Read Online A Choir of Ill Children by Tom Piccirilli - Free Book Online Page B

beard and considers. His contemplation takes him farther inside the almost empty pitcher of beer, and the bartender gives him a new mug and charges him for the busted one. The boys attend.
    “She say she miss Harry?”
    “No, keeps telling me she don’t ever want to see him again.”
    “Well, now, that ain’t a good sign, I’m thinking.”
    “Not what I was hoping for, truth be known,” Verbal says.
    “Yup.”
    They, like most men, are men of myth and mediocrity. They carry with them the fables of their commonplace grandfathers and the blood of warriors and drunks. Over the years, they’ve had to scrape their broken fathers off the back porch and put cold compresses on their mothers’ busted noses. They’ve awoken in unmopped kitchen corners beneath the scowls of wives who’ve been failed early by life. This is their heritage and legacy.
    “Her kids move in with you too?”
    “All three of them.”
    “Three! Goddamn!”
    “Jesus, take me now, Lord.”
    “Verbal, you is a doomed man. No wonder that Harry ain’t looking so glum anymore these days.”
    “The lucky bastard.”
    “She at least still good in bed?”
    “No more,” Verbal tells them. “Like lying a’top a fresh-caught bass.”
    “Deeder done that once. On accident, a’course. Don’t look at me like that. Me and him, we was—”
    “It’s only been three weeks, you’d think she coulda kept warm a little longer than that!”
    “It’s a sad affair, I’d say.”
    “The hell was you and Deeder doing with them poor bass again?”
    “I done told you it was an accident.”
    “But the game warden said—”
    “Who’s word you gonna take? His or mine? Wasn’t rightly doing nothing to them, mind you, it’s jest that when Deeder—”
    “Let’s have another drink.”
    “And fill ’em to the top this time.”
    Mugs high, the dim light catching in the speckled foam. “To Deeder and his Large Mouth Bass, may God forgive his profane soul.”
    The women circle and dance alone or in pairs to the lonely strains of guitars and banjos on the jukebox. Even if they listen to the men, which they never do, they wouldn’t hear them. A man’s dread is not their dread. There are dilemmas that cannot be equated or solved. His pitiful cares and frets have no real standing in comparison, they think. Look at the stretch marks and wrinkling upper lip and loosening chin, the ass that hasn’t quite dropped.
    Smoke is so heavy in the room that you could get stuck in it like barbed wire.
    Women coil in close, being eyed, laughing too loudly but without any humor, attracting the wrong kind of attention which is how it ought to be. Everybody will get laid tonight or wind up dying out in the parking lot, caught in the torrents and foul eddies that have come to claim us all. It’s the way it’s always been, but now it’s even worse.
    The animal heads stare down and we look back wondering which of us is the most neglected.
    My mother is still here in some fashion, weaving across the wet, stained floor. I don’t know whether she’s alive or dead, but her presence remains behind. She knows their speech and fears, and she smells no different than any of them. I can feel her nearby, breezing past, just out of eyeshot. The cloying stink of sweet perfume, sweat, and recklessness. She was sitting on the stool that I’m sitting on right now when she met my father, or so I’ve heard.
    “You wanna dance, Verbal?” the woman asks. She’s creeping toward forty but keeps her voice toddler-pitched, swinging her hips out far enough to clip hedges, and knowing this is a ceremony that cannot ever vary.
    Verbal Raynes, master of his own fate, at least as courageous as his cousins and uncles, drags his fingernails across the bar top, digging out thin curling gouts of shellac. He tells her, “Why the goddamn not? Let’s go, honey!”
    Across the haze sits Betty Lynn, her baby fat almost gone since I last saw her. Her stomach is flat, and at nineteen the harsh eons of