Penance by Sea - The Freighter

I’m on this tanker out in the middle of the ocean.  I’ve gone from living in a Midwestern rambler to this iron maiden floating on the sea.  The ocean tries to drown us every day.  We slice through swells forty to fifty feet high, and when the calm comes, it feels like a momentary reprieve from the wrath of an angry mother.

I know nothing that is required of a ship mate.  I got this gig from the captain, who I went to school with a hundred years ago.  We fought on the playground, we played tricks on each other, I egged his house, and then we became best friends.  We would ride our bikes to the edge of town and hunt for a giant snake rumored to be living in the gulch.  We traumatized a possum we found living in an oak tree.  We built tree houses, started fires in fields of dried grass, and then his sister died and his parents moved them out to the West Coast to forget.

Twenty years can change a guy.  Harris is thick and hairy; best way I have to describe him.  His arms are like stumps, his neck sunburned and gnarled like an old log.  Beneath his cap he is bald as a cannon ball, but  he is almost never without his cap.  Teeth aren’t so great, and he squints because he doesn’t want to buy glasses or wear contacts.

I am his polar opposite.  I wear reading glasses.  My arms are skinny and my skin sallow for lack of hard work and sun, but I’m hoping all of that changes after three months out at sea.  So far I’m spared much of the heavy lifting because the first week I broke my arm and spent days laid up in the infirmary.  Then as the sea swelled my stomach turned inside out.  Yes, I am infirm.  I brought along several novels and have started a ship library for the rest of the crew, though I think they would prefer I replace Joseph Conrad and John Steinbeck with Playboy and Penthouse.  Little do they know the joys of Lawrence and Nin.    

Why am I out here?  Unlike Harris’s parents, who ran away to forget, I have followed to remember.  You see, I killed Harris’s sister.  It was an accident, but something for which I never took responsibility.  But the mind does not absolve one who knows the truth.  The soul grows sick from a wrong never made right.

Captor in the Field

photo by niconicohumby.

How like a writer is this killer? Or how like a killer is our writer, there is little difference. He stretches his limbs spread eagle over the soil and peat moss in the moonlight, stretches his neck to look at the stars swirling about the celestial dome like a whirlpool sucking him in. He sheds his skin and gleams anew for all the stars to see. Cryptic syllabile, metered out in iambic pentecost, grew like pyroglyphic crustaceans upon his peculiar tabular rosa.
He is pulled to his feet by the moon, and goes in search of a reader.

How like a reader is this victim, or how like a victim is our reader? She regained consciousness to find herself being dragged across a recently harvested cornfield. The severed stalks poked her shoulders and scraped across her back. There it is again, that hideous moon bearing down on me, she thought. Wicked leer of Moon Man. The grip on her wrist was strong, a calloused hand with hairy knuckles, thick wrist with a thick silver bracelet. A medical bracelet? His boots crunched over the dirt, crushed dried husks fallen from the plants. It never occurred to her to wonder where she was being dragged. Does a rabbit grasped by its hind legs wonder where its captor is leading it? It simply hangs in the grip of its captor, watching the world sway as it rocks like a pendulum. It might be considered Mercy, the way the mind distances itself from the physical predicament of the body when it knows it will soon be separated from its longtime counterpart.

Words come out of the dark, lighting his way like a jolt of electricity through a conductor. Are you beneath there still, he wonders, under the skin, trying to resurface after a year’s long abstinence? His fingers grow stronger as the morning comes, and the keys heated beneath their constant pounding. There’s light in the Eastern sky, a bruised backdrop for his latest work

Sullen's Fish House

photo by German Chocolate Ladies.

Northern lights flash across the sky like dust blowing over a car windshield. This place is no desert, though. Here we got endless snow and ice cruel as any desert could be, and the people who live here are as cruel as our winters. What pleasures to we enjoy as we wait for it to end? Sit on a frozen lake in a plywood box, staring into a dark hole, waiting for something to bite?

