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  I kept walking toward it, and with trepidation began the ascent. From over the lip of the hill the sound of running feet came and I steeled myself. The first dog over the hill was a big beautiful animal with an ear missing, though that wasn’t a recent wound. He was charging, leading the pack out of the trap, he’d led them into. The weight of leadership sat well upon his shoulders and propelled him down the hill toward me and I sank to my knees. If this was my time, I was ready to go. When he saw me, he altered his course some, but did not flag in speed and was followed by six more mutts running for their lives.

  The last one over the hill, a short, wide wolfish looking creature yelped and tumbled over on his back and then back onto his front paws, but the back legs were done for. He’d caught a bullet with his hip and was going to die for it.

  Didn’t sit right with me.

  I heard some shouts from up ahead and checked the action on the Winchester.

  Hal Upchurch was the first one I saw. He came into view on my right, in a run. He stopped and fit his rifle to his shoulder, aiming at the lead dog. I figured he didn’t have a prayer of hitting his mark, but his intentions were enough to cause me to try my own impossible shot.

  I was way off, but Hal took notice of me. He started waving his arms and yelling, figuring I hadn’t seen him and was shooting at dogs still coming over the hill. I chambered the next round and let it go with a shout of my own. Hal ran away. So did I.

  I raced back to the hearse, half hoping I wouldn’t make it. I was tired and didn’t particularly want to keep going. I was never going to get rid of the incriminating evidence in time. I’d clearly shot at Hal Upchurch, who would tell the sheriff soon enough and even if he wasn’t quite believed, it’d warrant a home visit. Just seemed it would be easier if one of the dogs got me or the sheriff shot me in the back as I fled.

  No dice. I made it to the car and even made it home. Inside, I dropped the rifle and ran to the kitchen. I put my head under the faucet on cold and took three slugs of Jameson. Then, for reasons I’ve never been able to satisfactorily explain, I went to the basement and grabbed the cleaver. I brought it up to the kitchen and placed my left hand, fingers spread, on the butcher block and took off the pinkie.

  It was pretty impressive in retrospect. That’s an odd angle and the chop was neat. I took the severed finger to the back door and threw it into the yard before collapsing in shock. They found me an hour later still holding my mangled hand and unresponsive, though my eyes were open.

  Couple days later, I got a visit from Hunter Malcomson. Since we’d served on so many councils together, it seemed reasonable he might visit me at the hospital. The guard gave us the room. Hunter was pale and even though I promised that I had no intention of ever mentioning a thing about his involvement with me, he insisted on getting me a top lawyer. Whatever.

  There’s this program for prisoners to train puppies to be guide dogs. I’ve applied and been rejected three times, but maybe if I’m persistent, it’ll happen. I understand they have to be careful who they recruit what with those PETA fuckers looking over their shoulders all the time. Gotta make sure I’m not gonna eat it. Or fuck it. Nothing could be further from my intentions and I should know. I keep telling them, I’ve got a pretty exhaustive self-knowledge.

  Miriam

  The first great mistake Miriam ever made, the one she'd been paying for the rest of her life was allowing herself ever to be born in the first place. By not succumbing to the sickness her mother passed on, she'd cavalierly thrown open the door for everything that came after. All the other missteps, bad decisions and sub-par moments really took their cue from that one. She reflected now and again how much you can owe for mistakes made in ignorance or even innocence, though the latter was not her experience.

  Her mother lived in a Mississippi brothel near the Arkansas border another half year before she shot herself up with enough smack to kill a platoon and was buried, supposedly at midnight, under a tree overlooking the cat house, in an unmarked grave. The other girls had taken on the raising of Miriam as a hobby that helped keep their minds occupied when the life began to get to them and Miriam, still small and pink and given to fits of coughing and bouts of sleeplessness and without a trend toward feeding became a mascot of great importance to them.

