Finished reading Dan Simmons's The Terror. Not a bad yarn, but not a great novel. As simply a presentation of a situation (arctic exploration, two ships frozen into the ice for two years with supplies dwindling and an impossible monster killing off crewmembers and scratching its way slowly into the hulls) and subsequent progression and resolution of a story, it satisfied wholly. But as a Novel, in all the glory that the word implies, it falls somewhat short of other purported Simmons successes (Carrion Comfort, The Song of Kali, both of which are on my to-read list) with an unnecessarily bloated word-count (it's as if the author was determined to reveal every piece of information he gathered in his research inside the final text), poor characterization throughout, and - perhaps insurmountably - unbelievable, purely expositional and clumsily anachronistic dialogue.

I particularly liked the bits near the end, with the devolution of some of the lesser crewmembers into mutinous, murdering cannibals. I would, wouldn't I? I also like the monster, and the way Simmons isn't afraid to let it remain just that: a monster. I was afraid through the whole reading that the thing would turn out to be someone in a costume (awful idea, Shyamalan, just awful) or a large polar bear or a surviving dinosaur or something. Nope. It's intelligent, preying on the crew members not for food or for self-preservation but simply because it wishes them misery; it's a sort of Wendigo of the ice, a symbol of starvation and hardship for human beings in the wilderness manifested in a very real beast. Good stuff. Three out of five stars.

I enjoyed 4 on the Floor at the Deli last night. Local classic rock covers at their most carefree but proficiently performed. And as always most of the people there are just cool.

Applied for two summer jobs yesterday; need either of them desperately. Also, what are you hiring for out there? I'll do it.

I plan to continue my education at UAH in the fall. It'll have to be English, I'm afraid; I'm interested in something to do with publishing for a fallback career.

I have this idea that I need to be well-read before even attempting to publish my novel-in-progress; that I need to be well-read in the horror genre, at least. It's hard work, and quite daunting. I recently tried The Amityville Horror, and that damn thing is absolutely unreadable. I've never come across such odiously poor language or contemptuous disrespect for audience in a published work. I hope there aren't many more like it; I quite like the other writers I've read after a bit of research at the beginning of my trying to sweep the canon, like Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, W. Peter Blatty. It's gonna be a fun project to complete.

Right. Bed, and church drummer hat in the morning.

Divorce Your Husband!

I finished recording a song called "Divorce Your Husband!" today. It was hard, and it still has to be mastered. As a disclaimer, it has nothing to do with any of my exes who are married, but is about the ridiculous things that guys sometimes expect of girls. It also has a great deal to do with the Super Mario Bros. myth. So there. It will be on sale soon as a retro CD-single, just like from the nineties.

I've loved playing at the Main Street Deli each week; it's a great place to come home to. Anyway, here are the lyrics:

"Divorce Your Husband!"
by Jared Cushen

Think about the good times, like the night I walked to your house
And woke up everyone inside
Just to say 'I love you' at three in the morning
How many guys would do that for a two-week anniversary?

Just divorce your husband; you could stay at my house,
Hold me through the hard times,
Wake me up with French toast and eggs
Come be my lady; you won't ever leave home again

Can't believe your gall, girl, saying that you're happy
Living in the city now
You know I know you better,
Your blood is in the country
They say he's got the money, but babe, I've got the gravity

Bitch, divorce your husband!
You could stay at my house
Hold me through the hard times, wake me up with French toast and eggs
Come be my lady; you won't ever leave home again

Once there was a Princess; she ruled the Mushroom Kingdom
With her loyal Toadstool Gang
She really was a Peach; that girl should have seen it coming
Had just the kind of curves Koopas like to lock in castles
And when King Koopa bore down, laying siege to Mushroom,
At first they wouldn't let him in
It took a lot of shouting, a little roundabouting
But soon he had her taken with the blessing of her family
I went to the castle, asked her dad, King Toadstool,
'Why the hell'd you let her go?'
He said, 'The world is hard now; she had to go with someone
And how many men have castles?
Mushroom God only knows'

Well I know I'm just a plumber; I haven't got much money
Kind of short and stocky, but I've got jumper's legs
And I'm out to gather coins now; she's gonna be so grateful
That she won't even judge me for taking all those mushrooms...

Deep Cuts, Issue #2: Astral Weeks

Van Morrison - Astral Weeks

Fun trivia fact: this is the first album that Van Morrison made on purpose. Most people don't know that the single cut of "Brown Eyed Girl" comes from what Morrison thought was a demo session in New York, the cuts from which were released as an album without his knowledge or permission. It was a lucky mistake, but he apparently would rather have been making things like this.

V.M. has called Astral Weeks "anti-pop and -rock," which it sort of is. The arrangements by Larry Fallon are certainly faux-classical enough, but V.M. can hardly excise either pop or rock from his singularly fine voice (which, it should be noted, tenants te front of the mix where it ought to except on "Sweet Thing," where, inexplicably, the hi-hat does; strings share the focus on the left division of the stereo mix. Weird).

A motif of the ghostly accompaniment is the sustenance of a single note over several measures and chord changes, suggestive of the eternal or of the solid. V.M.'s pretensions to grand themes are certainly legitimized by choices like this, at the very least in theory, and often decidedly in effect.

"Cypress Avenue" is a bassist's textbook on what to do when one finds oneself the focal accompanying instrument. Excellent work by Fallon and upright bassist Richard Davis.

V.M.'s ambition often drowns out the successes on the album with unfortunately bloated songs. It's as if he thought of every riff possible for each song, then included them all and insisted they remained on the finished product.

The rhythm guitar is out of tune on "Ballerina." With so much care taken elsewhere, why such an annoying, sloppy oversight?

"Slim Slow Slider" is the best and final track, evocative, haunting, and bleakly transcendent.

Gems: "Slim Slow Slider," "Cypress Avenue"

"Deep Cuts", Issue #1: ...And Justice for All

Actually, forget that thing I said yesterday about making a new blog just for this. It's okay if I just make this a series within this blog, right? I don't have to make another one?

