In walk these two hombres through the swinging doors of the pool hall. They're skinny, hands grease-black, both with uneven beards. As they pass the tables, each grabs a cue. Corey's beating the crap out of THE DOMINATOR, a whole hour on one pinball. He's twelve years old, mouth burning from Wise barbeque chips and the Mr. Pibb chaser.

His grandfather plays the part of the hero who rides into town and saves him. Each summer and every holiday he takes Corey up the mountains and into the nowhere town of Huntingdon, with its boarded up shops and silent streets. Corey sometimes runs the snack bar and register, sweeps the place, loads the Coke and snack machines, and takes out the quarters. His grandfather has long silver hair in a ponytail, leather hands like a baseball mitt, the power to read thoughts, eyes with the force to push you back against a wall.

That's why the breath leaves Corey when his grandfather collapses under the first blow from the cue stick. The stick breaks across his forehead, down he goes, like nothing. Blood leaks from the cut. Corey makes a squeaking noise. The pinball drops down the hole and THE DOMINATOR laughs and says in his menacing voice I WILL DESTROY YOU.

"Kid. That your pappy?"

Corey nods.

"He'll be okay. Just knocked out. You keep a secret, all right. Wouldn't want to have to visit you some night."

One of them's punching at the register, but nothing's happening.

"You know how to get this open?"

Corey shakes his head. The one at the register pushes his grandfather onto his back with the cue stick. He holds the cue over the slash in his grandfather's forehead. Corey knows this scene, from the hundreds of Westerns his grandfather and he watch together. His grandfather's the thing that will make Corey do what they want.

The other guy, he unzips his pants, pulls out his thing. "Maybe I'd like to get this sucked, too. That wouldn't be so bad, would it?"

Corey coughs up chewed up chips and the fizz of soda and some breakfast eggs too. He reads books he shouldn't read, Stephen King, and a guy in prison tells this gang he'll bite it right off if they put it in his mouth. Corey's dad left because he couldn't keep his hands off his son.

"Not that," Corey says. "I'm not doing that."

The cue stick gets rubbed across the gash in his grandfather's head. Corey had to bleed from his butt before his mother believed him. Now she can't look at her son. Now she stays away. Now when she sees him, she sees the man hunched over him too.

An ax hangs next to the fire extinguisher, next to the side door, between Corey and the men with their cue sticks. What if he could chop them up? He might end up in some crazy house, with dreams of cut off arms and legs coming for him? And if he did what they wanted? What then? There's his grandfather's shotgun, too, but Corey doesn't know where.

"Get the fuck over here."

Corey does. He walks past the ax.

"That's a good kid."

Corey stands in front of the man with his purple thing that looks like a swelled up bruise and its pumped-up head he keeps shaking. Corey's grandfather groans. What if he wakes up and finds Corey with this thing in his mouth? His grandfather will become like Corey's mother, unable to look at him without seeing this man and his thing too. "Good kid," his father called him, for saying nothing, do nothing. It's what teachers say too, when you disappear in the corner of the classroom and never throw a thing or say a word.

Corey kicks the guy's balls hard, kicks them like he kicks THE DOMINATOR'S ass day after day, kicks them so fast and hard that his foot is a flash and even when the guy's dropped to the floor, Corey doesn't stop.

But it isn't over. The other guy, the one with the cue poised over his grandfather's cut forehead, he jumps up on the counter and down in front of Corey. His mouth, twisted into a snarl, with its yellow teeth that matches his yellow eyes and yellow greasy hair. A wild thing, escaped from a cage somewhere.

Corey clenches himself and his muscles into a dead thing, a thing that cannot feel, cannot be hurt. The cue raised over him, ready to crack, get inside, break those things Corey makes unbreakable. But the stick never lands, instead the pool hall explodes and there's a hole in the guy's chest where there should be a heart.

His grandfather holds a shotgun. They both stand still, taking stock of each other. The guy on the ground, the one with the bloody, kicked-in thing makes no sound.

"The world's full of 'em," his grandfather says.

Corey still can't move. There's that jagged hole. There's the puddle of blood. There's the insides prepared for a blow that never came. There's a father who whispers in his kid's ear, "You make a sound, any sound, and you're dead."

Pap. He stands tall and defiant. The thing the kid cannot live without. He won't leave his grandfather. He will be deputized. He will have a posse and walk the silent streets by his grandfather's side. He won't go back. All this spills out to the grandfather, mixes with the hard ringing in his ears, the smoke and awful smell of sweat and burnt blood.

The grandfather doesn't hesitate. He grabs Corey and pulls him into the dusk. A siren cries out, draws near. And when the dreams of the men with their bloody holes haunt Corey, he fights them off with this moment, the pink sky, the leathery hands, the two good guys and their walk into the faroff sunset.

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Randall Brown is a Pushcart nominee, a fiction editor with SmokeLong Quarterly, and on the editorial board of Philadelphia Stories. He holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College and a BA from Tufts University. His stories, poems, and essays have been published widely, with recent work forthcoming in Clackamas Literary Review, Del Sol Review, Cairn, and The Saint Ann's Review. He's currently working on a short short collection, Mad To Live.
E-mail: boscovbrown at comcast dot net
Website: randalldouglasbrown.blogspot.com
 

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autumn 2006 | kaleidowhirl