Sullen’s fish house is something else though, about three times the size of your average fish house, strung up with Christmas lights like a carnival drawing us in from the dark. Me and my brother Jay go out there to thaw out. Drink some Jim Beam and spark a bowl. Other bright shiny things draw us there, too; make us warm for a while at least. Then when they get cold we drop them down through the hole to come bobbing up again sometime in the Spring. Spring will never come though, we tell ourselves. It still hasn’t.

Mom don’t like us hanging out there. When we come home, me and my brother come through the back door and let in a drift of snow behind us. I stamp my boots off just inside the door, a pink slush of blood and snow. Jay come in behind me, slams shut the door and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

Mom stoops over by the wood stove, shoving in birch logs. “What you boys been up to? Sandy lake still frozen over?”

She knows it would be, but asks anyway.

“Yeah. Sullen’s fish house is all lit up. Nice. Like Christmas.”

“Sullen din’t light it up like that for Christmas, be damn sure of that. I don’t want you goin’ there.”

Sullen has been a buddy of mine since the third grade. Mom don’t like him much. Much of the town don’t like him much, nor his folks neither. The nice half of the town, that is. Then there are those like Jay and I. Something about Sullen makes you want to do what he does, look like he looks, talk the same. His whole family’s kind of like that. His folks’ place was the biggest in town once, but it’s falling apart now like some ruin. Last summer we’d go there to smash stuff in, with Sullen right there beside us, breaking up his own shit.

So I got friends like Sullen, right; I can deal with people like that. Dangerous people, some of them. Funny thing is, he isn’t the one to be scared of. I’d learn over the next several weeks what brought Sullen’s family down from the top.

“You got to watch what those Sullens do.” mom said. I’d learn that the ice and darkness didn’t keep to the lake, but spread from a place closer to hearth and home. ”Got to keep them in line,” she finished, almost to herself.

We knew who to be scared of, the one that called all of the shots and decided when winter and spring would come, when it was time for the ice to thaw, when Sullen’s Fish House would finally go dark and break through the thin ice, drift down through the dark and settle in the sediment.

Mom fed the last log into fire and slammed the stove door shut. “That should be just about enough, now. Spring’s coming.”

Ghost of the Bayou

photo by quizz....

Dive down into the abyss. The swamp. The bog. Light plays beneath the mire, even in the deep hours of night. The illumination is Sally, the ghost of the bayou, killed and dumped here by a man hiding his crimes in the remotest of locations. Only, her spirit turns his grim playground into something wonderful, a place of beauty. Bayou Sally is not a spirit of anguish but one of celebration, a soul turned joyous for this conversion by a murderer to her true spirit, set free in this part of the land so teaming with life. She sings. She dances in the eddies of water, lounges upon the backs of alligators, wears snakes around her neck. Wild orchids are tiaras in her hair.

The killer returns to deposit another body. This next spirit is more of what one might expect - forlorn and tortured, wailing throughout the night at the brutal interruption to her life. Bayou Sally looks upon her with distaste, anger at the disruption to her home, and drives her out. If the killer insists upon bringing her more visitors, then she must persuade him to find suitable victims to fill out her court; to entertain her, love her, dress her in palm fronds and place irises in her hair.

She sings into his ear, and fevered visions crowd his mind. Over the next several months, he brings her two youths to play with her the games of her childhood, then an elderly aunt to knit her shawls of ivy and vine, then two ladies in waiting to serve her, and a young man to fawn over her. There's one place left at her table, she decides, and she needs a soul to match hers: strong and virile, cruel with passion and devoted to her happiness, and it is with this last persuasion that Bayou Sally turns from princess to queen, arm looped in the arm of her husband, as the killer takes his last victim.

Giving Dad a Shave

photo by cristal78023.

William was sitting on his mother’s lap, leaning back into the crook of her shoulder while the family watched television, only his father wasn’t looking at the screen. He was scowling at William. “Boy, you’re eleven now. You shouldn’t still be sitting in your Momma’s lap.”

