Inkerman Writers - David Sowells

Hock has his own devil. What trouble will it get him into?...

Hock’s Little Devil

Hockney released his little Devil every morning. Walked out onto his porch opened the top pocket of his nightshirt and, hands cupped, just like he was holding a fragile bird would release the Sprite into the air. “Now you just get the hell out of here and have yourself a time, leave me to do my day ’s work in an honest way “. Lola would often be fussing about on her porch next door, putting out the dog or hanging the washing. She regularly forgave him his expletives and prayed that none of the kids in the neighborhood had heard the fool releasing his imaginary Devil. He cursed like it was everyday talk, “I heard you”, she’d shout. Theodore Hockney, often with tears rolling down his cheeks would reply “Maybe one day that little devil is going to fly into your pants and take a kick at your rosy butt. ” Lola would blush and disappear into her bungalow smiling at the thought. It had been some time since the devil had been in her underwear. Hockney loved Lola Simmons, who always seemed a little happier when her husband had left for work. Mister Simmons worked in a shoe franchise, sticking soles on sweaty synthetic uppers. He had Psoriasis from his years of handling cow glue and his nose was becoming bulbous.

Theo’s devil flew round in a circle and back into his pocket. “Guess you’re not going to let me go to work again,” he’d roar. Heading inside to start breakfast and teach his one legged parrot how to imitate loud farts. He also owned a goldfish called Jaws 8 who was pinned to a piece of bootlace hanging in his front window. When he ’d found Jaws that terrible morning in the almost empty fish tank, he’d sat and cried. He loved Jaws like the fish was his baby, cleaned, fed and filtered the tank that he ’d bought cheap at a garage sale. Somehow, a hole had appeared one night, draining most of the water from the aquarium. Jaws should have survived, but he got himself wedged between the foremast and the anchor of the little plastic galleon. Watched over by the luminous mermaid from the arch he ’d used to dart through, the goldfish suffocated in Theo’s front room’s strangely perfumed air. There he lay in the morning, golden, cold and dead. Theo wondered why goldfish didn ’t have eyelids, wished that he could cover the accusing eye watching him through the mossy rigging. He couldn ’t bear the thought of burying Jaws or flushing him down the ‘John’, so he dipped him in some clear resin and hung him from an old bootlace at the front window. The parrot spent a lot of time charging the side of his cage. Sticking his leg through to try to get to the rotating golden fish. Theo reckoned that was how Mips his truculent African parrot came to lose his leg. One afternoon after a excessively violent lunge at the goldfish, his leg broke off. Theo ’d gotten used to the butt noises and “screw-you’s”, from the parrot so didn’t notice it until sometime later, when particularly virulent and new curses from the parrot alerted him to the strange position of the bird in the bottom of the cage.

It was a bad time for Theo, within the space of a few days, his goldfish had passed over and a leg had dropped off his parrot. When he battered at Lola ’s door that morning, weeping, holding in one hand his cursing parrot and in the other, its leg, he wasn ’t expecting mister Simmons to answer. “His friggin noisy head should’ve fallen off” was the only retort to Theo’s plea for help. Whether he expected Lola to mend it, or maybe invoke a minor miracle, he didn ’t know, but Lola comforted him and bandaged the parrot’s stump. Theo kept the leg in a cookie jar on his kitchen table. Maybe hoping sometime he ’d find a way of re-attaching it to the parrot. He wished that his devil would do something bad to mister Simmons. It was around that time the swelling on Simmons nose started! After the leg amputation he renamed the parrot, Long John. Theo had ideas of making a small wooden leg, but the bird didn ’t need it. It learned to hop around on its good leg, farted louder, cursed harder and became the thoroughly disagreeable bird he ’d hoped for.

