true. He pulled the truck off to the side of the road underneath the shade of a bowing tree limb, expecting that the weather would sooner see him crash into a tree if he continued. There he waited, with his sledge perched in the passenger’s seat, for the rain to slow. They might miss him and his sledge at the slaughterhouse, but Lloyd doubted it. He was a killer but he didn’t think that he was a necessary killer.

The rain clattered against the roof of his old, rusted Ford, rattling methodically. Thunderclaps streaked across the sky, jutting like a blue-silver bullet-train. The sky twisted and swirled, black curling into gray and every once and a while, there was a streak of blue-silver lightening. The air was electric and the ground rumbled underneath Lloyd’s truck vibrated. There was a moment where the rain stopped being a sound. It was a quavering in his inner ear. The rain was a throbbing working through his muscles and all of a sudden, there was  a tinny knocking at his truck’s passenger’s side window. Lloyd looked out the passenger’s window and saw an old, black man in an overcoat and a fedora. He was soaked in the downpour, rain droplets beading off his chin and saturating through his clothing. Lloyd leaned over the passenger’s side and opened his truck without fully understand why he did so. Lloyd pulled his sledge over closer to himself, freeing the seat for the old man. The old man stepped into his truck and closed the door behind him.

“Thank you, sir.” The old man said, smiling with a soaked face.

“Not a problem.” Lloyd shook his head slowly and then grimaced at the rain.

“But it’s still good of you.” The old man said, offering another smile.

“Yeah.” Lloyd said.

“It’s coming down, ain’t it?” The old man asked, leaning back in the passenger’s seat and studying the rainstorm. The old man kept his hands folded in his lap. He had a wedding ring on his right hand.

“Yeah.” Lloyd said, stared down the running road which was looking like a painting of a road placed under a stream of running water.

“You’re a killer, Lloyd.” The old man said, still staring down the black stretch of road.     

“What?” Lloyd asked, looking at the old man.

“Just what I said. Lloyd, you are a killer. You have a killer’s hands and a killer’s remorse. You’re a strong man as well.”

“How do you know my name?” Lloyd asked.

“Same way I know you, Lloyd. You are without joy. You are without love.”

“Who are you?” Lloyd said.

“Just a man like you.” The old man said.

“What’s your name?” Lloyd asked.

“Curtis.” The old man said.

“How do I know you, Curtis?”

“You don’t. I just know you. I’ve come along to set things right.” Curtis said and somehow, Lloyd accepted this. He turned his head back toward the rolling rain. It didn’t seem to be close to abating. Lightening flashes licked through the sky, the rain fell and together, they sat and stared out at the runaway world.

“You smoke?” Curtis asked. Lloyd nodded without looking at the old man.

“Mind if I?” Curtis asked. Lloyd shook his head. No, he didn’t mind. The old man fished a soaked pack of mentholated Double Diamond cigarillos. He plucked a damp cigarillo out from the pack and pulled out a golden lighter from his breast pocket. Lloyd didn’t except the old man could light the tip, but he did and smoke issued as he puffed on the filter. 

“American.” Lloyd said, bringing his gaze to the soggy cigarillo pack. It’d been written in English. Lloyd had been used to seeing everything, except for the Coca Cola and Pepsi logos, in Portuguese.  

The Last Reich - Book 1: Ch. 5

5.

Clod had a girl named Wanda on his lap with her hand in his pants. He had gotten hard, but it was the stiffness reserved for deep sleep. Having a full bladder or a lovely dream. Wanda knew this as much as she knew that playing with the man garbed in black wasn’t a far cry from playing with a stick of dynamite. When she was alive, she had seen Clod’s hand disappear into a man’s chest and reappear with the man’s heart. When she was alive, she didn’t see a human male. She saw a hurricane condensed into the halls of her former whorehouse. There had been a clatter and a crash and that had awoken her in her whore’s crib. She had untangled herself from a fat man who had been too drunk to get in up. She had stopped to empty the man’s pockets and if she hadn’t she probably would have remained alive.

