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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... cc&d magazine (v214) (the November 2010 Issue) |
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Trouble Town
Rex Sexton
Plant closed, her sister up and gone, nothing but trouble since she got off the Greyhound ... five days traveling and everything upside down ... room by the station cockroach nation – still more than she can afford since she was expecting free room and board. At least till she got on her feet. Not that she could ever depend on her sister or anyone for that matter. She should have known better, stayed where she was even though her life was in tatters.
Sheila drinks and wonders what else can go wrong, aside from the roof in the dive she’s sitting in caving in. She was holding her own out west as a strip mall beautician, until the country made “Born To Lose” its new national anthem and the no hairdo blues became the recession fashion. No work, no prospects and on top of that the jerk she got herself hooked up with going even more berserk than she could deal with. Drinking non stop, beating her up.
“I’m living in a world of wonder,” the jukebox is playing her favorite song, “happiness around each corner.”
About the only happy thing around her corner would be the coroner. She felt herself getting tipsy, frowned and took another sip of her peppermint martini. The master of mixology behind the bar didn’t have any strawberry or chocolate kind of flavor so they had to concoct it with schnapps. It was a miracle he found a cocktail glass in that old, warped, spider webbed cabinet.
Last time anyone used one in this neck of the woods was probably the Englishman they stole the bar from at the point of a squirrel gun, back when moonshine cost a dime, and the Declaration of Independence was just signed, who was celebrating “his” independence from “them” happy to get back to merry old England. The not exactly lip smacking, neither stirred nor shaken creation was enough to knock her on her ass. But it made her think. The only wonder in her “you’re gonna get it” world that kept on giving was the sorry fact she was still living. Would it be too much to ask of that world that at twenty-one she could have a little fun? Isn’t that why she went blonde? She went blonde so she could ride a Greyhound and sit in a dump in a one horse town alongside every weirdo and loser from anyone’s worst nightmare?
“Buy you a drink?”
Sheila glances in the mirror at a shady looking guy who sits down next to her – pockmarked face, brown bomber jacket, greasy black hair. He lights a cigarette and taps the ash on the bar.
Tobacco country where asphyxiation is not open to litigation and no one ever heard of cancer or the Surgeon General. Everybody’s mouth is dangling one, if they’re not puffing on a corn cob pipe or chomping a cheap cigar stink bomb. Enough smoke in the room to set off a fire alarm.
Just as well considering the place is a real eyesore and it helps to hide the fact that it’s crawling with mice and rats. Across dark man’s Neanderthal forehead is a home stitched zipper scar, which helps him look even more like some character from the shock theater.
“No thanks. I’m waiting for someone.”
She forces a smile, meets his dark eyes in the mirror.
“Your boyfriend ain’t gonna come, Hon, cause you ain’t got none.”
His expression is blank, frank, grim; no smirk, sneer, grin.
“Then I’ll learn to live without one.” She shrugs. “So long.” She toasts him. “It’s been fun.”
“The fun ain’t begun, Hon”
He studies her and sips his beer.
The bartender slides an ashtray over, backs her martini with another, which she didn’t order, this one in a tumbler. She drops her eyes from the mirror, which she noticed had taken on the look of a startled deer. “This guy bothering you?” Wasn’t going to come from anyone in the room soon. OK Trouble Town, bring it on. Your day was long but I see your night is still young.
“I’m all out of fun Sugar Plum.” Sheila manages to turn to him. Now for sure her martini is shaken, if not in the glass at least in her intestines. If you let a situation own you you’re through.
Lesson one in grammar school. “Been traveling sweetie. Traveling makes me sleepy.” She forces another smile and she hopes a cute, helpless little yawn. “Someone ain’t my boyfriendbut my brother. He’s coming after me soon. He had to work late. Just got out of the service.
He’s an ex-marine. We’re getting together with our family. It’s a family reunion!” She manages, she hopes, to infuse a little flirtation in her baby blues. “But maybe some other time if you don’t mind. I’ll be around.”