Theodore Hockney had spent a good part of his fifty-one years, achieving a state of grace, only occasionally interrupted by spells of employment. Never left home to live anywhere else except for a few lost weeks in 66, when he ’d found himself on a Cherokee reservation after jumping-ship from a rusty tub on its way to Hong Kong. It was the time of too much of everything that did you good. If you survived to the next morning it was a bonus. He recalled vaguely boarding a boat in Boston, sharing a little something from a one-eyed Lascar and waking up in Lubbock Texas to the sound of a Buddy Holly track, wedged between two Indian girls in a VW camper van. He thinks that he got married, but wasn ’t too sure. Always a collector of mementoes, the 50DD brassiere from one of the girls and some strange looking feathers graced the end of his bed. Sometimes, he ’d remember fondly rolling about between mountains of warm brown flesh, laughing eyes, strange customs, that ’s where he got his devil’s.

The village Hokum-man had told him that everybody should have a devil to protect them from other devils. “Was the only way that you could get through life safely, if you didn’t have your own devil, then other people’s devils might seek you out”. Happiness by any means was all Theo pursued, so he paid the Hokum doctor thirty dollars and had him invoke ‘four’ devils, one each for his girlfriends, one for him and one for his mother. Each devil came in a little stone box that it learned to recognize, kinda like homing pigeons. Tina hung hers around her neck so it spent most of the time out of the sunlight. He couldn ’t remember where Maria kept hers, but he was sure that they were both very lucky devils. His was usually dropped into his Confederate nightshirt pocket. The prettiest boxed devil he sent to his Mom as a birthday present. Contrary to all that movie stuff, the Hokum told him that devils slept at night, any that didn ’t return to their owners disappeared forever, leaving them unguarded. So it was important that each evening, the devils were called back in with a special devil-chant. Theo called his back in, just before turning in, the neighbours called it howling at the moon, or a “goddam row”. Sometimes he was joined in the chorus by some local cats and Long John. After she had passed on, he gave his Moms box to Lola from next door. She thought it was the most un-Christian thing she ’d ever heard of. Still, just in case, she sometimes opened the box a touch and on those days felt life was more bearable.

Theo imagined that his devil looked like Marylyn Monroe, he thought about the sexy mischief it might cause through the day. Sometimes when it came back late and he was a little drunk, the neighborhood would hear a slurred “Yahoo!” and sometimes a “Did ya?” as she purred out her outrageous stories.

Theodore Hockney age fifty-one, believer in devilish fun, loves Long John, jaws 8 and most of all Lola Simmons, soon to be widow. Theodore Hockney believes in magic, American Indians and their devils. He howls at the moon, suffers from a harmless madness. Trusts his luck to the contents of the little stone box. That he keeps in the pocket of his long Confederate nightshirt!

Another long slog on the nightshift but this one would change everything….

Midnight Trailer

“Looks as though it’s gonna’ be a long night, so don’t you go sleeping, y’hear”. Lonnie smiled. The same corny quip each night they changed shift. Fat Minto climbed wearily into his battered Ford drop-side and disappeared into the driving slet. Lonnie was a guard at Higgs abattoir in Wear Ville, Pennsylvania, protected dead cows from live rustlers so the joke went. ‘Place gave him the creeps even in daylight. If he’d slept most of the shift no one would notice but Lonnie was conscientious, believed in doing the job properly. Having only one arm, he knew that another job wouldn ’t come along too easily.

They usually started killing after sun-up on account that the noise from screaming cows disturbed the local populaces sleep. Even though the nearest resident was at least four blocks away City-Ordnance ’s forbid slaughter at night. It made for mostly quiet nights, the silence was broken only, by the occasional car creeping on idle. It ’s cheap-trick client and shift weary hooker seeking seclusion. Sometimes the thud, thud, thud, of a Puerto Rican low-rider would set dogs barking. This part of the town ’s run down industrial park held little attraction for regular folk.

