DIRT LAND

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

illustrated by Ben Baldwin

Up on the mountain, not everything that gets born is human. Or at least, human enough. That’s just the way it is. Some of them are kept, if they look close enough, but a lot are taken down to the river before they get big, and drowned. Shaken out of a blanket. If you go downstream, you’ll find all kinds of dead babies bumping against the gray river rocks. Stiff limbs, open mouths. Getting picked at by fish. Of course, up on the mountain, the people who live there catch that fish, like they catch all fish. Fry it. Eat it. That may be part of the problem.

Audrey was six months pregnant when she thought maybe the baby in her belly wasn’t going to turn out human enough. Because of the way it was starting to move inside. A mother can tell.

She went to see her aunt, who she could confide in more than her mother, because her mother had never left the hollow, but her aunt had worked for years at a bank down in Farmer’s Crossing. Her aunt had slept with a lot more men than her mother ever did, so she knew a lot more about the world. She used to tell Audrey stories about, for example, what it was like sucking off a man who wouldn’t remove his socks and shoes, because he was afraid of feet, even his own feet, and how to behave in a restaurant.

Aunt Telise was in the back of her cabin, in the kitchen looking out over the river. The kitchen had a strong smell of cucumbers.

“Aunt Telise? Are you making salad again?”

Audrey told her aunt her fears about the baby she was carrying.

“Do you know who the father is?”

“I’m saying it’s Roy.”

Her aunt added some sliced radishes to the wooden bowl. Radishes are so easy to grow. Twenty-eight days, and that redness is ready to be pulled out of the dirt. “That’d be nice. Always try to align yourself with a man who’s not a hitter. And Roy’s not a hitter, right?”

Audrey took a seat at her aunt’s kitchen table, brushing her pale blonde hair from her blue eyes. Too beautiful to be living in the hollow, if there was any justice in the world, but since there wasn’t, it kind of made sense. “No, he never hit me. I got him really drunk a couple of times, just to see, and started talking about other boys, that test we all do? But he stayed calm. He cried, but he didn’t reach out to strike me. I’ve put him through a lot of misery, but the worse it ever caused was he’d start seeing hallucinations.”

“Like what kind of hallucinations?”

“Things crawling behind the boxes and jars in my mother’s pantry that weren’t there.”

“Or so you assume.”

“Never thought of that. But even then, in that stress, he never raised a hand against me.”

Aunt Telise added some fried potatoes to the salad. “Talk to him then. See what he wants to do. Young boy like that, cock as big as his is, so I’ve been told, he could give you lots more babies, if the first one is craps.”

***

Roy worked at the sawmill, like just about every other man in the hollow. Fourteen, but mature for his age. She didn’t like him at first, when they were growing up, because he used to always throw mud balls at her. Her mother told her to stay away from him, to go into the woods if she saw him approaching on the road, but her aunt told her to talk him up. “If he’s throwing mud balls at you, that means he’s trying to get your attention. He just doesn’t know how to do it yet with words.”

So Audrey went over his house one time when no one was home but him. She was fifteen back then and he was twelve, but because he was bigger than her he managed to get her out of her clothes, then he shoved her naked in the house’s one bathroom with a wild raccoon he caught by the scruff of its neck, leaning against the door, not letting her out, while she banged her fists and pleaded, because the raccoon was attacking her, clawing her legs, and when he finally had her completely dissolved in tears he creaked the door open so she could stumble out, all composure gone, and fucked her in the little hallway outside the bathroom, raccoon scratches on her thighs and stomach.

After that, he’d have her come over every day while his mother was at the sawmill. She always showed up, obediently, not knowing why she was obeying this little kid, but she did. He’d get her naked as soon as he closed the front door behind her, then ride on top of her, pulling her hair back, or make her eat grease from the skillet that had been left out overnight, or have her lay on the ground in the backyard while he stood over her, pissing down on her.

After a while, if she was a horse, she was broken in. The way he humiliated her, day after day? Made her do things, that sitting at her school desk in the civilized world she never thought she would do? No matter how much she loved a man? After a while, she kind of liked it. It was supposed to be the boy begging the girl for sex. But what it turned out to be, after he had worked on her mind long enough, was her begging him for sex. Even though he was so young, he had the tallest cock she had ever seen. Wasn’t a day that went by where visiting him in his mother’s home she wouldn’t cross one bare thigh of hers over the other, jiggling her foot like girls do, yearning to have that thick cock slide back up inside her again, so she wouldn’t have to think about anything. He got the upper hand on her, that’s for sure, and she found out she really liked that.

When she ran into Roy at the sawmill, she told him her misgivings about their baby. “Well, have it, and we’ll see when it comes out. If it isn’t close enough to human to pass, give it to me.”

“And you’ll drown it?”

“I may play with it for a while first. I’m the father. I got that right.”

So she carried their baby to term. Roy took a day off from his work to be with her in her mother’s home, where there was running water, while she delivered. All kinds of blood and tissue slid out of her, along with a lot of big, red bubbles. Finally the fetus tumbled out, with a clickity-clack you don’t often hear during a birth, limbs kicking, too many knees and knobbiness, big eyelids shut.

It looked normal, except instead of two arms and two legs, it had four legs.

Like a cow.

Roy and Audrey had to decide what to do with it.

She suckled it at her breast while still in her mother’s bed, its little front hooves clamped around her nipple, squeezing to get it to squirt, big eyes still closed. Her head tilted down, watching it slurp at her breast, rubbing her lips together. Wishing it was born normal, or at least near-normal. She started singing to it in a low, whispery voice. Old mountain songs. About men and women with three names who had a hard lot in life and often made bad decisions.

Roy scratched the back of his neck, looking down at mother and son. “Guess if any time is the appropriate time to ask this question, this is the time. You ever have sex with an animal before you got pregnant?”

Head on the white pillow, she raised her face. “No, I did not, Roy. Unlike you.”

“Point taken, I guess.”

He watched the little face as it pulled on his wife’s nipple, drinking from her body. “It does seem a little like me, I guess. The love of the breast.”

Audrey smirked, wincing slightly at the strong suck. Blue eyes knowing how to flirt. “Guess you’re not too upset, if you’re joking.”

“What are we gonna call it? Has to have a name, if for no other reason than convenience.”

“I was thinking Scott? After my dad?”

Roy considered. “I like your dad. But I think the name has to acknowledge there’s something wrong with it. We could hide that in the name itself. I’m thinking, Scowtt. What do you think?”

They took little Scowtt home with them three days after Audrey gave birth.

Home was a one-room shack Roy built out of scrap lumber and used nails at the rear of his father’s property, in anticipation of the birth, against a large magnolia tree, whose trunk and overhead branches helped with the framing. No running water or electricity, but the square holes in the walls they used as windows caught a nice breeze off the river, and the woods surrounding the shack were full of squirrels and birds. Once Roy finished their home, he dug a pit outside the front door and lined it with stones, and that was where they’d cook their meals and heat their coffee.

***

Now let’s talk about Roy, and then we’re going to talk about Audrey.

Roy was born into the Worley family as the second son. There was a first son, but he died shortly after birth, according to his father. There was an older sister, Misty, the first born, but she died in a car accident at an intersection in Turner’s Crossing, while little Roy was in the passenger seat. He loved his older sister. The first time he ever heard of pizza, and the first time he ever ate a slice of it, was when she took him in the family car to a restaurant in Eli’s Gulch. A boy can learn a lot about respecting women if he has an older sister who takes an interest in him, and introduces him to all the wonders of the outside world. At the time of that fateful car crash, he had accompanied his big sister while she went to Eli’s Gulch to enroll in the U.S. Army. She figured that was the best way for her to get thrown out into the wider world, and to visit lands that were so unlike her own. On the wall of the room where all the Worley children slept, by her bed, she had put up a photograph she found somewhere of an Egyptian pyramid. There were little men standing in front of it, to show its scale. “Nobody’s ever built something that big in Farmer’s Crossing, or even Eli’s Gulch. I want to live where the people think big. They build an Eiffel Tower, or an Empire State Building. Those are my people.”

