Searcy (excerpt from Odysseus Among the Swine)
I’d been living with my sister and her family in Searcy for about six months when I got in a fight with her meth-head husband. I’d been at work slinging burgers when she came and got me. The older kids were at their mom’s. She was in the van and wanted me to watch the baby while she went and got some things. I sat out in the van while she went in. Maybe twenty minutes went by, so I stuck my head in the door. Her husband Luke was sitting on the couch till he saw me. Then he came running. He went straight to the van, heading for the baby, so I pushed him off the porch into the rose bushes he’d planted the last time he got sober. He got right back up, dripping blood from his arms, and came after me. I hadn’t really thought it through, but I had to start real quick. He pushed me into the wall, and I went low and knocked his legs out from under him. There wasn’t much point breaking my fists on him. He wouldn’t really feel it anyway. I knocked him down, and he got back up. I knew I couldn’t keep it up for long. My sister Lennie came outside, running, and Luke lost interest in me. She got in between us.
“Leave him alone,” she said. Then, to me, “Get in the van.”
“You ain’t taking my boy,” Luke said.
“You ain’t fit to raise him. ‘Sides, what makes you think he’s yours?” she said.
We got in the van.
“You’re a whore of a mother,” Luke said. “And I want you out of my house,” he said to me. He walked up to the van and punched the window out over the baby and reached in after him, but Lennie grabbed the baby right before he did it. Somehow, she’d seen it coming. She handed him to me and backed the van out quick. Luke stood in the driveway, blood coating his arms. The baby was crying. The thing is, Luke and Lennie, they’d be screwing again before the weekend.
There was a guy named Keebler I worked with who’d been talking about moving out and getting a place. We went to a pay phone, and I called him. There were some subsidized apartments out on Towncraft. I met him there an hour later. Lennie stayed in the van. We filled out the paperwork then looked at the place. It was nice. Cleaner than I expected. Lennie cosigned for me.
“It’s got water and power,” Keebler said. I kind of laughed because I thought he was making a joke.
Back at the office, they had us fill out some more paperwork about how much money we made. We made about double what we were supposed to. Keebler just told them he was unemployed. They said we could move in right away. I went to find Lennie, but she was gone, so I went upstairs. Keebler lit a joint and offered it to me.
“In a minute,” I said. “You go ahead. I’ve got to go find my sister.”
I ducked out and walked around the buildings in the complex. There was a playground and a nice little pond and not much else. When I came back around, my sister’s van was there. I went upstairs and she was knocking on the door, but Keebler wasn’t answering it. You could smell the pot all over the building. I unlocked the door, and he was in his bedroom.
“You need to watch that shit,” Lennie said.
She handed me a couple bags of stuff from the Dollar Store up the street, mostly cleaning stuff and towels and things.
“You can’t afford to get stuff for me,” I said.
“You’re my brother,” she said.
I made a little mat with a sheet she’d gotten for me, and we put the baby on it. I went and knocked on Keebler’s door.
“My sister’s here with her baby,” I said.
“I’ve got to go to work anyway,” he said, and took off. He wouldn’t go near her. He was afraid of her because we all worked at the same place and she was his boss.
I went and sat on the floor and stared at the baby. It had empty eyes and drooled. It could barely sit up. I’d partied with folks like that. Lennie would make noises and move the baby’s limbs around to keep it interested. When she got up to go to the bathroom, she left me watching him. He sort of bobbled his head up and down a couple times then spit up. Lennie had a cloth she’d been using, so I wiped his face. He started crying. She came back out.
“You couldn’t handle him for two minutes,” she said.
I left her and the baby napping and found a meeting in a church on Race Street, a few blocks over. I walked it. I always liked to walk to meeting, if I could. It gave me time to think. I didn’t have what you’d call a sponsor. It wasn’t really my home meeting—I wasn’t from there. I’d just been living there while I got clean. I can’t say I was really working the program. But I wasn’t drinking.
At the meeting, there was a guy who got up and all he talked about was masturbation. He said it was an addiction like anything else, and it robbed you of your will. It was difficult not to laugh, but he was angry-serious. He said he was employee of the month at his work, but he’d missed the meeting where he’d get the plaque so he could come to meeting. Everybody applauded. After the meeting, I talked to him because no one else would. He was a butcher at a grocery store up the street. He rode a bicycle because he’d lost his license to DUIs. He said he might be able to get me on for a second job.
