Gita M. Smith

THE TRACTOR THIEF’S JACKET

This place will swallow you up. One-syllable words describe it: plain, dull, gray, and dry. Add ‘harsh’ in winter. One of the ice ages wore everything here down to a nub. If the emptiness doesn't hollow you out, the lonesomeness will. As far as you can see in every direction, the only thing taller than a man is a grain elevator. All the rest is flat, like something bit down on the earth, sucked all the juice out and left the skin.
I killed a man the other day. He tried to steal my tractor. I shot a hole in his neck and let him bleed out next to the John Deere. I'm wearing his jacket inside out, right now, and his gloves. Something of the man lingers in his clothes -- a desperate courage, maybe. By March, his bones will be bleached; by August they'll be reduced to their components. Calcium and phosphorous are good for wheat.

Under the laws of the prairie, he had it coming. Prairie law spells it out clearly. The worse your surroundings, the meaner you are allowed to get. The meaner you get, the greater the likelihood you'll overreact in elemental ways. Scorpions will sting each other over nothing. Sparrow hawks that've gone a week without field mouse flesh will try to fly away with a farm cat twice their size. A man tries to steal your thresher and ends up deader than a hammer.
Come see our laws in action for yourself.

The town, now, it has a thin veneer of civility. It had been a remote outpost until a railroad spur came to it in the ‘50s to pick up cattle hides and grains, back when America was selling wheat to the Russkies, and every stalk counted.
Main Street is a dirty thread running east-west. Ten stores, five on each side, face each other like chess pawns. The buildings are rough field stone with painted wooden facades, store names stenciled on them in the same Ponderosa style letters you’d see in a western movie. There are no traffic lights. Those cost money.
A dentist set up shop here, a while back. If every man, woman and child visited him once a year for cleanings and a filling, he’d have no more than 100 appointments. The man didn’t move here to earn a living. I’ve been pondering that for a while.
If you want a doctor, undertaker, shoe store, bicycle repair, barber or hand job, you got to drive 90 miles to Barstow on the Kansas–Oklahoma line. If you want justice, well good luck with that. You could drive to the courthouse in Wichita, but what they dispense over there is neither just nor adequate. That court is designed to put men into the new, ‘outsourced’ prisons that the governor ordered built by his brother-in-law’s construction company with kickbacks a-plenty for all the county commissioners and grain inspectors in this great state.
We have a café, Tessa’s, for coffee and pie, and a roughneck bar, The Combine, for out-of-town cowboys and grain estimators. Now and then, an insurance adjuster wanders through because someone’s barn blew down or a prize bull got struck by lightning.
Someone musta made a deal with someone, at some point, to keep whores out of this town. Even though there’s call for them on Friday nights, we have to send the drunks down the road to Barstow and plenty of them never come back alive. It’s our way of thinning the herd: natural selection.
If a man is stupid enough to drive drunk at night with a wallet full of payday, there’s all kinds of folks who’ll help him run off the road. One time, this kid from Montana came through, brand new souped-up Dodge, horny enough for a whole city. He threw back three or four whiskeys at The Combine, and when he mentioned his pecker was a ticking time-bomb, an accommodating few guys slid off their barstools and offered to show him the way to titty city.
“Naw, you ain’t drivin,” they said, shouldering him to the curb. “Ride with us and we’ll bring you back.” He slid his happy butt into their back seat and was never seen again.
After a while, the sheriff impounded the car, and a while after that was seen driving it. Those off-duty deputies who took the young man to get laid, they get to drive it, too.

What does a truly innocent man look like? I don’t believe I’ve ever met one. I’ve only known men by their shades of criminality. Some people are outright thieves and murderers who will walk up to you and say, “I’m going to kill you,” as rote as a catechism. Some are criminals-in-waiting: They have larcenous hearts but have not yet acted. The greed is there, simmering and dormant. Others wear the garments of righteousness while wielding their small amount of power like a club: the border crossing guards, the priests, the jailers. They are not what they seem until – until – you learn to see beyond the brass button and the cross. Out here, people expect very little love from their neighbors. and they are never disappointed.

