Monthly Archives: July 2012

[Sometimes I write a story in one hour based on an intriguing image. I call them Postcard Stories.]

Damn that show, thought Gavin as another pair of city boys slid and shuffled down the embankment of loose leaves toward his trailer. They had flashlights clipped to their belts and pairs of work gloves stuffed into their pockets, like they always did.

“Hey, buddy!” one of them called. He was short, both of them were, but this one was skinny, too — like some of the folk he often saw in the woods. That’s why Gavin didn’t pull both triggers of the shotgun the minute he saw them.

“Mornin’” Gavin said. He didn’t lower the shotgun.

The other one, muscular and tattooed, got to the bottom of the ravine first, sliding on his ass the last six feet. He landed with a grunt, dusted off the front of his jeans without realizing the back was slicked with jellied mud, and came forward with the paper.

Oh, the paper. The usual paper.

“You ever see the show American Pickers?”

Gavin closed his eyes. “I’ve heard of it.” Oh, had he heard of it. Every scrounging dumbass in America considered it license to loot barns and bust into abandoned houses. Most of them weren’t even as respectful as the fellas on the show.

“I’m Patrick,” the tattooed one said, “and he’s Bobby. We’re like those guys, traveling the backroads of America looking for history.”

“To sell,” Gavin said.

The two guys traded glances and then grinned.

“We don’t sell all of it,” Bobby said. “We keep the special pieces, the important ones. We’re just like you. We love old junk, too. Everything’s got a story, and we just let those stories out into the world.”

There wasn’t nothing to reply, so Gavin didn’t.

Patrick pointed back over his shoulder. “I notice you got an old railroad car full of stuff.” He handed the paper to Gavin. “Anything like this stuff in there? Old toys, signs, vintage car parts? Circus stuff? Anvils? Police light bars? Confederate cavalry swords? Medical oddities?”

“Movie posters?” the other one interjected. “Glass interior house fixtures? Old wire spools?”

“Any folk art? Human hair, momento mori, cross-stitch, matchstick, microscopic Bible verses on rice?”

Gavin nodded back up the embankment. “Y’all could go to the Country Barn restaurant on the interstate for all that shit.”

The two men laughed nervously. Gavin liked to make them do that.

“So what’s in the train car? Anything you could see your way to selling?”

Gavin shrugged. “Maybe. For the right price.”

Bobby slapped his hands together. “That’s what I like to hear. You mind if we take a look?”

If this was the show, they’d take no for an answer after some dickering. But jackasses like this with their city license plates and SUVs would just skulk around and take the stuff if he didn’t agree.

“Sure.” Gavin propped the shotgun on his shoulder. “Let’s take a look.”

They followed him down the trail he’d cut from years of walking down to visit the railroad car. He hadn’t known it was there when he bought the property, not the car and not the old rusty spur line they’d let rust almost to nothing from Jenkins Notch. Time was when they’d carry tourists up to the resort there and then lumber on back. Someone must have left this one all by its lonesome, and that worked out great for Gavin.

He let them stomp and crash their way through the reaching branches like city men often did; they swatted gnats away from their eyes and sputtered them from their lips. Once, Patrick stumbled on a root and went sprawling. Another time, a switch came snapping back right into Bobby’s fleshy beak.

“It’s way out here,” Patrick said. “We saw it from above off the bridge but I had no idea it was this far back.”

“Keeps folks away,” Gavin said.

“I’m sure it does.”

They came out onto the old gravel roadbed and tottered their way another twenty yards to the car. Even Gavin didn’t know how long it had been there, but the windows had long ago glazed over with fungus and vines had formed a kind of pelt along the top and sides. It was the fort he’d always wanted. The playhouse.

“I call it my playhouse,” Gavin said.

The two men chuckled. Bobby reached for the door on the near end.

“Be careful. It sticks.”

He propped up his leg on the old coupler and gave the door two good yanks to the side. It slid open and a cloud of dust motes sparkled in the beams of sunshine between the trees.

“Wow,” Bobby said. “It’s like a little theater in here.”

Playhouse, thought Gavin. It’s a playhouse.

Gavin let Bobby and Patrick climb inside and then he followed. They turned their heads all over the place like a couple of magpies, taking in the little red velvet curtains Gavin had sewn, the theater seats he’d rescued from the Bijoux when it burned down, the little wooden stage he’d built with the trap door for special effects.

“This like a little puppet theater?” Patrick turned on his little flashlight and aimed it. “You make this?”

“More or less,” Gavin said. In a way, it had made him, finding the parts over the years.

“It’s in great shape,” Bobby said. “These seats are amazing. What would you get for one of these?”

Gavin hadn’t thought about it. Since he’d put them in the train car, he’d been the only one to sit in them for long, leaning back and watching the shows. They were pretty comfortable.

“I don’t rightly know,” Gavin replied.

“Well, you think about it,” Bobby said, sidling down the aisle toward Patrick.

“Look at all these puppets. Wow.” Patrick reached behind the stage and pulled out Colonel Squirrel. He turned him around, checked his ass, and then shoved his hand inside.

“That looks almost real,” Bobby said.

