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  “How about the grass?” asked Walt next. He never worried too much about this one. If anything, marijuana stood as their one constant. Never too up, never too down – people were always willing to smoke themselves into a safe haze. Pot was safer than pills and needles, more acceptable in the culture at large. Movie stars smoked pot, comedians smoked pot, neighbors smoked pot, teachers smoked pot, everybody smoked pot. Hell, now and again came news that one state or another might consider legalization. The cigarettes, the gambling, the pussy business, the numbers on those jiggled up and down like a fisherman’s float on a pond surface, but not marijuana. The numbers for marijuana could be counted on for long–term consistency.

  She bit her lower lip and stared at the ledger.

  “Don’t tell me our pot business is off, too” he said, incredulous.

  “The numbers are down,” she said again.

  This made for a shitty evening.

  He thought she must be getting close to finishing for the night. If she wasn’t close, he’d have to turn in early and get the update in the morning. He could feel his mind fogging, overcome with harsh figures.

  Just as he was about to say good–night, she closed the books and handed him a piece of paper with a single number written on it: the total take for the day.

  He took the paper, read it, raised an eyebrow in her direction.

  “You’re sure this is right?” he said.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “The numbers are down.”

  “Hell yeah they’re down. Obviously they’re pretty damn far down.” He pushed his tongue into his upper lip, a nervous habit. “Is it Elmer, is he making a dent in us?”

  “I don’t think it’s Elmer.”

  “Well if it’s not Elmer, then what is it?”

  “It’s not Elmer.”

  Walt Slone believed it was Elmer. Period. Five years ago Elmer Canifax was a piss ant who mostly drew his market from the kids that gathered around his farmhouse like crows in winter, hungry for cheap beer and bags of marijuana mixed with pencil shavings. But that was five years ago and in the Slones’ business, five years was a geologic era. A lot happened in five years. The kids were growing up. Now, the kids must want more than cheap beer and a quick toke. Now, Elmer could make a dent in their business. That had to be the answer.

  “I don’t think it’s Elmer,” she repeated. “The numbers are down all over. It’s not just one thing or the other. It’s everything.”

  He shook his head. They’d worked so hard. Laid groundwork, made money, worked on the details. Diversified, made sure they weren’t painted into corners. The portfolio was both wide and deep. How could they be down? They couldn’t be down. It made no sense. “The car wash? The quarter machines?”

  “Down.”

  “Both the convenience stores, all the rental property?”

  “Down.”

  “The Bears Den? Surely they’re not down.”

  “They’re down.”

  He hesitated, not sure he wanted to ask the next question. “Even the pills?” It would be a bad sign if the pills were down.

  “The pills are down,” she said.

  She saw the frustration in his face and knew that it would soon boil over. She slid the ledger across the table so he could look at it. He trusted her with the mathematics but sometimes he liked to see for himself. “It’s right. Right as can be,” she said. “Not good. I understand that. But right is right. The numbers don’t lie. They’re damn sure down all over. I’m sorry.”

  Walt got up from the table and paced around the room. The news burrowed into his heart.

  The pills were supposed to take everything to the next level, spread their business the length of I–64, into West Virginia, Indiana, maybe all the way to St. Louis, who knew. The pills were the Next Big Thing. Hell, by now they were the Current Big Thing. Kids, parents, grandparents, whores, soccer moms, construction workers, preachers, cops, criminals –– everybody loved pills. This was the great wide–open market; anywhere there was a mouth that swallowed or a nose that inhaled, there was a home for pills. Vicodin, Lortab, Oxycontin –– the father, the son, the holy ghost. Everybody loved pills. Look at the news. People were dying out there. How the hell could the numbers be down? What about the damned pills?

  She looked at him, expecting the blow up would come any second, fast and hard. But her father only walked over to the window and peered out at the night.

  “You think it’s the meth?” he asked without turning around.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  But they shared the same feeling.

