Alan Sincic

         The plan was this: Barnett the bait. He gets the guy alone at the truck. The bastard starts to bluster and bully – bam. Here comes the law. Not so much an arrest as it is a scare. They’d done it before, the boot-leg maneuver they called it, little sleight-of-hand to nudge a trouble-maker out of town. You plant the contraband in the trunk or the bed of the truck, a couple gallons of hootch’ll do it, and lo and behold, the sheriff strolls up all nice and easy. Lays out the charges – assault and battery, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, bootlegging, kidnapping, whatever. The deal? Pay the fine here and now. Tens and twenties. Now get the hell out of town forever.

         Not that the sheriff’s what you would call corrupt. It ain’t so much a bribe as it is a gratuity, what GB pays him. Gesture of appreciation for a friendly favor. We can all agree that corruption’s a kinda rust, right? Granted. But it takes a craftsman to appreciate the difference between a pinch of cinnamon at the hinge of a hood and a gutful of char in a chassis. If the red of the rust weakens the load-bearing members, you gotta amputate, sure, but a little speckle here and there? Here. Strip of sandpaper. Give it a rub-down. Good as new.

         The plan was to position the sheriff in the field beyond the bar, by the clay turn-around where the truckers park, where you got the oak. Explosion of oak, fat as a cloud, not so much shade as it is a cavern of green, thicker than shade and heavy with the scent of peat moss and pollen and marl. The squad car, you slip it in there at sundown. Got yourself a killer blind.

         It was Barnett come up with the signal. The sheriff said What the hell’s the matter with you? Just shout – but GB’s got this image of himself as some kinda secret operative. The secret weapon a flashlight with a red filter and a button for behind enemy lines. From the Army Navy store but new, government stock, waterproof, spare bulb in the belly of the end cap and the Eveready’s out the package fresh. You blink out a missive with a tip of the finger, whisper of light – send reinforcements or attack at dawn or get me the hell outta here. Combat ready said the guy in the khakis at the counter. At a right angle the light, like a periscope in Bakelite green, so you can clip it to a shoulder strap or a belt, poke it up out a foxhole without fear of losing a finger.

         It’s that pride again. GB gotta complicate things so as to demonstrate his mastery over the moment. It was all the same to the sheriff. By lunchtime he’d already spent the bribe. Bought him a bottle of rye and a pair of lace panties for Bidwell’s wife, a woman who’d always had a weakness for a man in uniform. Postman. Milkman. Western Union. Uniform, plus badge, plus gun? Now that’s a trifecta.

                                               *  *  * * *

         At the edge of town, at the border where the auto body and the railyard and the Quonset hut meet the wood and the swamp and the broken bits of pasture, the Checkerboard glowed. GB sank into the shadows. The corner booth. Far corner. Got him a drink. Settled in to study his man.

         Not much of a drinker, GB. To be sociable, sure. But sociable’s the word for them as already got a spot at the fire. For them outside of the circle – always on the move, on the shuffle, side to side in the search for an opening – sociable’s another word for survival. The drunk’s gotta guard his secrets from the sober, but the sober’s got secrets as well. A drunk – when nobody’s looking – taps the keg or siphons off a sip of the other fella’s ale. He pretends to a ritual of friendship when, all the while, what he hankers for is a private oblivion. GB the same, only he’s the sober one. He rations out his every sip, bides his time, the whiskey pitches, with a flick of the wrist, underfoot, into the black, under the brass of the rail where the boots of the drinkers ride. In the company of drunkards he pretends to be drunk.

         But not today. Today he drinks for real.

         He drank and he watched, from a distance, as the man drank. Funny how a pinch of whiskey’ll amplify a fella. The man spoke as if the bar itself, clean up to the rafters, was a box he meant to fill.

         “I been looking for a fella got a scar on his back,” said the man. “Got a batch of scars.”

         Wes nodded as he worked. “Looking what for?”

         “He killed a man.”

         “You a lawman?”

         “Do I look like a lawman?”

