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Road Kill

Rex Sexton

    I sit in my cheap room, watch the raid from the window. PD flashers strafe the dead zone dark. Vice squad walkie-talkies crackle in the chaos, sirens wail, shadows scurry.
    They hustle the whores out first, cuffed, kicking – a prima dumba back-street ballet of fishnet stockings, skin tight shifts, spiked high heels, nightglow flesh – all shrieking, cursing, spitting at the narcs.
    The John’s follow hard on (no pun on that one) and nightsticks rain down, as the brawl of good ole boy beer guts, biker brawn, lunge, jostle, try to run.
    I pack my suitcase, thunder threads tossed in the trash, light another Lucky, slug down cathouse Jack. Paylor the pimp, Bubba the bouncer, are frog walked out next, sweating bullets in their lounge lizard best. Back stabbed, double crossed, facing jail, they look like cremating corpses one flame from Hell.
    Hookers, strippers, poker machines, drugs, booze, dice, ex-cons, thugs – by the time anyone wonders where the bartenders gone (out the back as soon as the first narc walked in) I’ll be dreaming of you Ruby (dead drunk on a Trailways Bus).
    Life goes on.

*****

    Drifter digs, you open the door and flop into bed. A single naked light bulb hangs from a ceiling chain. Devil shapes toss the room as its harsh light swings with the window’s wind. Each night I hear the druggies doing pratfalls in the dark as they stagger back and forth to the washroom down the hall, or try to maneuver through their tiny flops. Across the alley a back street lounge sleep streams until dawn. Jazz and blues fill the night with saxophones and wailing songs. Silhouettes slow dance in the windows.
    I watch them through my window, pillow propped against a wall, sipping rye and blowing smoke while the demons shift around. The music wraps the night in dream. Ruby and I dance inside a memory.

*****

    “Into the night riding that mare Man on the run – danger, beware Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide Into the night, grim reaper behind
    Eyes heavy from smoke and the long night, fingers furtively stroking the cue-stick, I move, back and forth, around the lamp-lit pool table and study the cluster of brightly colored balls which seem to float there.
    The room rocks and creaks around us in the lamp-lit dark, as Johnny Gun and the Rustlers ignite a foot stomping line dance in the rhythm and blues bar upstairs, driven by wailing harmonicas and electric guitars.
    I lean into each shot like a sleepwalker in a trance, dizzy from drink, playing combinations so crazy they make no sense, lost in some Twilight Zone of hustler Zen which, playing stick for meals and flops in two-bit joints, from time to time, never happened before and probably won’t again.
    Shadow shapes crowd the smoky cellar, as still and silent as apparitions in a dream. The usual specters who haunt the gaming dives – grifters, gamblers, sharks and jives, pimps, pushers, and other denizens of the night. Amidst the jamming from the rave upstairs, the clapping hands and stamping feet, I hear the rustle of money changing hands around the room, like the flurry of wind in a crypt, or the flutter of ghosts in the dark.
    “Ever make the wrong move,” I hear Johnny sing upstairs, “in the wrong town, cross the wrong path at the wrong time, play the wrong game with the wrong crowd?”

*****

    There’s a nightclub in a cellar (in my dream) small, dark, empty. A ghost woman in a gossamer gown sits at a piano under a spotlight. She sings:
    “Man in the moon
    Lord of the night
    Talk to the whispering
    Winds in their flight
    Man in the moon
    Tell them to sigh
    I have a new love”
    The singer’s eyes are like holy mysteries. Her pale skin is so perfect, it seems painted on. Her voice is like something you’d hear in heaven, and I’m wondering if she sings her love song to everyone lying on a slab in the county morgue?

*****

    “Easy does it.”
    I try to sit up but a big hand pushes me down. I’m lying on the asphalt looking at the moon. A PD flasher is circling the alley. My head is throbbing. I feel it oozing blood. A rangy lawman crouches over me, holding a gun. He is pointing it down the street and whispering “kaboom, kaboom.” He smiles faintly and then his edgy features cloud.
    “Someday I’ll clean up this town.” He looks down at me and frowns. He has coal black eyes and a prizefighter’s face, wild dark hair with lightening sideburns. “Saw them jump you from down the block.” He pushes up the brim of his cowboy hat with the barrel of his gun. “Three. They went at you pretty good with saps, digging in your pockets. They scattered when they heard my siren. Should of shot the shitheads.” He looks down the street again. “Let’s see if you can stand.”
    The long arm of the law. I grip onto it and struggle to my feet. My head is reeling and my legs feel numb. The lanky lawman towers over me looking me up and down.
    “Better red than dead, I reckon.” He pokes his fingers through my hair. “I’ll run you over to General.” He holsters his gun. “That’s in the next town. We can fill out an official Colsen County police report along the way. Just for fun.”

