Authors: Tom Franklin
He took a tentative step as a gust of hot, acrid wind swirled. He bent to roll up his pants leg, then disappeared as the light faded. When he appeared again, he held the Mississippi Gambler. “It’s real sharp, Slick. Ain’t no sawing involved. Just a quick cut and it’s all over.”
Glen moved back, swinging his mace, the shaker rattling beside him, the tank humming beneath his sneakers. He stepped onto the metal gridwork of a catwalk and the ground appeared for a moment, far below, then vanished. When the light came again Snakebite loomed in front of him. Glen yelled and the mace flew wildly to the right.
Snakebite struck him in the chest with a giant forearm that sent Glen skidding across the catwalk, his cap fluttering away. He tried to rise, but the truck driver pinned him flat on his belly, his right arm twisted behind him.
“Hold your breath, Slick,” Snakebite grunted.
Glen fisted his left hand and felt hot grit. With his teeth clenched, he slung it over his shoulder.
Snakebite yelled, let him go. Glen rolled and saw the big man staggering backward, clawing at his eyes.
There was only the one ladder down, and Snakebite had it blocked, so Glen began to circle the shaker. A glint of something white bounced off the rail by his hand—the Mississippi Gambler—and Snakebite charged, the trench knife gleaming.
Glen dodged and, running for the ladder, got pegged in the shoulder by the shaker. He spun, grabbing his arm, and fell, kicking at Snakebite, who swiped halfheartedly with the trench knife. Glen scrabbled to his feet and feinted, but the truck driver moved with him, and Glen was cornered. Snakebite, pulsing in and out of the darkness, lifted his giant hand as if someone had just introduced them.
Glen slowly raised his right hand, balled in a fist. “How could you cut off her brother’s toes?” he yelled.
“Whose brother?” Snakebite grabbed Glen’s hand and forced the pinky out. “Don’t watch,” he said.
Glen closed his eyes, expecting the cut to be ice-cold at first.
But the howl in the air was not, he thought, coming from him. He opened one eye and put his fist (pinky intact) down. The truck driver, clutching his tiny head with both hands, still had the trench knife hooked to his fingers. Behind him, Jalalieh was backing away with an iron pipe in her fist. Snakebite dropped the trench knife and fell to his knees. He rolled on his side and curled into a ball.
Glen picked up the knife.
“Come on,” Jalalieh hissed. “Roy’s on his way!”
They hurried across the tanks and the spotlights flared, as if the Black Beauty were about to lift off into the night. Glen knew Roy had flipped the master breaker below. Jalalieh took his arm and they crept to the rail. Roy was pulling himself up, sweaty, scowling, a snub-nosed pistol in one hand. Glen began to kick grit off the edge to slow him.
“Got-damn it!” Roy yelled, and a bullet sang straight up into the night, a foot from Glen’s chin.
“Jesus!” He pushed Jalalieh behind him and they stumbled back. Glen remembered a proposal he’d sent Ernie and Dwight a year ago—one that called for another access way to the top, stairs or a caged elevator.
A long minute passed before Roy finally hoisted himself onto the tanks, grit glittering on his cheeks and forehead. Breathing hard, he transferred the pistol to the hand holding the rail and with the other removed his fedora and dusted himself off. He took a cigar from his shirt pocket and chomped on it but didn’t try lighting it.
“Girl,” he said to Jalalieh. “Get over here.”
She left Glen, careful of the shaker, more careful of Roy.
“Get your ass down there and fill up that got-damn hopper,” he ordered. “It’s fixing to run out.”
She shot Glen a look he couldn’t identify, then disappeared down the ladder.
“Snakebite!” Roy yelled.
The big driver stirred, grit pouring off him. He rubbed the back of his head with one hand and his eyes with the other. There was blood on his collar and fingers. He blinked at Roy.
“Shit, baby,” Roy laughed, “we wear hard hats in the plant for a reason, right, Glen?”
Snakebite, his eyes lowered, limped across the catwalk and stuffed himself into the ladder cage.
