FROM MOGADORE TO LEIGHRING

BY TOM VAN GEMERT

                                                                                                                                                                                                      I

I woke up in the corner of the abandoned warehouse and walked outside. Mitzen and Jarl were out in the street throwing rocks at a bottle they had set up in the top window of a condemned building. Mitzen said that he had gotten word from his brother that he had plans to rob a convenience store and that he wanted him to come down with a few people to help him out. I agreed to go without really thinking about it. There was nothing else to do. I was wondering when we’d finally leave the old forgotten wasteland section of Mogadore, Ohio and move onward. I asked Mitzen where his brother lived and he said Leighring, Tennessee and that we can hop a southbound train in a few hours that could take us there. I went back to pack my things which consisted of a ratty, thin sleeping bag and a can of corn.

The train was an easy catch. It hadn’t gained full speed yet for it had just pulled out of Barberton. As we waited for it, I compared the bright sunny weather above where we sat to the overcast dark clouds of smoke over Mogadore and shivered at the thought of ever going back to those streets full of pale children and rusting abandoned cars. But the living had been cheap and the grocery store was an easy snag. That was until the clothes we had taken great pains to keep clean by only wearing when we went “shopping” had gotten covered with guano from the hundreds of silent bats in the rafters. If only the damn Laundromat hadn’t been torched the night after we arrived, we’d still be there, living good, in the shittiest of shitty towns. I looked at Mitzen and Jarl to see if they were looking back on Mogadore also. Mitzen wasn’t. At least he didn’t appear to be. He was sitting indian style, stirring a little piece of hollow twig in the dirt. I looked at his mostly bald head and noticed that it was already getting sun burned. He let his side burns grow down and connect below his chin. He did the same on top with his hair so that he had a two inch wide band of short hair going all the way around his head in a loop. He said that if he ever caught anyone with the same hair style, he’d kick the crap out of them. I believed him, kind of. Jarl whose name used to be Karl but he changed it because he hated the K sound, was laying on his side, leaning on his elbow, in the dirt also. He had long, thin, filthy brown hair that went all the way down to the middle of his back. It caught the sun and you could almost feel the grease starting to sizzle. He was playing with his chocolate-brown pup that he had found half drowned a week back down on the river bank. It always stayed near him and whenever the two got separated, it would sit down bow-legged and whimper and whine like a little infant until Jarl would go back and pick it up.

The sound of the train got my adrenaline flowing. We hadn’t jumped a train in a while. We laughed when we saw how slow it was going. It was like nothing getting on. Once in a car, we scoped out the scene: crates of ginger ale bottles and a passed out hobo. I drank so much ginger ale that I swear I must have pissed ten times in an hour. The train had picked up speed and our piss would spray against the dusty blue side of the car leaving nifty marks. It was like a work of art. After we couldn’t drink anymore, we passed the time throwing the bottles at signs and things that we passed. We opened wide both sides of the car for better access. The train soon passed out of the urban area and hit rolling plains. On the right side there were mostly scorched cornfields and on the left, pastures with patches of rotting woods. I caught a glimpse of the river every now and then off to the left, just to see if the rumors were true about it changing from a pinkish hue to a rusty orange color as it flowed south. But it passed out of view before I could tell. The hobo woke up around dusk but didn’t say much. Just asked where all the ginger ale went and if we had any pornos. He had long, bushy yet scraggly hair and beard and thick glasses that if you looked at him head on, made his temples look shrunk in. He sipped steadily from a bottle of whiskey and kept nodding off.

We awoke the next day to the sound of the train whistle and began to panic when we noticed that the train was slowing down.

