Monkeybicycle Issue 9

By Dzanc Books

Issue 9 of this literary journal featuring both short stories and poetry

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781941088142

Book preview

Slim and Mrs. Burns

JACK GARRETT

AS THE HERD TOOK FEED and water by the depot down the end of the dusty street, Slim sat down to breakfast at the Possum Tail Saloon. He gave a pretty girl a penny to sit with him. She watched him light into a plate of flapjacks and bacon, lard-fried grits with gravy, shirred eggs, fruit compote, beer, beans, and coffee.

Fetch me some syrup, Penny, Slim said. He called her Penny.

Molasses do? she asked sweetly.

He grunted, she got some, and he poured it. Penny sat holding her chin up and her legs open. From down the street he heard his cattle bawling, much disturbed by their confinement.

Slim finished his breakfast and pushed his empty plate at Penny. Then he drank down his beer and picked up his cup of coffee. That was a good meal, he said.

I’ll tell Mrs. Burns, said Penny, dragging a finger through Slim’s puddled leavings. She works so hard in the kitchen and never gets a kind word.

Mrs. Burns, you say?

Mm-hmm.

Slim finished his coffee and spat the dregs, a bitter black gravel, back into his cup. Penny took the cup, put her mouth on it, and sucked them out. Slim rose, upsetting his chair, and moseyed to the kitchen doorway. Over the batwings he saw an old woman, near 40, bent at the waist, her head inside a huge cookstove.

Just then was his view blocked by a dirty-aproned youth with a tray of plates, crying, Coming through! and pushing through the batwings. Slim held up a range-hardened forearm and the wings snapped back on the boy, who went down with a clatter of broken stoneware.

Slim came through, kicking aside the sprawl of boy and plate shards, and came about behind the still-bent person of Mrs. Burns. Her face was obscured and her body, wide and planted, hind end uppermost, was draped in loose-knit gray burlap stiffened with suet. Slim spoke to her. This Mrs. Burns? he said.

This is, presently answered the cook, without looking back.

I wanted to tell you something, he said.

Tell it then, she said, her words echoing out of the iron cave of the oven, if you still want it told. She was head, arms, and shoulders inside it, abrading its walls with an implement.

Slim’s lip twitched and drew back from some big dismal teeth. I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed my breakfast, he said.

There’s my reward, answered Mrs. Burns, unmoved from her task.

Slim, a long, cool drink of branch water, did seldom brook inattention from his lessers, and few, if any, were not so reckoned. From his vantage directly above and behind Mrs. Burns’s folded potato-sack torso, he loomed. Will you give heed? he gently boomed.

Mister, she answered, downturned yet, I have here employment. I done up and burned the biscuits and iffen I don’t get them black bitties sheared off these cursed iron innards, the joint’ll get smokier’n Jack Robinson.

Slim’s slender fingers swelled. A heat rose in that kitchen, partly from the behemoth cookstove whose maw Mrs. Burns continued to fill. On the bulging folds of her flexed neck—the only extent of bare flesh in view—a patina of perspiration glistened, sloppily matting the cayenne red curls that curtained her wide flaring ears.

Lady, you are elephantine, said Slim.

It may be, she answered, but at present doesn’t feature. If I don’t get this scoured by lunch rush they all’ll take me to a high hill and leave me.

In waves the heat now broke upon the cattleman and cook. Mrs. Burns toiled on, seeping sweat melting the suet in her sack dress where it hugged the contours of her elevated promontory.

As Slim would leave off his tarry, a notion struck. With the prowlike toe of his left boot he deigned to catch the lard-caked burlap hem of Mrs. Burns’s skirts and, like a dancing horse, lift them high and flip them to, till they bunched and gathered ’round the bend of her head.

Mrs. Burns, he said, you have no underthings.

Your point being? she answered, redoubling her to-and-fro.