  “It’s that goddamned meth,” he said, shaking his head in complete disbelief. “You got people cookin’ that shit up on their own time, layin’ around the house all goddamn day mixin’ house paint, cough syrup and Miracle–Gro. You got six year olds huffin’ drain cleaner before breakfast. It’s too easy, that’s what it is. Hell, it makes me wanna suck on a toilet cake and see if I can pop a chubby. Of course our numbers are down. What the hell do they need us for if they got the fuck all high of their life underneath the bathroom sink?”

  “The stuff moves on the street,” Karen said. “Maybe we should look into it.” She hated mentioning it. She’d mentioned it before. The answer never changed.

  “Hell no,” said her father. “Forget that shit. You wanna talk about medicine, we got weed, we got pills, that’s all the medicine anybody needs right there. We can bounce back on that. Don’t need meth. We ain’t down that much.”

  The answer was always the same. The numbers were down, but they weren’t down that much. Not yet, anyway. Weed and pain medicine, those were government tested and approved. It was strictly a matter of distribution from that point. Meth was different, though. Meth was seedy, evil, an abomination cooked up by miscreants in shoddy trailers and rundown shacks. Meth was ruin. The Slone family wanted no part of ruin.

  Walt bent his head back, shook his shoulders, loosened his body up, then went to the table and sat back down.

  He looked at her for a moment. Then he said, “Did you know some of these kids snort bath salts now?”

  Karen nodded. “I’ve heard that. They’re not really bath salts, that’s just the name.”

  “Bath salts. Whatever. Pretty soon these little bastards are gonna be smokin’ Windex and bourbon whiskey.”

  “They probably already do,” she said.

  “I heard some of the worst ones shoot meth straight up their own assholes. They get a needle and cook it up, then stick it right in. Can you believe that?”

  She nodded. She could believe it.

  On that note, the conversation went quiet. Walt’s attention drifted back towards the soundless television and he watched it for longer than he really wanted.

  Karen closed her final ledger, set it on top of the stack, pushed the whole stack out of their way. She clasped her hands and looked at him for a long moment, then finally decided it would be best to change the subject.

  “Election’s coming up next year,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he acknowledged.

  “We should start talking about that soon.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  She shook her head. She was the only one who could get away with shaking her head at him. “Fine. But if you want to keep your chair in the courthouse, you might want to start thinking about the election. We’ve got to get the signs printed, the baseball caps, the extra bottles of liquor.”

  There stood little chance that he actually might not get the votes he needed come either the primary in the spring or the general election next fall, but they still needed the signs, the baseball caps, and the liquor. These were the fuel that kept the machine running. The election meant little; the machine meant everything. The machine meant support. Support meant customers. Customers meant good business.

  He understood all of this. Still, he said nothing, only looked down and inhaled deep, through his nose. She knew he was thinking especially hard, whenever he breathed that way.

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sp; Several minutes ticked away before he cast his eyes back towards her. “I like my chair in the courthouse,” he said. “The chair helps us, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll order the signs tomorrow morning,” she said.

  PART TWO: THE GONERS

  BEARS DEN

  On the southern edge of Sewardville – the opposite end of town from Walt Slone’s house – stood a ramshackle old bar, constructed of cement block painted beige. It was the only place in the county that served alcohol by the drink (legally, anyway). A Vietnam vet named Ray Hoover opened the establishment in 1976. He painted a gigantic Old Glory flag on the outer wall facing the parking lot. It just seemed right. The sign out front announced RAY’S BAR, but it wasn’t much known by that name.

  A decade later, Ray Hoover died in front of that flag. A biker from Ohio slashed Ray’s throat with a busted Miller Lite bottle, the culmination of a drunken brawl that started in the men’s room and spilled outside. The next week, Ray’s daughter Lorna took up the place, and she’d run it ever since. The sign out front still said RAY’S BAR, but nowadays most everyone who went there called it the Bears Den. Not a soul could explain why, since no bear of any sort had been spotted in the area since the 1940s.

