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.

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 brown-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 all the same. 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. Uh, snacks are on the house.” 

He blinked then let out a short bark of laughter and collected what was his. 

Nonetheless, he was sorry for the necessity of his actions and he left the store bloodsoaked and ashenfaced with the food and 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

Home, My Love

Somewhere, the sun is still fierce, a fireball out there beyond the yellow-grey slab of clouds. The clouds are a vast, damp, infected washcloth spread over the world.

When I left the apartment this morning, I left it unlocked. Something I’ve never done.

Please. Be my home.

Needing to walk, I head toward town. It’s morning, so I think of birdsong, which makes me a sorry fool.

Three people are all I see: an elderly man and woman who cross the street at my approach and flinch from eye contact; and a wiry, feral-looking man of indeterminate age, who glares at me with naked hunger through coyote eyes and hesitates in a way that makes all the hair stand up on my arms. I let him see the hunting knife I carry on my hip, and he reconsiders. 

You are all I have.

This place only a year ago was a noisy, shabby hub of neon gas prices and clustered signs for pizza, subways, fried chicken, and burgers. The red-blue Open signs on liquor stores and pharmacies and laundromats and dollar stores. The wide carious mouths of automotive repair shops: mufflers, tires, oil changes, brakes, shocks (strangely mirroring the human narrative that got us here: muffled, tired, changed by oil, broken, shocked). It’s a place built for the automobile, and here I pass its one-time temple, a motel already gone to seed even then and here entombed in dismal slabs of graffitied particle board, like a thing bygone with shame now blinded and silenced.

For a moment, my heart leaps when I notice a nest tucked beneath its mossy roof, and I stand and wait awhile, dreaming of swallows. When after many minutes no birds appear, my heart returns to its dolorous sway, leaden within me.

Gas stations arid watering holes withered by drought in a concrete savanna, vehicles downed like the corpses of wildebeest thwarted by their maddening thirst. 

The McDonald’s is a ruin, its iconic sign an outline with much of its golden plastic gone. Golden? It always looked piss-yellow to me, even when times were okay. An empty produce stand has somehow retained its cruel sign proclaiming ambrosia apples for $1.79 a pound, Okanagan cherries at $4.99. Charred pieces of abandoned palettes spiked like warnings encircle it.

In a better world I would bring you home cherries.

A busy east-west road used to bisect these two strip malls. I don’t know why they called them strip malls; I never saw a naked person once. That road used to be the hunting ground of great screaming, hissing semitrailers that helter-skeltered along its length, eager to see our unremarkable town in their rearviews, perhaps take out a few locals as they passed. Only the buses were doomed to stay, but they don’t come now either.

There’s no right side of the tracks here, those too now rusted and quiet. Where once it writhed with sockeye, the wide and filthy river still heaves and disgorges the occasional corpse to the south.

In the parking lots, a few stripped and rusting cars sit in eternal hiatus, awaiting drivers who won’t ever be claiming them. The loneliness and the silence are uneasy allies in this war we lost long before the devastation loomed clear. Once it became undeniable, it was too late.

I’m heading home now, my love. 

Before I round the corner of our street, I hear someone humming quietly. I stop and listen. It’s a shaky voice, raspy with senescence, and it sounds like it’s coming from a backyard shed. I recognize the melody. “The Times They Are a-Changin’” by Bob Dylan. I bark a corvid laugh and the old man quiets his song. Guilty, I call out, “Don’t stop!” but he stays silent and I continue on home.

I think about laughter, its strange harshness cutting the stillness of the world like an angry trickster god. Robert Plant was wrong; we did remember laughter, or at least its humourless kin, but in the end it was love we forgot.

What else did we forget? Will you not answer me?

The door is still unlocked as I left it, and I wonder if anyone came in, though I doubt it. Home. I stagger; I call your name. The smell of your corpse is worse, and I don’t know what I’ll do with you. Or with myself now you’re gone. 

