STORY: The Hinterlands

(This story was written last year, and is modified from the first chapter of a longer work.  I tried it as a contained story to send out to story contests this last Fall.  In retrospect I agree with the rejections: not good enough.  But I do think this is close.  It takes place in Rockland, and is full of doped-up clamdiggers, and dead girls.)
Here a taste:
"My cell phone rings.  Not a good number.  Clam-diggers.  Clam-diggers who don't dig for clams much anymore, what with dope.  These are mud-folk from South Thomaston, come up South Main with a notebook of drug debt.  They always look for you on payday."

(the story BELOW)

*
How to describe this town.
This town is sinking down the hill, the ocean is its melt.  The people live in constellated hamlets like tribes.  In the Summer the water is for the comers.  We're low people here, we don't care.  Now is long days to drink at lunch, drink at supper, to screw our way into each other's families, and cuckold our ex-wives' new husbands.  Summertime, and up the hill the distribution of narcotic is so comfortable, be you giver or taker, everyone knows where.  In the ghetto, as the King says, the mamas cry, but here Ma is politely farsighted when the boys go to the porch to dust their nostrils.
Natural people.  Hill folk could give fuck all about ocean.


12pm
The girl on the TV has my name.
She's gone missing down south of the state.  Her picture was up at eleven, and now at noon.
Tequila in beer mugs with Davey.  We opened the bar by calling a waitress with a key and the desire to be liked by bad acting men.
Davey's married three times.  He's thirty-one, selling dope out of his work truck, rips off tourists with fake pills.  He had a younger brother get himself killed shooting a pistol at clouds.  The kid was in the Dairy Queen parking lot while a town cop sat at a picnic table with his family.  Davey's mother sued the town, settled, and bought pills with her windfall.  They got her a year later for trafficking.  Just another nana in prison.
The waitress takes Davey out back.  I know Davey is going to give her his sob story -- the brother, the mother, the truck, the ex he loved and lost -- that sex is coming already won't stop him, he's got on so well with this tune it'd be a waste not to sing to her.
On the street tourists try on lobster shirts.


We walk back down to the ocean.  I smile at the rich girls with the brown skin.  The white denim shorts.
In sight of the bar is a barn where the town once stored salt for winter roads.  A Massachusetts slob bought it from the town, now paying to redoubt the husk for storage of lobster shirts.  Hiked up on car-jacks, dangling over a grid of new rebar, the concrete trucks beat us to it.


The concrete is out, we watch it suck up to steel and dry.  We're blitzed.  Davey and I wrestle each other to the edge.  The boss shits that he's paying wages for this.  No one cares much about his foundation, but he's not paying us to act like it.
We get our cash, then fired.  
Screw, the boss says.  I bow to him.


Davey drops me off at my truck.  I'm trying to keep cute with him on what I'm doing, but he knows.
He says, I'll get stuff.
She gives me a better price.
He says, You a dog, Dude.


4pm 
Sherry has hippopotami all over the place.
Women pick an animal, and decorate by it.  Hungry hippo doing laundry on fridge magnets, hippo napkin holders.  Her kids wave at me from their snack time huddle.  Henry Jr. gives me a Saltine with peanut butter and grape jelly.
Sherry takes me around the corner from where her kids are watching TV and we share a kiss, a thing like in the old days.  Then she takes her scale out of the cupboard, measures my powder on the washing machine, and sweeps it into a bag.
Her husband pulls in the yard.  I put the kitchen table between me and his wife.
Hello, Henry.
He says, Newt.
How bout them Red Sox, Henry.
He says, Thought you were a Yankees fan.
Granite, Henry.  When your Bostons were taxing the shit out of us fishermen, New York was buying up all the Vinalhaven rock.  Brooklyn Bridge, Henry.  Screw Mass.  We seceded for a reason.
He says, It wasn't secession.  And you're not a fisherman.
I'm walking to his bathroom for a toot.
Henry works at the bank, but he can't stop Sherry doing what she do, around his kids, everything - she's paying the house off.
I don't sleep with her.  I don't.  A warm embrace between old friends, that's all.  These two love each other.  I'm three months she spent when we were twenty-two, before kids, cul-de-sac, comparted in that way women can - that I trade kisses for cheaper drugs, and she feels young again for twenty minutes, is this cheating Henry of something?
You'll tell me an oath.  I know.


