The Goodwill don’t hardly ever have clothes big enough to fit Earl.

Since he hurt his back, he ain’t been out at all.

That leaves me to pretty much do everything.

Most our spending goes to keeping him fed, of course.

There’s my Social Security and Earl Senior’s pension, but usually there’s too much month and not enough money.

Earl complains if it’s mac and cheese more than twice a week.

The boy always had an appetite, and it  seems to get bigger right along with him.

His uncle Bill made him that bed.

Made it out of rail ties.

 

Dear Da,

Cold here still, but that’s April for you. Ha ha. Thank you for the stockings, You have no idea how we covet them here. I think the last time my feet were really dry was at Christmas. 

He stopped, pen poised. He was out of topics.

He wouldn’t describe the hellscape of mud and splintered trees and rotting corpses, of the trenches filled with icy water long after the rains ceased.

He would not write of the soldier, his friend, caught in the wire of no man’s land, every night screaming for someone to please please kill him.

 

I’ll tell you what was in his godddamn vault. A book.

No money? No jewelry?

Like I told you. Just a book.

Well, what kind of book?

I can’t make it out.

You don’t know how to read?

There ain’t no words in it.

What then? Pictures?

No, they ain’t pictures exactly. It’s more like… I don’t know. Symbols or something.

Symbols? How do you mean?

Maybe you better come over and look at it.

You bet your ass I’m coming over. If that old bastard had it locked up in his vault it’s got to be worth a fortune.

 

“You’re on point, Private.” The lieutenant grins.

“Point, sir?”  The boy looks  confused. “But they’s only the two of us.”

“I was joking, Private. How much ammo you got?”

“Only what’s on my belt, sir. The leg bag with my spare clips got tore off in the jump.”

“We came in too fast,” agrees the lieutenant. “Slipstream. Can’t do anything about it now. We’ll get more at Division CP. When we find it.”

The private’s face is a pale slash in the summer darkness. He blinks.  “You got any idea where we’re at, sir?”

“France,” the lieutenant says, grinning again.

 

Thermite burns at a temperature of four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. You can make it easily, with chemicals you buy at Home Depot.

You can make serviceable napalm by adding Ivory Snow to gasoline until it turns to jelly.

It doesn’t take money to create terror. All it takes is imagination and patience.

I enjoy miniaturized explosives. I make my own C-4 and pack it into soda cans with a bunch of screws and springs for shrapnel, timed fuses powered by 9-volt batteries.

I’ll walk downtown and drop them in trash cans,  long gone by the time the first one explodes.

 

Ole Hank hit on his pint of Thunderbird, surveyed the yard with a cocked eye while the girl waited.

“I ain’t paying extra for them flowers,” was all he said.

She knew they didn’t cost nothing, and besides, she done that after all the other work. It did look nice, and was even funny in its way, though Ole Hank didn’t see the joke.

He grudgingly hauled out his pocketbook and peeled off three soiled bills, held out a grubby hand spattered with liver spots.

She put the money away. “So I come back tomorrow? They’s still plenty to do.”

 

Old timers tell you Mike Fink
was a legend like John Henry
or Paul Bunyan.

Horseshit
he was my great-great-great grandfather
real as you or me

worked up and down this canal and past it
out onto the Missouri,  the Big Muddy
poling flatboats of grain, whiskey, passengers

Mike Fink wore a red feather in his hat
to show he’d fight any man big or small
himself a giant of a man

Fists like Virginia hams
arms like tree limbs
face all creased with scars

He’d bite off an ear
swallow it whole
beat a man’s insides to black pudding.

 

Once this last test is passed I’ll be golden.

That’s what I keep telling myself as I shimmied up the drainpipe.

The first few were so easy they weren’t even a test, though the thing with the dog made me a little sick to my stomach. I love animals.

Still, the test was all about what you could  do, not what you want to do.

Outsiders never understand. They think we’re just a bunch of violent thugs who run around the city in red leather jackets committing crimes. Scaring citizens.

But that’s not it. It’s a brotherhood of the willing.

You never know what’s coming. You might not be able to go to the store, or if you went there it might be all empty. Imagine that.

Imagine the panic, especially if everybody knew them shelves was going to stay empty.

I always keep extras, just like I make sure wherever I go I’m wearing clothes that I’d be comfortable wearing for the rest of my life. I always have a knife, some string, my flint and steel. It wouldn’t be my preference to be stripped down to just them essentials,  but if it comes to it I’ll be ready.

 

Found a journal of the trip he took across the country in 1917. He must have been on his way to enlist. They didn’t have maps then, just a series of vague directions. Turn left at the green barn, go over a wooden bridge for a good while. Road might be muddy in the rainy season. That sort of thing.

He drove a 1902 Pan American made in Mamaroneck, NY. He had won it in a poker game in Baton Rouge, betting his father’s Civil War timepiece to do it.

He came back from France a changed man. They all did.

Friday Fictioneers