It's called "Deep Cuts," and its purpose is to review out-of-the-way pop music classics; still quite famous, but perhaps off the beaten path a bit. You won't find Zoso or Abbey Road here. My first choice is

Metallica - ...And Justice for All

This, on one disc, is the popular emergence of progressive metal. The opening of "Blackened" and the album recalls the opening of Queen's A Day at the Races with "Tie Your Mother Down." The two albums share a majesty and an innovativeness, if they share nothing else.

Neither the tightness of the group nor the skill of its players can be denied. I do have immediate personal objections which are purely tonal; Mr. Hetfield's voice never howls quite to the desired intensity, and the drums are EQ'd, if not poorly, at least in disharmony with my taste. The kick drum is clicky - make of it what one will. It's common enough in metal.

It's difficult not to hear ...And Justice retrospectively, with the knowledge of virtually an entire genre which has been influenced or is directly descended from it. It's also difficult to forget how many bands have improved on what was begun here, and in leaps and bounds. Rhythm-section pummellers like Mastodon come foremostly to mind.

The music is at its best during mid-range duel guitar breaks (Mr. Hammett's super-human blues freak-outs, while technically striking, fare less well) common of acts which have come to be called "Viking metal."* Sections such as these, along with dark Celtic overtones on "One," are aggressively evocative in the most pleasant of ways. Music suggestive of madaeval magic and Druidic orgies in the woods is enough to make a listener wish the authors of these lyrics more thoroughly understood why they liked music like this (Metallica is composed of high school dropouts to the last man) rather than being content to simply bunch together trite death and darkness cliches at odds with their intriguing music.

The ironic Wizard of Oz Winkie mimic at the start of "The Frayed Ends of Sanity" seems the most painfully dated moment.

We hear the most anticipation of the future of metal - and of all progressive rock - in "To Live is to Die," an excellent showcase of Metallica's dynamic which begins with roughly three minutes of the heaviest balls-to-the-wall bludgeoning on the album before proceeding to a section reminiscent of the softer "One," with some spoken word vocal in there somewhere. As usual, the group's at its finest when the lyrics are beside the point and ignorable.

* Drummer Lars Ulrich has named Queen as a primary influence of Metallica, and that's never more apparent than in these sections, which employ symphonic guitar arrangements the like of which Queen's Brian May pioneered and mastered.

Gems: "To Live is to Die," "One"

"Everybody in the whole cell block..."

I spent last Monday night in jail for an outstanding traffic warrant, which becomes more strange and hilarious to me every time I think about it.

Driving home from a short stay at The Tavern in Scottsboro, I was pulled over for a busted headlight. The officer complimented my driving and took my license and valid insurance card. After an abnormally long time he discovered the warrant, and promptly cuffed me (in size M-100 cuffs, I discovered upon inquiry), had my car impounded, and began to seem suspicious of me. I can only assume that, because where before he had been very friendly and good-old-boyey, he now breathalyzed me, gave me a sobriety test, and asked if I had drugs in my car. I was still in a very good mood at this point, you see, because I didn't realize I'd have to spend the night yet.

We drove up (he drove; I sat in the back asking questions like a bright kid on a field trip) the Mountain to Northeast college where I was handed over to a Fort Paye city cop; my violation had been in DeKalb County. Upon arrival at the county jail they took my stuff and my shoes and my money and my coat, took my cheesing mug shot, and let me call somebody. I hoped to reach my mom at home right away so I could have a chance to say, "It's me again, Margaret," but no luck.

Anyway, they put me in the big holding cell where they usually keep all the drunks. It's just a big concrete room with a blanket. Suffice it to say nothing happened to me that's improved my opinion of either law enforcement or penal systems.

Enough, enough. I promise I'm going to be a good blogger now; I was discouraged after a lukewarm reception of "Gold in the Hills;" which, if you haven't read it, is a good story. I promise. And even if you don't like it, I wouldn't mind hearing what you think. But one way or the other, I miss blogging, and I know there are some people who like this, so I'll be back regularly. Scout's honour.

I've been reading my face off lately. Right now, it's Dan Simmons's 1000-PAGE MONSTROSITY The Terror, which is sprawling and anachronistic as all hell and perfectly lovely for a horror fetishist like me. I like the idea of fictionalizing an historical event; not only casting historical figures as fictional characters (which, let it be said, is the only way any of us know them anyway) and imagining what they think and feel, but actually inserting a terrifying supernatural totally made-up element into the proceedings. Simmons has put a monster out there on the ice with poor Franklin and Crozier and their ice-locked ships, and I think that's awesome.

I'm headed to the Mainstreet Deli in Fort Payne tonight for Open Mic Night, which I've been doing each Wednesday for several weeks now. It's a nice place, all about low-key boozing and music. I've never encountered a club so friendly and so loyal to its musicians. You should come out some night. I hope to see my new friends from Cracker Barrel there, who liked my "Meet Me On the Other Side of the Graveyard" last week. Are you guys reading? Top of the morning to you!

I have a few reviews of music and things to post, which I'll do separately in an adjoining blog to this one. I'll be starting that...NOW.

"Gold in the Hills"

I'm gonna try this out, see how it goes. This is a short story of mine, "Gold in the Hills," from a cycle of stories set in a fictional DeKalb/Jackson area (you won't have any trouble figuring out which town names have been changed to what, and some of them haven't been changed at all, although my associates and I have fiddled with the geography a bit). And I'm resisting the urge to explain things up front like theme and purpose and whatnot, but this is all space I could be using to just post the story, and talk about all that later.

One more thing: I realize it looks really massive, but that's just because the blog format makes you skip a line to start a new paragraph; it's really only about 7500 words.

"Gold in the Hills"

1.