I have been watching the dentist. “Stent Wiley, D.D.S.” says the sign above his window. He is a well-spoken man, a bachelor with a slight stoop and blunt features. His flesh is loose on his frame in a way that reminds me of curds or clabbered milk. He attends the Episcopal Church in Barstow. He plays pinochle with the sheriff. He keeps his overhead low by foregoing a receptionist and taking phone calls himself. His waiting room looks out on a trailer park where the Indians live.
The good doctor locks up on many afternoons at 4:15, and carries a Polaroid camera down a rocky path, through Joe Pye-weed and sage, to the center of the trailer park. There he disappears, or so he thinks.
I have seen the look of resignation on the sad, cinnamon-colored face of an 11-year-old girl whose father pushes her inside the trailer where the dentist waits. She is on the upper age range of the dentist’s tastes. There are 9-year-old girls, as well, with bruises on their forearms where they resisted, where they struggled. The dentist pays these fathers well, in whiskey and in cash. Sometimes he carries a small black satchel with him to these airless trailers, these tin cans with dirty mattresses. I hear whispers that he anesthetizes the boys whose fathers offer them up to the rich, white D.D.S., and that he throws grim birthday parties for the Indian children and takes their pictures eating cake.

I have nothing else to do today, so I decide to go to the dentist. I arrive, walking casually, just at closing time. I am wearing the tractor thief’s jacket with its deep pockets and his gloves. I carry a simple tool: heavy-duty metal snips that cut through barbed wire. Every rancher carries a pair. In the pocket of the tractor thief’s jacket is a folding knife, a skinning knife, sharp enough to shave an eyelash. I pass through the empty waiting room and into the treatment area where Stent Wiley is bent over a sink, splashing water on his face. He stinks of medicinal soap and Listerine. I stand behind him for a moment admiring his dedication to hygiene. How do those little Indian children feel, in later years, when they smell Listerine, I wonder. If they smell it on a stranger, do they experience fear? Terror? A sickening helplessness? Will they always, for the rest of their lives?

I slip one hand inside the jacket for my knife and bring around the cutters with the other. My knife opens with a quiet snick. Oblivious, the dentist swishes the mouthwash around, hands braced on the sides of the sink, head down. Tick tock, I think. Enough foreplay.

My first slice comes from behind to his carotid artery, a deep curving slash. I take one giant step back to see which way his weight will shift. He goes straight down on his knees, gargling a little. It’s not an unpleasant sound.
My second slice carves across his forehead, just above his eyebrows, prodigious bleeders for some reason. In an instant his own warm blood-salt stings his eyes.
I step back again, to see where he will end up. Some people are crawlers. They haul themselves across the floor as far as they can go, pumping blood in spurts and streams all the while, until they are dry and their hearts stop. Stent Wiley manages to travel four feet before falling flat on his face.

I am quick as a bunny with the metal snips. This must be done while he is still alive.
“Stent,” I say, “would you like to hear a nursery rhyme?”
I pick up his left hand.
“I’ll sing it for you,” I say.
Taking hold of each finger in turn, applying the cutters to the second joint in time with the tune, I sing, “ONE little TWO little THREE little Indians. FOUR little FIVE little...”
I don’t think he heard me reach TEN. It doesn’t matter. I leave him there, the tractor thief’s jacket thrown over him. But I keep the gloves.

© Gita M. Smith 2012

Author’s Note to readers: This piece was put together from a few different ideas as my contribution to the short story reading circle at HoW3, the third annual gathering of internet writing friends. It will appear in the HoW3 collection book designed by Sandra Davies. Immense gratitude to all who attended HoW3 for their encouragement.

Gita Smith is a career journalist, whose work has appeared on The Sphere, Fictionaut, Not From Here Are You (The NOT), and her reporting on the South appears at LiketheDew.com, a news site.

Sandra Davies

‘From battle and murder, and from sudden death’