On the day of the fateful crash, Misty had just completed her sign-up papers for the Army, and she and little Roy were headed towards Papa Jupe’s Restaurant, where she was going to treat him to something called Moussaka, which he kept forgetting how to pronounce correctly, because of all the confusing syllables, but which was a Greek dish, from Greece where Aristotle and Jason and the Argonauts lived, and which had something called eggplant as a main ingredient. That ingredient, eggplant, intrigued him. He pictured a plant that grew eggs. How would those eggs be different from chicken eggs? Would they have yellow yolks inside, or once you pulled an egg off a stem and cracked it open, would it be all green inside? As they were driving towards Papa Jupe’s he was eating, from a small brown bag, pistachios she had bought him. Only he didn’t understand you were supposed to split the shells first, like clams, then eat the nut inside. So he was just popping the whole nuts in his mouth, cracking the shells with his back grinders, thinking, Well, some of this tastes good, but it’s a lot of trouble. Misty, hands on the wheel, glanced over, saw what he was doing, and laughed. “You got it wrong, firefly. Pull the shells apart first, then eat what’s inside.” He felt embarrassed he couldn’t figure that out, and she, good older sister that she was, started to reassure him, minimizing his error, when the steering wheel popped out of her hands and flew up into her jaw, crushing her two rows of teeth together, and she had really good teeth, she took care of them, even though a few were crooked, and those loving blue eyes he depended on, the top of her pale brown hair, and he woke up lying on the dirt street, lots of pant legs and high heels around him, wide river of strawberry jam coming out of the upside down car’s popped windows and squashed metal, soaking into the ground.

He never quite got over that death.

His parents dressed him up in a passed-down suit, black of course, for the funeral. They themselves held their hands in front of them as the pinewood coffin was lowered into the ground, glints of new nail heads decorating the edges of the coffin’s lid, like blue jean studs, but he couldn’t stop his shoulders from shaking. If you put Misty in the ground, I can’t confide in her anymore. She won’t touch my ears no more.

Little Roy was in a bad place. And a bad place is no fun to be.

But then, when he went back to school after Summer break, he was assigned to the class of Miss Abergine. That was the first time he ever fell in love. He’d sit at his school desk and just stare at her. She was real pretty, her eyes and her cheekbones and her smile, in a way his mother and the other girls in the hollow weren’t. Her voice was so soothing, lilting and humorous, and she spoke French every so often. Small wrists, long fingers, with the most delicate knuckles he had ever seen, fingernails that looked so thin they made him think of the bones of angels.

His hand was always the first that shot up to answer a question, even if he didn’t know what to say. Standing on his feet, in his embarrassing clothes, he’d blush bright red, blurt out whatever he could.

When she’d smile at him, it was such a kind smile, such a gentle smile, he’d shuffle his hand-me-down shoes, grin like a dog.

Halfway through that year, he was headed to school one day, the same boring walk up the country road where there was nothing but his thoughts, and at the bend in the dirt road, a splay of flowers hanging out over the road’s edge. He had passed that shoot of growth on that bend each day, and each day noticed the tapered tips were starting to form heads, but from what little color he could see in the heads as they swelled and fattened, he thought the blooms would be yellow. But in fact this day of their sudden bloom, when the flowers had overnight miraculously uncurled wide open, sixteen joyous arms celebrating the sun, he saw the flowers were blue. Like her eyes. Getting down on his haunches he picked them, down by the base of their stems. Hid their length and color inside his shirt, up against his bare skin. Their light touch, leaf tips and soft petals, tickled his skin, in a way he hadn’t felt awareness of his skin before. Not as a boy is aware of his skin. And of course, walking into the small school, he could smell their aroma. He sat at his desk all day with them in his shirt, watching her. When classes were finished, he let the other boys and girls trail out, then marched up to her desk, and pulled the long stems out.

But by then, so long without the earth to nurture them, or water to quicken them, the flowers themselves dropped off as he retrieved them, so all he had to hold out to her were tall green stems. He gave them to her anyway. Burst into tears. “Their heads fell off!”

She took the stems from him. This close to her, to where he could see the buttons on her blouse, her long brown hair curled around the backs of her ears, the pale freckles across the bridge of her nose, he thought he would lose his balance. “I’m going to imagine how beautiful these flowers looked when you picked them, and of all the flowers I ever receive from men in my life, these flowers will always be the flowers I remember first.” Tilting her head, smiling, she put her palm on the side of his face. And in that moment, feeling her warmth against his cheek, which before he had only dared imagined, he knew what love is. Putting someone else’s happiness above your own.

Summer got closer every day, birds building nests, black branches reaching up with green buds, and although Summer had been his favorite time of year, because of its freedom, now he dreaded its approach, because he knew that meant school would be ending, and he wouldn’t see her again. Maybe never. His last day of school, all his classmates stood in a line in the classroom to shake Miss Abergine’s hand. He hung back so he’d be the final one. He stuck his hand out, eyes mooning, trying to be the brave little man as she shook his hand with the same hand that a month before had held his cheek for a moment. She didn’t say anything, so he just straightened his shoulders and turned to leave, trying to hold in his tears under he got outside, under the trees, but then she said, “Roy?” And she bent her head towards him. Took a fat book out from the front drawer of her desk, and opened it in front of him. And there on the page, across the black words, were the pressed green stems of the flowers he had presented to her. “You try to preserve what’s good.”

He grinned all the way home.

An unhappy boy he was, in his family home. He moped. Listened to the radio all day, listless. His mother stood by the chair he was slouched in a couple of times those first few weeks, asking if he was okay. “I can hear Ben and Kevin down by the river, looking for frogs. Don’t you want to go outside and be with your friends? It’s a beautiful day. Get some color in your cheeks.” But he had no interest. A few days after that, he was sitting at the kitchen table, staring down at his fingers, while his mother boiled greens. Back to him she said, “Guess who I ran into today?” He didn’t make any effort to guess. “Miss Abergine.” Head lifting, suddenly alert. His mother said nothing more, tapping her wooden spoon against the cast iron skillet, gray steam rising. “Yeah?” “Yeah! She had a message for you.” “What would that be?” “She said to me, Tell Roy I’m looking forward to seeing him again in the Fall, when school starts again.” “Yeah?” “Yeah.” He ducked his head, excited. His mother just went back to stirring those dark greens, small smile on her face. In later months, Roy turned against his mother, but a couple years afterwards, he thought of this otherwise unremarkable day, his mother’s casual comment, and realized how much she had done for him. And felt ashamed at how he treated her once she was on her deathbed.

That news about Miss Abergine returning in the Fall perked him up, and he went back to playing outdoors again, and finding time on the front porch to study an English to French dictionary he sent away for in the mail, memorizing certain words, even though his pronunciation and grammar (unbeknownst to him) was terrible, laughable.

But then one day, in the sweet, yellow-treed afternoons of August, he decided to pay his Uncle Hollis a visit. Uncle Hollis was his father’s older brother. He lived further up the mountain than most, in a two-room shack with no running water, no electricity, and no windows. So going into his shack was like going into a wooden cave.

Uncle Hollis came out on the front porch cradling a shotgun. “Well hey, Roy.” What he always said when he saw his nephew. Bald head and a big nose. Looked like he enjoyed fighting, and in fact he would occasionally wind up in jail for using his fists to make another man’s face bleed.

“Thought I’d visit.”

Uncle Hollis glanced over his shoulder, at the interior of his shack. “Glad to see you.” Thought a while. “What are you now? Twelve?”

“Yes, sir.”

He leaned his shotgun against the side of his shack. “Tell you what. I’ll have to check, because it ain’t my call. But maybe you’re old enough to be initiated. We’ll see. Your daddy’s inside.”

