Daren Dean

Mercury in Retrograde 7

Troy

Troy stood leaning against the sink shaving in the house he and Alisha first lived in right after they were married by Reverend Scully. Alisha's family were holy rollers and they insisted on Scully even though he seemed about two drinks from Fairmont State Hospital to most folks. He drug the razor down the stubble on his face, dipped the razor down in the foamy water and shook it, shaved the rest of his face without stopping and studied his reflection for a long time. He decided he still looked fairly young, not bad, but crows feet were beginning to form. His complexion was not quite healthy, but he didn't know what to do about it.

He sat on the double bed wearing only his t-shirt and boxers. A Chippendale highboy sat there ridiculous in its grandeur with only three pairs of jeans, a few t-shirts, socks, and underwear, and a couple of flannel shirts tucked away in the top drawer. When he closed his eyes he could feel her in bed behind him. The shape of her curled in a lovely S under the sheet. His greatest regret was in not making love to her more regularly while they were together.

Time had not lessened his feelings for her. You only want what you can't have, he tried telling himself. Knowing it wouldn't work. Even the walls of the bedroom were painted by her, a soothing light blue from the ceiling down to the wainscoting, but only that one room. They hadn't stayed married long enough for her to get around to doing the rest of the place. He had never wanted to return here, but he had nothing else, only memories of better times and the things he had done. He pulled on a clean pair of jeans, poured a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and went out to sit on the porch on an old slatted chair and listen to the weeds grow in the yard. No one had even tried to take care of the place for him while he was locked up.

At least he was not down by the river with the rest of the Scofields, some of them living in houses on stilts they were so close to the water's edge. Many of his kin, he had never realized it until prison, were like ancient creatures slithering in and out of the river. They did not want him around and he was satisfied for the moment where he was. Vitriol welled up within him the more he thought of his family and her. They had all deserted him in this, the year of the bicentennial. The children were crazed with the celebration of the country and collecting the anniversary quarters, but men his age couldn't help feeling a certain skepticism toward the government. His jail time had kept him out of the war. He would have gone just like everyone else had his number come up.

 Everything about the place suggested disrepair. The hardwood floors of the porch careened at an angle as if a root bulged just below the surface. As he carried his mug around the house, he was thinking homestead. Even the windows winked at him like the eyes of a slattern woman making an obligatory proposal from an alleyway. There was nothing like an empty house for it to go to hell in a hurry, he thought. Horse weeds were growing everywhere and tall grass practically obscured the house. The chicken coop's roof was caving in. The chickens, pigs, and horses were all gone - as if he expected them to still be there. In his mind they were preserved, along with Alisha, but the place was a study in disarray. There were enough cats though, some of the cats would brush against his pant's leg but others hissed like Satan's girlfriend. He surveyed the damage from leaving the place alone and wondered if he could make a go of the of it or should just go back to the brick plant.

The sun glinted off a shiny metallic object in the back. He put a hand up to block the reflection to realize it was an old stove. There were all kinds of old appliances in the back pasture, an ancient Freezer, a wringer-washing machine, and a rusted out Ford Coupe that looked vaguely familiar. Another Scofield was most likely dumping shit on his property. He threw out the dregs of his coffee and stalked back to the house. Just as he rounded the corner of the flaking house, he heard the sound of tires cutting gravel and then saw a black Trans Am with a t-top. He knew Merle would show up sooner rather than later to give him advice or a lecture.

"Hey hotshot," his daddy said, as he pulled up the circle drive and stopped in front of him. "What are you doing out here?"

"What do you mean?" Troy asked. "This is still my goddamn place, ain't it?"

"Not no more it ain't," Merle got out of the car. "How you like her?"

"It don't look like your style," Troy said. "Where'd you get the money to buy it?"

"I've got a lot now," Merle said. "I'm selling cars. It's a bitch sometimes, but I can always sell one when it gets bad. Want a beer?"

"I'm drinking coffee," Troy shook his head. "What do you mean this ain't my place?"

"I didn't have the heart to tell you when you were sent away," Merle said. "You ever hear of taxes. Yeah, in this country you own something until the first time you don't pay your taxes that is. Then it belongs to the government."