“You ain’t got no brother either, sugar.” He takes a drag off his cigarette and blows a smoke ring at the mirror, studying her, not bothering to swivel his bar stool around and face her. “I know everyone and everything in this town. I’m the dog catcher, trash collector, public investigator, probably next mayor. I knew your sister Sue. When the plant closed she split.
Party girl, wild as they come. Probably partying tonight in parts unknown. She told me you were coming – dishwater blonde. She really didn’t want no part of you. ‘I need her clinging to me like a dog needs a flea.’ She said. You came in on the Greyhound. You put your bag in a locker and made an unanswered phone call. After that, you walked though the town to the pickle plant that just shut down. You read the Closed/ Keep Out sign and walked back. You got your bag and rented a room at the Horror Palace, and then you ate at the Ptomaine Terrace. Now you’re here with me drinking gasoline.”
“You stalked me?” Sheila’s voice came out squeaky. The shot and beer wizard didn’t have an olive or one of those little onions or even a cherry to make her martini look fancy so he put a pickled crow’s egg in it without a toothpick which he finger dug from a jar on the bar. “The townie stalked me.” She stared at it. She could see the headlines in the Goober Gully Gazette or whatever they had, assuming anyone around here read. “WHITE TRASH TRANSIENT FOUND RAPED AND DEAD! The mutilated body (fingers and teeth removed to eliminate any identification) of an unknown white woman was found this morning in a garbage can by the Greyhound bus station ...”
“I like your scar.” She took a big swallow from the martini in the tumbler which was even stronger. “That scar will take you far. I mean around here if you want to be mayor. Kind of makes you look debonair with that greasy, black, duck ass hair, and unique, since everybody around here pretty much looks the same due to all that inbreeding.” Once she got started poking she couldn’t stop, which was why Mr. Wonderful used to beat her up. Now there was a Jock.
Sit and stare in his under ware at the football games and drink beer getting all turned on by the physical contact between the men in helmets and the bouncing boobs of the cheerleaders who they tried to make look like girls next door but you could tell weren’t nothing but sluts and whores till he jumped her at half time whether she had her a real headache or the usual fake.
“You get run over by a tractor? Maybe you had a lobotomy? You could run as a Republican. Better yet that new Tea Party might be up your alley. Sarah Palin was a Dogpatch type mayor and look what happened to her!”
Her head was spinning and her eyes crossing as she shifted her foggy scrutiny from the blank profile beside her to the deadpan face watching her in the mirror until they combined in her mind to form a police mug shot like you see on “Most Wanted” which Mr. Wonderful liked to watch, maybe just to see if he was on it before he jumped her if he was still sober enough to get it up.
“Who’s this bitch?”
An Amazon from swampland suddenly appeared behind Cro-Magnon man in the mirror and was staring at her, hands on hippo hips, wild hair a tangle like black lagoon brambles.
“I told you I don’t want no woman of mine comin’ in here.”
Mr. Personality stares at the reflection standing over his shoulder and lights another Marlboro.
“I asked you who this slut is? Gargantuarina stamps her foot and the rafters shake. “I’ll stomp her whore ass all over this bar! I’ll rip out that bleached blonde hair!”
Yes, love is a many splendid thing. Sheila watches and sips her drink.
“I really enjoyed meeting you both.” She hops off her bar stool “But I got to go.”
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
“You better get your tramp butt out of here!”
“‘Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!’”
Sheila spins around and lifts her glass in the air.
“‘My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
And smitten me to the knee;’”
Chairs slide out of her way as staggers across the floor.
“‘I am defenseless utterly!’”
She shrieks.
“‘I slept methinks and woke,’”
She peers around and lowers her voice.
“‘And, slowly gazing, find me stopped in sleep,
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours.’”
“My God she’s crazy!”
The Amazon gapes at her.
Cro-Magnon stares wide eyed, mouth open.
“Goodbye Trouble Town!”
Sheila opens the door and bows.
“I exit as I entered, on the Greyhound!”
Lucky she had to memorize and recite Thompson’s “The Hound Of Heaven” for Mrs. McCully’s eighth grade English class. Probably just saved her ass.
