Spirit in the Night: Third Installment

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.

Spirit in the Night: Second installment

Note: Here's the next couple sections of this tale. I got bogged down a while there and wasn't going through this as quickly as I originally hoped. As Snake knows now, I ended up putting song on CDs I made him. I have a thought with what I want to do with collection where I turned each song into a long form story like this. That will be time consuming, but I'll post things as I do. My thought is to have all stories be from Lincoln. Maybe we'll even meet some nice folks. :) This particular story has a ways to go before it's finished. Hopefully it holds attention. 

KILLER JOE

Sometime after Billy had been put away, Joe lost his nerve. Joe chewed on a toothpick thinking about this while listening to Billy wretch in the ditch. The man had no stomach for cars. Billy could kill a man – likely was planning to kill the fag at the gas station – but put him in a car for an hour and his face turned green like a sissy at the sight of blood.

Joe couldn’t kill no one. Not even a nigger, if he was being honest with himself. Maybe when he was younger, he could have stabbed a darkie, but probably not. His nerve had always been more talk than action.

When Billy left, the quiet life had suited Joe just fine. He liked working a steady job. He liked going out with Davy and G-Man at night. He even liked the cold, shithole shack that he and G-Man shared. Getting real wild just wasn’t in him anymore. Now, that ain’t saying that his mouth still didn’t get him in a brawl or two, but hell, G-Man scared most guys in Lincoln away. Joe knew G-Man was all right as long as you kept an eye on the matches. Joe learned that pretty quick when the two started to live together about nine months earlier. The big man had started a fire in his own room, setting his mattress ablaze. If Joe hadn’t come home to douse the flames with a fire extinguisher, the whole damn shack would have went up.

Since then, Joe doled out matches and liters sparingly, and he made sure that G-Man got to set big fires every now and then in the woods away from the shack. That usually suited the big man enough. All the same, the last year in Lincoln had been good. Joe wanted it to stay that way. He and G-Man were putting money away to fix up the homestead a bit, maybe even get a dog or two. G-Man loved a good dog. Things were good.

The puking in the ditch turned to spitting. A clear dark sky with just a hint of purple at the edges set the scene around the car, and Joe considered firing up the engine and leaving Billy behind.

“Coward,” Joe snickered. “I ain’t no coward.”

The car door opened and Billy dropped into the seat.  Billy’s dark bangs littered his forehead, covering his eyes. His purple lips that covered two rows of perfect teeth save one gap from a tooth the queer had knocked out the night Billy got sent away were pursed tight shut. Joe wondered how a man with such boyish looks fared in the pokey for a year. He didn’t think he should ask.

“Are you ready?” Joe asked instead. Billy’s eyes were closed, contemplating the question like it was the big teaser on one of those quiz shows on the tube.

“Just sit here a minute.”

Joe turned his attention to the dark, barren fields surrounding the car. The emptiness made him sad. The reap was over this fall, meaning the next few months would be lean for G-Man and him till planting came around. Sometimes they could get jobs hauling feed for farmers, but really only Joe could do that. G-Man didn’t have a license. The big man could drive, but no farmer would take the insurance risk.

Plus, Billy was going to be around now. He’d never kept a job in his life, so that was likely another mouth that Joe would have to find a way to feed, and he didn’t think he was up for the ways Billy came upon money. Those ways usually ended with trouble, sometimes a lot of trouble.

“I can see the hamster wheel turning, Joey boy,” Billy was smiling, the gap at the bottom clear. The worst of his carsickness was past.

“Just thinking about money, Billy.”

“Money?”

“Yeah, me and G-Man have some put away, and…”

“And your worrying that Ole Wild Billy is going to use it up?”

“No, it ain’t that.”

“It ain’t.”

“Well, we could probably get you in some place this spring.”

“Place?”

“A farm, Billy. G-Man and me do farm work for our dough.”

“Hmmph.” Billy lit a cigarette. “Work.”

“A little work ain’t so bad. Do you have a better plan?”