"Shit," Troy said. "I never gave it a thought." He sat his coffee cup on the rail of the porch.

"It belongs to me now," Merle said. "But I'll give it back to you. I wasn't going to let the government grab a place that belongs to a Scofield."

"I'll be out tonight," Troy said.

"Don't get all touchy," Merle said. "You were always so touchy. It's okay. I don't mind. You can stay. I kept up with it for you anyway."

"No thanks," Troy said. "But I guess I'll take one of those beers now. Come up here on the porch and have a sit."

Merle swung on the porch swing, sending it into shaky convulsions as the chain creaked with the movement. Troy leaned back against the house on a kitchen chair with the front legs in the air. They sat on the porch for awhile drinking beer and smoking in silence. Struggling for something to say, they took long meaningful drags on their filters instead and occasionally stole sidelong glances. There were questions they wanted to ask one another, but had difficulty marshaling up the resolve to do so. An orange tabby from the barn hopped on the porch like a June bug attracted to light, hoping for a handout. Mud daubers hummed angrily along the roof of the porch around their papyrus nests.

"Got enough cats out here for you?" Merle asked. A slight smile on his face.

"Whose cats are they, anyway?"

"Hell if I know," Merle said. "I guess they're half-wild."

"Why didn't you ever come to see me?"

"Well - " Merle smoked more meaningfully now. "I, uh, didn't know if you wanted me to. I sent you that Christmas card that one time."

"That was three years ago," Troy laughed.

"Was it?" Merle said. "Why didn't you never call?"

"Because you never visited, so I thought you didn't want to have nothing to do with me."

"I've been in jail before, son," Merle said, finishing his beer and crushing his can with a twist in his hand.

"Not for what I done, you ain't."

"No," Merle said. "I never killed no one, but most folks don't blame you for it. Them old dogs down at Beck's pool hall said if it was them, they'd have done the same damn thing. A man takes another man's woman is lower than a three-peckered dog."

"Well," Troy said. "Why would I care what those motherfuckers think? I don't give a damn."

"You sure are tough," Merle said, popping the top on another beer. "Ain't you?"

"Tough enough," he raised his chin. "I guess I got to be."

"You're heading for more trouble, if you don't mind me saying. And the hell with you if you do."

"You were always right," Troy said. His face turned red. His temper had always been his biggest weakness. "So I guess you know what you're talking about."

"It's that temper of yours," Merle said by way of explanation. "The old man had a temper just like it. That's who you get it from. He had to stay half blotto just to be on an even keel."

"Self-medication, huh?"

"Or something," Merle said. "You ain't never been like me. You may look like me, but sometimes people are throwbacks - and that's what you are. You're a throwback and so was the old man. And if you don't control all that piss and vinegar you got welling up in you somebody's gonna. Somebody else is . . . "

"Well," Troy said. "Let me have another one. I wouldn't want them to get warm on you."

A sound of a truck grinding its gears on the gravel road in the distance. Father and son sat together drinking beer and watching the horizon. Locusts sawed from the trees like something out of a Hitchcock flick. Merle's hand trailed down and stroked the cat as it made its rounds between them. The sun was beginning to get well up and they would have to move off the porch soon.

"You don't have to stay here, you know it?" Merle said.

"Yeah."

"You could stay with your brother and me," Merle said. "We still live up to the old place."

"Royal ain't my brother."

"He's your half-brother," Merle shook another cigarette out of the pack and lit it with a silver Zippo. "I know you blame me for running your Mama off. I wouldn't say I didn't have nothing to do with her leaving, but she wanted to leave. We married young and she wanted to do things with her life. Her family was upper crust and everything. She moved out West somewhere. Heard from her once. You were just a little thing. You were livin' out to Paps when she called me."

"What'd she say?"

"Well," Merle said. "It was the funniest damn thing. She said. How's everything going? How's Cully?"

"That's it?"

"Basically," Merle said. "Another time, I went up to the Crawford house on Court Street. I banged on the door and Mr. Crawford answered. And you're not going to believe this shit, but he was wearing some kind of Japanese get up. A robe like. He was always one to put on airs like that. As if his shit didn't stink just because he was a banker. One time he called himself the district deputy master or the right worshipful brother right to my face trying to make some point about how much better he was than me because he belonged to the lodge."