When I come out Henry is on the couch with the kids.  I sit in his easy chair and watch Spongebob.  Sitting here with the family when I'm dosed up I love them theoretically, and my brain writes the future.  Darla will be the park ranger eleven years old has chosen.  Tim to business school like Dad.  Henry Jr. a cleric.  Hallelujah.  Saltines for the flock.
Second time out of the bathroom, Henry has the news on.  Here, the girl again, the missing girl.  Muppet-headed newsman Pat Callahan; a Glamour Shots portrait of one Olivia Pike.  A smiling lanky little bird with a long neck.  Last seen at a river rest area with her friends noon on the Saturday last.  A south of state news frenzy.  No park rangering for her.
Henry says, Any relation, Newt?
My bypass: I like Pat Callahan, he looks like a good Irish drunk.
My cell phone rings.  Not a good number.  Clam-diggers.  Clam-diggers who don't dig for clams much anymore, what with dope.  These are mud-folk from South Thomaston, come up South Main with a notebook of drug debt.  They always look for you on payday.


Kids outside screaming at each other over who can and can't walk closest to the road.
I hug Sherry goodbye in the back yard, walk along the neighbor yards, get to my truck parked down back of the cul-de-sac of houses in an abandoned sand pit overgrown with wild blueberry bushes.  I pick berries, and squish them, my thumbs blue.  And Sherry has followed me.
Kids screaming still.
Thank you, I say to her.
She wants more time, but I need to get somewhere with a bathroom.
I leave her there, and coast my truck down the hill, to the ocean, to the town.  Sherry has lived here all her life.  Me too.  Families can be old, and when they stay poor, they remember the hill is old.


6pm 
This town down here is a matter of opinion.
This town here is a fishmonger walked off the water and taken an aisle at the Home Depot.


The tavern is full of jobless men.  I'm back in the club.
I order my drink with my index finger.  Still the local news on the tavern television.  Here is this missing girl for the twentieth time.  Olivia Pike.  Seventeen years old.  A beautiful girl.  A construction site would be a rough place for her to walk by.
No time, Ms. Pike: here come the South-Tommy boys through the door, wanting my paycheck, my spent paycheck, so I take my ass out the back, pretending the bathroom.
Outside the bar I hear them coming after me.  I'm not going to make it to my truck, so I run the other way.  I run west to the dull melting hill.  The tequila thinks I'll make it off the Main Street and up where these boys after me will lose me, but the hill is a grid of town away, and I'm tired in half a mile.  I turn into the messy lot of the new town library, a building still under way.  I duck against a trash connex from the construction, and listen for the follow.
Nothing.  They'll wait at my truck for awhile.  Maybe smash in a window and scrounge it for what they are owed.  Nothing in there for them, all in my pocket.  Screw it, I'll sit here a bit.


I tell you the benefit in a misspent youth.
Newton Pike.  The son of another man with that name.  My life hasn't been much.  The truth is, I don't care.  I am that guy, when faced with adversity, will say, I don't care.  That's not a defense, it's lack.
To care so little is the gap in me.  I wonder why I keep even to this loosey morality, why I don't steal when I run from debt.  But I don't wonder really: I'm a coward hanging on with the little stuff, no guts for casting the die too far - shooting at God from the Dairy Queen.  No guts for a purge.
No villain.  Just misspent.  People accept that.  Not stupid, not even lazy, just not squared up, as my father would say.  Pitiable people do enjoy others' troubles, and clowning survives a hard town, as my father would not say.
He's unhappy with what I've done with me.  I'll get cute, to bypass him as I do with everyone else: We're just alike, Pop, we both went to shit subsidized by your money.
I don't see him much anymore.  He gets drunk alone in his house.
When my mother died, she was disposed of quietly and cheaply.  He told me this was loving her.  I wanted a church.  An empty big room would have been a bit of rubbing her nose in it, was his gist.  He did it at the house, his few friends limped up to drink the booze; a wake he called it, it looked like the disbandment of a failing order of moose-callers.  
I went for him in front of these yeasty smelling Rocklanders: A cheap funeral, but so much good money on street pussy.
What happened next was his girlfriend at the time punched me in the face.  A nice swipe right on the lips.
I said, No offense, Kiki, and swallowed a little blood off my gums.
Moose-callers snickered.  Kiki went upstairs.  Dad went for a gun.  
I took a bottle of vodka out of the pantry, and left.
It wasn't Kiki I was talking about.  Kiki was okay in my book.  When you spend eighteen months with a dying woman learning her house, there are playable odds you'll continue past the death.  It was the girls sneaking around before Kiki.  Those girls never shopped the groceries.  They didn't bathe my mother.
No offense, Kiki.  It was a good line.
I thought of this, squatting behind that trash can at the library, when the South Tommy boys came up on me, and slammed me on the pavement.
There is no poetry in a beating.  Ball up, and cover the eyes and teeth.  Wait for them to tire out.
When the Clam-diggers leave one of them calls out the number they and me have to straighten out.  And I have nothing inside of me but catering words.  And while, Nice hippos, Sherry, doesn't work the same way with Tommy clam diggers wanting the money you promised the weekend before, I can't help but think they laid off the beating just a bit.  They kicked me in the back instead of teeth.