As it was, she stole into the hall with nothing on but a pair of panties. The fat man’s money was clenched in her fist as she hurried down the hall, expecting the commotion to be a rowdy drunk who had too little money and not enough sense to walk away. The commotion kicked up louder and women were screaming. Maybe the drunk had a gun. Maybe he’d start shooting. She hustled along and realized, too late, that she had hustled in the wrong direction. Wanda stopped in her tracks and her fingers went slack, pouring the fat man’s money onto the scoffed wooden floor. One of the men that the whore house employed to keep things civil came flying through the door Wanda was planning to go through. He laid stretched out in a heap of broken door and splinters. She then saw Clod as the hurricane. She saw him throw his hand into the man’s chest and rip his heart out. He flung the heart away and turned toward Wanda. Wanda began to run in the other direction and so she didn’t see the other, Rein, coming behind her. She later learned that Rein hadn’t intended to turn her. He had just gone into a kind of frenzy, tasting a little of everyone. He left her half-drunk on the floor and then took her in when she turned up sobbing and confused one night.

“Pretty, pretty girl.” Rein had said, holding up her cheek and smiling. Rein had given her a still-live baby and she hadn’t felt bad when she drunk it. Rein had told her to wash Clod. She knew that Clod wasn’t a vampire, but she also knew that he wasn’t exactly human. She also knew that she wasn’t allowed to drink him. That was part of the reason she wanted him. When she took him by the hand and led him into a tub, the water turned a deep scarlet. All that blood. It had just dried on his skin and she kept wanting to put her mouth on him. She had blood to drink, but she wanted to know how he tasted. She settled for tasting his skin instead of his blood. She put her head in his lap at first, but got a kick in the ass by Hess, another one she couldn’t drink. It was a senseless bit of meanness and he plopped himself in a high-backed chair as if he were gloating. Possibly, he was gloating. He hadn’t told her to let Clod alone and she had played with men while other men watched before.

Clod’s member shriveled in her hand and she realized that he was looking at her. She didn’t have time to read the emotion on his face. She saw his wide, blue eyes and then he snatched her by her hair and pulled her away. She tumbled to the ground, but he hadn’t released her. He was pulling her, jerking her back and forth and she was afraid that he was attempting to part her from her scalp.

“What is this!” Clod screamed across the room at Hess.

“Somebody Rein made.” Hess sounded scared.

“Back alley trash. I’ve ascended to god-hood and you offer me trash. You’ve brought me whores and vagrants. I do not operate in the shadows, not anymore. You shall not either.” Wanda was sobbing and shivering, but she didn’t attempt to run. She figured that this man, this new man, had forgotten about her and if she attempted to move or fight, he would snatch her life away.

“I’ll  do better. We’ll do better.” Hess said, sounding more and more like a scared child.

“Out in the open. Something shocking. Something horrible.” This new man seemed to have relaxed slightly, although he hadn’t loosened him grip on her hair.

“Yes.” Hess said quickly.

“Children. I want children. The men, with their guns, will come for dead children.” The new man said, drifting off into his own thoughts.

“Yes.” Hess said, just as quick.

“Keep this one. She’ll be a reminder. Never again.” With that, his hand went slack around her hair and he actually helped her to her feet. She wanted to run away at that point but her legs wouldn’t obey her. He turned to her and she knew what he was going to do before he did it. It was impossible to know, but she still saw it coming. He put his hand on her cheek with his thumb stretched out onto the bridge of her nose. It might have been mistaken for a tender touch but all of a sudden, there was a heat like the top of a hot stove. It burned and blistered her skin and when he took his hand away, there was a  black handprint surrounded with deep purple and throbbing red. She knew that vampires could heal, but she also knew that this would never.

No Magic For Luke Peters, Ch. 3

Chapter Three: Luke, Meet Bobby. Bobby, Meet Luke

The old man had started towards the wooden back steps of his house while Luke was still seated on the crabby grass that was his side lawn. The garden hose continued to spread water across the blacktop driveway. The German Shepherd followed suit, bounding at his master’s side with his shaggy, black and brown tail swishing behind him. Luke put his legs underneath him and started after the old man, landing a hand on the old man’s shoulder. Luke had been raised to respect his elders, so the hand wasn’t firm and it wasn’t harsh. It was tentative and coaxing.

“Sir. You can’t…” That was as far as Luke got before the old man’s cane shot into his stomach, forcing all his air out all at once and causing him to double over in pain.

“Damn it. I barely touched you. All you brats are too damn soft nowadays.” The old man said, laying a hand on the brass doorknob and turning it. He swung the door open and pulled Luke along by the collar, spilling him onto the kitchen floor. The German Shepherd came in next, his overgrown nails clacking the dusty-gray tiled linoleum. Lastly, the old man slammed the door, moved around Luke and pulled up a chair at the kitchen table.

