FEATURED
SO BARREN SOIL
The time for dying rightly had passed long ago.
It didn’t start out this way. There were plans and motley dreams as to what the family might achieve. There was hope, diminished, since seized.
In a sullen pitch beneath the big, dead tree, Penn mulled such things. He’d been mulling them a while, because the decision to murder his family hadn’t come easy. There were the boys, Jericho and Bob — ”Bob” named so only because Sara remained a Dylan fan — and Rebecca, so small and sweet, with chestnut hair much like her mother. It’s just tonight, they all had to die.
“The myth of America,” Penn chuffed, concluding aloud the verdict looping endlessly in his head for weeks like an ear worm, about the prospect that a man really stood a chance to die better off than in what circumstances he was born.
Penn looked beyond the tree, across the blanched landscape to where a gated community shone brightly in the night. There they had a functional power grid. They had access to cyber. To civilization.
Not that the residents knew how to maintain it. That was the lowly job of men like Penn to do. Those who worked with their hands. Who toiled in tangibles. Who fixed the physical things broken — engines, pipes, treadmills, dogs.
The rabies forced Penn to “fix” his family’s dog some while back. What little, lasting joy remained in the house, or the barren soil outside it, vanquished in an instant by a single round.
The kids had seen him do it. Sara, too. The horror in her eyes only confirmed in Penn’s mind that the time had finally come. With debts insurmountable, a future that promised only further punishing servitude, mere survival was no longer enough.
Penn rocked off his knees and into a clunch, chin pressed into the top of his chest. He placed the revolver on the dry earth before him, kicking up dust, its chrome surface glinting pallid moon. Five unspent bullets remained inside. All Penn would need.
He squinted tears, then glanced one drop to the ground. The most wet this ground has felt in memory, Penn thought, fixating on the dark splotch of dirt between his feet.
Yet in it, for much longer than a moment, Penn spied a fitful bloom.
SLUSH PILE
RESTAURANT ROW
Su Mei called the city. That’s what the fish guy said. “I’m Victor Fucking Joseph and if I wanna sell black pepper chicken, ain’t nobody gonna stop me.”
A squat keg of a man with wet Stogie plugged in his face, Victor opened Captain’s Galley only weeks before in what was briefly the place where Wimpy’s was at, but remained best recognized by those in the know as what used to be Doodle Burgers. And on this block chock full of restaurants, patrons and parking come at a premium.
See, old man Marquis built the block for his wife, or so the story goes. A stage actress of some renown, he erected for her in the middle of the block a theater, put her, its star, on the residential side in a house all her own, then populated the surrounding cottages with supporting actors and artisans. To support this fledgling troupe, restaurants were opened on the street down below.
The old man died, the stage lights went dark and the star, she moved away. The restaurants stayed put.
A non-competition clause each signed in their lease made some stick more than others.
Here’s the deal: Gelato Vera sells coffee and Italian ice cream; The Greek Tycoon deals in the obvious cuisine, served too often with raucous karaoke and late-night visions of Jimmy Durante in Spandex; Shakespeare’s keeps the lager on tap, along with all that fine British chuck -- unique in that it actually has flavor; Su Mei owns Saffron’s, where she’s all about Thai chicken; and, directly next door, what the Captain’s Galley’s got is fish. And ain’t nobody buying fish.
The lunchtime crowd is all about chicken.
Victor don’t understand. “My fish is fucking good. They don’t wanna buy fish, fuck ‘em.” So he put a big sign on the sidewalk and started grilling chicken.
There’s an ordinance preventing big signs from being put on the sidewalk, so Su Mei called the city.
That’s when the real row began.
Now, twenty-three parking spaces is all there is on the one little stretch spanning from Washington to Winder streets. All city metered. All monitored fiercely by the city’s parking police. All but one, on the corner across from Gelato Vera’s.
People circle the block two, three, four times and more in effort to land a slip to moor their 'mobiles, rarely holding out for that most coveted of slots.
