Ryan Burden is a computer security analyst in Charleston, South Carolina. He spends most of his time at work surreptitiously writing, and is annoyed when people ask him what his hobbies are. He has work currently online at the Quills Quarterly, Wilde Oats, and Writers' Bloc Magazine.
Babylon, The Dead Have No God (May 20, 2010. Issue 17.)
Danny wanted a son so that he could tell him, while there was still time, how they used to pile the trash like an empty funeral mound on the flat strip of land overlooking the dump. Back then they would light it once a month without fail, starting at one end so it burned along slowly like a monstrous, reeking cigar. I guess he wanted to sit on the edge of his son’s bed and linger over the memory the way he had lingered that first day with Malone, sitting on the tailgate-down bed of the older boy’s truck, its hood spattered white with three-year-old bird shit. I guess he thought he’d describe it like he had described it to me, in picturesque detail: the unexpected green flames that leapt from the hollow post of a child’s bed, the blistering stench of a dead man’s pillow blowing away with it the feverish dreams of sixty-odd years and the chest wrenching triumph of blood-red flames over the slick silicon glaze of an antiquated refrigerator at the end of a hard-fought two hour siege. Malone had told him that it was better than drinking and a hell of a lot easier. He said (like he would know) that drinking just covered up the dead like a blanket soaked in kerosene, but after the fire they were gone from the world like the forty pounds of grocery bags saved up to be burnt spectacularly at once instead of each one on its own, transmuted into nothing like the wet bloated dogs’ bodies that people snuck into old suitcases and hollowed couches because it was an even nickel disposal fee at the town vet. I only remember it so well because it was so hard to hear the things that another man had taught my son, and harder when I found underneath the maniacal a cleverly generated truth to what Danny said he had learned that day: that there is nothing that isn’t worth burning except life itself, because only in life is there something that responds to the fire purposefully, in a way more spiritual, more soulful than the simple flame reflected in the smooth hard mirror of the cornea.
That was before Malone had taken him and Elizabeth South to Tennessee to start his sham clinic, before the women from that clinic started having 
their living abortions and before Danny finally decided that the man he called prophet might just be off his rocker. But even the lying, even the sight of those unnatural fish things emerging week after week from the soft conception mounds below their mothers’ angrily determined faces couldn’t shake his belief in the things Malone had told him: converted truths, some vaguely high-religious, some generated apparently in the cyclone of adolescent thought as beacons to mark a wayward path from eye to wall and back again. He would tell the son he didn’t have in the voice that to a child is like the voice of God that from this lesson of the flaming trash heap depended all the happiness of his entire unlived life, because even though Malone had said it he hadn’t said it strongly enough. No, Malone had said it in the voice of a stubborn old man, not the voice that was like the voice of God, so Danny took it as any eleven-year-old mesmerized by flames that moved like a lapping sea over the destroyed relics of lives ended long before his birth would take it; like a piece of colored glass he finds by the side of the road and keeps with him as a curiosity, just until he finds his pocket too full and tosses it to make room for a ball of tar melted by the sun.
But while what happened in Jackson had destroyed Danny’s faith in his prophet it had also apparently thrown everything he’d been taught into sharper relief, like turning down the light on an etching. Since the trial he had not only remembered the fires but fixated on them as the prime symbol if not progenitor of his entire convoluted moral system. He now thought Malone had underestimated the importance of other lessons as well, which terrified him because for a kid just past nineteen Malone had had a sense of moral importance that would have astonished a Wesleyan preacher. At that age his seemingly incorrupted virtue was hard to figure, except that the others had always hated him in the illogical way kids have of hating – because he slurred his speech a little and sometimes lisped, because all the pretty girls liked him and he wouldn’t do anything about it, because he crossed one knee over the other in class and answered his teacher with a mouth that was always full of spit and because their mothers had told them that his mother was a trashy whore who took a daily fifth of black velvet with him inside her and that that meant that he was an alcoholic too, or else would be soon. So far as I know that prediction never panned out, but the kids had hated him nonetheless because their parents had told them to, and fifteen years or so of being hated tends to turn kids either hard or rotten with the dumber ones almost always going rotten. And when they do it doesn’t have to be a hard turn away from morality but might just as well be one toward it. Malone was proof enough of that, and proof of what too much morality will do which is turn a man hollow, hard as stone on the outside but empty within, so that he snaps and shatters at the first good jar.
Daniel was proud that Malone had picked him before his sister Elizabeth. Even though in the end he’d taken both of them to that city of thumpers it was Daniel who he’d first taken to see the fires and Daniel who he had first promised to make a prince in his platonic kingdom – to stand beside him on the bloody rostrum where everyone could see him and whisper his name to one another in the dark. And like any other brat in that god-loving generation he believed it and leapt like a stiff dog at the chance to be envied, even if it was for nothing at all. He brought the prophet to meet his sister Elizabeth who was twelve and didn’t care what the kid said about Calvin’s polemic or something he called conditional sin, only that his tanned face was long and smooth like his body and that his ass was shaped like the curve of a bell. He took her hot little heart and the two of them brought the kid home like they should have brought boyfriends and girlfriends five years later, all smiles and eager to please. We weren’t entirely sure about him because, after all, he was almost a man. But he didn’t say anything about the importance of life for life’s sake or the necessity of immediately burning anything dead or for that matter the importance of him getting off with our son, so that when he had gone Catherine had said wasn’t it sad and told them be kind to him he has so few friends he has to play with an eleven-year old. I’d thought then that God only knew what they were playing at out behind the pile of garbage on the ridge overlooking the dump but I didn’t say anything because you can’t accuse someone of making you feel uncertain. I just shut up and kept the peace, exactly like I did ten years later when Danny told me he wanted a son to tell all of this to exactly like writing it down but warmer, so that at least if there was ever a fire it could run, and I just said I remembered the day he brought Malone home and hoped like hell he had sense enough to quit talking. I should have known it wouldn’t work. By twenty-five the bloody prophet’s poison had had an awfully long time to work. The sickening tenets and the boardwalk hawker’s way of revealing them had become a comfortable habit like watching football or drinking and so talking to Dan was never like a conversation but always like a goddamn prayer meeting. He went on telling me like a father talking to a son that there were things I never knew about the day he’d gone to see the fires, like how Malone had taken him gently by the hair as the flames began to die and kissed him on the forehead, and how it was during that kiss that he had become devoted. And how just a few weeks later in the basement of his mother’s house he’d let Malone show him how to purge what he called the body’s will to sin with a man instead of a woman, because while He couldn’t prevent the ones that came it was not God’s will that there be so many children in the world.
