Heartland Calamitous

Western

NO GOOD WESTERN BEGINS WITH INDIANA. Never mind how American it is: me, the Eldorado, and me having stolen the Eldorado from a One Stop in Fort Wayne.

I am trying to escape the heartland.

I want to be the type of man who would shoot another man for his wants. But I could never shoot another man. It’s why I waited for an empty vehicle left running. Why it was done under the cover of dark.

We are on the road inside America when we hit a buck head-on in Cairo, Illinois. I’m beside its carcass, unable to leave it, though I’m on the lam. I mistake a Bronco for a police interceptor. The man in the Bronco offers me a knife. He says I have earned the buck’s head. I saw through the bone with my eyes shut.

Where do you go from here if this is as far as you can get?

The man in the Bronco says, Is it just you?

No, there is a baby too. It is pressed against the cracked windshield of the Eldorado. I didn’t check on it after the collision. I went to the buck and waited.

I should have run.

I thought about running when I first discovered the baby in the backseat while searching for things I could sell for gas. This was before Cairo, before Illinois. I told the baby, Coochie coo. I sold a stag’s skull for half a tank. I started the car.

I said, Your pa must be some pa.

My father was a drover, the baby said.

I admitted I didn’t know where we were going, but we sure were.

The baby said, Going is all we’re after anyhow.

The baby isn’t moving. It’s gone. Still, the man in the Bronco is trying to resuscitate it.

We’re all trying to figure out what’s alive, what’s not, and ourselves, I think.

The man in the Bronco weeps, the baby hanging from his fist like a kill.

I’m under the confluence of the rivers. I’m in the backseat of the Eldorado. The man in the Bronco is wearing expensive cowboy boots, looking at me like he needs a revelation.

I say, What’s the point of spurs in a landscape such as this?

Oh god. Is that all?

No. There is the road.

Sister

MY SISTER WAS BORN A SHEEP. No. That’s not right. My sister was born the same as me except for the thick, black wool. I never saw her skin and neither did anyone else. That’s a tough way to be alive in the heartland.

Our parents spent her childhood trying to figure out why she was the way she was. Some folks insisted it was a sign god wasn’t being loved outwardly enough.

I don’t think our parents didn’t love her. They were attentive, caring, and there. They were concerned, is all. That girl— they often said. I never once heard them finish that sentence.

When she turned eighteen, she moved to the city. She was working inside a burlesque club where once every month she stood on stage and sheared herself nude. It was art. I read about it in the papers. I showed our parents. They put me on the bus the next morning.

I snuck into the dressing room. I had a wooden cross in my pocket. She was in front of the mirror, blankets wrapped tight around her head and shoulders. No matter how I angled myself, I still couldn’t see her skin.

I set the wooden cross on the floor. For your neck, I said.

I’m cold sometimes, she said.

I’m here a little while if you want to talk.

I go on in ten minutes.

That was it. I never saw my sister again.

The club was shuttered, then reopened as a bistro. Everything we think won’t change eventually becomes a bistro. I understood. We move on. It’s America. But I don’t think my sister saw it like that. I think she felt there was nowhere else for her. I think she never once considered coming home.

She shot herself three times and that should be the end of this story. But I can’t stop thinking about that number. I know the first bullet meant she wanted to die. I know the third is the one that killed her. But what about the bullet in the middle? What comes between wanting and receiving? What does it mean?

Killing Square

IT’S THE MANIPULATIONS THAT END YOU. I was told this by Sam Shaw after he learned he’d been promoted to the inside. We were on the outside of the outside in the designated smoking area. Sam Shaw said, What’s suffering worth? He picked off the shards of animal blood that had frozen to his overalls.

I shook like I was caught in electric wires. The cigarette butt hissed when I let it drop into a snowdrift. I could hardly feel myself living, felt like I was alive as a series of smoke breaks.

Sam Shaw said, Nothing’s as dead-end as it seems.

Easy for you to think, I said. You’re on the inside now.

I warmed my hands with the heat of the conveyor’s gear motor, clenched and unclenched until my circulation was good enough that I could reach for my cutter and hand it off to Sam Shaw without either of us losing a precious something. Sam Shaw cut into a plastic clamshell that contained a dress shirt and tie combo. He pulled the tie too tight. I told him he couldn’t breathe. He called himself a real professional. I lined up the next group of animals.

You’re not dressed for this no more, I said.

Sam Shaw looked at me and then the cutter. Take it easy on me, he said, taking an animal by its pit, cutting it with no regard for the stainlessness of the shirt.

MY DISCOMFORT was visible. I was almost thirty and gutless, sitting across from my mother in the kitchen in the home I’d grown up in. I’d just started my second decade of winters shoveling the driveway. I was tired from pulling doubles on account of Sam Shaw’s promotion, chain-smoking to make up for the lack of sleep.

I smell it all over you, my mother said.

I’m in fine shape, I said.

We didn’t raise no smoker. No butcher either.

It’s temporary.

Your father quit.

My father had smoked Parliaments until the second heart attack. This was last September. I’d asked him what it felt like and he gave me his lighter. I’d told him I guess I’m next. No. It’ll be me again, he said. He was right.

I assumed it was snow sliding off the roof when his body slumped onto the floor in the living room. I was outside checking when my mother started screaming. The ambulance pulled up. The medics asked whose blood was on my shirt.

Animals’, I said.

They strapped my father to the gurney.

He’s dead, my mother said.

I am? my father said.

We don’t think so, the medics said. Not yet.

I sat with my mother in the waiting room in front of the LCD display that lists everyone in surgery like flights incoming, outgoing, and delayed. My mother began to list all the wrong things we’d eaten. I got up to get coffee. The coffee machine was next to the bathrooms. A man in a hospital gown asked how long I had left. If it’s life threatening, he said, the nurses let you drink for free.

I’D BEEN at the killing square since college. My folks thought I’d graduated. I only had the debt. The killing square was the only place hiring for higher than the minimum. I’d passed a piss test, proved no aversion to blood.

The