   ‘YOU as good as murdered him, so don’t even think about coming to his funeral. We don’t want you there.’
   Des.
   Unaccustomed mid-morning coffee still hot on his breath, as was tobacco from a half-smoked cigarette, thrown down and swivel-killed under his toe as I emerged.
   The eldest of my four step-sons, newly succeeded, due to his father’s death, to the ownership of Burdock’s Farm. Entitled and impatient to occupy the family farmhouse. Waiting only for me to remove myself and my personal belongings, his failure to immediately expel me, in the shocked small hours of Sunday, still rankling: others, less vindictive, had overruled him.
   Now, contrary, he had parked his Land Rover so as to prevent my final leave-taking until he spoke his piece. Thinking, from my silence, that I’d not understood he repeated ‘We don’t want you there.’
   The sourness of his scowl had telegraphed hostility but his ultimatum had been delivered with unprecedented viciousness. It had taken more than a moment for me to recover the power of speech. Then, holding rigid the muscles in my jaw and throat so as to disguise any tremor, lifting my chin, fully meeting his barely-shamed eyes, I retaliated with precisely-enunciated scorn.
   ‘You are being unnecessarily melodramatic which does no credit to your father. Bearing in mind that I have spent the past thirty years as his wife, have born two, have brought up four, perhaps five of his sons (I don’t know how your brother feels about that) and in all that time he uttered not a single complaint about my behaviour, you may be sure that under no circumstances whatsoever will you prevent me both organising and attending his funeral.’
   I made no claim to having mothered him. Never had done since he, thirteen years old when I married Mike, had declared himself not to need it.
   And at the time I was but seventeen myself.
   Those extra four years, plus, thank god, a talent for quick-minded verbal self-defence (honed in dealing with my elder brothers) enabled me to manage him far more effectively than ever he learnt to deal with me. Even so it had been another dozen years before we reached any sort of equilibrium, during which time he moved from a confused hatred which oozed, pustulent, from his unadmitted (because thought ‘unmanly’) mourning for his first step-mother, to resentment at my too-speedy (and in his eyes unsuitable) substitution. Resentment had been shortly after intertwined with discomfort at his dawning perception of his father’s lust, and only superseded by a rampant need to satisfy his own, culminating in an attempted rape (which I never did inform his father of). Thereafter, guilt-spattered, threadbare tolerance ensued.
   And even now – especially now, despite him having reached his early forties – I had to maintain ascendancy because, in a complex confusion of anger and revulsion, Des still found it impossible to be dispassionate towards me. His nature contained too little in the way of moral certainty, a lack uncompensated for by his inheritance of better-than-average Burdock good looks and a deceptively easy-going smile.
   One he’d never used on me.
   Grief further aged him – he anyway looked older than I nowadays – and he barely listened as I said ‘We cannot even begin until after the post mortem. And then I shall tell you what arrangements have been made.’
   ‘No. You’ve forfeited the right. He was our father, and we will organise the funeral. You have no choice. We don’t want you there, you won’t come, it’s as simple as that.’
   I smiled.
   With apparent confidence and with pity. It cost me, and was wavering brittle, but I smiled.
   For all his bullying and his bluster Des was not a patch on his father. Mike was – had been – no saint, had a devil of a temper, was inclined to arrogance, was impatient, stubborn and could be unthinkingly cruel in some of the things he said, but he had many virtues too. Certainly he would have been incapable of the underhand disloyalty, would have roundly condemned anyone who displayed the moral weakness that I’d long known Des possessed. Even so, I was glad I had full-size ammunition with which to shoot him down.
   ‘No, Des, you have a choice, one that’s even simpler than you realise. Either you accept my right to organise Mike’s funeral and to be there to follow Mike’s coffin, in first place, as his wife. As his widow. Or I tell Alice about Natalie Brown.’
   I made sure to watch his face to see the twitch of shock before he swung guilt-blistered shutters into place.
   ‘Tell Alice …? I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know a Natalie.’
   ‘You’ve forgotten her already? When you were there on Friday afternoon? You’ve forgotten that she has a five year-old the spitting image of your Eddie? That she had an abortion, at your request, with your signature countersigning the permission form, at a clinic in Hertford a year ago? Don’t give me ‘don’t know’ Des, you may be a two-timing shit, but you’re not a stupid two-timing shit.’
   Unable to continue facing me he turned, walked away, saying ‘It’s grief, or guilt, gone to your head, anyone can see that …’
   ‘Then you’ll not mind if I go round and tell Alice? See if she thinks I’m deluded with grief …’
   Finally my words penetrated his hear-no-evil rant. He turned, grabbed my arm and brought his face close to mine. ‘You say anything of that, of those lies to Alice and you’ll be sorry!’
   Disliking having to stoop to this level of attack, I nevertheless demolished his threat. ‘But you’ll be sorrier won’t you? Because you need Alice’s money to …’
   ‘Shut the fuck up! How the fuck did you get hold of this stuff?’
   ‘Never mind how. Just accept that I did. Just accept that for something as important as this I am prepared to expose your dirty behaviour just as readily as tales were told about me. I’d prefer not to, but you do need to believe that I will if necessary.’
   And without waiting for him to reply I turned and walked away. Away from thirty years of family memories, from a centuries-old farmhouse, not especially beautiful except in the patina of its familiarity, but a place I’d been fulfilled and happy in. My destination now, temporary but more than welcome, a utilitarian red-brick and slate-roofed agricultural tied cottage, home of my eldest son, three villages away.
   This battle, unanticipated though it had been, I’d won.
   The next I would lose.
   Not necessarily on my arrival but before too long my son, as shocked and aching at his father’s death as Des, would question me.
   And he would very quickly force me to admit that it was witnessing the fleeting more-than-kiss between myself and the man with whom, for the past two years, I’d been having an affair that had caused the heart attack that killed his father.

© Sandra Davies 2012

More writer than printmaker these days, but still needing, and responding to, those wide horizons while juggling three novels. The blog is sandra-linesofcommunication.blogspot.co.uk