________________

Image © Esther Voisin

Then

That’s it, I’m leaving. The road is spread before me, wide up close and narrowing ahead, ruined by its history, and I move into its sex trap scope, an ingenue. When last it rained here’s measurable in years, and the dry old asphalt’s cracking and clumped and dusted with skeins of sand. Drifting. Downcast as a virgin, I step forward again, glance into the cracks, halfway breathe along the narrowing arid lines of perspective. 

No other lives or moves here. The brutal sun itself is cataracted. No winds breathe.

However crumbled, like ancient cheese, I love the yellow lines that remain. Tell myself that treading them will break the long-gone backs of so many of my kin. I miss them. Kinfolk, signs. I miss those childhood rhymes. I miss the rampant trees of then. I miss such succulence. I miss so many things.

This town consists of scattered homes, squat as toads though drier and more dead, a dimmed red light askew and hanging like a shrunk albino grape and optic nerve, bone-dry jackstraw corpses strewn beyond. Nothing for me here. Nothing for anyone here, including God and her wide-eyed antic crew. 

I focus on chewing my own hangnails, tearing with my loosened teeth my raw, torn cuticles. The consumed flesh of my fingers recedes like long-ebbed tides from a dying bay. My nails are black, my scalp alive with vitriolic things that compel urgency. 

Maddened, I lope. 

Feet raw and wrapped in bloody cloth. I won’t even look at my feet unswathed; like something lame and lurching, that way lies limp surrender.

Movement on my left, amid the dying scrub, the blue-grey sage, the burned and skeletal mesquite.

Coyote. 

She’s following my halting steps and glancing right. I glance right back.

Speak risible words into the rising heat: “I’m proud to share with you this leg of our fruitless odyssey, my slat-ribbed sister.”

She looks away but stays with me, snout sleek as a pocket blade, bleak and colorless eyes a-shimmering.

Ten years ago we might have contravened some fabricated line in a mound of imported sand, some feeble wall of rusted slats. She didn’t care then, and she can’t care now. Her offspring gone through violence, she shadows me in this inferno desert, loping between parched stumps, if only because we’re the only two things alive we both can sense. 

Attachment. Linkage. Fusion.

Left like an unraveled arm, once knitted, now forlorn. 

The feminine a last unlikely want. Yet still a want, a wish. A loveliness, the opposite of scorn; an artless, candid, bleached and blasted ache.

Lana and the Bear

Image © Michael O'Toole"I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb." — Oscar Wilde

He comes out of the mouth in the rock, underneath dripping, towering cedars, and stands swaying in the chill March air. More brown than black, his damp fur is matted as fever. Alone on a gravel curve, he hears the rage of dogs behind him, ahead of him, in all the directions, and knows he has to pick some astonishment of a path, some unlikelihood, even as his head still throbs from a season of sleep. 

Steaming in the late afternoon, he shows the wet earth to the pale ghost of a day moon, scuffs the moist dirt into sculptures.

The world is not the same. Will never be again. 

Bare and rude, a strip of blond ground, boxy green buildings, a place without complexion, long abandoned. The planes and shadows and golden light of a full day move across this vista, and nothing, absolutely nothing, changes.

A child emerges from nothing. She sits by a mildewed wall and with wordless sounds she confers with the waning day and she waits. Coyotes answer but she sits stoic and unresponsive; her parley is not with them, those subtle dilettantes.

Loneliness threads this land. Eyes appraise it: the black terror of a doe's wet stare, the eagle's stern glare. In time, resignation afflicts even the artful coyotes. There will never be another train.

She sits and waits and she calls out like a lost bird. Her name is Lana, but she has forgotten this. She almost remembers flutes and honeycomb, dreams of primrose paths arrayed with bees.

The great silence is the largest voice now.

Feral dogs and the liquid throats of ravens gulping high up in the conifers are no match.

A sound in the undergrowth, at the edge of the forest, and Lana clambers to her feet. And then he is there, lumbering perplexed from the leaking shadows, and he hasn't yet seen the little girl, Lana, whose name means "wool" in Spanish, and who dances a sudden dance at the first happy thing she has ever known, the first good answer to her silent query of a quiet land veiled in rain.