Roy came forward, beckoned by Uncle Hollis’ impatient fingers. “Initiated? Into what?” His mother didn’t like Uncle Hollis. Didn’t like him one bit. He had a way of getting whatever he wanted, by any means. Whenever Uncle Hollis would visit, she’d stay in the back room as much as possible, and if the uncle insisted to Roy’s father she come out, she’d come out in a dress that had the hem down by her ankles.

“Come on in, boy. Be a man and find out. Or be a little girl and run back down the hill in your pretty little pink dress.”

“I’m no girl. Don’t say that.”

“Stubbornness! Maybe you are a man.”

Inside, it was dark and hot. Uncle Hollis picked up a lit kerosene lantern, its swing in his right hand swaying light across the interior, illuminating a few chairs, a bench, some animal skins, a row of full bottles with no labels.

“Don’t see my dad.”

“Course you don’t. He’s in the back room. The bedroom. You can’t see through walls, right? You’re not Superman, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“Nobody’s Superman in my house, except me. Everybody else just Clark Kent. Hey Carl, I got your boy here. You want he should come in back? Maybe join us? Wet his little beak?”

Muffled sound from the bedroom.

Uncle Hollis tilted his bald, big-nosed face. “Well, all right then.”

He lifted the lantern, casting a yellow flicker that made the doorway to the bedroom glow. “After you, little man.”

Roy had to go through the doorway, because if he didn’t, Uncle Hollis would think he was a girl. He lowered his jaw so his uncle couldn’t see him swallow, then stepped into the back room, thinking about that day at the kitchen table with his mother, and how the world of women was so much different from the world of men.

The bed took up most of the room, and first thing he noticed was there wasn’t one person on the bed, there were two. He could only see them up to their armpits at this point, but it was clear, the lantern light falling over their naked bodies, one was male, and one was female.

“That you, Dad?”

A man’s hoarse voice in the darkness. “You ready for this Roy?”

So that was his father’s cock he was looking at, curled half-hard on top of his thighs. Hairier than his, but looking weaker.

The woman’s legs shifted, but his father held her down with a hand disappearing up above her shoulders.

To Roy’s side, Uncle Hollis got out of his clothes, tossing them sideways, his cock erect. Once he was naked, he walked to the head of the bed, put the lantern down on the table beside the pillows.

Lantern where it now was, Roy could see the two yellow faces, his father, and his school teacher.

Had he thought about what she looked like naked? Of course. But not in a carnal way, or at least not much that way. More like a statue or a painting, something to admire. But now she was black pubic hair, small breasts, staring eyes.

Uncle Hollis thumped the back of Roy’s shoulder. “You kinda like Miss Abergine, right? What your dad told me. Think she’s so high and mighty, and delicate and such. Riiight? Well, let me show you something you need to learn.”

Naked, Uncle Hollis walked over to the foot of the bed, his back wet with perspiration. Leaning over, grinning, he slapped the insides of both her knees, like you’d slap a dog. “Carl, would you oblige your older brother please with nine o’clock and three o’clock?”

As Uncle Hollis lay his wet stomach on top of Miss Abergine’s, Roy’s father reached around the uncle’s ass, grabbing both of Miss Abergine’s ankles, spreading them far, far apart.

“Are you raping her?”

Uncle Hollis grinned. “You tell me, boy!”

As Roy watched, his uncle slid his cock up inside the school teacher, slid it up some more, then, as her head rolled back and she let out a gasp, slid it up the rest.

He felt himself get hard, his uncle’s ass bobbing up and down between Miss Abergine’s spread thighs.

When Miss Abergine raised both her forearms off the untidy pillows, crossing them around the back of his uncle’s neck, Roy wet his lips.

Halfway through, Miss Abergine wrapped her legs above Uncle Hollis’ bobbing ass. The bald head twisted around, grinning up at Roy. “You see, Roy? They all like a good fuck. Even the fancy ones.”

After that, Miss Abergine didn’t show up for Fall classes. Rumor was she went away for a while. When she did return, mid-semester, she was trim again, and never talked about her mysterious absence. She didn’t speak French much anymore.

Roy, young as he was, started fucking a lot of women. Those women in the nearby towns who had the same casual attitude towards sex men have. A lot of times, all he remembered was the humidity of it, the herbal smell of heroin rising off the wet flesh under him.

***

Now let’s talk about Audrey.

From an early age, she knew she was second-born. One of the few objects her parents had in their shack was a small photograph on the wall of her older sister. A photograph of a baby pretty much newly born, eyes still shut. Her father would sometimes stand in front of the picture, especially if he had too much to drink, which he often did, swaying, and touch with his fingertips the baby’s face. But her mother never did. Even though she drank too. As Audrey got older, she came to realize the smallness of the photograph was because it was only of the baby’s face. Someone had long ago cut the picture with scissors so all that was left was the baby from the chin up, the rest of her body thrown away.

When Audrey got old enough to talk, she asked, “What was my older sister’s name?”

Her father raised his head. “She never lived long enough to give her a name.”

“What did she die from?”

Her father would reach sideways for his drink. No ice cubes in the drink, because they couldn’t afford ice. “She just died. It was quick.”

Audrey knew from the time she knew anything that her family was poor. Even poorer than the other families in the hollow, and those other families were poor as well. Just not as poor as Audrey’s family. What she heard much, those early years, from her parents was, “Can’t afford it.” When Audrey was still a little girl, she used to sometimes play with a girl her own age just down the road. One time she toddled down that dirt road, arms waving for balance, because walking takes a while to get right, and this other little girl, her friend, such as it was, had a small baby in her arms. Audrey was enthralled. “Can I hold her?”

And finally her friend let her. But the baby wasn’t warm at all. It was cold, and its skin was hard. Its eyes just stared straight up, at the sky. “This baby’s dead!” Her friend laughed at her. “This ain’t no baby! This here’s a doll. It never been alive. It just look human if you look from a distance. It made out of plastic!” Her friend rapped her tiny knuckles against the baby’s forehead, gleeful she had an advantage over Audrey. “That sound alive, or hollow? It’s a fake baby, just to play with. To do things with it you can’t do with a live baby.”

Audrey, of course, was mortified. But fascinated. A fake baby that’s all yours? That you can hold in your arms, and take places with you? Talk to it? Whisper your secrets? When she got back to her parents’ shack, she excitedly explained what she had seen, asked if she could have a doll.

Her father’s face closed down. “Can’t afford it.”

So Audrey never got a doll growing up. What she did instead was carry around some of her old baby clothes, and pretend it was a doll. But some of the other kids in the hollow, they were a bit mean, they started calling her Crazy Audrey, bending their knees behind her in a semi-circle as she tried to ignore them, thinking about her mother, looking up at all the interesting tree branches. So she had to not walk around with the baby clothes anymore, although she cried bitterly the first morning she decided to not take the baby clothes outside with her like she normally would, petting them, telling the blouse cuffs and collar how sad she was that she had to leave them behind. Those are the loneliest tears, with the most salt in them, the tears of a small child giving up.

When she got to grammar school, one of her classes was Home Economics. That was where girls learned how to cook. And part of that initiation into the adult world, they had to chop onions. Now that first day, when each girl stood in front of her table with a yellow onion on the tabletop next to a knife, Audrey had no idea what to do. She had never seen an onion before. What was it? It certainly didn’t look like something she’d want to eat. It had hair at one end. It looked like a deformed baby’s head, but no eyes.

