It was good money, easy money, for fairly enjoyable work. I was the ax man. I swung my pick at the graves and broke up that ancient earth and Davey scooped. Davey was the spade man. We called ourselves The Muscle. Putt and Charlene were The Brains. Nobody called them that, but that’s what they were. Putt was an artist, a real old-fashioned craftsman. Once The Muscle dug down to the coffin, Putt would slide into the pit and bore through the lid with an awl and hew out a porthole with a bow saw he wielded like a scalpel and snake a noose down into the box and snag the body by the wrist or ankle or neck and coax it out of the hole like one of those serpent charmers with the carved reed flutes. Putrid limbs, mummified faces, danced to Putt’s manipulations. Then we’d strip the valuables – muck-green buttons, brassy buckles from skin-thin boots, primitive golden fillings, whatever we could pry loose. Once, in a field outside Fredericksburg, Putt pulled a Confederate lieutenant colonel out of the hole with his hat, scabbard, and cavalry pistols still gleaming, intact. The hit was in a historical hotspot, and we were rewarded with some nightwatchman’s warning shot whizzing over our heads as we fled. Well worth it. Charlene got us each a stack of scratch for that, so much money she’d had to get it counted by one of those money counting machines. I still remember the crisp stiffness of it standing in my palm. Charlene knew the dealers, the pawnmen, the buyers. She never got her hands dirty during the heists, just stood above us smoking Marlboro menthols in the moonlight, ashing into an old mint tin, stashing the butts in her pockets, leaving no trace of herself save the smoke curling starward and dissipating on the southern breeze. But Charlene knew the buyers. She was the one who made it worthwhile, who could leave with a shoebox of rusted bellum metal and return with cold hard cash.

Charlene was on her third menthol and we were in the second hour and this was the first grave of the eve. We were in some town in some state in a boneyard choked by kudzu. Putt coiled loops of rough hewn hemp rope into a noose. Davey scooped shovelfuls of soil over his shoulders. I swung my pickaxe and lifted my pickaxe and swung my pickaxe again. Cicadas droned with the mosquitos and horseflies. Davey hummed while he worked. Some late Blondie or early Bowie. When my iron collided casketside, the thump was just another noise in the night. Davey’s spade hushed against the last of the soil. Putt tightened his noose, hefted the awl and bow saw. Charlene smoked on.

It was maybe two feet wide and five feet tall, the coffin. We used to be so small. Putt joined us in the hole and drove home the awl, twisted. Wood shredded and fell in a neat ring around the widening hole. At the width of a fist it was ready for the saw. Steel scraped through pine. Davey clambered out the grave. I followed him. I wondered if anyone in history had escaped more graves than us.

Putt looped the noose around something inside the coffin and eased it to the entrance of the hole. A little shriveled hand like a monkey’s paw. Putt whistled up at us and shook the hand like a businessman, smiling coy and mud-caked. Davey and I muscled the rest of the cadaver to the surface and laid it flat in the thick and knotted grass.

Three brass buttons on the slate gray coat. Two lost to the immense sometime between then and now. Putt twisted them off, pocketing loose twine. The shoes were buckleless, what we’d now call moccasins. This man, this slayer of men slayed by men, surely called them boots. Putt tried to peel them off. They returned to dust in his hands.

“Open him,” Putt said.

I stuck my fingers in the mouth and pried the jaws apart. A century of jerkied sinew snapped. I tried not to register the supple give of the gums, like a dish sponge overused and left in the sun. I pulled the black prune of a tongue back from the teeth while Putt checked for crowns of gold.

“Strip him.”

The threads crumbled off at my touch. In middle school, to form the interior of the white whale for a drama class production of Moby Dick: The Musical, we’d draped wet muslin over latticed wooden slats and let it dry. This ribcage looked much the same. Another button clasped closed the pantaloons, and I added it to the clacking collection in Putt’s pocket. The corpse’s dead member curled, reptilian, in its nest of coarse hair.

“Flip him.”

