CarlSpackler

Lately

Was laid off along with about a third of editorial staff last week. I’ve got a new offer to go work doing my same job for the company in Phoenix. Intsead I’ve been spending my free time writing this piece of shit:

The prairie fires had been burning out to the northwest for six days now, the sun just a smudge of tired sunset red through the haze even at high noon. Walter’s parents had been dead for two.

His mother had gone first, suddenly, a ticking cough in the back of her throat that afternoon that left her dead before the next sunrise. She was small, pale, the one who taught Walter how to read and his maths and which states and cities were still friendly with which.

His father, darker and older and with a separate set of sons from another woman, watched over his wife’s body until the sun began come in from the windows of their small ranchhouse. Walter stood and then sat nearby him. He was nine, now.

There was a time when he’d spend nearly every night huddled in her arms, his father on the other side of him. His father grumbled, but his mother smoothed his long, dark hair back and sang a song about a blackbird. After some time it would just be all of three of them breathing together, dreaming of whatever they may want. Walt would wake up inside that strange swaddling world, the white sheets up above him, the light coming through like summer haze, just his parents arms and bits of forearms visible as they murmured above the blankets about things Walt didn’t know about. Had no interest in knowing about.

His mother’s body was now on the bed, her fingers traced with blackblood veins like how some trees are in winter. Her white pillowcase was covered in red, in some places black, from her final hours coughing up everything she’d had inside of her.

“We’ll need to work fast,” Walter’s father said. He sounded furious. “She needs to be put in the ground.”

Walter nodded. His father, much like his other two sons, were quick with their hands when angry. Walt brought them both shovels, and found a soft patch in the ground. It was next to where they kept the goat, pigs, and one ribwracked cow behind cyclone fencing, but also behind the wooden fencing that the property proper lined off.

Walter had to jump both feet first on to the shovel to get any purchase, and then hang his whole body off the top of the handle to pull dirt up. Still, he made better time than his father, who began to lean down on the side of the house more and more as the dim red sun worked its way up through the sky.

“About 70 miles out, now,” Walter’s father guessed, looking at the solid black wall the grass fire was sending up. “And it’s coming this way.” He wheezed into a cupped hand, and Walter saw something red and spotted in there. He tried to wipe it way, and then saw Walter watching him.

“You think it’s the smoke? Making you sick?” Walter asked.

“No,” his father said, this time spitting blood directly down on the ground.

His father looked at the one grave, breathing heavily. “We’ll need another.” Walt had put down his shovel, and his father kicked it back over to his hands. “We’ll need two of these.”

He began putting a foot into a new patch of soil. Walter wanted to throw down the shovel, to complain, to find his mother and lay out the reasons that this would simply too much. But there was nobody, as far as Walter knew, alive for over 20 miles in any direction. And, if the prairie fire was any indication, there would be even fewer sooner. Walter stood up and joined him.

–

Walter and his father could barely carry his mother to her grave by the end. They wrapped the white flannel blankets she had brought to this ranchhouse, part of her dowry, his father said. Walt took a moment and put in a few things as well: her hairbrush, a pair of earrings, a old phone that never worked but still had some pictures on it that she would look at from time to time. They wrapped the bundle even tighter and tried to move her outside.

His father had a high sheen of sweat across his entire body, and Walter had to keep reminding him where they were going as they moved the woman out of the house. But they got her there, right at dusk. Even with the prairie fires sending up their smoke, evening was still beautiful. The moon was low to the southeast, a hunter’s moon, thick and creamy. Walter’s father was swaying like men did when they were drunk. Walter gave him a shovel to lean on, as Walt covered his mother’s body with dirt.

“It’s not going to be enough,” Walt’s father said. His voice, normally deep and cold like water in a cave, was reedy and filled with rot now. “If the fire doesn’t burn this place down, and it won’t — those winds are pushing north — those dogs will come back. Those coyotes too maybe. Dig us up, both us. Put rocks on top of us.”

Walter nodded, still attempting to spill more dirt down on top of his mother’s body. He’d bite the head into the dirt over the grave, but just end up sending spray of dry clay and few wet morsels of dirt down. His father inhaled in a huge racking stream of air, coughed up a glob of red-specked phleghm the size of a newling potato, before grabbing the shovel from Walt.

“Come on, now, Walt. We gotta do this part right.” Walt’s father quickly began to pick up thick clods of dirt and tumble them into the grave. They landed in haphazard rolls of thick black dirt, piling up around her where her armpits and neck and legs would be. More dirt came tumbling in. Walt turned away as the last of her face beneath the white flannel sheet disappeared. After four minutes she was gone completely.

His father sighed, sat down next to the other open grave, and began coughing in such long, wracking heaves Walt was sure he was about to tumble, dead, into his own grave. Instead, he looked up and said, “You should mourn her Walt. You make sure that you mourn her. She raised you as well as she could.” His father had something of her’s in between two of his fingers, but he kept it clutched too close to his body and the night was too dim to see anything.

