LITMIR.BIZ

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      “If it’s not one thing,” I said, “it’s your mother.”

      Dinky flipped the light. “Christ on a crutch,” he said.

      On the floor, in a bamboo cage with pits and dung, lay a lovebird dead as wood.

      “Now that,” Basil said, tapping the cage with his boot, “is some weird-ass shit.”

      Hickory looked at Dinky. “You’re not going to tell me this was yours, I hope.”

      “We’ve never seen the thing.”

      “Maybe,” I said, “it was your grandpa’s.”

      “Granddad hates animals. He wouldn’t let Dad have a fish.”

      Lucille had been picking at her lip so long her mouth looked like a steak. “I had a bird once,” she said. “When we lived in Carolina.”

      “That’s very nice, Lucille,” Dinky said. “Thank you for sharing that with us.”

      She ignored this and shuffled closer. “It was a finch. Then one day I came home from school, and she was gone.”

      “It flew away?” Hickory said.

      “Her name was Zoë,” Lucille said, and put a hand to her face. The stink was really nuts. “My father said if he had to hear that racket for one more day, he’d be forced to use his gun.”

      “You ever hear a finch?” I said. “Not loud at all. Finches are about the nicest bird around.”

      “He hated cleaning its cage, is what I think.”

      I left the kitchen as Hickory told Basil to dump the bird. He complained at first, but then a door slammed and slammed again, and there they were, Dinky and Basil, huffing at their smokes.

      Lucille had laid out a dog-eared copy of Fear and Loathing next to a stack of discs. She jabbed the On button, then Play—out came “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”

      “So who’s going to get the ice?”

      I told her she had two legs.

      “Excuse me?”

      She was always making people repeat themselves. It gave her notions of power.

      “Turn that down,” I said. She waited a second before turning it down. “I said you’ve got two legs.”

      “You ought to know. You’ve been staring at them long enough.”

      “Check the TV,” Dinky said. “We want to see if they’re still saying it’s going to flood.”

      “It’s the day before New Year’s Eve,” Basil said, as if the weather played to dates.

      Dinky ran through the channels till he reached a woman with hair like GI Joe’s. On the screen beside her flashed bombed-out streets and men at guns, perched on inexorable tanks. Another face appeared, a weeping crone, trailed by a man with a shapka and fatigues. The anchorwoman sat with considered reserve. Her voice was a tool for faith. Operation Joint Endeavor, she said, appears to have reached a point of…

      Dinky squealed like he’d won a prize. “That’s Atherton,” he said. “From our company!” He knelt by the tube and gestured toward some pimply kid in a truck. “Jesus, that’s our whole frigging company!”

      “So much for your fifteen minutes, huh, Dink?” I said.

      “You know I can’t drink my whiskey without ice,” Lucille said.

      “Snow’s good,” Basil said. “Use snow.”

      “We’re going to draw straws,” Lucille said. “The two with the shortest get to make a run.”

      Dinky shook a bottle. “But we don’t need no ice. We need bourbon. And as we can all see, we have mas bourbon.”

      “No mas no more, pinche,” Lucille said, and squeezed Dinky’s ass.

      We cut the straw from a broom in the kitchen. Then Basil took the longest, Hickory the next, Lucille after that.

      “Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well,” Basil said.

      “Sorry,” Hickory said.

      Dinky looked like he might cry. “Why’s it always me that’s getting the shaft?”

      “Cause you’re feeble,” Lucille said. “And jinxed.”

      “Hatchet Lady,” Basil said, classic. “So mean.”

      “Just remember whose cabin you’re in,” Dinky said. “We’re here for a week.”

      I punched Basil’s arm. “Hey, asshole. You get rid of the bird?”

      THE ROAD WAS RUNNY AND BLACK, AND WHEN the lights hit the trees they looked like creeping skin. A DJ yammered about our noses and what Jack Frost had done.

      “So whose idea was it,” Dinky said. But instead of taking his bait, like usual, I waited. He said, “We know you’re familiar with the word moronic, Andrew. We won’t talk about how we spent the last nine months in a place so cold your pee breaks on the ground. We’ll save that for our golden years. You know what we need?”

      I stared at him. He didn’t want an answer. He’d ask you a goddamned question just to answer himself.

      “What we need,” he said, “is Hawaii. What we need is Guam. Girls in grass skirts and pigs with apples in their traps. Mai tais is what we need, AJ.” And the gloopy bastard never drove with his hands at ten and two, either. One of them flapped about as he talked while the other hung across the wheel like an old rubber chicken. “How,” he said, “are we ever supposed to get Hickory on her back when all she can think about is misery?”

      I fiddled with the radio. I pulled down the visor to hate my face in the mirror. “You take a look in the mirror these days?”

      “You know we don’t like mirrors.”

      “Look at you. Look at your head. Especially your head. You were planning to get laid with that thing?”

      Dinky started coughing so bad he stopped in the road. “We did fine in Germany,” he said. Then he saw my retard’s face and hit the gas. “You know, with the chicks.”

      “The chick, you mean. I saw her picture. She looked like a fat albino parrot. Not to mention she’s a professional thief. Not to mention she gave you the clap.”

      “Fortunately for us, Uncle Sam takes care of his boys.”

      I studied the water on the window as it turned to pearls and marveled at the creatures in their snowbound lairs. I thought about my grandmother, how she answered the phone to say she’d been raped, or lost her child, or found a bag of stones. She hobbled from my flat one day, and when I asked her purpose, she said, Home.

      “This thing in four-by?” I said.

      “What do we think?”

      “We think we should get the lead out.”

      The road had just two lanes. Trees flashed by, now sparkling, now black, a strobic land of bugaboos dreamed and real. We saw no cars, no people, not even the twinkle of lights on another unnamed road. The Cruiser heaved with empty cans and cigarette butts, a single dirty sock. And roasted peanuts and peanut shells, Basil had tossed them everywhere, the dashboard, the seats, one was in my hair. It stunk of laundry hampers, and ragamuffin carnivals, sculleries from days of yore…

      My old toad once brought me to a creek bottom full of sycamore and oak. Everything shone in hues of green, lancets of sun pushing through the shadows. An odor of struggle suffused the air. It was the odor of springtime, of birth. High overhead a worry of jays had attacked a nest of fledglings. When my toad climbed a stone to piss the creek, I made my way to the tree. Shells lay about, and in

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