Just above the small of the back an angry crusted crater erupted. An entrance wound to which no commensurate exit existed. Putt inserted his awl and wound it around and around until the flesh began to pulp and ooze and stink of long-dormant carrion. With a sufficient hole bored, Putt took my pointer finger and thumb and pressed them together pad to pad and popped them inside and said, “Hold that open.” Then he used his own fingers and, disturbing something moist and warmer than I thought corpses got, rooted inside for the bullet. After many seconds he emerged pinching a hunk of lead ballooned at the tip like an open umbrella and dropped it between the body’s shoulder blades. Slick with viscera, it glinted ruby in the moonlight.

Putt shoved the corpse back in the pit, folded the body through the coffin’s porthole, and crammed the threads of clothes after it to stopper the smell. The Muscle moved dirt back over the casket and stomped the earth until it shone like copper. Putt rolled out the sheet of turf we’d cut from the grave. We packed the roots into that dead brown grassless space.

Putt handed Charlene the buttons and the bullet. She placed them amidst the ashes in her mint tin. We moved on to new graves, new wonders, new money to be made.

♧

Davey and I both showered with the door open so we could listen to the sitcom running on the motel’s box television. One of the characters had an escaped pet monkey midnighting as a mugger in the Central Park Zoo, and two others were in love, and a third was trying and failing to bake the perfect chocolate cake. It was funny, and we turned the volume loud enough to hear over the rushing water, loud enough that Putt slammed on our shared wall and shouted at us to shut up because some people were trying to sleep. We muted the TV. We watched the mouths move and pause for silent laughter, watched the monkey make finger guns and collect wallet after wallet. We pulled the chains dangling from the lamps on either side of our bed. We shut our eyes. We interlaced our thighs, Davey’s head on my chest, hands around my waist, as I’d come to expect after heist nights. We slept until the long red light of evening fell across Davey’s eyes, then slept on, chests sweaty, skin stuck to skin. Putt’s knocking finally woke us.

We rose and brushed our teeth and packed our bags and left.

Charlene had already checked out, collected her stolen credit card from the lobby, and visited the local pawn shop. Davey and I walked down the dirt path to the parking lot and found her and Putt leaned against the Firebird like a regular Bonnie and Clyde. Charlene smoked, ashing on the asphalt, and Putt tried to appear inconspicuous as he counted a thin stack of bills.

Charlene dropped her menthol and let it burn on the blacktop. She produced a wad of cash and handed it to Davey. Without counting, he split it in half and handed me my share. 

“To the bus stop?” Putt asked.

The back of the Firebird smelled of leather and hot metal. Trees blurred outside the window like a swollen green river. Charlene swerved and we thumped over something small, twice, and Davey whimpered as the wheels beneath our feet fell across the creature.

At the bus stop, Davey got on something sleek and silver heading East toward the sea. I ascended a green beast bound North toward the mountains. Putt and Charlene waited for me to find my seat. Putt waved through the window. I put my fist to my ear, thumb and pinky extended, and mouthed Call me? Charlene nodded almost imperceptibly, the single dip of her chin sending tiny tremors through her ringlets. The bus pulled out and the Firebird followed for a few blocks. Then it turned on the highway heading West and away.

♧

I went back to stacking shelves at Piggly Wiggly. I waited for the call. I slept alone, watched sitcoms on the television set, missed Davey’s weight in the bed beside me. A few afternoons, my manager’s mother came over and made tea and we performed passionless sex on the sofa. A bird died in the backyard. I threw her in the trash compactor. I regretted not burying her in the yard. I ate beans from a can with cheese from a jar. Charlene called. I boarded a bus for Savannah.

Immediately apparent was the wrongness of the situation. This was a city. We didn’t hit cities. Cities had people, living people, who kept watch over their dead people. A billboard in center square advertised ghost tours. We were in the business of disturbing haunted spaces, not of disturbing the haunted spaces business.

Charlene booked two conjoined rooms in a colonial boasting ghosts. We four met in the foyer and Charlene was all smiles. She introduced me to the skull-faced landlady as her brother, Davey as her brother-in-law. Putt nodded along dotingly. The dusty air smelled curated, wrong. It all smelled wrong.

Sitting in a circle on the four-poster bed, curtains drawn, antebellum candlesticks dripping translucent wax, Charlene explained that things would be different this time, that we would focus on one site alone, that we were no longer bound by the currency of buttons.