         Wes took care to pilot that rag of his round the mountain of the man’s elbow. “Whatever is the opposite of a lawman,” he said with a laugh. “That’s what you look like.” He waited for the man to laugh. Silence. “So this fella – ”

         “Georgia boy. I heard tell you got a Georgia boy here made himself a… what do you call it?”

         “A go of it?”

         “A stir.”

         Wes had a way of seeming. Just what it was that troubled, say, the fella at the dark end of the bar, the babbler in the bright center, the straggler at the empty end of the day, it was Wes who’d always make as if he knew the score. “I seen plenty of boys make a stir,” he said.  “Come payday. Friday. Saturday. Howl at the moon.”

         “I don’t figure this boy to be a howler. Too sturdy for that. I figure he got himself a trade.”

         “A trade?”

         “Turpentine. Boy been buying up a batch of pine already been – here’s the thing, see – tapped out. It don’t make any sense.”

         “The hell you say.”

         “I hear the talk and I’m thinking…”

         So on he went, cheered on by the whiskey and that gift of Westy’s, that nod of the head, that murmur of, not approval, but astonishment that a regular fella (such as the man most certainly was) could’ve happened upon a venture so tragical and grand. The regulars edged away as the man became more animate. On and on he went.

         So the time had come. GB slipped out the back way. Through the kitchen -- jug of moonshine babied up into his arms -- and out the alley into the night. Not so far to the man’s rig. Beyond the gravel lot and the bumper-jumble of cars at the lip of the ditch, at the pull-off there in the clay beside the pasture it sat. A big rig, Mack with the logo Dr. A. W. Chase’s Syrup of Linseed and Turpentine, and the brass bulldog on the hood, and the torque of the trailer at a angle in the spongey turf.

         Over yonder the oak. Glint of the grill of the squad car and, afloat like a firefly above it, the red tip of the sheriff’s cigarette. GB gave the flashlight at his waist a click. Click-click. The slow click says ready. A rapid clicketty-click? Help. Like something outta Saboteur or Confidential Agent or Journey Into Fear.

         Immaculate the cab. Slick as sub on the outside, pure the curves and the chrome aglow, even the door latch and the lock (he took care when he picked it so’s not to leave a scratch) flickered in the light of the moon. What does it tell you, a rig like that? Depends on the man. A vehicle is all, mostly, to most of the men who haul the goods – the beer and the cattle and the claw-foot piano. A box on wheels, right? But not to the man of vision, the man of a temper to see it for something more, who hankers after a power bigger than what the body alone’ll give.

         Not so much as a shiver of dirt on the inside. Smelled of Pine sol and leather and rubber buffed. A tin of mints in the ashtray, lambskin shammy in the glove box, skein of cellophane to shield the fleshy bosom of the Charmette air freshener afloat above the dash. Why would such a man go to such a bother? It had to be about the order of it all. Like you throw a heap of laundry in the washer machine, you with the crust of the sweat on the band of the cap and the creak in the bones of the neck and the reek of the barnyard and the pate of poop on the heel of the clodhopper and the whole damn universe in a whirl overhead, and underfoot, and in a rampage up and down the river of the blood, not even so much as a mosquito obedient to your will. But then you set the washer to work.

         It’s a sifter’s what it is. It don’t birth a single thing that ain’t already already there, no, but it grabs the all of it, shakers it all together, sifts away at the swamp, bubbles and scrubs and spins to where it jettisons, off into the outer darkness, the chaos. And the cycle ends, and you lift the lid, and into the empty center of the spin as it slows to a halt you lean, and stretch out your hand, and with your filthy fingers behold, lo, a cosmos in the making.

         Everybody got a cosmos in the making. Everybody hides in a blind of their own design. The cab a kinda amplifier. It rocked with his weight. He pictured himself at the helm of the truck. You stir the foot, tender the wheel, shoulder up into position the shifter. With a nudge like you nudge a mug of beer off a barroom coaster you baby it into gear. Not but a molecule of muscle in play. A god is what you are.

