Rich and Jean were very much in love, let’s get that out of the way first.
They started riding the rails and wandering these scrubland flats of the West back in the roaring twenties, round about ’22. Rich lost his house after a bout of obscure malady contracted in tropic climes, a pleurisy or a catalepsy or some ailment of that exotic nature. Jean hit the skids when her husband shot a deputy one night in a fit of rancor after the deputy showed up at his trailer and told him he had to quit slicing Jean when in one of his mean blue moods. The husband lit out on the lam and was forever lost to history. Alone after that, Jean couldn’t keep up her home and soon had to take to drifting ways. And that’s when she drifted into my personal hobo jungle.
The two of them met when sharing a frank on a stick outside my lean-to in the dry season of September when the creek runs a trickle, and that merely sluggish and all stunk up. Like some duchess at a Russian ball, I presented them one to the other and they hit it off immediate. I felt right proud of my matchmaking. I considered that I would perform many more such pairings-up as time went by and become in due course some grubby old byways cupid. But it turned out they were my first and only victims of this kind.
Rich was not rich, obviously enough. That’s perhaps why he called himself “Poor Rich” with a sly ironic grin and a little phlegmy cough. He’d been overseas as a footslogger in the infantry and had caught some shrapnel in his inner ear and his left knee that sang to him in unison on days with thunder in them. He wasn’t that old, maybe twenty-eight, but he’d gotten plenty beat up by time’s squad of brutal henchmen. He was lean and wiry though he hobbled, and he’d been hobbling alone across the land for some months before I introduced him to Jean at my campfire wiener roast.
Jean was unlovely on the outside but radiant within. That’s how I saw her: radiant within. She had that special shine on her which some folks emanate that can’t be tarnished no matter how much life tries to scuff it off of them. I would’ve been quite jealous of Rich’s great fortune in finding a woman like that if my inclinations had tended that way. As it was, I became somewhat jealous of her and her monopoly of the tarnished beau whom she’d entrapped with her radiance.
Later that night in my lean-to, Rich lay down for me as Jean squatted a short ways off and called soft words of encouragement, urging him to perform for me with willingness and enthusiasm, to do by all means whatever I wished him to do.
He did the necessary to my requirements, then I shared with them both a bottle of home-distilled potato hooch that I’d named Throatburner, and gave them as a betrothal gift a special mooseblanket that I’d taken off an old dead trapper out by the lakebed. Then they lay together in a quiet spot over by the wiener fire and my role as hobo matchmaker was consummated.
But this tale really isn’t about me. Oh Professor, you old dodderer, you bloviatin’ dotard! Try to stay focussed on the task at hand, keep on message...
I know, I know. But my point with all this variegated verbiage is this: Jean had not a hair of jealousy in her, was happy to see her man lay with another man if it meant some small accomplishment for them both to revel in. This achieved, they settled down for the night. And a warm night of togetherness swathed in fur is no mean feat in the cold world into which we’ve been thrown.
They say love is never having to say you’re sorry. Rich wasn’t sorry at all for the old man juice that leaked out of him that night as he writhed while enclosed with his true love for the first time within the mooseblanket. I snuck down and snooped however I could, having already as it were enjoyed the right of primae noctis.
You might well imagine I got some perverse creepy jollies from watching them, but this is far from the truth. Human closeness was enough for me after so long an exile. I sucked into my nostrils the scent of their lovemaking like the bouquet of some fine wine and was content. The moon rose then, horned and swarmed by moths. It was time for old transformations to take place.
Then, when they were done, I remade both of them anew. I consecrated the arrangement for always. They were mine and they were one another’s, each to each and his to hers. They would live now locked in their love forever.
There was a sweet time after that. Though I insist this tale’s not about me, I can’t refrain from recounting that as a resourceful chap, I’d run a cable from the county power line up on the bridge down to a crystal radio set in my encampment.
So it was that Jean charlestoned the night away to the black bottom and the shoogalooga rattling out of the wireless as us men clapped rhythm around her, and later, as the day broke, we slept to the somnolent intonations of President Warren G. Harding and his solemn prayer for normalcy in our time.
The next time I saw Rich and Jean was the spring of ’23, when the pandemic was a recent memory and people’s discontent was vague and formless still. From what I could glean from the normies we panhandled in town some nights, it was turning out to be a great big nothing of a time. Neither triumph nor revolt, just a dissatisfied sameness.