Walking back, I thought about drinking like I always did, the cool, bitter jolt of it. I thought about Charlene, who’d been dead six months, her blonde hair framing her face, her eyes, the taste of her lips. It hurt, all of it, but it was kind of like working a loose tooth. I kept coming back to it.
When I got back, my sister and her baby were asleep on the floor. I stared at them for a little while, trying to make some sense of it. If I was what I should be, I thought, I’d see something beautiful in this, but all I saw was trouble down the road.
2
We all worked at Burger Barn. My sister had gotten me the job. It was my first real one since I’d gotten sober. Before, I’d worked at a grocery store, but that seemed like years ago. This place was run by a guy named Doug Korn. He’d asked me, during the interview, why I had a gap in my work history. I’d sort of shrugged.
“I worked on my dad’s farm,” I said.
He laughed and shook his head, like that didn’t mean a thing. “Lennie,” he called.
“I’ll keep him in line,” she said.
“All right.” He didn’t even shake my hand.
It was me and a couple guys maybe five years younger than me in the back, running the grill. Keebler and this guy Josh. Keebler was all right, except he hadn’t seen nearly as much of the world as he thought he had. Josh was big like a church but also slow as stone. Neither of them spent more than a solid 15 minutes a day sober. There were a couple youngish girls who worked back there making sandwiches and whatnot. Amber and Tiffani. They were both big blondes, which was fine with me. I’d never understood the appeal of petit women that looked like little boys. Of course, they were both pretty homely. Up front, there were 3 or 4 middle-aged housewives. There were a couple younger married girls, and occasionally some oddball would drift in for a few days, but that was mostly the staff.
Fast food is fast-paced, but it’s monotonous. It’s the kind of thing you can do on speed. Nobody much cared about what happened; it wasn’t like anyone was working there by choice. We were all desperate, one way or the other.
Sometimes, when it was slow, my sister would go in the back and light a pipe in the big walk-in refrigerator. Something about the coolness of it suppressed the smell. One of the girls would go back and take turns with her. It was kind of homey, in that sense.
Doug’s wife was this big blonde named Darlene. She came in sometimes and worked, but mostly what happened was she’d drive whoever she was working with to quit. She came to the back after I’d been there a couple months and made sandwiches. We usually had one grillman and one or two sandwich makers. She was jittery, like she needed a fix.
“Hurry up with that order,” she said, when we got our first little rush.
“I like it when you tell me what to do, Darlene,” I said and winked at her. She didn’t speak much for the rest of the shift, but she always kind of watched me after that. I watched her too. There wasn’t much else to do.
My favorite was this lady named Mrs. Sandy. She had short, brown hair—so short I thought she was gay for a long time. She drove around in a big red pickup and strutted like a cowboy. The first time I worked with her, she walked in and gave me a speech.
“We ain’t never worked together,” she said. “So I just want you to know, I expect you to pull your weight.” She was talking about some of the other boys, who weren’t really much pumpkins.
“I’ve got all the meat you want to put in your buns,” I said. I slid the spatula under a hamburger patty and held it up for her to see. She blushed red as her truck. “I can keep them coming as long as you want them,” I added.
A little while later, she said, sort of over her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to come down on you before. Some of them won’t work. You do, though.”
“That’s all right, beautiful,” I said. “Can I ride in your truck?”
She kind of laughed, and that was that. We were, as they say, thick as thieves from then on. We’d call each other pet names.
“Good morning, honey-shorts,” I’d say.
“Same to you, angel-pancakes,” she’d say.
We flirted like crazy but there wasn’t nothing to it. I acted like I was big fun, but I wasn’t nothing but a little boy, lost. It was my first time living away from home sober. Sure, I’d squatted in lots of places, slept on lots of floors, hell, I’d seen the country from the back of a van, but it was a lot more real when you woke up every morning and went to work. It was a good place for me, too. Searcy was a dry city in a dry county. I had to drive a solid half-hour in any direction on the interstate to hit a liquor store, and my car wasn’t really in shape to make it.
On the first day I worked at Burger Barn, my sister announced to all the women, “This is my little brother Butter. His name’s Butter cause when I was a kid, I couldn’t say brother so I called him Butter. Be good to him. He’s a motherless child.” It took me weeks before any of them saw me as anything but soft. Still, I don’t blame her. She’s my sister. She was more of a parent to me than anyone else. After I blew my shot at college, she took me in, even though I didn’t have a thing to bring with me except trouble.
