You can try to make the best of it. That's all you can do, so you do it, but it feels hollow and empty. It makes you depressed. It makes you want to leave.
The evenings are the hardest. There is no boss to appease. There is no structure. The evenings and the weekends make you feel lost and scared. Alone. You grit your teeth, and wait for the time to pass. Wait for the alarm that tells you it is time to be productive.
There is nothing worse than being unproductive. It is the cardinal sin which no one wants to face. No one even talks about being unproductive, even if they clearly accomplish nothing. Appearances are important. Never forget that.
If you do a good enough job of being productive in your work hours and invisible in your free-time, there can be a kind of freedom, but it is fleeting. Still, it is the closest you will ever get.
Enjoy it.
It feels like a future dystopia yet simultaneously now... Oh, wait.
ReplyDeleteYep. I feel it.
DeletePart one
ReplyDelete________
“[call] Well who's that writin'?
[response] John the Revelator” — Blind Willie Johnson
Latrant, a man from the north, knew that fear makes men cruel. And that beauty and cruelty, valves both arterial and veinic, vie at the ventricular core of the world.
And though he was lean as a wolverine starved and shaped by austerity and weathered like a twisted tamarack lone upon a tundra, and though he had brought down many animals for food and skins, cruelty was not an indulgence to ever tempt him.
He played fair, though he played hard.
On the road behind, he’d ditched his ride, an eighties Mercury passed down from his long-dead father and driven into oblivion. Transmission now gutted like a rattler shedding its spine. Last song fading on his halfbusted radio Blind Willie Johnson’s gravel and ice “John the Revelator.” He’d walked a good fifteen highway miles since, that old blues song conferring inside him like a memory of dread, until this inconvenience store hove into view above the prairie buffalograss and patched asphalt.
He nodded at the clerk behind the counter, a dark-skinned young woman who had barely cleared her teens. The bell like a harbinger still echoed in the otherwise empty store. Her return nod was almost imperceptible, but he perceived it. Along with some inkling of distant kinship.
Three men came in like envoys of chaos while Latrant stood contemplating snacks. He knew immediately their number by their disparate voices—the touchpaper toll of one used to deference, the flinty cringe of his sidekick, and the wavering, sexless pitch of a witless powder keg—and that they would need to be defused.
Cold electricity ran in quick pulses along his skin, and he slowed his heart and breathing, let his knees sag, and enshadowed himself in the narrow aisle, eyes fixed on the convex mirror up front in the corner.
One of the men, the leader, said, “Check the aisles.”
The sidekicks wouldn’t see Latrant; practice and blood ties had bestowed upon him uncanny stealth.
In the terrain map of his head, he assigned names to their voices, to their essences. Groan: the short bald leader whose cockiness belied his meager talents. Muskrat: needy watery-eyed enabler. Deejay: soft of mind and body but endlessly cruel.
“Well, fellas, seems we lucked out,” the one named Muskrat said upon spotting the clerk. “So which are you, honey, a dirty illegal or a filthy squaw?”
The woman didn’t make eye contact or reply and stared only at the counter. Latrant watched the mirror in silence.
Deejay’s interest was piqued. “Answer my friend, cunt.”
“Hey, hey, come now, my brothers,” said Groan, all false bonhomie. “We come in good faith and only wanna rob the place and not cause unnecessary pain. But first, would you be so kind as to indulge my rude but curious friends and divulge your ancestry, princess?”
She whispered a word—“Nuwuvi”—that Latrant knew meant Southern Paiute.
“Speak up. And speak American,” said Deejay, the pale rindlike orifice on his dusty ocher face tightening in a strange moue.
Muskrat laughed but Groan didn’t.
“Paiute,” she said more clearly.
“Don’t sound too American to me,” said Muskrat.
“Shut up,” said Groan. “Pocahontas ain’t American either, but at least we know she ain’t no beaner. Might even earn her a stay. Up to a point, anyways.”
Deejay perked up at this. “So once we git the cash, we git to have some fun?”
“Sure. Violate but don’t mutilate. Not this one. I almost like her.” He stared at her, not blinking. She didn’t look away. “Hand over the contents of that cash drawer, missy. Then come around this side of the counter. Hands where I can see ’em.”
Part two
Delete________
Latrant knew the men had to be armed, yet they hadn’t so much as given her a glimpse of barrel or blade, such was their hubris, for which they’d pay.