Most of the girls cut into their onions matter-of-fact, chatting to each other, but Audrey, even side-glancing, had trouble figuring out what to do. Finally, Miss Wilson, the teacher, had to mold her elderly hands, veins and age spots, around Audrey’s young knuckles, and guide her blade. As she sliced down, Audrey’s eyes smarted so much tears wet her eyelashes. Unlike her fellow classmates, who had cut up bushels of onions over their young years in their families’ kitchens, because their families could afford onions. Audrey, red-eyed, thought, even when it comes to onions, my poverty is evident. Miss Wilson told her, in a quiet voice, sensing Audrey’s embarrassment, After you chop up as many onions as these other girls have, your eyes won’t smart as much. So that day forward, Audrey showed up at Miss Wilson’s class an hour before, volunteering to chop any onions that were needed for the day’s instruction. She determinedly sliced her way down through a whole lot of onions, wanting to get her eyes used to the sulfur, so she wouldn’t stand out. Miss Wilson would give her a pale-lipped smile. “You got determination, girl.” Audrey, staring down at her latest onion, slicing her blade into the dry yellow skin, wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “After a while, you stop crying, right Miss Wilson?” Miss Wilson nodded, furrows in her face. “Yes my little sweetheart, after enough cuts, you stop crying.”

But one advantage Audrey did have over all the other girls in the hollow was that she was real pretty. Real pretty. Some of the most beautiful girls are born to poor families. Why is that? She’d take the breath away from a fluttering angel. Hair that was so light it was barely blonde, and the bluest eyes. Nothing wrong with brown eyes, or black eyes, or green eyes, or any other color eyes, but there’s something about blue eyes. And hers were the bluest of all, so that when you saw them, you stopped for a moment. Those eyes weren’t something you expected to see during your day. And when you looked into them, trying not to stare, especially when they were in a child’s face, it was like what was looking out was a better world, a kinder world.

Her beauty got her noticed. Women touched her shoulder. Girls tried to find fault with the rest of her, anything. Men asked how old she was.

One day when she was fifteen she was helping her mother carry flour out of the general store, and this big man stood in front of her, grinning. “Well, look at you! Never saw a pack horse this thin before!”

Her mother, ahead of her, turned around. Backtracked to where Audrey and the man stood. “Honey? Just keep walking. We got a lot to do today.” Glared at the man.

He touched his right index finger to his eyebrows. “How are you today, on this beautiful, beautiful morning, Emma?”

Later on, back at their shack, Audrey asked her mother who that man was. Her mother just put her hands on her hips. “Stay clear of him. He’s no good.”

Well, telling a young woman to stay away from a specific man, and that he’s no good, may in fact have an effect the opposite of what was intended. It has been known, in fact, to cause the young woman to become a bit intrigued with the man she’s forbidden to see. Not much discussed, but there can be an element of self-destruction in curiosity.

So the next time she ran across this man, this time by herself, walking home from school, she decided to let him engage her in conversation, just to find out more about the adult world, which she was coming around to believe was both dangerous and exciting.

She was on a turn in the dirt road headed home when the car pulled up beside her progress, engine idling. She immediately recognized the face behind the steering wheel, as it leered out at her. “Well, we meet again! As if by destiny!”

She turned up her nose, having observed how her fellow classmates treated inquisitive boys. Waited.

The man let out a deep, masculine chuckle. “I can see right through you, girly. So…indifferent to my advances. But between you and me, out on this deserted road, your mama nowhere around this time, I bet that little sparrow’s heart of yours is just a-thumping against the delicate bird bones of your rib cage. Would you like to go on a ride with me?”

Audrey, nervous, knees jumping, gave a frightened laugh. “You think you can lure me into your car that easy?”

The man considered. “I don’t know. But it was worth a shot. I was just driving along, and I saw the vision of you on the side of the road, and I just had to stop. You looked like you just arrived from Heaven.”

Audrey, not used to male compliments, blushed. Confused, she said nothing.

“I’m a wealthy man. I don’t want for nothing. I could put clothes on you that came from all the way across the ocean. I could take you for a ride up in an airplane. Goddamn, you’re a pretty one. That hair of yours? It looks like sunshine on ginger ale.” He swung out the front passenger door of his car. “Now, you could keep walking down this dirt road, and wind up back at your mother’s, and spend another boring evening indoors, or you could climb your beautiful young self up into my car, and I’ll take you places you’ve never seen. I’ll give you an adventure. An adventure you can recollect about when you’re alone in your bed at night, listening to the night insects. An adventure you’ll be eager to continue next time I swing by to pick you up in my car.”

Once she got in his car, he reached over her lap, locked her passenger side door. “You made a wise choice.”

He didn’t talk to her while he drove along the dirt road, and that was fine with her. And her heart was thumping. Little sparrow’s heart. Delicate bird bones of her rib cage. Nobody had ever described her like that before. Nobody had ever described her in any way. She liked having someone, a man, tell her who she was.

He veered off the road up a trail, low-hanging branches bruising across the car’s windshield.

Up at the top of a rise, he braked his car. Turned off the engine.

She put her small hand on her passenger side latch. “Should I get out?”

He grinned at her. “Yep. We’re where we want to be.”

While she smoothed her hair standing outside the car, he went around back and got a blue blanket from the car’s trunk. Carried it draped over his muscular forearm to a sunny patch in the clearing. She followed behind, uncertain.

Once he had the blanket spread across the ground, he sat down on its blueness, patted the wool beside him, for her to join him. Which she did.

“What’s your name, little girl?”

“Audrey. What’s yours?” She was blushing.

“Hollis.” Grinned at her again, with his bald head, big nose. Reached into his pants pocket. Pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You ever smoke a cigarette before, Audrey?”

She watched his long fingers jiggle out a pair. “Family couldn’t afford them.”

“Family couldn’t afford them. I hear that.”

He stuck two cigarettes in his mouth, cupped his palms around his match’s glow, lit the first cigarette, then the second. Took the second out from between his lips. Passed it to her, smoke curling from its orange end. Shook his head, giving her a stern look. Her hand, which had risen to receive the cigarette, obediently dropped back down to her lap. He angled the unlit end himself between her lips. “Now you can hold it.” Her hand rose, obediently. Eyes squinting at the smoke, the smell.

Audrey copied him as he drew in on his cigarette, her gums and teeth feeling the warmth of the smoke inside her mouth. Still watching him sideways, she inhaled the smoke, all that grayness swirling down the back of her throat. Little bit of coughing. After all, it was her first time. But not too much.

“Good girl.”

She grinned at him. Intensely aware her lips had wrapped around the same white cylinder where his lips had been. Like kissing him, a little bit.

She took another puff, self-conscious about this man her daddy’s age watching her. Looked down at his big hands.

“Audrey, you ever play a game called North or South?”

“No, I haven’t.” Feeling a little dizzy.

“That’s okay. The rules are very simple. I don’t like games with complicated rules. Do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna place my right hand, this one here, on some part of your body. But don’t worry! It’ll be an innocuous part. Then all you have to do is, you tell me if you next want me to place my hand north, or south, of where it is. Sounds pretty easy, right?”

She took another puff on her cigarette. “I guess so. If I don’t want your hand to go north or south, can I just say Equator?”

Hollis reared his head back in genuine surprise. “My, you really are a treasure. Oh and look at you now, my little bird! There you go with that lovely blush spreading across your cheeks again, and also, if I may be so bold to notice, the top of your chest. In answer to your question, I’ll tell you what. How about the first time I put my hand on you, I allow you to say Equator if you want to? But no other time?”

“I guess.”

“That’s my good little girl. You ready to start playing our game?”

She nodded, taking a puff.

He drew in a breath, reached his right hand out, towards her. Looking down she saw his strong fingers coming. Sat up on their blue blanket.

His fingers settled around her throat.

The feel of a man’s hand resting on her throat, it was… She felt it, all over her body.

“Tell me where next, little darling.”

She had to catch her breath. “Equator.”

“Equator goes around the earth, so my hand’s gonna go around your neck. That’s fair. I’m not cheating. That’s playing by the rules.”

Her eyelids fluttered as his big, strong hand circled right, away from her throat, onto the side of her neck and then, still sliding, around to the back of her neck, those manly fingers scratching lazily across the delicate blonde hairs at the nape of her neck, sending all kinds of sensations up and down her body.

She couldn’t contain her moan, maybe even her first woman’s moan, letting those oh so blue eyes slide left, lips parting, nostrils flaring.