  Too young for intent, she became the confessional by virtue of helplessness and dependence. The ritual of rocking and cooing her over their shoulder whilst unburdening the day's trespasses into her tiny curved ear repeated nightly. She took in the very sweat and breath of sin and sighed and farted it back at them all cleaned up and smelling of infant. But it growed her up in an accelerated fashion such as was popularly believed by radio preachers to be the way in wicked times.

  She learned things, as all children do, by osmosis and it colored the way she perceived the world and conducted herself in it. Though shy on use, she learned never to be in want of arms. She knew that cash was but one form of currency, that blessed by the Federal government which meant little much outside of legal documents. And she learned that sheep were wolves, sure as shit.

  None among the rotating cast of mothers was more devoted to the child than the Nubian. She called the child Child and nourished her as one of the many she'd never birthed. Over time, she was generally acknowledged as the primary authority in matters concerning Miriam.

  Her motherly ways were not demonstrated exclusive to the child and when Miriam was eleven, Auntie no shit Jemima got called upon to take over the madamship of a house in Hot Springs and brought her north. It was amidst the curious natural phenomena, claimed to purify a body and restore a soul, that Miriam first self administered opiates and then never looked back.

  Auntie Jem knew the signs of junk better than your typical vice police and gave her a beating, like you reserve for the ones you love, the lines of which they are to read betwixt and comprehend the heighth and the breadth and the depth. Miriam was in bed afterward four days and reversed the cure just as soon as she walked. Jemima looked in the child's unfocused eyes, saw another sign she knew well, and changed up her tactic.

  "If you make these vows, it will be more binding than any holy matrimony you aint never gonna enter into anyhow, an I oughtta know, so go on now an listen Auntie Jem." She taught the child heroin the way she'd taught her intercourse, as plain mechanical facts and proven strategies for recovery from. Flesh was one element among the bounty of creation and held unique properties like any other, but the real difference from wood and stone and sea and air and steel, was only possession.

  "There now, then, that's everything I know. Jes don be letting it get in between you and what you need to do. An don ever let me catch you keepin mo secrets from me."

  Tired of routine and itchy for the horizon the child ran off at age fourteen with a G.I. who'd seen Indochina. Among other promises, he claimed he would take her to exotic places and teach her worldly things. Two weeks later, her eyes open to nothing so much as the saming of America, she left him the clothes she'd used to tie him up with in a motel room off I-44 on the outskirts of Tulsa and took the rest of his belongings, including a photograph of his mother in a wide collared, floral print dress and high off the forehead construction of hair, as her own.

  On her first night conscious of what alone in the world is meant to say, she removed the picture of the soldier's mother and spoke to it while sitting in a booth by the window of the Stuckeys. She thought she'd know what she wanted when she saw it and chances were, whatever it was could be found as likely in Tulsa as Toledo.

  The picture, which she had not yet named, looked at her in a kindly but knowing way and a voice peculiarly like Jem's said "Child, you are alone."

  "I know." she stated, without a value attached of emotional import.

  "Where is it you going?"

  Miriam shrugged.

  "What is it you trying to leave behind?" Miriam spotted a bear of a man leaving the Stuckeys and ambling with a notion toward a sixteen wheeler parked on the far side of the lot. She slipped the pi
cture back in her pocket and answered without listening.

  "Only what I know."

  She worked the highway circuit and saw more of what she'd seen before. She carried a knife with a retractable blade, she'd only once had occasion to cut with. She'd used it on another drifter she'd spotted a curious amount at diners. Once, outside the Loaf 'N Jug, he surprised her by coming upon her while she slept. He had ideas he couldn't pay for and she reminded him of that by making him aware of the blade's tip in his kidney. His counter was to strike her face and she followed through by slicing deep and around to the front. It was enough to encourage him to roll off and she told him if she ever saw his mutt face again, she would certainly kill him.

  Not all the familiars on the road were hostiles. Not to first impressions anyhow. She fell in with a boy she met doing a westerly drift originating from Bowling Green. He was nineteen, and thin as a reed with bear black hair, a bit long, and worn back with grease. His name was Casper and he met her by climbing into the cab belonging to a trucker who was distracted by the pickle tickle he was receiving from Miriam.