There’s a game, and I’m sure you’ve played it, where everyone sits in a circle, Indian-style. Usually it’s children made to play the game. Someone’s chosen to begin, and they’re It. Whoever’s It writes down a phrase on a slip of paper and doesn’t show it to anyone, then they whisper it to the person next to them, and the phrase gets whispered all round the circle (clockwise, if you’re playing strict rules) and when the whispering comes back to whoever’s It, they reveal what’s written on the slip of paper. How the phrase began and how it ended have never been the same in recorded history, and the children get to yuck and learn how myths are made, and that you shouldn’t trust them.

In a way, I wrote this story down to show you just that same thing.

2.

I could tell you any number of tall tales about the Mountain and Wenham Point, the town at its feet. Then I could tell you where they came from, what the phrase on the paper was before it got bungled by the gossiping circle. And I suppose I will, if only briefly, to give you a for-instance.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Southerners are more trusting than most, and I’ll tell you why: they have plenty of space for it. It’s the same reason they’re friendlier than most, and more helpful. On a sidewalk in Los Angeles or Chicago, there isn’t time to smile at people as you pass, or to help someone with car trouble. Nobody would ever get anywhere; the cities would be crawling, useless masses of people endlessly smiling and saying hello to one another.

The first woman in Fyffe, AL, to report having seen an unidentified flying object was called Doris, and what she told the sweet elderly dispatcher at the station, who was called Melba, was that the object looked like a banana with a blinding light in its center (“And just where,” Melba wondered, “is the center of a banana?”), moving soundlessly and impossibly through the sky. Melba said she certainly would tell the Chief about it and wished Doris a good night.

A week later, Melba sent Doris a card expressing her regret for not having paid her more attention to begin with, considering the way things turned out.

More than fifty people reported sightings of a hovering abomination in the four and a quarter square miles of Fyffe city limits that week. No explanation was ever offered by anyone in charge, although the people had their theories. Each year since, the town has sponsored a “UFO Days” festival with games and live music and snow cones – this whether in hearty self-deprecation or in secret remembrance, no one can say for sure.

After only a few months people began to forget, and to doubt. Doris never did. When she talked about it, she would always wonder aloud why the Lord had not instructed his vessels to make mention of extra-terrestrials in the Bible, if He was going to bother creating them. This was the only point of the whole affair upon which she had any mixed feelings.

This, combined with scattered whispers linking the sightings to a few unexplained cattle mutilations in the 1990s, is the myth of the Fyffe UFOs. But nobody would believe it if they thought for two seconds of logic or geography.

We all know the one about how when you eliminate the impossible, then whatever’s left, however improbable, it must be the truth. On its own merit, I think the idea leaves a little to be desired, but I feel certainly that it could apply to this particular case.

The trusting Southerners I’ve mentioned seem to trust, more than anything else, the United States government. One must suppose that it’s something to do with the illusion of safety. Most would never suspect the powers that be of underhanded dealings or of harbored secrets, nor would they suffer any such implications.

Forty miles from Fyffe, as the proverbial crow flies, the Redstone Arsenal covers ninety percent of the city of Huntsville in deathly serious and ultimately secret military mystery. Huntsville, a sizable town as it stands already, would sprawl like Nashville or Atlanta if it were to absorb the Arsenal. There are nine gates which allow access to it, and God help anyone attempting to enter otherwise. Probably He won’t.

Obviously, all that stands to reason is that in 1989 the government built a mysterious aircraft that we’ll never know anything about and launched it for testing from Redstone Arsenal. It made the short trip North and across the Tennessee River onto the Mountain, and conducted whatever clandestine business it had over Fyffe so anyone who saw it and reported it would be thought a crazy hick, a stupid hillbilly. Thus the secrets of men in suits would be maintained, as would the national social repression of the country bumpkin. All would remain well.

It’s all that makes sense; it’s all that can be true. And so it is called, by learned people, the origin of this myth.

3.

Don’t forget what I mean to tell you, now: you can’t trust these myths. I wanted for years to believe that something from another world had come down to Fyffe, but it simply isn’t true. Remember the game, remember that however the phrase reaches you, chances are slim-to-none of its matching what’s really written on the paper.

I’ll tell you the stories I want primarily to deal with now, and I’ll tell you up front that they aren’t true at all. Really, they aren’t proper stories anyway, just two things that supposedly happened. Then I’ll tell you the truth about them, the story that enables the tall tales. There won’t be a break in between. After that, you’ll understand why the myths aren’t to be trusted, no matter how plausible they seem, and maybe you’ll understand why people sometimes want to hide the truth that’s written on the paper. If you don’t understand by then, I’ll have failed in what I meant to do, and you aren’t ever going to understand it.


4.

Two Fishing Stories

There were three men fishing in a boat, but two of them didn’t have hair on their chins. The third one was their father.

Upon the older of the son’s insistence, they had taken the boat out onto the deepest calm in the river. The father had hesitated because the youngest son was a mite slow, and couldn’t swim to save his life.

When they had been fishing for almost two hours, the youngest son sprang to his feet so quickly that the edge of the rowboat dipped into the water, and it got their boots wet.

“Daddy!” said the youngest son, unheeding, “look at that big old snake!”

“Settle down,” the father said as patiently as he could.

“No, Daddy! Look at it! It’s a big old snake!”

“By God,” said the oldest son, so the father looked over his shoulder, upstream, where his idiot son was pointing.

It was like the Loch Ness Monster that they talked about in stories; like a sea-monster, or a dinosaur that had waited at the bottom of the ocean for a million years only to rise now and rule the earth again.

“Daddy,” whispered the oldest son, “it’s coming straight for us.”

It was. “Jump!” the father shouted, but it was too late. The boat reared up on its side and hung for a moment on the water before capsizing. By then, all three were scrambling for the shore (the youngest with an arm over his father’s broad neck).

In the throwaway newspaper column allowed the incident, the oldest son was quoted as saying, “It’s like it didn’t even know we was there, like the boat was just in its way, and it was too important a thing to pay us any regard at all.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The Tennessee River separates Scottsboro from the eastern foot of the Mountain.