         The jug of moonshine he tucked behind the seatback. Searched the cab for weapons. Here we go. Under the seat, a .45. Bowie in the glovebox. He pitched the Bowie off into the weeds. The crowbar followed. The .45? Easy enough.

         On his way back to the bar GB stopped, once again, to order his thinking. Re-order. Think himself back to an order. He’d always mapped his way around a trouble, plotted a course of action to fit the contour of the map, but here the whiskey threw him off a step. Carried him back to being a boy again -- the hot poker, the sawdust, the thick mitts of the men. He stumbled on the gravel. Lost his footing. Caught himself. The memory burned away at the map. Disordered the plan.

         No matter. At the center of it all he could feel it still, little fist of self in a spin, tornado he’d managed, over the years, to finally tame. A gyroscope is what it was, is what he called it, the steady in the center he could always count on to carry him along. He patted the flashlight that rode the belt in a roll at the hip.

         Blame the whiskey, or the nip of moonshine he pilfered at the truck, but back at the Checkerboard he had a revelation. A vision of glory. Between the cigarette machine and the glass noggin of a gumball dispenser, Wes – in a fit of exuberance inspired by a trip to the circus the night of his divorce – installed a snow-cone machine. Five Cents – The Eskimo Treat read the sign, in letters of gold, above the face of a clown in a hood with a furry white fringe. Inside the glass box, a metal scoop half-buried in a drift of snow. Beside the box, a stack of paper cones and a row of decanters in purple and yellow and red and blue.

                                               *  *  * * *

         “They always return to the scene of the crime,” said the man finally, at the end of the pitch, at the last call. In a booth by the door, Smokey dozed. Swaddled he was in a flap of Naugahyde ripped free of the bolster and reconfigured to the fit of that boney frame of his. Smokey the smell. Catfish and bug spray in a marinate of beer. A couple loggers scrimmaged over the bill. Shook the sawdust out the collar of their coveralls, the shavings off the cuff of the jeans. As out the door they ambled, Wes went round, in his round-shouldered way, from table by table to – shot glass in hand – snuff the candles. No. Candle-lamps. Like in the bistros of Paris.

         “Psychology,” said the man. “Basic psychology. I figure that’s where to find him. Out there in the pine. Make him pay for what he done.”

         The man rose. No more than a silhouette, but GB knew him by the way he moved. Big. Like a bear. Broad. The man made his way out the door and into the red glow of the Budweiser sign. The beard a break-out, a bristle the color of goat. A sag at the eye where the sun been working away, and the hands clutching, unclutching, clutching at nothing, and a weary kinda sway to the walk, like a ticket-master trekking up the aisle of a train-car.

         GB followed at a distance, careful not to tip the carton with the two cones, the blueberry and the cherry. Traveled in the deep of the trees at the edge of the road. Skirted the moon. Bye and bye the man arrived. Stirred himself to pee, not in the road, but – like a gentleman – in the ditch already damp with the day’s rain. Up into the cab he hauled himself.

         Equipment check. GB clicked the flashlight -- On, Off -- then circled round to the rear. The passenger side. Clumped over the fat track in the clay. Clicked open the door and, careful not to spill the tray, climbed in.

The man snapped awake. Sent a tremor through the cab as he turned. Straightened. If the man’d been a smaller fella, a stick of a thing, they probably woulda come to blows, but GB  (clever boy) figured it right. The man with the power got a choice, the fella with the shoulders and the bush of the beard at liberty, he is, to bide his time. To not to make a mess.

         Like you lift a martini glass, GB held the cone in the slot between the thumb and the fingers. Gave it a squeeze. “Snow-cone?” he said. Tuneful the voice. Up onto the brim of the cup the syrup bubbled. He gave the cone a shake. The ice at the top shifted. Softened in the heat.

“I got it for you,” said GB. “On the house.” In the other hand he held the second cone. Took a slurp. A trickle of juice tobogganed down the slope of his chin to crash the white of his sleeve. “No?”