Waves of homeless filled the streets and were moved along. These unfortunates hadn’t yet the knack of existing out in the edgewise peripheral eye where nobody really pays no nevermind, where you are seen but unseen. The ones who got moved on still hadn’t absorbed the iron first law of the unhoused: it ain’t no crime to be poor, it’s only a crime to be poor and visible.
It was April, when the creek alongside my shelter gushes clear and clean. Nights we’d grapple for trout and roast them on my brazier. It’s said that the fish sleep at night, but we don’t.
Bless my soul, what a time to be nearly alive! In all the time that had passed, my little hobo jungle had built up to become quite the gathering of my admirers and hangers-on. I’d kept on those who could be relied upon not to hit the opium pipe or blitz too hard on the white lightning. With the others, the truly lost, I had manifested my disapproval. Meth-tweakers and fentanyl ne’er-do-wells were dispensed with, leaving a small community of some dozen or so out there under the rail bridge.
On this visit Rich was light one eye, his left — he didn’t explain the loss, nor did I inquire — and sported a light pink ‘flesh-colored’ eyepatch that ill accorded with his brown skin. As if to compensate for this obscure loss, Jean had picked up a little mongrel bitch called Hettie, a distempered little thing, fur made all irregular with the mange, but loyal as only a dog can be. The creature had a tiny little cough which rhymed weakly with Rich’s rich baritone hack, and a third-leg hobble which matched his gait to perfection. Rich and Hettie great-and-small limped under the near-full moon that night as Jean rushed to me and hugged me, lamenting all the stretch of time they’d been a-wanderin’.
They were truly gracious guests and most welcome after such a long absence out there in the world. I offered them hospitality in the annex to my lean-to where I had installed a cardboard shelter guestroom, and while Rich blew me, Jean cooked up a stew of horseberries, wild radish and flatrabbit peeled from the roadside. Love is never having to sweat the small stuff or to worry too much about who blows who.
Some time later that night, as the moon and its attendant moths were declining, Rich and Jean said they were fixing to move on, to hike over to the railyards and jump on a westbound freight. I gave them my blessing and a whale-oil lantern that I’d found one night in a derelict steamer on the dry lakebed. They packed up their mooseblanket and left soon after, the picture of sweet coupledom in the night-time drizzle with their faithful mongrel hobbling by their side, tiny dog yap-coughing in unison with the chesty wheeze of one-eyed Rich.
I sent out one of my young ones, Punk Steven, to trail the pair at a distance as far as the railyards and see that they hopped safely on the freight train west. But within an hour he got in touch to say that Rich and Jean had encountered a setback and would be returning.
“I managed to get a signal oot here just up around the old slaughterhouse,” said Punk Steven in his Canuck accent. “They’re headin’ on back, eh? Dog got mashed up pretty bad and they’re lookin’ bereaved.”
I pressed Steven for more details, but he seemed embarrassed to relate more of the story and started to break up, saying only that the pair were coming back. We lost connection soon after.
I sat there waiting for the wandering pair to reappear up the creek in the moonlight, now so silver and gleam-lined after the April rains had ceased.
And there they were: one-eyed Rich like a tubercular pirate, tall and dignified as he marched, bending over every so often to hawk up some sputum. With his left arm he sustained a broken Jean, tearful though still somehow glowing with that radiance of the good that she bore and which bore her up also through all manner of adversity. I loved her sweet clear aura and could wish to feed on it all night long, though I loved Rich the more for the richness of his flesh. I loved them both, I loved to be their mentor and friend, the one who had initiated them into our ways so very long ago.
Punk Steven was following them a little ways off, and I waved him away. He wandered off into the scrubland so as to round his way back towards the camp. I watched his limegreen mohawk crest sidle away into the chaparral and then approached the lovers.
Jean was carrying a black plastic sack and I guessed what was in it. “Hettie?” I asked, and she nodded, sniffling up her grief, her face a rictus of loss.
“Mashed,” said Rich. “Squished by the bulls.”
The nobility with which he said it, clenched to his radiant lady in the damp moonlight, was the single most magnificent thing I ever witnessed. Separately they were nothing much at all to be considered, but together they became a something. Love means never having to yield to separate outcomes, but to share the all-in-all, mashed-up dog just as much as silver moonshine in the glistening drizzle.