Davey and I slept above the sheets, daring a ghost to grab our naked feet.

In the morning, we bought tickets to tour a historic plantation in a swamp several miles beyond the city. A college kid in a knit cap drove us down a gravel path in an ATV-drawn wagon. We sat in the back swatting swarms of mosquitos and midges and listened as she listed historical factoids – battles with Indians, battles with Spanish, battles with British. The discovery of fool’s gold, battles for fool’s gold. The discovery of coal, battles for coal. She brought us to a fort in a mangrove cove, warned us about gators, invited us to lick the walls. They were made of hardened plaster and oyster shells. Davey licked the battlement, said it tasted of lemon and blackboard chalk.

We piled back in the wagon. The college kid turned a wide circle and we returned to the path. Already, afternoon sunshine split the tree-lined drive. Spanish moss hung like spiderwebs from the branches. Clumps shivered in the breeze and cast slender shadows on the gravel.

“Where are the bodies buried?” Putt shouted from the wagon.

“What?” the college kid shouted back.

“Is there a family mausoleum?” Charlene shouted.

The college kid killed the engine. We sputtered to a stop beneath the gleaming trees.

“There are three crypts in total, and a mass grave in the swamp. The third is for the household servants, the second for the distant relatives, the first for the founding family.”

“Who’s in the mass grave?” Davey asked.

“The slaves.”

“Can we visit?” Putt asked.

“The grave? Unfortunately, it’s in dispute at the moment. The family wants to keep it, the anthropological society wants to excavate it, BP thinks there’s a coal deposit under it.”

“Battles and battles and battles,” Davey said.

“And the crypts?” Putt again.

“Closed to the public. A matter of familial privacy.”

Charlene took a pull from a menthol I hadn’t noticed her light. “Could you take us to see the outside? My brother here is an architect and he’s hoping to design a mausoleum for our family, one that matches the grandeur and scope of this site.” Her voice oozed earnestness. “The sight of it might inspire artistic fervor.”

So we left the wagon parked in the middle of the drive and trekked into the trees and through the swamp and into more trees and stopped before a towering wrought iron fence with spiked posts and a padlocked gate.

“The big one with the domed roof is the founder’s mausoleum.”

I frowned and considered the crypt in a manner I hoped invoked artistic appreciation.

Stone blocks stacked crosswise constituted the mausoleum. A grate guarded the door, which looked to be made of one contiguous black granite mass. The windows were stained glass and aflame in the afternoon glow. Putt wrote something down on a pad produced from nowhere.

On the return trek, I pushed a piece of Spanish moss out of my face and several hundred pincers stabbed my hand in succession, then ascended my wrist and forearm. The college kid shoved me into a brackish green puddle and submerged my arm up to the shoulder. Something slithered inches from my nose. The pain subsided as dozens of tiny mites floated to the surface.

“There are critters in the moss, folks. Sorry. Should’ve told you earlier.”

I stood and peeled muck from my elbow.

“Come to think of it, there are critters everywhere. Don’t touch anything, to be on the safe side.”

Back at the colonial, there was only one shower. Charlene, saved by her mentholated aura, was the only one who hadn’t been made feast by miniscule beasts. The rest of us were mostly bug bite. Clothing sandpapered my raw skin, and Davey slapped phantom buck flies long after we’d secured the windows. Still, Charlene showered first. Then Putt. Brain perks. Davey and I scratched madly. Rather than argue over who deserved the shower, we both jumped in as soon as Putt cleared the curtain.

Swollen welts peppered Davey’s shoulders like spilled rice. Almost reflexively, I reached out and brushed my fingers over them. He winced.

“Sorry,” I said, quickly.

He turned to face me, body parts swinging at the edge of my eyeline.

“Let me see yours.”

I didn’t move. He turned me by the waist, touched my shoulder blades in return. His fingertips burned. I gasped. He didn’t apologize. I didn’t wish for him to stop.