A couple days after I moved in to the apartment with Keebler, we made the rounds to Goodwill and anywhere else we could think of. Keebler had a truck, so we hauled everything in that. I got a trundle bed from my sister and a couch from a Dumpster. When we went to get the bed and the rest of my stuff, Luke was sitting on the couch, watching some woman do exercises on TV.
“I’m here for my shit,” I said and stood in the doorway, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t even remember kicking me out, probably not the fight, either. He just sort of looked surprised. It was a brand new world to him. I got my stereo and everything and took off.
We bought a bunch of Fabreeze and arranged everything as well as we could. All the furniture was from the 60s. Keebler thought that was the best. That evening, Keebler was smoking out in the living room. I had a job interview at the grocery store the next day, I told him, so I had to be clean to pass the test. There was a knock on the door. It was this blonde with a bad hip so she walked funny, and her boyfriend, who you could take one look at and tell he was a bruiser.
“Are you guys smoking pot in here?” they asked.
Keebler invited them in. It was the single stupidest move I’d ever seen. They sat on the couch and got high. They were just the first.
The grocery store was up on a little bit of a hill so that the parking lot sloped down. Carts would get loose and roll out into traffic. People would honk and swerve; nobody ever really had a wreck, but they didn’t do anything about it. I went in right after my shift, stinking of grease. There was this little Italian guy, the regional manager, there.
“You’re going to have to cut your hair,” he said. “And shave.”
I had to take a kind of personality profile. I tried my best, but I didn’t really know what the right answers should be. As I was turning it in, I couldn’t find the Italian guy, but I saw this woman I sort of recognized. She was a friend of my sister’s. Darla. She was a manager. She asked what I was doing there and everything, so I gave her my test. She took it back in the office and told me to change some of the answers.
“I thought you were working with your sister,” she said.
“I need something to fill the hours,” I said.
We sort of chitchatted about things. I talked about what I was reading, and she just sort of stared at me. She wasn’t much to look at, but she kept looking me over. My mind kept drifting to what she might look like naked on a pallet of canned peas or something. She sort of held my hand instead of shaking it, and said she’d call me in a day or two. She winked when she said it and gave my hand a little squeeze.
Keebler worked at Burger Barn, but his real ambition was as a drug dealer. It had taken him months to gain the trust of a pretty small-time dealer who would sell Keebler quarter pounds (QPs) every couple weeks. I could’ve made a couple visits and paid half the price, but this was the only person who would sell to Keebler.
Maybe a week after we rented the place, I went along on a run with him. He’d been doing a lot for me lately, hauling furniture and the like, so I went. Keebler was like that—he was always game. I think that’s why he got played so much.
Keebler drove this raggedy old 64 Ford with rust holes in the body and, depending on your attitude, either no paint job, or several conflicting paint jobs. It was a loose ride, like I think Keebler wished he was. I always liked that truck. It never broke down, but you always thought it was going to.
He drove over to this run-down shack on the edge of town with plywood walls. There were old washers and dryers and stoves and things piled up in the yard and on the porch. The whole place had an air of rust and decay about it.
“How the fuck do you know these people?” I asked.
“I went to school with one of them.”
Keebler walked around to the side because, he said, they wouldn’t answer at any other door. He knocked three times fast, then paused, then twice slow. You could tell he’d practiced it, come up with it himself, and inside, they were probably laughing at him. This kid, maybe 6, opened the door in a long, dirty tee-shirt. He glared at us with pointy ears and dull eyes. Lizard eyes. Keebler said,
“Is Stacy home?”
“Who’s that?” the kid said, nodding at me, mouth open.
“Butter. He’s cool.”
The kid laughed like it was the funniest thing since Benny Hill. We waited. He kept laughing, just standing there, laughing.
“Must’ve got a new shipment,” Keebler said, over his shoulder, to me.
The kid finally wandered off, and Keebler went in after him.
“Wait here,” he said.
“Fuck that,” I said, muscling in behind him. “Let’s get and go.”
The door led to a dark, bare room. Past that was the living room. We heard a throaty laugh, a woman’s laugh, and came out into the room from the side. The lights were off, but the windows were open. The laughter was coming from a couch in the middle of the room. It was bowed with a dirty sheet over it. The woman was on the phone, lying on the couch. She saw us and waved at Keebler to be quiet. The kid was sitting on the floor, looking bored. When he saw me, he started laughing again until his mom, as I assumed the woman to be, reached down and slapped him hard on the leg. He covered his mouth and yelped into his hand.