"He said all that with a straight face?"

"Yes, son, he did. And, anyway, I asked him where Natalie was and he said even if he knew he wouldn't tell me. She was above my class, he said, and those kinds of marriages are doomed to fail."

"I never knew you even cared that much."

Merle looked at him with a startled look in his face. "I loved your Mama more than anything in this world. She was too good for me. Maybe you're more like her. Not willing to make do. Always wanting something more, or better. I'm not sure why I ever thought to get tangled up with them Crawfords, they was always high society. But old man Crawford had four daughters, and all of them more beautiful than the next. Your Mama was the oldest of the bunch. Her sister, Lucinda, next in line was probably the most beautiful. But she liked boys and got messed up with a wild bunch out of Holts Summit. She drowned in a boating accident on the Missoura River."

"What happened?"

Merle shrugged. "Nobody knows. I don't think it was an accident. Maybe she wouldn't give it up. Who knows? It hit your Mama hard. She never was the same after that. We hadn't been married too long when it happened. You were just a little guy. Then, Natalie up and ran off. Left us."

"I never knew."

"I don't guess it makes much difference now."

"No. I guess not," Troy swatted at a mud dauber and stubbed out his cigarette. "Father like son. Speaking of wandering women, you know where Alisha's at these days."

"No. No, I don't. Even if I did I sure as hell wouldn't tell you."

"I know. You're right. But you ain't me."

"Let's just skip it, son." Merle finished his beer and sat the empty next to the last. He stood up and stretched and knocked an empty hanging pot with the back of his hand. A dove perched on top of the slanted roof like a weathercock spinning in the breeze. Wounds went deep in the Scofields like malignant cancer below the surface awaiting fate to trigger a guaranteed painful death. A shared genealogy spooled behind them but was powerless to heal the rift. The men pretended a grand and certain stoicism, but it was a weak defense at best.

"Come on out sometime," Merle said from behind the wheel. "We'll all go fishing and I'll fix up whatever we catch. I'll even make up some hush puppies. You bring the beer."

Troy nodded. He watched the new car drive off sending a plume of white dust in the air like a jetstream. The beer can collapsed in his hand, smashed it under his foot, and hissed at the barncat which sent it mewling around the corner. The screen door slapped shut behind him.

 

He pulled the Ford over at Sinclair gas station to fill up. He liked the old Ford, but he didn't care for the men who sold them in their second-hand polyester suits and callous piscean faces. Troy went inside where he bought a 40 ouncer and couldn't hide his shock at the grimey checkerboard floors. The white-haired man working in his olive uniform tallied up his bill with a pencil, ignoring both the antiquated adding machine and matching cash register; he stabbed at the No Sale button and made change. Some of the money went into the till and some into the attendant's pocket.

"Thank you, Roy," Troy said.

"I guess you got the drop on me, ole' son," Roy said. "I don't believe I recognize you."

"Troy, Troy Scofield."

"Oh, that's right, you're daddy is Walker, or no - Merle Scofield. Heard you was out now. You looking for work yet?"

"I guess I ought to be."

"Not if you're independently wealthy," Roy said. "Or maybe your trust fund's paying up."

"You were always full of shit," Troy said.

"No, I'm serious," Roy said. "If you get desperate you can call on your Uncle Roy now. I'll give you a job here at the station. Keep you in beer and cigarettes, but I'll work you."

"I just may do that," Troy said.

"No you won't," Roy said. "But you can't say I didn't offer. Give the gentleman down at the tap room my regards."

 

The interior of Beck's was cool and smelled like last year's beer. The mahogany bar was one of the main attractions for lovers of sour mash and conversation, even the high and mighty showed off the place and it's fancy ceiling work to those who mistook Fairmont for a hamlet with buildings of historic significance and value. The building did not possess anything unusual, but the souls haunting the place gave it its character and atmosphere that only the locals could fully appreciate. A visitor often as not missed the point. Troy recognized the Budweiser clock on the wall as a holy relic from his own childhood when he would come looking for his daddy of an afternoon just after school let out.

A Texas swing version of "One Scotch, One Bourbon, and One Beer" was playing on the juke.