“Where’re we at?” Mitzen asked the hobo. The hobo scratched his head and said we must be in Tennessee and we cursed him for that later. We hopped off and made for the farmhouse we saw an acre or two off a paved road. A couple of scrawny cows looked up at us with liquid eyes. I wondered if those eyes would pop like water balloons if a needle were taken to them. They watched us for a while and then went back to nibbling at the rare clumps of grass stubble scattered about the fields of dust. Despite the shabby farm yard, the white house was oddly bright. I was even more amazed when the most exquisite girl I had ever seen answered the door. She had short, flaxen hair cut off at the neck and glittering, hungry blue eyes. I couldn’t believe she let us inside, with us being so filthy and rotten looking. She told us that we should have kept on going because we were in Kentucky and that Tennessee was further south. Mitzen asked her if she had ever heard of the town Leighring and she shook her head, bit her lip and said “nuh-uh, sorry I haven’t”. She kept looking at Jarl and smiling, pushing her hair back with her painted nails. He smiled back and I knew he was conscious of the grime that covered his body. She had on a thin, loose dress and when she was at the sink doing dishes with her back turned, she showed off the most luscious apple of an ass I had ever seen. She said that her father and brothers were out in the fields and since she didn’t mention her mother we figured she was dead or something. She cooked us up some eggs and muffins which made me suddenly realize that I hadn’t eaten a morsel in a day and a half. We fumbled with forks and knives while she was around but once she left the kitchen, we ate like animals. Yolk oozed down Mitzen’s chin and onto his shirt and he was so ravenous that he didn’t bother wiping it off. I felt guilty for not slowing down to enjoy the taste of such wonderful food. When she came back into the kitchen we noticed she had put on perfume and she asked me and Mitzen if we could go out and get some fire wood for her from the stack against the shed down by the woods. We obliged and when we came back, Jarl was on the front porch grinning at us with his hands in his pockets.

“You guys go on ahead and catch the next train. I’m gonna stay here for a while. I’ll catch up with you in Leighring alright?”

We were surprised but quickly understood what was going on and shaking his hand, walked away. Mitzen thrust his hands into his green pockets and marched away bent over, staring hard at the ground, stirring up a lot of dust with his boots. I quickly followed and, wondering if I’d ever see Jarl again, turned my head back and noticed him still standing there watching us leave.

“Are you sure it’ll be alright?” he shouted. I thought I noticed his voice crack on “alright”.

I looked hesitantly at Mitzen and called back, “Yeah, we’ll manage.” I noticed a weird look in Jarl’s eyes - as if there was fear in them.

“I’m still hungry,” said Mitzen after we had walked a ways in silence.

“Me too,” I said back so we decided to raid the chicken coop down the hill but didn’t find any eggs.

“Damn it what does he think he’s doing?” Mitzen exploded finally, kicking at some red boards leaning against the shack on our way out causing the hens to flutter and gurgle. I heard splattering sounds and knew that it was the chickens shitting themselves.

“Give ‘im a break,” I said. “You’d’ve done the same.” This stumped him. He knew damn well that one less person wasn’t going to ruin the convenience store heist.

“Look on the bright side,” I added, looking up at the sweltering sun to see if I could make the purple circles appear, “More money for us.”

Food then annexed our thoughts and we searched intently all over the farm until we found a road killed possum further down the road we had crossed earlier. We stood on either side of it, bent over with our hands on our knees, examining it. Mitzen sniffed but his face didn’t change. I pointed out how there weren’t that many flies on it but he shot that notion down right away pointing out how this wasn’t Dossetville and that there could be less flies here. (Dossetville was the town we had dwelled in before the town before Mogadore and where we had had the fly counting determiner down to a science). He went even further to say that all the flies were feeding off the cow and pig shit from the farm.

“So what do you think about it then, smart ass?” I asked through my teeth.

He sighed and stared at the carcass in deep thought, “I’d say its border line but that I’m too hungry to give a damn at this point.”

We soon had a small fire on the side of the road and sizzling possum meat on the ends of sticks. The rear end section of the animal we found to be definitely rancid when we cut it open, but the rest didn’t look all that bad, just a little grayer than usual. And runny too. The juices from my slab put out the fire at one point and we had to start it up again.

The smell of the roasted meat got my mouth watering and as I rotated it, watching it sizzle and smoke, my thoughts turned to Jarl and what he must have been doing at that very moment with that girl. The image I conjured up made my hunger even more ferocious and I quickly devoured the chunk and prepared more for the stick.