We stood in the doorway and tried not to stare. The woman was middle-aged, practically naked except some shorty-shorts and a tee-shirt. I glanced and saw more than I wanted to. She would’ve been all right, but there was a smell in the house like sweat and cheese. Eventually, she hung up the phone. The kid immediately started hollering, so she smacked him again.
“’S’up, Keeb?” she said.
“That thing we talked about last time,” Keebler said.
“What thing?” she said, then stopped herself. “Oh, yeah. All right. You ready for it?” He nodded. She studied him. “Aight,” she said. She reached down and put her hand on the boy. “Go get your brother,” she told him. He got up and ran into the other room. “And bring me back that bag, when you come,” she called after him.
She looked at us. “Who’s this?” she said, looking at me.
“Butter,” Keebler said.
She laughed, just like her kid. “You had some messed up parents,” she said.
“It’s a nickname,” I said.
The kid came back with a bag and another, younger, kid. They were clearly brothers. They both had the sickly jaundiced skin and the slack features of drug-babies. The younger one had a severely pronounced backbone. He was naked, maybe about 4 years old.
“Gimme that,” the woman said, taking the bag. She rummaged around and drew out a marijuana brick, wrapped in plastic. Keebler took it and handed her an envelope. The whole thing was sloppy as hell. “Well,” she said, then. “You gonna try it?”
Keebler looked at me and shrugged.
We were there for hours. Stacy put the youngest kid to bed, then passed a joint around. It was a real hog-leg. The smell hit me like a pie on a window-sill, but I was a little nervous about the setting. When it came to me, I just sort of put it to my lips, and kind of Bill Clintoned it. The other kid sat in the corner and watched. After a while, it started getting dark, but the lights stayed off.
“Hey Ken,” Stacy said, “go light that fire under that hot water heater so I can take a bath in a little while.”
The kid went in another room. The youngest kid reappeared around that time. Stacy yelled at him and sent him back to bed. She lit another joint, and he came back out. This time, she started laughing at him. He’d fall over, or run and hit his head against the wall and she’d just laugh and laugh. The other kid came back, yelling. His eyebrows were blackened.
“I used too much gas,” he said.
Stacy laughed and then smacked him in the head.
I followed Keebler back to the other room. The kid had set some wood around the hot water heater and soaked it in gas. The floor was scorched black, as were the walls. The room reeked of gas and smoke and melted plastic.
“We’re leaving,” I said.
“I don’t want to offend Stacy,” Keebler said.
“We’re fucking leaving,” I said.
We went back to the livingroom. Stacy had the youngest boy in her arms. She was sort of whispering in his ear and rubbing up against him. He had a beatific smile on his face.
“Nice to meet you, and thanks for everything, but we’ve got to go,” I said.
Stacy shrugged. I grabbed Keebler and dragged him outside to his truck.
“Don’t you ever fucking bring me to a place like this again,” I said.
“What’s your problem?” Keebler said.
“That’s fucking evil in there,” I said.
Keebler shrugged. “They’re just people I do business with.”
“No. If you do business with them, you’re one of them. You help support that bitch.”
Keebler shrugged again.
I could feel the buzz from the contact high, but I wasn’t really stoned. Still, I needed a meeting. I had Keebler drop me off at the church on the way home. I know I reeked, but I went in. There was nobody there, so I just went up to the altar and prayed some. I had to use the bathroom—it had a can of Lysol in it, sitting on the sink. It made me think of how Charlene and her friends would go in the bathroom at her church and huff the Lysol or whatever to get them through the service. That’s where she started, I guess. For me, it was sneaking drinks of my dad’s bourbon while he bullshitted with his buddies and didn’t notice me.
I was in there a long time, staring at the can, reading the ingredients. The bathroom was really kind of scummy, so I found what I could under the sink and cleaned it up a little. I sprayed Lysol all around so at least it smelled clean.
CL Bledsoe is the author of the young adult novel Sunlight; three poetry collections, _____(Want/Need), Anthem, and Leap Year; and a short story collection called Naming the Animals. His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for storySouth's Million Writer's Award. His story “The Scream” was selected as a Notable Story of 2011. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 5 times.
Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, Prick of the Spindle,The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. Bledsoe lives with his wife and daughter in Maryland. He blogs at Murder Your Darlings.