My son: biting his knuckles for the goddamn bloody prophet of Jackson. It didn’t get my blood up like it should have. Mostly because I’d already suspected it but also because the kid had taken my children away from me for ten years to use as some kind of disciple-slaves two and a half states away, so even a gut-wrenching revelation like that wasn’t bound to come as much of a shock. When he took them Dan was still a kid and I didn’t get him back until he was already grown, until the clinic patients started giving birth to that nightmare of deformities – kids with mannequin faces and half-wits with too much spit – until Malone had to run like a bit dog and Danny found maybe a little bit of air in all that suffocating darkness. I didn’t even get Elizabeth back then. She followed along with the little chuff, I guess because she had been more interested in the long tan body she couldn’t have, the hairless chest that she had never seen uncovered, than the kid’s sallow-faced morals since the beginning. Even after two years at home the bastard may as well still have my son because if it isn’t clear enough already Danny isn’t much like the kid I wanted anymore. Hell, he isn’t the kind of kid anyone would want but it isn’t as though you can throw them back like you would a ruined fish so after a while I just gave in to having him around. For the first year and a half he took the last bus each night back from the factory where he does the job I left behind. Then we would sit like a couple of old fags, me drinking beer and scotch because I’ve made my peace with death and him drinking tea and warm milk because he’s still unnaturally scared of it, and for nearly two years we managed to avoid saying anything about the man they called the bloody prophet of Jackson. Right up until Danny was ready to burst like an unmolested boil with all his disgusting excitement at the possibility of pumping everything he believed in short hot bursts of sermonizing into the blank unknowing son he didn’t have. He said it didn’t matter what Malone had done in the coward’s safety of a Tennessee slum with the clinic patients who’d trusted him or the monsters he’d helped them have because in the first place it wasn’t Malone’s fault that they drank and drugged themselves into chronic oblivion, just praying through the haze that it would rot the kid to death from inside so they could have it sucked out the way they’d wanted it to begin with, and in the second place a man’s mistakes didn’t make his thoughts any less true.
I didn’t have to ask him how he planned to reconcile straight sex with his faggot religion because he may be rotten but he’s also smart, and it seemed as though during all the quiet of that first year and a half when I had hoped he was rediscovering the world of the gentiles he was really just matching up his beliefs with his desires like freaks at a key party, so now he could break the vow of purity he’d made because in the first place he’d made it to Malone who was a proven fake and in the second he could not allow the word to die. He had decided that it was alright, exactly as it had been alright for Malone to tell the clinic patients he was killing babies when in fact he was just in there twiddling his thumbs so the children they wanted killed wouldn’t die. The only difference was that Malone had been wrong: it was never alright to lie even to save a life, because after Dan had seen the monsters born he’d decided that there was one thing more important than life and that that thing was the truth. I didn’t even ask him what the hell truth meant because I already knew the answer. He’d told me himself the only time I’d asked him how in God’s hell he could think it was a good idea to run off with a simpleminded pimp like Malone: he said that true believers just know.
That, goddamn it, had scared the hell out of me. So when he left for work one day I called up Leon, who answered what’s shakin’ boss you’re a little late getting’ in like we’d just spoken yesterday even though it had been three years since I’d retired and I hadn’t found any reason to look him up until then. I knew about the stuff because we were the warehouse guys, the lowest caste, and they used to make us go kill weeds on the front lawn because they didn’t have the money to hire a service. It was Leon who’d noticed the warning while we were sitting around behind the building sneaking a beer. He’d read it out loud in mock horror, improper exposure may result in birth defects impotence or the inability to become pregnant, then showed us the label where it was set among less serious dangers like liver damage and cancer so we’d know what kind of stuff we were mixing in the spreaders once a month, getting it all over our hands and clothes and probably in our beer; just so we’d know the dangers we were risking to make sure Checkrow Agricultural didn’t look as shitty from the outside as it did from the big picture window in the boss’s office that overlooked the house floor. After that whenever we went on weed duty Leon would say it was time for his monthly contraception. We’d tell the smart little college fags on the crew not to worry because all their little swimmers were going to end up in the toilet anyway. And just like we all remembered everything longer than we should have because there wasn’t that much of it, Leon remembered the joke and met me at the warehouse door with a gallon bucket and a bar of chocolate from the vending machine to give to the new girl he was sure I had, since I’d decided to go back on the pill. I said without him asking that it was for the scotch broom I’d planted last summer thinking it was a yellow variegate because the picture looked kind of the same and now it looked like if I let it get to another season I’d never get a second chance to knock it out. He laughed and I said ain’t this shit expensive though, like you wouldn’t believe. He said he didn’t want to know because it probably came out of his check. I shot him a half-hearted wink and left.