II

When I awoke the next morning, I knew right away that we had made the wrong decision about that possum. I stumbled through a thicket to the crick we had found and hunched over it, my hands sinking into the mud, staring at the water. I always preferred to be over water when I vomited. Its more comfortable and soothing. My eyes lost focus and I listened to the babbling sound. I hunched closer to the surface. The babbling got a little louder. I spit out the saliva that had been collecting in my mouth. It wouldn’t be long until that awful wave of sickness would rise to the surface. I thought of sticking my finger in my mouth to get it over with but something stopped me. I could never figure out what the force was within that made me prolong the agony. I knew my fate. There was no way I could fight this one off. I was going to puke my living guts out in a moment but my body was trying to fight it. “The body is so stupid,” I thought, “Why can’t it listen to the mind. The mind knows what’s going on.” I saw something moving and my eyes came into focus to observe the tiny tadpole that was working its way upstream. How lucky that tadpole was. He wasn’t about to vomit. He felt wonderful. Yet he was taking it for granted. I thought about how I was just yesterday. How I had felt fine yet I didn’t even notice it. This was god’s way of punishing me for that. I vowed that when this sickness passed and I felt normal again, I would stop for a moment to enjoy the feeling and be grateful that I felt that way and not the way I felt now. I spit again. This time a drop hung to my lower lip by a thin thread of saliva. I watched it through unfocused eyes as it crept lower and lower towards the water. When it reached the water, the current carried it away causing the shiny thread to break. The time had come. I tilted my chin forward and concentrated on keeping it in that position. I looked back at the tadpole and knew that it was in for the surprise of its life. I pictured him two days from now, in a deep, dark cesspool, telling his friends about the disgusting chunks that rained down on him from the sky. How cozy they must be in that world under water was my last thought before the vomit welled up out of me and hit the open air.

III

Mitzen had thrown up too and we walked down the road towards the point where the railroad crossed, feeling empty. We were so surprised to find Jarl sitting there on a tree stump next to the tracks with a white sheet wrapped around him. He was all clean and so was the pup, which he was cradling like an infant as if feeding it milk from a breast. He said that one of her brothers came back early and had chased him out with a shot gun and that he had felt one of the bullets whiz by his neck. He said this all as if it wasn’t a big deal. Something else was on his mind. He stared at the dirt at his feet and didn’t look up. He was completely naked under the white bed sheet. It was the only thing he could manage to grab during the frantic escape. It was amazing how clean he was.

“What’s with your hair?” Mitzen asked.

“Oh,” said Jarl, running his hand through the shiny hair, “She washed it with conditioner and then brushed it.”

“What’s conditioner?”

“She said it makes hair softer and more manageable.”

“Sounds like sissy shit,” Mitzen grumbled and began throwing rocks at a tree stump on the other side of the tracks. There was a long silence only disturbed by the thud of rock against wood. Finally I asked Jarl what had happened.

He frowned and didn’t look up. “I couldn’t do it,” he said.

Mitzen stopped short from throwing and studied Jarl’s face with squinting eyes. Then he wound up and blasted the rock into the stump.

“What do you mean you couldn’t do it?” I asked.

Jarl was slow in answering. “There she was on the bed, completely naked, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I couldn’t........” His voice broke off and there was more silence. Mitzen was pegging the stump harder with the rocks. Every time there was a louder thunk until, when I thought the stump would certainly explode from the next hit, a giant red ant larger than my hand popped out of the top to see what the racket was all about. It sat there on the stump, looking at us.

The sound Mitzen’s rock made when it hit was like the sound a rock makes when its thrown into an advancing wave. Kind of a glugging thuck sort of sound. The rock hit the ant in the face and passed through its body, forcing all of its inner organs and juices out of its ass. I squeezed my eyes shut and wondered how the ant must have felt just before it died. I remembered the time when I ate only sewer rats for an entire week and how every time I took a shit, it felt as if I were shitting out all of my inner organs. That must of been how the ant felt. What a way to die.

The exoskeleton of the ant lay there turned inside out atop a mass of gory pulp. Its juices drizzled over the side of the stump and balled up when it mixed with the dust like liquid silver. Mitzen didn’t whoop and yelp about his direct hit like I expected him to. He just stared at it quietly and then walked slowly over to the tracks and knelt down to lay his ear on one of them. Then he stood up and told us that the train was coming.

I looked over at Jarl who’s head had sunk even lower. I wanted to tell him something that would make him feel better. I reached deep down but couldn’t find anything. There was nothing I could do or say to comfort him and it made me feel wretched and worthless.