Meanwhile, Victor’s got a plan: “I’m gonna rent a bus, pick up 50 homeless people and give ‘em a dollar bill each,” he says. “Lunchtime, I’m gonna line ‘em up at Saffron’s and have ‘em go in and ask for change for a dollar.”
Thinking is, that way he’ll sell him some chicken.
But Victor’s a good guy and he doesn’t rent the bus. I hold out for the free space on the corner, but by the time I find it open, now some five years later, a meter marks its spot and the Captain’s Galley is gone. An expanded Saffron Chicken in its stead.
HAIR OF THE DOG
COLUMN 2, MID-80s
Wake up later than most I do, often later than I like. Stems from chasing bells all night. Bells are to cabbies what a case to a dick is. It's the stuff dreams are made of; the stuff with which you pay your bills. On this particular afternoon I awoke atop a dingy, little stool in a sleazy, little dump hosting a single fern, a tired juke box, and the woozy miasma of inebriate jubilee: Happy Hour to most, cheap drinks to me.
The young thing hovering next to me at the bar called herself Melodious Flank. She called herself an actress.
"My condolences," I said.
Conversation dwindled after that so, spying a vacant seat, I landed myself across the table from Tito. Tito was from Trinidad. The bulk of his head consisted of face. In it a single eye looked me over good. Where the other had been only a cloth patch could be found.
"I know you," Tito decided at length, this putting him at ease. Apparently he recognized my mug from the author's photograph never taken for the jacket of my unpublished collection of short stories, Wives Tales and Pigs Feet.
"I'm a guerilla," he said.
A diminutive fellow suffering from chronic rubicund nose swaggered passed and into the restroom. Tito watched him closely, waited until the door was closed before answering as to what he was doing in town.
"Me and some Australians come to vacation from the war."
"What war?"
"Salvador," he said quietly.
"Oh," I replied intelligently.
"People I kill," he said. "They try to kill me, I kill them first. I make more money than them. You write. Me, I am a mercenary."
I tried to spot Melodious.
"You look my nose," demanded Tito. He thumped his nose, the bridge of which was noticeably absent, separated from his brow by a deep, ghoulish crevice. "They shoot out my eyeball. They try to assassinate me by sneaking up on the side I don't see them. But I am smarter. I cut out the bridge of my nose so I do see both sides with just one eye!"
"Umm," I said.
Tito took a swift swig from the flask he'd snuck in. Racket in the bathroom stirred the table. "Mr. Boggins!" came the bathroom racket. "Mr. Boggins!" it came.
The bathroom in this joint consists of nothing more than a tight vestibule with a shallow porcelain troft able to accommodate one individual at best. Rubicund Nose was the only one in there.
"I've got you now, Mr. Boggins!"
"You I like," said Tito. "You want to kill someone, you come to me."
Melodious Flank stood by the door. "Cab!" she yelled to a passing taxi.
"Right here!" I leapt from my chair, not one to miss a cue. "I'll take you home, Melodious."
"Aren't you a writer?" she asked.
I smiled and took the actress, Melodious Flank, home.
OLD THAT WAY
There he was, the old man this day, with only one eye and smothered in bulky layers of woolen blankets that pressed his bent frame deep between the wheels of his chair and seemed to smell of wet mule. The old man was always stuck in that chair of his, brooding in silence, periodically punctuated by a wheeze or shiver as all the tubes and wires that protruded from his nose and limbs and other places I’m not so clear on went about gurgling and dripping and clacking and monitoring what little activity there was left to monitor inside him. When he wasn’t in that chair, he could always be found in the bed with white railings. The railings prevented him from rolling over and falling off, should he ever muster enough strength to do so. He didn’t do much of anything, the old man. He didn’t watch TV. Even Dozer likes to watch TV, and he’s just a dog.
Dozer was a present to me from Dad when I turned four, when he still lived with Mom and me. In dog-years I think Dozer is now old enough to be a great-great-grandpa just like the old man. But the old man wasn’t so great. He didn’t fetch. He didn’t play. He was just old that way.
