Issue 45: Spring 2019

SIGNPOST

The leaves of the magnolia were brown and strewn across the lawn.

The leaves of the magnolia were brown and strewn across the lawn. There hadn’t been any snow or wind to hide or sweep them away, only enough to scatter them around the driveway. Beau and I walked through them. I had heard on the news a few days before about a town, nearby in Arkansas, where all the birds had dropped dead from the sky at once. Thousands of red-winged blackbirds dead in the air on New Year’s Eve, and the magnolia leaves reminded me of that. The speculation that followed the story was conflictive. My brother believed that it had something to do with God. My mother was ill, and believed that it, as with all sad things, had something to do with radiation or pollution. I figured that it was a storm of some kind.

Mom must have skipped on the power bill, and the TV wasn’t working. I needed to get something I had left by the creek, so we had gathered ourselves and left the house. Like I said, we walked across the lawn. Dusk hung above the sky waiting for some dark but empty clouds to let it slide in. My dog, my brother and I crunched across the leaves into the lot adjacent to the old farmhouse we lived in. His clothes smelled like kerosene as I walked in his wake. My dog had killed two possums the week prior. Beau wanted to see if they were still where he’d thrown them after he’d cleaned them off the porch where the dog had proudly brought them.

The dog remembered. We broke through some bushes and slid down the cliff of red mud that bordered the train tracks. There they were. Two possums torn open by time, and fire ants or whatever else had crawled in and out of them. No trains were coming, so we kept walking.

“Well that’s something,” Beau said.

If there were boys who looked less adventurous, I didn’t know them. We were raised on biscuits and gravy, and each of us had a gelatinous pillow of fat wrapped around our stomachs. Beau’s pants, which were my pants, sagged under his bottom. The hems were torn, and white strands and rags of jean dragged behind him as he walked. He had grease stains on the shins of his jeans from filling the heaters and they looked like they’d always been there. He had on an ill-fitting shirt that he clung to because it said ABERCROMBIE across the chest. He hadn’t gotten it at Abercrombie, but at Goodwill. We assumed the impression was the same.

I turned and looked him in the eye. He shot his gun off into the air. It looked like a storm was rolling in.

We left the house with guns. I’ve told friends in the city that I could shoot a penny leaned up against a barn plank from a hundred yards away and that Beau couldn’t even hit the barn. Heading down the tracks, we argued about who was taking better care of our mother. We crossed over dead electric wire into a pasture where cows were feeding. Beau, in the middle of the field, started shrieking like a lunatic. I turned and looked him in the eye. He shot his gun off into the air. It looked like a storm was rolling in.

I had been to where we were walking about a hundred times before. There was a creek bed that ran through the fields. On the south side of the line there was sparse forest, to the north, grass. From all angles and practical entrances were signposts that read TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. The one we saw went unheeded.

Sometimes I’d take girls down to the creek bed in my truck. We’d walk to what I called “the beach.” There, if the water was low, we would roll around in the sand and feel wild until dusk and the mosquitos came. Growing up, I would camp out at the beach with my young friends. We’d catch crawdads and frogs, devein and skewer them, then spit them over the fire. Then, I don’t believe I would have paid the wildlife any mind at all. My focus had changed.

A few days before Beau shot up at nothing, I’d left a Hardy Boys book on the bank of the creek under a protruding rock. I wasn’t reading it. It came from a collection in my mom’s antique shop, and I had brought it down there because it was nice to look at and hold. I wanted a girl from school, Taylor, who wore glasses, and was smarter than me, to think that I read cute nostalgia in my spare time. I was going back to get the book, so I wouldn’t catch hell, then Beau let his gun off and a storm came rolling in.