I’d been living with my sister and her family in Searcy for about six months when I got in a fight with her meth-head husband. I’d been at work slinging burgers when she came and got me. The older kids were at their mom’s. She was in the van and wanted me to watch the baby while she went and got some things. I sat out in the van while she went in. Maybe twenty minutes went by, so I stuck my head in the door. Her husband Luke was sitting on the couch till he saw me. Then he came running. He went straight to the van, heading for the baby, so I pushed him off the porch into the rose bushes he’d planted the last time he got sober. He got right back up, dripping blood from his arms, and came after me. I hadn’t really thought it through, but I had to start real quick. He pushed me into the wall, and I went low and knocked his legs out from under him. There wasn’t much point breaking my fists on him. He wouldn’t really feel it anyway. I knocked him down, and he got back up. I knew I couldn’t keep it up for long. My sister Lennie came outside, running, and Luke lost interest in me. She got in between us.
“Leave him alone,” she said. Then, to me, “Get in the van.”
“You ain’t taking my boy,” Luke said.
“You ain’t fit to raise him. ‘Sides, what makes you think he’s yours?” she said.
We got in the van.
“You’re a whore of a mother,” Luke said. “And I want you out of my house,” he said to me. He walked up to the van and punched the window out over the baby and reached in after him, but Lennie grabbed the baby right before he did it. Somehow, she’d seen it coming. She handed him to me and backed the van out quick. Luke stood in the driveway, blood coating his arms. The baby was crying. The thing is, Luke and Lennie, they’d be screwing again before the weekend.
There was a guy named Keebler I worked with who’d been talking about moving out and getting a place. We went to a pay phone, and I called him. There were some subsidized apartments out on Towncraft. I met him there an hour later. Lennie stayed in the van. We filled out the paperwork then looked at the place. It was nice. Cleaner than I expected. Lennie cosigned for me.
“It’s got water and power,” Keebler said. I kind of laughed because I thought he was making a joke.
Back at the office, they had us fill out some more paperwork about how much money we made. We made about double what we were supposed to. Keebler just told them he was unemployed. They said we could move in right away. I went to find Lennie, but she was gone, so I went upstairs. Keebler lit a joint and offered it to me.
“In a minute,” I said. “You go ahead. I’ve got to go find my sister.”
I ducked out and walked around the buildings in the complex. There was a playground and a nice little pond and not much else. When I came back around, my sister’s van was there. I went upstairs and she was knocking on the door, but Keebler wasn’t answering it. You could smell the pot all over the building. I unlocked the door, and he was in his bedroom.
“You need to watch that shit,” Lennie said.
She handed me a couple bags of stuff from the Dollar Store up the street, mostly cleaning stuff and towels and things.
“You can’t afford to get stuff for me,” I said.
“You’re my brother,” she said.
I made a little mat with a sheet she’d gotten for me, and we put the baby on it. I went and knocked on Keebler’s door.
“My sister’s here with her baby,” I said.
“I’ve got to go to work anyway,” he said, and took off. He wouldn’t go near her. He was afraid of her because we all worked at the same place and she was his boss.
I went and sat on the floor and stared at the baby. It had empty eyes and drooled. It could barely sit up. I’d partied with folks like that. Lennie would make noises and move the baby’s limbs around to keep it interested. When she got up to go to the bathroom, she left me watching him. He sort of bobbled his head up and down a couple times then spit up. Lennie had a cloth she’d been using, so I wiped his face. He started crying. She came back out.
“You couldn’t handle him for two minutes,” she said.
I left her and the baby napping and found a meeting in a church on Race Street, a few blocks over. I walked it. I always liked to walk to meeting, if I could. It gave me time to think. I didn’t have what you’d call a sponsor. It wasn’t really my home meeting—I wasn’t from there. I’d just been living there while I got clean. I can’t say I was really working the program. But I wasn’t drinking.
At the meeting, there was a guy who got up and all he talked about was masturbation. He said it was an addiction like anything else, and it robbed you of your will. It was difficult not to laugh, but he was angry-serious. He said he was employee of the month at his work, but he’d missed the meeting where he’d get the plaque so he could come to meeting. Everybody applauded. After the meeting, I talked to him because no one else would. He was a butcher at a grocery store up the street. He rode a bicycle because he’d lost his license to DUIs. He said he might be able to get me on for a second job.