It used to be that being old, old like the old man was old, meant that no matter how impetuous or cantankerous or bumbling or befuddled you actually were, you had at least managed to get old and were to be respected for doing so. You’d made it this far, by God, and were entitled to unrelenting gobs of love and selfless understanding from even the most recent and unfamiliar additions to the family brood. For all those decades of hardship and tribulations and sacrifices you’d been subject, you were to be regarded with courtesy and patience, even if there at the Thanksgiving Day table you should one day find yourself simultaneously prodding cranberries on your plate and breaking wind in your seat.
It’s true.
“Gramps!” came the admonishing, if any at all. “Get a hold of yourself.”
Nowadays Gramps would be committed for senility to a convalescent home with a room the size of a walk-in closet. There he could whittle away the hours with a triple-E shoe box, sifting through artifacts of a lifetime kept cozily within.
“Go on, Boiler. Go inside.” Mom nudged me into the room containing the old man and myriad machines that pumped slothful existence into him.
I didn’t want to go and made a raucous at informing her so, after which I conceded and obeyed. I did a lot of that at my age, conceding and obeying. Not that I minded much, though. Both Mom and Dad had agreed to lunch together in an attempt to solve the mystery as to why they were so often compelled to shout hideous insults at one another so often when they lived under the same roof. Because of some difficulty in locating a proper sitter, I was to spend the day with the old man while they went out and tried their darndest not to shout hideous insults at one another under somebody else’s roof.
Mom and Dad call me Boiler.
Most sitters call me Trouble-With-A-Capital-T!
Fidgeting before the wheezing old man staring morosely into the grey morning drizzle drooling blurry curiosities on the opposite side of the windowpane as hospital apparatus continued their gasping, sucking, pumping, prolonging of reluctant life, I stood. He probably didn’t even know there was somebody else in the room with him. Maybe I could watch some TV, I’m thinking, when suddenly I see for the very first time the old man’s eye fill with dim recognition. He jabbed a jagged digit my way and beckoned me forward.
Fear is often your driving factor as a kid, a-scared of the unknown, nestled precariously on a perch next to fearlessness of that which grown-ups implore you to know good-and-well to fear—grown-ups by this time having determined that the only thing to fear is everything that is known. Known, that is, to kill you when clinically induced in gratuitous amounts ample enough to keel over a gross of pink-eyed mice; or known to cause unfathomable anguish when the money you are producing can no longer keep up with the money that you owe; known that every scrupulously laid plan, every spoken word, every action that you make can most assuredly be counteracted with even more meticulously thought-out plans, and more intimidating, caustic words, and greater, more powerful actions capable of wielding such thorough devastation to the fiber of your existence as to cause you unrelenting misery for the remainder of your life; known for certain that sooner or later you are going to die, or worse, exist plugged into a machine and be rendered incapable of dying.
It’s the simple fear of the unknown that got me. So again, for the umpteenth time this day so far, I conceded and obeyed.
[ MORE ]
WINTER'S SON
Chicago night, 1968. A vacant car idles under the heavy cloak of winter, dark clouds the color of bruises. The car's driver-side door is open. Otis Redding faint on the radio.
Nearby a thin young mother stands bent before the city's icy shore. Her husband, my father, fled into the sleeting dark only hours before. She releases the spent cigarette from her hand, lets it drop into the mottled snow where it sizzles and dies. She looks my way, an urgent afterthought. "Stephen," she confesses, voice wet with the name of my stillborn twin brother.
I shudder. It's cold.
Eyes wide sober now, my mother presses toward the frigid wind as a worn Marine who'll raise me darts from the shadows and prevents her willful fall.
Forty-four years later I stand at the edge of a similar abyss, praying my brother will catch me.
I shudder. It's cold.