On one occasion, three boys played truant from Scottsboro High School, as they often will in April, and went fishing a ways down the bank from the bridge over the Tennessee, where their parents wouldn’t observe them should they happen to cross it. I won’t say who they were, because you might know them and they’d be embarrassed to have the subject brought up again.

Now, you might not know it, but catfish will grow to be as big as their surroundings allow. If you put an infant cat into a tiny goldfish bowl, he probably won’t ever get any larger. If you buy a tank for several fish but leave only he in it, he will grow to fill the tank, and then stop. This progression begs the question – how big would a catfish grow if he were left to his own in the Tennessee River? And more importantly, how would a body go about catching him?

The answers to those questions, respectively, are a) about seven feet long at three hundred pounds, and b) you have to dynamite the water.

That’s what the three boys were out to do, of course, although to be fair they never got as far as lighting the questionable-looking mite stumps they’d rolled. Before attempting such an exciting (and illegal) feat as that, they sat content with common fishing rods and chicken liver bait to get their courage up.

They had a whopper of a catch on the line before hardly any time had passed. They had just time enough to talk briefly, about two minutes after the last fish had been reeled to shore, before the big snake came up behind them, and the conversation was going something like:

“You reckon that’s why there’s them giant squid in the ocean?”

“There ain’t no giant squid in the ocean. That’s just folks selling papers.”

“No, I mean, it makes sense, see? Maybe the squid is like the catfish, maybe it’ll grow as big as it can, and maybe at the bottom of the ocean there’s just space so big we couldn’t imagine it. And think what kind of cats you could catch down there!”

That’s when it rose, and it hissed at them.

The first boy on his feet was jumpy by nature, and when he turned and saw what it was he fell right into the shallow water by the bank.

Accounts differed according to the moods of the boys in later years; sometimes the snake was six feet plus its tail, no taller than the tallest postman on the basketball team, sometimes ten feet (“About the height of my kid sister’s tree house”, one would say), sometimes twenty, and everything in between. The points upon which all agree are that it showed no signs of being threatened by them; that it behaved much more like a cat than like any snake they’d ever seen.

They attempted to escape at once, of course, back up through the woods to the road which ran alongside the river, but it cut them off ever which way they tried, never attacking, only confining.

“What’s it doing?” one of them asked no one in particular, and another one said, “It’s waiting for us to get tired,” and that’s when the third one, the jumpy one, threw the whole catch of catfish at the thing’s giant head and bolted up the slope of woods for dear life. The others were only a moment following.

Never having looked back, that’s all those three boys have to tell about the snake, and they have all, at various times, gone so far as to deny that the encounter ever happened at all.



5.

Gold in the Hills

Malachi was just a nigger, so Benny didn’t think there was any truth to what he said.

“I can get me and you some money any time I want,” Malachi said, trying to skip a stone across the pond and only succeeding in a muddy plop.

“You can not.”

Malachi bent to dig another stone out of the dust. “I can, too. I can get ten times more money than you can.” Another throw, another plop. “Twenty-five times.”

Benny thought that mighty unlikely, on account of Malachi was a nigger, but he felt that it might be impolite to say so. Malachi was all right to play with on a Saturday afternoon, when the wind was too high and the sun too hot to stay indoors.

“Is that so?” asked Benny. “How much do you reckon you can get?”

Malachi stood up straight and wiped his dirty palms on the front of his overalls. He thought a moment, then said, “I reckon I could get a hundred dollars. Maybe two hundred.”

Benny’s eyes went wide. “You can’t either. You’re lyin to me. You’re a liar, Malachi.”

“I ain’t! I ain’t!” Malachi balled his fists and stepped forward. “You’ve got no place calling me a liar ‘less you know it’s so!”

Benny sighed, and looked out at the pond. “She wouldn’t do it no way.”

Over three weeks of Saturdays, Benny and Malachi had been analyzing, philosophizing, and agonizing about how much money it would take to get Benny’s older sister Wendy to take off her clothes and permit them a few moments’ examination. Wendy was fifteen.

“Probably fifty dollars,” Benny had said at first, eyebrows scrunched in thought, “but she might go as low as thirty. We’re just asking for a minute or two.”

“Right,” Malachi said, pacing around. “And she might go to twenty…or ten!” – whispering, hardly bearing to wish it – “on account of she’s been naked with a couple of boys and not charged them nothing at all! You told me that your self!”

Benny had nodded. “That’s true.”

“Up on the loft in the barn,” Malachi had said, looking up and out at the clouds, or possibly heaven. “Good gracious God.”

They had not yet agreed upon a precise figure, so the agenda for this particular Saturday – it was still morning, around ten o’clock – was to come up with as much money as they could, then offer Wendy however much it was. The enterprise seemed more promising than ever.

“She would, too!” Malachi said, bending for another stone, “for as much money as I can get. For that much money, I don’t reckon there’s anything she wouldn’t do.”

Benny kicked some dust into the pond. “Why don’t you prove it then? Turn up all this money you can get. Where’s it at?” Then, after a moment, “Nigger trash talk’s all it is.”

Malachi turned on him, eyes huge and wide in his brown face, and he stamped his foot. “I’ll show you, Benny Goolesby! I’ll give you what for, for calling me nigger!” Then he turned and started marching away from the pond, back toward the road.

“Where you going?” Benny said.

“Follow me!” Malachi called back without stopping. “You’re going to make me mad in a minute.”

Benny kicked the dust again. Then he moved to follow Malachi. He had to step briskly to catch up.

“Where we going?” he said.

“We got to go back to town,” Malachi said, “and tell my ma that I’m eating lunch at your house. It’s a little ways off, where we’re going.”

Benny groaned privately as he struggled to keep up. When Malachi said ‘a little ways,’ he usually meant it would take an hour to walk there at least, and probably through bush and briar patches at that.