Looking back on it, I figured those birds were hit by lightning, or froze to death in some kind of flash freeze, then fell to the earth. I couldn’t say why it was all red-winged black birds. I only heard about it once, strangely, as I listened to the news most mornings. My mom would yell “Simon! Coffee!” from her bed. “Simon! Coffee!” It was obnoxious when she was fine but endearing when she was sick. I’d bring some up to her and watch some Good Morning America, or maybe the local news. New Year’s morning I had climbed into the bed and laid beside her on top of the covers. Since she’d started chemo, she smelled how medicine tastes when you chew it. The dog wouldn’t even go near her.

“Radiation,” she said, “I just know it is. They’re trying to say it’s not, and they’ll bring in experts, but I just know.”

I didn’t want to be scolded for being scientific in our newly church-going house, I just nodded and agreed. I stepped over the dog and headed downstairs and began running her bath. Beau or I would have to carry her down, but she’d drive herself to her doctor’s appointment.


My brother wanted to join the army. Or maybe he didn’t want to, but when he talked, he talked about it. I didn’t know what to make of him, then. He had a girl back in Arkansas, Lindsey Buchenauer. She was trouble from the jump, and I didn’t like her brother, Buck. He was always around our house messing with our lawnmower or pretending to fix things. My mom would offer him ice tea and he’d take it without saying thank you. I remember that. I also remember thinking that they didn’t know what church was and wouldn’t care to shower and go if they did.

Beau began his thing with Lindsey, I was convinced, sheerly out of proximity and convenience. He loved her because there wasn’t any other girl living in any other trailer close enough to our house for him to love on without owning a car. He’d talk like a martyr and he’d talk about fate. He seemed to have a profound respect for their poverty and had latched onto it like a disciple of no-name chips and soda, of poverty and its wonderful way of excusing sin. Whenever he’d come home from their trailer he’d be brooding like a stray cat who just ate out of the garbage. A full cat, I thought. He must’ve been doing more than just watching them be poor. He’d sulk and look at me as if I should bless his soul, which I did, albeit inwardly. It made me worried.

The day we went for our walk, he was moping, and looking at me with arrogantly consoling eyes, like he had just performed a sermon; silently chastising me with his presence and meandering around in my proximity. We left the house. Mom was at her chemo appointment with the truck, the power went out as she pulled out of the driveway, and we didn’t want to stay inside. Well, I had to get my book. We took our guns and left. Our dog tore into what was left of the possums and I thought about how there might not be anything sacred in the world. Maybe that’s what the inkling of apocalypse looks like: dead birds blackening lawns a few towns over and a couple of hollowed-out possums getting molested by a dog.

“Well that’s something,” Beau said.

I didn’t buy into his story about the trailer down the road being the birthplace of an impoverished gospel that I needed, for some reason, to know about and to respect.

We sauntered down the train tracks towards the pasture, following the twitching flag of my dog’s tail. In the summer, the trees form a canopy over the tracks, like a private tunnel, but now the grey sky was intruding through their bare limbs. It was like looking out of a skeleton’s chest from the inside and into nothing. I could smell the kerosene on Beau’s pants and it was giving me a headache.

He said, “Buck’s in the hospital.”

“How’s that?”

“Lindsey says he was fighting their dad. Her dad was drinking, I guess. I guess he beat Buck so bad that she called the ambulance.”

I didn’t want to think about why Buck was fighting his dad. I didn’t want to think about anything, really. I was sort of happy that someone had whooped Buck, because it wasn’t going to be me, or the government, or Jesus. He had it coming.

But, then, a lot of people did. I was sick of blessing Beau’s soul and sick of watching him mope around. I didn’t buy into his story about the trailer down the road being the birthplace of an impoverished gospel that I needed, for some reason, to know about and to respect.

“You don’t care!” Beau said, hysterical. “Don’t you care about anything?”

“Man, if I cried every time you say something’s a matter with Lindsey I could fill a lake.”

“Buck’s in the hospital!” Beau yelled from down the track.

I kept walking.

“What is wrong with you?” he said.

