There’s a skirted table for every kind of gun. Vendors hawking aftermarket magazines—Schmeissers and ProMags for AKs, Choat’s tubes for shotguns—next to rows and rows of nickel-plated .45s from Colt, Rock Island, a dozen armories more.
Another booth is manned by a covey of bad-ass biddies, gun-toting grandmas with hair bleached to blonde frizz, saggy arms in sleeveless tees that read: THE FIRST RULE OF GUN SAFETY IS CARRY A GUN. They’re selling pepperbox pistols, mouse guns, and derringers like you’d expect a poker cheat to keep hidden in his sleeve in an old Western shoot ’em up.
The whole place smells of body odor and gun grease, pickles and beef jerky. Long-spent nitrocellulose lingers in a thousand old muzzles’ mouths. A man in a ten-gallon hat with bandoliers crossed over his chest asks Kevin if he wants to try a new kind of bore snake for cleaning his guns. He probably doesn’t look at Guns & Ammo just for the pictures, the way that Kevin does. Kevin thinks better of telling the man he has yet to get his concealed carry.
His older cousin Dave is within shouting distance, sizing up some gaudy snubnoses, barrels nitre-blued or dressed in Cerakote. The idea of someone getting shot by a Bubble-Yum-pink gun squeezes nervous laughter from Kevin.
There, at the end of the long run of tables is a pipe and drape booth with gray velvet drapes, a vendor’s stall hidden inside its fabric box. Its entry is two curtains the yellow of butternut squash. The noise of conventioneering fades to a murmuring hum, like parents whispering a late-night argument on the other side of a child’s wall.
An unnaturally long-necked man peeks his head out between the curtains. He doesn’t smile but bares candy-corn-colored teeth. His ghostly, glacier-blue eyes stare daggers at Kevin.
Kevin hears noises he oughtn’t to be hearing. Young men screaming, calling out for mother. Metal clanging against metal, wood beat against wood, gunpowder roaring, men biting the bullet and hissing through a sawbones’ bit, horsehooves pounding scorched earth, whinnying, nags falling on their flanks with a thunderous boom. Smoke sieves through jagged slits in his candy corn teeth, serpentine gray haze slithering towards Kevin. Smells of scorched matchheads, of pigeon shit simmering in the sun, of coppery stink bleeding into the cold ground.
The man scans left to right outside the curtain before a disembodied hand slides through the fabric’s lower part. He’s curling his fingers for Kevin. Come, come in.
Kevin hears music.
Hearing the song puckers his asshole and squeezes his throat shut. The man’s lips move but Kevin knows he isn’t singing. It’s not one man’s voice, but a hundred rowdy drunks—their rotting teeth and whiskey-breath and their stink of infected bed sores, of tainted shit and blood, offset by sulfuric ether and chloroform.
The wretched chorus sings:
They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot,
I wish they was three million
Instead of what we got
Kevin makes his way toward the pipe and drape booth, with a feeling like he’s beckoned across a rope bridge that unraveled years ago.
After two hours of looking for his missing cousin, Dave can’t find Kevin. He decides to wait him out in the parking lot. Dave remembers his girlfriend Rita leaving an overnight bag in the car from their weekend in the Poconos. Maybe there’s some of those girly cigarettes she smokes when she’s drunk. My Mistys aren’t menthol, they’re minty-fresh like me, Rita says. He’ll root around inside her bag, fish out a square.
A smoke break beats the alternative: “Auntie Dara, I can’t find Kevin.” And if she discovers where exactly Dave lost her only son? There isn’t a hole deep and dark enough for Dave to hide on this earth. Aunt Dara will find him, remove his testicles, and turn his nutsack into a hat.
He’s got a hot itch in his jugular notch.
Dave pops open his trunk. And once he’s savvy to what’s in the boot, his cigarette jones is gone.
There’s a caplock Kentucky longrifle sitting inside the trunk.
Built by some madcap gunsmith, of unusual design; a hexahedron barrel, six-sided along its length. Big sonofabitch, too, Louisville-Slugger-sized bore. Black cast-iron instead of ordnance-grade steel. Looks like it could punch a hole bigger than a softball through a man’s center mass.
“The fuck…?”
“Oughtta be goin’ now.”
The voice startles the hell out of Dave. He bangs his head on the trunk’s latch. Dave spins around to catch his cousin Kevin. “Goddamn it, Kev! You scared the shit out of me. Where the hell were you?”
“Snagged the ol’ Yankee-clipper,” Kevin says, dipping his head down at the open trunk. “Spent a mite lollygaggin’, I’ll admit. Picked me up some chaw.”