I considered the remains of the flattened mongrel.
“The railyard guards have a mean streak to ‘em,” I said. “They shouldn’t have been given ATVs what with their well-known propensity to flatten innocent critters. It’s a damned shame.”
“We brought her back,” sobbed Jean.
“A goddamned outrage,” I said. “Burial?”
“Protein,” said Rich. “I mean, we loved her an’ all, but what’s done’s done and there ain’t no mileage in reverencin’ away a meal at this stage.”
“Like ashes in my mouth,” said Jean, but she made an effort to dry her tears. “You got sage and sassafras?”
“And wild garlic and mushrooms,” said I. “We’ll do Hettie proud, never you mind, my Jeanie.”
Love is never having to reject a source of sustenance when fate has offered it to you. Love informs you tenderly that when life gives you squished dog, you make squished dog hotpot.
Some nights later we consumed the last of our mournful feast and spoke about all the good things Hettie the squashed bitch had stood for. I promised to find them a pup they could love in her place, a stray cur or a coyote or even a wolfcub detached from the wolf folk in the wooded hills.
A ways away, Punk Steven and a small clutch of the young ones pogoed to DK and chanted “Fight the Power” along with Chuck D. Their youthful rage and jollity could not disturb one jot the quiet pleasure of our sublime grief for the little dog.
Rich and Jean held hands beside my pot. The waves of time swept past us as we sat, and it seemed that we were racing towards a new and final epoch. Years plummeted and the night sky whirled giddy to the radio blare and the howling of punk kids and beasts in the night.
“It’s been a while we’ve known each other,” I said. “A century or more at this point?”
“A year, I’d say, nigh-on,” said Rich.
“Of course,” I said, stirring the stew. “A year nigh-on, or a century, what’s even the difference? 23-Skiddoo, brother! When you live our kind of life, what even is time anyway?”
“A burden to be relieved,” said Rich, chewing on his stew with philosophical intensity.
“A delight, fresh in every new day and charged with possibility,” said Jean with a smile.
Love is taking the rough with the smooth, the eternal with the ephemeral, and the optimist along with the pessimist. Love is absorbing the blows and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and getting up to fight again. Love is the opposite of finality.
Things settled down around midnight and the radio, which had been talking urgently of end times and war’s hungry clamors after all the music was done, became quiet once again.
The red horned moon rose to the west and the night was filled with silence and the far-off wailing of wolves and the lost strays that move in to occupy the silence when there’s nothing else out there in the fleeing dark.
Gray moths and silver moths took to the air and looked for light, any light at all, to obsess over and lose their minds to. June was stretched out in the cardboard annex and Rich was sitting at the fire, looking at the flames with a contemplative air. I was in my lean-to and humming a quiet tune of abandon, the happy music of the time after satiety.
The horned moon cowered down over the disused viaduct and a lone wolf yowled. This was when the fabric of time started its wobble and squeezed us into itself again. I don’t know how to explain it. It happens every so often, or maybe it happens always and we only notice it on the wolf nights.
“Professor?” said Rich. “I been feelin’ kinda funny these last years. Like my life is driftin’ out from under me, ya know?”
“I’m familiar with the sensation, Richard,” I said. “It’s our curse.”
“What curse?”
“Or maybe it’s a blessing. In any case, it’s a way of experiencing time that associates of mine tend to fall into sooner or later. It’s perhaps the true way of time, and the other way, the way of normal men and women, is the false way. Who’s to say?”
Just as he was about to inquire of me further, there was a chain of distant glows across the horizon, like far suns trying to rise and failing to do so. It was like a faraway man with a firelighter had come and The fire of them rose like licks of light and then smouldered into limbs of smoke. All was silent. Even the brethren of wolfkind in the scrubland, the coyotes and stray dogs from the city, even they kept silence. There was just the moldy glow in the distance and then staggered stubs of smoke billows clambering upwards to become great fingers and puffballs. Giant blooms they were, a far garden that grew into a silent domination of the sky.
We listened on the wireless set for boogie-woogie, hip-hop or news, but there was only ever a static hissing and sometimes the single tone of a xylophone announcing some speech that never came.