A couple of farmers sat at a back table with young girls making much over them. Girls who were definitely not their wives. One of the farmers looked like someone he had known in another life, high school maybe or the Army. The man didn't seem to recognize him and instead curled up his lip as if he might make a smart remark, but the girl on his lap turned his chin so that he faced her cleavage which distracted him for the moment.

"Hold on a minute there handsome," a female voice from the bar growled. "There's a fella who used to look a lot like you. He went by the name Troy Scofield, but I think he died sometime ago."

"You know it's me, Wanda Faye," Troy said. "My eyes ain't adjusted yet, but I would know that sexy voice anywhere."

"You always were full of shit," Wanda Faye said. Her dirty blond hair hung around her face like a cowl about a disturbingly androgynous face. Her eyes were small and watery with dark bags underneath like shadows from an artist's charcoal pencil. She wore a peasant blouse which attracted some attention to her saggy breasts. "First beer is on me, then you better go."

"Ain't that a way to do an old pal," Troy said.

"Just the same," Wanda Faye said. "Old man Beck said you was barred ever since you got sent up to Jeff City."

"Aw baby."

"It ain't me," she said. "Tell you what. I'll pour you a cold one and I'll even give the old man a call myself. Can't promise nothing, but I'll see what I can do for you all. Okay hun?"

"That's my girl," Troy said.

Wanda Faye poured him a beer into a frosted pint glass, dialed some numbers on the old black rotary and disappeared with the long pig-tailed cord into the short-order kitchen behind the swinging doors for privacy from the juke box. Troy spun around with a beer in hand to survey the bar and a tall thin man with dark greasy hair plastered on his head sat hunched at the other end of the bar over a double whiskey shot and beer chaser.

"Scofield," a man vested in black down the bar said.

"Well, if it isn't the Great Depression," Troy said.

"Used to be," the man said. "They up and changed my name on me."

"Thought you had to go to court for that."

"Well," he said. "They done changed it to Great Recession."

"What's the difference?"

"Hell if I know," Great Recession said. "I liked GD better. I guess I was used to it. But all the rednecks won't call me nothing else now. I guess GD sounds too much like a curse word." His teeth looked a bit green as did his complexion, as if he were slowly pickling himself as a peculiar sort of penance.

"We're going to have do something about that," Troy threw a leg over a barstool. "If there's anything great about you . . . depression, GD."

"Appreciate the vote of confidence," he moved his little stack of bills and pack of cigarettes on the bar to make room. "Let me buy you a man's drink. Hey, Wanda Faye, get your sweet ass out here."

Wanda Faye came out of the kitchen with a dirty look. Her middle finger extended toward GD. She slammed the receiver back to its resting place. "What do you want now?"

"You know what I want," GD moved his eyebrows up and down suggestively.

"Shit," she said. "You ain't got enough lead in your pencil for what I got in mind."

"Why you think I hangout in this hell-hole for Godsakes?"

"Because you're an alcoholic?" Wanda Faye hooted at him and bopped his nose with her index finger. "And you're a horny old bastard."

"You got me pegged all wrong."

"I'd say she's got you pegged about right," Troy said.

"By-the-by, give this boy a shot of what I got."

"Would that be whiskey or the Clap?" Wanda Faye asked as she sat a glass on the bar and poured a jigger. She shook her head when GD pushed a bill at her. "His money's no good here."

"Damn, feels like I'm visiting royalty," Troy said.

"According to Beck," Wanda Faye said. "That's exactly what you are. You ought to finish these drinks and scoot."

"Why's that, darling?" Troy asked.

"Beck just don't like you," GD said. He leaned conspiratorially toward Troy and whispered, "That young turk back there is a Guthrie. I don't recall which one, because all their men look exactly alike - but he don't like you much. Now, I ain't lecturing but I figure you ain't supposed to be in here and he'd love it if he could you put back in the pokey."

"He looks familiar," Troy spun around and looked at Guthrie as he bounced a girl on his knee. "But I don't think I know him or why he wouldn't like me."

"He's been carrying a torch for Alisha since high school." Wanda Faye leaned with her elbows on the bar to give Troy an unobstructed view down her blouse.

