Chaingang

By nine o'clock, according to both his inner clock and the position of the sun in the sky, he had almost reached the turnoff to Whitetail Road, which led to the pond and the conservation area beyond the North Quarry.

The odd weather pleased him: a near-freezing November one day, tropical heat the next. He registered the field in his mental computer, noting that there were eats to be had here. In season he could gather and devour a found meal of mouse-ear, pokeweed, lamb's quarters, wild mustard, and assorted “soul greens.'

He stepped down into a thick scrub of staghorn sumac, wild carrot, black locust shrubs, butterfly weed, horse nettle, common mullein, and a rampant Mother Nature lode of weeds and edibles even he could not identify.

He crossed a mud-and-sand-filled ditch, weapons cases and duffel sinking those huge pawprints even farther down into the soil, and he clambered up on a rock road. Quickly moved across it, over heavy chunks of broken machinery, a tap and bolt the size of a golf ball, and—on the adjacent ditch—turtle tracks left in the mud like the marks of a bike tire.

Something prodded him and he moved into the protective arms of the overgrown road ditch, trampling bright red careless weed, the bloom like sumac, the stalk scarlet to bloodred, and his scanners were on full alert. He registered everything that moved, that lived, that pulsated: a row of barn swallows lined up and evenly spaced along an overhead power line; a mockingbird that sat on a rusting advertisement for Northrup King Corn; yellow butterflies. He moved cautiously through the overgrowth, up over another bank, and saw the ditch forty feet below.

The ditch contained moving muddy water that appeared, variously, as olive drab, khaki, brownish green, and black. Wind and the current rippled the water and left it looking like a wrinkled, moving sheet.

The ditch almost stopped at a point near a fallen tree that had dropped across some mud flats that extended to nearly meet and touch in the center of the dirty stream. He could jump across there. The mud was dark black in the shadows, gray in the light.

A table leg stuck up out of the water. It could have been part of someone's trot line or fish-box. Gnarled tree roots grew down into the ditch from the centuries-old oak and sycamore that blanketed the other side. He saw the old bridge.

The bridge was made from mighty planks the size of railroad ties. He stepped across deep cracks in the parched earthen pathway and walked out onto the bridge.

It is a railless bridge, and forty feet up one gets a sense of vertigo, a high anxiety that attacks not in the head but in the feet, and he feels himself swaying a bit, losing his balance. It enrages him for no reason other than it fucks with his head. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski is tired of people fucking with his head and no more Mr. Nice Guy, so to punish himself for this offense, he grasps his own hands together and squeezes as hard as he can, really bearing down on his own hands, squeezing until he almost passes out. There. Maybe that will teach you, he thinks.

Pushing his limits is an old hobby. He forces himself to stare down between the two-inch cracks of the bridge planks until he gives himself a queasy acrophobic feeling of disorientation. He sees fishing line caught in a nest of vines and tree roots under some overgrown limbs. Feels that nauseating, swaying feeling in his huge feet again and immediately clasps his hands together to dish out more punishment to his obstreperous brain, but something pulls him off the bridge.

First it is the two diving dragonflies, their wings beating maniacally as they swoop and soar across his field of vision like a pair of Cobra gunships in an aerial dogfight. Does he see the dragonflies or hear them first, or does he hear the distant chopper noise and free-associate the Huey slick comin’ for to carry him home? He makes a dive for the underbrush nearby.

The bird is coming closer and is audible to the human ear now, with the water giving it an intermittant turbine sound, and the dragonflies adding to his misperception, but the helicopter turns out to be a loaded eighteen-wheeler rumbling around the corner and over the bridge.

OUT

OF

NOWHERE

THE

RED

TIDE

IS

ON

HIM

AND

HE

WANTS

TO

TEAR

SOMETHING

APART!

He can hardly focus for the scarlet roar in his head and he grasps his huge, meaty hands again—frustrated and enraged—squeezing with a grip that can make the FUCKING ACID OOZE FROM A FLASHLIGHT BATTERY— squeezing with all his might, and then the worst of it passes. How did he get in such a foul mood? He tries to remember Lucille, the live one, who reminded him in some way of the girl who once bore his child. He cannot think of them now. He realizes it is the monkey presence that has brought about this black mood.

Even here, on the dark side of the booniemoon, there is traffic. It never ceases to amaze him—the busy business of the monkey people. They are always in such a hurry, populating every isolated, distant corner of the planet, dropping their unwanted frogs hither, thither, and yon, hurrying to copulate again, to impregnate, to bring to term, to propagate once more, to make more screaming and unwanted monkeys. Daddy must drive his eighteen- wheeler seven days a week to make more money so he and Mommy and Buddy and Sis can buy a poorly constructed, overpriced home in the burbs, and drop more frogs, who will someday drive their own eighteen- wheelers and so on. If he was mad, what were the monkey men?

How he hated them with their credit-card vacations to Yellowstone, and their squalid romantic interludes, and their tireless, remorseless quests for fur coats and tax shelters. If there were a nuclear button that would wipe their millions off the face of the globe in a series of all-kill mushroom clouds, he would push it in an instant.

His unbounded loathing and murderous desire act as his flexible chain mail, the lust and the killing, linking themselves together to form a kind of neurological protection from normalcy—or so his mindscreen suggests, as he thinks of the chain reaction of mushroom blasts, and he moves across the bridge, into the next field, and sees a rust red, discarded refrigerator with a heavy chain around it. His life has been a chain of violent events.

Enters woods, surefooted now, pulled by his homing mechanism. Finds the old shack. Rectangular blocks of scorched steps, with bent iron pipe and broken conduits and reinforcement rods protruding. Charred timbers, combat-assault concrete, battlefield brick, exploded masonry, mortar fragments, and twisted firefight wreckage— this site suggests.

Half the shack is gone. A fire consumed it, seemingly in one big black bite of hungry flame, then it was extinguished. What remains is half a shack, roof and walls more or less intact, one side open, and a square of burnt earth where the rest of the shack stood, bordered by what was left of the stove and the blocks the house sat on.

A sharecropper's place, perhaps, tucked into this little woodsy grove of trees and shrubs, not a hundred feet from the rock road, but hidden and safe from prying eyes.

With one level of his mind he is rebuilding a temporary wall, sealing off his newly acquired snuggery from the elements. With another he is thinking about the sign he's seen for the last half a klick, remembering the abandoned end of a railroad spur now far fields away, and the assorted tracks and messages he has duly recorded.

His entire life, both institutionalized and—for wont of a better word—free, has been spent in close proximity to riffraff, robbers, rascals, ruffians, scamps, scoundrels, scoff-laws, scumbags, burglers, buggers, brutes, bangers, deadbeats, derelicts, desperadoes, degenerates, criminals, cutpurses, cracksmen, crooks, tramps, tricksters,