HAIR OF THE DOG
COLUMN 1, MID-80s
I only drink alone or with someone. And I like a bar I can smell from the street. It's the foul effluvium of liquor that gets me. It tugs me through doors both far and near and envelopes me peaceably. I am welcomed in such pubs because, known as it is that I'm a man who fully appreciates a drink no less than a drink likes to be drunk, I prefer to drink a drink that lets me know immediately and unabashedly that I am in fact drinking. That's when I tip well.
It's also widely known I'm a writer, a terminal affliction which stems from my childhood.
I blame my parents.
It is the cause of this column to shed light on the faceless features of folk who often populate the cozy sanctions of such environs, those who often in secret nestle the ambition of signing a verbal lease that'll render them residence in a habitat of words forged on a plot of page, in a cozy community of tales and premise. Characters they are, in search of a story. They're out there. When they're not, they're usually at my place, committed to the yarn in which they've been woven.
Catching them's the hard thing. They're much more than a name, but spice and life, insight and abnormality--the stuff you want to write about and read. But you've got to know where to find 'em. They don't want to know about some frisky-fern lounge trimmed in light oak and narcissists. No, they want gaudy, poorly lit, smoke-loaded rooms with a jukebox and cheap booze that leaves you pickin' grit from your teeth. A joint where nobody wants to know about Long Island Ice Tea and if you ask for one, you're served instead a frosty exit. A place with character and characters.
One such place exists on Adams Avenue, the Ken Club. There the beer is cold and talk negotiable. That's where I ran into Yellow Man and Mable, neither of which knew of my work or that I was a famous writer. Nobody seems to. Yellow Man was sickly looking, with pallid skin stretched over bony carriage that jutted out here and there and made rigid lumps in a silk shirt that appeared to have been applied with a brush. His hair was long and grungy. He was explaining to the barkeep that the Coors Beer legend above the till was eating him.
Mable was arguing with the wall to her right. Apparently it was confused about Mable's purse and whether or not it indeed belonged to her. Mable was set on straightening the wall out.
"That's your stuff," said Mable to the wall. She slapped a pudgy clump of fingers on her purse. "This is my stuff."
The Coors legend illuminated the first and second letters slowly, C after which would come O followed in rapid succession by ORS.
"It's e-e-a-ating me," said Yellow Man of the Coors sign. "Turn it a-a-w-fff," he said.
I perched myself between these two and told the barkeep to give me one of whatever Yellow Man was drinking. The wall must have made its move. Mable back-handed it.
"The yello-w-w-w," Yellow Man then said, fearful eyes cast unwaveringly at the legend, "is e-e-a-ating me!"
Coors was spelled out in yellow. It was the same dull yellow that small lamps in the ceiling there are cast. These lamps are positioned intermittently, perhaps one above every other stool. One such lamp was directly over Yellow Man. Feeling obliged to warn him, I tapped him on the shoulder.
Mable had had enough of the wall antagonizing her. She grabbed her stuff and left.
It was then I noticed Yellow Man wasn't looking too well. He peered up at the lamp for an uncomfortable while. Then he made a noise no man wants to hear twice. The sort of noise that turns heads and bellies.
He moaned, "No..."
Yellow Man slid from his stool and began to shrivel--I swear he actually shriveled. He pulled at his hair and proceeded to wind his spindly self like a coil around the base of the stool.
"The yellow is e-e-a-ating me..." again he confessed.
Yellow Man was expelled from the bar. But by then it was too late. Already had I concluded that I liked it there. Already had I concluded that I'd be back.
And I will.
DOG DAY
I killed a puppy in front of the kids.
Am driving home from CostCo, doing about 35 up the hill because the road is winding and there's a grade school at the top.
It's a narrow road without curbs, meager single-level homes built in the late-50s strung snug one against the other. No fences. No curbs. The providence of families who won't or can't afford such greatly prized amenities found farther up the hill.
The thump didn't even feel like an impact. More of a sensation, really. In the rearview I saw the dog lying in the street.