“A plan? Oh yeah, I got a plan. Why don’t you forget about money, and let me worry about planning things. Now, get this bitch going, I got business in Lincoln.”

Joe slipped the gear and turned on the headlamps. I was afraid you got a plan. He pushed down on the accelerator hard, splaying out gravel behind them.

CRAZY JANEY

The fluorescent lights hummed and glowed yellow above Aisle 4 in Oly’s Station. The old man behind the counter had a radio playing the broadcast of Lincoln’s varsity football game. The announcers were loud and overreacted to everything, but all that Janey heard was the hum of the light and the way it bore into her thoughts. In front of her three boxes caught her attention. One was white. One blue. One pink. One guaranteed an answer in 10 minutes, the next 15, the last didn’t give a time, but promised never to fail. The only real difference was the price.

“What ya see, baby!” Davy called from the freezers in the back of the store. “Better grab two big bags of those corn chips for G-Man. That guy loves those.”

“I know, you’ve told me three times already,” Janey yelled back. She put her hand to her belly knowing that wouldn’t tell her anything. Gods, if only it would. The old man behind the desk was staring at her, and she was sure that he shook his head at her. She stuck out her tongue in response. The man’s eyes went wide and looked away.

The freezer doors opened in the back and bottles rattled as Davy made his selections. Janey shifted her attention to the opposite side of aisle and the row of brightly colored chips. She grabbed a few without looking as Davy entered from the other end. He had one case of beer under his armpit and one in each hand.

“Babe?”

“What?”

“The corn chips?”

“Jesus.” Janey looked around, and found the corn chips pulled them off the shelf, holding two of them up for Davy to verify her selection. He put that dumb grin on his face that she loved at first but now hated. He had thinning blonde hair and a flat face. He was no prize, but he had a nice face. Not like her daddy. Her daddy’s face had always scowled, even on those late nights after a good day at the track when the lights were out and the apartment quiet. Janey shuddered.

“Hey, you got enough hands to grab a couple bottles back there? I can’t handle anymore.”

“How you paying for all this?”

“Pay day, babe! Plus, I save more since you don’t let me go out so much anymore!” He kissed her on the cheek on his way to the counter. She walked around to the next aisle, picked up a bottle of whisky, vodka and scotch. She hadn’t drank enough to know much about it, so she just grabbed the cheapest.  At the counter, the man eyed her as she dropped the chips and alcohol on the counter.

“She’s not old enough for some of this.” The man said as he put the bottles into brown bags.

“She’s ain’t buyin,” Davy shot the man a wink. “I won’t let my girl have none. I promise.” Davy winked again.

“Christ.” Jany picked up the chips and bags of booze, as Davy dropped a wad of bills on the counter. She was already in the car by the time Davy was fumbling with the front door. He put the beer in the trunk before sitting down in the passenger’s seat.

“I can’t walk by that last rack without getting the chills,” Davy said as she turned the engine.

“Not this again.”

“I was sitting right here in Joe’s car. I could see it all. It was like a slow motion movie,” he went on as she started to back away. He reached to floor and picked up the bottle of scotch, untwisting the top. “Billy pulled that boy right over the counter, and then boom, the boy hits him in the chin with that bat. Billy goes sprawling backward, knocking over that rack right there. Twinkees and snack cakes went flying everywhere.”

“I’ve heard this all before,” Janey said. Davy took a long swallow from the bottle and then held it toward her. Janey frown as she pulled out onto the interstate.

“I know you have, but it was really something. Here, have a drink of this. It’ll relax you a bit.”

“So tell me the best part,” Janey said.

“What do mean?”

“Come on, you being my knight in shinin’ armor and all. Spill it.”

“You ain’t gotta be like that.”

“What’d you do when you heard the sirens and realized that poor boy had pushed the alarm. Hunh? What you’d do then?”

“I wasn’t about to go away like Billy. Is that what you want?”

“Hey, if you’re going to tell the story, be sure to add that you got out of that car and ran like a school girl from the boogeyman. What a stud I have.”