9pm 
Davey picks me off the library new asphalt.
We go up the hill, and I sit with his ex-wife at his ex-trailer, and let her pat me with KFC wetnaps.
You hear about this girl?, She asks me.
I'm just staring in her eyes.  A woman touches your face, she's pretty.  This one is Lenise.  Just another good one with gardening in her fingernails.  
The missing girl?  I say.
Not missing, Lenise says, Drug her out of the river an hour ago.  Its on TV.  Some sicko dumped her.  If someone did anything to Sasha, I'd kill them.  
A common thing to say.  Made a million times in like conversation.  She means it.  I understand Lenise to be a twenty-seven year old woman who has considered how to kill a man if the man does her kid.
How would you kill a dude?  I ask her.  
If I knew him, and he did something?
Sure, you know this is the guy.
I'd drug him.  Then snip his penis with hairdressing scissors.
She was raped, Davey says from in front of the TV.
Did the TV say that?  Lenise asks.
No, but I'm pretty sure, He says.
Me too.  Lenise says.
I say to Lenise, You look just like that actress.
Who?
The pretty one.  I don't remember the name.
Davey says, That's my ex, Newt, you fucker.
Lenise says, They pulled her out of the river, Newton.
I heard you.  I say.


11pm 
Now the biggest house on the hill to borrow money to pay the clam-diggers.
A sea captain house with a widow watch that was my hiding place once.  Up there I'd watch the sun set and the grid of Rockland revive below.  A rebellion is what electricity is.  A pukey little rebellion.  It scared me then, when I still believed in things in the forest angered by the light.  I'd see that little horseshoe of a town advertise, and I'd know: the wolves are coming now, and here is the first place they'll stop.  Animals eat the guts out of other animals, there is no shame in them.  I was scared of light.  I was scared of town.  
Father is sitting in his chair.  Even though midnight outside is still July, he has a fire burning.  You don't think people stare into fire anywhere but in stories, but they do when they are blisteringly drunk.  I smell the juniper.
I need money.
He does the move where sleepily, drunkenly, bemusedly he looks at a spot in the room where another person could be, but isn't.  An imaginary friend to nod to his incredulity.  I used to see this move used on my mother all the time, and not for important things.
You need money.  He repeats to let me hear his voice say it.
I do.
What for?
A pyramid scheme.
He yawns.
Five-hundred.
No answer.  He's fallen asleep.  That's what I think.  I walk closer to him, and suddenly his face has turned to me, and he is crying.  Not yawning, but falling tears.  He's crying, and suddenly he's whipped his glass past my head.  It smacks off the wall, and doesn't break.  It rolls under a rocking chair.  Gin splotches the wallpaper.  And when I look back at him the tears are gone.  Magically he's cooled down and mummified.  He's tightened down into his chair, and there is sweat in his hair from the fire.
He says, I don't have money for you.
I pick up his glass, and carry it back to him.  I kneel beside him, and present it to him.
He digs at the corner of his eye with his thumb.
I say, The girl on TV?
He won't look at me.
I sit across from him.  I lay some powder in my hand, and snort it.
You remember taking me on the road with you that time?  I say.  I was twelve?  Come on.  It only happened once.
I should state here that taking drugs to some people is a matter of great anxiety.  To me drugs are chewing the inch of fat off a ribeye, or sleeping with a dirty girl: getting back to the old ways for a bit.  They are no more meaningful than spending twelve hours reading about Vikings to the point that you feel like a brute yourself, and forgetting the story a week later.  I bring this up only because what I said to my father, might have been mad chatter, but was not the first time: I utter, he overhears - this is the way we did it.  I admit I was tuned up.  Tuned up allows soliloquizing to the wall.  The man can hear things this way.  No direct challenge.
Schools.  You were building schools, and on the way home we stopped at a bridge.  The river.  We sat on rocks.  It was a rest area.  Other people were there.  That rest area was on TV.  Same place.  Rest area.  This girl on TV washed up on the same riverbank.  I see it on TV, I remember being there.
You do?
That woman and her daughter.  She gave me a sandwich.  She had a baby.  You were drinking a can of beer.  You told me to take the little girl over to the bridge and show her the underside of it.  And you and the woman and the baby stayed on the rock.  She gave you a sandwich and watched you eat it.  She was your woman.  The older daughter was the same age as me.  This one on the TV is the baby.  Sensible.  The time you took a minute with me, you saved time working them in.
I was with your mother 'til the end.  He says.
The king of efficiency.
He holds money up, presents it in his hand.  He was counting and sleeving the hundreds together in his other pocket.
I can see he is close to saying something else, and it feels so much like he will speak to me like I'm human, and not a strange toy given to him years ago that he had little use for, and I hate myself for the craving grumble in me for it.
Then I hear truck engines in the yard.  These clam-diggers stupid brave coming up here.  They have no idea what this man is.
I get up and jog out of the room, down the hall past pictures of my father's brothers, and, counting the steps I go down to the older stone cellar that smells like edible dirt.  And in the dark I walk around the perimeter of old mother's stuff we moved from the upper quarters two years ago.  I go to the gun cabinet.  I feel around for a pistol.
My father is high above now, a shadow in the light looking down at me.
Is this loaded?  I ask.
Which?
The Forty-five.
I know they're all loaded.  I take the .45, and count the paces back through the murk.  When I get up the stairs to him he says, Go out the back.  I'll handle it.
You sure?  I say.
He walks away.  I pull the baggy up out of my pocket, and spill it out on the stair rail.