“Leave the boy alone,” she said. “You’re still my baby, aren’t you?” she teased, hugging him close, but William started to squirm away as he watched his father. He had always been intimidated by the cigar smoking, gruff man, but now he studied him closer. He felt that inevitable tug as a boy starts to cross the threshold of boy to man, the trepidation of leaving the protective wing of his mom, and yet drawn to those masculine instincts just starting to form. He noted the way his father chewed on the cigar at the corner of his mouth, the casual tilt of the whiskey glass in his hand. That night he heard his mother and father arguing in their room. William tucked his head under the pillow, buried himself beneath the sheets and tried to become invisible.

Each night his father came home from work, his mother needed to give William a push to go hug him. His whiskers scratched the boy’s cheek. When he slipped off his shoes, his black stocking feet stank. William had the job of putting his shoes in the closet, and hanging his father’s hat on a peg. He ran his fingers over the felt brim, smoothed the brown feather tucked into the sweat stained band.

He turned twelve that summer, the last summer vacation before he would have to start working, and he spent his days secretly trailing after his father from twenty yards back, to and from the plant, in the evenings when he’d stumble out of the bars, on the weekends when he would run his errands. He adopted the way his father would lean against a wall or a tree with one leg cross over the other and propped on a toe. He carried change in his pockets and jingled the coins when he’d walk down the sidewalk. He learned to spit into the sand without getting any on his chin. He substituted a toothpick for the cigar and sucked on it all day, shifting it from one side to the other using only his mouth.

Now when his dad came home from work, there were no more hugs, but his dad grinned proudly, ruffled the boy’s hair, slapped him on the shoulder and told him to go get him a glass of whiskey, “two fingers high, no ice. And no sipping,” he chided, shaking a finger at his son. When the boy returned with the glass, he said, “Okay, you can have a little sip,” as though relenting, but William hadn’t asked. He took a small taste anyway, just enough to wet his lips. It burned.

That weekend, he tailed his father as he went on another of his errands, this time to the barber shop for a cut and shave. William’s mom still cut his hair, but something about the barber shop drew him. He had only been there once a few years ago, but remembered the checkered tile floor, the smell of pipes and cigars, and a baseball game playing on the radio. His dad never wanted him to come along, for some reason, so he followed him in secret and waited from behind a tree across the street. After twenty minutes, his dad came out with a clean shave, trimmed hair, and his arm slung around the barber’s sister. They disappeared up the stairs leading to a small apartment above the shop. The blinds dropped shut. Half an hour later, his father came slinking out of the building and around the coiled barber pole and swaggered toward home.

Back at the dinner table, he watched this man accept food from his mom without a hint of guilt or regret, watched him tell her the pork was overcooked and the peas too cold. The next time he announced that he was going for a cut and a shave, William followed. Once again, his father came out of the shop with the barber’s sister and disappeared upstairs to the apartment. William balled up all of the fury a boy of twelve can muster, ran into the barber shop, grabbed the straight razor off the sink, and stomped up the stairs with a man’s bearing instead of a boy’s. He slashed his father forty times and left the barber’s sister untouched but soaked in the blood of his father. “That’s for momma. It’s you that was never good enough.” He dropped the razor, walked out of the apartment, and disappeared into the streets.

Narrative: Boys Will Be Boys

photo by Haeretik.

