Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

“Look here.” Jimmy pulled Rusty away from his work and stood up to Jess cept he was so small standin in Jess’s big shadow that he was silly lookin. “We paid you, mister. We ain’t gonna build no fence.”

Jess just laughed that same real hearty laugh, mainly at that “mister” stuff I spect cause it come right out of the blue.

Bout then was when she come out of the shack. The witch did. She was holdin Mary Hannah’s hand and Mary Hannah was as pretty as could be with powder and lipstick and you could see how she wasn’t no little girl no more.

“Now don’t you be scared,” was what the witch whispered to Mary Hannah. “There ain’t one thing to be scared of.”

Jess looked Mary Hannah over with a big grin then he says to Jimmy and Rusty, “Now you remember what I said bout your daddies.” And then he took hold of Mary Hannah’s hand and took her up to the big house.

I sat down in the dust, in the sun, right tween them two postholes, listenin to the radio and lookin at the worms squirmin in the black-red mud and tryin to recollect how things went when I’d brung Jimmy’s notes to the witch.

All of a sudden I smelled sulphur.

Soon enough the witch got Jimmy and Rusty busy with a shovel and them old posts and that old rusty wire. Their hands got cut up somethin awful cause they didn’t have no gloves, and she just shook her head at Rusty when he begged for somethin to drink. She said, “You boys wanted to make men, didn’t you?”

Like the Doctor in the picture. That’s what I got to thinkin. He said he wanted to make a man. But that ain’t what he ended up makin. He ended up makin a monster. A giant that stoled storybooks from nice little fellas like Peter. But Peter thought that giant was nice and Ygor thought he was nice too. And Mary Hannah always said how sad he was and how he never did nothin bad that those other folks didn’t make him do cause he was really just gentle as could be. And I watched Jimmy and Rusty and I thought Jess was pretty nice and I recollect diggin them two holes by the porch after the witch took me inside the shack. And then I took off my gloves and looked at the scabs on my palms and recollect how she told me to hold that last note to Jimmy real careful so I wouldn’t get no blood on it.

Rusty finished makin his barbed-wire man first. The witch pushed him up against it and then pushed him away and she started rubbin on the barbed-wire man with her red dress all wrinklin up round her like before. And then Jimmy finished and she did the same thing to his barbed-wire man and Rusty started cryin then. But I think it was just cause he was scared cause he couldn’t have knowed what was gonna happen to him cause of that man.

And then the radio went quiet and Jess come out of the house with one arm round Mary Hannah and the other round the RCA. He walked right over to Jimmy and handed him the radio, sayin, “I was just spoofin you bout keepin it, boy. We sure wouldn’t want you to get into trouble with your folks.”

The witch laughed at that and then Jess give Rusty the keys to his daddy’s Ford and Rusty stopped bawlin so I knowed for sure he didn’t really understand.

“Skedaddle, now,” the witch said and Rusty and Jimmy did just that real quick, runnin down the creek bed over the hot fryin pan rocks, runnin like they was so happy to be free and didn’t have a care in the world like you can still see them boys runnin today.

Then Mary Hannah come over and took my hand, and she had little scratches on her hand. And the witch went round them postholes and slid her little hand into Jess’s big one. I looked up at him and I was all mixed up cause I didn’t know if he was the soldierman with the rubber arm who come to save me or the Monster or the giant who stoled my storybook or maybe all three, like Ygor was Dracula and the Monster was the Mummy. But I looked at his eyes and I looked at them two big holes like sores in the ground that was dug by me when I made my barbed-wire man and I knowed that I was never gonna grow up to be a man cause Jess had done that for me and I was grateful cause I bet it was somethin I never coulda done by myself anyhow.

And Mary Hannah had a hold of my hand. She said, “C’mon, Little Pete, I’ll take you home.” And she picked up the witch’s shovel and the poke of lipstick and powder and I got the spool of barbed wire. Off we went tween Jimmy and Rusty’s barbed-wire men and that rusted wire was startin to sigh and then we was climbin through what was left of that busted-down fence and it was singin in the hot breeze.

And the witch waved goodbye and said, “Thank you for my man, Little Pete.”

And I looked one last time at Jess who looked mighty happy and big and strong as anybody could ever want to be and it was like lookin into a mirror and seein somethin that was never gonna be.

And I smiled at the witch and said “Thank you” right back.

(For Alan M. Clark)

THE PACK

ONE

The deputy’s name was Vin Miller, and the waitress’s name was Vera Marlowe. Truth be told, Vin didn’t much like Vera, but Vin wasn’t one to let like get in the way of need.

Vera did have her faults, though. She was a little on the plump side, and she kept the jukebox in the diner jumpin’ with Dion and Fabian and Bobby Rydell and even Elvis, now that the hillbilly cat was out of the army and had a new set of tunes to peddle. The deputy was a Marty Robbins/Johnny Horton/Jim Reeves kind of guy, so that teenybopper stuff didn’t sit well with him. But neither did the diner’s menu, a wide array of overcooked meat dishes which were invariably served with either undercooked fries or lumpy mashed potatoes lathered with greasy gravy.

Vin figured that Vera had a real taste for that gravy, judging by the swell of her Playtex girdle. Still, Vera had a pretty nice ass if you stacked it up against the local competition. There were far too many rawboned Okie asses around these parts for the deputy’s taste — flat dust-bowl behinds that had cannonballed into the local gene pool thirty years back without hardly making a splash.

Personally, Vin preferred something he could hold on to, and Vera had plenty of that. Plus, she took real care with her hair and make-up. Why, if Vin squinted just right, the waitress looked kind of like a meatier Carroll Baker, and Vin thought a whole hell of a lot of Carroll Baker. But Vera wouldn’t go out with him even though he’d been piling on the tips since the sheriff had first pinned a star on his chest three months before.

Three months on the graveyard shift in a one stoplight town. For all the headway he’d made, the deputy might as well have arrived yesterday.

Just like Elvis, Vin was a veteran. He’d come to California from Germany, where a stint as an army private had ended in an honorable discharge, just barely, and only because all military defense attorneys weren’t the chuckleheads you’d imagine. But that was in the past, and Vera was part of the future. Vin knew that in a podunk town like this one he had to take it where he could find it. And if he couldn’t even make it with the queen of the local diner, he was going to have one hell of a time getting to the undertaker’s daughter, or the straight-razor tottin’ lady barber, or the banker’s wife. All three were on the deputy’s short list.

So when Vera brought the prisoner’s meal over to the jail herself — instead of sending the Mexican clean-up boy, as was the usual case — Vin had an inkling that things might be taking a turn for the better. And when she moved close to Vin — so close that he could smell that sweet gravy on her breath — he had a sudden premonition that he’d be hearing a whole hell of a lot of Elvis Presley in the very near future.

Vera’s eyes sparkled in a way that the diner’s silverware never dared. “Did you really catch him all by yourself?”