“Hey, nothing wrong with running when things go south.”

“Yeah,” she snatched the bottle from him. She pulled a long gulp from it before handing it back. Her hand went to her stomach as the scotch burned her throat and kept going all the way down. She brushed a tear away from her left eye, mad that she broke her mascara rule. “Just don’t go making a habit of it.” 

Spirit in the Night - Part 1

Note: My initial plan was to make this the next CD project, but a few things derailed that idea. One was that the CD I have this song on has a scratch or something on this song only. Two, I think I am going to steer away from Bruce on the CDs I'll make Snake soon after realizing I had a few other groups and songs that I'll try to pitch to him. The last being is that the story isn't going to stretch far enough for an entire CD project, and I don't want have to bend this tale to other songs and lyrics. 

With all that being said, this first part is long as you'll see. I pulled the names for characters out of the song. My inspiration being the way the "Spirits in the Night" can pull people together and what can happen when all these elements are together. The song itself seems to have something nefarious going on underneath or on the edges. ANYWAYS, with no further ado, here it is. 

SPIRIT IN THE NIGHT

PART 1

Link to song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIVbLsU9IR8

Lyric – “Stand up right now and let it shoot through you”

G-Man

G-Man stacked the logs in a pyramid and fantasized about how they would burn. First, they’d smoke a lot cause the damn logs were wet. Like the big idiot he was, G-Man had left the logs outside the night before as a late fall storm rumbled through Lincoln. Being a firebug didn’t exempt G-Man from being D-U-M-B, as Killer Joe would spell out for him several times a day.

“No matter anyhow,” G-Man said to no one as he finished with the logs.  “I’ll get this damn thing burnin’ before Joe and Wild Billy get back from da pokey. I’ll do it dammit. It’ll be cracklin’ and sizzlin’ and every one will see it glow.”

G-Man struck a match from between his fingers and lit the cigarette that had been dangling between his thick lips. He cast an imposing figure as the sun set on sleepy little Lincoln. He wore nothing but a pair of bibs over his huge frame. G-Man stood just a few ticks below seven feet and weighed over four hundred pounds. His pale skin glowed in the sunset beneath the denim bibs and his gray eyes were hidden below a yellow and green soybean cap. He and Killer Joe were hired hands on a half dozen farms around Lincoln. G-Man couldn’t think for himself, at least not since his daddy had punted him in the head as a baby, so Joe set up the work. If somebody pointed the job out to him, he could do all right. Most folks just wanted him to lift things anyhow.

“These logs will burn,” he repeated scratching at his stomach below the bibs. “Oh, they’ll glow.”

He loved watching them glow knowing that he’d released the hidden power within the logs. He was the master of that power. Excitement tingled up his legs and settled in his groin. This would be a small blaze. Not like some of the others he’d done. This was just for his friends. Wild Billy. He was getting out of the pokey. Killer Joe. Hazy Davy. He was a guy they drank with. Good fella, and Davy had a girl named Janey. Joe called her Crazy Janey because she thought she’d get Davy to give up the hooch and settle down.

G-Man liked Janey. He’d like to touch her. He’d like to rub on her. He lit a wad of paper and thrust it into the logs, and adjusted his growing erection before squeezing out some liter fluid onto the logs and the paper. The flames shot out, and the logs started to smoke. Soon they would glow. He thought of Janey’s paper white skin and the glow.

“I said that damn thing would burn.” He said, then masturbated before the smoking fire behind his and Joe’s shack north of Lincoln.

CRAZY JANEY

“You promised no fuckin’ drinking!” Janey screamed over her shoulder before slamming the door behind her. She reached behind her and slid the chain into the door to the apartment above Bowers Pharmacy in downtown Lincoln. Inside, her mother sat still wearing her pajamas underneath a pink bathrobe. She had curlers in her hair and a smoke resting between her fingers. Some smut show glowed on the television set.

“Oh, shit,” her mother sat up on the coach. “You two ain’t at it again. I can’t hear my program with all that racket.”

