Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

“C’mon.”

“Oh, my,” she said, when she turned around and saw the furry ball in his hands.

“It’s a female. Looks a lot like Pickles, don’t it?”

Setting the hot pan on top of the stove, she took the kitten from him and held it up to look into its green eyes. “Where did you find her?”

“The ol’ momma’s got ’em hid in a dead tree over on the widow’s place. I been watchin’ her awhile now.”

“Who?” Eula said with a grin. “The cat or the widow?”

“Ha!”

“Can I keep her?”

“Course you can.”

Later that night, as they were getting ready for bed, Eula said, “I’m going to name her Josephine, after my mother.”

“That’s good,” Ellsworth said. He hung his bibs on a peg and turned out the lamp.

They had been lying in the dark for several minutes when Eula said, “I still wonder why we haven’t got a letter yet.”

“Letter?”

“Yeah,” she said. “From Eddie. At least one to let us know how he’s doing.”

“They probably got him busy,” he told her. “I wouldn’t worry about that. Besides, we couldn’t read it anyway.”

“Maybe so, but Mr. Slater could.”

Ellsworth decided the best thing to do was try to steer the conversation in another direction. He thought for a moment, then said, “Oh, I see what’s goin’ on now.”

“What do you mean?”

“That damn schoolmarm. You’re stuck on him, ain’t ye?”

“Don’t be silly,” Eula said, then giggled and swatted at his shoulder.

“Must have been that flute he was a-playing. Or maybe that dandelion stuck in his ear.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“Yep,” he said, as he rolled over to face the wall, “I knew I should have never took you over there to see him.”

“Go to sleep,” she said, “before you get into trouble.”

Ellsworth closed his eyes, but images of Eddie twirling some little strumpet around in a circle kept him awake long into the night, and it was nearly sunrise before they finally spun off into the shadows.

ON A COOL, cloudy morning four weeks to the day after committing their first crime, the Jewett Gang made their way into a small, quiet village they had been observing for close to an hour from a dried-up creek bed. After spending three days ducking a group of assassins accompanied by a supply truck flying a flag that had the Montgomery family crest sewn on it, they were down to their last saltine and desperate to replenish their supplies before moving back into the brush. By that time various explanations were being tossed about across the nation — in newspapers, saloons, parlors, town hall meetings, churches, and courthouses — as to how they could have committed all of their crimes without getting caught or even sustaining a single scratch. Thanks in part to a tabloid story that claimed the gang was traveling with a Haitian voodoo priestess named Sylvia who had been chased out of Texas for casting a spell on her landlord, a good portion of the public had come to believe that their run of luck was the result of supernatural forces. Others, being somewhat more rational, considered it evidence that they were either the most brilliant criminals to ever come down the pike, or that the South was in bad need of retraining its police departments. The vast majority, however, held firm to the belief that the brothers would eventually make a mistake, in much the same way that even the most skilled of gamblers will eventually draw a bad hand if he keeps on playing; and that was exactly what was about to happen in Russell, Kentucky.

As they approached the general store, Cane tried to hand Chimney some money for the groceries.

Chimney looked over at the wad of dollar bills and sneered. “Shit, I don’t need that,” he said, patting the pistol hanging on his side.

“Look, goddamn it, we can’t be takin’ any chances over some lousy canned goods,” Cane said. “I thought we done went over this.”

Even though Chimney had been able to see the merits in Cane’s argument that it was time to lie low and focus on making it to Canada, he wasn’t quite as keen as his brothers were on completely giving up the outlaw life when, in his opinion, they were just starting to get good at it. Besides that, he was in a foul mood. He still hadn’t gotten a chance to fuck a woman yet, and lately it had been preying on his mind something awful that he was going to die before getting a chance to shoot his jizz into something other than his hand. “Don’t worry,” he said, as he slid down off his horse, “this won’t take a minute. C’mon, Cob.”

“Do I have to?” Cob asked.

Cane spat and looked up and down the street. Except for a kid playing with a dog a few doors down, there wasn’t another soul to be seen. “Yeah, fuck, you better go on in with him,” he said, “just to be on the safe side.”

As Cane sat out front keeping watch, and Chimney pilfered the cash register and loaded up two gunnysacks with provisions from the shelves and a stack of old newspapers lying on the counter, the bony, spectacled storekeeper wrung his hands and cried like an old woman, his boo-hoos getting louder by the minute. “Knock that whiny bastard in the head!” Chimney yelled, but instead Cob tried conversing with him about the price of hams and the need for rain. It was no use, the clerk kept up his racket. Though the store was drearier and more poorly stocked than any they had come across, just as they were getting ready to leave, Chimney found a long unopened packing crate hidden under the counter. “What we got here?” he said.

The man quit bawling immediately. “You don’t want to mess with that,” he said, sucking in his snot and wiping at his eyes. “That’s a special order for Mr. Haskins.”

“What’s so special about it?” Chimney said, as he started to pry the box open.

“Mr. Haskins is not a man you want to—”

“I’ll be damned,” Chimney said. Inside the crate, wrapped in oiled paper, lay a new Lee-Enfield and two wooden boxes of cartridges. He tore the paper off and picked the rifle up, aimed it at the storekeeper’s head.

“You take that gun,” the man said, swallowing hard, “Mr. Haskins is going to make me pay for it. It came clear from England. Please, boys, I’m just barely makin’ ends meet now.”

“Well, that’s between you and this Mister feller you keep going on about,” Chimney said, as he turned and walked out the door, loaded down with groceries and the Enfield and one of the shell boxes, the heels of his new cowboy boots clicking loudly on the scarred wooden floor, the few dollars he’d taken from the register sticking out of his front pocket. “Come on, Cob, let’s go. And don’t forget that other sack. I got some peaches in there for you and Cane.”

Cob looked at the clerk and shrugged his shoulders and put his pistol back in his holster. Then he picked up the gunnysack and started out, the cans clanging against each other. The man stared after him grimly, his spectacles a little crooked on his long, narrow face, thinking there was more food in those two pokes than his wife and seven children sometimes got to eat in a month. Again this morning, breakfast had been a corn cake so thin you could have read the fine print on one of Mr. Haskins’s loan agreements through it. He realized suddenly that he had finally arrived at his own personal crossroads, just as his grandpa had said would happen someday if he lived long enough, and that what he did in the next few seconds mattered more than anything else he’d ever done in his life. For once, his fate was in his own hands and not somebody else’s, and though his hands were trembling with fear, he reached under the counter.

At the door, Cob stopped and said, “Well, been nice talkin’ to you about the rain and all.” Because the man seemed to be in such a bad mood over Chimney taking the gun, he didn’t really expect a response, but he turned and looked back at the clerk anyway, just in time to see him bringing a Winchester repeater to his shoulder. Dropping the sack, Cob ran for his horse. Bullets started flying through the open doorway and crashing through the windows, the sounds of rifle blasts and glass shattering echoing down the street. He was throwing his leg over the saddle when he got hit. As Cane emptied his pistol into the front of the store, Chimney grabbed the reins of Cob’s horse and led him out of town at a gallop. Within two hours, after poring over the blood drops in the dirt and the wanted poster the sheriff passed around, a group of citizens, including the store clerk, gathered together a few supplies and horses and headed out of town to make their fortunes.