M Coe - New Veronia

Jay gasped. “I need you to stop.”

I stopped. I couldn’t think of any more statistics, anyhow; I was too tired.

I woke to Jay clutching my arm. “Bennet, I heard it! It could be anything. Some Florida thing.” He was panting; I knew that he was thinking about the Zimzee, too. Maybe he’d been having a nightmare, because normally, he would hide his distress; I saw fear in him even more seldom than sadness. “What are we going to do?”

The noise did sound closer, and I thought that I could hear footsteps, a heavy thing moving towards us. I gripped the tangle of branches that held me.

“What if,” Jay said, his voice deadly serious, “what if it’s the devil?”

“Shut up. It might be able to hear us.” I worried he was losing his marbles, that he might give us up on purpose because his guilt over Toshi was finally choking him. The devil , he’d said.

The noise came again; I felt certain I heard steps.

And then something huge, looming, broke through the foliage of our little clearing, and I begged my heart to explode right then so that I wouldn’t have to feel myself being skinned. The thing had a tail, a thin, flapping triangle of flesh, and it walked on two legs over to our pitiful campfire and kicked at the ashes. For a second, I felt relief—it was a man, the dingy white of his t-shirt making him visible in the almost-dawn—and then his face turned towards us up in the tree and my stomach dropped straight through the earth’s crust.

“What you boys doing up there?” The man’s eyes and mouth were holes in the predawn, and his large body moved loosely, as if every joint were double-bending. A black strap bisected his chest, the sort of strap that held a shotgun, and his strange tail twitched from side to side.

“Was that you howling?” Jay asked.

“You sleeping up there? How about you come on down.”

“I don’t think we should go,” I said quiet as I could to Jay. At the tree trunk’s base nestled our black backpack. We were stupid to have left it so far away.

“You think that man can’t climb a tree?” Jay said. “He can climb a tree.”

“Get down. Now.”

Jay and I didn’t hesitate any longer; we each held onto a different branch and dropped ourselves to the ground. In the second I was hanging, I felt acutely aware that my bellybutton was showing, that it made a perfect gaping target for the man. I reached for the backpack, but the man told me no. “I’m a quick shot,” he said.

Once we stood before him, a ways off from the tree and our pack, he brought his tail around to the front. It was an alligator, a small one, maybe two feet long, with a rope tied like a leash around its snout. “Dinner,” he said, and the dangling thing twitched angrily. He dropped it and set a foot over the rope. “You’re in my swamp. Tariff to pass. So, give me all your money.” He held out a hand; his skin was tanned a dark, wrinkled brown, like bark. Like the Zimzee. But he was a white man, and even through my fear, I realized that was wrong: Jay’s Zimzee, the one his father had scared him with, was black.

“Sure,” I said, “that’s okay. Jay, give it over. Just give it.”

“We don’t have any money,” Jay said, but his hand burrowed deep into his pocket, where he kept the stolen cash; he fiddled his fingers around in there.

The Zimzee growled and then hawked a loogie onto the ground near Jay’s feet. “Don’t lie to me.”

“Okay,” I kept saying, hoping my voice sounded soothing to the Zimzee, “okay…”

The Zimzee casually reached behind his back for his sawed-off shotgun, then pointed it straight at Jay’s head. “Money,” he said. His eyes went on and on, omnipotent.

Finally Jay pulled the bills out from his pocket and defiantly tossed them at the Zimzee’s feet.

The Zimzee shook his head like we were the dumbest pair he’d ever come across, and probably he was right. He jerked the barrel of his gun towards Jay and said, “Get down there and pick it up and hand it to me nice. Then you get out of my sight. How old is you two, anyways? Out on your own.”

Jay slowly got to his knees and bent, his neck looking vulnerable and dirty, towards the cash.

“Fuck,” the Zimzee said, staring down at Jay. He poked the barrel of his gun against the back of Jay’s neck, right where the tattoo marked him.

The ground was creeping up around my shoe, wetting my toes. In fact, my whole body felt wet, a trickle down my back, my underarms swampy, my groin like a Jacuzzi, like something bubbling in there.

“You piece of shit.” The Zimzee’s voice, a smoker’s growl, grated against the insecty hum of the vegetation. Like proving me right, he pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette. When he lit it, the burning smell floated above the thick musty loam where I’d thought for a moment that Jay and I might be the last two people on earth. “You’re one of them, huh? That means a tariff is too good for you. You owe more.” Smoke inched out through his nostrils and for some reason it scared me, to see something solid burned into nothing before this man’s lips.

“But you told us we could go,” I said. “You have our money now. All of it.” I pulled Jay upright so that he was standing beside me again. “That’s everything.”

“You’re those Eye Whites,” the Zimzee said, and the way he talked, it was like he was chomping the tobacco smoke.

“And proud of it.” Jay tried to straighten himself, but his shoulders still curled inward.

A slow, cruel smile cleaved the Zimzee’s face. “You know what you mean by that? You get what you’re calling yourself?”

“I’m calling myself a real man.”

“They took my boy,” the Zimzee said. “Now he’s one of their gang. I don’t know him no more.”

“So they’re around here?” Jay asked, excited. “Where’s their place?”

“Like I said.” The Zimzee spat bits of tobacco onto the ground. “Plain tariff is too nice for an Eye Whites. Here’s what I’ll have you do.”

During those long seconds before he came out with it, I must have aged a decade, because by the time he told us, I knew my adolescence was over.

“I’ll let you get off,” he said, “after the two of you grummet each other here. Give me a look.”

The alligator, Dinner, whipped its body in an attempt at escape, but all it affected was a crackle like small-time fireworks against some dead leaves. This was the universe’s way of getting me back, of bringing it all full circle. We’d met him only a few minutes ago, but I felt as if he’d had us imprisoned for weeks. “But we already paid you,” I said. “We already—”

He interrupted: “That wasn’t really no ask.”

The Zimzee settled himself down on the same termite-occupied log we’d used as a bench the night before. He held his sawed-off shotgun in one hand as if it were a cheap can of beer, not paying too much attention to it, but not about to let it go, either. Dinner lay docile at his feet.

There once was a time when the slightest provocation—when the opposite of a provocation—would get me hard in an instant, but my cock hadn’t stirred in days. Maybe being on the road, or not eating much, or the last time I’d had a boner… something like that must have robbed me of the quick-trigger teenage-given right to an erection.

“He wants to make a sort of live porn out of us,” I whispered to Jay. “That’s all.” For some reason, the idea made me giddy. I could be fucked by Jay in the ass, almost like a reversal of what I’d done to Tosh, and then I would be free and I could go on my merry way and never have to look at Jay’s sick sad hole of a face ever again. I could find my mom and see what she was like and then grow up on the other side of this godforsaken swamp.