Benny said, “You got to tell me where we’re going, or I ain’t gonna go with you.”

“Okay. But you’ve got to swear the Brother’s Oath that you won’t tell.”

Benny spit a sour wad of saliva and mucus into his right palm and offered it. Malachi did the same. They clasped hands and shook.

“Come on,” Malachi said, “and I’ll tell you while we walk.”

They went silently around the bend in the road, and the pond was out of sight. Benny thought for a moment that Malachi was going to be yellow after all and not tell, then realized that he’d only been deciding how to begin.

“You ever hear tell of any big animals round here?”

Benny stuck his chin out and said, “I sure have. My dad’s killed bobcat. He saw a cougar one night, too.” Then, as an afterthought, “We hear the coyotes in the woods sometimes, around dusk.”

“Naw, no,” said Malachi. “Not animals that’s supposed to be big. Animals that’s supposed to be small, but they ain’t.”

Benny was only offended in the slightest that Malachi had not been impressed by his father’s hunting exploits. He said, “What animals?”

Malachi smiled wide, teeth even and white. “Snakes.”

Benny stopped. “Big snakes? You’re pulling my leg. Who told you about a big snake? And how’s one going to get us any money anyway? You gonna enter it in the fair come August?”

“I’ll show you,” Malachi said. “Call me nigger.”

Soon they came out of the woods and began to see houses here and there. The sounds of chirping birds and creaking bark were replaced with the noise of motors and boot heels on cement. There were no more branches to block the sun; the morning bore down hard upon them.

When they reached the first side walk at the edge of town, Benny asked, “Is your mama at home, or is she at the store?”

Malachi said, “She’s at the store.”

Malachi’s mama was a frail woman, short, and she worked at a store which was apparently called “SHOES”, at the corner of 14th and Gault. She stocked the floor, swept the pavement in front, and sometimes even dealt with customers if she was feeling froggy. She had named her son Malachi because that was her favorite prophet in the Bible. Malachi’s father was no-account, his mother told him, but he had never met him.

“Hello boys!” said Mrs. Jackson, the white lady clerk, as they stepped inside.

They nodded Hello, then glanced briefly around the hundreds of shoeboxes, some on display, some simply stacked floor-to-ceiling. In a back corner, a dangerously fat woman was trying on a pair of tiny high-heels, every so often reminding the saleslady helping her that these were “just for church.”

Benny followed Malachi to the back of the store, then through a door that read, EMPLOYEES ONLY.

Malachi’s mama, whose name was Francis, stood with her negligible weight on one hip and a pen and clipboard in her hands. She was directing two other women in stacking boxes of shoes (a fresh shipment from a truck departed only five minutes, although Benny and Malachi didn’t know this). Benny thought that Malachi’s mama must be a real good worker, to be a nigger and in charge, when one of the women she bossed was white.

“Hey Mama,” Malachi said when she didn’t look up.

Patient, she turned and said, “Hey there, boys. I thought you all were going to the pond this morning.” She looked at her clipboard again.

The black woman she was in charge of said, “You want these done just like them others?”
Francis looked up, said, “Yeah,” and the woman stacked some more boxes.

“Mama,” Malachi said, “I want to go and eat lunch with the Goolesbys, ‘stead of coming back here with you. Is that all right?”

“Hmm? You all have a good time.”

“Okay,” he said, and they stood a minute, watching the women work. When Francis saw that they weren’t leaving, she looked up and shifted her hips.

“Mama,” Malachi said, “tell Benny that there are too big snakes around here.”

“Francis,” said the white woman, “we can take a minute while your kid’s here.”

Francis said, “Take two or three, if you want them.” The two women sat down right where they were. The white one took out a cigarette and lit it with a match she produced, as nearly as Benny could tell, from out of nowhere.

“Snakes,” Francis said, and smiled. “There’s certainly been tell of some real big snakes round here.”

“Back in slave times,” said the black woman.

“Yes,” said Francis, “but I don’t reckon there’s any truth to it. I never killed no snake longer than a yard stick myself. Folk tales is all it is.”

“But Mama,” said Malachi, “that old nigger said – ”

In an instant Francis had her son laid across her knee, and spanked him hard, five times. Nobody said anything; there was no sound at all save for the loud, high-pitched slaps, and Malachi’s moans of displeasure.

He stood up when it was over, sniffing and wiping his nose. “Yes’m,” he said.

“You go on, have lunch.”

“Bye, mama.”

“It’s bull,” said the white woman smoking the cigarette, “I ain’t ever heard nothing about no big snakes.”

The black woman shook her head. “It’s only black folks knows about it.”

The white woman exhaled and coughed. “Why is that?”

“I reckon all that time they spent in the woods, running from white folks.”

The two women started laughing. Francis sent the boys away.

Malachi stamped ahead of Benny on the sidewalk, and neither of them said anything for a long time. There were more people in town than usual, come down from the Mountain or around from the valley to do their Saturday shopping, and the boys had to dodge their way east. They were headed toward the slope of the Mountain.

“You heard what your mama said,” Benny managed finally.

“It ain’t about the snake at all!” he said, as they stepped off the sidewalk and over the train tracks which ran by the base of the Mountain. “It’s about what the old nigger said.”

6.

It was a year ago, 1943, and Malachi was nine years old. He was out with his older brothers, Zechariah and Elijah, and they were looking either for rutting dogs to gawk at or for a game of anything resembling baseball, whichever came first. They had no luck.

The old nigger sat waiting for a haircut on a bench on the sidewalk in downtown Wenham Point (‘nigger,’ Zechariah told his younger siblings, was a word only proper to use of uneducated blacks, never of civilized young men like themselves), and he’d overheard them talking of maybe going hunting up the Mountain.

“Don’t you’uns go up der,” he told them. “Dey’s de bad tings up der.”

Zechariah said, “What’s up there, old man? Something tougher than us?” and he laughed and flexed his biceps, holding his pose until his brothers reluctantly joined him.