“Who are you?” Luke asked breathlessly. He was going to vomit again. He could taste the bile at the back of his throat.

“Christ, boy.” The old man said, picking himself up out of the chair and snatching Luke by the arm. Luke’s feet scrabbled for purchase as the old man dragged him toward the kitchen sink. Luke found it and held himself up as he released into the metal basin. He spat out a slimy string and turned the tap on, washing the bile down the drain.               

“Who are you?” Luke asked again, adding some force behind his words.

“I’m the man that saved your life last night.” The old man said.

“I don’t think so. I was in bed last night.” Luke said, turning to face the old man.

“Your legs turned to jelly? Your chest hurt? Your head feel like someone’s been stomping on it? Your heart pumps blood to the rest of your body. If someone monkeys with it, it causes all sorts of havoc with the rest of your body. The man who did it to you was looking to kill you. I chucked a boot at him.”

“You saved me with a boot? Do you have some medication that you’re supposed to be taking?” Luke said.

“Cute. How about I make swallow your teeth, Pecker-wood. You have two choices here: Believe me and live. Don’t and die.” The old man said, his voice sounding closer to a growl than human speech. What was odd, was that Luke wanted to believe that the old man had saved him last night with nothing but a boot. He couldn’t remember his dream, but he knew that he’d been dreaming. As hard as he tried, all he could summon was two yellow eyes like twin moons behind a film of smoke.

“Who are you?” Luke said for a third time. He found that he didn’t want to say he didn’t believe, because part of him knew that those yellow eyes were real and something had made them go away.

“They call me Perkins. Dale Perkins, but Perkins is fine. That, there, is Cesar.” Perkins said, pointing to the German Shepherd, who had found a corner in the kitchen and curled up with his head resting on his paws.

“Luke.” Luke said. “Why are you saying that someone wants me dead? What did I do?”

“It’s not what you did. It’s who you are.” Perkins said, returning to the drawn out kitchen chair. The chair creaked and shifted underneath his weight.

“Who am I?” Luke asked.

“Unlucky. Somebody pointed a finger at you and decided that you’d make a good guardian.” The old man said, stretching his legs out underneath the table.

“Who did?” Luke asked.

“That, nobody knows. We’re all just pawns on whoever’s chessboard. They’re looking for you to either die or stop somebody from dying.” Perkins said.

“Who?” Luke asked.

“Who knows and who cares. It ain’t my concern to play their games. You listen to me, it won’t be your concern neither.” Perkins said, scratching his fingers through his iron gray stubble.

“That seems harsh.” Luke said, smiling. The old man hadn’t sounded amazed.

“You ever kill a man? You, even, been in a real fight, Luke? You follow them and they’ll let you die and choose another, seemingly at random.” Perkins said.

“If it isn’t your concern, why would you have saved me? Why not let me die?” Luke asked.

“Because I’m such a nice guy. Or maybe, you’ll end up doing a bit of damage after one of them snaps your neck.” Perkins said.

“Damage?” Luke asked.

“None of your business.” Perkins said, a gravelly growl piquing in his voice.

“It’s about me. How’s it not my business?” Luke asked.

“Because I’m the one calling the shots. I’m the one keeping you alive. I decided what you know.” Perkins said. A sneer was stretching across his face, his lips peeling back to show his off-white teeth. 

“I haven’t decided that you are keeping me alive. The most I’ve seen you do is knock me in the stomach and enter my house without my permission.” Luke said, sounding surprisingly calm. Luke and Perkins peered at one another from across the kitchen.

“ I don’t know, but I think that something happened last night.” Luke said, breaking his gaze with the old man. There was a crisp knock at the front door, an affable sound like a delivery man calling. Luke, Perkins and Cesar all turned their heads toward the sound almost all at once.

“Don’t answer that.” Perkins said, leaning forward and gripping his cane tightly.

“People trying to kill me? I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m not going to answer the door.” Luke said. Perkins stole a glance behind Luke and gestured toward something.

“Take that up. Just in case.” Perkins said, suggesting that Luke pick up a freshly washed frying pan, the one that Luke’s father had used to make his breakfast. There was another amiable knock at the front door, sounding slightly more urgent. Luke suddenly distrusted that knock at the door and he snatched up the frying pan.  There was something off about the knock, but Luke couldn’t quite place it. It sounded like someone from Federal Express, but it was too low to the ground, like a knock from someone standing at about three feet.