         The man drew himself up. Cab the size of a closet. Only so much height you can muster. “Who the hell are you?”

         “Who the hell you think I am?”

         “How should I know?”

         “All night you been talking me up.”

         “Talking what?”

         “About the boy killed that friend of yours.”

         “And you would be who?”

         “The boy. The boy killed that friend of yours.”

         “You don’t look like a boy to me.”

         “I don’t look like a killer, neither, but I killed him. I’d kill him again if he was here.”

         “And you telling me this why?”

         “To see what kinda man you are.”

         The man gripped the wheel with them hands of his. Hammer hands. Red the knuckles. Worker hands. Worker build. Big round the middle but thick with muscle in the shoulder and thigh. Barnett figured, if it came to that, he could outrun the man. On the far side of the pasture -- woods. The river. 

         “A hell of a curious fella you are,” said the man. “You figure maybe the sheriff to be maybe just as curious? Maybe even curiouser.”

         “Depends on what he’s curious about.”

         “The puzzle. What happened to that friend of mine.”

         “That ain’t no puzzle. You know what happened.” GB gave the cones a shake. The slush of red slurried fore and aft.

         “So you the one killed him.”

         “The very.”

         “Prove it. Show me your back.”

         “You done already seen my back.”

         “You heard me.”

         “You know the last fella seen my back. Didn’t turn out so well for him.”

         “The law come looking for the fella done that. On the lookout. They still on the lookout.”

         “I read about that. I read about the law. But the law for boys ain’t the same as the law for men. And the law for men with a history – history like you? I read about you. You got a history.”

         “I don’t care about no law. I don’t care about no history neither.”

         “But I got a bet.” Barnett slid the cones back into the cardboard tray. Balanced the tray on his lap. “What I’m betting is, no matter what you are, you ain’t a killer. Not that you don’t got the necessary… never mind. A thoughtful fella, that’s what you are. And prideful. Every damn thing you do, you gotta justify. Gotta prove yourself to yourself. And the consequence to killing me – you gotta know, aside from all the fuss and the bother and the law – would be the blow to your honor.”

         “Honor?”

         “A man of honor. That’s what you are.”

         The man laughed. Big laugh. Whiskey laugh. Rocked from side to side like he’d done at the bar. For the first time in his life he surprised himself with himself, with the thought himself as, well, other than himself. On the door-side under the seat, snug in a hand-tooled holster, the .45. “What makes you think you’re worth a killing?”

         “My point exactly. I ain’t the same as you, am I? A low-born, that’s what I am. It’d be beneath you.”

         “Then you’d be mistaken.” The man was quick. That was the first surprise of the night. How quick he was. Snap. With the one hand he steadied the tray. With the other he clamped hold of Barnett by the shirt collar. Twisted the collar into a noose. “It’d be an honor to kill you.”

         Barnett met the man’s eyes. Fire to fire. The man gave the shirt a extra twist. “What do you say to that?” The man pulled him closer. “I can’t hear you.”

         GB darkened to a purple.

         “Open the door,” said the man.

         GB found the door handle. Gave it a shove. Out the door the man tossed the tray with the cones. One-handed he hauled GB along with him, out the driver-side door and onto the gravel. GB skated. Found a footing.

         “Now.” The man loosened his grip. Held the collar like you collar a dog. “Now we take us a walk.”

         As they stumbled round the front fender to the other side of the truck, GB fumbled at the button on the flashlight. The man too busy with the footwork to notice. GB gave it a click. Click-click-click-click-click. The angle true. The red glimmer pulsed out over the dark and onto the oak.

         “God told me to talk to you,” said GB as he grappled the hand at his collar. “He said, you gotta make peace with that man, GB. Gave me a roll of twenties, said, render unto Caesar the things that are – ”

         “How big a roll?”

         “Two hunnert.”

         “Show me.”

         GB took a knee. Fumbled in the shadow of the truck, extracted the roll from a cubby in the guts of the cardboard tray.