But the old man laughed too. “Tings up der, dey eat yo arms right up!” cackling and leaning on his cane. “Dey suck em off yo bones like de drumstick!”

He spoke of a creature that was part mountain lion, but distinctly divorced from one; with a white coat like an albino but without red eyes, and a long, prehensile tail that could allow it to hang from a tree like a monkey. One might fall on top of you and have you half eaten before you ever knew it was there. If that failed, its howl could freeze you with terror just like a rabbit, for it was indistinguishable from the scream of a human woman.

He related a few accounts of hunters and campers having seen these animals in the wild, none of them proved or disproved. Chairs opened up in the barber shop, and the old man didn’t move. Eventually he lit a home-rolled cigarette with a matchbook from his shirt pocket, and the boys found spots around the bench to sit.

He went on to tell of Kilgore Manse standing lonesome in the deep woods on back of the Mountain, which four families had tried to tame. The first two men to do murder on that homestead were father and son. It was Christmas, and the grown son’s family had come home from across the river to spend the holiday with family. 1837, this was, and cold. The father drank more corn mash than was good for him on most nights, but on this one he had a sight more than any man ought to have (for warmth, he said), and early that morning he killed his son’s wife with a dirty stone he dug out of the creek. He was out in the yard trying to mount her corpse when they found him a little before dawn, and his son cut his throat with a fish scaler.

But the old man had forgotten himself, he said, and such tales were not for children. Suffice for an ending that the house had gone back to the wild, and there it sat, waiting for some ignorant soul to fill it with fodder again.

Malachi’s favorite, though, was the Tale of the Mud Snake, which goes like this:

In the old days on the Mountain, there was a pile of gold to be had, and the Lord found Himself unsure of what to do about it. The gold could not be gotten rid of, for that was against the rules of the game that He Himself had set in motion at the beginning of time.

What He did, in the end, was to hide it in a cave, and He told none what He did except the whippoorwill, the coyote, and the mud-snake.

The Lord brought they three to the bottom of the Mountain, and He told them where the cave was.

“Hold on a minute,” said Zechariah, mesmerized. “You got to prove you ain’t foolin us. Where’s that cave at?”

“It ain’t far,” said the old man. “You know whey dat murder was? On de train track?”

They nodded urgently and fiercely.

“Well. You just head on up the Mountain from there.”

Then he continued:

God told the three of them that of all the animals on the Mountain – the squirrels, the deer, the snipe, the crickets, and all the rest – only they were fit to have the gold. It would be a race to the cave, the Lord told them, and it would begin now, at this very moment.

The whippoorwill took to the trees and hopped from limb to limb at its own easy pace, its heart swelling with pride at what a clever bird it must be, for the Lord to have chosen it above all the others. The coyote would become distracted along the way by some prey or other, it was sure, and the mud-snake would be far too slow, crawling on its belly as it did. The whippoorwill did not worry.

But halfway up the Mountain, there came a commotion in the woods, of gasps and sighs and wailings.

“Brother Whippoorwill!” cried a raccoon whom the bird knew as it passed, “come and see! Your nest has dropped from its branch, and your eggs have scattered and broken in the dirt!”

The whippoorwill found its woman mourning over the gooey mess of their children.

“Some snake has been here,” said the raccoon, “though we never saw head nor tail of it.”

The whippoorwill had not the heart to continue the race.

The coyote bound madly through the thicket, which he knew well. He was not threatened by the mud-snake, he thought, for two reasons: because it was slow of travel, and because it had made prior disharmony with the Lord. He was not threatened by the whippoorwill because it was small, and even if by some chance it beat him to the cave, he would only kill it upon his arrival. Surely, the gold would be his.

So sure was he of victory that he stopped his running when he caught the scent of freshly dead hare, which was his favorite food. He could tell that it was close by, and there was no harm in a few moments’ delay. Besides, this was a day for celebration.

He turned west and after a minute’s sniffing came to a clearing where he found the hare. It was dead, as he had known, but peculiarly so: its blood had not been spilled, but its eyes had popped from its rodent-like skull.

The coyote never saw the man hidden in the top of the tree, who killed him with a spear through his brains, just where the spine met the skull. The last thing he thought was, “It looks to have been squeezed to death; suffocated.”

After a time, the Lord went up the Mountain to see how the race had come out. He passed a raccoon, which wished Him good morning, and a man who, though he could not see Him, was overcome by a mysterious impulse to reverence, and fell to his knees, thanking the Sun for his lucky slaying of the coyote-pest.

When the Lord reached the cave, He drew the rocks back from its entrance. Below Him was the gold, which He had placed there, but He found no champion gloating over it.

“I have won,” said the mud-snake, under the Lord’s feet, concealed by a scattering of leaves and pine straw. “The gold is mine.”

“So it is, mud-snake,” said the Lord. “You startled me. Have the others not yet arrived behind you?”

The mud-snake shook the treefall from itself and began to slither down the slope of the cave toward its prize.

“You know what happened,” said the mud-snake.

“That’s true,” said the Lord, shrugging and shaking His head, “I do.”

“I waited until the whippoorwill’s woman went to find food for herself,” said the mud-snake, “then I crawled up the tree to her nest. No animal cried out in warning, because you see, they could not tell me from the brown bark of the tree. I tipped the nest onto the ground, crushed the eggs which had not cracked in the fall, and was away to other business by the time any creature knew I had been there.

“I soon found a hare that was young and vital of life, and I told it of our race to the cave. I told it I would allow it half the gold if it were to run ahead to claim it for me, as it was very swift and I could only crawl sluggishly along on my belly. It agreed at once, but when it turned to go I pounced on it, and wrapped my coils around its belly, and I choked its life from it. I left it in a clearing for the coyote, and whose business if I noticed a human hunter in the trees nearby? He certainly did not notice me.”

The Lord said, “And then you came here, to hide from Me and to scare Me like a pranking imp. These are fell means by which you have got this gold, mud-snake. I am most displeased.”