Slim examined her anew. Her rearward aspect, now wholly exposed from shoulder to heel, appeared to him as soft and white and wet as a shelled boiled egg, the most imposing boiled egg he’d ever known, peppered at the ankles with house grit, emptying out into feet like two flat fish landed weeks ago, gray nails of the great toes like open dead eyes, condemning one for leaving them to rot.

Mislay your shoes? asked Slim.

Now and again, said Mrs. Burns, scraping, a body’s like to feel what’s underfoot.

Been said, said Slim.

A gust through the kitchen door brought the savor and din of Slim’s longhorns from down the depot. A hundred thousand head ready for slaughter, booked on the next long train north. He’d fetch a fair price and another year be flush. Killing work but such was his lot. He didn’t ask the mole why it dug holes.

Rocking onto his toes, he splayed his bony fingers and seized the prodigious ass globes of Mrs. Burns, pulling aside the moist pale moons and shifting their phase slightly skyward.

That’s a help, said Mrs. Burns, still scraping. Her medial fissure, not lent such daylight this ten years, tensed and flexed like a fat cloven baby woken, its one dark eye staring through crusty brown sleep in its long, tangled eyelids, its elusive chin disappearing beneath a bushy Lincoln beard salted with flecks of caramel froth. Abiding Slim’s ministrations, the eye as if spooked squeezed shut, then with a labored contraction blew him a soft kiss, and a butterscotch tear trickled into the beard.

Pardon me, said Mrs. Burns.

As he was wont in his beloved backcountry, Slim breathed deep, suffering a bouquet as big as a prize bull, big as the land, big as his hanker. Not at all, he said, and bending low kissed the eye shut again.

Brusquely giving o’er his grip, he unlooped his chaps, unbuttoned his fly, reached into his trousers, and lay hold on the assemblage of pink tissue that first defined him as a manchild. Though not to be sure such in soul and heart, in loin was he graced by Creation with the dimensions of a monument. The testes alone weighed nine pounds damp—confirmed at a water hole when once pulling a catfish from a hook-and-spring scale, he snagged his ballsac—and his membrum though of average span was of girth at rest like a polecat pup, inflamed like a wintering marmot.

None of this would Mrs. Burns deem tenable as Slim hove closer to the stout cook’s station, and wetting his crimson helmet in her beard—now sopping as a toothless codger’s at a feast—he dragged it up and down that muddy slough till, like a hog’s head butting through hot tar, it drove deep to the bottom of her blinded black eye.

Down Main Street thundered the herd in a crazed, eye-rolling throng, a distant cry of Stampede! penetrating Slim’s ken as he harrumphed his load of seed into Mrs. Burns’s snug stall. The voice was that of Gimpy Lee, Slim’s foreman, a puny fellow in whom he had implicit trust in matters of husbandry, despite the hombre’s discomfiting gait.

As the vacuum seal of their union broke with a crescendoing slurp and a pop, Slim withdrew from Mrs. Burns, the sound punctuating the skull-numbing pound of myriad hooves. There, ’at’s the last of ’em, said Mrs. Burns, rising, wielding a gunk-blackened spatula, and turning to face Slim for the first time. In her satisfied, carious grin he saw his mama, his grandmama, and every quilting bee biddy whose skirts he’d ever hid beneath in the parlor of his boyhood Panhandle home.

Her little eyes level with his umbilicus, she now a mite lowered. ’spect those need tending, she said, nodding at his pendent gonads, bruised kelly green from banging against her adipose flanks.

He studied these same and furrowed. Like as they been beatin’ a bass drum a fortnight.

What drowned out the herd till they was upon us, said Mrs. Burns. They your’n? She flicked a look over the batwings of both kitchen and saloon to the hurtle of livestock down the street.

Yes’m, said Slim, queerly deferential. He removed his hat, checked the sweat band to confirm he had it on frontways, then replaced it.

Reckon they need seein’ to, said Mrs. Burns.

Yes’m, he said again, chagrined at the spell it was taking to harness his mettle.