         The man released him. Snatched the money. Proceeded to count. GB sat on the running board. Felt again for the flashlight. Aimed. Signaled with a rapid pulse. Red. Red the color of blood. Where the hell was Starr?

         Looked up at the man. Looked up at the moon. Found his voice. “I gotta know. Gotta know what become of the other fella.”

         “I never said there was – ”

         “It was three of you done it,” said GB. “What’s left is you and him.”

         “What do you care?”

         “I don’t want to wait to find him some morning at the foot of my bed with a hammer and a shovel.”

         “I look like a snitch to you?”

         “No. You look like – I make you out to be – a man of honor.” Again he signaled. Damp in the heat of his hand, the light.

So go the signals we send to the world outside the circle of self. And who’s to say what larger harmony the Lord’ll make of that single note we sing? The throb of light a perfect fit for the shrill of the crickets, the rhythmic shimmy of the squad car, the red pulse of that tango between the sheriff and Eva Bidwell. 

         The man pocketed the money and lit a cigarette. “You wanna get the jump on him, no?”

         “No.”

         “Go to the law.”

         “No no.”

         “Get him all – anonymous-like – all tangled up with the law.”

         “No.”

         “What the hell you take me for?”

         “I just – ”

         “What kind of gutless wonder surrenders a friend?”

         “What I’m saying – ”

         “Two hundred. A extra two hunnerd.”

         “What?”

         “That’s the price. You gimme a couple C notes, I tell you where he’s at.”

         “I don’t got that kind of money.”

         “The hell you don’t. Look at them boots. I figure you’re good for another helping.”

         “Maybe I am. Maybe you’re right. God is good. God’ll provide.”

         “True enough.”

         “So long as you promise not to tell him.”

         “God?”

         “No. The man.”

         “Word of honor.”

         “God has a plan,” said GB. He could always shout. That he could do. But GB’d always bragged about his ability to talk his way out of a trap. You figure pride it was that told him hush, to not to cry out, but pride too civil a thing to account for what moves a man in a moment of risk. And the whiskey, sure, it’ll give you a sizzle, but you don’t abandon yourself to the fates without a surge of something deeper’n that. Maybe spite, or will to power -- to win a battle of wits and to roar in a rage, to rage and to roar, to impale yourself – come what may – on the point of the enemy spear.

         From out his vest pocket he pulled a Gideon’s Bible size of a gingerbread cracker. He loosened the shoestring that held it shut. Inside was a hollow carved out by a razor knife, into which he’d pressed, lovingly, with the thumbs -- like you press a fine tobacco into the bowl of a pipe -- a clip of C-notes. From Exodus to Revelations, a boutonniere green.

         He never saw the fist, GB, that cracked him on the jaw. Nor the one to follow, so quick in the wake of the first. Single. Like a single blow. Broke his nose. Not that he knew it at the time. The crunch of the bone carried, not through the ears, but across the soundboard of the skull. He opened his eyes to find himself sitting on the running board, the white shirt a blaze of red, his body numb as a leg of ham.

         “Glory be to God,” said the man. GB looked up at the blur.

         The man crushed the money, then peeled, like you peel an orange, the crumple open again.

         “I thank you,” said the man. “And the other fella – Clayton. He thanks you. Died a year ago, Clayton did. TB. But before the TB took him he says to me you get the bastard. You make him pay.”

         Into his pocket he jammed the money. In a pleasant voice, a voice you play on a picnic, he turned. “How many people you killed?”

         “Just the one. But that was special. Like you. You’re special.”

         The man disappeared. Replaced by the moon. GB looked up at the moon. Steady the moon. The man again.

“You ever seen one of these?”

         Square in the face. Big the barrel. The gun.

         “Sure enough,” said GB. “That’d be the one.”

         “Such a mouth on you.”

         “The chamber’s empty.”

         Into the shooting hand the man shifted the .45. Spun the chamber. Snapped it open. Slapped it shut.

         “I figured I’d lighten the load,” said Barnett. The man struck him on the brow with the barrel. Down he went. Banged his arm upside the running board. Again the pistol rose.