Davey picked up the complimentary bed and breakfast bar soap and ran it through his hands, then over my back and down my spine. He paused at my waistline and returned upward, pressing out as he went, fingers radiating fire from the cleft of my vertebrae to my kidneys, ribs, nipples. It burned. I ached. He knelt behind me and massaged the meat of my thighs. I clawed the curtain; all of me was stiff except my knees, which wouldn’t lock. He turned me again, and as I spun my erection hit him in the chin. He giggled a little girlish laugh and rubbed the bar of soap white in his hands, then rubbed me, and I clenched in places deep inside, places I didn’t know could clench, and finished quickly onto his neck and chest.

He turned into the steaming water to rinse me off him. I stood there dumbly. I covered my crotch with my hands because it felt like the thing to do, then removed them because that pose didn’t feel right. I felt unashamed, then suddenly, deeply, terribly ashamed at my shamelessness. I washed Davey’s back. His soft moans made me afraid. I left the shower while the water ran.

In bed, Davey said nothing. I wore sweatpants and a T-shirt and socks. Davey wore shorts and no shirt and no socks. The T-shirt burned my back. I wanted to take it off, and I would not take it off under any circumstances. Lights off, candle wicks still smoking, our bare arms brushed. There was no TV in this historic building, no sitcoms. Heavy, leaden, velvet silence smothered us until Davey looped his leg over mine and laid his head on my chest and I became conscious of the fact that I could not hide my fear from him. He could hear my heart race.

My lips almost touched his scalp. I thought of kissing his head. I did not kiss him.

The next night we ransacked a cryptful of corpses.

We returned to the plantation after midnight, Davey’s spade replaced by bolt cutters, my pickaxe now a sledgehammer. Putt and Charlene purchased headlamps, but we weren’t to light them until we hit the swamp. We walked the gravel path in sacred darkness. Charlene chain-smoked to keep the bugs at bay. Eventually, we each took a cigarette. Putt and I smoked. Davey tucked his, burning, behind his ear.

“Three years,” he said, “and I’m not even tempted.”

In the swamp, there seemed always to be creatures splashing just outside our narrow beams of light. Something colossal jumped and we all turned in unison. Two white orbs glowed at us like comets from the glassy blackness, the rest of the gator submerged and statue-still.

At the wrought iron fence, Putt cut the padlock. The gate made a low mewling sound as it swung open. “That’s exactly the sound of a slaughtered cow,” Davey said.

I stared at his silhouette framed against the darkness.

“I used to work in a kosher slaughterhouse.”

How little I knew about this man with whom I’ve showered, about all of these people I’ve shared my life with.

“Good to know.” Putt clapped Davey on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

The door to the crypt was a chain link gate before a granite slab. Putt made four careful snips at the corners. Davey and I caught it as it fell forward, tossed it to the side. Clangs reverberated around us. The swamp pulsed.

“Careful,” Putt said.

“Are we worried anyone will hear us out here?” I asked.

“No,” Charlene answered. “But we’ll need that for later.”

The granite pushed inward. There was no handle, no place for a lock. We squeezed into the space between slab and jamb one at a time, handing our tools to the person ahead of us. Inside was cobwebbed and dust-caked, moonlight trickling in through stained glass skylights. The clouds of disturbed dust and fractalated light lent the crypt an obscure, occultish air. Plaster squares with bronze nameplates perforated the back wall.

I waited for a directive from The Brains. I received none. I shouldered my sledgehammer and coiled and swung at a square, aiming for bronze.

The hammer punched right through, almost taking me with it. The handle jumped from my hands and remained standing in the wall, head buried in the vault, vibrating. The vague implication of rotten wood settled on my tongue. I wrenched the hammer free and swung again.

I smashed the lid off every vault. Davey cleared the brittle remnants from the wall. Putt bored out a hole in the front of every coffin, twisting that trusty awl.

These were not the Spartan burials of those killed in action. Each cadaver came with rings, coins, watches, teeth. I held open the jaws and Putt pulled a pair of pliers from his belt and wrenched gold crowns, fillings, caps – teeth taken whole from their sockets and smashed to bits for the metal embedded within. Charlene filled her mint tin, then we all stuffed our pockets full. My jeans sagged with the weight. I had to hold them up with one hand as I worked.

Davey pulled a long black belt from around the waist of a corpse. He reached around my middle and snaked it through my belt loops, fingers cramming cracking leather through the denim. When he cinched it shut in front, hands resting above my zipper, breath hot on my cheek, I pressed against him and felt faint, a nitrous static fizzing up my spine.