“Jesus Christ, mom,” Janey put her back against the door. She felt the knob turn and Davy’s weight press against the door. The chain kept it from opening all the way.

“Janey let me in.” Davy’s voice rose from the other side. “I didn’t know Billy was getting out before…”

“Will you two shut up, I can’t hear my program.” Her mother stood up flicking her smoke across the room toward Janey’s feet.

Janey rolled her eyes and stamped out the remaining orange glow at the end of the butt. She looked down at her uniform – an ugly orange and cream outfit that she hated. That was fine because she hated the waitress gig at Marty’s, but the job had opened the previous fall after that geeky kid stabbed her predecessor. She unbuttoned the top and slipped out of her white sneakers.

“Take another valium,” Janey said leaving the door. The apartment had two rooms. One was the large living room with an attached kitchen, and the other was her bedroom. There was a bathroom off of the bedroom. The apartment was Janeys. Her mother had moved in a year earlier after leaving her father.

Outside, Davy started knocking and said something that was muffled as Janey shut the bathroom door and dropped on the stool. She wiped at her eyes, hearing the front door open. Her damn mother let him in to hear the stupid TV. On the counter, lipstick and bottles of nail polish were strewn. She pulled the tie from her black hair that had red and purple streaks. His boots thumped on the floor of her room.

“Come on, Janey,” Davy whispered through the door. “It’s just this once. Billy’s coming home.”

“There’s always one more time and one more person coming to town,” Julia couldn’t believe she was sniffling.  Her black skirt from the night before was wadded on the floor below the toilet.  Two blouses were draped from the hook on the back of the door.  One was a leopard print. The other was a blue and purple ditty that Davy said made her look like a peacock. Well, her feathers were up now. She rose from the stool with her fists clenched.

“You wanna drink,” Janey mumbled. “I’ll show you drinkin.” 

She washed her face before applying eyeliner. Her rule – when the eyeliner went on, no more tears.

WILD BILLY

He counted the telephone poles alongside Highway 15 like he had counted days behind bars with his teeth clenched and his knuckles itching. There were more poles than the 445 days he spent behind bars, but they passed much faster even after he warned Joe not to drive too fast. He never handled motion all that well, but it was worse after not being in a car for over a year.

But, now he couldn’t wait to get to Lincoln. Not because he missed that piss hole. No, he wanted to ride in tonight and ride out in the morning. He had quick business in Lincoln. The first was a few drinks. He hadn’t had true hooch since he went away. Just a couple hard ones to take the edge off.

After that, he had business with Bruce Page…

“Shit, it’ll be good to have you back,” Joe said. He had some shitty seed dealer cap on turned backward with a toothpick stuck behind his ear. Underneath was a smooth dome. Killer Joe, as he liked people calling him, was a skinhead with all the prerequisite hates and swastika tattoos to prove membership. Billy didn’t go for all that crap, but got along with Joe all the same. “G-Man will have a fire going. Davy will bring the booze. It’ll be tight.”

“You’re still runnin’ with that giant dumbfuck? I can’t believe he ain’t set himself on fire yet.”

“He’s dumb,” Joe said with one hand on the wheel while using the other to take the toothpick from behind his ear to between his lips. “But he knows fire. And he’s good to have around in a brawl.”

“Hmmph.” Billy didn’t give a shit about G-Man, or Joe for that matter. Joe was just his tool for getting him back to Lincoln and back to Bruce Page.

“Hey, Davy has a broad now,” Joe said. “She’s real fine. Real young too. I think we get her drinkin, she’ll be up for some fun.”

That did make Billy smile. It had been a long time since he had any of that too. Of course, he wasn’t going to share it with those bastards. Maybe he’d slit Davy’s throat and Joe’s too for that matter. He wouldn’t go after G-Man. That’s a fight he wouldn’t win, but he could probably keep the big man away by promising a piece of the action after.

“She’s tasty, huh?”