“It’s your lucky day, girl.” Groan’s genial demeanor dropped away. “Gonna taste you some white meat at last. And since we’re probably gonna let you live, you can tell your fellow savages how you done fucked some real men on this blessed day of our good lord.”
Listening and watching, Latrant thought how each of these men had a void in his head that clashed and clamored like a ceaseless howl. Each an echoing vacancy, self-loathing disguised as righteous entitlement. Mediocrity cosplaying masculinity. He wondered how such creatures were made. What dark unruly compensations vied inside their quaking spirits.
The woman did as she was told, passing a wad of bills and moving slowly, hands raised. Latrant was not often impressed by people, but he was impressed by her; she knew beyond a shadow he was here in the store, but not once had she flicked her glance in his direction or otherwise risked his detection.
Any exchange of words would give them the advantage, so he decided on action only. And once he’d decided on action, it would happen with swift brutality.
Groan had his back to him, and Latrant would have taken him first regardless. Stepping from the shadows, he grabbed the man’s slippery forehead and pulled back while simultaneously using great force to draw his nine-inch Bowie knife across and deep into his neck, feeling the tendons and vessels part, the trachea and esophagus rupture, the volcanic heat of the blood spout. All this before the other two had barely registered it. The woman noticed, though, and reached behind the counter and produced a classic wooden Louisville Slugger and cracked Deejay across the temple while Latrant let his victim fall and first circled then stutter-stabbed the wide-eyed, slackjawed Muskrat in a quick frenzy of kidney punctures, pirouetting him for the coup de grâce, a merciful upthrust below his sternum and into his tiny shriveled heart. Latrant stood back and let the woman finish her work on Deejay, the bat scoring home run after home run on his uncomprehending boxlike head until it lay in globs of quivering viscera, bone, and the negligible cupful of brains it had once contained.
Latrant grabbed a set of keys from one of the men’s belt loops and turned to the woman, his hand outstretched.
“The bat. Call the authorities in fifteen minutes. Come up with a plausible story that won’t implicate you. I know it was self-defense, but, they were white and… well, you know the rest. Invent a description for me and the truck I’m taking. Put it all on them. And me. I was never here, but a ghost was.” He paused and they kept eye contact. “You did good.”
“You did too.”
Nonetheless, he was sorry for the necessity of his actions and he left the store bloodsoaked and ashenfaced with the set of keys and recognized that the old Ford pickup resting forlorn in the dust of the parking lot like an old man awaiting gentle death would be his home now indefinitely and he drove onto the highway unremarked and diminutive, centered within the immense and shifting wheel of the encompassing horizon.
The many unnumbered, those who seem to matter not, might prove to be our ransom, the price paid to balance the ledger.
“[call] Tell me what's John writin'?
[response] Ask the Revelator.”
I was riveted to this, D. Beautiful in its horror and viscera.
DeleteSame for me. I also find this piece really interesting because it’s so different from your usual style. I want to make a bunch of comparisons, but that’s bullshit. But I do hear Cormac McCarthy. I heard some of Leland weirdly enough. It’s way more direct and linear than I’m used to reading from you. There’s a western noir than I’m used to reading from you. There’s a western war quality to it too. quality to it too. I really like it. Visceral. Righteous. JD
DeleteI don’t know why my sentence has got chopped up, but you’re an editor you should be able to figure it out 😂
DeleteHa ha, I sometimes think this blog is haunted, with all these glitches! Maybe it's Leland? That would be a good haunting. And thanks, brother, I appreciate your thoughts. Western noir, for sure, and yes, it's a more linear story than usual, less impressionistic. And righteous anger too, you got it. (McCarthy definitely got in my head; I've been rereading his Border Trilogy, and it's fire.)
DeleteThe longer the meeting had gone on, the more he wanted off the phone, the more he shook his head and groaned and wished he’d never made the call; now fingers had been pointed, new candidates appointed, recriminations were incriminated without discrimination or examination…
ReplyDelete“Barry!”
His eyes snapped open. “Wha…”
“You were sleep-rapping again.”
“Damn. Really?” He had to stop listening to Kendrick Lamar before bed. He grinned at the cute irritation on her face. “Was I any good?”
“Actually, yes. Which is even more annoying. Will you call the damn meeting already so I can get some sleep?”