The belt fit me perfectly, big brass buckle still shining.

In the end, we left some valuables stashed inside the final coffin. We just couldn’t carry it all.

We slid back out through the crack in the slab and pulled it flush behind us. The Muscle replaced the grate, leaning it against the granite frame. At the fence, Putt closed the gate with a sound like a slaughtered cow, picked up the padlock he’d cut, and replaced it with a new one from a pouch in his belt. The lock snapped shut with a definitive click. There was nothing to show that anyone had visited save a slightly off-kilter grate, the faint aroma of Marlboro menthols, and an utterly ravaged interior no one would see until the next family death.

We splashed back through the swamp as the edge of the sky spoiled green. The faint light revealed hundreds of blinking eyes watching our escape.

♧

Piggly Wiggly, sitcoms, intercourse with my manager’s mother, beans. I waited for a call. I slept alone.

This new system meant a delayed payday. Charlene said it would take time to divide the pickings among several buyers, selling only enough at once to avoid suspicion, authenticators, authorities. I almost didn’t believe my share would come. Then, one day, an envelope in the mailbox. I still don’t know how she found my address. Inside, a bundle of hundreds bound by a rubber band. I unfurled the bundle to count the payout and inside sat a slip of paper. On it, an address, a date, printed in Charlene’s curt script.

I bought a bus ticket to the corresponding city. We scoped out the high-profile location. We looted the rich dead. I lay with Davey. I returned home. Then, a bundle, an address, a date. On and on.

The targets got bigger. Colonial, like Savannah. Plymouth, Providence, Salem. Northern towns with brick city squares and ice cream parlors and rocky beaches. Places I’d never dreamed I’d be. But Charlene never forgot why we started. We hit Civil War battlegrounds, broke into the tombs of generals, stole bayonets and rifles from the shriveled hands of fallen soldiers. Each time, a bigger name, more bodies, more money. Lynchburg, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, loot.

The final hit was a return to form. The address on the note in the mailbox was so isolated it didn’t have a bus stop. Charlene’s script told me to head to Richmond, where she and Putt would pick me up in the Firebird.

They were waiting at the bus stop, arm in arm against the hood like old times, smiling their old time smiles. Davey had already arrived, and he popped out of the back seat and spun me in a hug. If The Brains found this strange they did not say.

We drove to a nothing motel like old times, the vacancy sign missing so many bulbs it read VACA  Y. Charlene got two adjoining rooms. She paid in cash. No need for stolen cards in our newly bountiful lifestyle.

In our room Davey and I showered together, his fingers massaging my scalp, kneading knots from my shoulders and neck. I washed his back. We fell into bed and watched mute faces make jokes and pause for laughs. Davey looked up at me. He seemed to want something. The television bathed him blue, ghostly. He lay his head on my chest, lips brushing my neck, and I pulled him up by the chin and kissed him on the open mouth and was glad I did.

In the morning, Charlene drove us to a quaint cemetery. White rope ran through stone pillars the height of our thighs, bounding the boneyard against nothing. We hopped the rope, crunched over sparse yellow grass and around twisted pines, and followed Charlene to a solid little gravestone.

“Arm of Stonewall Jackson,” I read aloud.

“That’s why we’re here,” Charlene said.

“We’re gonna sell a hundred-year-old amputation?”

“I am going to sell a hundred-year-old amputation. You are going to dig it up.”

“Who’s gonna buy your hundred-year-old amputation?”

“An enthusiast currently expatriated in Mexico deals exclusively in the trade of human remains. He’s already agreed to pay.”

Someone whistled, or a bird whistled. Some swallows fled the pines.

“There’s no way Stonewall Jackson’s severed arm is buried in a county cemetery in Podunk, Virginia,” Davey said.

“You’re right. This is just an empty memorial. But I know where it really is. Come on.”

Charlene savored knowing what we did not. The Brains had the lore, the intel, and liked it. The Muscle followed where they were told.