“Why not just call the police?” Luke said, moving toward a tan, hard plastic phone mounted on the wall. To the left of the phone, there was a white message with the legend ‘Numbers to Remember” scrawled across the top. The first number was for Dr. Anton Burns, the family physician. Beneath that, there was the number to the Lowell Police Department. 

“You try that, Pecker-wood.” Perkins said, eyeing the back window.

Luke didn’t feel that perceived emergency would be taken seriously by a 911 operator, but he also believed that something was happening and he had to get a cop car in front of his house. The amiable sounded at the front door, except it had lost some of the friendship it had promised. There was a note of irritation in the sound. Luke picked up the receiver and dialed the number for the police. He put the receiver to his ear and heard the conclusion of two hard objects, one dry and the other wet. For a moment, Luke believed that it was coming from beyond the phone, but he began to realize that it was phone lines were occupied with the sound of a metal baseball bat caving in a human skull. There was an initial blow and then a weepy, dazed groan and then there was another blow and another. There was a crack and a ring. Beyond that sound, which could only be murder, the irritated knocking at the front door seemed unimportant. Perkins came and took the phone from Luke’s hand. He put the phone to his own ear and then grimaced at the sound. He put the phone back on the hook.

“We can go out the back. If he’s in the front, we leave from the back without him knowing.” Luke said. His voice felt shaky in his throat, but the words came out clear enough.

“That mean that you’re taking this seriously now?”

“That means something’s happening that I don’t like.”

“That’s a start. Look out that window. What do you see?” Perkins said, pointing a finger toward the window looking out onto the driveway. Luke stole a glance, but he didn’t see anything worth noticing. There was the garden hose that he hadn’t turned off yet. There was the barest patch of the house’s side yard. In the distance, there were Red Maples and Eastern Hemlock regaining their leaves from the winter’s frost. There was nothing worth reporting.

“There’s nothing.” Luke said.

“Look closer. You’ll see footprints.” Perkins said. Luke did see footprints, but he had assumed that they belonged to Perkins.

“Your footprints.” Luke said, suddenly unsure of himself.

“If my feet got wet, yours would have too. We were eye to eye, cheek to cheek. There’s a man in the back as well as the front. You seem like a smart boy. Why would one man be loud while the other one stays silent?” Perkins asked.

“Distraction. He wants us at the front door, so we’d have our backs turned to the back door. What if we just leave out the front. Rush past the guy up front.”

“Monkey with their plans. I like it, but the man up front could have a gun. I don’t know about you, but I could never outrun a bullet.” Perkins said.

“Then what?” Luke asked.

“We go straight for the man in the back. Get the drop on him before he can on us. But first, you go up to your room. Get something on other than bed cloths. Pack a bag as well. I’m giving you thirty seconds. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.” Perkins continued as Luke hurried up the stairs, scrambled into a pair of blue jeans and threw his feet into some sneakers. He pulled his bed shirt off and failed to noticed a bead of blood at the exact location that Perkins had struck him. He dumped his school books out of his Army-green book bag and began stuffing in clothes.

“Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven. Ten.” Perkins called. It came to Luke that he was unquestioningly packing away his things to leave to places-unknown with a man he had just met. Why? The only explanation he could come up with was that it felt right. He needed to be gone from this house filled with his dead mother and his crumbling father.

“Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Time’s up, Pecker-wood.” Luke came down the stairs with his book bag slung over his shoulder and the frying pan clasped in his hand.

“I’m ready.” He said, looking down the stairwell to Perkins and Cesar.

“Well, I’m delighted. If we could get going?” Perkins growled, moving back into the kitchen.

Perkins stood at one side of the doorframe while Luke stood at the other. Cesar stood between the two of them, wagging his tails and waiting for the open to swing open. Perkins gripped the handle and pulled it open on the morning light. No explosions or screaming. No gunfire or scratch of metal on metal.  Luke could hear a sparrow chirping in the distance, but that was all. Perkins stepped out ahead of Luke with Cesar trailing along at his side. Luke followed after, closing the door to the house behind him. He was considering whether or not he should lock the door when a young man stepped into vision. He had short, blonde hair, blue eyes, broad, muscular shoulders attached to muscular arms. Luke had taken in all of this, but the young man’s most striking feature was the scuffed, metal baseball bat in his right hand. Luke’s eyes locked onto that, remembering the phone call.