  Casper, slick as duck shit, stepped in and placed his lady stinger behind the trucker's left ear. "Hoss, you got 'bout um ten more seconds to finish 'fore Ima need these here wheels." The trucker's boner did an immediate soft and Casper apologized. "Nah, Hoss, didn't mean for that to happen. Truly, I'm sorry. How much?"

  The nervous trucker with his pants around his knees said "It's all in the glove box."

  "Nah, I mean, how much you pay for the French?"

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing?" Casper looked Miriam in the eyes, "That so?"

  Miriam wiped her mouth daintily, "He was going to drive me to California."

  One second's consideration was all Casper needed. "No sweat, Hoss. I got it." He pulled the trucker, who was twice his size, out of the cab and hopped into the driver's seat. "I'll get her there, don't worry and I truly am sorry. Looked like your pleasure was sincere and I hate to disrupt that."

  Miriam watched the trucker tug his jeans back up with both thumbs in the rearview, then fixed her eyes on Casper who glanced briefly in her direction, then focused on the road. He said, "Not enough sincerity these days. Not in people, don't you think?"

  And she answered, "Are you for real?"

  The way they worked it changed up. They targeted bowling alleys, veteran's halls and the occasional Y.M.C.A. Sometimes they'd be seen together and he'd be her brother and explain they needed money for traveling to their uncle's ranch after just losing their father to tragic circumstances. He would lean in and go on about how nice his sister was and how grateful she'd be for smiling on them in their need.

  Other times, she'd arrive in the truck stop cafe alone, count out nickels enough for coffee and nurse it sallow cheeked, fishing for looks. Whatever the method, the climax was the same. Casper would slip in, apologize and leave with what he could carry. He gave the sincerity rap most times he made an entrance.

  Then they would speed away, and with a fresh spike tapped, Miriam would sink into the deep enveloping grip of the leather seat and, with her feet, twist the dial of the A.M. radio. She'd switch back and forth between religious stations, just barely coming in, as though the open air were a winding, rut pocked trail sapping them the conviction to beg, once arrived. Casper, when her bare toes fell into his lap would change it back to rockabilly and tap the steering wheel unconsciously. Sometimes she raised her foot and punched an instrument of tuning only to be met by a single clear intonement coming out of the wilderness to "Repent. Make clear the way..." and Capser would nearly break the knob turning it off. He'd hum instead.

  One such night, Miriam, trying to curl around the tickle making its way through her said, "Casper...you're what Auntie Jem would call a... hedonist."

  "That so, Mirry? What is that, some kinda bible shit?"

  "...guess so..."

  "Sounds like bible talk." Then he rhapsodized about ancient things and the irrelevance of philosophy. Said weren't nothing thinking about preposterous hypotheticals could do for you now that you wouldn't do on your own without having wasted an hour and a minute, you could have been living, supposing. "Besides, all those bed sheet wearing pederasts never heard Gene Vincent." And with that, he drove the final nail into the coffin of rebuttal.

  She liked the sound of that, far off sound that it was. It seemed to bounce around the car's interior something less than normal fast. It took banking paths off the windshield and dash into a slow cascading arc before reaching her ears. Other sounds were made that never did get there intact. They tended to arrive in fragmented syllables unlinked to any intentional meaning. Some said things escaped out the open windows when Casper would take a curve and she imagined them melting into the countryside to be picked up by wild beasts who knew no better than she what to do with them. But the timbre of his voice and reasoning appealed to her teenage sensibilities. She would volley something back occasionally mostly for the pleasure of provoking further ideological commentary. It was like listening to a conversation from underneath a bath.

  "Tell me about your momma, Casper." She pulled out the G.I.'s wallet picture of his own mother, looking like an Eleanor or Gertrude or possibly a Helen. Her forehead was impossibly high and her mouth was small and dark and carried front teeth that met at an unlikely angle and which showed only a little bit between lips in her smile. Miriam was eager for traits to assign her imaginary matron, possessing, as she did, no picture of Auntie Jem.