Guthrie looked toward the bar his mouth an outraged rictus as he shook the girl off his knee and nearly into a hard sit on the sticky floor. She howled at him, but he stood up and puffed up his chest like a bullfrog as his arms, bent comically at the elbows, floated up as if a string were attached to them leading to a helium balloon at the other end towing his arms toward the ceiling. He wore a shirt with the chevron of a farm equipment company under the collar and a grimey cap with a feed supplier emblazoned in green and red. Guthrie was breathing heavily, his face appeared sunburned, apoplectic, as he stomped drunkenly to the bar in his workboots.

"You want something, Scofield?" Guthrie asked. "You want something? You been giving me the eye ever since you walked in here."

"He don't want nothing," GD said. "I was just saying how I was about to buy you a beer."

"I don't give a damn," Guthrie shrugged off GD's nicotine stained hand. "You think you're such big shit. Ain't nobody here scared of you either, especially me."

"I can see that, friend," Troy knocked back his shot and sat it on the bar.

"What?" Guthrie shouted. His forehead glistened with sweat. His complexion had gone from pasty white to green.

"I wouldn't want you to be scared of me," Troy said.

"Is that right?" Guthrie's legs appeared to wobble.

"Yeah," Troy drawled. "That way I don't have to chase you when I decide to kick your ass."

"That's it!" Guthrie said. "Let's take it outside!" He was goose-stepping toward the door and careening off the stools and the wall like a pinball seeing high action. Through the window it was plain to see Guthrie didn't want to fight as much as he wanted to get out of Beck's without losing face.

"I'll meet you out there," Troy called after him. "After I finish my drink."

The other farmer and the girls got up from their table in the back and sidled out. The young man wearing a straw cowboy hat with a tan band gave Troy a respectful nod as he passed by. He heard Guthrie's girlfriend whisper in a loud slur, "Why didn't he kick his ass?"

The cowboy didn't offer an answer, instead he pushed at the small of the backs of the young women hurrying them toward the door like lost yearling cattle.

Everyone at the bar could see Guthrie sitting in the cab of his truck. He wasn't staring into the window, but at the building itself as if here counting all the bricks that made it up.

"Didn't even wait for you," admiration in GD's voice. "He just hit the bricks."

"He was afraid of you," Wanda Faye's brow knitted together.

"Guthrie was about to piss himself," GD said.

"You'd better leave soon," Wanda Faye said. "You can come see me anytime, Troy. But you'd better get out of here. Old man Beck would have my job. He wouldn't say nothing to you if he was here, but he'd take it out on me, okay?"

"All right," Troy pu his hands up in front of him. "Great Depression . . . cheer up."

"Watch yourself," said GD.

"Wanda Faye," Troy said. "You're a real beauty. Give me a sixer to go."

Wanda Faye pulled a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon out of the cooler and stuffed it down the mouth of a brown paper bag. The whole time she kept giving him the eye as she made much of rolling the opening of the bag down to get a grip. He held out a five dollar bill, but she just shook her head and kissed him on the cheek. Troy smiled and looked modestly down at the slanted floorboards.

"Well," he said.

"Well your ownself," she said. "Beck's got a garret I could sneak you up to."

Troy shook his head.

"A good shitkicker band's playing Friday night," GD said. "You'd like them. They just coming up from Nashville."

"Maybe I'll see you then, old timer."

"Maybe you better not, Cully," Wanda Faye said.

"You seen King Henry around?"

"He doesn't hang out here," Wanda Faye said. "Try looking over the tracks in niggertown."

"All right," Troy said. "You all take care."

"You know," the Great Depression jumped up so fast he knocked over his stool. "Merle Scofield could have been King of Fairmont! And you could have been its crown prince!" He held up the dregs of his pint glass in no mere mock salute. "Here's to you."

The night air was misty, taking on a chill he carried his sack of beer under his arm like precious cargo. He ducked down the first alley, sat his package on the brick-lined street, unzipped his pants and wrote his name over the graffiti in urine. An old advertisement stared down at him familiar and foreboding. He tried to remember what it was for. He was sure it was for a soft drink, but no matter how he forced the images through his mind it refused to be summoned. It was an important detail, or it seemed superficial, but it was like forgetting your own phone number or where you put your car keys that made it so disturbing. He zipped up again and he realized how smokey it had been in Becks.