12am 
Now the yard birds.
I go to the back of the house and follow the second basement through the carriage house, and I come out in the dark side yard where I crouch in under the low branches of the pine trees, and squat-walk my way out to the front.  Men are out of the trucks and standing in the yard.  These are the South Tommy boys alright, full of matter, as my Dad would say, pairing up on bottles, making an impromptu truck party here in the driveway.  We're a half mile from the street, and I've walked beyond them, and down the driveway, when one of them starts on the horn of one of the trucks.  This is hard-packed euphoria the drugs have put me to.  I think that horn honking is beautiful music.  A wolf call.
My father appears in the yard.  He's motioning at the boys, like, What?.  He comes down the walk, close to these men.  They seem put off by him, unsure what to do.
One of them calls my name, and now I'm out from the trees, quietly walking up the driveway behind them.  My mind is cooked over this, this and the drugs.
The kid talking at my dad, wanting me, is waving his arms around like a Frenchman.  The Frog-Call.  That's bad.  I told you before I am a careless person, and if they'll come in the yard, out of the dark, for five-hundred dollars of coke, they've set the standard.  I walk up behind the yokel closest to me, and furthest from the house, and the .45 is pointing at him.  Dad's old line: Don't point a weapon at something unless you mean to.  Not that he followed the rule.
The kid hears me and turns around.  When he sees the gun he says Shit.  In the blurry background I see the other kids glance back, and when they do I point the pistol down, and fire at this first kid's feet.  Blow a hole in his work boot.  The shot is like wood batting wood, Plak!
He falls down screaming, Shit!  Must be his catch phrase.  The other kids scatter.  The weirdest thing is the ejected casing bounces off of the kid's head as he goes down.
My father is staring out at me dumbly.


Three times in my life my father went after me with a handgun.
I've seen him pull a pistol on other people plenty.  He is lucky not to have shot someone as often as he has meant to.  When I was a boy I would come home to find him going through his weapons.  Immaculately kept, it was compulsion in him to want the weapons out, all of them, unfolded before him.  A collection of handguns mostly; he fancied himself a real pistolero.
He never pointed them at women.  But men were animals to him.  Even me.  I say this now not to compare what I have done, but to shadow the reason.


1am 
The Night Wolves scatter and retreat.
They take the kid I shot with them.
My father takes my hand, and we go inside.  We go to the widow-watch to spy what vehicle lights are up and down the hill.  Nothing going on.  They've taken their wounded to the other side of the bay.  Authorities will not be notified.  South Tommys don't call cops.
My father takes the pistol from me, drops the magazine, actions the round out of the chamber.  It bounces on the floor.
What do you think, Newt?  He says.
I gotta go.
We look down the hill.
My father pulls a second pistol out from the back waist of his jeans.  A 9mm Sig, his new favorite.  He lets the mag drop in his hand, (fully loaded), and de-chambers the live one.  He looks me in the eye.
I say, About this girl.
Nothing from him.  Just looks at me.
She's my sister, isn't she?
He jacks the slide on the .45, and looks at the pistol again.  Now he's holding both pistols.
Yup.
The older one.  Olivia and who?  
What?
Olivia and what's the older one?
He's crying again.  Fiddling with the pistols.
Oneida.  He says.
He sets the pistols on the windowsill, and he looks at them for a long time.
She's dead.  He says.
The other one's alive.
He does look at me.
You see me right now?
Yeah, Newt.  He says.
I got to go anyway, right?  I'll check on her.
Pulled out of a river.  My Dad whispers.
Little dead Olivia Pike was my sister.  And she has a sister.
Oneida.
Daddy looks over, You're not you today.
No shit.  Me was an only child.
Now he's laughing, No, you're you.
Stops laughing as abruptly as he started.
Why'd you shoot?
Scared.
He nods. 
Oneida.  You and her's the same age.  What would you say to her?
I'll say her Daddy is broken-hearted, but he had a little prick of a son got in the way of his visiting her more often.
That's not true.  He says.
I'll tell her my mother got sick, and you were by her side.  Then I'll slide her some money.  From you.  And if things go well, I'll ask her if she remembers me from under that bridge.
The man looks at me.  He likes this routine.  He asks to hear it again.  It ends up a thousand dollars he gives me.  And a truck.