Jeff Jacobson - Foodchain

But Ernie, after years of getting kicked and kneed in the crotch, was used to this trick, almost expecting it, blocked Theo’s clumsy kick easily. He retaliated by savagely punching Theo in the face. Theo stumbled back, desperately trying to block the relentless pounding. He hit the gates near his father and doubled over, protecting his head. Ernie didn’t let up; now he could take his time, gritting his teeth, slamming blow after blow down, cracking his taped knuckles across Theo’s skull.

Horace Sturm never moved.

Finally Theo crumpled and he fell, curled up, drawing his knees tight against his chest. Ernie rested for a moment, arms shivering, then started kicking Theo. He stopped just long enough to spit on Theo’s back.

The clowns leapt over the gates, swarming Ernie. Instantly, the Glouck brothers flew over the gates and attacked the clowns. For a moment, chaos reigned inside the ring. Grunts, shouts, blows, and curses filled the room. Frank lost track of who was fighting whom. He glanced up, beyond the ring, at Horace Sturm.

Slowly, calmly, Sturm pulled that six-shooter out of its holster and held it tight against his leg. And just as Frank realized that Sturm might just shoot somebody for the hell of it, a gunshot shattered the air and a blue cloud of gunpowder erupted from around Sturm, rolling through the ring like ground fog. The clowns and the Gloucks stopped fighting. Reluctantly.

As the smoke cleared, Frank saw that Sturm had fired directly into the ground, just an inch from the outside of his right foot. If it had been anyone else, it would have looked as if the person had fired the revolver by accident, arm straight down, aiming at the floor, but by the look in Sturm’s eyes, it didn’t look as if he was the type to do anything by accident. Especially around firearms.

The two sides parted quick and suddenly froze, as if unable to admit the gunshot had caught their attention. They backed away from the center of the ring, out of the light. The Glouck boys pulled Ernie back. The clowns helped Theo to his feet.

Sturm stepped forward, fingers still tight around the revolver’s handle. He eyed the men in the ring, his son, and then the crowd, taking his time, letting the silence gather and build. The crowd stood still, afraid to even sit down. Finally, Sturm spoke. “This fight is finished.” His voice was low. “I declare Ernie Glouck the winner, by default.”

The Glouck family erupted in shouts, screams. Everybody else was silent, nobody even moved.

Sturm reholstered his pistol, speaking slow. “My son…my son will regret this night for the rest of his life. These fights are over.”

DAY THREE

Frank didn’t advertise the fact that he’d bet on Ernie Glouck. The clowns were pissed and wanted to go raise some hell. They wanted to get back at the Gloucks somehow, but nobody suggested actually going on over to the Glouck’s house, although Pine and Chuck wanted to go collect their shotguns and at least shoot the shit out of that satellite dish. But Jack wouldn’t let them, pointing out that Sturm would be pissed. In the end, they stood around their pickups in the auction yard parking lot, drinking some more, bitching about those goddamn Gloucks, and chucking the occasional rock out into the night.

Finally, around three or four in the morning, the clowns passed out. They had offered a bunk to Frank, but he declined. Something was itching, gnawing at the inside of his skull like a trapped, hungry rat, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Jack offered to give him a lift back to the long black car at the fairgrounds, but Frank decided to just walk, see if he couldn’t figure out what was eating at him.

He headed back, along dark, quiet streets of abandoned houses and dead lawns. The air felt mercifully cool. Thanks to the beer and Seagrams, Frank felt pretty good. Confident. Almost even optimistic. His sense of humor was back. But even in that condition, he had to admit to himself that the possibilities of a future safe from Castellari were getting slimmer.

Maybe that’s what was bugging him. The sinking feeling that he would be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. But he wasn’t sure. It didn’t feel right; that didn’t seem like that was the little tickling thorn in his brain. Maybe it was the alcohol, dulling the effects of fear.

He kept walking, through the center of town, down buckled sidewalks along a Main Street wide enough to fit four or five lanes of traffic. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a town this small, and the silence surprised him.

An honest-to-God tumbleweed bounced lazily along the curb. To Frank’s eyes, it seemed small for a tumbleweed, maybe only two feet straight through, but it didn’t matter, not really. It was a sign.

An overwhelming sense of being in the West washed over him, stopping him short and leaving him weaving slightly in the center of the wide street. It wasn’t just the geographical sense of being in the West either, it was more like stepping into a land of myth and legend. A landscape that never truly existed, except in dreams. This was a land of possibilities, a land where someone quick, someone sharp, someone willing to do whatever it took, this was a land where someone could make something of themselves. The wave of civilization had crested out here, to be sure, but it hadn’t crashed yet, hadn’t flattened out and receded, settling everything into place. Everything was still topsy-turvy; the silt was churned and the waters muddy. A man could establish himself in the murk, where people couldn’t see clearly, and when the waters did calm, and the silt finally settled, that man would have something to stand on. He’d be ready. Frank nodded to himself, flush with the drunken importance of a heavy philosophical realization, and started walking again.

Nearly every building was empty, either gutted and hollow, or had large sheets of particleboard over the windows and a ‘For Rent’ sign nailed to the front door. Apart from an ancient grocery store, the only other place still in business had a carved wooden sign, hanging motionless in the still air, that read “Dickinson Taxidermy.”

Frank stopped for a moment, cupping his hands on the dusty, cobwebbed windows and peering inside. A long workbench stretched along the right side, under a wall full of various knives and hatchets. A sign had been tacked up in the back, “You shoot it, we’ll stuff it.” Large boxes littered the rest of the room. And the heads. Deer, elk, antelope, and boar. Some complete, hung up on the left wall, frozen in an eternity of blank, open staring. Other heads were in a reversal of decay; after being stripped down to the bone, they were being built back up, antlers bolted to skulls, hide tacked to frozen backbones, glass eyes popped back into sockets.

The itching thorn was suddenly yanked from his brain as an idea hit him.

Frank held the thorn, all sharp and glistening in the starlight, up in front of him. A sequence of possibilities clicked into place like the tumblers of a padlock, and suddenly the future didn’t seem quite so tight. He started moving again, not seeing the street anymore, instead sifting through the variables, the difficulties, and the risks. Deep down, he didn’t think it would work. He made his way to the fairgrounds and crawled into the backseat of the long black car and watched the stars slowly fade into the sky as morning broke.

* * * * *

He drove back to the gas station and brushed his teeth with his finger, tried to straighten out his hair a little, shaved using a disposable razor and spit, and put on the fresh suit from the trunk. Then he followed the highway out north of town, past the fairgrounds, past the auction yard, out into the flooded rice fields, watching for the cluster of buildings that he’d seen last night. It took a while, but he finally found the driveway.