I climbed up the lowest part of the wet red ditch and up towards the dead part of the electric fence, and over it. Beau caught up quick behind me.

“Her dad was fuckin’ her, Simon! He was fuckin’ around with her! And Buck found out and…”

“Well, I reckon that makes two of you. Are you jealous?”

“Her whole life! I try to be there! I tried to be there!”

I parted the tall grass and was looking southeast to where the beach was. I heard a high-pitched guttural noise kick up behind me and turned around. Beau looked me dead in the eye and shot his gun straight up into the clouds. It echoed like thunder across the field surrounded by trees, and onward. The air settled as the noise fled, and nothing dropped from the sky. I looked up and saw what looked to be a storm come rolling in.


The shot signalled a chain reaction of leavings. I left my book on the bank, Lindsey left her house, my mother left this earth, Beau and I left Arkansas and I left whatever remained of God’s light in my life right there on the field. Clouds shortly covered it all.

A few weeks after the funeral, Beau and I moved from Arkansas to our father’s house in North Carolina. We tried to adjust. Things were getting on at school and I was more and more confident that I’d get into a decent college. No one cooked for me anymore. I slimmed down and had miraculously become an athlete but was barely passing my classes.

Taylor asked over the phone, “Where do you think you’re gonna get in?”

“Wake or Duke,” I said.

“For what?”

“Football. Maybe wrestling at UNC.”


After high school, Beau joined the army and got stationed in New York State. By that time, I had dropped out of college and I moved up there with him and stayed in his barracks for a couple of weeks. We had gotten all the paperwork and lousy money sorted out from our mother’s death. We were working on buying an apartment in the city. I was going to move there to look for a place and get a job, and Beau was going to come back from Iraq with enough money for a down payment, for which I’d have to pay him back.

After my mom passed I wanted to get rid of everything. I showed up to my dad’s with boots and a bag and a nearly complete set of Hardy Boys’ books. I sold my mom’s antique shop and none of the prospective buyers wanted the contents. They wanted the building or the land for cheap and nothing inside, so I held a yard sale. The shop had sat untouched for about four years, and I thought that might have made the things inside more valuable. It turns out that anything without someone to care for it isn’t worth much at all. As it stood, everything was damaged, or junk to begin with. She alone had been making it all appealing to the rest of the world.

I had dropped out of college in the middle of my sophomore year. I’d gone to Methodist University in Fayetteville on a small scholarship. I ended up going to Methodist because Taylor had told me she was going there. None of that turned out to matter. One day I came home to her messing around with a boy who worked at a bar called Big Shots downtown. I knew him, but he didn’t know me. Then one Friday night my lung just busted on the field. “BOOM!” like a shotgun blast inside me. I wasn’t playing football after that and wasn’t at all interested in the schoolwork so I just up and left without formally quitting. I began to feel natural and familiar again with nothing to do.


I remember cleaning it all out. After almost everything was gone I stared into the shop and thought about those possums that my dog tore into. I started putting the remnants in my truck to take to the dump. I placed the Hardy Boys collection on the bench seat and thought about the book that was missing. What was the title? I drove off thinking about it. As I drove I did my best to recollect the moment in the field, what happened the day my mother had died.

I doubt anything would have turned out differently If I hadn’t gone and retrieved the book. I still would have waited up for my mom all night with the lights out. The magnolia leaves were black on the ground when I left home and were blacker still in the morning. The police would have crunched through them when they showed up with the news.

 

About the author

Zak Jones is an American expatriate living and writing in Canada. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in PRISM International, Bad Nudes, Half a Grapefruit Magazine, Milkweed Zine, Palimpsest: Yale Graduate and Literary Arts Magazine, Hart House Review, and elsewhere. Zak is a graduate student at the University of Toronto where his creative work intertwines with his research to explore the particular traumas that abound within the Southern United States. He has completed a poetry manuscript and is at work on a novel-length prose project under the mentorship of Pasha Malla.