“Oh, real fine. I don’t think she’d fight at all. Fuck, Davy will probably be passed out early enough for us to work on her by midnight, and she’ll need someone cause I doubt Davy will be able to get it up.”

“Hmmph.” Billy went back to counting the telephone poles thinking about this girl and booze, but before long his mind was back on Bruce Page. That fucker. The girl and the booze didn’t matter, but he did have a date with the guy that put him away.

“Hey, Billy,” Joe said. It must not have been the first time, because Joe was looking hard over at him.

“What?”

“You know, we can have a good time tonight. Just like the old times. We can get fucked and screw around with the girl. We don’t need any other trouble, right?”

Billy smiled.

“Right.”

HAZY DAVY

Davy dropped down on the couch next to Janey’s mother, took out the flask for a swig and offered it to her. Janey was still in her room getting ready for the night. Peg grabbed the flask with one hand and rested the other on his thigh. He brushed it away.

Peg snorted and brought the flask to her mouth. Inside was vodka – no aftertaste, no smell. Janey wanted more than anything for him to stop drinking, and part of him wanted to do just that for her. They had met at Marty’s six months earlier, and he had been sure to stop there every day since either for breakfast before his shift at Lincoln Manufacturing or afterward for supper. The factory was the first job he had kept for more that a few months in his life.

She was the reason. He no longer drank all night, every night. He didn’t drink a beer when he rolled out of bed, and didn’t sneak his first sips until his shift was over in the afternoon. But he still needed the flask, and he emptied it every afternoon before dinner. After that it was a six-pack of beer, twelve if Janey had a late shift at the restaurant.

It was one of the late shifts that had got him into the trouble with Peg. He had drank too much at the bar, got into a brawl and then stumbled to Janey’s apartment instead of heading to his place on Horizon Avenue just off Thunder Lane. He didn’t have a license, and he hated walking down Thunder Lane alone at night. That street was old, and full of old spirits as his drunk of a father used to say. That had stuck with Davy, and maybe it was the booze, but he felt those spirits every time he was on the street.

That night, two months earlier, he was drunk and disappointed that he’d let Janey down by getting into such a state. But mostly he was scared. As stupid as it was for a 30-year old man, he was scared to walk home. Sometimes on dark nights, he thought he heard voices from that street calling him to visit. He didn’t want to, but the call was very strong.

So he stumbled to the apartment above the pharmacy, and she was there. Not Janey. She was working till close at the diner. Peg. Wearing not much more than a bathrobe, smelling of cigarettes and the cheap wine that comes out of boxes. He was weak, and she was lonely. The rest of the story is old and familiar.

“You still think about it,” Peg said. “Was it that good?” Peg smiled taking out another cigarette.

“Shut up woman, “ Davy shot back. “I don’t even remember it much. I hate lying to her. That’s all.”

“Just like you lie to her about this?” Peg picked up the flask again and took another drink to drive home the point.

“I’m trying.” Davy said, taking the flask and draining the last half of it in one gulp. It didn’t even burn anymore going down. He had started drinking hard alcohol with his dad when he was 14. The beer had started years earlier.

“You men are all the same, always trying, never doing,” Peg said. “Janey’s daddy was the same. His was the gambling though, not the drinking so much. Always going to the casinos that Frankie. Lost all our money. Every dime.”

“I’m not Janey’s daddy,” Davy said. “I’m stopping. I just can’t do it all at once.”

“Hmmph,” Peg picked the remote up to turn the TV’s volume up again. “Well I ain’t going to tell her, if that’s what you’re worried about. She’s my angel, and I’d never hurt her like that. She’s all I got.”

Peg clicked the volume button and the characters on the screen were screaming at one another. They sat there silently for a few minutes before Janey came out in her black skirt and the peacock blouse. She had too much makeup on and her hair was teased about to look like she hadn’t spent the last 20 minutes on it. That was her look though. She’s so young, Davy thought. Barely out of high school really.

“What you two been talking about,” She put her hands on her hips, and something in her eyes sparkled, and that sparkle screamed of trouble. Part of Davy wanted to skip the get together with the boys because of it. He felt in that instant the same way he felt about Thunder Lane. Something scared him in the look.