Back in the Firebird, across lush hills, into a dense copse of live oaks. Charlene parked just inside the circle of trees and led us deep into the canopied green. In a clearing, a log cabin stood, its gray brick chimney breathing black smoke. A wooden cross, white, stood proudly in the front yard, its shadow cast long across the grass. Patina-green copper tubes ran up one side of the cross and down the other, terminating into the earth below.

Charlene stopped at the edge of the treeline. Putt made a sweeping revelatory gesture. The Muscle stared.

“The arm is in the house?” Davey asked.

“The arm is in an urn in the vault beneath the still,” Charlene answered.

“What still?”

“That cross is a moonshine still.”

“Why is Stonewall Jackson’s severed arm in a moonshine still?”

Charlene shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. No one knew where it was buried – where it was really buried – for decades. It was stolen after Appomattox, switched hands, wound up in some carpetbagger’s suitcase, and disappeared after that. Somehow word got out it was in the archives of the military history museum at West Point. A backroom deal or two and now it’s here, ten miles from where it’s been supposedly entombed since the Civil War.”

“And where is here?” I asked.

“A cabin.”

“Whose cabin?”

“The official Virginia chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.”

I looked at each of our crew in turn.

“Thank almighty Christ,” I said, “that we’re all white.”

“I’m Jewish,” Davey said.

“I’m an eighth Cherokee,” Putt said. “Some quantity Lebanese.”

“It doesn’t matter what we are,” Charlene said. “These people mean it when they say come and take it, my property over my cold dead body.”

We returned through the trees to the Firebird, to the motel, beneath the sheets.

Davey lay across me. Terra cotta sunset snuck through the blinds. We would leave at midnight. Now was nap time.

“Can I see where you’re from?” Davey asked.

“It’s a magical land called West Virginia,” I said. “The streets are paved in golden coal.”

“West Virginia?” Davey lifted his head off my stomach. I could read the lines of my face in his opal pupils. “That’s not too far. Could I come back with you?”

“We’ll talk later,” I said.

“When later?”

“After the arm later. Sleep now.”

I fought my way through gauzy slumber. Then Putt knocked on the wall.

Charlene killed the Firebird’s headlights half a mile from the treeline. We drove through fields bathed muted moondust white. We parked among the trees and debarked. The live oaks choked all light. Then, the clearing. The cross shone silver. A burst of stars burned above it.

No black smoke from the gray brick chimney. We approached the cross in perfect silence.

I swung my pickaxe at the base of the cross. I had aimed a ways away from where the copper pipe disappeared into the ground, but all those months of easy-money mausoleums left me rusty. The tip of my pick struck the pipe. A thin ethanol mist hissed into the night. Davey dropped to the dirt and puckered his lips to the spray. He came up smiling, dew-shiny. I fell to my knees and drank too. Even Putt partook. Charlene stood some steps away, watching us, watching the cross, watching the cabin.

I the pick man swung some more. Spade Man Davey cleared the soil. In less than ten minutes we struck something hollow. A wooden trap door. Putt pulled it up and we dropped down.

Putt clicked on a headlamp. The Muscle followed suit. Inside the vault were copper pots, ceramic jugs. In the direction of the cabin, a reinforced dirt tunnel disappeared into darkness. Habit compelled me to heft my pick and bury it in the soil.

Putt put a hand on my arm. I left the pick standing as he guided me to an altar set in the far wall.

Davey was already staring.

There were medals, medallions, capes, caps, boots, two crossed cavalry swords mounted across a tattered Confederate flag and, in front of it all, a box. Black steel, bolted shut, about the size of a fire extinguisher. Putt hefted it under his arm and turned to leave.

“That’s it?” I whispered.

He shrugged. “Chump change, the rest of it.”

The Muscle still pocketed as much as we could carry. I cinched my cadaver belt against the extra weight. Davey pulled my pick from its place in the dirt. The Muscle ascended out of the vault.

Putt held the box high above his head, framed against the brilliant night sky like a champion prize fighter. He bounded to Charlene and embraced her, pulling her toward the fountain of moonshine. Together they fell and together they drank. The Muscle joined them, lying in the mud, guzzling. I rolled on my back and considered the stars scattered like shotgun spray above us. Davey kissed me on the cheek and we all four stood, Muscle and Brains together, victorious, rich, wet.