“It should. I sew them from the ones I catch.”

Patrick squeezed Colonel Squirrel’s mouth shut as though the puppet was the one disgusted to have his paw up a rodent’s colon. Then, wincing, Patrick slid it off his hand.

“You’ve got all kinds back here,” Bobby said. “A couple of woodchucks, a crow, a raccoon. What’s this one? Oh, some kind of wildcat.”

“These are awesome.” Patrick turned over Dr. Eatum Crow in his hands. “Stand these up on a nice dowel rod base and you’ve got a real statement piece for a mantel or display case.”

A statement piece. Yes, it was that, Gavin figured.

“Holy shit, what is this?” Bobby’s voice got high all of a sudden. “Oh, my God. Is this human?”

Of course she was. She’d always been.

“She fell out my mama’s belly all dried out like that. When I was a boy. She’s my sister.”

Bobby dropped it to the stage and stepped back, wiping his hands on the back of his pants. “And you kept it?”

“Wasn’t supposed to,” Gavin said. But he’d waited a long time for a sister, all his life back then, and he wasn’t going to let them put her in the ground just because she was different. No, sir. They’d tried to stop him the first couple of times he dug her out, but by the third or fourth they just let him have her.

“She wanted to be an actress.” Gavin picked her up from the stage and petted the hardened black smear that might have once been wispy hair. “To tread the boards in Branson, she always said. So I made this for her. It’s our playhouse.”

Through the fingers clasped to his lips, Patrick said, “Oh, no. There’s another one.”

“Folks ’round here don’t always mean to have children and I take the extras, that’s all. I’m like one of them foster homes the state runs. But I teach them how to act, how to sing. So Wendy isn’t lonely.”

“How many are there?” Bobby asked, his words slow and quiet.

“‘Bout seven or eight. Enough for a decent production of King Lear if you let a couple of them do double-roles. Colonel Squirrel usually plays King Lear, though: he’s the master thespian of the troupe.”

Bobby and Patrick turned away from the stage now and crushed each other between the seats in their hurry to get up the aisle.

“I don’t think any of them are for sale after all,” Gavin said.

“No, that’s okay. Sorry to have bothered you, sir.” Bobby motioned that he’d like to get past but Gavin stood his ground.

“Oh, I went ahead and locked the door. You can’t have folks come busting into the middle of a show. Ruins the dramatic dream.”

“You don’t have to–”

“Oh, no. It’s no trouble. I was fixin’ to come down here and run a show anyway. It’s nice to have a bigger audience than usual. Have yourselves a seat and I’ll get everything going for you.”

Bobby and Patrick backed down the aisle.

“I said, sit down.”

They stopped.

“Sit,” Gavin said. He hated having to say it so many times but city folks were dense.

They did, their knees curled up to their chests, and Gavin stepped behind the curtain for a limited engagement performance.

[Sometimes I write a story in one hour based on an intriguing image. I call them Postcard Stories.]

Nobody believes me when I tell them that every Country Barn is cursed. Mr. Wurley doesn’t let me talk to the new employees, but I find them sooner or later to tell them the truth. Out smoking by the back door, maybe, or reorganizing the pop guns.

I start out slow. “How many objects you figure are on the walls in the dining area?” I ask.

They’ll usually shrug. “About a thousand,” is what most of them guess.

“You’re probably right,” I tell them. “Maybe more, maybe less. And of all those broken plow blades and soup can labels and portraits of Civil War soldiers can be, I don’t know, hundreds of years old, right?”

Some of the new people are skeptical. “Well, unless they make them in a factory somewhere.”

“Oh, no,” I tell them. “They’ve got antique dealers out on the prowl, buying up whatever they can find that looks home-y. All of it is one hundred percent real. All of it is old, and all of it has history.”

I let that word sink in. History.

“They find it all over, further north than you’d think because it all rusts up and rots away down South. It’s in fallen barns and farmhouses, heaped in little bottle dumps by lost homesteads, stacked in sheds or scattered in the woods. It’s been handled, man, handled by God knows how many people.”

By now, Mr. Wurley has usually seen us and come over. He always scowls at me and says, “What you doin’, Byron? You think them hashbrown casseroles are gonna waltz THEMSELVES over to the tables?”

So then I slink away and pick my next moment.

“So as I was saying,” I’ll say, sauntering up to the newbie behind the register or out dusting the rocking chairs, “that stuff has been handled by lots of people. And if you think about it, some of those people had to have done terrible things. I mean, statistically speaking, there are a certain number of evil doers in the population, and they’ve probably touched some of that stuff on the walls. So with all these Country Barns with a thousand objects each, it’s a mathematical certainty that in every restaurant, at least one of the objects is cursed. And you never know which one it is. Or maybe it’s more than one.”

The new employee often squints at me after that, but I know I’ve got him or her hooked.

“I mean, weird things happen, don’t they? I heard at the Country Barn near exit 219 that they have to throw out every other batch of coffee because it turns to something like blood. A guy and a girl fell in love at the one near exit 5 and they ended up killing themselves out in the woods by the overpass because their manager had a strict anti-fraternization policy. These are emotional crucibles, man, so you better watch yourself.”