Perkins had seen him in time, raising his crimson cane up to repel a strike from the young man. It was lucky he did, because the strike would have cut straight through Perkins’ middle, blunt instrument or not. There was another strike, sending long, echoing clacks up into the air. Luke was thinking that the cane would snap at some point and the young man wasn’t holding back. One strike and Perkins would be gone. Cesar must have had the same idea as Luke because he launched himself up through the air like a furry bullet. The addition of Cesar had distracted the young man long enough for Perkins to take the offense, cracking him across the face with the length of the cane. The young man was on one knee, a red mark stretching across his face and droplets of blood dribbling from his mouth. His arm was bleeding from where Cesar had bitten him. Perkins had his cane raised up in the air, ready to kill the young man. The cane came down and the young man struck out with the bat, swept Perkins off his feet. Next, he bashed Cesar across the side, there was a loud snap that had to be a rib breaking. Cesar howled out in pain.

As soon as Perkins smacked down onto the ground, he had rolled onto his knees, but by that time, the young man was on his feet, readying his bat to give the same treatment the young man would have gotten a few seconds before. Before he was able to, Luke came with the frying pan. It seemed that the young man hadn’t considered Luke a threat until the moment the frying pan was ripping though the air. Crack. Luke brought the frying pan across the young man’s face and he went sailing to the ground. The baseball bat flew from the young man’s hands and onto the blacktop driveway. Impossibly, the young man was raising from the ground, his face soaked in a stream of blood. The young man’s progress was slow, making Luke wonder if he’d given the young man a concussion. 

“Come on.” Luke said to Perkins, pulling on the old man’s arm. With Perkins on his feet, Luke turned his attention to Cesar who was panting and whining. Luke gingerly put his hands underneath the dog and lifted him up.

“Give him here.” Perkins said, taking the dog from Luke. The two stole down the street with the dog whining in Perkins’s arms.

Analysis: Harrison Bergeron

When reading Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, a number of themes and concepts are introduced to the reader. These themes run the gamut from conformity to desensitization toward violence. I intend to discuss these concepts, as well as to compare the different interpretations of this story.

 The short story starts with a married couple seated and watching television. The husband wears a mental handicap, which makes concentration almost impossible. The wife aspires to be the Handicapper General and they both watch ballerinas dance across the stage. Halfway through the program, a news bulletin announces the escape of one Harrison Bergeron, an athletic and ingenious teenager. Now, depending on how the reader interprets this story, two very different impressions can be derived.

 On one side, the story can have a bit of an elitist point of view. It describes average as being almost mentally retarded and incapable of moral outrage or even have the capacity for understanding human emotion. To be fair, the average American isn’t that impressive mentally or physically (e.g. being average), but when I first read this story, it felt like something a high school math-lete would have written after getting a swirly. It seemed like Vonnegut had a bit of intellectual frustration when he wrote this piece. Don’t get me wrong, it’s well written, but I got an impression from the story that the author had little or no confidence in average America. For example, in the beginning of the story, Vonnegut wrote, “the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.   It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts” Now I’ve worked with the mentally handicapped and I’m pretty sure that they’d notice if there child of fourteen years was snatched away from them. So logically, a person of “average” intelligence would both notice and care deeply if their child was taken away.

 On the side of the coin, it also gives the impression of Orwellion revolution and of hope for people to be the best people they can be. If average is actually a metaphor for accepting the bare minimum, for permitting oneself, to live in the crowd. Then that would make the scene at the end of the story with, Harrison dancing with the ballerina, a demonstration of human excellence, a demonstration of what we all could do if we had the will to. He spoke of the two of them leaping 30ft into the air and of Harrison snapping metal like celery. These are extraordinary things, but with enough will and want a person could achieve these things.

 It also is delivering the obvious message of “Don’t-allow-yourself-to-live-in-the-crowd.” But although, I got both these messages, one of intellectual arrogance and a message of hope, I think it doesn’t have to be either/or. I’ll be the first to say that people from all walks of life can be dumb, but no matter how shallow the gene pool gets, people can still surprise you. Harrison Bergeron. I hope I succeeded in doing that as well as in discussing possible meanings hidden behind the words.