"Scofield," a distinctly black voice said.

Two men moved under a fading orange streetlamp which made their faces look as grainy as a stonecut sculpture. He thought it might be Guthrie and the cowboy, but he could see by the way they stood that it wasn't either of them. They didn't stand like farmers. The light became sulphurous as the mist turned into a slewing rain. One of the men moved toward him and he heard a sound like a snap bean echo in the alleyway.

"Heard you were looking for me, Cochese," the smaller man said pulling the brim of his hat down.

"King Henry," Troy said. "Is that you?"

"The way you talk makes me laugh," King Henry said.

"Who's that with you?" Troy asked.

"What do you care?" the large man said. "You a racist?"

"Maybe," Troy said.

"Motherfucker."

"Come now, friends," King Henry said. "This is my business associate, Baptiste. Now, I'm getting wet. My car's right back here."

"Sure," Troy said. "Let's go."

A long black Cadillac was waiting in the back of the alley. Baptiste slid behind the wheel as King Henry and Troy sat in the backseat.

"Care for a drink?" King Henry asked motioning toward a variety of liquor bottles in a milk crate.

"How about a beer?" Troy asked, motioning to his package.

"You know," King Henry said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but you look like shit and you smell like cheap beer."

"I am tired," Troy admitted.

"Take him to our place," King Henry said to Baptiste.

"We going honky-tonkin'?"

It was still raining. Large droplets clung to the windows and ran in rivulets as they drove through town. The cold white buildings of the MFA yawned above them like monoliths from an earlier age; those responsible for the odd smell of soybean could have been a race of aliens. The car bounced over the train tacks as they cruised Hardin street. Troy leaned into the window as they drove through the projects. A prostitute with a decidedly male face slouched outside a squat wooden structure with chain-link fence to protect the wares of the world's smallest liquor store. A man almost as tall as the whore came out of the store with a green cap like an ashtray tilted on his head at a jaunty angle and stood under the street lamp.

"Are we having fun yet?"

"You like funny cigarettes, Cully?"

"Sure."

"Baptiste does," Baptiste said.

King Henry produced an engraved silver cigarette case and opened it to reveal four rolled and filterless cigarettes. He took one out and inspected it with a craftsman's eye for detail before replacing the case and lit it. He passed the cigarette up to Baptiste, he cautioned against bogarting, and the joint made several rounds between the triumvirate until it became too small to hold to their lips so King Henry extracted a set of specially designed tweezers and then they passed it back and forth until it was extinguished. They smoked another.

The Cadillac pulled into an already overflowing parking lot at a brick joint called Lou's. Troy fell toward the pavement as he opened his door before it had even come to a complete stop. Baptiste made a concerned gesture, but King Henry waved it off. The sheer number of vehicles in the lot belied the capacity of the tavern. Troy blinked hard and leaned with his backside against the car as groups of black men and women moved in knots like souls on a ferry moving toward anguish and torment, but still with the hope of a miraculous nirvana or at least delayed judgment in purgatory where the drinks are two-for-one and the women dance topless.

A live blues band was playing inside. A woman in a pink terry cloth robe stood across the street with a steady stream of obscenities pouring forth for the wicked, but she was roundly ignored. A mustached man in a tweed jacket made as if to walk over and clout her in the face, but his partner dissuaded him with a veto nod and slight hand gesture.

A heady mix of smoke, sweat, and beersmell from the last thirty years greeted them at the door. Baptiste went ahead of them like a bulldozer as haunted young men turned to look at him with a sneer which broke into a smile equal parts respect and detestation, but still they grinned and shook hands and hugged, patting backs and ashed over one another's shoulders. Two couples were sitting at a red vinyl booth, but with a word from Baptiste they disappeared in four separate directions like an exploding star under the carnival light and flashing strobe. A cocktail waitress appeared before they were seated and wrote their drink orders down and disappeared into the morass of black bodies heading back toward the oasis a mere twenty-five feet away.