Elizabeth came home in November. Until she did Danny was out most nights as soon as work ended and floating half days as often as possible, tossing weak beer and chatting up the cougars at the Foxhole, a place he said he’d never set foot in, trying like politicians do to appear like a common sinner and looking for someone to have his child. He said it didn’t matter to him who the mother was since compared to him everyone else wasn’t more than bottom rot. He only cared about finding one fast and making sure she was willing, because though he could have managed an accident he was still unprepared to lie. It turned out to be a harder sell than he’d expected, of course, so that before long he was out so often it felt like I was running a boarding house. He was treating me like a woman, come to expect dinner in the fridge and a pot of tea close to the stove where he could heat it up quick but I wasn’t as upset as I should have been since it made it easy to get the stuff into him once I had it. The first night was a wash. I thought it was a lot of tea and not much poison after all but that night he’d made his own after tasting it and retching, so afterwards I scaled it back. Within a week he was eating like a teenage girl and bitching about cramps like one too until it wasn’t much different than having Elizabeth back. I wasn’t worried though because Danny had always avoided doctors like a kid with a drug problem and now after his thorough brainwashing he thought they were insufferable heathens, trying to spit up through the sky at God. When he started sugaring his tea like a kid, complaining all the time about his goddamn cotton-mouth, I upped the dose and prayed his unused seed was as thin and faded as he was.
I was willing to shave something neat off Danny’s wasted life to save the world a repeat of the Jackson horror but I wasn’t willing to go to jail over it, which is why I decided to give it a rest the day his face erupted like a preteen leper. It didn’t say anything about that on the jug and I’ll admit it scared me off pretty fast: like carrion worms under the skin I kept expecting to move, to make his lips mumble and eyes pull back in accusation.
The night Elizabeth came home I heard my two children talking quietly in the kitchen beneath me, after midnight like they hadn’t done for over ten years. I dreamt unnatural dreams of pock-faced men in panting humid backrooms and of the fecal progeny of their hellish unions.
Despite his pitted face Dan kept up his visits to the lounge, though he came home earlier now to sit with Elizabeth and talk about all the things they thought no one else understood. They both hated him now, the bloody prophet Malone, Danny for the same reason that everyone else hated him: because of the plague of children who would never be much more than animals but who would eat just as much as anyone else, and Elizabeth in part because he had never apologized for making her lie to those women in the clinic (for which she had at first forgiven him) but mostly because he’d decided suddenly one night in November that some things he’d thought were sinful may not be and had tried to experiment on her to find out. She had not only refused to forgive him for this but it had made her take back her forgiveness for everything else and leave him crying in a Preston Street flat with the roaches in the bedroom and the little kids who threw stones at the windows to make him look out so they could laugh at him, and come back home to hide from everyone but her brother who would understand and her father who wasn’t allowed to stop loving her. I was happy the kids were back even if they were a couple of cowardly fanatics, a fag and a whore who wouldn’t give up their ludicrous morality even though they hated the bastard who’d given it to them.
When Malone had cut and run he’d left his two disciples hesitant enough to get caught when the cavalry showed up. The judge had only let them off because they always went mute as soon as the courtroom doors closed and no one could prove they’d known what Malone was doing. For a half-wit he’d covered his actions well and of course it’s hard working with a plaintiff in absentia so they’d had a tough time getting him convicted, much less his two disciples who he had sheltered enough that they may not have known the service he was offering was outside the law and may not have known that he was only pretending to perform it in the end. Everyone thought they’d been brainwashed anyway, a comforting little circumstance that I was ready to believe in too until Elizabeth ran back to him and Danny came home but started hanging out at the community center gym instead of the bar or the house like I’d expected him to, making it unabashedly apparent that he wasn’t going to let either a small generation of unintentional imbeciles or a simple courtroom verdict loose his hold on insanity. Two years with Danny had shown me I wasn’t going to undo anything so when Elizabeth swung back I just let the two of them keep their own counsel and pretended to forget they’d ever run. It was difficult again with the bad blood in the house, either mine or theirs depending on who you asked, but none of us were much disposed to try cleaning it. We talked sometimes about things that made no difference like how the fishing was on Little Swan, whether Alfono’s or Rosie’s made a better pie or what to do about the sheltering crickets in the basement, or if these failed we sat silent like a bunch of peacenik monks until they started talking at me in their backwoods preacher voices. I didn’t bother to listen or to get angry because I considered it like listening to a crazy person who there was no sense in reasoning with. You can’t talk a dog off a shit pile unless you’ve got something better, and since I knew I didn’t I just shut up.
It shouldn’t have worked any differently with both of them home than it had with just Danny. They tried to pretend they didn’t care what I thought of them but I’d still been their father for almost fifteen years before they left, time enough to talk to them in that voice that to a child is like the voice of God. What’s more they hadn’t forgotten yet that they’d been off with the false prophet Malone helping to make monsters when their mother had coughed her last a few years shy of forty and they knew that the anger I’d had then was still in me like a hidden powder-keg, undiscovered and transparent, so although they took all the rein they could they were still capable of being scared. That should have been enough, goddamn it, but there isn’t any accounting a fanatic’s perseverance when he sees his courses blocked: I didn’t find out about the baby until May, already past the legal limit. Elizabeth walking from the shower to her room with what looked like a bowling ball wrapped in the worn cotton of the robe she’d worn at thirteen wouldn’t turn when I stopped her, already half-aware of what it was. That simple defiance just grazed the powder keg inside me, made me tear the robe off of her her screaming and hugging the bulge that the baby had made in the belly skin beneath the purpled scar from where another one I’d never suspected had been taken out. There wasn’t anyone else in the house, and I sure as hell hadn’t touched her.
By the time Danny got home that night it had been four hours and I can’t say I’d cooled much. I think he saw by the way I was sitting there straight-backed at the kitchen table next to an untouched bottle of gin that I’d found out what they’d done. He didn’t put up more than a weak struggle when I made him drink, my hand on his pitted throat and the bottle tipped back over his head. I guess I thought I’d wash the sin out of him, make him a man again like he’d been pretending to be with his sick pretence of normality at the Foxhole lounge. And maybe I thought as long as I was sanitizing I might as well get Elizabeth too, or else a part of me hoped my dime store rotgut gin would do what the drugs and cut rate wine the Jackson patients used couldn’t and leave her with a thicker scar like a puffed black snake to keep the dogs from sniffing their way back instead of with what I knew was coming out of her come fall.