Charlene sparked a Marlboro menthol and pale flame engulfed her right arm. She shrieked briefly, then stopped, dropped, and rolled into the still. The cross became blaze, a behemoth spitting fire from its burst pipe. The Muscle bolted. Charlene rolled into dry grass. Putt dropped the arm and smothered her with his jacket. They both stood. Charlene’s face was black with soot, blouse burnt to cinders, curls smoking. She didn’t look hurt. But when she saw the steel box where Putt had thrown it, swallowed by fire and already melting, she lunged desperately. Putt circled her waist and dragged her away wailing.

By now, the door to the cabin had opened and closed and opened again. A man naked to the briefs stood on the porch shouting as he attempted to sight us through the blinding firelight with the bolt-action thirty-aught-six against his shoulder.

We took off into the woods as the man pointed his barrel skyward and let loose a warning shot. The noise knocked me in the nuts and I stumbled toward Charlene’s still-smoking frame, trusting even her enkindled state to remember where she’d parked the Firebird.

More shouts rang out behind us, then more shots. Live oak branches snapped dead above our heads. Cold air stung my lungs like smoke. The Muscle ran together. Davey took my hand in his. I thought maybe I would cry. Between my gut and my heart a beating sea swelled. Davey laughed his wonderful little girl’s laugh, whooping, head back, and I couldn’t help but join him, cackling through the broken branches, howling like a hunting pack, the echo of us filling the forest, subsuming the gunshots, the blaze behind us, eyes ahead, hearts far beyond our minds. We ran like kids playing tag in the night, like teenage lovers caught in a parked car, like captive beasts feral and suddenly freed. Then Davey fell.

His body and head snapped limp in separate directions. He nearly took me with him and I dropped his hand and he collapsed with his feet pointing away from each other and his elbows chicken-winged and only then did I register the gunshot. I stared. He twitched. I struggled to relate the noise to the sight before me. I could not comprehend the connection between Davey and the gunshot.

The Brains kept running. I started running. I stopped running. I existed in some paralyzed state between Davey’s pull and the push of the thirty-aught-six. I crouched and ducked my way back to Davey and dragged him toward the Firebird. I ignored the gurgles sucking from his throat.

By the time we arrived at the car, the shots had ceased, the man’s shouts had receded somewhere distantly to the East, and The Brains had turned the Firebird around and were pulling away.

I shouted and jumped and succeeded in getting them to slow.

I muscled Davey into the backseat. I held his limp hand as we raced away.

In a field miles from our motel, the gurgling stopped and the Firebird stopped and Davey was dead.

Putt laid him out supine and Charlene prepared a starlit autopsy and I cooed into his deaf ears something utterly meaningless. I suddenly realized this wasn’t Davey and my actions disgusted me. I retreated to the car. I leaned against the hood. The Brains stripped Davey and found the bullet wound.

“It went straight through his spinal column,” Charlene stated, “and missed his vital organs entirely. It’s a miracle, how little trauma the body has undergone.”

“It killed him instantly,” Putt said. “Miraculous.”

“It wasn’t instant,” I said.

“And the organs,” Charlene said. “The organs are salvageable.”

“Am I going to have to bury him alone?” I asked.

“We’ll need ice,” Charlene said, to Putt. “The Mexican will want him on ice.”

“Throw him in the trunk,” Putt said, to me.

Twenty minutes later we bought six bags of ice from a 7-Eleven and shoved them in the trunk with Davey.

An hour after that, Davey lay on ice in my motel room’s bathtub.

I asked Putt and Charlene if I could sleep in their room. They said no.

I turned on a sitcom. I turned off a sitcom. I lay in bed wearing my boots.

I pissed in the bathroom. I stared at Davey. A faint red bloom colored the ice around his throat like cherry slurpee. A mustard drop slid out of me and plopped into the bowl. I shook myself dry. I stared at what was left of Davey. That dead thing once held me, made me shake, kissed me wet and heavy. It lay still. I’d felt those muscles jump. Its heat had covered my chest. I shook the limp penis in my hand and pulled the skin taut. I rubbed, I twisted, I stroked. I felt nothing.

I clawed into the ice. I found a hand. I held it in mine, rolled it between my palms, tried to warm the cold flesh. It leached all the heat I had left.