Stay here. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I just have to go find the deputy. He’s out back looking for bodies. See his flashlight bobbing on the grass? Why did you do it? You had so much going for you? Don’t answer that. I already know what drives a man to kill. But my own son? My own boy? Didn’t I raise you right? Didn’t I take you fishing? I paid for that pansy summer camp when you were twelve. Lots of good it did. I knew you were going to do something, one day. I knew you were going to go too far. Sit down. Didn’t I tell you to sit down? I’ll go out back. I’ll take care of the deputy. Tired of cleaning up your shit, I can tell you that. I’ve been cleaning up after you all your life and it’s why you continue to make such a mess of things. What are you going to do when I’m not around to clean up your mess? When I get back here I want to see you cleaned up. Get a duffle bag. Pack enough for a week on the road. No more. No less. Now you can get up. Go on. Didn’t I tell you to get up? Don’t start crying now. Did I teach you to cry? You made choices, and now you have to live with them. You’re one thing or another, but not both at once. You have to decide. Are you a man, or are you a baby? Are you my boy? Or are you a little girl? I didn’t raise you to be a girl, so go on now. Boys will be boys. We’ll get this cleaned up in a just a second. Stay in the house. I got to go find that deputy.

Seven Wives a' Calling

photo by Katrijn Michiels Photography.

Late one morning, a man in his mid-fifties sat down in his living room with his cup of coffee and a newspaper, and was about to take a sip when an odd noise caused him to pause. Was it coming from inside the house, he wondered. He lived alone. He had only just moved in a few weeks back. Through the windows, he saw crows crowding around outside, cawing like an angry mob and beating the air with their wings, but they were not making the noise that caused him concern. He rose from his chair and pressed his ear to the wall. Quite distinctly, he heard the sound of wood groaning and cracking. As he drew away from the wall, he heard the unmistakable sound of windows sliding open and banging shut, one after another, from somewhere inside the house, loud as gunshots.

He grabbed a butcher's knife from the kitchen and took a tour of the many empty rooms with their gleaming hardwood floors broken up only by stacks of boxes still waiting to be unpacked.

One room after another greeted him with nothing but the mundane. He was about to chalk it up to nerves from living in a new place, when he heard a faint rustling sound in the attic. He climbed to the second floor, pulled on a rope to a trap door in the ceiling, and ascended the steep ladder to the attic knowing that most likely he would find only pigeons or mice. He had never been up here before. Instead he found a dozen mourning doves sitting atop travel chests and perched on the shoulders of a headless seamstress’ dummy. He looked closer and saw that all of their eyes were merely black beads sewn into their sockets, stitches running up their breasts, mottled feathers, and sawdust spilling to the floorboards.

He chuckled, but he started to sweat. Just the heat caught under the roof, he told himself. The silence calmed his nerves, until he noticed that the noises had not died; they only migrated to the cellar, and the sound was less mistakable. A woman, perhaps? She was crying, and it was getting louder.

He plunged down the attic ladder, through the house toward a woman’s cries that steadily grew to the pitch of a wail. He came to a halt when he reached the stairs to the main level. Draped down the staircase, like the shedded skin of a snake, lay a wedding dress. Mildewed lace and torn veil flowed down several steps. The moment he saw the dress, the wailing stopped. He stepped closer, reaching down to touch the fabric, when the sound of shattering glass brought up upright.

He proceeded slowly but steadily now toward the cellar. He had only descended halfway down the crumbling concrete steps, just at the depth where the dank air circled round his ankles, when he saw her standing at the bottom. A gauzy mirage, with a face faintly recognizable, but he wasn’t sure. Was she the first, or the third? Red hair like a slow burning fire. Behind her, another woman in a shredded veil, standing barefoot atop a shattered jar and spilled white powder that left a caustic odor in the air. From behind him, at the top of the stairs, came another movement as another bride slowly descended towards him, this one with hair black as crows feathers, eyes hollowed out and spilling river pebbles from their sockets. He moved away, ever so slowly, but not in an attempt to flee. He had already moved enough times to realize he could never really get away. Instead he brushed past her on the stairs and went to the kitchen to put on the kettle.

He ignored the dozens of dishes shattered on the kitchen floor and routed round the cupboard for the large teapot. It was the favorite tea set of . . . which one was it now, the fifth wife? He gathered up the seven teacups on their chipped saucers, carried them to the sink to delicately clean them until the water boiled.

He had guests to entertain.