Because by then I’d remembered the poison: Leon’s goddamn monthly contraception. I tried to talk to them then but my tongue felt thick and numb at the thought of what monster or already dead thing was growing silent inside her. Even with a lean-muscled smooth and maniac preacher in the mix there isn’t an excuse for not just a faggot and a whore but their incestuous runt living unmolested in a town full of clean-hearted American citizens. I’m not ashamed to say I thought of taking it all off the table then and there as the three of them lay passed out at my feet with the responsible ones’ faces turned toward each other instead of up toward heaven like they should have been. But God help me if I couldn’t help a click of guilt when I saw Danny’s face and heard his whistling breath through the acne-spaces top and bottom of his goddamn aberrant lips. I let them stay, Elizabeth locked up inside like the goddamn nun she still thought she was, and in late September the kid was born on the pull out in the den red as a baked snapper with half its skull exposed and dripping something rotten out behind. It wasn’t much bigger than a rat and she had an easy time of it with just her brother’s filthy hands and a strong belt for the pain but when it was over they looked like toddlers with a fish they forgot to feed and I was screaming in Danny’s ear, is this what you’d make a murdering faggot like his father, until it died with its open head in his lap and the rest of it all twisted up in its mother’s arms.
It’s morning now and the little disciples are either still asleep or cut out on me; they’re too ascetic to have much of their own in the house that could tell me which. In a while I’ll go take the child bones out of the tainted well of the grill and bury them somewhere cool, dark and forgotten. Danny wouldn’t like to know I’m doing it. I don’t really think Elizabeth would care. She may even understand because while she always seems as tied up in religion or morality or whatever they call it as he does she’s just a follower in the end, an addict spitting out unmeaning childisms just to keep in the clique. But I will bury the thing soon and if he isn’t already gone he will be before the ground over his dead son sinks, or else he’ll be lying there unburnt beside him. Because I know my son’s a monster, the yet unrecognized successor of Jackson’s bloody prophet. I know this because he told us in a hard, unwavering voice, hard but hollow, that you can’t get rid of the dead with anything but fire. Because you can’t get rid of death with anything but bright, immolating, un-ignorable life.
The Man in the Middle (April 20, 2010. Issue 16.)
The pastor stood impossibly tall at the pulpit, his arms outstretched, hands centered majestically upon the purple cloth like a great eagle at rest, 
beneficent for the time being but poised to strike quickly if necessary. The congregation stared with wide and bulging eyes. controlled the urge to cough and sneeze as desperately as they controlled the inexplicable urge to sin.
“For Hell,” said the pastor, “is a place of unimaginable torment. The Apostle tells us that in Hell the sinners of this world are not as they are now – naive to the eternal joys, the uncompromising glory of the God they have forsaken. No, in Hell you will know exactly what you have lost.”
“A dark place, without God!” someone shouted. In the packed upper gallery it was impossible to tell who.
“Impossible wide!” returned the pastor, to a sudden animation of his congregation. “and impossibly dark! There is no end to the devices great God has devised for the sinners He casts there. You may hear from others, more worldly than I, of pitchforks and iron spits; of glowing tongs to pull and glowing knives to pierce the sinner’s body as he cries out to Heaven; as he tries desperately to repent. But to God the damned are silent. To Him they are less than dead men, they are men who have not been born. Pitchforks, glowing spits and iron tongs are nothing. Nothing, compared to the terrible torments that await those fallen from His grace. The pains of Hell are infinitely more fearful than these earthly pains, such that the sinners themselves cannot believe their existence, even as they are acted upon by them in the reeking bowels of God’s prison!”
The congregation murmured furiously over the image of the tainted fires and raging torments they had so narrowly escaped. The pastor had them snared, and knowing this he paused to calm them.
Only Stephen Smith, did not hear. He sat quite still in the back of the church, though his eyes roamed insipiently over the gathered mass, searching with firm intent for one like himself, a single man or woman not rapt by the pastor’s tortuous images. To his dismay they were aghast, every one of them silent and unmoving as he dreamed the souls of Heaven would be: like dogs begging for tattered promises of punishment not-to-be.
The pastor began the inescapable part of his sermon during which they must pray for the souls of any in the congregation not shackled by the grace of God. Stephen’s eyes quit roaming. He braced himself body and mind, knowing that now every eye was on him: Stephen the bastard; Stephen who on no less than seven occasions was caught guzzling communal wine behind the fire-escape, who was forced to chew the bitter host with the other children at the bitter end of every week and who would, come Monday, lead all of them back astray. It was Stephen Smith, whose name was a hiss upon the congregation’s pious old tongues, who had once read a terrible book of witchcraft; who had once convinced the town that he was dead and started from the mortician’s table and frightened the poor man into early retirement. It was Stephenwho they thought of when they thought of Hell – he who had let the Devil into his heart and would not cast him out again.
But it was also Stephen for whom they prayed. They beseeched their God on bended knees to cause the Lost to see the error in his ways, to build arenas for the heart-struggle between God and Devil that would end, they prayed, in his salvation. And if this all could not be managed, then they prayed that he would pester them no more.
“If there are any among you who have refused God’s call – who have never confessed, or who have confessed utterly in the Divine presence and yet gone on to sin again – I ask you: let Jesus into you heart. Allow him access, that you should have everlasting life and glory in Heaven, and escape from the undeniable pains of deepest Hell.”
They prayed for Stephen, unaware that at the back of their little sanctuary, beneath the suffering Godhead that hung heavy from the balcony ledge, Stephen Smith was not praying at all. Behind his bowed head and closed eyes he was concocting a plan worthy of the Devil himself. It had come to him suddenly, with the burning intensity of an upward flare from Hell. He cracked a wicked smile hidden from the congregation behind contemptuously clasped hands.