“But you knew from the beginning I was going to do those things,” said the mud-snake. “Why punish me for doing things when You created me already knowing I was going to do them?”

The Lord did not answer, but neither did He move to deliver His wrath.

“I have an idea,” said the mud-snake. “The gold is here, and You won’t send it away, though You could. The same is true of me. You once took my legs away from me, but You will not destroy me, and I have not wronged You, God of Abraham. My enmity is with Woman, as You Yourself have decreed.”

“Come to the point,” said the Lord.

“I am content to lie here among my gold pieces,” said the mud-snake, “and sleep the world away. In return for this allowance, which I have earned justly, I would not come out to do these mischiefs I have done to the coyote and the whippoorwill. No animal will be plagued by myself, who is the color of the world and may go unseen. For if I may hide myself from You, oh Lord… what threat might I be to a man?”

It was still morning, and the Lord looked round the woods, at the little trials of life, and at its steady rhythm. He reached out with Himself and felt the souls of men nearby, who suffered worse than the animals when one of their own was taken.

“Very well,” He said. “Is there anything else?”

“Only one thing more,” said the mud-snake. “This is my gold; though I will not leave it to do the world needless harm, I will defend it, as any creature defends its home.”

The Lord said, “I will close the cave again with these stones, and that will make an end of the matter. Good riddance of you, mud-snake.”

The mud-snake said nothing while the Lord worked, but soon the chore was done, and the Lord breathed easier. He has never regretted it since.

And what happened to the mud-snake, none but He can say, who created him.

Zechariah, Elijah, and Malachi left the old timer where he sat, and they went home and asked their mother about the tales he’d told. She laughed as if she had heard them before, but said little about them, and kept whatever secrets she had.




7.

Benny stood wide-eyed, aghast. “Gold?”

Malachi nodded. “Gold.”

Benny swallowed. “Shoot, Malachi. Gold’s about the most expensive thing there is.”

Malachi began the ascent up the Mountain. Benny grabbed hold of a sturdy hickory limb as he began to pull himself up the incline. He rolled spit around in his mouth, thinking. It seemed to him that he’d heard something like this before, but he couldn’t place it.

“Well,” he said after a few minutes, beginning to huff, “how do we get the gold away from the snake?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Malachi said. “If there’s much of it, we could probably sneak up to the bottom of the pile and take some without ever waking him up.”

Benny’s feeling of vague deje vu persisted, annoying and silencing him.

“We’re almost there now,” Malachi said, lodging his boot into the crook of a stump against the ground for leverage.

“Good,” said Benny. “I’m about tired enough that she can leave her damn clothes on.”

Malachi’s eyes burned. “Come on,” he said, and kept climbing.

Benny watched him go, with a determination unmatched in himself at any point in his life thus far. He wondered about it; envied it. It was enough to bring him over the plateau where Malachi had stopped and called down breathlessly, “Here it is!”

Malachi was stooped over a bunch of mossy boulders, picking them up and methodically but quickly moving them out of the way. “We almost there now!”

Benny went over to help move the rocks, and he swirled the spit around in his mouth some more. He felt just on the verge of remembering what this reminded him of, and he was now thinking of that more than of any gold, or naked girls, or anything. Somehow it seemed a little more important just at the moment. More urgent.

Little by little, a hole opened up in the ground, a short tunnel which led to a drop off some six yards deeper. Benny barely noticed until Malachi was pulling him along behind.

They both got on their butts to slide down the tunnel, feet forward to catch them from falling over its edge. Mud gathered on their hands, and Malachi felt more than one earthworm squish to grime between his fingers.

They reached the end of the short tunnel, and Benny understood at once.

Benny’s mother made him go to the Wenham Point Public Library for Storytime every Tuesday afternoon during the summer. Mostly it was sissy stuff, and he hated it – The Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, Black Beauty, Beauty this and Beauty everything. But one book she had read to them over an entire summer two years ago was much better. It was a story about a funny little man who was fat and liked to eat, but a wizard came along and made him come thieving with a gang of elves, and they got into all kinds of scary adventures. This was the way the story ended.

“We’ve got to go, Malachi. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“You wait here then,” Malachi said. “I’ll go down and get it myself.”

“Wait!”

Now, remember, this is the truth; this is the secret that’s written on the paper, what the phrase would be if any of us could bear to repeat it the right way:

It wasn’t quite a drop off they’d come to, but it was a very steep descent, and he slid down quickly and roughly, noisily.

The stone blockage which had barred the ancient entrance was open fully now, and there was no mistaking all the shining gold for what it was, and it brought to mind every beautiful thing you could think of: wheat, honeysuckle, angels.

Incredibly, the dragon didn’t stir when Malachi crouched down and tip-toed over to the edge of the mountain of gold atop which it slept.

The wyrm (for this is what the vermin was called when last it was seen by men or by the sun) lay in a sort of camouflage. Its scales alternated apparently randomly between gold and brown, like capped teeth in the mud. The wings drooped from a puny joint on its back like tattered umbrellas.

I’ll pause for a moment, as Malachi did there by the horde. I believe, and I think you’ll agree with me, that there’s nothing sweeter in any possible world than a moment of clarity, in the midst of strife and confusion. The obvious answer to the question Malachi and Benny had been asking themselves was, of course, one. Of whatever they came up with, whether it be a dollar or an emerald. If she wouldn’t do it for one, she wouldn’t do it at all. Malachi made his decision.

He took one gold piece from the slope in front of him, about the level of his chest. That was enough.

A deep rumbling began in the Earth, as it will every so often near Wenham Point, and in a moment the lair was shaking as if Lord God had taken it up and shot it from His heavenly cannon. Heavy coins flew and landed in extravagant puddles on the stone floor.

It was Benny who saw its eye slam instantly open, an eye which was orange and slit vertically like a cat’s. It turned its long face toward him and rose silently as the plates in the ground screamed around them. The coiled joints unwound slenderly until it stood like a cobra in a basket, and then it roared.

