PART ONE
SEEDS BEFORE THE TEMPEST
IN MILES’S WORLD there was no God. That belief had been destroyed by the vigilance of the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army. Sometimes it was the gunfire traveling football fields of distance across rice paddy crops or exploding from the jungle brush that lined the rutted roads of Da Nang. Gunfire that ripped a grunt’s brain from his skull as he swept the roads for land mines leading in and out of Hill 37 or Hill 65. A five-mile trek where explosive devices were constructed of scrap wood or bamboo, tied together with rope or vine. Buried beneath the earth with an oxidized nail touching a blasting cap that, when weighted down by the pressing of a marine’s boot, the trespass of a vehicle, or a tank’s heft, metal and human would become one and the same, an explosion that dispersed body parts into unrecognizable shapes.
But then, there was that other enemy. A host of rogue soldiers that had once trespassed the same territories as Miles. Breathed the same air. Enjoyed the same freedoms. They were the one memory he tried to keep buried, some days with booze, other days with iron. On days away from the 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. shift, he cruised the county back roads when his irritation level redlined, when it inflamed the memories of a war that to this day still offered more questions than answers.
Lance Corporal Miles Knox had been a combat engineer in the US Marine Corps. Schooled in demolition. Taught how to use TNT and C-4, he blew up bridges traveled by the NVA, destroyed their ammo caches and food supplies, and torched the villages where they were stored and hid.
Using C-4 he’d mold the gray puttylike explosive, set a blasting cap, pack the plastic explosive on the nose of an unexploded ordnance, cut a length of detonating cord based on how far he could run, and yell, “Fire in the hole.” And then hope to hell he didn’t get disintegrated into human dust before he got away.
Miles left for Vietnam on December 18, 1967. His tour of duty was twenty-four months. Three Christmases and three New Years in Da Nang. His time ended on January 3, 1970, but the images and the voices of war still haunted Miles’s waking and sleeping hours thirty-four years later, leaving no good for this man who still conversed with the dead.
That was what Miles was doing as the voice of Childers questioned him with, “Gonna make him pay up, Turtle?”
Miles felt the shadow of Childers grace him as he grumbled, “With interest.”
Standing outside of the sheet-metal walls of the dirt plant—a night-shift factory job he’d worked since the early eighties, landed after the tobacco plant down the street where he’d worked for ten years folded—he watched strangers appear from the shadows on Thirteenth Street like cockroaches. Staggering and stumbling over the pavement at 2:00 a.m., tilting a paper sack with lights honing their paths, the soles of their shoes dragging and scraping the pavement. Others pushed corroded shopping carts loaded with dented plastic bottles, their hole-worn boots, and ragged blankets they used to live off the streets. They appeared like nocturnal animals, only to disappear back into the stagnation of night.
The smell of sewage swelled up from the steam of manhole covers. Reminded Miles of how the dead smelled in the Da Nang heat. The rot and spoilage from decomposition. Their lost eyes sunken into yellow skin. Flies zeroing in on a decomposed landing strip to dump their spores. Porous clothing split by the bark of an M16, mortar round, or grenade. Some men took souvenirs: ears, fingers, or scalps. Others posed with the dead. Lined them up like cutout paper dolls, saying “Cheese” or singing “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E” and snapping pictures. Not Miles. He dealt with the war day by day. Word by word. Cracking movie lines from his favorite up-and-coming actor at the time, Clint Eastwood. When in a firefight, Miles always quoted, You shoot to kill, you better hit the heart.
But Miles knew that for those soldiers who severed ears, digits, and scalps, who snapped pictures—that was how some men dealt with the repercussions of war. They found taking from the decomposed or posing with the breathless to be, in some form, humorous. Not Miles. Other than taking gear, he felt the dead’s body parts should be left intact; why stoop to the level of the inhumane, the cannibalistic, let the dead be dead. At peace.
Truck lights bounced down the city street next to the factory. A barnacled Ford Ranger with a goose-sounding suspension turned into the blacktopped area before Miles. The engine killed. A hulking shape weighted down the driver’s side, tilted his head back. Looked to be sucking down a bottle of water. Through the rolled-down window Miles heard the mash of plastic. Thump to the floorboard. The door opened. It was who Miles’d been waiting on. His coworker Kimball. He owed Miles six hundred dollars’ worth of steroids. He was nearing his next ten-week cycle. Needed his juice. His roids. Kimball had faltered on repaying Miles with the vials of Deca and testosterone. Kept telling Miles over and over, “Don’t got it tonight, get you tomorrow, bro.”