"You came back," she says.

The bear startles, his fur like acres of dark wheat in a prairie gale, undulating, fluctuate. Then he crosses the span between them in seconds and stands like a steaming boulder before her. She touches his cold nose and grabs his fur and climbs on his back and laughs, ignoring his savage reek, which is like memory. She digs in her pack for the dead things she's saved and dangles them over his snout and he feeds and is glad.

"Of course I came back," he says between bites, his voice abrasive from neglect. "It's winter I don't love. Not you."

Mediocre, This Uncivil War

The restless dead still wander the sites of old battles. Ironic to this misfit how much they still belong.

The thing squats on the arm of my chair. A sound like veins being knotted, unknotted, gurgles from its abraded throat, a spoiled creek.

"How gentle are you?"

Faraway dead moan their irony. It's a hammock, this world. Where, which places, is it anchored?

"Gentle as I have to be," I answer, and it is a good answer.

Something falls into an abyss and screams, dopplering to silence.

"Enjoy the silence."

How can something in such surly folds of grey make so firm a claim to whiteness when clearly they mean purity? Is anodyne a prize now? 

"Funny. I refuse both silence and joy."

"Then you're a fool. As all your kind have proved."

So be it. It's not wrong. How normal is it to stand in your bathroom, your mouth unhasped, no sound emergent, while your fingers crawl amid the grainy air and the muffled drop of a cat stooping from a chaise longue onto a hardwood floor punctuates some mutant night that dreams of being a sentence? The cat a comma. Your silent scream an ellipsis. Your burlesque fingers quote marks emulating talk.

Is mimicry all we have left? Will this sultry air not move again? Or ever match this hankering? 

The stench of the dying dead fills everything. Help me. Help.

***

And you don't even own a cat.

***

Yearning for a cloudburst.

Apples, blueberries, fresh basil, a pickled human finger, spring water, kidney beans, parmesan, labia minora.

Fungal uncle. Aching aunt. A dozen cousins, and portabella bella, under her umbrella. Ella, ella.

Cumulonimbus. Digital familial. Expertly packed, the things we need today. Riding the subway, a muted rollick under the fungible layers of love and tragedy. A rhythm section somewhat lower than the cacophony.

Wetness. Extra virgin truffles, and the staring, gutted eyes of a slaughtered baby. 

Compare grocery lists?

No. Please, let's not.

***

Cry wolf and loose the battalions of ravens.

Coyote always had two syllables to me. 

This is the West. The terminus. The place the world crawls to when its legs give out. When its heart wears thin. When all thoughts spiral out from certitude, recoil from discipline.

You hold a torch, guttering in the prairie wind, but your endgame, your raw sortie is clear. Nothing is happening in the gathering impasse in the sky; a skirmish of silence and spreading shameface. A pinto gelding sighs and looks askance, partway asleep on its sturdy legs, its long piebald face more sorrowful than genocide.

A hiccup. Something rustles. You cut the flap, ignite the walls, and eviscerate a child.

As you run, the keening starts and flows like some soon-to-be-discovered cloud form, and it follows you, a subdued post-rape scream as you stop to slake from a brittle canteen, the leather cracked and crackling, the lukewarmth of its bowels more jittery horror than quenchment, and it follows you and doesn't ever blink or quit, not even once. Not even in judgment.

***

"Time to wake up, baby boy."

A slow tide sucks itself back over pebbles. A harbour rocks its boats.

"I won't wake up. I won't ever wake up. All this is a lie. You lied to me. Goddamn it, you were supposed to be kind. Whatever happened to kind?"

"I won't ever answer that, my brother."

"You ain't my fucking brother."

***

Wild blueberries and whistler marmots bisect a sheer plane of scree. Fruits of the woman, of the delta. Contours the shade of American ordinance. Blue is the overtopping god above grey, above white. Great banks of snow in mid-August. Tourists braying like burros. This caldera, this cascadia, this hallelujah, shouted from a ruined throat into ink, chorused into unspooling light years of astonishing indifference.