Walking back, I thought about drinking like I always did, the cool, bitter jolt of it. I thought about Charlene, who’d been dead six months, her blonde hair framing her face, her eyes, the taste of her lips. It hurt, all of it, but it was kind of like working a loose tooth. I kept coming back to it.
When I got back, my sister and her baby were asleep on the floor. I stared at them for a little while, trying to make some sense of it. If I was what I should be, I thought, I’d see something beautiful in this, but all I saw was trouble down the road.
2
We all worked at Burger Barn. My sister had gotten me the job. It was my first real one since I’d gotten sober. Before, I’d worked at a grocery store, but that seemed like years ago. This place was run by a guy named Doug Korn. He’d asked me, during the interview, why I had a gap in my work history. I’d sort of shrugged.
“I worked on my dad’s farm,” I said.
He laughed and shook his head, like that didn’t mean a thing. “Lennie,” he called.
“I’ll keep him in line,” she said.
“All right.” He didn’t even shake my hand.
It was me and a couple guys maybe five years younger than me in the back, running the grill. Keebler and this guy Josh. Keebler was all right, except he hadn’t seen nearly as much of the world as he thought he had. Josh was big like a church but also slow as stone. Neither of them spent more than a solid 15 minutes a day sober. There were a couple youngish girls who worked back there making sandwiches and whatnot. Amber and Tiffani. They were both big blondes, which was fine with me. I’d never understood the appeal of petit women that looked like little boys. Of course, they were both pretty homely. Up front, there were 3 or 4 middle-aged housewives. There were a couple younger married girls, and occasionally some oddball would drift in for a few days, but that was mostly the staff.
Fast food is fast-paced, but it’s monotonous. It’s the kind of thing you can do on speed. Nobody much cared about what happened; it wasn’t like anyone was working there by choice. We were all desperate, one way or the other.
Sometimes, when it was slow, my sister would go in the back and light a pipe in the big walk-in refrigerator. Something about the coolness of it suppressed the smell. One of the girls would go back and take turns with her. It was kind of homey, in that sense.
Doug’s wife was this big blonde named Darlene. She came in sometimes and worked, but mostly what happened was she’d drive whoever she was working with to quit. She came to the back after I’d been there a couple months and made sandwiches. We usually had one grillman and one or two sandwich makers. She was jittery, like she needed a fix.
“Hurry up with that order,” she said, when we got our first little rush.
“I like it when you tell me what to do, Darlene,” I said and winked at her. She didn’t speak much for the rest of the shift, but she always kind of watched me after that. I watched her too. There wasn’t much else to do.
My favorite was this lady named Mrs. Sandy. She had short, brown hair—so short I thought she was gay for a long time. She drove around in a big red pickup and strutted like a cowboy. The first time I worked with her, she walked in and gave me a speech.
“We ain’t never worked together,” she said. “So I just want you to know, I expect you to pull your weight.” She was talking about some of the other boys, who weren’t really much pumpkins.
“I’ve got all the meat you want to put in your buns,” I said. I slid the spatula under a hamburger patty and held it up for her to see. She blushed red as her truck. “I can keep them coming as long as you want them,” I added.
A little while later, she said, sort of over her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to come down on you before. Some of them won’t work. You do, though.”
“That’s all right, beautiful,” I said. “Can I ride in your truck?”
She kind of laughed, and that was that. We were, as they say, thick as thieves from then on. We’d call each other pet names.
“Good morning, honey-shorts,” I’d say.
“Same to you, angel-pancakes,” she’d say.
We flirted like crazy but there wasn’t nothing to it. I acted like I was big fun, but I wasn’t nothing but a little boy, lost. It was my first time living away from home sober. Sure, I’d squatted in lots of places, slept on lots of floors, hell, I’d seen the country from the back of a van, but it was a lot more real when you woke up every morning and went to work. It was a good place for me, too. Searcy was a dry city in a dry county. I had to drive a solid half-hour in any direction on the interstate to hit a liquor store, and my car wasn’t really in shape to make it.
On the first day I worked at Burger Barn, my sister announced to all the women, “This is my little brother Butter. His name’s Butter cause when I was a kid, I couldn’t say brother so I called him Butter. Be good to him. He’s a motherless child.” It took me weeks before any of them saw me as anything but soft. Still, I don’t blame her. She’s my sister. She was more of a parent to me than anyone else. After I blew my shot at college, she took me in, even though I didn’t have a thing to bring with me except trouble.