“Nothing, sweetie,” Peg said. “Don’t you look just beautiful?”

BRUCE PAGE

In the dream, the phone rang dozens of times before he picked it up. After about the fifteenth ring, it sounded more like an alarm clock’s high-pitched beep. His hand went to the receiver just as it had two days earlier as he tended the station, and his voice followed.

“Oly’s full service, Bruce speaking.”

“Two days fucker.” The voice at the other end said.

“What’s that?” Bruce asked, knowing full well who was on the other end of the line.

“Two days, and we’ll settle this once and for all.”

“Yeah, well. You just try. This time I’ll be ready. I’m warning you. No surprising me at work with your buddies. I’ll be ready.”

“Two days.” The other end of line went dead, but the dull dial tone was replaced by the sound of an alarm clock. This, of course, was just a dream. He woke.

Above him, the paint was peeling on the ceiling of his trailer. He had sweated through his wife-beater and his drawers were wet. He rolled to the side of the bed and reached for the wood cane propped against the wall. He used the cane to stand and support his right leg. That was all thanks to Wild Billy Hawthorne. Wild Billy had cut a nine-inch ridge with a bowie knife from Bruce’s hip down his thigh the last time the two had met. The wound left Bruce’s right leg nearly useless, making him a 25-year-old, 120-pound cripple.

Growing up, Bruce had been the target of bullies. He was short, skinny and had a nasally voice that other boys love to mimic. It only got worse when he turned 14, and everyone in the class seemed to pick up on the fact that Bruce Page was a homosexual, just like the one’s on TV. Hell, Bruce thought some of his classmates knew he was gay before he even knew he was gay.

Well, that just made the beatings come more often and more vicious from the homophobic population of Lincoln High School. Even the girls got involved a couple times. The worst came from Wild Billy Hawthorne, a boy a few years older than Bruce who had lived but a few houses down for all of Bruce’s young life.

When he graduated, Bruce took the job at Oly’s Station on the west side of Lincoln in hopes of saving enough money to get out Lincoln as soon as possible. The popular notion around town was that he gave blowjobs to truckers in the bathroom for extra cash. The truth was that he wasn’t smart enough for college, and his parents sure weren’t going to help out their queer son when they had the perfect cheerleader daughter to dote on. He’d yet to get on his knees for one trucker, although he wondered if there was an actual market for such talents.

So, he rented a trailer on Grease Lake from the owner of Oly’s and started to put away cash. Of course, that was until Wild Billy and his boys showed up drunk one night last year at the station. After that particular incident, his extra dough was lost on medical and lawyer bills. The only relief being that Wild Billy had gone away.

But, he was coming back, as the phone call two days earlier had confirmed.

Bruce walked out of the trailer and around to the back to take a piss in the lake. The sun was setting on the outskirts of Lincoln, and he knew that meant his time was running low. Sometime tonight Wild Billy was going to come. He shook his cock twice before turning away from the dirty water and limping back up to his lime green trailer. On the backside, someone had spray painted the word “QUEER” in uneven black letters. That was as imaginative as the artists got in Lincoln.

Bruce didn’t care, especially tonight. He went around to the front. His rusted out Lumina was parked in front. He supposed he could drive away. He had enough money to get out of the state and probably stay a night or two at a cheap hotel, but then what.

No, Bruce Page was tired of being bullied, tired of being beat. He opened the door to the trailer and walked inside passing the kitchen counter on his way back to the bed. He needed a little more rest, and he knew it’d be late before they would arrive. They’d drink awhile to get their courage up and then come looking for him. They’d probably try the station first. The manager was working tonight. Bruce sat back down on the bed, propped the cane against the wall, and dropped his head down on his pillow. Soon he was snoring lightly and in his dream the phone was ringing again.

On the kitchen counter next to the sink, an old revolver rested. Next to it were six bronze bullets, a flashlight and a pack of smokes.