“Why are you talking like that?” Dave says. He sneaks another glance at what’s almost an elephant gun. Turns back facing his cousin. “Did you buy this?”
Kevin spits something syrup-brown on the asphalt from a wad tucked in his lower lip. His body odor is rankly sharp in the way of the unhoused mentally-ill. A full moon’s rising, nearer the earth than it’s ever been before; its supernormal stimulus moves a crimson tide across Dave’s body; he feels his blood’s urgency under his skin. A salt-and-pepper five-o’clock shadow bristles on what was, this morning, Kevin’s babyface. His cousin’s walk is graceless but nimble, the gait of a guerrilla. Dave wonders if he himself could spot a killer face-to-face.
Kevin approaches, and Dave only realizes he’s retreating when the hough of his knee hits the Tercel’s back bumper. Is Kevin taller than he was before?
“Can’t buy something, anyhow, always been mine,” Kevin says, lip prodigiously overloaded with dip. He nudges Dave gently out of the way and closes the lid of the trunk.
No doubt about it, now he’s a bigger man.
Kevin claps a hand like wrought iron on Dave’s shoulder. “Come on. I feel like having me a nip of the old antifogmatic.”
“Huh?”
“Let’s you and me get us a drink.”
Kevin’s smile isn’t the innocent grin it’s always been before.
“Place’s as good as any.” Kevin picks out a joint named Stahley’s, its sign painted in white baseball script on a black wall. There’s a red door catty-corner to the mural. A half-dozen Harley Davidsons tilt on their kickstands out front. The smell of fried food floats out of the kitchen exhaust.
A tow-headed man with colorless flesh and brows—irises’ pigment so scant his periwinkle eyes are almost white—exits Stahley’s into the lot. He’s one missed dose of Vitamin D away from being albino. His shirt says: REGISTER COMMUNISTS, NOT FIREARMS.
Dave raises his eyebrows at his cousin. “Kev. This place. Are you serious?”
But Kevin’s left the car before Dave hardly registers his objection. Walks towards the taphouse with a cocksure stride, exuding an air of banner-day-bad-ideas.
Dave figures it’s better he goes in with his cousin. At least then he can keep track of him.
Inside Stahley’s, there’s a sea of vinyl-and-steel banquet chairs, picnic tablecloths draped over mess-hall-sized trestle tables. It’s a redneck refectory of the Pennsyltucky old school.
A woman who looks like she arm-wrestles long-haul truckers for beer money pours a draft into a clear plastic pitcher. And God love it, actual FM radio’s playing through the PA system, Foreigner leading into a mattress commercial.
“Help you boys?” The man asking is shrunken into himself, a drab olive field jacket hanging flag-like from his bones. The twill sleeves are rolled to his elbows, skin an ink-drawn map of black-faded-blue. Someone needled his flesh back when only sailors and Hell’s Angels got tattoos.
“How ya’ll fixed for tanglefoot?” Kevin says. Dave’s cousin doesn’t sound anything like the kutcha butcha dweeb who begged his mom to send him to Space Camp.
“Tanglefoot?” The brawny barmaid looks walleyed at the out-of-towners.
“Rotgut, forty-rod,” Kevin says. “A nip of coffin varnish to balance the humors.”
“He wants whiskey,” the tow-headed Bircher says, walking back in and towards the bar. He stops to clock the two visitors, standing right next to them. “A little early in the night for whiskey, ain’t it, boys?” The Bircher looks around to make sure his audience is listening. “Maybe you’d prefer a nice, warm glass of milk.” The war veteran and the barmaid exchange glances while the regulars titter.
Kevin squares his shoulders and braces the bar, skells and barflies sizing him up as he goes, and Dave’s got no goddamn clue what the hell is going on. Kevin sidles up alongside Stahley’s steadier customer base, leaving just one barstool for a buffer. Dave hangs back, unwilling (or unable) to move.
“Ya’ll oughtta hear somethin’ I done told my boys—shavers that the two of ’em was—and I told ’em oftener than not.” Kevin’s patriarchaic cadence somehow fits him like a glove. Stahley’s patrons are gobsmacked by this cowboy of a kid who talks like their grandpappy’s own peepaw.
“Well?” says the vet. Everyone on tenterhooks.
Kevin slaps a grimy, balled-up tenner on the bar. He moves with the languid ease of a man comfortable keeping others waiting. If this is his cousin, Dave’s never met him before. “Old Crow. You can keep the scrip, and I’ll thank you ’til you’re better paid.” If anyone understands him, they don’t share with the class.