“Bet you didn’t know you had that button back there, didja?”

Hung her head, big sloppy grin, luxuriating in what he was doing to her.

“This is just one of my hands. And still on the Equator. Imagine what both of these big ol’ strong hands could summon up in you, if you don’t turn scaredy cat.”

Her head rolled back as he kept up his slow, patient tickle at her nape.

“You ready for me to put my hand somewhere else? Shall the game continue, little bird? With your bird bone delicate rib cage?”

Long blonde hair hanging in front of her eyes, like a drowning victim. Helpless nod. But enthusiastic.

“Where will this big ol’ hand go next? Where ever the dickens will it land on this beautiful angel’s beautiful body?”

His hand molded itself comfortably around the knob of her bare knee. “Oh! There it is.”

Those lips of hers. Secret smile.

“North or south, babe? You just know where my fingers are twitching to go.”

From out that curtain of hanging blonde hair, a little girl’s voice. “North.”

The hand slid off her knee, up onto the muscle of her warm thigh just above her knee.

Her head jerked back. Big smile.

“Now where?”

Huge inhale of breath through those small nostrils. “North.”

The big hand took possession of a long, lovely stretch of her inner thigh. “You’re in charge, darling. What’s this big strong hand gonna grab next?”

“North.”

He cupped his hand against the warmest skin of her upper thigh, just below where her two legs joined.

She raised both her arms, frantically swinging her hair away from her blue eyes, so she could see. See his grinning face, see his muscular forearm buried deep up her dress.

“You ever hear of the word ‘cunt’, sweetie-pie?”

Her cheeks a darker red now, the red of shame, surrender. Blue eyes frightened, vicious, like a bird’s eyes when it’s first put in a cage. She nodded, breathing through her mouth.

“North? Or south?”

And that was all it took. Usually with Hollis, but not always, that was all it took.

***

After the four-legger Audrey had given birth to was alive and kicking, and kicking, Roy and she took him home to their own small shack.

Nothing beats being in your own sanctuary. Your walls around you. Falling asleep in the woods with your wife, the familiar smells and shadows of your shack.

But away from her mother’s place, in the quiet of their own home, a lot of the structure the tree Roy built that shack against, and under, he felt disappointed. Like most decent boys, he had looked forward to his first born, with male shyness, but he expected it to be normal, with hands. Plus although it looked a lot like Audrey, it didn’t look much like him. The eyes weren’t right, and the nose, even small as it was, was too prominent.

But like most decent boys, he vowed to give little Scowtt the best childhood he could. After he’d come home from the sawmill each day he’d take up his rifle and go out into the woods, shoulders aching, thinking his thoughts, looking for squirrels and birds on the many limbs not too far a walk from their shack. Whatever he brought home, and dressed, Audrey would boil then mash-up, mixing it with her own milk, pulling her nipples above a glass bowl, so Scowtt could be weaned off her breasts.

Even with his hooves, they both loved the boy. That special time in a young couple’s life, when there’s a wide world outside the windows, but inside their modest home, and indeed it was modest, there’s that hearth fire of a young couple starting out, snub noses and thinness, still getting to know each other, being gentle with each other, so many soft words during the day, adjusting against the warmth of each other’s bodies in bed, playing after dinner with the baby between their knees. That was a special time, an isolated time, an island green and breezy, both of them would forever have in their memories. It brought out their best qualities. The little girl who chopped all those onions so she wouldn’t stand apart. The little boy who took flowers to celebrate his admiration of what was good in the world.

After about a year, young Scowtt was clomping all over the floor of their shack, like a spider with four legs. Half-circle scars across the wooden planks. A bit rambunctious. Outside, by their stone-lined cooking pit, Roy would throw a stick, and damn if Scowtt didn’t gallop down the dirt road, snatch up that crooked stick in his mouth, trot back with it, eyes blazing.

Roy tried to teach the boy to stand up on his hind legs, like a human, even offering it food as a reward if it did so, a fire-roasted squirrel thigh, held at Roy’s waist, a real treat, but it was clear, after a number of attempts, Scowtt’s front legs falling back down heavily, clip-clop, onto the floor, he just wasn’t going to ever be a boy who walked upright. Which caused some sorrow to Roy, and perhaps to Audrey. They never discussed it between themselves, but he accepted that. If his boy had to walk on all fours, that was all right. It was his boy clip-clopping.

Whenever the family went into town, there was of course a lot of attention paid to little Scowtt. From children, because you would expect that, tugging on their parent’s sleeve, pointing; but also from the parents themselves, who should have known better. But Audrey and Roy both held their chins high, caught each other in the marketplace doing so, and smiled that shared smile between the two of them, in public circumstances, that bespeaks great strength in a couple. Young and poor, dirt poor, yet in love, and proud of that love, like it was gold coins.

Saturday nights, the three of them sitting on the porch outside their shack after dinner, in the whippoorwill wilderness, the fire in the stone-lined pit in the front yard still guttering blue and yellow within moon-lit grayness, tree trunks flickering in the distance, Roy sipping some of his family’s moonshine from a jar, sharing a cigarette and small talk with Audrey, were their happiest times.

Then school started.

Scowtt didn’t do well in school.

For one thing, he couldn’t fit comfortably within the attached desk and chair arrangements used in most schools. Front hooves clacking on the desktop, vibrating off the wide schoolbooks. His spine just didn’t work that way. Too much pressure on his hind side, while the teacher talked for an hour about Romeo and Juliet, or the wonder of parallelograms. Just wasn’t going to work. He’d come home after school walking crooked on his four legs.

So Audrey started home schooling him.

A treat held high in the fingers when he learned the capital of Argentina, for example, and could spell it.

But like any home schooling, this isolation from other children his own age made him even less socially adept. When the three of them travelled to the market, even though they’d release him, pat on his head, to approach others, those other children would draw away, frightened. Hard for them to get past this child who probably had the same interests as them, but was down around hip level, clopping around, trying to follow the clique. Children have limited coping skills.

The only place Scowtt really felt at home was when he was with family.

One Fourth of July, Roy’s Uncle Hollis threw a big party on his front lawn. Didn’t say why. All the clan gathered. Skinny men with eyes that were too blue, women in old fashioned dresses. Kids chasing each other around with sticks. Lots of orange coals glowing in grills, spirals of ruby and pearl sausages sending up smoke.

A couple of peculiar things happened at that picnic.

For one, Roy was sitting on the grass under a tree, Audrey, who seemed very uncomfortable, by his side, not as animated as she usually was, when he saw Scowtt running on all fours off in the distance, down by the river, chasing blue jays. But how could that be? Scowtt was still by their side, sad look on his face, because he knew it was useless trying to mix with the other children.

The other thing was, as soon as Uncle Hollis came out of his shack, holding up the newspaper full of sausages he was going to cook, Scowtt raised himself up on all four hooves, went galloping off towards Uncle Hollis.

Roy trotted behind. Couldn’t have Scowtt eat raw pork.

“Come back over here, Scowtt. Here, boy.”

A battle over who Scowtt was going to trot towards, Roy or Uncle Hollis, based on their calls.

Both men wiggling their fingers down by their knees, looking at the other.

Uncle Hollis was laughing with his cronies, real hillbilly men, foreheads that weren’t right, when Scowtt reached him. As much affection as Scowtt showed Roy, he was jumping all over Uncle Hollis.

Roy caught up. “Maybe he thinks the sausages is his treat.”

Uncle Hollis was scratching Scowtt’s scalp with his free hand, holding the other upraised hand with the sausages away from the jumps, as if he were the statue of liberty. “Or maybe something else.” Country boy wink at his cronies.

Roy was confused. “Something else like what?”

Uncle Hollis chucked his fingers under Scowtt’s chin, grin on his big-nosed face. “Ask your wife, boy.”