Holding the pistol loosely at his side, Roy watched Glen. “You want something done right,” he muttered, “don’t send no stupid-ass Texas redneck.” He slipped the gun into his pants pocket and turned, walked toward the ladder. “I’m gonna garnish your salary,” he called over his shoulder, “till your debt’s paid off.”
Glen followed him, his heart rattling in his chest. When he lifted his hand to cover his eyes, he saw the trench knife.
Roy was crossing the catwalk, holding the rails on either side, when Glen lunged and hit him in the back of the neck with the brass knuckles. The cigar shot from his mouth and Roy was surprisingly easy—a hand on his belt, one on his collar—to offset and shove over the rail. Falling, Roy opened his mouth but no sound came out. With eyes that looked incredibly hurt, he dropped, arms wheeling, legs running. He was screaming now, shrinking, turning an awkward somersault. Glen looked away before he hit the concrete.
On the ground, Glen could
feel the tanks vibrating in his legs. He took deep breaths, hugging himself, and felt better. His heart was still there, hanging on, antique maybe, shot full of holes and eroded nearly to nothing, but still, by God, pumping. He went to a line of breakers and flipped one. The spotlights died.
He heard footsteps, and Jalalieh ran past him in the dark. Glen reached for her but she was gone. He followed. They found Snakebite standing by Roy’s body. He’d thrown a tarp over him.
“He slipped,” Glen said.
“Right.” Jalalieh ran her brown eyes over Glen, then looked up into the darkness. “He must’ve.”
“God almighty,” Snakebite said. He rubbed his nose. For a moment Glen thought the truck driver was crying, but it was just grit in his eyes.
Jalalieh knelt and pulled back the tarp. There was blood. Without flinching, she went through Roy’s pockets and found his gun, the keys to his car, his roll of money and his ledger. She stood, and Glen and Snakebite followed her into the control room. Inside, she studied the ledger. Looking over her shoulder, Glen saw an almost illegible list that must have been Roy’s grit clients. He strained to read them but Jalalieh flipped to a list of names and numbers. Glen’s own debt, he noticed, was tiny in comparison to Snakebite’s, and to Jalalieh’s.
Jalalieh’s?
Glen frowned. “What about your little brother?”
“What brother?” She licked her thumb and began counting the money. Behind her, Snakebite sat heavily in a chair.
“So, wait,” Glen said, “you were paying Roy by, by—”
“By fucking, Glen.” She glanced at him. “You want it spelled out, little man? He was fucking you one way and me another
way. And the truth is, you were getting the better deal.”
“What now?” Snakebite asked, his voice like gravel.
“You deliver, same as always,” Jalalieh said. “And keep quiet. Nothing’s changed.”
With the truck driver gone, Glen grew suddenly nauseated. He crossed the room and took a hard hat from the rack and filled it with a colorless liquid. He closed his eyes and breathed through his nose.
At the control panel, Jalalieh tapped the dryer’s temperature gauge. “How hot does this thing get?”
Glen had cold sweats. “Thousand degrees Fahrenheit,” he said, which didn’t seem nearly enough to warm him.
She smiled. “Shut the plant down.”
Half an hour later things
were very quiet, only the fiddling of crickets from nearby trees. Jalalieh came in the loader. Glen looked away while she scooped Roy, tarp and all, off the ground.
He walked through the plant, pausing to kick open a cutoff valve that released a hissing cloud of steam. At the dryer, Jalalieh lowered the bucket and dumped Roy’s body. One of his shoes had come off. In heavy gloves, Glen turned the wheel that opened the furnace door. It took them both to lift the fat man and, squinting against the heat, to cram him into the chamber. Jalalieh pitched his fedora in, then sent Glen after the shoe. By the time they’d closed the door and locked the wheel, they could see through the thick yellowed porthole that Roy’s clothes and hair had caught fire.
Jalalieh followed Glen into the control room and watched him press buttons and adjust dials, the plant puffing and groaning as it stirred to life. She said she wanted to ignite the dryer, and when
it came time to set the temperature she cranked the knob into the red. For an hour they sat quietly, passing Glen’s flask back and forth, while Roy burned in the dryer, while his charred bones were pounded to dust in the crusher and dumped into the shaker, which clattered madly, sifting the remains of Roy Jones through the screens and sending him through various chutes and depositing the tiny flecks, according to size, into the storage tanks.