When the service had ended he exited the church quietly, feeling very much the wolf in the sheepfold as he was politely greeted and asked-after by the happy congregation. He pressed the pastor’s fleshy hand and took his benediction with a grin. He walked slowly to the little whitewashed church-gate, head bent as though in solemn contemplation.
Once beyond, his steps quickened and brought him without fault to the placid quay, where the fishing-boats were all docked and tied in deference to God’s benevolent law. Here he made sure of his solitude, then set immediately to work. He climbed unabashedly into the three largest boats and with a great many ropes and tight-stretched knots he set their motors straight. This done, he took from the harbor-master’s shed a large wheel-barrow and filled it with a half dozen gallon canisters of gasoline and a pack of matches from the desk drawer.
It was only a little past noon when he finished these preparations and returned home. On a bookshelf he found his father’s almanac and flipped quickly to the table of eclipses printed there. “Only one,” he muttered, “lucky.”
Dinner was ready at seven-o’clock. Until then Stephen lay flat and still across his bed, rehearsing. At his mother’s call he descended to the kitchen and took his place before a heaped plate of roast lamb and red potatoes. He began eating immediately, stuffing the hot meat into his mouth and taking it down almost whole, like a dog.
“I hope you heard the sermon,” his mother said as he gorged.
Stephen grinned at her, mouth agape, his meat protruding from behind his teeth like the open end of a grinder.
At nine-o’clock he crept easily out the side door.
Outside the moon shone down like porcelain through the mist lying fine as silk along the garden path. The garden itself was newly dead, it being September, and Stephen could not help but think as he passed the yellowed stalks and greenish rotting bulbs how much they looked like the sea of aging and pious heads he saw each Sunday morning, bowed over their psalm-books, from the church balcony. He paused once beside a drooping, grey-lipped rose near the gate and gave thanks (to no one in particular) that he would not be seeing them again.
At ten-o’clock he struck a single match and set the dead fields aflame. They burned wonderfully in the silvered light – far better than the Hallowe’en bonfires the children made (though it was forbidden). He thought for a moment that he might spare the children (but that would only bring more to replace them, he thought, and gave it up).
He stood for a while, watching the fires to judge their effect. Burning as they were along either side of the road and shedding a continuous, ghostly light over the blue-granite flag-stones of the quay, he thought it all looked very much like Hell, and was pleased.
On the steps of the bell-tower he was stopped by an image of the Lord, appearing suddenly from the dead shadows like a spectre from remembered dreams – feverish nightmares of twisted bodies and gnarled old faces baring contracted sneers at one another from the hideous gaps in their cages. It was this face – this faded and ghostly countenance, that peered down over all of them from the darkness as it now seemed to peer over Stephen, knowing what he would do and not caring because he could do nothing to change it.
At eleven-o’clock he set the bells ringing. With each back-jarring, downward swing of the rough-hewn rope he saw through the tower window the moon glowing increasingly dark and reddened as the Earth passed majestically before it. Even he, knowing why it was so and how the celestial bodies beyond and before accomplished it, felt a thrill of misgiving; a primal urge to run wild from the tower and hide himself beneath the soft protective eaves of his bed-frame. He rang the bells haphazardly, tugging two and three cords together to create an awful din as far removed from the happy clang of the Sunday call to worship as his heart seemed always from the quietly pious souls of his fellows. Below him, across the darkening square, the boats roared in their moorings where he had set them, their engines spraying green-white foam high into the chill night air as they tugged dutifully away at their fastenings. On every side the great fires raged, replacing the fading moonshine with ghostly, flickering tongues of yellow and red. The bells cried on. The boats grumbled without pause: great machines like grinders waiting to be fed.
The first to answer the bells cried to one another in astonishment and ran antically in all directions about the square in search of water to quench the crackling flames. At last they managed to discover a few pails and started off fast for the quay.
Stephen stopped them. He stopped the bells, first, and then he stopped the people with a booming, godly voice from atop the tower.
“BE STILL!” he cried. The words carried in slow undulation of sound from the top of the bell-tower to the quay. He had fastening one of the bells sideways on its rope and spoke into it, rather than toward his listeners, amplifying his deep-throated cries.
“BE STILL!” he cried again, and the people obeyed. They forgot the fires in the fields and the hideous roaring of the boat-motors and stood bewildered in the center of the square, gazing wide-eyed at the dark mouth of their church tower.
“BE STILL!” cried Stephen Smith, “For Thou Shalt Be Judged!”
A woman screamed, and it seemed to still the billowing air.
“Thou Shalt Be Judged!” cried Stephen.
The Pastor called out. “Fear not! Our God shall –“
“Blasphemy!” cried Stephen. “Get Thee To The Boats, Sinner!”
The Pastor cut short his oration. For a time there was only the glow and crackle from the fields and the insidious roar of the boats. The people gaped like fish beneath the colorless sky. Then the Pastor turned, slow like the turning of some great and ponderous engine upon its axle. He withdrew his arms in supplication to the voice he took to be his God.
“Blessed Lord,” he began.
“Get Thee To The Boats!”
The infernal fires burned brighter from without the square. Stephen turned from the bell to watch with devilish amusement as the Pastor resigned his fate. He went with the slow, even steps of a man entranced to the clattering quay and stepped heavily into the nearest boat.
Stephen, with some effort, stifled a wicked laugh and turned back to his resounding. At his command they formed a line – a line two hundred bodies long – and one by one they came to be judged. One by one they walked in shame to the waiting boats.
For the Pastor’s wife it was the sin of gluttony; for the shopkeeper the sin of price negotiation. The tailor’s daughter was a harlot (for Stephen had once seen her swimming naked in the stream); the miller’s son was a bully; the miller himself was guilty of sloth. For the schoolteacher there was the grave sin of alchemy; for the Mayor that of ingratitude.