Kevin’s inside a circle of wide eyes and open jaws.
“Comin’ right up,” she finally says, furtively side-eyeing the gangly vet, Stahley’s sage-in-residence, who pulls the tangle of silver whiskers under his chin. Waiting and watching. This strange little dance.
The bartender pours and sets the shotglass down in front of Kevin. Then, folds her hamhocks inside her elbows, one arm crossed over the other.
Kevin picks up the shotglass and looks, not into it, but beyond it, glassy eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare. “Used to tell my boys, ‘Always carry a flask of whiskey in case of snakebite.’” Kevin knocks back the shooter of Old Crow. He nods his head, raps his knuckles on the bar.
The bartender consults Stahley’s sage veteran, who cracks a crooked smile and nods the barest nod. She uncrosses her arms and pours another Old Crow. “On the house,” she says, and slides grandpa’s cough medicine over by Kevin.
“Thank you kindly,” Kevin murmurs real low. “Furthermore, my good gentry,” he turns, raising a toast to everyone and no one: “Always carry a small snake.” Kevin doses his whiskey medicine, taking it straight to the head. Then, clanks the shooter back down on the bartop.
Everyone stares but no one speaks. For forever, it seems.
The silence is broken when the Bircher slaps his knee and breaks out in laughter. He’s bust a gut, rolling in his own barrel of monkeys. He wipes away tears from his eyes.
Everyone starts laughing along. And Dave decides, at last, to wade further in.
Dave and the gangly vet—name of Bingo, he learns—form a bond between the two of them. The duo commences to chucking darts. They half-ass every other throw, regularly detouring into Bingo’s back catalog of stories: parties at the Tự Do Nightclub in psychedelic Saigon, roadying for Molly Hatchet, his time spent as a bouncer at the front door of a brothel just outside Reno. Dave forgets, for the moment, how strange is the night. The improbability. That him and this hollowed-out warhorse are shooting the shit and pounding brewskis. It fills Dave with a spirit of redemptive hope.
In the corner, there’s a trio of numbskulls sitting in a stew of hate. The head numbskull’s got a sour taste in his mouth; he was kicked out of the Gun Show for flagging. King Dummy did a muzzle sweep at a vendor’s kid. So they’ve been sitting here, holed up in their shadowy corner, draining boilermakers like a new Prohibition’s just a drunk driver away. They empty their glasses while King Dummy nurses his pride.
He’s spent two hours railing against the Jews, and the Illuminati (and the Jewminati, for good measure), and even his fellow goons are bored of his Julius Streicher shtick. So now he’s sizing up scapegoats.
King Dummy’s given name, inspired by his father’s love of The Naked Gun franchise, is Leslie. And Leslie, or “Les” to anyone who wants to keep their front teeth, is wound up as tight as a duck’s ass. Leslie and Les are forever at war inside their shared bodily home.
Between the Janus face’s two sides, it’s Leslie who feels a sexual attraction to men when he’s a few pitchers deep. Leslie’s the prepubescent with a drunken groper for a mom. Leslie’s the freak-looking one with the bulldog nose, a Bruce-Willisonian billboard bridging his honker to his wormy lips. “Little Lon Chaney,” mother’s brothers have called him. “Pig-faced and peckerless,” often by his own mom.
If one thing’s worth knowing about a fatherless man, it’s his rage burns black inside him.
Now that he’s all tanked up, Les is feeling more Leslie than Les, and that sets his teeth right on edge. Leslie, with blood flushing his groin at seeing beer glisten on his buddies’ wet lips. Leslie, with hate driving its spike between his skull and spine. Leslie, the furious, ugly little faggot, his mother tells him from toddlerhood through trade school.
“I want to play darts,” Leslie says.
Leslie’s buds are run-of-the-mill under-bullies. Big Chet, the size of an NFL linebacker and dumber than a box of rocks. Then the animal-torturing bedwetter, a pipsqueak named Seth. All reared, as you might expect, in domestically-violent hellholes.
Seth the pint-sized zoosadist worries his thumb where he burnt himself lighting a bird’s nest full of hatchlings on fire. “Well, good fucking luck with that. That queer old commie and his little pet Indian been hogging the board.”
“Heh, heh. Fuckin’ queers,” Big Chet says. His chuckle’s both a snort and a part of his limited vocabulary.
Leslie gets up from his seat at the tall table to head toward the dartboard wall. Seth slaps his back knuckles against Big Chet’s chest. “Come on,” he says and cocks his chin out. Follow the leader: “Les says we’re gonna play darts.”