Two weeks later Jalalieh called
the plant, collect. She told Glen that Ernie and Dwight were slated for another surprise inspection on September fifth. She gave him the phone numbers of two reliable hookers. Then she read him her account number in the bank where Glen was to deposit her cut. She wouldn’t give her location, but said she lived alone, in a cabin, and there was snow. That she jogged every day up mountains, through tall trees. That she’d taken a part-time job at a logging plant, for the fun of it, driving a front-end loader. “Only here they call it a skidder,” she told him.
“Ja—” he said, but she’d hung up.
He replaced the phone and leaned back in his chair. Propped his feet on his desk. It was time to throw himself head, body and heart into work. He speed-dialed Snakebite on the cellular phone and told him to be at the plant by eight. Tonight would be busy. You’d think, from all the sandblasting grit they were selling, that the entire hull of the world was caked and corroded with rust, barnacles and scum, and that somebody, somewhere, was finally cleaning things up.
For Uncle D, Robert, Steve, Jim, Simon and Bryan
Welcome to Shubuta
.
Look around. Abandoned tractors eaten up with kudzu. Flat land, high distorted sun, dry fields. Along the road in a dirt yard walleyed children hunch over a circle of dusty marbles, still as a picture. A black lady carrying an empty laundry basket walks against traffic. There are shiny cars and houses on blocks. I lift another can from the ice and pop the tab and let the beer run down my throat.
This is what I think: Dying in a hospital can go to hell. You’ve got to cash in violently, with some honor—rescue a baby from railroad tracks, get done in yourself by the train. Smother a hand grenade in combat and save eleven buddies, something like that. The pistol to the head’s an option, but you need a creative twist.
Take Willie Howe. He was a black watermelon farmer who lived right here in Shubuta, Mississippi. He stood thirty ripe melons along his fence and duct-taped reading glasses to each one and shot them through the left lenses. Then he went in the house, crawled under the bed and shot himself in the right lens. The newspaper said his brother-in-law was a white optometrist in Mobile. His name’s Ted. When I went to see him, Ted told me Willie’s suicide was the best advertisement he’d ever had. Looking into my eyes with a penlight, Ted told me Willie did it because his old lady left him.
“Love goes bad all over,” Ted said.
I’ve been spending nights driving
by my ex-girlfriend’s with my lights off. Her name’s Diane; we both live over near Mobile. When she didn’t come back to her house last night, I went to price pistols at Wal-Mart, but instead had my biorhythms read by a machine in the mall. It cost a quarter, and you put your finger in this little hole. My creativity reading was off the scale on the high side. Sex and romance were way, way down. Health, drive, endurance, finance, friendship and luck were medium to low. I photocopied the printout at a gas station and slipped it under her door.
I thought about my uncle Dock, who’s dying. How love went bad for him after he’d been married only two months. This was in the 1940s, and now, fifty years later, he won’t talk about it unless he’s drunk. If you mention his marriage when he’s sober, he changes the subject. He’ll tell you about his younger sister, Nannie-Rae. “Oh, she had herself a way with birds,” he’ll say. “She could whistle any birdsong there was, and goddamn jaybirds used to perch on her finger and circle around her head. Damnedest thing. Even chickens’d follow her.”
Or he might tell about his daddy’s—my granddaddy’s— drinking. How the old man was drunk one afternoon and forgot to pick up Dock and Nannie-Rae from school. Dock was eight, Nannie-Rae six. Walking the dirt road home, they held hands and sang songs. It was three miles, dry weather. High up a hawk circled, and as the children walked, eyeing the bird, a log truck barreled around the curve, enclosing them in dust. Dock yelled and yanked Nannie-Rae out of the road, hurting her arm. She was crying, holding her shoulder, when she stepped defiantly back into the road.
The second log truck dragged her two hundred feet. Dock ran after, dropping his schoolbooks. He ran past her shoes, scraps of her dress. By the time he got to the truck the driver had his coat spread over her. It was a black man and he caught Dock and said, “Don’t look, don’t look.”