Which made Roy even more confused. ‘Boy’ was a sign of disrespect, for someone his age. He had a regular job, down at the sawmill. He turned to Audrey, who had caught up, reluctantly. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

A few hoots from the cronies, sucking on their corn cob pipes.

Audrey was old enough now, and had been through enough, she no longer blushed, but she did look nervous. “Your Uncle Hollis is just having fun with you, Roy. Just ignore him.”

“Yeah, just ignore me, Roy.” Went back to petting Scowtt. Couldn’t resist adding, looking down, “Up this close, I certainly do see your wife in Scowtt’s face.” Squinted, pretending to be puzzled. Not a good actor, deliberately. “Sure don’t see you yourself in Scowtt’s face though, boy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But with the smell of those sausages rising up in the air, carrying on the breeze, a whole group of young four-leggers broke out of the tree line, galloping towards Hollis.

Roy was stunned. There were others?

Only some of them wore clothes. But they all sure seemed to love Uncle Hollis. “Hey, now. Calm yourselves down. This food ain’t ready yet.”

Scowtt swung his head left, right, surprised at this herd of boys and girls down around Uncle Hollis’ waist level who looked like Scowtt. He started talking to them, shyly at first, but excited.

Uncle Hollis turned over one of the spirals of sausage, half gray now, half still pink, smoke rising. “Little Scowtt? Anytime you want to mix with your own kind, you just trot over here to my place.”

“Why are they all flocking around you?”

“Guess that’s kind of obvious. I got bad seed, but it sure is a prolific seed. These aren’t even half the army I got living in my woods. The others…they don’t look as presentable as this lot. They only allowed out of the woods, at this point at least, early in the morning when I feed them, and late at night, after the sun goes down, when I train them.”

Back at their shack later that night, Roy questioned his wife. “Why’d Uncle Hollis say, Ask your wife? And why was he talking about his seed?”

Audrey kept her back to her husband, burning feathers off the birds he shot earlier. “That’s just how he talks, Roy. Doesn’t mean anything.”

“He was pretty specific.”

Back still turned to him, paying extra close attention to the birds, the backs of her shoulders gave an unhappy shrug. “Don’t mean anything.”

“You ever lay down with my uncle?”

“That’s…so ridiculous!”

But a husband is rarely reassured during these moments.

Something terrible grew up between these two young people who had beforehand been so happy. A silence. Like a wall of glass, palms pressing on either side. And something cancerous began growing inside Roy. Resentment. Towards his wife.

For the first time ever, Scowtt began disappearing for long stretches of time during the day.

“Are you going over to Uncle Hollis’ place, to play with the other four-leggers?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t want you over there. I want you here, at our home. We’re your parents.”

But each time they had this argument, Scowtt would just look up at Roy with the same black-eyed intensity of a child’s stubbornness to do what it wants to do.

One evening, Audrey was serving dinner, silent like she had been the past few days, as if there had been a death, because she knew anything she said, no matter how innocent, would just enrage Roy further. Scowtt was missing for the meal, probably off you know where.

They were eating fried fish, which the Kellobash boy had sold them, going shack to shack up their road, fresh catch hanging from hooks slung over his shoulder.

“Fish is burnt.”

Audrey kept her head down, fork to mouth.

“Said, fish is burnt.”

“You want mine?”

“Maybe if you were cooking for Uncle Hollis, the fish wouldn’t be burnt. Maybe it’d be fine, tender white flesh, lots of moisture, because you’d take more care.”

Audrey, head bowed, fork held in her fingers, crying.

Roy flinging his plate of fish off the table. With the side of his left hand. “You fuck that bastard? You fuck him?”

Audrey kept her head down. Praying to Jesus. So secretive, her lips didn’t move.

“No man fucks my wife.”

“He’s too big in the hollow, Roy. Got too many friends.”

Roy snorted. “I don’t give a good Goddamn how big he is. I’m going up against him. And I’m not walking away until he’s on the floor, twitching. Beaten down by my fists.”

***

The next night, while he was trying to relax in his chair after dinner, whittling, but rather furiously, curls of wood flying, there was a knock on the door.

Roy picked up the shotgun propped against the wall beside the door, but it was just Audrey’s father.

“Mind if I come in, Roy? Set a spell?”

“Of course.”

Audrey’s father, Scott, was a small man, with a humped back. Teeth were snaggled. But everybody liked him. And of course Roy had to show respect towards him, since he was Audrey’s dad.

Roy offered him a jar of shine.

Scott took a sip. The old seem to taste alcohol different from the young. Raised his age-spotted face. “I always love coming over your place, Roy, because whenever I visit my other children and their spouses, there’s always conflict. But in your house, I’ve always felt peace.”

Roy had his own jar. Audrey kept to herself by the sink. “Thanks.”

“But this time, I feel a tension. Something’s wrong. You want to talk about it, man to man?”

Roy rarely talked about his feelings with anyone, and certainly not another man, you learn to be dead that way pretty early in boyhood, but because Scott was so much older, and Audrey’s dad, he looked down at the jar of shine he was holding in both his hands. “You know, or maybe you don’t, my Uncle Hollis has been saying some truly disrespectful things about my wife. Your daughter.”

“I am aware.” Scott’s cataracted eyes looked into Roy’s. A weak shrug of Scott’s right shoulder. “There’s always going to be people like Hollis in this world.”

“Yeah, but. How he treats me influences how other men treat me.”

“Well, that’s true. But are you going to move out of the hollow? Because otherwise, Hollis is part of your lot in life. Plus, he’s related.”

Roy shifted his jaw. “I’m going to do whatever I have to do.”

“Of course, just saying, you have a wife. You have a child.”

“If it is my child.”

“Well, that’s an unpleasant thing to say.”

“I’m going to do whatever I have to do.”

Scott took some time lighting his pipe. Maybe to calm Roy down. The old do know how to use our respect of them. Once he had smoke going, and there was that cherry wood smell in the air, he leaned over sideways in his chair towards Roy. “You ever hear about Dirt Land?”

“Don’t believe so.”

The quaver of old age in Scott’s voice. “You can change in some ways as you get older. You can change your behavior. But you can never change what’s in your head. Whatever’s in your head, it crawled in your ear when you were a little child, lit a cigar, and set up shop. It’s never gonna go away. But like I said, you can change your behavior. So at least there’s that.”

“So I’m never going to have less inner turmoil than I have now, as a young man?”

“Never, ever. You’re gonna be walking around, and smiling, and making love, and checking to see if anybody need their drink refreshed, the considerate host, and watching the television, and flossing your teeth and asking the doctor what side effects these pills have, and grinning when somebody snap a picture of you behind your fiftieth birthday cake, and trying to get along with the nurse assigned to you in the old age home, and that turmoil is just gonna keep seething inside you. But you know, after enough years, maybe you learn how to live with that? Can’t change what’s inside you. That’s as much a part of you as your heart or ten miles of intestines. But you can change your behavior.

“What you keep telling yourself, is you got Dirt Land up ahead of you. Dirt Land is a marvelous place. You reach your hand down in that dirt, and you can pull up anything you want. A crown of jewels to put on your wife’s head. Imagine that? A brand-new suit that fits you like you spent one million dollars on it. Like the tailors fussed for one week deciding where each needle should re-enter the cloth, to have that wool hang perfect around your body. Maybe you’re being modest? You just want a dog? You can dig him up out of the dirt, pulling out his front paws, his smiling jaws, and he’ll be the most faithful, loving dog you ever had walking by your side. That’s what Dirt Land is. It’s where everything is finally right. The way it should be. The way it’s supposed to be. What happens here? Around us? Just try to get by with as much dignity as you can. Swallow the affronts. Take in that poison. Because, really? That’s what life is. It’s being insulted every day.”

Probably good advice. But Roy didn’t take it.

Later that night though, after Scott left, Roy walked up behind Audrey while she was washing out the drink jars. She froze her hand with its white rag deep down inside the soapy glass, looking with wife eyes at him, to see what he had to say. Her husband’s face still so young, but eyes getting old. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I pissed on you that time, and made you eat grease.”