Kevin’s mind is both his and not his own. He occupies two worlds at once. Outside himself, a dead stranger’s terrible memories drag razor wire through his brain. Concurrently, Kevin’s earthly body spots the three inbreds crowding Dave and Bingo: A trio of boys-room-smokers who think the world is still their stall.
He soon dips further out to that other place, a place Between the Rivers. Elk and bison graze, forage through sedges, sun rising big as the sky over the plains. He’s a man named Jack now, in a place called Bubbling Springs, where the air smells thickly of cottonseed oil and the milky sweetness of just-shucked corn. Smells of cattle’s dried dung, manure of old brokeback mules. Of the sweat and blood of slaves.
And Kevin-Who-Is-Jack considers those comforts bought by others’ bloody toil, the honors freely given a propertied man, an owner of chattel who abide in cultivating his land. At a time, General Ulysses himself is welcomed into Jack’s home. That stature that Jack had had.
And while barbs are slung through Kevin’s cerebrum, he remains a reservoir host idly watching those three angry men (with their clenched teeth and balled-up fists) hemming his cousin in against the dartboard wall.
But then, Kevin-Who-Is-Jack is flung beyond the barroom imbroglio. He comes to a first-person vantage of a grievous sesquicentennial. A dead man’s unburied pain will soon grow inside his soul.
Kevin-Who-Is Jack sees the sons that Jack had, sees them barely not boys, neither men (not quite yet). They’re hunting deer. George, with his mother’s green eyes. Little Jack, the spit of his daddy, down to his underbite and hawk’s nose.
Sees their dead bodies dragged from Fort Donelson all the way back to Bubbling Springs. George and Jack’s severed heads mounted on the gateposts on the plantation’s outer wall.
Kevin-Who-Is-Jack is stuck in Father Jack’s hell, seeing it with blood yet to dry and the sorrow still fresh. It fills him with anguish all his own. His guts feel fishhooked and wrenched through his mouth, lungs so tight he’ll never not choke.
Kevin seethes with Jack’s ghost’s immortal anger, the boundless fury of a father of murdered sons.
Jack-Who-Is-Kevin conquers the body, grown past a whisper to sound out the boy’s bones. Watches Kevin’s cousin brought to bay, cornered alongside the silver-headed old Johnny, who hangs so thin inside his shell jacket he’d have to stand twice to throw a shadow.
Jack-Who-Is-Kevin strides wide toward the dust-up, legs growing meat and length, body expanding the way of powdered gelatin in warm water. His healthful host’s young spine crackles, and the feeling is true delight. The warm blood of youth surrounds his old soul.
That boy Dave’s a colt’s tooth, the shape of a man with the bright eyes of a pup. Eyes like lime peridots. Eyes like Jack’s wife; like his son George., too.
Jack-Who-Is-Kevin hears his host’s soul hollering allegiance to Davey. Davey Boy, who the ballyraggers have back on his heels.
Jack-Who-Is-Kevin thinks of Baby George’s soul jayhawked through his green eyes once beheaded. Thinks how they sat brightless inside his dead skull. His boys, like this Davey Boy, and how there was life ahead of them. Ain’t there so much life, too, for the Hindoo pup to live? The pup with his green eyes like George? And he decides, Jack does, that he won’t cotton to these ballyraggers; he decides, just as he did at seeing his sons’ corpse-heads mounted on the gateposts of Bubbling Springs, that he’ll become the righteous wind riding in upon the storm.
Jack-Who-Is-Kevin, mad enough to spit nails.
Dave eyes his exit. But the physical giant—who is a moron, but not moron enough to fail as a human wall—has him blocked off. Neither does Dave think he can leave Bingo on his own.
“We said you could play,” Dave pleads, “so just play.”
The lead antagonizer’s eyes wander their sockets, veering between drunken rage and glassed-over psychic absence. Dave wonders how a man with nothing inside him can harbor so much hate.
“Go ’head and toss your corks,” Bingo says, holding out his clutch of arrows, willing the three shit-stirrers to just take the darts.
“I want to know,” the bully-boss says. “I want to know where you’re from.”
Dave knows exactly what this shitheel means, but defiance glows like an ember inside of him. So he tells the bully: “Millbourne, Pennsylvania.”
“You know what I’m askin’. I wanna know where you were born.”
“Lankenau Hospital. Why? Let me guess, your cousin’s head of cardiology. Small world!”