Walter’s father’s face was soft the moonlight, the angry jags of cheekbones and dark swoops of eyebrows turned mournful and questioning. “She wanted you raised so much better than she could have.”

His mother wanting him to go to town, even it was Ketchum, to learn, to be around kids, to not be in this ranch house that had always been in the middle of nowhere but had, in the past twenty years, suddenly become even more of a nowhere.

Hard to think of them fighting about anything now, with her already in the ground, and him lolling his head over to stare at Walt with beseeching eye. Even in dim moonlight Walt saw something begging in his father’s eyes and was suddenly ashamed and sad for the first time since his mother took ill.

“Walt,” his father said, “I want you to go find the corn whiskey in the house and bring it out to me. I think I need to be drunk for this next part.”

Walter walked back into the ranch house. In the main pantry, he found the bottle he knew he was supposed to find. The Bixby men would bring it around from time to time. His father would buy one to be polite, but as far as Walter knew, he never touched it.

He brought it back out — the bottle was neary half the size of his body — and sat it down next to his father. The night was fully out now, and even with the grass fires the crickets and ciccadas were in full roar out here. His father seemed to be deep inside himself, so Walter opened the stopper on the bottle pushed it over to him. His father picked it up, considering.

“Walter, you should find your brothers. They’re both in Tulsa now. They may not remember you, but they should recognize family” His father took a deep swallow. “They’ll hate me. Let them. Tell them about whatever you want to tell them. You need family.” The night air had the smell of smoke, mixed with the deeper ache of rotting grass and the sad sweetness of a season turning itself over. His father stayed quiet, his breathing seeming to have been slowed down even further by the liquor, while the evening’s chorus rose around them.

“You remember that the dogs can’t get us, Walt?” he said, barely able to get out the words in between hacking coughs.

Walt nodded.

“She loved you so much, Walt,” he said, suddenly teary eyed. It was the first time he’d ever seen his father cry, and Walt shifted his gaze back out to the low-hanging moon.

“You never know the last one is gonna be the last one, I guess,” his father said, last. The bottle slipped from his fingers and rolled in a half circle, a wet line of whisky tracing itself in the dirt. Walter’s father curled over onto his side, and gave five short, sharp coughs, each one painting the dust with bright red speckles of blood. Within a few minutes he’d stopped moving.

Walt waited. He took a tiny experimental pull from the whiskey bottle. He coughed terribly, and had a moment where he was convinced whatever had killed his parents was now in him. After a moment, though, a bloom spread out into his body, and the next hour wasn’t so hard. His father required a simple push, and then he did his best to get thick chunks of sod down. He drank more whiskey, and went to the pile where they were always planning to build a stone fence around the garden but never did. He gathered big rocks and then small rocks and laid them over his mother and this his father. His fingers bled from being smashed against the fledspar and granite and odd bits of sandstone.

He sat that night, going in only to unseal a jar of grean beans and some salted pork laid away. He watched over the burial mounds, his father’s rifle on tiny knees. He wondered if he’d be able to fire it if any dogs actually did come along. That morning the wind did indeed shift north, and the prairie fires began to retreat back into dead grass, dying out.

He finally slept on the porch, under the screen that his mother had forced his father to put in. He woke up in darknesss. His ears strained for the sound of dogs worrying at poorly laid rocks, but he heard nothing.

He dragged a chair back out and sat next to both of them. There was no moon in the sky to be seen, and he watched satalitte sketch patterns over the night sky — so many, his mother said, that every country on earth had 200. Like being on the inside of the silver self-winding watch his father had — he had, now, he guesssed. Part of some great clockwork, but he was off in a forgotten bit, where things were winding down.

When he woke in the morning, his brothers were there, with their truck.

–

Walter had never seen a truck like this before. The Bixby men, the only real traders at the range, drove van with things tied on everywhere, was mainly pale blue with bits of rust poking through. This thing was the best looking thing Walter had ever seen. He saw them pull up while looking down from from his parents second story bedroom. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to sleep in the bed his mother had just died in, but he did.

The two men who got out were more like Walter’s father than him. Long black hair on both of them, both frowining at something already. One was tall and too skinny to Walter’s eyes and the other was short and didn’t look like he could work a full day. But he knew them. Ben, tall and skinny, and Sandy, short and fat. His father’s long gone sons, ran off with their mother after she’d dreamed of marrying “a rich Osage but settled for a poor Ponca.”

They stood, cracking their backs and checking on the remaining gas cans in the back of the truck. Walter still had the rifle, and he had the safety off. But he also had about two months of provisions here, and an unclear idea of how to get from where he’d spend the last nine years of his live to anywhere else.

So he came downstairs with a bullet bolted and the clear but unsure idea that if he had to, he could kill both of his brothers, steal their truck, and make it somwhere.

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CarlSpackler

In General

Lately