***

Uncle Hollis and his cronies hung out at the Fury Bar every Wednesday night. Just a glorified double-wide shack in town, no toilet, you had to go out the side door, be discreet. No tables. Stools around the half-moon of the bar itself. Behind the bar, Lola, maybe fourteen years old, dark-haired, face already so old it almost, but not quite, canceled out her body. (Takes a lot to cancel out a woman’s body, especially a young woman’s body.) She poured the drinks while Rufus, the owner, old and lecherous, sat on a stool behind the bar. He had her wear a white T-shirt, came to just above her hips, and nothing else. Bit disconcerting the first time you saw her behind the bar, not when she took your order, but when she turned around and reached up to the shelf at the back of the bar to get the bottle for your drink. Bare ass, and when she turned around, bare pubis, dark hair. The old men sitting on their stools were always asking her to pull down another bottle, so they could see her nakedness.

Roy went in, already fairly juiced. Face numb. First time in the Fury Bar. Close atmosphere. Saw Uncle Hollis was at the end of the bar. Faced Lola, asked for a whiskey, neat.

Maybe she was surprised a man so young as Roy had stepped into this establishment. Maybe it was hormones. Or the mating instinct. Whatever it was, she acted like she was a princess and Roy was some white knight who tied up his horse outside. Gave him a courtly bow, as if she was wearing a ruffled white dress, instead of a white T-shirt with her cunt exposed.

Placed the squat glass on the bar between his hands. Poured in that straw-colored mind-fucker. “Here you go, sir.” Actual lilt to her voice, gotta hand it to her, her dreams hadn’t been completely pulped by a steady fist yet, like he might rescue her from the humiliations into which she had strayed, and got stuck.

He avoided her eyes. Put his hands around the glass. Her smile wobbled away, like it often did.

Hollis leaned out from his stool. “Fancy seeing you here, little nephew. Looks like you got a bee in your bonnet.”

Roy threw back his whiskey. Burn at the back of his throat. That’s the thing about whiskey. It lets you know, warmness descending, when it’s taking over.

Still leaning back from his stool, Hollis raised his voice. “You here tonight to fuck Lola? Cause I can certainly recommend her. As can every other man in town, and the adjacent counties. Stick it in her mouth, stick it in her cunt, stick it in her shit hole. I’ll tell you this, the girl is game. Ain’t that true, Lola? Gotta earn those nickels and dimes somehow. Or maybe you want to plow some new territory, like jamming your dick up one of her nostrils. Just about the only hole she got that’s still kinda virgin. Plus you got a choice with her nostrils, Roy. Left or right. Maybe you fuck her left nostril, and your big ol’ Uncle Hollis fuck the right nostril, and he grab you by the scruff of your neck and stare his big baby blue eyes into yours while the two of us fucking her nose, both of us feeling our big hard cocks pumping so close to each other, nothing much separating those two engines from rubbing directly against each other, like moose heads rubbing together, swooning, but, what they call that wall of flesh between the nostrils? The septum? That it?”

Roy signaled to Lola he wanted another shot. “No, I ain’t here tonight for Lola.”

“Really!” Uncle Hollis unsaddled his stool, standing up, all five feet eight inches of him, with his big nose, bald head, wide grin. “So who you here for tonight, little nephew? Wife won’t put those luscious wet lips around your cock? That the problem? Tell your Uncle Hollis. I’ll coach you on how to get her to suck your cock, much like I schooled her in how to suck my cock.” His blue eyes blinked. “When she do suck your cock, does she by any chance reach that delicate right hand of hers up behind your scrotum sack, scratch your balls from behind? Well, if she does, you can thank your ol’ Uncle Hollis here, because I’s the one taught your wife to suck real hard and nasty on a man’s cock, nostrils flaring out like she undersea and her oxygen is running short. That why you here? To thank me for teaching your young wife how to suck my cock? You have a golden award statue or some such you want to present to me?”

Roy tilted back his second whiskey shot. Signaled to Lola to pour him a third.

“I’m here to kill you.”

“You’re here to kill me! Well, well, well.” Eyes darting to his cronies. Walking closer to Roy. “How you gonna do that? You gonna tell a real funny story, and kill me with laughter? You gonna bake me a fudge cupcake with thick buttercream swirled atop and kill me with cholesterol? Or you gonna get down on your shabby little knees, take me in your mouth, work my cock with your lips like your wife do, and kill me with kindness?”

Hollis didn’t know Roy had a knife in his pants pocket.

Didn’t even see Roy pull it out. Start it on its high arc like a missile headed towards Moscow.

But Hollis caught Roy’s wrist long before the knife descended. “This? This was your plan?”

Still holding Roy’s hand aloft, Hollis gave Roy’s face a series of short, sharp slaps.

Dancing left, right in front of Roy, avoiding the younger man’s free hand wheeling around, until that many eye-stinging slaps disoriented the boy, mouth gasping, and Hollis was able to wrest the knife from Roy’s weak fingers.

A few more open-handed slaps, and Roy fell backwards, on the bar floor, landing on his ass.

Hollis still standing, looking at the little knife he had taken from his nephew.

Lola, who had whooped when Roy attacked, quickly changed her strategy when Roy failed. Blew Hollis a kiss, swinging her shoulders.

Hollis stood over Roy’s sprawled body. “You got a Plan B, boy?”

Roy, despite himself, let his face get red. Started crying.

“Didn’t think so. That’s what makes a boy a boy. No Plan B. Stand up.”

Roy had no choice but to rise.

The close atmosphere inside that small bar got even more unfriendly.

“Lucky for you, you’re my nephew. You weren’t my nephew…” Wicked grin. “Which would be fun. But anyway since you are, you know what? I’m a-gonna let you just turn around, and walk out that door. Ain’t that a treat? And all you got to do is understand that from now on, I’m not gonna be discreet about fucking your wife. Fact is, I may even ask you to hold her ankles apart while I ease on in.” Hollis gave a lazy, big-shouldered shrug. “Who knows? Maybe you pick up a technique or three. You’re just gonna have to live with it each time, like your dad, Audrey’s father, and every other man here in the hollow. Now you walk out that door, go back to your little shanty shack, and tell Audrey to get a good night’s rest tonight, because I’ll be by tomorrow, and I want her energetic. Oh, and Roy? Tell her to fix me some scrambled eggs, little nephew, will you? I just love scrambled eggs.”

Now, Roy knew whatever he did next was going to determine the rest of his life. And it’s rare you come to such an all or nothing crossroads. He could say nothing, which was the same as saying, Yes, sir, walk out the door and buy some eggs on the way home; or he could walk back down the length of that bar, and once again attack his Uncle Hollis. And almost certainly lose. Coward? Or hero?

Hollis saw Roy’s indecision. “What’s it gonna be, boy? You just got to resign yourself to your fate, much like a married man after two or three years have passed resigns himself to masturbation, ear cocked to make sure his wife is still snoring.”

The old men on the stools, and Lola behind the bar, waited.

Sometimes you have to be smart, and wait for another day.

Roy walked to the front door of the bar.

Everyone in the bar, except Hollis, looked disappointed.

Roy pushed the front door open.

Cool night air outside. Sound of insects in the trees, sharing their rhythms. Moon up in the sky, just above the dark shoulders of the hilltops. Would it be that bad? He could go off hunting whenever Hollis came over. Have Audrey take a bath in the river afterwards, each time. Was trying to learn to swallow that, get it down, having trouble with it, but maybe he could have, then those two words got stuck in his craw. ‘Each time’. In his thoughts, the memory of him and Audrey in their little shack, one evening after Scowtt had been born, sleeping with his hooves drawn up on his belly, he and Audrey sitting on the floor by the blue blanket, and he didn’t remember who got the conversation going, but they started talking about when they were kids, before they knew each other, and how each of them, separately, first read a book. Each had to use a finger, following along the bottoms of the sentences, but that was okay. He started off, telling her his first book was The Little Prince. She sat up, eyebrows raised. That was the first book she ever read! Both of them grinning at the coincidence. She went on, and after I got to the last page, and there were tears dropping on the words, I saw that someone had drawn a blue-inked heart under the last paragraph. Roy reared back his head. That was me that drew that heart! You read the same copy of the book I did, but years later? That extra coincidence shut them both up, but in a good way. Maybe they were destined to be together. Maybe there was a pattern to it all. Maybe life was bigger than they thought. Kinder. And he didn’t want that Audrey, the Audrey of that evening, excited and shy, blue eyes smiling, pale hair even paler in their candlelight, to have to go through anything bad even one time, let alone ‘each time’.