The train came roaring around the line of woods, stirring up dust. This one was going fast and we crouched in the bushes preparing ourselves for the bruises and strains we were about to receive. Then it was rushing by and we were up sprinting along side it. I could see that Jarl was having problems from the start, trying to sprint while holding the pup and the sheet around himself. Mitzen and I got on without much difficulty and then Jarl tossed the pup to us and made ready to jump. I saw the bar he was going for and he missed it by inches. His sheet got caught on something and was stripped from him and he was thrown spinning hard to the ground. He rolled a few times stirring up a hell of a lot of dust and then was on his feet again sprinting. He was going to try again on a car further down and we yelled at him to hurry. Just before he made it look as if he was about to leap something went empty in his eyes. He no longer squinted. He started to slow down. “No!” we shouted, “What are you doing?” He slowed to a stop and then collapsed in the dust, laying there on his back, staring up at the sky. I looked down at the ground and how fast it was rushing by, thinking about jumping off. Mitzen must of seen this for he pushed me into the center of the car and told me I’d break my neck. He was right. There was nothing we could do. I lay there watching him watch Jarl, seeing the confusion and frustration in his squinting eyes.

“What’s he doing?” I asked. “Is he still laying there?”

Mitzen nodded. “I can hardly see him anymore. What is wrong with him? Why doesn’t he get up?”

“Maybe he’s hurt.” I said.

“No, I think he just gave up.” Mitzen sat down on the edge and stared out at the dusty fields. I stared too and felt a dry soreness well up in my throat.

IV

The car we were in this time was carrying boxes of gin which we quickly started to drink hoping to dull the sharp edge out of what had just happened. We soon had ourselves convinced that Jarl was just tired and that he’d try again. Perhaps he had even come to his senses soon enough to catch a car further down. If not he’d surely catch the next train. Soon we were throwing bottles again at stuff that went by. Mitzen threw an entire box of eight bottles at a flashing railroad crossing sign and hit it dead on. The explosion was fantastic. The shattering glass. The splashing liquid. The fracturing metal and plastic. We fell down laughing.

We crossed the Cumberland River and passed into Tennessee by mid afternoon. A few hours later we passed a sign for Leighring. Below it was written in bold black letters: Neogypsies Stay Out.

“What the hell is a neogypsy?” Mitzen asked.

I shrugged my shoulders and looked farther down, out at the horizon. The town looked gray and dreary just like all the others I had been in.

V

Mitzen stepped out of his brother’s apartment and told me that his brother would be out in a minute as he sat down on the bench that formed an angle with the one I was sitting on. He picked up his bottle of gin and took a pull. I lifted my bottle and took a pull also. The pup was on the ground in front of us. Although it had been nice and clean earlier, it had since managed to find something dead to roll in and now its floppy little ears were caked in some kind of black filth that if you got too near to catch a whiff of, you couldn’t keep from gagging. It walked over to something tannish-brown on the ground and started to eat it. I told Mitzen that the pup was eating shit but he disagreed and said that it was a candy bar. He picked up the urchin and after smelling its breath, wrinkled his nose and gagged. I was right. He dropped the pup and it sat down bowlegged in front of us, continuing to chew. I laughed so hard because it was the most fucking nastiest thing I had ever seen. Mitzen laughed too and took another pull off his bottle. There the pup sat, looking up at us happily as it chewed as if to say “Hey look at me. I’m eating the best damn meal I’ve ever had.” I burst out laughing again when I thought of this, spraying gin out of my mouth. But my laughter soon faded out and I looked down at my bottle and then stared out over the dark buildings at the hill tops far away, covered in gray fog.

“We don’t have anything,” I said to Mitzen. My voice sounded unfamiliar to me.

Mitzen’s voice still had left over laughter in it and he said “What do you mean? We have a box of gin, a shit-eating dog, and we’re about to be rich.”

I thought of Jarl then. I pictured him as I last saw him: laying there naked in the dust under the burning sun. I wanted to send him some clothes. I wanted to send him a bottle of gin. I wanted to send him his filthy dog. I wanted to send him another chance.

I set my bottle down, rested elbows on knees, face in hands, and stared down at the footprint I had made in the dust. A faint gust of silent wind blew it away.

“I have nothing,” I said.

“What?” Mitzen asked, looking up from the dog, still chuckling.

“Nothing,” I said.

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