Harmless

By Dean Kisling

Gravity REVOLTS against mankind! A CHICKEN comes home to roost... with a VENGEANCE! Ahab haunts the HIGH seas of MODERNITY! Discover the HORRORS of ACTUARIAL SCIENCE and the tattered SHREDS of ancient SECRETS! Thrill to the ghosts, mad cows and coffee fueled HALLUCINATIONS!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Kisling
• Release date: Sep 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466000070

Dean Kisling

Dean Kisling is a high school dropout who learned to type when he was 47. He has been a soldier, laborer, taxi driver, welder, carpenter, performing musician, acupressurist, fractal artist, mountaineer, trail runner and fool. He writes what happened and also makes stuff up. He lives in America and is very happily married.

Book preview

Harmless

and other headlong stories

by Dean Kisling

Smashwords Edition

copyright 2011 Dean Kisling

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Harmless

Ascendant

Getting Along

Dance for the Dead

Yacht Club

Channeling Ahab

Actuarian

Discontinuous Cows

Out for Coffee

Fragments

about the author

acknowledgements

Harmless

The drunk from downstairs is standing on the back porch when I get home from work. He seems harmless, but I don’t much believe in harmless anymore. He and his girlfriend moved in below me about a month ago. At night I hear their voices coming up through the floor, sounding like wind through bare trees in winter... mixed with laugh tracks and gunfire from their TV.

He says his name is Buck. A country nickname worn by a skinny guy in jeans, same as he wears his faded shirt and scuffed cowboy boots, like he was leaning on a corral gate instead of the back porch rail of this big house in town, turned into apartments now, with more closed doors than it had when it was young.

He offers me a drink from his forty ounce beer. I say no thanks, my mouth tastes like sawdust and dirt and horse manure and I need to shower and brush my teeth. He tells me he used to work on ranches but got run over by a flatbed truck and can’t work no more and gets disability. I’d guess he is a little younger than me, maybe fifty, but looks at least twenty years older, frail and shrinking in on himself. I pull out my smokes and offer him one. I’ll give him that long.

I say something about my job, figuring he’ll use it to talk about himself and his former life before becoming a drunk, as though that life still exists and we are a couple of blue jean wearing western guys in work boots, leaning on the porch rail after a day’s labor, tired enough to be satisfied we earned our keep.

I’m not satisfied. I know I should quit this job but I’m not sure I have the nerve to do it. I need the money. I drove in about six months ago, with my pickup truck and carpentry tools and enough of a stake in cash to start fresh if it didn’t take too long. It took three months to find a job and by then I had seen enough to know this small town had fallen on hard times and hadn’t hit bottom yet. Empty houses and boarded up store fronts scattered around town and most of the generation between twenty and forty gone missing, which ought to tell you something. But I’d put my money down and now I was stuck with it.

It ought to be a pretty good job, building a big pole barn out in the foothills. I drive over an hour to get there by daybreak, the last eight miles on a gravel road winding through the woods and meadows of eastern Oregon. The pay is good by local standards, and there are plenty of sunny days. But the boss has what you might call an anger management problem. At least you might call it that if you didn’t spend ten hours a day four days a week waiting for him to lose his temper and start snarling–stomping around with his shoulders hunched up, clenching his arms like he means to tear the world apart with his bare hands, eat its heart and spit out the parts he doesn’t like.

I once worked with a guy who would throw stuff when he got mad, but he always threw it in a safe direction so nobody minded too much. When the boss gets mad you feel like it is aimed at you personally, like as a member of the human race, he wants to destroy you so completely even god can’t put you back together again. Even if whatever set him off has nothing to do with you and you just happen to be standing nearby.

The third or fourth day I worked for him he threatened to get his rifle out of his truck and shoot me. I had just wasted about fifteen minutes doing something the wrong way and had to do it over, so I thought he had a right to be a little critical. He was smiling when he said it and I almost believed it was just good old boy gun talk, just part of the noise you hear on some construction sites. But it made me nervous all the same. The bastard might be crazy enough to do it for all I knew. You see all kinds of smiles on people’s faces.

I also figured he had never shot a man in his life which I have, in the war, maybe more than one, I’ll