Les’s face turns redder than a maraschino cherry. His mother’s violations, always crawling inside him, making anger into rage. Alcohol’s poison disinhibits him. He hates this bright-eyed Brahmin, with his lustrous locks and dewy skin. Hates the Brahmin’s boundless future. He hates this Vietnam vet with his grimy rattail like a school janitor’s mop. Hates the bridge the vet and Brahmin built between them. Les’s pulse throbs its noose around his neck; he’s an embodied limb inside the world’s blood pressure cuff.
A shadow cuts the huddle, larger than its projecting body can account for. Les and the rest turn their heads facing the bar. Les sees a man whose existence feels wrong. Bottom lip pooched over his chin, eyes the near-colorless blue of hospital bedsheets. The bodily shape of a teenager, unhealthily contorted. Boy’s got a sky-high spine curved like a cripple’s, salt-and-pepper stubble like a hungover middle-aged man.
“The fuck you want?” Les slurs.
He hears Seth and Big Chet both stepping back. Like there’s a rattler coiled around their feet. Les feels that fear, too, but doubles down and puts his foot forward.
That’s when Les first truly sees it, the abomination of this geriatrified youth. This skinwalker that should ring every cosmic alarm. Smells the musk of wolf’s piss—worse than wet dog and roadkill skunk.
“You got a problem?” Les says, voice breaking. He expects laughter, hears none. Only the omen of silence. He realizes he prefers humiliation to cosmic dread.
Air thrums—and Les can hear it, and he knows everyone has to hear it, too—loud as fifty utility transformers, all running hot. “I want to play darts,” he says. “I like to throw them. I like darts. I just want to, please.” His voice, all aquiver, shaking dribble from his lips: “I just want to play darts.” A blur of darkness draws in tight around him, the electrical thrum grown so loud maybe no one can hear him speak. Everything here is unexplainable. Ozone and shadows, diffusing identities. His belly aches like contaminated bathtub hooch’s taint in his guts. The skinless world, unending. Les hears his mother laughing somewhere inside.
“What’s your name, boy?” the human black hole asks him. His watery blue eyes are drawn to beads, skull’s hollows scooped too hollow and too skullish, housing hawkeye dimes. Les doesn’t expect the accent, more Good Old Boy than Guddu. The black hole smells like whiskey that only dead men ever drank.
“Les,” Leslie answers.
“Naw,” the black hole answers. “I’ve known a Les or two.”
The black hole speaks from native sons’ graves, reciting the bloody epitaphs that whisper a nation’s doom. The world is a confusion of secrets and ages. Death waits in hand with hunger past the root of the black hole’s tongue.
“Tell me true, boy. Tell me the name your daddy gave you.”
His name. He knows it. The fraidy-cat’s name, the crybaby’s name. The one true nothing, he of his mother’s loathing. Why does he have to say it?
But he does:
“Leslie.” Leslie fights the tears in his eyes and throat.
The human black hole paws Leslie’s shoulder. Comes, then, a revelation: that executioners wear masks as often as hoods. Some of them wear the mask of another man.
“You reckon you’re a curly wolf.” As sinister a laugh as you’d never hope to hear, short of Satan. “You ain’t no curly wolf, boy. But me?” Whistles like stones dropping down an endless well. “I’m jus’ about the curliest one you might not like to meet.” The wolf wearing boy’s skin. Overwhelming stench of piss. Leslie feels sick as a man chugging ipecac.
Leslie cries, eyes stung, heart grown littler and cold. And the predator sneers inside Leslie’s ear, his breath smelling of another age’s whiskey and bad blood. Devil takes the hindmost, and Leslie’s a straggling calf outside the herd. And this particular devil wetly smacks his chops.
“No, you ain’t even fit to eat. A whelp,” this very bad man says, sucking Leslie’s stink up his nose. Leslie feels the heat of the man’s nostrils on the skin of his neck. “And I can smell the piss comin’ outta you ’fore it’s come, even.” Leslie’s lungs are inside a pneumatic vise, every particle of air pressed out of them.
Mother said it. Didn’t she? Queerbaited coward. A piddler. And soon it’ll show.
Shaking in his boots, Leslie lets go his bladder. Urine streams slowly down to the floor.
“There you go, boy,” the man says, gingerly patting Leslie’s face with his executioner’s hand. “Fella like you. Well, you’re just the northern end of a southbound horse, I reckon. No, boy, you don’t step in my yard. Not unless you ready for the Big Bad Wolf.”
The cowards abscond. More whiskey is poured.
Waiting in the past is Kevin-Who-Is-Jack. His soul, eternally traded for a dead man’s pain.
-- Alex Grass was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three kids. His stories have appeared in Maudlin House, The Genre Society, Trembling With Fear, and many other places besides. Alex was nominated for the 2022 Kirkus Prize.