  Whatever the name, the concrete–block little bar with the giant American flag painted on one outside wall was the favored haunt of Sewardville’s drinking finest. Boone Sumner’s brother Jimmy went there more than most; he was indeed the finest of the finest when it came to drinking. Every night, Jimmy stayed belly–up to the bar until either he couldn’t hold his head up or Lorna tossed him out the front door, whichever happened first. If a day went by that Jimmy didn’t show up at all, Lorna would call Harley Faulkner’s funeral home to see if he’d turned up there instead.

  Tonight, though, brought no need for such a call. Jimmy Sumner sat in his customary spot atop a stool at the left end of the bar. He wore a ratty old army jacket, pulled the collar up just beneath his thin, pockmarked face with locks of salt and pepper hair spilling down onto the camo cloth. He sat not far from the jukebox, which was mostly filled with Steve Earle and AC/DC discs, and also a few from the singer–songwriter types like Springsteen, and Ryan Adams.

  “Lucky Now” kicked across the room, melancholy, lonely, brokenhearted. Jimmy figured it was one hell of a good time for another drink. He ordered up another shot of bourbon whiskey. Lorna brought it, and Jimmy slammed it back, setting the empty shot glass on the bar in front of him.

  “The lights’ll draw you in, and the dark will take you doooown, and the night will break your heart, but only if you’re lucky now,” sang Ryan Adams. Jimmy joined him for the next line, barely in tune, “And if the lights should draw you in, the dark will take you down, and love will break your heart, but only if you’re lucky now.

  Jimmy traced his current state of obliteration back to around four–thirty that afternoon, when he belted down the day’s first taste of straight Maker’s Mark. That was seven hours ago; yet now, even though the clock headed towards midnight, he still felt like he was just getting started.

  Then again, Jimmy always felt like he was just getting started.

  “Hey Lorna. Bring me some more of that brown liquor,” he said to the hefty woman behind the bar, a plump lady twice Jimmy’s size. She was pushing fifty now but looked ten years older than that, if one judged by the wrinkles in her haggard face and the nicotine–yellow sheen on her teeth.

  “Where’s your brother?” she asked, pouring him another shot of bourbon.

  Jimmy smiled. “Boone? Fuck Boone,” he said. “Why you gotta be askin’ about my brother anyway?”

  “Somebody ought to come get you, Jimmy. You finish up that drink and get on out, you hear?”

  He bit his lip, swished the bourbon taste around in his mouth. Bourbon carried a sweet burn, which he liked. “Yeah. Brother ain’t comin’. Fuck him if he did.” He swallowed a thick curl of saliva. “Boone, he’s prob’ly sittin’ at home, whinin’ about his baby girl or some shit. Y’all think he’s such a goddamn bad ass.”

  “Nobody said Boone was a bad ass,” Lorna said.

  “Fuck they didn’t. Y’all think he’s a real shitkicker. I know. I know what y’all think. Now give me some more Maker’s, why doncha?” He tapped the empty shot glass on the bar.

  “You don’t need no damn Maker’s,” said Lorna. “You don’t need anything but to go on home before you get yourself or somebody else hurt.”

  Said Jimmy, “You don’t know what I need.”

  Said Lorna, “You don’t, either.”

  Jimmy went quiet. He looked around the bar, saw a couple of ragged old men that sat in the same corner every night, figured he would sit in that corner himself whenever they died.

  He came back at Lorna one more time. “Just one more shot. That’s all. One more little shot. Then I’ll git.”

  “Nah,” she said. “You’ll git now.”

  But he wouldn’t git now. Two fifths’ worth of bourbon coursed through the veins in his wiry body, and it still wasn’t nearly enough. Most folks would be passed out in the floor or puking in the bathroom sink, but not Jimmy Sumner. Jimmy Sumner thought two fifths of liquor was nothing but a head start; check back when he got through another half gallon. It so happened that in Sewardville there was only one good place with enough alcohol and good music. Jimmy came to the Bears Den so he could sit with the rednecks and the coal miners and drink Maker’s Mark bourbon and listen to the by–God old jukebox and fuck if that wasn’t what he was gonna do.

  Ryan Adams faded out of the juke, and soon some dirt–fuzz opening licks from Angus Young’s guitar cut through the Bears Den atmosphere in much the same way that a rusty machete hacked through a briar thicket.

