Who Art Worthy

*Content warning for racism and misogyny and implied sexual violence*

________________________

“[call] Well who's that writin'? 

[response] John the Revelator” — Blind Willie Johnson

Latrant, a man from the north, knew that fear makes men cruel. And that beauty and cruelty, valves both arterial and veinic, vie at the ventricular core of the world.

And though he was lean as a wolverine starved and shaped by austerity and weathered like a twisted tamarack lone upon a tundra, and though he had brought down many animals for food and skins, cruelty was not an indulgence to ever tempt him.

He played fair, though he played hard.

On the road behind, he’d ditched his ride, an eighties Mercury passed down from his long-dead father and driven into oblivion. Transmission now gutted like a rattler shedding its spine. Last song fading on his halfbusted radio Blind Willie Johnson’s gravel and ice “John the Revelator.” He’d walked a good fifteen highway miles since, that old blues song conferring inside him like a memory of dread, until this inconvenience store hove into view above the prairie buffalograss and patched asphalt.

He nodded at the clerk behind the counter, a dark-skinned young woman who had barely cleared her teens. The bell like a harbinger still echoed in the otherwise empty store. Her return nod was almost imperceptible, but he perceived it. Along with some inkling of distant kinship.

Three men came in like envoys of chaos while Latrant stood contemplating snacks. He knew immediately their number by their disparate voices—the touchpaper toll of one used to deference, the flinty cringe of his sidekick, and the wavering, sexless pitch of a witless powder keg—and that they would need to be defused. 

Cold electricity ran in quick pulses along his skin, and he slowed his heart and breathing, let his knees sag, and enshadowed himself in the narrow aisle, eyes fixed on the convex mirror up front in the corner.

One of the men, the leader, said, “Check the aisles.” 

The sidekicks wouldn’t see Latrant; practice and blood ties had bestowed upon him uncanny stealth.

In the terrain map of his head, he assigned names to their voices, to their essences. Groan: the short bald leader whose cockiness belied his meager talents. Muskrat: needy watery-eyed enabler. Deejay: soft of mind and body but endlessly cruel.

“Well, fellas, seems we lucked out,” the one named Muskrat said upon spotting the clerk. “So which are you, honey, a dirty illegal or a filthy squaw?”

The woman didn’t make eye contact or reply and stared only at the counter. Latrant watched the mirror in silence.

Deejay’s interest was piqued. “Answer my friend, cunt.”

“Hey, hey, come now, my brothers,” said Groan, all false bonhomie. “We come in good faith and only wanna rob the place and not cause unnecessary pain. But first, would you be so kind as to indulge my rude but curious friends and divulge your ancestry, princess?”

She whispered a word—“Nuwuvi”—that Latrant knew meant Southern Paiute.

“Speak up. And speak American,” said Deejay, the pale rindlike orifice on his dusty ocher face tightening in a strange moue. 

Muskrat laughed but Groan didn’t.

“Paiute,” she said more clearly.

“Don’t sound too American to me,” said Muskrat.

“Shut up,” said Groan. “Pocahontas ain’t American either, but at least we know she ain’t no beaner. Might even earn her a stay. Up to a point, anyways.”

Deejay perked up at this. “So once we git the cash, we git to have some fun?”

“Sure. Violate but don’t mutilate. Not this one. I almost like her.” He stared at her, not blinking. She didn’t look away. “Hand over the contents of that cash drawer, missy. Then come around this side of the counter. Hands where I can see ’em.”

Latrant knew the men had to be armed, yet they hadn’t so much as given her a glimpse of barrel or blade, such was their hubris, for which they’d pay.

“It’s your lucky day, girl.” Groan’s genial demeanor dropped away. “Gonna taste you some white meat at last. And since we’re probably gonna let you live, you can tell your fellow savages how you done fucked some real men on this blessed day of our good lord.”

Listening and watching, Latrant thought how each of these men had a void in his head that clashed and clamored like a ceaseless howl. Each an echoing vacancy, self-loathing disguised as righteous entitlement. Mediocrity cosplaying masculinity. He wondered how such creatures were made. What dark unruly compensations vied inside their quaking substrata.