A ripe young thing with dark hair and disturbingly blue eyes danced before them in an oblivious haze. The men smiled at one another and shook their heads in time to the beat. The girl was so close to Troy he could see the sweat running down her neck and shimmering on her arms like dew, but as his eyes adjusted her makeup dissolved on her face like a mask being removed to reveal a fallen state, a fiend within, but she continued to dance as though possessed or given an assignment by a conjurer.

"Not her," King Henry shouted into his ear.

"You look Chinese," Baptiste smiled, his first joke of the evening. He nudged Troy and they made room for him to sit down. He put his large fingers on either side of his head and pushed at the skin to make his own eyes slant. "Both of you."

Dark faces watched them through the blue fog of cigarette smoke. Bodies moved fast in time with the beat, but just as suddenly fell into a nearly frozen state. King Henry laughed. He made it known he was looking for a wife and heir - King Henry II, he smiled. There seemed to be a few likely candidates to apply for the position as one young woman after another took turns sitting next to the dark little man. Delicate green veins pulsated just beneath the surface of a woman's skin as she sat next to King Henry like a creature living without light in a murky cave - under a limestone rock.

A youngin moved seductively toward him and then out of reach. A leopard print two piece with a western fringe at the waist. Too far gone for one such as you, am I. King Henry got out of his seat and took the barely clad girl by the arm, walking her toward the bar speaking sternly to her; they both fixed him with looks - his determined and hers resigned. King Henry flashed the peace sign and a double okay. The girl was familiar, or he should have known her but her green mascara and heavily made up face gave his already blurry vision some difficulty. Instead, he saw the flesh and flesh called out to flesh. There was no mystery to it at all. It was natural. A musk. An animal reek of estrous, pretty pout of cherry lips, and grinding hips. King Henry lit one of his skinny mulatto cigarettes, dragged on it heavily and placed it in her mouth with an overtly sexual motion and she submitted to it in a ridiculous tease of ecstasy - directed primarily at him. A mood change on her part, riotous and contradictory. Troy thought to wonder, to question, to be properly cautious but instead he decided to submit to it instead.

"This one's a freebie," Baptiste called out, slapping him on the back with gusto.

"Need a new man," King Henry clapped him on the back.

"New man," Baptiste echoed.

She reached out to him, and he followed her upstairs to a darkened room. He bumped something with the top of his head, her hands went up jerking the chain and a bluish-black light came on in the dim narrow room which seemed pitched at an unnatural angle. Her animal print top came off in one motion, he licked his lips trying to focus and she plainly liked this reaction: cartoonish or horror show. He fell to his knees, burying his face in her small girl's breasts kissing and sucking, latched onto those breast like a starving child or a lecherous old man thinking this may be the last time before he has to start paying for it. The girl spun him around, she was no girl, and pushed him down on the piss-yellowed, black-striped, mattress and stuck her tongue in his belly button making her way down to the button of his trousers his head cocked back to the roach-stained walls. The towhead below him moving up and down with all the purpose and commerce of an oil well. He became conscious of nothing but his body winding down like a mechanism poised for one last shaking climax as he clutched the back of her head - and there it was. Then the girl spit up on him and it felt like he was bleeding to death. She ripped the blond wig off her head and threw it at him and he caught it as if it were a frightened animal. She was no child. A grown woman much older than himself, he felt vaguely ashamed now as if she accused him of raping elderly woman which he now felt he had. She stood over him hollering.

"Trying to choke me to death? You son of a bitch?"

"I'm sorry."

"Ah! You're all sorry! Look at you. Too drunk to fuck."

She gathered up her two articles of clothing and slammed the door behind her. A picture of the good shepherd under the queer light slipped to an odd angle. A butcher paper window shade flew up. He wiped at himself with her wig, attempted to pull his trousers up around his waist but could not manage it, and prayed to God that he would only pass out until morning. He slept and dreamt as he crouched, his legs drawn up under him in a fetal position. A woman was being beaten. A pretty woman was being beaten. Her red lips screamed. A dog barked. An explosion in his ears awoke him as it often did, but as usual there was no cause of the sound; only his mind communicating an ancient warning to save himself from himself. In his dream, hiding in the tall horseweeds at night, he hid from the big man and the woman was no comfort. No comfort. Nothing. None. Nada. A spotted horse stood guard over him with a tired expression. He curled up with a small snake twined about his hands.

 

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March 9, 2010