  Everything about the motel was thin. The walls were thin, the mattress was thin, the comforter was thin. Certainly the proprietor was thin, as was the smile meant to conceal his lechery when he handed Casper their room key. Casper'd paid extra this evening for a room with a television set and they'd decided to leave it on all night to get their money's worth.

  Johnny Carson was sure a funny fella and made California seem like a nicer place than she already imagined. That was their stated destination and Casper meant to arrive on the top part and work their way down at a leisurely pace with an eye toward Mexico. He said they could make some money in California and it would spend better across the border.

  Casper's lip curled reflexively. "My momma's a mean bitch, Mir."

  Miriam turned over to face him, but he wasn't looking her way. "No. You don't mean that."

  "I'm sincere sugar. You gotta know least that."

  "Why? What was so horrible about her?" Without thinking, she pressed the photograph to her breast as if protecting its ears from hearing the potentially hurtful things could be lobbed at a mother.

  "Just mean. What else you want me to say?"

  She didn't know. Anything would be better than mean, though. She'd seen enough of mean among the women of Jem's places. She'd seen other things too, but mean was a trait she'd grown weary of. It was a quality she was leaving out of photographic mother's personality. Betty, she decided she would name the picture, Betty. "Tell me if she could cook then."

  "Course she could cook. Nothing to that. Not like fancy, but there's hardly a thing can't be choked down given the right treatments. Hell, anything that makes its own grease is got half the work done for you. So, yes, she didn't starve me. Thank you, momma."

  She ignored the sarcasm in his voice and took the concession as a minor victory. Casper was a man of certainties, earned or not, and she was always pleased to discover a new area of gray in his views which she could continue to bring up until he'd pondered it thoroughly. He had no interest in discussing things he did not have a well formed or at least unretractable opinion on.

  "Betty couldn't cook."

  "Who?"

  "My momma." She handed him the picture. "She didn't any ways. Auntie Jem did all that kind of work and Betty just made her hair pretty." She smiled at the ease the story came out with.

  "Since I already got the pretty, I'm gonna learn to cook."

  "Well, sugar now we know everything."

  They had a pretty good thing going till she spoilt it by getting pregnant by him,
or rather by telling him that she was. Her reluctance to say until she was most positive bought her only an uneasy spectator's type enjoyment of their time together. She watched those weeks like it was a TV. show she'd like to be part of, knowing it was destined to end soon. When the sick was pretty much a constant, she said it. He shrugged the way was reflexive for him and gave her the options.

  "We been good together sweetheart and I will miss you if you go off and have this kid, but you wanna keep with me, don't worry none, the woods is full of sharp sticks." She spoilt it further by crying when she said she wanted to stay with him.

  The next day he told her they could make a much better score by being more selective in their marks. They were somewhere near Lincoln when he explained what he meant. It was mid November and the sun wore out awful quick those days, so though it was not even five in the evening, dark had moved in and all but changed the locks on the doors when he stopped the Chevy across the street from a pool hall.

  "Where is this?" She asked.

  "Relax, Mir. I know this place. This is where we can make some good money." They crossed the street and he walked right through he puddles while she took care not to splash in them. He looked impatient with her, holding the front door open, waiting for her to catch up. The music warmed her instantly upon entering. Merle Haggard was having the same trouble with a lady he always seemed to be and it was a minor disappointment to realize that wouldn't change no matter where she went.

  The warmth of the music in the air turned into a suffocating density of smoke emanating from a score of sources and holding everything in the atmosphere like a body of water. She could nearly see the disturbance sound waves made passing through, rippling out and disappearing in the corners of the broad hall. A dozen red felt tables in the front gave way to a bar that bisected the room. Casper led them between the tables; nodded at the man behind the bar and continued toward the back room where a short and round man with a cigar like a chicken leg clenched in his large teeth stood from his table and motioned Casper back.