John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

“That was a week ago.”

“So you slept.”

“Can I come in?”

There was this Indian in their house, and the four of us messed around while a pit bull watched from a cage. Next thing, the Indian was leading Sheila and her kids away. “I’ll never see those kids again,” Ray wept.

I wondered if I’d missed something. “Is there more?”

“You want to be my bitch?”

“What do you mean?”

He reached over, stuffed my balls between my legs, and said, “My bitch.” We drove across to Cherokee and played slots until we had cash to start cooking again. He had me wear Sheila’s panties when I went out for Sudafed. Law makes you buy just a little at each store, but it adds up. So does the money, and we were broke when AT&T offered ten thousand dollars to let them put a tower on Ray’s land. They disguised it like a pine and birds nested in it like it was any other tree. Ray would come upstairs with these water bottles full of lithium and xylene and lye and say, Go for a bike ride. In my bottle cages it all sloshed around and mixed up while I climbed to Davenport Gap. Up there one day, I entered a cloud that hit me with a spray of mist and then I was opening a bottle, offering my mix to the cloud. Just then, a car sped by. I chased it down the slope and caught it, flipped it off, sped home to Ray.

“Where’s the other bottle?” he said.

I seized up: I’d left it at the gap.

“You drink it?”

“Can you drink it?”

“Well, you’ll die.”

At first I believed I had. “Guess that’s your punishment,” he said.

“Don’t you care if I die?”

“There’s more of you where you came from.”

That kind of emptied me out. “Just kidding,” he said after a while.

“So you think there’s more of me.”

“Well, just fetch that bottle.”

Folks would come at all hours. There was a deputy who bought five hundred at a time and we would listen to his cop radio. One day a dude filed a complaint that his wife had pissed in his mug of coffee. “Call and say we’ll report to the scene,” said Ray.

We piled in, Ray and the cop in front, me behind the grid. The siren screamed as we sped across town. At the man’s house Ray told me, “Stay.” I tried to get out anyhow but I was locked up. Whole hours passed before they came out, chuckling.

“What happened?” I said when they were in the car.

“Filed a report,” said the cop, and then a look passed between him and Ray.

“Did he think you were both cops?” I asked as we drove off.

“Maybe you should beat him with your stick.”

“Replaced our sticks with Tasers.”

“Tase him, then.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Won’t fit through the bars.”

“I’ll pull over.”

We veered off onto a dirt path and then Ray got out. “Stand up,” he barked at me. A wild boar was watching us from the woods. It had come to protect me, but Ray would tase it too. Stay back, I begged it in my head, and Ray lifted the Taser and at the last moment, as I shook, he said, “Just kidding.”

Things got better. We drove to a cockfight and busted it up, then went to another and won some cash. There was a guy the cop told us was Dolly Parton’s brother. He smoked with us and Ray said, “Where’s your big tits,” and when he got mad Ray pulled the Taser out and tased him. We took off. The cop got to talking about Dolly and her songs. He said she’d written more songs than anyone in history, thousands upon thousands of them. “I admire that,” he said. “Me, I’ve written ten, maybe twelve songs.”

I said, “I bet she’d be having fun if she was here with us.”

I got scared they’d tase me again, but they laughed and the cop started singing. That was around when she got in and rode along with us for a bit. She’d done this deal with the governor called Imagination Library, where poor kids get free books. It was on some billboards we were passing, and Ray’s kids had read some of those books. Why she was in the car, she’d found out Ray’d stole them from her. I thought to warn him but I looked up and the next light was for her road, Dolly Parton Parkway. The cop thought his own fingers were the ones that hit the signal, and I froze and next thing we’re at Dale’s, but if I tell you we watched Dale screw his girl and took his cash and pistol-whipped him, you won’t see how I sat frozen while that bitch stared through me, steering us toward hell. She wanted to show me what happens in hell when you give AIDS to your wife. She had it from her husband, and that’s what her songs were about. She wouldn’t kill us just yet cause it would all be there waiting, come time.

I woke up alone with a note by the bed that said, “Call your mom.” I drove to my ma’s and let myself in to find her at her table, writing. “Knock knock,” I said.

“Hi,” she told me without looking up.

“You copying a recipe?”

“Where’s Lisa?”

“Is it your brownies?”

“Who’s Ray?”

“He’s my blood brother.”

I could see she wasn’t meaning to bake brownies. There were some medical instruments lying around — a blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope, a roll of gauze — along with several pill bottles, like she was intending to put Ray out of business.

“Lisa called here not fifteen minutes ago.”

“So then you know where she is already.”

“She told me she was at Krystal.”

I can’t explain. It was like all women were inside her right then, cussing at me for not wanting them hard enough. I got to feeling she was a cop. I said, “If you’re so naïve, why’d you have that heart attack?” I knew I just needed a hit, so I headed back to Ray’s, but no one was home.

For the first time I went down to the basement and turned the knob. There he was in a chair, wearing a shirt and nothing else, waiting.

It took me a second to react. I jumped and hit my head on the low ceiling.

“Remember when you told me you’d break my arm?” he said.

I shook my head, stammering sorry .

“How would you do it?”

“I know you don’t want me down here.”

“Tell you what, go buy some whiskey. Here’s twenty bucks.”

I stumbled over myself running back upstairs. I knew he’d call his buddies, which was too much to bear. I sped fast through the holler. I ran over a dog and decided it belonged to a boy who told his dad my license plate, so now I’d have to go back the long way while Ray screwed the whole state.

The clerk was a lady I hadn’t seen before, with icy eyes the color of blue Kool-Aid. “Back for more?” she said.

“Huh?”

“Run out?”

She was nodding at me, her curls bobbing along with her nods. “Of what?”

“George Dickel?” she said, and I thought, maybe I’ve got a twin, maybe Ray’s doing him right now and drinking his Dickel.

“I’m an only child.”

“I’m the youngest of ten.”

As she stared through me, I felt more fear than any soldier at war, but she rang me up and let me go. On the way home, the long way, I passed the black-toothed billboard girl and tried to count my teeth with my tongue but I lost count. I recalled finding Lisa on the phone with her friend, giggling about me. She thought Ray was part of her plan but the joke was on her, because I was in love, and I decided then to help Ray get his kids back.

I carried the bottle in and presented it. “Look,” Ray said, gesturing out the window behind me.

I turned and saw the pine woods across the road. “You mad about the basement?”

He shook his head. “While you were gone,” he said, “I realized I hate you.”

I figured Ray was joking, so I laughed.

“That’s what a pussy you are. I say I hate you, and you laugh.”