landscape passes, two skinny silhouettes fighting with sling blades. My clothes and hair are damp from sweat, the four o’clock sun in my eyes. I come to a rest area and rumble off the road. Not a fancy place like on the interstate, this one just pine trees and a few rotten picnic tables, a garbage can. Kudzu climbs the trees, scales power poles, goes wire to wire.
My cigarette package, empty, flutters to the ground. A far-off buzzard doing wide, slow turns above the tree line is the only thing moving. Uncle Dock calls them country airplanes, the way they glide. He says your average buzzard can see for miles. I suppose that old fellow up there can see me clear as day, though he’s just a speck from here.
If he’s looking now, he sees me close my eyes. I’m imagining a young, healthy Uncle Dock going after the man who stole his wife. I make the thief a curly-headed half-breed from Shubuta, a high yellow giant with a hearty laugh. He is handy with knives. I pour straight rotgut down Uncle Dock for three days, bring him red-eyed and reckless to Shubuta with nothing to lose. My family knows how to work a shotgun. How to drink. Uncle Dock, reeling, pictures thick fingers undoing his wife’s dress and a bone-hard torso pressing her against a door, a big red tongue in her ear as the half-breed seizes her by her wet crotch with one hand and lifts her off the floor. Her high heel shoes fall off: thump , the left one, thump , the right.
Hearing her cries, Uncle Dock stops in the hall. Clutches his face. Turns the shotgun.
I open the van’s back door from the inside.
An old yellow dog with gnats around his ears regards me from one of the picnic tables. His tongue hangs out, and he doesn’t even blink when I approach, cradling a watermelon. I flick open my pocketknife and cut into the rind. The dog’s ears twitch, his drab tail wags. I reach over and shake the scruff of his neck.
“Half for you, half for me,” I say.
Without rising he sticks his head down in the bowl of melon and laps.
I think of Diane. Her sweet salty pussy. When I called her on the phone last week she said, “Somebody who goes on and on about suicide used to be considered not likely to carry out.”
I said, “What do you mean used to be?”
She said, “Now psychology’s changed and you’re actually dangerous.”
Dangerous . It gave me a spiny thrill, being dangerous.
The evening air, crowded with bats and the bugs the bats eat.
At Uncle Dock’s house, while the dog gnaws chicken bones from the floor next to the refrigerator, the room grows dark around us. I sit with my elbows on the table and light a cigarette. Blow a thin jet of smoke toward the window. Watch cloudy shapes rise and swirl in the Mason jar before me. The love potion. It looks like plain river water, infested with bacteria and sludge from chemical plants. Sewage. I unscrew the lid and there’s a muddy grating, the dog growling softly over his bones.
When I finish my cigarette, I’ll go into the bedroom and sit in Uncle Dock’s chair and press my forehead against the windowpane and spy next door: they’ll be sitting there smoking pot, fat lady and hippie, in love. They’ll toast and toke and giggle, and I’ll giggle too, and so will Uncle Dock when I sneak into the intensive care unit later and tell him how, after getting sky-high, they stumbled into her house and the lights snapped on, how I slipped outside and climbed the fence between the properties and crept through the high weeds of her yard. How I placed my eye against the window and saw they’d taken the missionary position, Patsy Cline crackling on the turntable. How a dusty gray moth flaring in my eyes causes me to tumble backwards into the reefer plants, how I just lie there with my eyes closed and the earth spinning, and the lovers come to the window with a bedsheet covering their bodies, and they frown and whisper, but instead of the fat lady I imagine it’s Diane I see, and my heart lurches murderously,
My cigarette package, empty, flutters to the ground. A far-off buzzard doing wide, slow turns above the tree line is the only thing moving. Uncle Dock calls them country airplanes, the way they glide. He says your average buzzard can see for miles. I suppose that old fellow up there can see me clear as day, though he’s just a speck from here.
If he’s looking now, he sees me close my eyes. I’m imagining a young, healthy Uncle Dock going after the man who stole his wife. I make the thief a curly-headed half-breed from Shubuta, a high yellow giant with a hearty laugh. He is handy with knives. I pour straight rotgut down Uncle Dock for three days, bring him red-eyed and reckless to Shubuta with nothing to lose. My family knows how to work a shotgun. How to drink. Uncle Dock, reeling, pictures thick fingers undoing his wife’s dress and a bone-hard torso pressing her against a door, a big red tongue in her ear as the half-breed seizes her by her wet crotch with one hand and lifts her off the floor. Her high heel shoes fall off: thump , the left one, thump , the right.
Hearing her cries, Uncle Dock stops in the hall. Clutches his face. Turns the shotgun.
I open the van’s back door from the inside.
An old yellow dog with gnats around his ears regards me from one of the picnic tables. His tongue hangs out, and he doesn’t even blink when I approach, cradling a watermelon. I flick open my pocketknife and cut into the rind. The dog’s ears twitch, his drab tail wags. I reach over and shake the scruff of his neck.
“Half for you, half for me,” I say.
Without rising he sticks his head down in the bowl of melon and laps.
I think of Diane. Her sweet salty pussy. When I called her on the phone last week she said, “Somebody who goes on and on about suicide used to be considered not likely to carry out.”
I said, “What do you mean used to be?”
She said, “Now psychology’s changed and you’re actually dangerous.”
Dangerous . It gave me a spiny thrill, being dangerous.
The evening air, crowded with bats and the bugs the bats eat.
At Uncle Dock’s house, while the dog gnaws chicken bones from the floor next to the refrigerator, the room grows dark around us. I sit with my elbows on the table and light a cigarette. Blow a thin jet of smoke toward the window. Watch cloudy shapes rise and swirl in the Mason jar before me. The love potion. It looks like plain river water, infested with bacteria and sludge from chemical plants. Sewage. I unscrew the lid and there’s a muddy grating, the dog growling softly over his bones.
When I finish my cigarette, I’ll go into the bedroom and sit in Uncle Dock’s chair and press my forehead against the windowpane and spy next door: they’ll be sitting there smoking pot, fat lady and hippie, in love. They’ll toast and toke and giggle, and I’ll giggle too, and so will Uncle Dock when I sneak into the intensive care unit later and tell him how, after getting sky-high, they stumbled into her house and the lights snapped on, how I slipped outside and climbed the fence between the properties and crept through the high weeds of her yard. How I placed my eye against the window and saw they’d taken the missionary position, Patsy Cline crackling on the turntable. How a dusty gray moth flaring in my eyes causes me to tumble backwards into the reefer plants, how I just lie there with my eyes closed and the earth spinning, and the lovers come to the window with a bedsheet covering their bodies, and they frown and whisper, but instead of the fat lady I imagine it’s Diane I see, and my heart lurches murderously,
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