A young church scholar had neglected his garden. The tobacco-shop owner sold poison. A girl Stephen knew was a Harpy (the bell-tower God could not explain further, at present). One by one he dealt them swift and summary justice from the darkened tower maw, until at last he came to those few he did not know by name or appearance. Now the hat maker was sentenced to deepest Hell for the “sin of haberdashery,” a poor farmer for “failure to sing merrily.” A woman with her five daughters clutched around her was convicted of running a brothel, and her pretty daughters sentenced as whores. A musician was sent away for “pure inadequacy,” and cried softly as he left. There was a Doctor who kept his medications always in a locked cupboard and so was damned for unscrupulousness and greed. The church deacons were all sent off for absent-mindedness. The town constable went for failure to punish the wicked.
Then it all got out of hand. Seeing so many grief-stricken faces peer up at him in wonder and amazement, obeying without thought his command to march in slow and solemn procession to the boats, he felt a deep pang of pity strike through the joyous caterwauling of his wicked heart. But by then he knew it had gone too far. “Them or me,” he said to himself, “They or I,” as he sent away a newborn babe for the unforgivable sin of public nudity.
At last they all were judged. The square lay empty before him, a shallow pool of fiery light and shadows. At the water’s edge the damned squatted painfully in the crowded fishing-boats, some wailing noisily on above the rise and fall of the grinding motors, some silent, their heads buried deep into folded hands. At Stephen’s command the most pious among them cut the heavy cords. The motors surged amidst the rising waves and they were off at breakneck speed across the little sound. Stephen remained in the tower and watched until the diminishing grey specks blinked away over the dark horizon. For a long time he stood still in the bell-tower smiling, pleased with his horrible success. And yet he could not help but think at intervals of the poor, pious townsmen far away from him, alone upon the endless sea. They were without a drop to drink, without a bite to eat. But they were, indeed, without their God. It was because of this that Stephen smiled. It was for this that he began once more to ring the bells. Slowly, mournfully: a small comfort to those with keen ears upon the long and hungry voyage to Hell.
Learning to Howl, or Lobos Americanos (August 20, 2009. Issue 8.)
Carlos and Johnnie were on the ridge. A week of unrelenting rain had made a long, shallow pool below them on the desert side. The pool was still and sparkling like a cracked mirror beneath the blazing afternoon sun. The house was behind them over the other side of the ledge, and was apparently alone in the great desert beside the highway.
Johnnie held out a fist-sized rock against his palm. Carlos took it and heaved it over the ledge. It hit the shallow water a hundred yards out, and they couldn’t hear the splash.
“Nothing,” said Johnnie. “Wasn’t nothing but the height.”
“Height, yeah,” said Carlos.
Johnnie got another rock. He leaned back on his heels and threw it, grimacing wildly with the effort. They watched it come even with the ripples Carlos’ throw had made, but still obviously short.
“Yeah,” said Carlos. “That’s the height.”
Johnnie scowled at him. He kicked once at the dirt and then moved off toward the ledge. Carlos stared out over the pool and watched the ripples fade.
From behind them over the ridge came the sound of something slipped over the sharp scrabble that formed that side of the face. They turned and saw Cathelina’s shining black head rise toward them from among the rocks.
“What are you doing here?” said Carlos.
Cathelina got up over the ledge. “I can go where I want, can’t I?” She went up to her brother and hung deliberately on his arm.
“Why do you do that? I can’t move hardly when you’re around.”
“Shut up, Carlos,” she said. “It’s Marci.”
Johnnie turned around and came back from the ledge. He stood near them, looking out over the pool, and listened.
“What do I care about Marci?” said Carlos.
“She got in trouble. They got her in the hospital over at Odessa.”
Carlos stared at Johnnie, who stared out over the pool and pretended not to care.
“Some guy, you know?” said Cathelina. “Some guy she met at a club or something, I guess. She must have come on to him but – ”
“How bad?” Carlos interrupted.
Cathelina stared at Johnnie staring out over the pool. “I dunno. Pretty bad, I guess,” she said, then fell silent as though she had done what was expected of her and was now only waiting to be told what else. She buried her head in her brother’s arm and shook without crying.
“Well?” he said, “So what was she doing with some guy?”
Cathelina spoke into his arm and Johnnie quit looking at the pool and moved a few steps closer. “She said to me they were going to Port Arthur. I think his name was Fred, or something. You know, for Mardi Gras like the kids from Midland.”
“Who was the guy?” Johnnie said. He stared at Cathelina now, though she wouldn’t stare back. “What’s he look like?”
“I dunno.”
“Everybody looks like something,” he insisted.
“She said something to the police about a red mark – like Uncle Elvio.”
“Yeah but what’d he look like?”
Cathelina let go of her brother’s arm and stared at him. “I don’t know, okay? Anyways you don’t care.” Without another word she started down the side of the ridge toward the water. They watched her slip down by degrees, then take a handful of stones from the water’s edge and begin to skip them, one after another, across the pool, reaching obstinately for the other side.
Carlos watched Johnnie. He found a new rock and tossed it a few times in his palm, then let it drop. He looked at Carlos.
“So you wanna go out to the flats?” Carlos said.
Johnnie just stared, and Carlos knew then that he had taken Marci to the school dances and so now they were going to do something. It was going to be something that he did not want to tell even himself that they were going to do. He looked down the hill at Cathelina and felt Johnnie’s eyes light on the back of his neck.
“All right,” he said after a while. “You know it won’t do any good, though.”
In Midland he would have had to say more, but in the desert the words were so far dried up and sucked back that they had to understand each other for the most part with drab emotionless glances like a pair of stray dogs.
“Probably not,” said Johnnie, but he kept on staring at Carlos like dog does when it doesn’t have anything else to do.
“Yeah, all right,” said Carlos, and turned away from him toward the valley.