At around three each morning, a police patrol would cruise by and beam its hand spotlight into the gatehouses cracked window. Lonnie always wished that they would stop and talk with him. Human voices to interrupt the swishy rap-jocks jabbering on his cheap radio but they never did. He took an envious dislike to cop ’s and their easy lives. He’d acknowledge their probing spot with a wave and know that he still had six hours of his long shift left. Wishing that they wouldn ’t always arrive at the same time but they did, he added that irritation to a mental blacklist of grievances set aside for inconsiderate cops. Every two hours he had to ‘clock’ the premises. The lonely round of the dead, by the barely alive. Tall at six-two, there wasn ’t much that could scare him. One arm or two, he would be no easy mark. But he never got along with the presence of the carcasses. ‘Knew they were dead, something at the back of his mind convinced him that one or two maybe weren ’t.

Small noises made him jumpy. Hours spent lying in tall grass outside of Phnom-Pen had tuned his senses to every silent threat. One night he shot a hole through four hanging cows. The bullet stopped when it hit the stainless hook behind the fifth. Convinced that there was an intruder his frazzled nerves jerked-off a pistol shot when he got no reply to his challenge. A stupid knee-jerk reaction, that wouldn ’t have happened when he was in uniform. The echo around the killing room deafened him. Fortunately for Lonnie, nobody ‘cept some guard dogs heard the shot. He worried for days that somebody might find the hole in the five cadavers. His nerves got to be so bad that one night he thought he heard a knock on the booth door. When he opened it, a half killed cow fell in on him. He awoke screaming, fighting away imaginary guts and gore away from his sweating face. The experience shook him badly. Half dead cows don ’t un-skewer themselves and cross the yard to wake the watchman. He thought then that he ought to get another job, at forty-seven and minus one arm, he wasn ’t wanted.

Occasionally a rig would get in late with maybe sixty cattle for slaughter. ‘Though it was against company rules, the trucker would unhitch the trailer in a dark corner of the yard and disappear until daybreak. Sometimes some blowsy woman might be leaning out of the side window shouting to Lonnie to “Guard them there animals y’hear” as they revved through the gate, all chrome, dazzling lights and silicone implants. Heading for some cheap motel or dark truck park. Lonnie worried that he should have thought about the girls in some sort of sexual way but somehow, the gloom of the abattoir shut out any carnality.

It happened one bitter winter's night, Lonnies seventh in a row. Christmas was approaching and as usual, to be able to provide just subsistence festivities meant a hundred hours work. ‘She’ didn’t call it work. She never raised what he did to provide to the level of honest work, only disgust that he couldn ’t do better. They were on their own now. Carol their daughter saw which way the wind was blowing. Got married as soon as it was legal and left home forever. Never wrote, hated them both, which upset Lonnie. He ’d done his best. When he lost his arm, his army career was finished. His wife never forgave him his invalidity, even though the cause was a cancerous tumour. The once doting army wife had had her future planned around ‘base’ life and needed him whole. He accepted the inevitable discharge and graduated downward from then on. Their marriage went the same way but he hung-in, he still loved her. Stayed mostly out of the shabby two-roomed apartment that passed for home to avoid arguments. But this Christmas week he was happiest he ’d been for a long time. Carol had called-collect out of the blue, to say that she ’d given birth to a baby boy. They were going to Pittsburgh to spend Christmas with her new husband Jims parents and the bus rest-stopped at Wear Ville. Because it was Christmas and only because Jim had insisted, they could meet briefly at the bus depot to see the newborn baby.

The Greyhound to Pittsburgh would arrive at Wear Ville thirty minutes after Lonnies last shift. Just enough time to pick his wife up and get to the bus- depot that final shift was going to be a long one. He remembered the anxious waiting for Carols birth all those years before, this night was going to be even harder. The luminous dial on the booth clock crawled, he avoided looking at it. During each round of ‘clocking’ checks he tried not to register the time’s red blinking LCD on his key dial. Tonight he didn’t notice the dead animals or killing implements, just the clock like drip of water into the blood sluices. At around midnight a dark truck pulled in to ‘overnight’. The tired driver joked about kebabs but Lonnies mind was somewhere else. He just waved the rig in, and then a short time later, out again. Registering vaguely the crackle of six wheels on the frosted slush. It was starting to snow.