He agreed, but the idea of getting into it with everyone scared the pants off him. He’d had his separate calls. With MVP of course. Some of the others. But official business had to happen. It would be ugly, but hard decisions had to be made with all members in attendance. So he lay there for a while, postponing the inevitable, and when he heard his lovely wife’s breathing settle into sleep, he got up and made the arrangements.
Only moments after that, his private line rang. It was Dubya. The forty-third president rarely initiated calls with him, so he pressed accept.
“George. What are you doing up?”
There was a long pause, during which Forty-four swore he could hear the breeze across the Texas plain. And then a soft snuffling. “Are you crying? Do you need a minute?”
“No. I’m fine. I just. Well, I’m not so fine. I feel like I let you all down.”
“You vowed to stay out of the endorsing business, that was okay. You do you. But calling to congratulate him was a little over the line.”
“Yeah. I know. But, see…” He let out a deep sigh. “There’s a reason for that. I made a bargain with…my higher power…to do penance to relieve me of the burden of my sins.”
Forty-four scratched the back of his neck. “And congratulating him was part of it?”
“Among…other things. I’m not supposed to be talking about it, but—see, there’s a project I’ll be working on, and I might need some help.” Forty-four was about to ask if he wanted it to be an agenda item for the meeting when Forty-three said, “I’m probably gonna need a good lawyer.”
“Of course. Happy to help.” The snuffling started again. “Maybe make a nice cup of tea and try to get some rest, okay?”
The call ended. Forty-three smelled the brimstone, creeping in with the night breeze on the patio. “Oh, don’t even with me,” he told Lucifer. “Like I’m not doing enough for you already.”
Delete“That’s fine.” Lucifer perched on an empty chair. “Talk to whomever you wish. As long as you keep your part of the bargain.”
“I’m doing it, all right? I already got plans for my little sanctuary city on the back forty, but this new assignment isn’t sitting well with me.”
“Do you want your beloved state of Texas to become Ground Zero for mass deportations?”
“Of course not. I just don’t think your plan for me to burn down the camp he wants ICE to build is the way to do it. It’s too obvious. Could you maybe send down a convenient bolt of lightning?”
“I’m the devil, not a meteorologist. What else would you suggest?”
“Well, that was kind of my backup plan. The make-it-look-like-an-act-of-nature sort of thing.”
Lucifer stroked his beard. “I hear tell you have friends with a time machine.”
Forty-three’s jaw dropped. Nobody was supposed to know about Dr. Franklin’s visit to Washington. “Did Bill Clinton tell you that? He is such a blabbermouth.”
“But so entertaining. He’s one of my favorites. So here’s what you do. Have them take you back to a certain inflexion point and convince certain people to make a different choice that results in a different outcome.”
“That’s not awfully specific.”
“Also not my job. But I see you’re foundering so I’ll throw you a bone. There was one man in your Senate who could have insured that a certain party would never be allowed to run for a second term.”
“McConnell. The second impeachment,” Forty-three said. “I just gotta convince him and few of his friends to change their vote.”
Lucifer smirked. “So it is true that you’re smarter than you look.”
Before Forty-three could respond, the cloven-hoofed little man was gone, leaving that godawful stench in his wake. He sat for a while, ruminating. Acting on this idea would mean going against his vow not to get involved in the affairs of other presidents. But it could prevent a lot of dark things from happening. He could be a hero. People would stop calling him a war criminal. Maybe they’d even buy more of his paintings.
A coyote howled in the distance. It sounded crazy. Find Ben Franklin to take him back in time so he could change the course of history. But it was worth a shot.
"Maybe they’d even buy more of his paintings." Ha ha, that made me laugh. Weird that we had similar ideas yet came at them in such different ways. Even down to the coyote (Latin name Canis latrans... the source of my character's name).
Deleterecriminations were incriminated without discrimination or examination… —- this was so pleasant to me that I repeated it over and over again in my head before I read on - that really happens to me. This is a really interesting piece with a lot of depth too. There is humor for sure but it’s that dark edge…
DeleteIt makes me wonder what the series would be like if it was even darker. Like the darkness from Anthrobus’s piece. Or even darker. KetchumXMcarthy - but it would be scary to go there. JD
I ache to go darker. Watch this space.
DeleteStruggling not to pack my car and head south, South of the border.
ReplyDelete