         It was too late to wrestle back. If it came to a grapple, GB could hold his own with a bigger man. Like a bulldog, he had a grip and a ready balance, knew how to latch ahold and never let go, but he was drunk, and dizzy, and what with the busted arm and the bloody pulp of the nose, and nothing but the dark above and the dark below, his only weapon’d be the word.

         “I want to thank you,” said GB. Squared up at the shoulder but his head, like a bulb in a broken socket, swayed. It shifted course, the rivulet of blood at the fringe of the lip. It shot out over the slope of the jaw in the shape of an S. Clouds in a convoy sailed over the face of the moon. Into the dark it all -- the man, the truck, the far fringe of the tree-line -- dissolved. “I don’t got nothing but the hide I been born with, but what you done to me, that’s a gift.”

         The barrel caught him a glancing blow. Just over the ear. There it was again. The moon. He swayed. Straightened.

         “Shut up,” said the man. He pulled out a handkerchief. Wiped his fingers and the freckles of red off the back of the fist.

         “He’s testing you,” said Barnett “God is. I can see it.”

         “You don’t got no right to claim – ”

         “I don’t. It’s you. It’s you got the claim. And here me thinking it’s you I gotta visit, come pay you a visit like I done that friend of yours, a visitation of glory, when all the while it’s you the one to visit me.”

         Never before had GB played so big a gamble or called so big a bluff. It was Maggie taught him to go – no matter where, no matter what – all in. You push the other fella. Find out what he’s made of. It ain’t till the final push – into the heart of the fire – that you get the temper true.

         The man folded the handkerchief to hide the red, then wiped his brow with the square of linen. Checked again, in the moonlight, his hands. Into a fist he assembled his fingers. Shifted his weight. Bam.

         A blow to the gut. GB folded. Fell to his knees. In increments, little increments, like an accordion with a broken stopper, he gathered his breath. From out the pocket of that cowboy vest of his he drew a fist. Held it there in the space between them. An offering. “Blessed be the pure in heart. A man of honor’s what you are. A thrashing – I can see that now – a thrashing’s beneath you.”

         The man rubbed his knuckles as he rocked from side to side. 

“Here,” said GB. Into the man’s open hand he dribbled the bullets. “You gotta kill me.”

Not but a flash but – what? On the man’s face. Was that a look of fear?

         GB backed away. Kicked with his heel the carton. Like you pluck a flower he gathered up, two-handed, the broken body of a cone. The wax paper soft. Not but a shot-glass worth of slush in the hold. Empty the road. Dark the bar. “Over yonder’s a pond. Got a marsh and a batch of cattails. Nobody’d know. Nobody for miles.”

         He walked without looking back. Through the raw brush and into the pasture he climbed. The sandspurs plucked at the cuff of his denims. The stars in a congregation gathered.

         When the clangor of the day dies, and the timber stills, and the bee hovers at the head of the calliopsis, the sound of a shell in a chamber carries. GB counted. Five… six. He stopped. Called out to the sky behind him. “Can you hear it? The voice of God?” He looked down at the cone. Lifted the hand. Made as if to take a sip. Down the front of that shirt of his the red – ruby-red it was in the moonlight – ran.

         Elemental he said, he whispered, elemental the mantra he breathed in place of the person of God. Is that all he was? A meal? In the oven of the earth, and under the plow -- a midden, a slurry of ambergris and humus and bone? How was it possible? That the cosmos – the cricket and the brick and the Johnnie Walker Red, the iceberg and the buffalo and that spitfire, the sun – could roll, on and on and on, without him?

At the edge of the wood the ground gave way beneath him. His hands abandoned him. The – what was it he was holding? – dropped away. Paper cone. Color of bone.

         When he heard – after a pause of such a breadth and a height the whole of an earth could make a portage through it – the churn of the diesel, the thump and the rattle of the cab, the crackle of gravel in the grip of the rubber, his knees gave way. Dropped him where he stood. Bid him kneel at the altar of the idiot earth.