He wondered if the baby might look like him. Tonight he mustn’t sleep, so he turned the radio up loud, Christmas on all stations. The sound of the phone ringing startled him. The heat in the booth was already making him sleepy. It was Minto, his relief, good old Minto.

Minto tells Lonnie that he’d have to stay on an extra hour in the morning to see the boss. He was sorry that he hadn ’t told him on the handover, but he’d forgotten. “Only rang this late because it might be important, maybe they wanna give you a rise ” he joked. The background din told Lonnie that the bar was busy and Minto wasn’t alone. “C’mon honey” the drunken voice purred from behind Minto. “But I can’t stay back Minto, not tomorrow, not tomorrow of all days. I won't” he heard himself shout into the shaking receiver, he heard himself beg Minto to forget the message from the boss. He was hoping Minto would come in early as usual, a pathetic plea as he heard the woman wrestle the phone from Minto. Then the ugly, slurred, “he might not even make it in tomorrow” and a filthy cackle as the phone was slammed down. He heard total silence, felt his heart race until his chest hurt. The desolation he felt when the doctor ’d told him that he had a tumour wasn’t near the sick feeling that flooded his body now. The next two hours he argued and remonstrated with his conscience. “Screw the job, what then, go anyway, what then? Leave the plant empty, what then? No job, no money, no wife, what then? ” He told himself that there may be other times to see the baby, they’d understand. She wouldn’t, Carol wouldn’t. If he wasn’t there tomorrow morning, he knew he’d never ever see his grandson. Weary, he fell asleep.

The police patrol would later report that at three-o-clock they spot-lit the Gate booth but saw no-one. They had no instructions to enter property, only check that the gates were secure which they always did from the comfort of the patrol car. They joked down the station that they only shone the spot on gatehouses to wake the security guards who they all regarded as ‘phoney’ cops anyway. Lonnie jerked awake at five-thirty, it was snowing hard. He raced his clocking round dazed and in a turmoil, he wasn ’t going to stay. He was finishing at seven no matter what, nothing was going to stop him getting to the bus depot.

Towards the end of his checks, he came across the parked midnight trailer in the corner of the yard. It was full of lambs, very silent, but awake small lambs. They ’d never killed lambs at this abattoir before, but here it was, a trailer full of lambs all for the slaughterer, staring at the forlorn human with the flashlight. Lonnie Mincher cried, cried for the lambs, the fucking cold, his daughter, baby grandson, his sour marriage. Lonnie cried for the cancerous arm that he could still feel. All six-two of him shook for everything that constituted his mean rotten life. It was Christmas and he was going to meet that bus come what may. For just once, since the army, he was going to do the right thing. He sobbed the sheep began to bleat.

They found him around seven. Sat outside of the gatehouse in the road just like a snowman. Sat looking through frozen dead eyes, searching for the bus to Pittsburgh that would never come. Clutched in his arms was one small lamb, the radio played carols.

Lonnie Mincher, sometime soldier and good father was going to meet that cold bus taking with him a small warm present. He ’d reasoned that his job would be over anyway so what would the theft of one tiny lamb matter. He would reprieve one small lamb and make his new grandson smile, he was happy. The heart attack caught him totally unaware, his life ended right there within reach of the warm booth.

The bus to Pittsburgh ran late so didn’t rest stop at Wear Ville. Lonnie’s wife never ever got to see the baby. Lonnie was due to be fired that morning. Somebody had whispered about the bullet hole in the carcasses. Minto came in early as Lonnie had begged him to. He removed a small dead lamb from Lonnie ’s arms before the ambulance and police arrived.