That’s what I tell them. Because, hey, somebody has to, right? It’s a real workplace hazard, the sheer volume of possibly cursed goods nailed to those walls. I mean, somebody abandoned that shit in the first place because something wasn’t right about it. My guess is that probably 30% of the things on any given Country Barn wall were used in a passionate back-country murder at some point.

And those objects just suck in that karma like a sponge. Nobody believes me, though, until a deer head falls on them or a kid at their table chokes to death on a golf tee.

But you believe me now, don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be talking to me in this room about the little sailor boy.

I had a bad feeling about that kid’s picture ever since I started. He seemed to be watching me, the squat little fucker with that freakishly big head. What was it full of, that head? Secrets? Anger? Spirits? Water? We’ll never know. But it’s full of something.

Usually it didn’t matter. If it was in my bus zone, I just swept all the dishes off into my brown tote and got the hell out of there. If I lingered too long, the kid in the picture would chuckle a little, maybe shake his head sadly at me. Mr. Wurley once wrote me up for flipping him the bird.

The boy in the picture, not Mr. Wurley.

When I mopped the floors at night, the boy in the picture would whisper his story to me. The trouble is, I’m not so good at hearing anymore after the accident, so I could only make out bits and pieces. He was murdered, I know that much, and it was his family that did him in. Seems he liked running around his little Kansas town in the Depression pretending to be a ship captain, standing atop the roof of his little shack pretending to face the tempest. He’d cry out for “Wind, more wind!” and soon enough it came, carrying a billion billion particles of sand all in it. That’s what swept away the farms, the houses, the very town.

And his family — his crazy family — blamed him for it. They hung him from the church steeple to show the wind they’d done its will, but that didn’t work.

He was alive for the first couple of hours. If you’re there late at night waiting for Mr. Wurley to lock up and take you home to the halfway house, you’ll hear him gasping for breath in the storm, coughing and crying, begging for someone to cut him down. Then he screams as the sand scrubs his bones clean of flesh.

So the upshot is the boy in the picture is pissed off. He’s got good reason to be, in my estimation, but we could all be collateral damage of his rage. I’m proof enough of that, sitting here.

Last Sunday, in comes this guy and his family, and they seat them right beneath the sailor boy. And as I’m taking away their old plates and glasses, I look up and see, holy shit, that they’re kin. That the guy sitting under the picture has got to be related to the sailor boy somehow.

I told Mr. Wurley. “He has the same big head, the same mouth, the same eyes, the same chin. We’ve got to do something.”

Mr. Wurley turned me around by the shoulders and said, “Byron, the only thing you gotta do is make sure people aren’t ass-deep in their own dirty dishes.”

Which meant that he’d be no help.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said to the man beneath the sailor boy. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but–”

“Can we get some more butter, please? And not the frozen shit that tears through my pancakes, okay?”

“Right away, sir,” I replied. “But first, I need to call your attention to the photograph above you. I’m not sure you want to sit within its…reach.”

The man turned around, scowling.

“Do you recognize him?” I asked.

“Why should I?”

I leaned over and whispered, “Because he’s your kin.”

“Bullshit,” the man said. “You think any family of mine would dress a kid in a damned sailor suit? Look at that poor asshole.”

“Shhh,” I said. “Just move over here.” I pulled out a chair.

“No, I like to sit here. I’ve got my wife on one side of the kids and I’m on the other. It’s a picture, for Christ’s sake.” He waved over Yvonne, his waitress. “Can the manager do something about this…this retard?”

“Shhh,” I said, not realizing at first that he meant me.

Mr. Wurley came and offered to comp his whole family their ticket, and I was forced to stand there while they talked about how crazy I was. Mr. Wurley promised I’d be fired that morning, that he’d always had his doubts about me, and that’s when I heard the sailor boy whispering to me again.

“Get me down,” the sailor boy said.

Neither Mr. Wurley nor the customer heard him.

“The hook…get me off this hook.”

I kind of side-stepped to the wall anyway, hoping to blend into the wood with my brown apron. The sailor boy was right beside me now, promising me he’d never fire me if I only did this one thing. One thing. One easy thing.

I lifted my right leg and stomped twice on the wall as hard as I could. The thundering noise silenced all the customers, and they turned around just in time to see the picture drop — I’d say jump, leap, swan dive — off the wall right down onto that guy’s head.

The glass broke and it slid down near his neck. The shards punctured him from four or five sides. He screamed, I screamed, his wife screamed, the kids screamed, and Mr. Wurley screamed as he staggered to his feet trying to pull it off. Blood drizzled off that frame like rain from a tin roof. He stumbled a few steps into someone else’s table and then staggered back. He thumped into an old hand drill and fell forward gasping. When he hit the ground, the picture almost severed his head.

It was a glass noose, knotted just for him a half century before he was born.

So yeah, I’m back in the hospital. It’s not like I mind — there’s no Mr. Wurley here, and nobody hangs crazy shit on the walls even in a nuthouse. The only thing I miss is getting to hear secrets from the sailor boy. Oh, and the blackberry pancakes.