The woman did as she was told, passing a wad of bills and moving slowly, hands raised. Latrant was not often impressed by people, but he was impressed by her; she knew beyond a shadow he was here in the store, but not once had she flicked her glance in his direction or otherwise risked his detection.

Any exchange of words would give them the advantage, so he decided on action only. And once he’d decided on action, it would happen with swift brutality.

Groan had his back to him, and Latrant would have taken him first regardless. Stepping from the shadows, he grabbed the man’s slippery forehead and pulled back while simultaneously using great force to draw his nine-inch Bowie knife across and deep into his neck, feeling the tendons and vessels part, the trachea and esophagus rupture, the volcanic heat of the blood spout. All this before the other two had barely registered it. The woman noticed, though, and reached behind the counter and produced a classic wooden Louisville Slugger and cracked Deejay across the temple while Latrant let his victim fall and first circled then stutter-stabbed the wide-eyed, slackjawed Muskrat in a quick frenzy of kidney punctures, pirouetting him for the coup de grâce, a merciful upthrust below his sternum and into his tiny shriveled heart. Latrant stood back and let the woman finish her work on Deejay, the bat scoring home run after home run on his uncomprehending boxlike head until it lay in globs of quivering viscera, bone, and the negligible cupful of brains it had once contained.

Latrant grabbed a set of keys from one of the men’s belt loops and turned to the woman, his hand outstretched.

“The bat. Call the authorities in fifteen minutes. Come up with a plausible story that won’t implicate you. I know it was self-defense, but, they were white and… well, you know the rest. Invent a description for me and the truck I’m taking. Put it all on them. And me. I was never here, but a ghost was.” He paused and they kept eye contact. “You did good.”

“You did too.” 

Nonetheless, he was sorry for the necessity of his actions and he left the store bloodsoaked and ashenfaced with the set of keys and recognized that the old Ford pickup resting forlorn in the dust of the parking lot like an old man awaiting gentle death would be his home now indefinitely and he drove onto the highway unremarked and diminutive, centered within the immense and shifting wheel of the encompassing horizon.

The many unnumbered, those who seem to matter not, might prove to be our ransom, the price paid to balance the ledger.

“[call] Tell me what's John writin'? 

[response] Ask the Revelator.”

______________________

Image © Krystle Wright

Glorious Things

Have I got a half-baked story for you. Turn your pretty head. 

I sit at a corner table where I can see the main doorway and the windows, keep myself mindful amid warm, oblivious goldfish trapped in a frozen hell. 

Karla is the recently Sharpie'd name on the left breast of her waitress smock. She asks me if I would like to order, and I tell her I was supposed to meet someone a good thirty minutes ago, and will wait, see if they're the belated kind or the bailing kind. 

"Would you like to order a drink while you wait?" she asks.

"Sure. Coffee. Dark roast. Cream."

She brings a porcelain mug and a delicate matching jug on a tray. White with a subcutaneous shadow. It feels French. Or Elvish. Or English from some other time and place. My hands are large and clumsy.

Her eyebrow is an arch, an irony, a bow flexed by a squire. I try to stop myself, but I fail: I laugh out loud.

"What is it, sir?" 

She is so fine. My heart pumps extra blood.

"You. Just you. You're priceless."

"All respect, mister, I ain't, and nobody is. We all got a price."

"All right. Look. Yes. I didn't want to say this, but I'm dying. Does that change anything?"

"No, sir. Not anything I said, if that's what you mean."

"Yeah. Yeah."

"Uh, if you don't mind me asking, you're a fairly young fella. What you dyin' of?"

"Well, Karla, you just asked the exact right question."

"Okay, and I'm glad…" Her pretty face is flushed. "But I'm too darned inquisitive, and I gotta get back to the kitchen."

"Yeah, sure. Go. Nothing says I should answer you, or you me. Even when you talk in poetry."

Three emotions run across her face, her eyes, her brows, and she retreats, sensibly. 