I’ll be help, said Mrs. Burns. Slim, after scowling at the woman’s hard face, nodded. He turned to go. Better stow them boys first, she said, eyes cutting to the bristly ovoids now knocking about his knees.

With an unmanned Pshaw, Slim ladled them up, tucked them, and fumbled a button shut. Mrs. Burns followed him out.

The herd was in full riot. Slim looked to the hitching post, but his cutting horse Blackheart was long fled, gone to a place where a horse can at last relent and again drop head. Slim stomped down the plank porch that bordered the street, calling for his foreman. "Gimp! Gimp, goddamn ye, where you gone?"

Not yet neither, Mr. Slim! answered Gimpy, his breaking voice shrill enough to pierce the roar. And it don’t serve taking the Lord’s name vainly! Lift up yer mortal nose!

That Slim did. There Gimpy, battered and tattered, bone naked, blown dead sideways by the power of the panicked beasts, hung by his arms from a baluster coming down from the roof. Gimp, let go a’there! said Slim.

Beggin’ mercy, nay, said his foreman. Let go a’here and I’m good as doggone. You done spooked Lucifer hisself with y’all’s caterwaulin’!

Slim shook a fist at Gimpy, then, noting how it gleamed with the viscous effusions of Mrs. Burns, swung it out at the herd in frustration, the centrifuge of the gesture bringing him face-to-face with the cook. She stood strangely calm at the railing, gauging the cattleman skeptically.

His shoulders rose. Gimpy’s the one knows the stock! he told her. I don’t deal with them day to day! They won’t listen to me!

Mrs. Burns shook her uncombed head. They won’t listen to you if you was God A’mighty Jesu. It’s too loud down there.

Slim turned a circle and stamped his feet, then took a strut back down the porch looking like he knew what to do or trying. This big a herd, this narrow a street, the stampede could keep on for days. And where the street widened, petered… where then? The empty place. Nobody knew what yonder lay. Even the stranger who watchful thereabout wandered.

On the planks beneath the flapping Gimp lay the foreman’s fallen bullwhip, frayed and shiny with old use. Slim leaned and lay hold of it, then reared like to crack it across that river of rawhide beside him, his hand scarce stayed by Mrs. Burns. That way’s folly, she said for his ears. You’ll only lose them the sooner.

Knowing Mrs. Burns spoke true, Slim reeled, seeing no help for it, this day his undoing. But as he watched beast by beast his life lurch away from him, leaning on the post from which his ragged foreman yet flew like Old Glory in a twister, Mrs. Burns made other designs. Bodily mounting the railing, she sent a quake through the strutwork where Slim languished, rousing him to the terror of an imminent trampling. But lo, the woman, the big one, who’d made him breakfast a lifetime ago, did now stand teetering atop the balustrade, keenly surveying the welter of beeves. Slim gaped. What now are you about?! he whined.

Looking for one, Mrs. Burns replied. See, cows are like anybody. They don’t listen. But if you find one who’ll hear the word, the rest’ll think he knows what’s what and settle.

Slim’s face creased. "Just one? he said. But which?"

Arms akimbo, Mrs. Burns peered into the tumult. Don’t yet know, she said, but I’m a’lookin’.

What in deuces she gonna do when she finds him? Slim bootless mused, as Mrs. Burns brayed, There he is! and with a deep-knee thrust bounded off the railing and into the maelstrom, her burlap skirts billowing around her as she landed on the butcher’s end of a careering steer. Not you, sweetie, she said as, remarkably agile for her size, she abruptly sprang from that dusty rump and like a mime tiptoeing between raindrops leapt from cow to cow to cow across the rumbling mass until lighting on the creature she’d dubbed the elect.

Well, how do, she said, settling over a broad bucking hump. Scooting down to straddle the great bull’s jowls, she tucked her knees under his longhorns to brace for a parley.

Scuttling along the porch, Slim watched as Mrs. Burns, squeezing those deadly horns tight, dipped her head and appeared to murmur something under the beast’s furry flap of an ear, so much like her own in Slim’s searing first impression.