Tomorrow had turned into two weeks, and two weeks was becoming a blur. And he wasn’t nobody’s bro.
Miles was fifty-seven, fighting age. Needed his stack. Trying to keep his frame as strong and muscular as possible.
Each man worked the same job, renting their wares for coin every week. Miles wondered why one working man would fuck over another. Knowing the rigors that each encompassed night after night. Sacrificing sleep, time, and health inside the tin prison that was the factory. He estimated it was part of their generation gap. Older man coming from an era of earning and offering respect. Knowing he was owed nothing, that he had to earn and work his way through life. There was no self-entitlement. The younger generation ignored respect, believed that respect was no longer earned, but given regardless of stature and sacrifice. It was some disillusioned entitlement, wanting to pick and choose what they would or would not do, regardless of a job’s responsibilities.
Miles had quit school at seventeen. He wasn’t drafted, as some had been, he enlisted in the US Marines. Having a chip on his shoulder, something to prove, wanting to be a tough guy, he wanted to be a rookie cop in New York but couldn’t, as he’d dropped out of school and there was a height stipulation. He was five-eight and needed to be five-ten, so he took the next option. Remembered the words a friend spoke when the heifer wagon wheeled into the barracks of Parris Island, South Carolina, after that long-haul overnight. Eugene Clemmons sat next to him nervous as a whore in church when the drill instructor stepped onto the bus, a chiseled but crazed, pale-faced, box-topped hard-ass. He read them the riot act with a bullhorn voice: “No more sucking your mother’s tit and filling your socks with cock jam, you fuckin’ parasites, move your pathetic asses now!” Seats of young men yawned and knuckled crust from their sockets. Hesitant and slow, Clemmons whispered to Miles, “Think we fucked the pooch, buddy.” Bodies were herded from the bus to the burn of barrack lights and a yellow-footed path to a building where cots were lined up, no sheets. They were ushered into another room full of tables. The DI barked, “Remove every goddamned thing from your pathetic bodies except your fuckin’ ID. No carrot-cracking pics of Tootsie-tits playing with her honey hole. No shaving kits. No money. Leave it! You’re now property of the United States Marine Corps, maggots!”
With that memory seared in his mind, Miles knew Kimball and he were divided by the duration of time. By age. Kimball was twenty-eight. His father, Dannie, worked the day shift at their factory. Got his son this job by blood affiliation and good attendance. The other side of showing up to work on time was, Dannie’d been busted for suspicion of child molestation, sleeping with a girl under the age of eighteen. Was somehow holding on to his job until his next court date. Then there was his spawn, Kimball, who’d had a child from his first marriage that didn’t pan out because of the unplanned second child he planted in the babysitter one night while his wife was out with her hens at a Tupperware party. He’d come home early from the gym. His libido bouncing, he offered the eighteen-year-old the fuck-me eyes. She accepted, he gave her the dog and pony show before the wife came back.
The apple didn’t fall far from the family tree.
Six weeks later, the sitter gave him the EPT test and his wife filed for divorce. Now he had a girlfriend who watched his two kids while he worked, weight trained, and saturated his body with illegal hormones. Whored around on her during his late-night lunches working the night shift, in between snacking on Rally’s burgers and chicken sandwiches for his five-thousand-calorie-a-day dirty bulking diet.
Probably hit the drive-thru couple blocks over, Miles thought, for a sack of plain burgers, down past Cousins Liquor store on Thirteenth and Hill, where men hid their booze in a paper sack. Picked up young whores for a five-dollar hand job or a ten-dollar suck-and-fuck. Money earned initially to care for their children; instead, they slung dope or fought turf wars to defend their affiliations, men without fathers, raised without the guidance of two parents, young men raised in an underprivileged environment where only the strong survived and the weak perished and the city ignored them both.
Miles believed Kimball needed his temperament recalibrated. To be reminded that Miles was overdue on what he’d paid for. Roid rage amped through his hands. Fingers tensed as he raised his cigarette to his lips, pulling a final draw of nicotine from his cancer stick. He knew if he got caught handing Kimball his ass he could lose his job. But by now he was beyond consequence and knew a way around the guidelines. Union or no union.
The company may own the building and property in which he worked, but they didn’t own the street.
With the steel entrance door to the plant behind him, Miles knew Kimball would have to navigate through him or past him, or he could run to Miles’s right, where two metal silos stood housing the amine that was pumped into the building, next to the railcars full of clay that traveled from the Dakotas. The clay was vacuumed into the plant through a three-inch line where impurities were washed from it. Mixed with amine, dried, bagged, and sold as a paint additive that made paint adhere to a surface. Didn’t matter. However this was going to go down, Miles was no longer asking.