I pull out the nine millimeter, caress its cool barrel. A woman in a booth with two small kids clocks it and looks away, alarm on her handsome maternal face. She has that dry Christian denial in her glowing bones, which are also porcelain. Somehow, within a minute, she's signaled the waiter, corralled her children, paid her check, and left the diner before I can even register it. All I see is the caboose of her receding Cherokee, one child looking back, a girl, tiny face stricken, like she's always known, like she wishes she never did. 

So instead I stand and shoot the fat old white guy in a neighboring booth. Nothing personal, but I'm playing the percentages at this point. I damn well want him to be a bigot and a malignant human blemish. He doesn't immediately die, which upsets me. His wife tries to stanch the carmine gouts of arterial blood that ejaculate from his throat, and as he gurgles and drowns, I admit I laugh. Not out of cruelty but out of absurdity. Stupidly, I think his neck is orgasming. 

"There are glorious things in this world, but I can no longer find them." 

I think it is me who says that, but I also think it's someone else. I feel forked like a tongue and skewered like a heart.

"Tell me he hates niggers and faggots and cunts," I say gentle into her face, but she only looks blank and crosses herself.

A siren blooms from the landscape, like a blister aching to be burst. So I oblige. Step out into the gravel lot where the snow is falling like soft artillery and pop both uniformed men who alight so breezily and guilelessly from their cruiser. One is gone from the get go, and the other clutches his throat and grabs my ankle as I aim to walk on by. He can't speak, but his face can. It says: "I don't know you, and you have now become the second-most important person in my life, since you've done killed me. Please tell my gentle wife I died clean. That I didn't cry or beg. That I died well, uncomplaining, upholding my duty." 

I nod yes. I wish I could talk, but I feel all stoppered up. And I think we hear each other regardless. 

None of this is personal. Yet it's about as personal as it gets. Not all the bad guys hate niggers and faggots and cunts. (But all the guys who hate niggers and faggots and cunts are bad.) You see? 

This is the land of the locust, the rat, the serpent; the wounded and the livid. Violators of women; fondlers of children. The doltish and the dotard. Malevolence squats beneath the bleachers. Feigns piety while reconnoitering malls, noisome with loathing. 

This bleach is not to whiten but to clean.

Watch the steam unfurl from a grate. It strives to form a shape, like the birth of a ghost. Most times it's stillborn. But that one time, you know? That one time is a glory to behold. It's the silver tongue behind speech, delivering all that is lyrical, midwifing the honeycomb of words.

We're not bad but flawed. That distinction might not comfort those we fail, might even be a feint or dodge most times. Look. Some say we are fools to love what death can claim. But death can claim all things. Why would we withhold the last great fragile thing that renders us unimpeachable? 

In my mind's eye, I see the place again, and this time I sit still and wait, and Karla comes out from the kitchen as the man enters the diner at last, that icicle sound as the door opens and his brogues are the first part of him to cross the threshold. His rage enters next and is endless, even while quiet. Karla smiles at him and with a gesture of her head and eyes offers him a choice of seat. He smiles back, but it's a cold thing in a warm place, and it stops people dead. In the abrupt silence, I start to get up, but it's too late. He unsheathes a sword—a katana—and swings it toward the fat old white man, who sees it coming and grabs Karla by the waist and the katana slices into her instead. I howl like something raised in a hidden forest among a shock of echoes and the eternal creaking of a giant raven. I know I am too late. This is all wrong. I blink, and the picture changes to white noise and static, and all I can feel is relief. A lie. Resignation and relief. 

Glorious things. Her sapphire eyes. Wide salt lakes. Forever gone but not quite lost.

Midnight in America

An old man: "Sometimes I think the only important things that happen happen between a woman's legs."

A young woman: "That sounds like something you would think."

"Today I saw a ladybug with no spots. Just a flawless shiny bloodred dome moving on a leaf. It looked more like a machine."

"It is a machine. We're all machines. Soft, wet machines."

"But a female machine. Or we wouldn't call it lady."

"I've never used this word to describe anyone before, as it's the type of word you only hear in movies or read in books, but you're incorrigible."