The lady in the car behind me braked just before rolling over it. I clutched into reverse, got back fast to the scene, some four or five car lengths behind me, and got out.
The lady in the car behind me stood behind her open driver's side door, hand to mouth, crying. She was blonde. She was horrified. She made eye contact with me only once then started heaving. The drama in front of her car's bumper was still playing out, spasmatic and gruesome and unpleasant to watch, unfolding in colors too vivid to bear.
I fucking love dogs.
Have seen a lot of souls surrender, too. Many because they brought it upon themselves, making it a bit easier to rationalize yourself into a knot of studied, distant, near-clinical observation. Others not. But when a happy little puppy darts out in front of your car at an angle you simply do not see it coming from, and you kill it . . .
You kill a happy, helpless little puppy dog. In front of children.
I looked up to see a young girl stride over and swoop up the convulsing, bleeding wreckage of the puppy and disappear quietly around the corner of the house. It’s pretty much then that I registered the younger brother and sisters idling silently beside the road, impassive. Rather freakishly nonplussed, in fact.
The blonde woman in the car behind me made noises meaning something I couldn’t figure and drove off. The car behind her did a u-turn and rolled away back down the hill.
I didn’t know what to do so I tried to talk to the children, but they didn’t seem to understand English. Of course, I couldn’t remember the crucial words I needed to express to them in Spanish.
So I went around the corner of the house.
There stood the older girl and the boy. The puppy laid in some long grass crawling up against the house. I say the only thing I could muster, “How bad?”
And the teenage girl says, “He’s dying.”
The little boy says nothing. Meanwhile the puppy continues to bleed out all over the place.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
And you know what this teenage girl does? She turns to face me fully, not a shred of judgment or despair on her face, and says, “It’s not your fault. He should not have been in the street.”
Then she and the boy turn their backs and return their full attention to the dying puppy.
Several long, unforgivable beats later, I head home, pour a drink, then get pissed at the unconscionable mentality of people who let their puppies run unleashed.
Not being my fault doesn’t make me feel better.
BROOD BEHIND THE WHEEL
"Nurse!" shouted Archimedes Brood at the top of his lungs. "Nurse!" he shouted. "I'm shivering, I tell ya. Gimme a blanket!"
No response.
"Typical," he scoffed. "Nobody cares. S'pose I have to get up and get it myself."
Archimedes threw back his sheet and sat up with a huff. He set his bald feet carefully upon the floor, fearing sudden movement might jar the wheeled gurney out from under him.
"I can't see anything, either," he grumbled.
True, the room was dimly lit and his mind still foggy from anaesthesia. The combination could make getting to the door an effort. Archimedes stood fully, wobbling, unsteady. Something spilled. "Nurse..." he warbled, growing nauseous. The world then listed and Archimedes fell forward. "Nurse!"
A door handle stopped him. He clung to it a while, cool, smooth aluminum pressing against his cheek. "Those sons-of- bitches," Archimedes said to the handle, biting back bile. "Uncaring bastards," he added. "I'm not a well man, goddammit. You hear me? I'm sick!"
Archimedes leant ear for an answer and held his breath. Quiet. He heard footsteps approach. A doctor being paged. A moment longer and they were gone. Archimedes cursed and pushed at the door. His foot found something slick and slid through it. Lurching awkwardly, Archimedes started to fall, arms flailing wide. He yelped and found the handle again, held onto it. Something soft landed on the floor with a smack. There was dripping, too dark to make out.
"Wha-the hell is that?"
Regaining equilibrium, Archimedes shifted his weight. He pressed again against the door, shoving on through and into the hospital corridor.
[ MORE ]
ABOUT
Caucus de Bourbon is a storyteller, former columnist and comic book writer. A passionate biographer, it has authored titles on subjects as diverse as Muhammad Ali and Yogi Berra to David Lynch and Ross Perot. It lives in Imperial Beach, California, with five cats named Jerome. Its name is properly pronounced KAH-kus day-bur-BONE. Its pronoun is it.