Note: I sort of hit a wall on this story, as to how to get it from start to resolution. I sort of feel like there isn't much movement forward here.
G-Man
In the fire, flickers of his past danced between logs in
mixed, confused dramas just the same as they did in G-Man’s corrupted mind. At
the bottom was his earliest memory, back in the days when he was just Gordy LaHarpe,
son of Gene and the late Vicki.
He was six, maybe seven. Fat. Always fat. Cheeks bursting
out with both halves of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich jammed behind a big,
gapping grin. King Kong Bundy was
on the tube squashing some no-name slub on the Sunday morning wrestles. He
loved the wrestles. Bundy was fat like Gordy, but no one messed with him.
Someday, no one would mess with Gordy either.
“Kick him, Bundy!” He shouted at the old black-and-white
screen. Behind him Gene LaHarpe broke a snore, and Gordy covered his mouth.
Gene LaHarpe still wore the grease-and-soot stained uniform
from his Saturday night overtime shift down at the forge of Lincoln Hardware.
His big steel-toe boots were hiked up on the footstool in front of his chair. They
were black from the forge and chipped in spots where sparks jumped from the
forge for a hot kiss with the leather.
“Gordy?” The word came out slow like Gene’s tongue weighed a
ton. “I’ll be God damned. What have I told you about waking me in my chair.”
“Sorry, sir.” Gordy spit out between the remaining hunks of
sandwich in his mouth. “I got excited about Bundy, that’s all.”
“Bundy? Not that sissy wrestles,” Gene sat up, squinting at
the screen, while holding his hand to his head. “That shit ain’t real. I’ve
told you to stop watchin’ that a hundert times.”
A smarter boy would have left it at that, knowing the temper
of Gene LaHarpe when he woke from a short slumber. Even then Gordy wasn’t
smart. He wasn’t as dumb as he’d soon be, but he still wasn’t a sharp tool.
“It’s real, you just don’t understand it,” he said. “Look at
Bundy, he just kicked that slub in the head, and he’s hurt real bad. Now he’s
going squash him! Get him Bundy! When I get big, I’ll be just like Bundy. I’ll
smash everyone. You’ll see.”
“I’ll see!” Gene shot up from the chair. He stood well over
six feet and towered over his son. The same son who cost him his Vicki during a
violent birth. “What the hell does that mean? You threatening me, boy.”
“No, I was just…” Gordy couldn’t get the words through the
chunky peanut butter. Before he could start again, the size 13 boot of his
father came down across his forehead. Somewhere a bell was ringing, and he
actually turned his head to see if Bundy had finished off the slub. The images
on the screen were all scrambled and a rainbow of colors spiraled out like a
pinwheel. Before he could call out the colors like at school, something thumped
against the back of his head, chewed up sandwiched splattered on the floor
below him before everything went dark.
G-Man took a drag from his cigarette. He’d seen that vision
in the flames a thousand times. A few logs up a better memory played out, and
just like the first one, this vision was just for him and no one else.
Gene LaHarpe stood before the huge furnace door at the
forge. Inside, the flames danced high, burning at an ungodly temperature to
melt steel. He was feeding the flames during another late night shift alone.
The factory was loud still, and that made it easy for G-Man – now a burly
teenager with a noticeable dent in his forehead and a grudge against dear old
daddy.
“It’ was so easy,” G-Man smiled.
Gene, as always, was so focused on his work that he never
noticed his son Gordy sneak up from behind with a steel pipe in his hand.
Gene’s skull squashed under the pipe. That one hit was all it really took. Gene
stumbled forward toward the open furnace door, and G-Man shoved him all the way
through. The screams were horrendous, but G-Man could not take his eyes away
from the melting form of his father. He closed the furnace door before it was
over, but from then on he was fascinated by the dance of flames.
“See papa, I got big like Bundy, and no one could mess with
me. Especially you.”
There were half dozen logs on the fire with other memories,
but they were scrambled just like the wrestles after his dad had kicked him.
Besides, those were the two that he could always see.
An engine broke the quiet behind the shack, and he rose from
one of the lawn chairs he had set up. The chairs were stolen from various decks
around Lincoln. When times are tough, fingers get sticky. That’s what Killer
Joe said, and G-Man liked that idea. He liked Joe well enough to put up with
his mouth. He chose another log from the stack he had made for the night and
tossed it on the fire.
“Time for a new memory.” He smiled, his tongue sticking out
between the gaps between his front two teeth.
WILD BILLY
“What a shithole.” Billy said. Before him was the humble
abode of the eloquent Killer Joe and the massive G-Man. The two-story country
house had what looked to be the original wood as siding. Most of the exterior
was exposed gray, but some spots had patches of old paint. Some white. Some
green. The shingles were also wood, but stripped in spots. Across the left side,
a blue tarp covered a caved in portion of the roof. The upstairs windows were
busted out with plywood slats filling the gaps. The first floor windows were
intact, each with four panes. The front door was red, likely stolen from some
lumberyard.
“We’re working on it,” Joe said, holding Billy’s duffle bag
from the pokey. “It’s not the penthouse, but it’s not the outhouse either.”
A shiver worked its way up Billy’s spine. His uncle had
called his guestroom the penthouse. Billy had spent two summers at his uncle’s
farm the next county over when he was 10 and 11. He arrived the first day, his
fat uncle wearing bibs and a gray T-shirt. The first two weeks had been about
work, cleaning up pig shit and lifting bales of hay. He hated the work, but by
the end of the third week, he would have cleaned every pen with his tongue
instead of the real reason his uncle had asked his sister for her troublesome son
for the summer.
It was a damp morning, that’s all he could remember. He
entered the kitchen, taking off his muck boots. His uncle sat at the table, a
stack of bills sitting on the table.
“Listen, bub,” His uncle opened a beer bottle using the edge
of the table. “I’ve got a friend waiting for you up in the penthouse.”
“What for?”
Before he could flinch, his uncle’s hand was around his
throat. He could smell the pig shit under the man’s fingernails. Quickly the
world at the edge of his vision started to turn dark.
“Bub, you mine while you under my roof. Now, when I let you
go, you best head up to the penthouse and see my friend. He’ll tell you what to
do, and you’ll do it. Do you understand me?”
He remembered standing at the bottom of the rickety stairs
with the loose banister, the smell of cigarette smoke wafting down from above,
and it seemed real dark. He remembered screaming and crying and hating and
hating and hating.
“Let’s do this.”
“What?”
“Come on, man. G-Man has the fire going. Let’s go.”
Billy slipped a cigarette between his lips, noticing for the
first time the plume of smoke rising from behind the shack.
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