They left Cathelina at the pool and went down the other side of the ridge to the truck. It was Carlos’ father’s truck, a ten-year-old junker that had already been half-dead the day he bought it. Johnnie got in the passenger seat and Carlos went around to the back of the truck and got a screw-driver from the toolbox. He pushed it into the ignition until it stopped. When he turned it the truck shook once and roared at them like a plane leaving the runway. Carlos set his foot against the clutch and forced it into gear.
“Your Dad’s gonna miss it,” said Johnnie.
“Not for a day or two,” Carlos said. “You don’t care anyways.”
Johnnie closed his eyes and they drove from Odessa to Highway 10. Carlos drove fast because he hoped to make Port Arthur before dark. Outside of Odessa it wasn’t much more than empty desert, and they drove through it in silence like strangers. Halfway to San Antonio the truck began to whine like a plane going into a dive. Carlos forced the gearshift down to second without touching the clutch. The truck shuddered once and then the engine was dead.
“Goddamn,” said Carlos. He pulled the truck over to the side of the road and wrenched the gearshift forward. “Goddamn.”
They got out of the truck. Johnnie asked Carlos what they were going to do.
“I dunno. I can’t go home now, anyways. You know how to fix a truck?”
Johnnie said he didn’t, and Carlos went around back of the truck and took the toolbox from the bed. They stood by the road and looked dejectedly out across the open desert. The highway curved away from them about a mile distant, around a low, steep ridge. Carlos said it wouldn’t be worth it to go around, so they walked out across the desert toward the ridge. When they reached it Carlos put the toolbox behind a rock and they climbed up over the ridge and down the other side. It was pretty late in the afternoon, now, and the highway stretched smooth and red in front of them. They stopped by the side of it and Johnnie stuck out his thumb.
“There’s no cars, idiot,” said Carlos. “You see a goddamn car?”
Johnnie scowled and put his hand down. They sat by the side of the road and waited. After a while a car came and Carlos told Johnnie to stick out his thumb. The car went by them and slowed to a stop. It was a big gray Lincoln, a town car that rolled and shifted on its shocks like a ridiculous rolling water-bed as it pulled slowly through the dust. They went up to it and slid in against one another in the back seat. The driver was a woman. She was probably a little over forty, had long hair that was blonde with little streaks of black in it and a mouth that looked suffocated with lipstick. She said her name was Charlene, and asked them theirs.
“Johnnie’s a beautiful name,” she said. “I knew another Johnnie once, you know, a long time ago I guess. Wasn’t as pretty as you, though. I bet you drive ‘em wild, huh Johnnie?’
“Yeah,” said Johnnie. “I guess.”
She was chewing a huge wad of gum that smelled like raspberry, and kept craning her head up toward the mirror so she could see into the back of the car.
“I just bet you do,” she said, and snapped her gum. “Hey listen, there ain’t no reason you both gotta be in the back. Why don’t you come up here with me, Johnnie? Be more comfortable.”
Johnnie looked at Carlos and grimaced. Carlos turned away and stared out the window into the desert. She stopped the car and Johnnie got out. He went around to the passenger side and got in again. She looked once behind her and pulled back out onto the Highway.
“That’s better,” she said. “I ain’t no damn chauffer, you know. Had to pick you up, though. It’s the Christian thing to do of course, though you know I’m not in the habit of picking up any of those crazies you see. I mean it’s the Christian thing to do for a couple of nice boys like you. You looked so lost. Where you headed anyway, Johnnie?”
“Port Arthur,” Johnnie said.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “That’s not so far. Why we’ll be there in no time.” She craned up toward the mirror again to make sure Carlos was paying attention. “You going for Mardi Gras, I guess.”
“Yeah,” said Carlos.
“Well that will be fun. Couple of young bucks like you ought a find a lot of fun in a place like that.”
They had crossed the desert and were coming into Houston, now. The traffic along highway 10 was beginning to get heavy.
“Looks like people here are already moving,” she said. “Should still be able to get you guys there by nightfall.”
As she spoke she kept reaching over the gear shift toward Johnnie. Each time she did it he squirmed and pressed himself closer up against the door.
“That’s when all the fun happens, anyway, right? It’s gonna take some doing with all this traffic, but I think we can work out a way.”
She took her eyes off the road and made a playful grasp for Johnnie. He let out a yip like a kicked dog and pulled himself up against the window.
The woman laughed. “Quit playin’, Johnnie. I was only teasing.”
Johnnie put his arms tight around his knees and stared away from her out the window.
“Goddamn it, Johnnie. I thought we had something goin’ there. Well if you don’t wanna play nice I ain’t gonna make you.”
She stopped the car abruptly on the side of the road and made them get out. They were in the center of Houston, now. Johnnie stared angrily at a dress-shop window as the woman sped away from them toward the long stream of cars merging back toward Beaumont.
Johnnie kicked an empty beer bottle. It sheered off and shattered against the curb. He said they’d better start walking. Carlos only nodded, and they went a few blocks down McCarty to the bus station on the corner. When they got there the station was more or less empty.
“How much you got left?” Johnnie said.
Carlos grimaced and started to walk toward the counter. He bought two tickets for Beaumont and they sat down to wait.
“What day is it?” Johnnie said.
“Tuesday. We gotta make it by tonight I guess.”
Johnnie nodded solemnly. “He’ll be there a day or two, at least,” he said.
When the bus came they went aboard and sat down between an old man in a tattered suit-jacket and a young woman who leaned away from Carlos as he took his seat. The bus should have taken them as far as Beaumont, but the driver dropped them off outside of Channelview because, he said, they didn’t have the extra fare to go on.
They walked the three miles across the Lost River. Johnnie held his thumb out most of the time, but nobody stopped. On the other side they stopped at a gas station near 563. Carlos bought a bottle of pop and they drank it outside by the pumps. While they were drinking a black mini-van pulled up at the pumps and a group of kids got out of it and went into the station.