A couple days after I moved in to the apartment with Keebler, we made the rounds to Goodwill and anywhere else we could think of. Keebler had a truck, so we hauled everything in that. I got a trundle bed from my sister and a couch from a Dumpster. When we went to get the bed and the rest of my stuff, Luke was sitting on the couch, watching some woman do exercises on TV.
“I’m here for my shit,” I said and stood in the doorway, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t even remember kicking me out, probably not the fight, either. He just sort of looked surprised. It was a brand new world to him. I got my stereo and everything and took off.
We bought a bunch of Fabreeze and arranged everything as well as we could. All the furniture was from the 60s. Keebler thought that was the best. That evening, Keebler was smoking out in the living room. I had a job interview at the grocery store the next day, I told him, so I had to be clean to pass the test. There was a knock on the door. It was this blonde with a bad hip so she walked funny, and her boyfriend, who you could take one look at and tell he was a bruiser.
“Are you guys smoking pot in here?” they asked.
Keebler invited them in. It was the single stupidest move I’d ever seen. They sat on the couch and got high. They were just the first.
The grocery store was up on a little bit of a hill so that the parking lot sloped down. Carts would get loose and roll out into traffic. People would honk and swerve; nobody ever really had a wreck, but they didn’t do anything about it. I went in right after my shift, stinking of grease. There was this little Italian guy, the regional manager, there.
“You’re going to have to cut your hair,” he said. “And shave.”
I had to take a kind of personality profile. I tried my best, but I didn’t really know what the right answers should be. As I was turning it in, I couldn’t find the Italian guy, but I saw this woman I sort of recognized. She was a friend of my sister’s. Darla. She was a manager. She asked what I was doing there and everything, so I gave her my test. She took it back in the office and told me to change some of the answers.
“I thought you were working with your sister,” she said.
“I need something to fill the hours,” I said.
We sort of chitchatted about things. I talked about what I was reading, and she just sort of stared at me. She wasn’t much to look at, but she kept looking me over. My mind kept drifting to what she might look like naked on a pallet of canned peas or something. She sort of held my hand instead of shaking it, and said she’d call me in a day or two. She winked when she said it and gave my hand a little squeeze.
Keebler worked at Burger Barn, but his real ambition was as a drug dealer. It had taken him months to gain the trust of a pretty small-time dealer who would sell Keebler quarter pounds (QPs) every couple weeks. I could’ve made a couple visits and paid half the price, but this was the only person who would sell to Keebler.
Maybe a week after we rented the place, I went along on a run with him. He’d been doing a lot for me lately, hauling furniture and the like, so I went. Keebler was like that—he was always game. I think that’s why he got played so much.
Keebler drove this raggedy old 64 Ford with rust holes in the body and, depending on your attitude, either no paint job, or several conflicting paint jobs. It was a loose ride, like I think Keebler wished he was. I always liked that truck. It never broke down, but you always thought it was going to.
He drove over to this run-down shack on the edge of town with plywood walls. There were old washers and dryers and stoves and things piled up in the yard and on the porch. The whole place had an air of rust and decay about it.
“How the fuck do you know these people?” I asked.
“I went to school with one of them.”
Keebler walked around to the side because, he said, they wouldn’t answer at any other door. He knocked three times fast, then paused, then twice slow. You could tell he’d practiced it, come up with it himself, and inside, they were probably laughing at him. This kid, maybe 6, opened the door in a long, dirty tee-shirt. He glared at us with pointy ears and dull eyes. Lizard eyes. Keebler said,
“Is Stacy home?”
“Who’s that?” the kid said, nodding at me, mouth open.
“Butter. He’s cool.”
The kid laughed like it was the funniest thing since Benny Hill. We waited. He kept laughing, just standing there, laughing.
“Must’ve got a new shipment,” Keebler said, over his shoulder, to me.
The kid finally wandered off, and Keebler went in after him.
“Wait here,” he said.
“Fuck that,” I said, muscling in behind him. “Let’s get and go.”
The door led to a dark, bare room. Past that was the living room. We heard a throaty laugh, a woman’s laugh, and came out into the room from the side. The lights were off, but the windows were open. The laughter was coming from a couch in the middle of the room. It was bowed with a dirty sheet over it. The woman was on the phone, lying on the couch. She saw us and waved at Keebler to be quiet. The kid was sitting on the floor, looking bored. When he saw me, he started laughing again until his mom, as I assumed the woman to be, reached down and slapped him hard on the leg. He covered his mouth and yelped into his hand.