  Bon Scott wailed “Go Down” across the grimy room for the eighth time that night. The song played so much on this jukebox that sometimes one patron or another felt the need to ask if the machine was stuck. Jimmy liked it that way – the same song, over and over and over and over. He often told people it just plain fit his compulsive personality.

  He slid his empty shot glass across the bar, towards Lorna. “Fill ‘er up.”

  She watched the plain little glass come her way, shook her head, but had no other visible reaction.

  “I’ll trade you half a pain pill for a drink,” he tried again.

  She just looked at him.

  “Come on, Lorna.”

  “You ain’t suited for a beggar,” she said.

  He waited. Lorna showed not even the smallest sign that she felt at all inclined to do as Jimmy asked, but still he waited. And waited. And he waited some more.

  While he sat there and he waited, he stared at Lorna’s hefty cannonball breasts, each one bigger than his head, the pair of them barely contained by her dark red turtleneck sweater. He imagined his head could rest between them perfectly, that they would look good in the moonlight that shone through his bedroom window. He thought he might ask if she’d take him out back and show those beautiful titties off for a dollar. Maybe for five he could cop a decent feel.

  Before he could make that mistake, a tall, rugged sumbitch walked into the Bears Den. It was Deputy Caudill, a lifer in the Seward County sheriff’s department who’d come into law enforcement twenty years ago with Sheriff Slone, and since earned every ounce of his skull–cracker reputation.

  CAUDILL

  The deputy wore a loose, dark blue sheriff’s department uniform that looked like a paramilitary outfit, only with a badge pinned on the shirt. He had a permanent look of discordance. Red gin blossoms spidered around his nostrils and disappeared into his thick sandpaper mustache, a monster of bristly facial hair that looked as though it might have shined shoes in a previous life.

  When Caudill sat down, he showed Jimmy a cold smile, curled up beneath the hair monster, although calling the brief gesture a smile was like binding up dead tree bark and calling that a book.

  Jimmy paid no mind. “Bring me some Maker’s, dammit,” he told Lorna one more time.
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  “Jimmy, you done drank all the Maker’s,” she drawled back, while she was already walking over to serve Caudill.

  “Rot gut, then,” said Jimmy. “Don’t matter. Just bring it.”

  “Go home,” Lorna said. She pulled a glass from under the bar, set it down in front of Caudill and filled it with cheap Beefeater gin. His favorite.

  “Thank ya, honey,” the deputy said. He took his drink in one hand, had a pull, then showed Jimmy a stiff middle finger.

  Jimmy twisted on his seat. He felt a creeping illness. He rubbed his eyes, hoping the sudden slosh in his stomach would go away, but it did no such thing.

  The sick orange light of the Bears Den smeared across his brain; neon beer signs mingled with the cigarette smoke and fluorescent overheads. The walls and ceiling slid around. For a second he thought he might fall to the floor, but grabbed on to the edge of the weathered maplewood bar and pulled himself back from the brink.

  “Lorna. Lorna! Hey, Lorna!” he said.

  She occupied herself with Caudill.

  Jimmy tilted back on his stool and reached for the little blessings he carried around in his jacket pocket.

  The pills.

  His hand closed around the amber plastic of a medicine bottle half–filled with Oxycodone. Suddenly everything felt right with the world again.

  He closed his eyes, raised both eyebrows and held them in that high position. He did that a lot when thoroughly hammered the way he was thoroughly hammered right now. Rolling the pill bottle in his palm, he thought about telling big bad Deputy Caudill to suck a long hard one. Instead, he just whispered, “Hell with this,” because he knew nobody in the room was listening. He’d been in this spot enough to know that nobody ever listened to him.

  But this time Lorna did. “Fine. Hell with it,” she agreed.

  “Hell yes,” Jimmy concurred. He popped open the Oxy bottle and caught a single white gem with a deft motion he’d honed over the last several years. OC’s, Lortabs, Vicodin, Xannies, these were his friends. He knew how to handle his friends.