Miles heard Childers ask, “You gonna tug on that cancer stick all damn night or you gonna light his ass up?”
“I’m gonna ignite his ass like napalm, motherfucker. Just sit tight and watch,” Miles said as he glanced to the charcoaled silhouette of Childers, then coiled his left hand. Homed in on Kimball. Flipped the smoke into Kimball’s chest with his right. Got his attention as ashes Tic-Tacked orange.
The two men made eye contact. “The fuck’s your damage, Knox?”
Miles divided Kimball’s frame from head to toe. Made an imaginary line just as his trainer had taught him in Puerto Rico, circa 1970. Halve the opposition’s torso, create your opening.
“Been two weeks too many. Need my fucking juice.”
Kimball chuckled. Held a double hamburger in his one hand, which swelled with veins, muscle, and a bit of water retention, a paper sack with several more burgers in his other hand. Miles could smell the whore-stank and cheap CVS perfume smoldering from his T-shirt. He told Miles, “Crazy ole bastard. Out here carrying on a conversation with yourself. No idea what a girl like Shelby sees in you but look—”
Shoving the remaining burger into his mouth, cheeks chipmunked-out as he chewed, he buried his hand into his one sweatpants pocket, then the other, reaching across his pumped chest, forearms bulged as he pulled the pockets out. Pulled the white lining from the cotton inside the pants like two ears dangling above his groin.
Bread and beef particles fell from his mouth as he said, “—I’s broke as a whore in a recession. Why don’t you get on your bum knees, old man, kiss the fucking bunny between his ears.”
The knob of a blowtorch turned in Miles’s mind, created a canvas of red-butchered outlines barking, KILL! KILL! KILL! That was all Miles could hear, all he could see, taste, and smell. He came with two open hands, clenched them into Kimball’s chest, twisted a grip into his shirt, planted his foot, pivoted, and swung him out into the middle of the street and off company property. Kimball found his balance, stood crooked. Miles was loaded up and combusted into Kimball’s face with his left. Immediately felt the ache of old age shoot through his knuckles to his sculped forearm and into his rounded shoulder of stitched fiber. Watched Kimball drop the sack of burgers and spit a regurgitated wad of bun-meat as he staggered backward.
Shaking the spin of having his clock cleaned, eyeing Miles, blinking and salting up in his eyes, he raised a forearm to his nose and mouth. Trembling, he wiped the warmth that showed under the vapor lights homing from above the street. “Think you’re gonna beat my ass, ole man?” he shouted.
Smirking, Miles told him, “Know I’m gonna use your ass to wipe the grime and grit from your truck’s hood when I’m finished using you as a rag to clean my knuckles.”
“Well bring it, you ole motherfu—”
Miles cut Kimball short. Came forward, faking a right. Flushed his hearing with a left hook to his right ear. Dug his hips in. Twisted a right cross into his chest that sounded like a ten-gauge shotgun holing out a rotted stump with buckshot.
“Nice one,” Childers said to Miles.
The guy was spewed from a generation of backward-backwoods racists. Some would say inbred. Just because you were white, poor, and scraping to get by didn’t mean you were inbred, Miles knew. But Kimball’s people were a lineage of men who’d developed a history of thieving, beating, and molesting those they felt were weaker and who held something they wanted. Meaning whatever they gave or dished out they believed was deserved in order to take what they wanted. And if you were kin to their bloodline, they felt they owned you.
Miles agreed with zero of that semblance.
Kimball groped his ear with his right. Came back with a wild left that bit Miles’s chin. Miles spit and returned fire with a straight right of his own. Kimball caved in and shelled from the cross. Glared between his forearms. Tasted pain and hurt, met the afflicted eyes of Miles, who’d beads raining down his graying complexion of gritted teeth and heaving lungs wheezing from the pack of Marlboro reds he inhaled every day.
Miles saw it in Kimball’s eyes. Fear. And Childers told him, “Got his soft ass now.”
Kimball lowered his arms, shouted, “Crazy gook-killin’ fuck.” And swung a whooping right.
Miles coughed a nicotine glob, spit a chunk of tapioca yellow, and stepped back. Watched the haymaker miss by two rungs of a heifer’s backside. Calculated his distance. Placed his left hand in front of Kimball’s view, blocked his sight of the right hook he speared into the bulky tissue below Kimball’s armpit, his lung point. Then fired a stiff left jab into his esophagus.