We stood in the doorway and tried not to stare. The woman was middle-aged, practically naked except some shorty-shorts and a tee-shirt. I glanced and saw more than I wanted to. She would’ve been all right, but there was a smell in the house like sweat and cheese. Eventually, she hung up the phone. The kid immediately started hollering, so she smacked him again.
“’S’up, Keeb?” she said.
“That thing we talked about last time,” Keebler said.
“What thing?” she said, then stopped herself. “Oh, yeah. All right. You ready for it?” He nodded. She studied him. “Aight,” she said. She reached down and put her hand on the boy. “Go get your brother,” she told him. He got up and ran into the other room. “And bring me back that bag, when you come,” she called after him.
She looked at us. “Who’s this?” she said, looking at me.
“Butter,” Keebler said.
She laughed, just like her kid. “You had some messed up parents,” she said.
“It’s a nickname,” I said.
The kid came back with a bag and another, younger, kid. They were clearly brothers. They both had the sickly jaundiced skin and the slack features of drug-babies. The younger one had a severely pronounced backbone. He was naked, maybe about 4 years old.
“Gimme that,” the woman said, taking the bag. She rummaged around and drew out a marijuana brick, wrapped in plastic. Keebler took it and handed her an envelope. The whole thing was sloppy as hell. “Well,” she said, then. “You gonna try it?”
Keebler looked at me and shrugged.
We were there for hours. Stacy put the youngest kid to bed, then passed a joint around. It was a real hog-leg. The smell hit me like a pie on a window-sill, but I was a little nervous about the setting. When it came to me, I just sort of put it to my lips, and kind of Bill Clintoned it. The other kid sat in the corner and watched. After a while, it started getting dark, but the lights stayed off.
“Hey Ken,” Stacy said, “go light that fire under that hot water heater so I can take a bath in a little while.”
The kid went in another room. The youngest kid reappeared around that time. Stacy yelled at him and sent him back to bed. She lit another joint, and he came back out. This time, she started laughing at him. He’d fall over, or run and hit his head against the wall and she’d just laugh and laugh. The other kid came back, yelling. His eyebrows were blackened.
“I used too much gas,” he said.
Stacy laughed and then smacked him in the head.
I followed Keebler back to the other room. The kid had set some wood around the hot water heater and soaked it in gas. The floor was scorched black, as were the walls. The room reeked of gas and smoke and melted plastic.
“We’re leaving,” I said.
“I don’t want to offend Stacy,” Keebler said.
“We’re fucking leaving,” I said.
We went back to the livingroom. Stacy had the youngest boy in her arms. She was sort of whispering in his ear and rubbing up against him. He had a beatific smile on his face.
“Nice to meet you, and thanks for everything, but we’ve got to go,” I said.
Stacy shrugged. I grabbed Keebler and dragged him outside to his truck.
“Don’t you ever fucking bring me to a place like this again,” I said.
“What’s your problem?” Keebler said.
“That’s fucking evil in there,” I said.
Keebler shrugged. “They’re just people I do business with.”
“No. If you do business with them, you’re one of them. You help support that bitch.”
Keebler shrugged again.
I could feel the buzz from the contact high, but I wasn’t really stoned. Still, I needed a meeting. I had Keebler drop me off at the church on the way home. I know I reeked, but I went in. There was nobody there, so I just went up to the altar and prayed some. I had to use the bathroom—it had a can of Lysol in it, sitting on the sink. It made me think of how Charlene and her friends would go in the bathroom at her church and huff the Lysol or whatever to get them through the service. That’s where she started, I guess. For me, it was sneaking drinks of my dad’s bourbon while he bullshitted with his buddies and didn’t notice me.
I was in there a long time, staring at the can, reading the ingredients. The bathroom was really kind of scummy, so I found what I could under the sink and cleaned it up a little. I sprayed Lysol all around so at least it smelled clean.
CL Bledsoe is the author of the young adult novel Sunlight; three poetry collections, _____(Want/Need), Anthem, and Leap Year; and a short story collection called Naming the Animals. His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for storySouth's Million Writer's Award. His story “The Scream” was selected as a Notable Story of 2011. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 5 times.
Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, Prick of the Spindle,The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. Bledsoe lives with his wife and daughter in Maryland. He blogs at Murder Your Darlings.