Much later a soft rumble that was rolling high and low into the sky and earth crept across our night but refused to make its meaning known. The younger ones at the encampment became agitated but I shared the last of the dog stew and we sang a few of the old old songs and everyone began to enjoy the unknowing, like it was the night before the day of an important surprise.
The next day did indeed bring a surprise. The surprise was that the people in the town, heretofore our superiors, came to beg of us. All was topsy-turvy and hurly-burly, the world was hoisted upside-down. The least was become first and the greatest was now humbled in the dust under the leaden sundown sky. We were just stirring after our day’s rest.
They came in tatterdemalion rags and blistered visages like some antique woodcut of the infernal circles of hell, creaking in their swollen joints and each one groaning discordant and separate, not a choir of misery but a talent competition of amateurs. Some of them had nylon suit jackets fused into their skins, while others had the glass shards of their spectacles burst into their milky leaking eyes. Coyotes yapped at their heels and tore of strips of ankleflesh and trouser from them, provoking random screeches.
The ones in the lead threw themselves in the creek and did what they could to splash cool water over their blistered hides. Some passed out from the shock and drowned right there in the three inches of the stream’s running water. Others held out melted fists in supplication, the stumps of their fingers ragged and pustulent. It wasn’t clear what they wanted from us, at least at first.
I saw June and Rich, Punk Steven and all the others, look around in confusion and horror. They edged up closer to the encampment, closer to me, avoiding the outstretched limbs with the bubbled hands and the faces with their dripped features like melted candles. They looked over to me and then I knew then what to tell them. Inflows and outflows: of fate and of inspiration.
“There’s been a sudden plague of the normies!” I yelled. “They want to join us now that their lifestyle has failed them!”
“What shall we do?” called out Jean. “Looks like they really need our help!”
“What do you do when there’s only a little lifeboat and a great mass o’ drowning folk tryin’ to swamp it?” I demanded.
Rich got where I was going with this hint. “They’ll bring their sickness to us!” he said. “They’ll collapse time down to its regular shape again!”
“Brothers and sisters!” I stepped up onto the little crate we used as a dining table and held out my hands as if I were a prophet of abolition.
“Brothers and sisters! Let them be consumed!”
The time that followed was both pleasant and very unpleasant indeed. It was pleasant to see my children, those young ones — my punks and emo urchins, the elder ones a century or more in age, Rich and June my broken lovers — to see them gather their embers of retribution from the ashes of the regular world.
Less pleasant it was to see them actually claim it: the thirsty slurping of hollowed-out eyes, the ripping-open of caved-in chests, the strong white teeth closing on those necks with their dripping lesions, the little orgasmic grunts from Jean as she sucked up the arterial spray from a blood-blinded teenager wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt stained with mustard.
The radio came on again at the moment the last normie died. Our folk paused in their work and listened. It was “Blue Moon”, now sung by a woman with Jean’s sweet voice to the lazy strum of electric guitar that I imagined played by Rich. The woman la-la-la’ed her way into the tune, in no hurry to get to the chorus. One sad day her baby went away and he died, she sang, and the soft guitar lamented in that space where the lover was not.
A blue full moon rose in the hard sky, and all the normal folk were gone from the world we knew. We hadn’t finished them, or only just these few last ones. They’d chosen to take themselves away in their mold, their dust and their clouds.
Only us outcasts in our hobo jungle would remain now, immortal in our blood and thirst, along with the wolves and the coyotes and the small stray dogs who had run away from railyard guards looking to crush their small skulls beneath the wheels of wanton vehicles.
======== [ SASSAFRAS AND FLATRABBIT // END ] ========
NOTE
Originally written for Dylan Bosworth’s Drek Death and Doom Valentine’s collection which was unfortunately fated not to be. So I’m posting it in honour of that fine enterprise.
I feel it’s appropriate to be read as Friday 13th turns into the 14th, Valentine’s Day — while the last horns of the waning moon settle towards darkness.
Dedicated to my lovely ladies, true love M and my little one K. Fine gals both.
That really is a perfect song choice. The song sounds exactly like the language in which the story is written. And as soon as it starts my brain immediately starts visualising the end credits.
It also happens to be such a good story that any superlative words I might come up with for it won't do any justice, so I'll leave it at that - and let the song do the work for me.