♧

Piggly Wiggly fired me, or I quit. I liked the volume loud, played Friends, Suits, Scrubs, Sweats at fork-rattling decibels. Jars of cheese sauce and cold beans. My manager’s mother didn’t want to screw me since her son stopped telling me what to do, or else I never called her. I took my pick to the mailbox, pried up the dirt around the post. It lay on its side, a hunk of cement stuck to the base like the bulbous follicle of some plucked pubic hair. When I stomped the tin box, it crumpled with an empty whoosh. Air rushed from some place to some other.

The money didn’t come. No mail came. I developed a taste for slurpees, relished the rush of ice shards tumbling down my throat, graveled and sharp and cold. 79 cents, 89 cents, 99 cents for the big one, the styrofoam tub with the domed top. All four flavors in a sick brown mush. Crushed cups littered my living room leaking sludge.

One day, a knock. Charlene. A thick wad of cash in my hand. The bills flat and machine-crisp. There were many, many bills.

I waited for words. She said nothing. I closed the door.

Another burst of knocks.

“Where’s Putt?”

“Can I come in?”

“No.” I walked into the yard and shut the door behind me. I sat on the concrete follicle where my mailbox once stood.

“You should count that.”

“I will. Later.”

“It’s a lot.”

“I’m glad.”

“Two shares. The Muscle’s half.”

“Thanks.”

She held something closed tight in her fist like a firefly she feared would flee. She extended her hand to me, unfurled her fingers. Some teeth on a string. Impressive roots, long and sharp and white, the tops pitted and smoke-browned.

“My Mexican made this. I thought you might want it.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s a necklace.”

I didn’t take it. She squatted, set it in the grass at my feet.

“Your face,” I said. “I imagined it disfigured horribly.”

Her hair was cropped close on the sides in a post-singe cosmetic necessity, but some curls were just coming in on top. She looked like an aging punk, like one of those ladies who threw dildos at the NYPD in the seventies. She stood and said nothing.

“How are your teeth?” I asked.

She prodded the necklace with the toe of a tennis shoe. “Still embedded in my skull.” She bared them at me in a facsimile of a smile.

I scooped up the necklace of teeth. “Do you think he used dental floss to string them up? The Mexican.”

Charlene started toward the Firebird parked in the gravel gutter. I stood up from the remnants of my mailbox.

“Are you planning to get that fixed?” she asked. “Or should I save the postage and just call you for the next job?”

“Call me,” I said, and she got in the car and drove West. After the dust settled behind her, I realized I still had my hand to my head, thumb and pinky pointing outward, lips hanging open limply. I mouthed it to no one. Call me.

I didn’t count the money. I lay in bed while men in suits and scrubs shouted one-liners. I pulled the rubber band around the cash until it snapped. Half the band flew across the room. Half curled on my sheets like a spent match. I wanted to throw the money in the air, let it flutter and settle on the bed. I wanted to roll around in it. I wanted it gone. I set it on the table next to me, got worried someone could see it through the window, hid it in a drawer.

I clasped the necklace of teeth around my throat. Molars rested on my clavicle. I went to the bathroom and considered myself in the mirror, stripped naked save the necklace and was disappointed by my flabby belly and sagging chest and limp dick against the firmness of those teeth. I plugged the tub and lay in it. I pulled the string holding the teeth together. It popped. Little white things skittered against the porcelain. I rolled around the tub, knocking first my right shoulder then my left then my right against the sloped sides. Roots of bone sunk into my back and sides, stuck. I ground into them. The tub slicked with blood. I plucked a molar from my love handle and popped it into my mouth. I sucked. It tasted like blood. I don’t know what I expected. It clacked against the backs of my teeth as I maneuvered it with my tongue. Other flavors revealed themselves. Something almost artificial, plasticky, masking a deeper fungal rot – a lifetime of not flossing after dinner, of caramel and Coca Cola and cigarettes, of cavities in the making, of absences ever growing, of living things living in dead things, of dead things that had once been alive.

I swallowed. The muscles of my throat constricted, seized, relaxed around the tooth. It scraped down my esophagus and came to rest within me.

♧

September 7th, 2025