So door to the bar open, Roy turned around. Didn’t go back down the length of the bar, because he knew that would be the end. But what he did do was, he raised his right hand, and raised his middle finger. Stuck it up, at Hollis, defiantly.

Thought maybe he could get away with that. A small protest that maybe he could build on. After all, they were related. Maybe Hollis could give him this tiny crumb.

But he was wrong.

Hollis stared at his nephew. The bar was silent.

No sound in the world, but those insects. And loud as they were, they didn’t care what happened in this small bar.

“The sure sign of an impotent boy. The finger.”

Roy kept it raised.

“Can’t let that go, Roy. Just can’t. Sign of disrespect.”

Roy turned to leave, trembling.

Hollis’ hand whirled him around, shoved him against one of the stools. Grabbed Roy’s right wrist. Hoisted it up.

Blue eyes staring into his. Left hand holding the wrist, his right hand encircled Roy’s middle finger, which tried to hide, by curling, but to no avail.

Still staring into Roy’s eyes, Hollis bent Roy’s middle finger back. Bent it back more. More. Roy’s knees lifting, mouth howling.

In the quiet bar, the bone snap was loud as a pistol shot.

Still holding the wrist in his left hand, still staring into his nephew’s eyes, Hollis’ right hand slowly twisted Roy’s broken middle finger clockwise, clockwise, clockwise until the middle finger wrenched from the other writhing digits, detached, twitching in Hollis’ mid-air lift.

“Lola? Fetch a jar to put this finger in, then once you got it in the jar, drown it with pickle juice, then put it with my collection. I occasionally like to look at all these brave middle fingers that thought they was attached to a strong man. But first thing, hand me the phone.”

Lola reached under her side of the bar, pulled out a black telephone, put it on the bar near Hollis’ waist.

“You can go now, Roy. Start to head back towards your shack, where your young wife is waiting. You won’t make it to her sweet face. You saw that face for the last time when you walked out of your shack. Right now, from this moment forward, there’s a grave following you around like an unfed dog.”

***

Roy staggered by himself down the dirt road, stumbling that mile towards his and Audrey’s shack. Blood dripping from his right hand. Trying to hold his head high, in that moonlit loneliness, but under these present circumstances, no neck muscles are that strong.

Might as well kiss goodbye to his job at the sawmill. No way they’d let him work in that high speed environment, metal teeth tearing into wood, when he only had but the four fingers on his right hand.

Decided he wasn’t going to buy any eggs for Hollis.

Made a decision he was going to make it home, tell Audrey what had happened, because she had a right to know, then ask her to accompany him down to the river, to wash his wound. Once down there, he’d get her in the black water, push her face underneath the ripples, bad hand and all, and drown her. She wouldn’t die happy, her hands slapping up at his shoulders, but she’d die before Hollis could spend any more time with her. Up until now, it hadn’t been that bad for her. But he knew what Hollis did to women over time, once he got bored with fucking them, but didn’t want to let them go. She still had something good inside her. Something sweet-smelling. He didn’t want to let Hollis work on her, month after month, until she had no more hope than Lola at the bar.

Up on the right, the bend in the road where so long ago he had picked those flowers for Miss Abergine.

His tired face jerked up. Listening in the night, eyes jerking left, right.

There it was again.

Something moving through the woods on his right, towards the road, towards him.

Oh, but also through the trees on his left.

Lots of somethings.

He turned to go back to town.

But down the road behind him, figures stretched across the dirt in the moonlight, advancing.

He faced forward.

But figures advancing from in front of him.

Through the woods on either side they broke, leaping, like wolves.

All the four-leggers, surrounding him on that lonely stretch of road.

He had no idea there were so many of them.

And after them, the ones hiding in the forest who were even less human. Who because of their anatomical extremes, had difficulties moving.

One of them clopped over, back bent horizontal. Glared up at him, from Roy’s knees. “You nobody’s da-da.”

Roy kept swinging his head around.

No idea there were so many of them!

“I’m Scowtt’s father. I—”

Let out a cry of pain, left knee buckling.

Turned around, looked behind him.

The four-legger who had hit Roy’s knee with his hoof glared up at Roy, smirk on her face. “Nobody’s da-da!”

Another one ambling over. Taller on all fours, he hit Roy squarely in his stomach. Roy bent over. Hard to breathe.

Out of the crowd, Scowtt trotted over to Roy’s pained face. Hatred in his eyes. “No four-legger ever gonna listen to a four-armer ever again!”

Roy went down on one knee, trying to deal with the pain in his chest. “I’m not a four-armer. I’m normal.”

Hoof from another four-legger, this time across Roy’s face. That one stung. Stung all the way up into his brain.

Nose broken, flopped to one side on his face. Roy trying to blink his way through the pain, tasting his own blood. “I’m not—”

Still another four-legger, maneuvering his angry face up against Roy’s. “Take off your shoes and show us your second set of hands!”

“I don’t, I’m not—”

He didn’t know whose hoof hit him next. Hard against his temple. Sprawled on his stomach on the dirt road, he reached out his hand.

Another hoof. Spat out red teeth.

Another hoof.

Hooves.

Hooves. Hooves. Hooves. Hooves. Hooves.

***

It was after two o’clock in the morning.

Audrey, who had been waiting for her husband to return, sitting in the dirt by their fire pit, went back inside their shack.

The beauty of those blue eyes, that pale yellow hair, that wasn’t going to last. Not in the mountains. Alcohol, rape, grief, poverty…that can thin a face fast. Thin it to where a woman of twenty looks sixty. You see it everywhere up here.

She sat in the darkness of their shack, waiting.

About three in the morning, no light yet in the sky, she heard feet outside their shack. A rise of hope, but then she realized it was too many feet.

Scowtt came through the open door, on all fours.

“Where’s your daddy?”

“He ain’t my daddy.”

“Where’s Roy?”

Scowtt twisted his face up from his four-legged stance. “What were he and you gonna do when he came home?”

She backed up. “I don’t know. Go to bed.”

Scowtt smirked up at her. “I hear the two of you in bed. He get on top of you, right? That how it work?”

“I’m going to go over my daddy’s. You stay here, get some rest. You got dark circles under your eyes.”

Scowtt reared back his face. “I’m gonna get my rest in your bed tonight. With you.”

“You can’t do that. It’s not right.”

“Take those clothes off.”

The thing is, up in the mountains, in the isolated shacks, you don’t get to choose. All you have is Dirt Land, and knowing that if it doesn’t turn out human enough, there’s always the river.

She looked around Scowtt’s bulk, trying to figure some way to get past him, to get out into the night.

Scowtt grinned. Spit on the floor. Those eyes. “What you gonna do, cunt? You gonna try to run to safety? You can’t outrun me. I got four legs.”

***

‘Dirt Land’ marks Ralph Robert Moore’s sixth appearance in Black Static, with previous stories featured in issues 37, 39, 41, 43 and 46. His books include the novels Father Figure, As Dead As Me and Ghosters, and the short story collections Remove the Eyes and I Smell Blood. A collection of ten novelettes, You Can Never Spit It All Out, will be published next year. You can find him at www.ralphrobertmoore.com, and on Facebook. Rob and his wife Mary live in Dallas, Texas.