“Hey Lindsay get some chips, too,” one called.
“Get ‘em yourself Trippy.”
They were obviously drunk. “Lighten up, I can’t help it,” he said, and followed her into the store.
Carlos and Johnnie watched the van idle beside the pumps. The big sliding door on the side was still open. After a while the kids came out of the store with a couple cases of beer. One of them started filling the van with gas while the others all clambered back inside. Carlos went up to the boy 
who was filling the van and asked him where he was going.
“Freakin’ Mardi Gras!” cried a different boy from the front of the van.
“Yeah, man,” said the boy at the pump. “Why? We got room.”
He leaned over the pump handle and tried to pull it out of the van. The handle was stuck fast on the gas cap. Carlos nudged him aside and replaced the pump. The boy didn’t seem to notice. He started screwing on the gas cap and kicked disinterestedly at the back tire.
“You mind a couple more?” Carlos asked him.
“What? Yeah, man. I said we got room, right. Hey you guys know anyone in Lubbock? “ Carlos shook his head. “Yeah I didn’t think so. We met a couple girls from Lubbock a while back.”
“Hah! Lubbock!” called the boy in front.
“Hey Scott get your ass in the car already,” said one of the others.
“Yeah, I’m comin’. Hey gimme one of those beers.”
Carlos waved to Johnnie and they both got into the back of the van behind a couple of girls with black-blonde hair and strings of beads around their necks. The girls said hello and then started talking loudly with the boys up front about someone they thought they remembered from Lubbock. Carlos stared over at Johnnie staring out the window and wondered what they were going to do when they got to Port Arthur. In his head he could get them down the rest of the highway and into the crowds by the pier, but couldn’t go any further. He could tell Johnnie was thinking about it too, and then decided it didn’t matter because they’d probably know when they got there, and if they didn’t they would go home.
“Hey you guys Mexican or something?”
“Lindsay!”
“What?” said Johnnie.
“Don’t listen to her, she’s drunk.”
“I said are you guys Mexican. I got a cousin who’s Mexican – I mean really Mexican, from Mexico and everything.”
The boy up front reached over and leaned on the horn. The sign beside them said Port Arthur. The kids in the van all cheered wildly. The boy who was driving stuck his head out of the window and showed his tongue like a wide-eyed dog to the people in the car beside them. Johnnie looked over at Carlos, apparently frightened, then turned back to the window again.
When they reached downtown the streets were choked with people. In the background they seemed to coalesce into one great rippling mass of color like mottled smears across an artist’s palette. Closer in it was different. There were spaces between the people that were filled in haphazardly by wild arms and noise – the signal crash of a beer bottle that set off a symphony of raucous laughter and tinkling glass – the snap-snap-crack of cheap fireworks and a finishing shower of burnt red paper. They reached a point near 10th Street where the people would have been crushed by the van. The kids stopped it by the side of the road and flung open all the doors at once.
“Where’s the beer?” one of the girls cried. “Hey Scott, where’s the beer,” and tumbled out into the crowd. Johnnie turned from the window and said “What,” but Carlos pushed him toward the door and they were immediately swept up.
In the crowd it was like floating down-stream. The little groups of revelers on either side and behind pushed them gently and surely along the cluttered street toward the pier, where great masses of them had gathered to drink, scream and grab disinterestedly at one another. Now and again they were lost in a flutter of confetti and black-powder pops. Then the crowd would open up around them and close in again, driving them once more down the cracked and dirty streets. They looked for the man with the birthmark half-heartedly, aware that in the small shifting gaps between the living bodies they were not likely to catch even a glimpse. It was already near sunset, and already the glaring street-lamps were switching on one by one, prepared to obscure those sections of the street that were not within their small smears of light with unapproachable darkness.
Then they could see the water – the bright-flashed image of a boat strewn with half-naked bodies shuddering against the pier. Johnnie made a sound like a suddenly-frightened child and pointed toward it.
Carlos could not see the man he was pointing at, but saw the scared and angry glimmer in Johnnie’s eyes and fought hard against the rush of people at a diagonal, over the curb and toward the pier. Halfway down the crowd opened to watch two people doing something by the rail. Johnnie pointed again and Carlos saw the man with the birthmark walking toward the boats. He had a stumbling blond girl by the hand and was dragging her off through the crowd.
They looked at one another and Carlos still did not know what they were going to do. He saw only the dark glimmer in Johnnie’s frightened eyes and didn’t think.
He took Johnnie by the arm and they rushed forward together through the crowd. A woman by Johnnie’s arm cried out as he shoved her off to one side. They were in sight now, but the man did not turn, intent on helping the girl up from the edge of the pier where she had tripped and fallen. Then they had reached the end without slowing and at last he turned, suddenly aware, like a fox at bay. He let go of the girl’s hand and she tumbled back against the pier and began to laugh. He was there all tangled up in their arms, and without knowing what else to do Carlos kicked out at his feet and sent him sprawling beneath them. The glittering crowd pushed in around them and laughed like monsters. Johnnie jumped once on the man’s chest and kicked him hard. Then there was blood on the street and they ran off together with the crowd milling in behind them and parting effortlessly before.
Before long there was the sound of sirens behind them, across the pier. They pulled up beside an ice-cream shop with nobody in it. Johnnie looked at Carlos and he wasn’t scared anymore. There had been time to be scared, before. But now there was Johnnie beside him and the sirens coming hard across the pier, and it seemed too stupid to be scared anymore.
“I guess we’ll go home,” said Carlos. Johnnie could see that he heard the sirens. He could see that Carlos was not scared, either.
Johnnie looked at him. He was happy that they had killed the man, but still he wished they hadn’t.
A man went running by, grabbing hard at something in his front pocket. They leaned against the wall of the ice-cream shop and waited.