The blast of it took him off his feet.

In Montoya, further up on the plateau of the Mountain, the wind of it blew past a boy on a bicycle, and he thought of the panthers and bears which were said to have once lived on the Mountain. He shuddered, and put it out of his mind.

In Wenham Point, a woman laboring over her wash in the yard heard it, and thought dark thoughts which she hardly dared acknowledge even in her heart. She scrubbed harder, humming a hymn to herself.

Somewhere in the woods, where no town claims authority, an old black man still fresh from his annual haircut sat smoking the wildwood flower on his sunken porch. The roar came to him from all over the acoustic bluff, and he knew exactly what it was. He grinned rottenly, and pulled deep on his roll.

Many heard the noise, too many to know. These will do.

The last complete, conscious thought Benny had time to think was: “You can’t feel the heat coming off them; they just make the fire when it comes.”

Malachi had trouble all his life recalling just the order of things after the dragon roared its angry breath onto Benny’s hair, his skin, his clothes. He only remembered scrambling back up the rock, that the world kept shaking, and the sound of Benny squealing high, all the way out of the hole and then down the mountain a ways before he fell for good:

“I’m sorry, God! I’m sorry, God! I’m SORRY, God!”

The Mountain stopped shaking as Malachi sprinted precariously down the trail of lit saplings to where Benny lay. Enough stones had fallen to close the hole they had opened, and why Malachi was spared, or if he was at all, none can be sure.

Malachi looked at him for only a moment, and that was enough. He didn’t look like charcoal, as Malachi had expected he would. He looked like a tasty roast. He smelled like one, too. Malachi went on down the Mountain.

He walked for a long time, neither thinking nor remembering; only moving along. He would know where he was going when he arrived. Sometimes he fiddled with the single gold coin in his pocket.

It was getting toward three in the afternoon when he stepped over the train tracks on the easternmost edge of Wenham Point, where the woods stopped and the ground leveled off. He picked up a railroad spike that had pulled free and considered it for a moment, then left it where it had been and put it out of his mind.

The people were fewer on the sidewalks downtown than they had been in the morning. The day had become moderately cool. Malachi had almost walked right by the place he needed to go before he realized that he’d come to the end of his wandering.

McCURDY’S DRUGS said the sign over the door. But Malachi wasn’t going inside.

In a tiny park between McCurdy’s and BOOKS, not much more than a patch of grass and a slab cement picnic table, Wendy Goolesby sat in her lightest sundress, and her hair was wheat, honeysuckle, angels. She sipped from a tall, dazzlingly pink strawberry shake, and she had her eyes locked on some bum across the table. She leaned over it, and he sat back.

Malachi steeled himself for only another moment, and then stood up straight and marched over to them.

“Hello, Wendy,” he said.

The bum had been in mumbling mid-sentence, and they had not heard Malachi’s approach.

“Well hey there, Malachi!” she said, and smiled. That helped.

“Hey,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you for a minute. In private.”

“Heehee!” said the bum. “I’d done got used to having you to myself now, Wendy. I wasn’t expectin any competition. How much you packin, nigger boy?”

“Travis,” she said. “Malachi – where’s Benny?”

“He got burned up by a dragon. Can I talk to you? Over there on the sidewalk?”

“Sure,” she said, and turned. “Be nice.”

Malachi waited while she stood, and walked to the street step by step with her.

He dug in the front of his overalls for the coin, and when he showed it to her she sighed deeply, but so she thought he didn’t hear. Except he did. That helped, too.

“Where did you get that?”

“Wendy,” he said, “me and Benny went and got this gold coin for you. We – well… I guess just me, now. I was hoping you’d give me a peek under your dress for it.”

Malachi’s cheeks were flushed to boiling, and it took all of his discipline to hold an erection at bay.

She giggled only a little, and that wasn’t too bad. “Awww,” she said. “Let me see it.”

He handed the coin to her, and she held it above her head to catch a ray of the weakening sun. For a moment, Malachi could not tell the difference between the two.

She said, “Little boys aren’t supposed to ask such things of young ladies,” and handed it back to him.

Malachi shook his head. “But them other boys – ”

“I’m just kidding you, Malachi. I’d think about it, you know, but you’ve got to give a girl some credit. You and me both know that coin ain’t nothing but fool’s gold.”

But it wasn’t, and she knew it. He knew that she knew it.

“Well,” he said, “goodbye, Wendy.”

“Goodbye, Malachi. Hey, tell Benny to come on home if you see him.”

He’d already turned, and he gave no answer. She shrugged, then went back to the bum and the ice cream.

Malachi walked for some time more, but now he knew just where he was going, and he thought of many things – mostly of how hard everything was, how little a chance there was of getting anything to go right. And he thought a little of Benny, but fiercely little; time would come for that later, and probably sooner than he’d like. Eventually, he was going to have to show them where he was, allowing that the coyotes kept away from what was left.

But save that, he thought. Save it for later.

When he reached the pond, he saw a copperhead snake sunning itself on the bank nearby, and he shook his head. Then he took the coin out of his pocket for the last time, and tried to skip it across the water. Of course, it only fell gracelessly and landed with a tiny poinking sound and sunk to the bottom, where, as far as he knew, it would settle into the muck and wait, undisturbed and unseen, for a thousand years.


THE END

Crushedpeartire wine

I think there's probably something absolutely elemental about the Mountain in the sour wine that congeals in little puddles on the pavement after you crush a wild pear under a car tire and let the fruit-and-rubber hybrid mess rot in the sun for about a week. Probably it's magical in some way. Or it'll be like honey, you know, where you can eat some that's grown locally and that'll help your allergies, only if you drink crushedpeartire wine you'll gain magically powerful influence over key people in your community. So come by my house if you want to try this stuff out, but make it fast! My dogs are at it as we speak, and the old one plans to run for mayor. God help us all.