*****

    “On the run son?” The sheriff lights a cigarette as we drive along through the black windowed backstreets of the small tank town, takes a long drag off it and tosses me the pack. “Car break down?” I close my eyes as his Zippo flares in my face. “Seeing the U.S.A. by sticking out your thumb?” He pulls a clipboard from under the seat and sets it beside him, gropes in his top pocket for a pen. “Get kicked off the Trailway’s for snorin’ too loud?”
    Buildings blur past, crumbling brick boxes, ramshackle houses folding in upon themselves, shanties, shacks, all smothered by tangled trees and dense foliage, and then a dark rush of nothingness, as the highway comes at us, its white line unraveling in my foggy head like a silk snake from the sleeve of an illusionist.
    “My wallet.” I fumble at my back pocket, try to shake away the cobwebs from my shadowy consciousness. “They got it.” My head pounds and my back aches. A couple of my ribs feel cracked. I press around my stomach, under the belt, take a drag off the cigarette, manage not to chocke on it and settle back in the seat.
    “No ID.” The sheriff says flatly and scribbles on his sheet. “Vagrancy?” He muses. He blows a perfect smoke ring at the windshield. It floats like a ghost’s mouth over the steering wheel and dash, vanishes when it hits the glass. “Just kiddin’ bud. Give me a name, where you’re from, where you’re going, what happened.”
    Paylor, Bubba, Ruby, the raid – there can’t be any kind of A.P.B. out on me. That would be crazy. No one back in Maddon even knew my real name, or anything about me, not even Ruby. All they knew was that Stanton sent me, an old cell mate. Besides, that was hundreds of miles ago.
    “Corbett.” I stub out my cigarette in the ashtray, slide the pack back over to him. “Jim.” My fingers feel like an assemblage of wooden clothes pins. I must have really nailed someone. I fold them, stretch them, gingerly touch my swollen face.
    Four flat tires seem to occur simultaneously as the squad car bucks, bounces, bobs along the highway and I look out the windshield to see a migration of snakes slithering across the asphalt under the squad’s headlights, trying to shimmy like crazy to the other side.
    “Snakes in a lane.” The sheriff smiles as we roll across the road kill. “Down the road of no return.” He picks up the cigarette pack with his forefinger and thumb, studies it and puts it in the glove compartment. “I FEEL WHOOZY.” I remember two ton Tommy Phelan saying when I clobbered him a good one in my first big fight in the playground after school – which made everybody laugh. I felt whoozy, right now, like I woke up in the Twilight Zone.
    “Gentleman Jim Corbett.” The sheriff glances at me. His coal black eyes ignite. “Heavy weight champ of the world in 1890? 1910? Sure it ain’t John L. Sullivan?” He laughs softly to himself, stubs out his cigarette and picks up the pen. “Go on.”
    A sign flashes by for SPECTER, five miles down the road. The sheriff looks at me and clicks his pen.
    “I’m just passing through.” I try to keep my voice steady, but I still feel dizzy and the psycho sheriff is driving me crazy. “I’m traveling to Miami. I have a ticket on the Trailways.” I lie (I was dead broke starting yesterday). “But I guess that’s gone too.”
    “So what are you doing here, he gives me a side look, “a snappy stud like you, out in the middle of nowhere, get bored with the Rivera?”
    “I stopped to visit a friend.” I feel the pain settling behind my eyes that I get when I have to make up alibis. I’m not fast at it. “McDonald, Norman. Couldn’t find him. Maybe he moved?”
    “Old guy owns the farm? No, he’s still around. Eee I o in and Yo in.”
    The sheriff chortles as he scribbles something down and then reaches for the intercom.
    “Cole to Willow.”
    “Go Cole.”
    “Driven’ a drifter over to General. Corbett James. No ID. Twenty something. Caucasian. Stocky. Ugly. Got banged up by the boys. Bar fight. Back in a jiffy.”
    “Copy Cole. Hey bring me some Crispy Creams!”
    “Snakes in a lane.” The sheriff winks at me. “Can’t do nothin’ but run over them.” He pulls over to the side of the road, reaches in the visor and pulls out another cigarette, lights it. “Here’s the rest of your report, best I see it. You won a bundle at Smokey’s shootin’ pool. Must have been a bundle or the boys would have let it go. You saw the writin’ on the wall and snuck out the restroom window. Shoved the money down your pants. The boys saw the writing too, went out back and waited for you. They didn’t get to explore down yonder.” He eyes my crotch. “Give it to me.” The sheriff sticks out his hand and blows a smoke ring in my face.

*****

    The radio squawks unanswered calls. Snakes slither across the lonely highway, as I give it to the small town sheriff, over and over again, across his lightning sideburn, with the dropped sap I picked up in the alley.

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