The bull rolled one big brown eye back at Mrs. Burns and snorted indulgently, and when Mrs. Burns repaid him with a buss on his splotchy brow, the critter dug in his cloven hooves and came up short. Within moments, the great churning flow subsided around them. Their frenzy forgotten the cattle looked about as if for news, turned, and came together, lowing gently now, ruminating. Those that had reached the end of the street and beyond came sauntering obligingly back.

Slim, still slack-jawed at the railing above, took his hat off his head, listlessly beat a cloud from it, put it back. Mrs. Burns, having dismounted the bull with a few words of parting, rejoined him on the porch.

Slim regarded her from under his brim, her hair ratted and fanned like a debauched orang. Pure loco was that, he said plainly. Stomped and trampled and gored by horn would you a’been till nothing were left but bits of burlap.

Mrs. Burns smiled to herself, pleased he’d noticed her outfit. Oh, they were packed pretty tight, she said, blushing. Be hard to slip in edgewise.

Then Gimpy, who’d at last descended the balustrade and still denuded rejoined the herd, reined up on Blackheart. All accounted for, Mr. Slim! he hollered. All hunnerd thou! Lost nary a one! Count ’em yerself! Yee haw! he crowed, as pretty Miss Penny vault mounted behind him.

Yee haw, Slim repeated quietly. Oddly pensive, jaw flexing, he kept watch on his booted feet.

With a proprietary gander at the now docile herd, Mrs. Burns said, Did I mention that your balls put me in mind of the green harbor buoys of the Sandwich Islands?

Slim simpered, belched to cover it, then, turning toward Gimpy as if to bark some arbitrary command, said, The Sandwich Islands, you say. Well, now. One’d hazard I could stand a sandwich about now. Something beefy between slabs of a crusty loaf and doused with a sauce, a right tasty sauce that only a bona fide cook knows how to fashion. Keeping his eyes on his foreman, Slim continued. Back at the spread Gimpy Lee does most of the cooking, matter of fact, for me and the hands. Matter of fact that used to be his handle—Cookie Lee—till he lost that piece of leg to a breeding mount, and with it his moxie. Couldn’t cook near so good after, Slim allowed. Shifting his feet, he finally looked at Mrs. Burns. But I reckon he does good enough. Put a piece of flesh on the fire and no matter how you do it, after a while you can eat it. And then you ain’t hungry no more. I reckon that’s how it is, he said, and how it’s gonna be. He briefly smoothed his hat brim between thumb and finger, then once, with finality, tugged it down at her.

Mrs. Burns gave him an even look. You don’t take me with you, she said, I’ll kill you dead.

Slim let out a breath. What about Mr. Burns? he said.

He comes too.

Shapeway

COLLEEN MORRISSEY

TOM

I think one of the stagehands is in love with my wife. His name is Fred Vincenci, and he is a small Italian man. He’s got black body hair like a thick dusting of pepper on his arms and a small, oily face. I am not worried about him, truly. He is shorter than Edie by a good two inches, and Edie is not a tall woman. He also drinks wine from a little brown skin from Italy that he carries, and Edie is a teetotaler.

I might not have noticed it if I hadn’t wanted to test the new footlights myself. I spent most of yesterday morning on my stomach on the stage floor, watching the man from Lincoln braid the wires into the bulbs. The stagehands, including Fred Vincenci, were moving around the sets for the production of The Last Days of Pompeii that’s going on this week. Edie stood at the house doors, calling across the seats to me that it was past noon. I told her I knew that. She said that noon meant it was time for dinner. I said I knew, and could she please bring me my plate and my coffee. Edie stood at the doors and said that she certainly had time to do that.

When she brought me my cup and my plate of baked beans and flank steak, I stayed on my stomach, so she came right up to the edge of the stage to hand them over to me. She had to lift her chin to see me over the edge.

"Nice