Kimball gagged for air, dropped down to one knee, as a Ford F-150 came barreling by and honked the horn, brake lights beating red and slowing as it turned right just before the railroad tracks.
Winded, Miles paused. Yelled, “Take a picture, motherfucker, it’d last longer.”
Kimball sucked up the hurt. His back butterflied wide. He came with rage from his knees. “Ahhh!” Speared his bowling-ball shoulder into Miles’s abdomen. Pushed him backward.
“You gonna take this weak-ass football charge?” Childers questioned Miles.
Miles spat air. Gritted his teeth. “Shut the fuck up. Got him right where I want him.”
His lower back and knees jarred and popped with ache. He gained his footing, brought his thick elbows down into Kimball’s spine like two ball-peen hammers. Took whatever glow the man had left, listened to the undigested grease and meat patties splash and pile from Kimball’s mouth to the pavement.
“You got this motherfucker now,” Childers told Miles.
Miles’s lungs flared like an enflamed throat being doused with rubbing alcohol. He reached into Kimball’s wad of sandy locks. Feeling his shoulders and back knot and cramp, Miles lifted the man’s complexion to viewing, watched the crimson pulp from Kimball’s nostrils and lips. Spun him around to face the parked Ford and dragged him from the street’s center to where Kimball’s own vehicle was parked.
Miles didn’t trust the pilferer, he’d learned his lesson with the VA pretending to be farmers in Da Nang. Give the fuckers an inch, they’d take a mile. Shoot you in the back.
Kimball slurped and whined, “Crazy old man, told you I’d get it to you next—”
Miles huffed and chuckled. “—You’d be correct, you bent-lip bastard, you gonna get it and it won’t be next week. We’re going for a ride, bro.”
Opening Kimball’s passenger door, Miles glanced to the other truck, which sat idling down across the tracks, a shadow watching.
* * *
Shadrack palmed the busted screen door, causing it to slap the side of the house. Leaped out into the void that was night. His ears purged with explosions. Screams rang in his ears as he took to the hillside barefoot. He retreated into the dankness and spoils of timber, wondering if any of this was real or if it was a madcap juvenile dreamscape, a make-believe cartoon.
His heartbeat contorted in his temples like when he ran in PE class, catching and dodging the red rubber balls, never catching his breath, only fueled by adrenaline.
He thought back to what he saw. The frail shape of a man had come in with the bill of a ball cap poking out from beneath a hooded sweatshirt. Hiding features and smelling like soil, mildewed vinyl, and a hint of something saccharine, like rotted perfume.
Shad’s father, Bedford Timberlake, had called the man a regular. Someone who tended to come by the house early in the day. Now he’d shown up late, unexpected, sometime between when David Letterman started but before he signed off for the night. The man jerked and turned to his right, then his left. Kept pacing in place, saying he was sold a bad batch of pills and demanding more of what Shad’s father told him he did not have. The cotton. White pills in caramel-colored bottles with ivory lids that Bedford and his partner got from one of several pharmacies in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
The shape balled his slender fist into Bedford’s Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt and squealed with a Bob Dylan–esque voice, “Done told you that batch was bad. You promised me a hundred pills, ain’t near fifty in here, you Gumby-mouthed motherfucker!”
Shadrack’s father had worked for Keller Manufacturing until he’d hurt his back nearly five years ago. Gotten hooked on painkillers. Found disability. His wife waited tables at the local Waffle House. What she earned in addition to Bedford’s disability checks wasn’t enough to get by on, let alone support their son nor their pain pill habit; they chewed on the cotton as though it were bubble gum or a tough cut of steak. That was where Bedford’s partner came in, Carney Dillman, a friend since birth, someone his baby brother, Nathaniel, never liked him running around with. That was why Bedford kept their dealings to himself. Carney explained that he had connections, could help line up the doctors who were easy, not thorough when it came to giving prescriptions throughout the different states; he knew which doctors held little concern to whom they wrote prescriptions for. Bedford was disabled, so all he needed to do was show up, show his disability paper, get the prescription, and move on to the next one. Doctor shopping. They never researched a person’s disability or pain. Around coal country this practice had become more and more popular. And, Carney told Bedford at the start, he had a line of customers ready to buy plenty of cotton.
Along with the government checks, that was how Bedford earned a living, peddling eighty-milligram tablets of Oxy for forty to eighty bucks a pop, unless he landed a higher dosage, then it was eighty to a hundred bucks.
Copyright © 2023 by Frank Bill