"Listen, chica. When I was a tiny boy, I believed. I prayed to the big god they told us about in church and in school. I asked that god to help me when I felt sad or lost. I fought in a war and took refuge with a whore, and while I knelt and was tender and attentive, I asked that I become a better lover. I was present when my daughter was born and I asked that same god to make me a good father. I'm an old man now and the final darkness is not too far away, yet I gotta say out loud that I've spent most of my life waiting for anything resembling a response."

"That's a lonely thing."

"You got that right."

"So that's why you're here?"

"Kinda. Why do you want to know? I pay you and I get what I want and then we're done."

"Because it's more than that. I know you. You may be an old bastard, and a cranky one at that, but you're not some anonymous client. I watched you cry that time."

"Fuck that. I was a pussy back then."

"No you weren't."

"Anyway, I thought you said we're all machines. None of this matters, if that's the case."

"Nothing sadder than a sad robot."

"…"

"See? Okay, I gotta ask. Are you depressed?"

"That's a simple question with a complicated answer."

"So answer. I got time."

"Ha. You're a tenacious little cunt, aren't you? But okay. I'll give you the simple version, since you're like a pit bull chewing on a femur and I like that the same way I admire Jack Nicholson's character in that movie with the big Indian. Or perhaps the big Indian himself. Hell yeah, I'm depressed. But I'm no more depressed now than I was last week, last year, last decade. You learn to deal. And some days I deal better than others."

"Tell me more."

"What are you, my therapist?"

"Nah, I'm curious."

"Right. Okay, you wake up in the flat grey morning of a gloomy Sunday. Sometimes that feels like the end of things, other times it feels like it's the low point you might climb out of. Or rise, like that firebird. It's always there, a giant fucking shadow. If you let it, it will drop from above, a tear-soaked canopy, and impede your every step. You won't be able to escape your bed, let alone some mythic fire. But you can't. You can't let it win. You gotta keep finding ways to let the light in. Fill the days with good. Could be a handful of blue M&M's one day, a Warner Bros cartoon the next. Things that are light, and free of that awful weight."

"I never heard you say so many words."

"Well, you asked."

"I did do that."

"I like something else about you. Can you guess what?"

"What?"

"I called you a name earlier and you didn't flinch. In fact, you smiled just a tad." 

"Words are words. Each one has more than one meaning."

"You'd have liked my daughter."

"Past tense?"

"See? You say you know me, but you didn't know that, did you?"

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah, me too. It's alright, I ain't mad at you."

"Why would you be mad at me? For not knowing? Because she's dead?"

"Nah, none of that. No reason at all to be mad at you. I'm a cranky old man, remember? I'm mad at most everyone much of the time."

"It's understandable."

"Ha! Hey, that time you seen me crying? That's why. My daughter. That's the real reason I was bawling like a baby, no matter what bullshit reason I gave at the time."

"Better late than never, I guess."

"Huh?"

"Honesty. Being honest. I'm glad you trust me enough to be honest."

"You're a fucking riot, girl."

"A pun?"

"Not intentional, but it works."

"So you still want to do this thing?"

"Uh-huh. Never been more sure of anything."

"It'll change you."

"I don't doubt that. I'd chew on it more if it was noon or even midafternoon, but I'm far closer to midnight, so it don't matter." 

"Okay. I wish I didn't know you, though. Makes this harder."

"Just let's go in the room and bring in the redneck."

"Alright. Did you pick your implement?"

"Gonna go with a claw hammer."

"How's your swing, gramps? It might take a while…"

"No problem. I want him to suffer. I need to experience this. Being bad, I mean. Evil, even. The last eight years, the Trump presidency, pretty much killed my love for people, especially the miserable fucks that helped him get there. This yahoo properly vetted?"

"Oh yeah. Skinhead past. Swastika tats. Stormfront bona fides. Has a long record of assaults against blacks and gays."

"Good. Let's go spill this hate machine's blood."

"You break my heart, old fella, but you paid your money and this is still America."

"Damn right, girl."