The Book of Duels (23 page)

Lonnie Newhouse, 57,

Witness, Owner of the Crossroads Saloon, & Cuckold

 

H
ush up and listen at him, will ya:
I don’t care where you bury my body, baby, once I’m good and gone
. This fool don’t know half the truth he sings yet I’m more the fool for bringing my old lady ’round him in the first place—I should have reckoned that look in ole Bob’s eyes the same as I give to them ole country gals—big thighs and jelly rolls—give em my rock and stroll home to sweet Irene—bathe till I’m fresh from beer and smoke and pleasure and flop beside her in our bed, where once I heard her call his name as she slept, though it sounded like his voice—thin and eerie as ghost speak—as if some wanting haint from another world was tasting on her tongue the name of its lover—at first I was spooked but then I grew howling mad as when Lou’s ole blue tick got in my coop and ate the day’s eggs, crushed them and licked they runny middle, which got me hot, sure as shit, but when I stepped into the light of day and seen the dead hens too, one after another littered on the yard, all twisted in bloody heaps, and knew he’d killed them just for fun—well, man, I went buck wild and straight off to the Dreyfus Druggerie and got me some strychnine and stuffed it into a chunk of raw meat and it was a pure de-light to watch that mangy dog suffer, moaning and whimpering three days into death—last night old Roustabout Tommy told me how this singing mutt here slicked my gal and tangled her hair good and I pictured them twinning and hanking on the bed where our baby was born and I began to howl and to plot—tonight I’m gonna do this boy in with a hot spiked drink of gin and then he too has got to go, I guarantee.

Custody Battle for Chelsea Tammy: Malgrove v. Bowling

At the Toys “R” Us, Aisle 6, in Minneapolis, Minnesota,

December 24, 1983 (for Jeanne Leiby)

Tyler Malgrove, 38,

Attorney & Divorced Father of a Six-Year-Old Daughter

 

I
am a trial attorney. I make a damn respectable living through confrontation. I own a Saab turbo sedan, a closet full of Polo and Armani, and a Movado watch my wife gave me on our fifth anniversary. I bought a three-bedroom ranch and my Jennifer attends the finest prep school and my wife drives the Volvo 240 that I paid for in cash and lost along with the house when she divorced me last year. She was a cheerleader, my wife, at the University of Georgia, and her legs are long and golden. She is great at parties, her platinum feathered hair tousles when she laughs, and when she laughs, you are the only man in the world. And whom does she laugh for now? When she leaves a conversation, she’ll touch your wrist with her long bronze fingers and you go deaf for the next four minutes. And because our daughter’s play pals all have this doll, she must have one too. The hell with the forty dollars; I want her to be supernormal and I want my old life back. So I slipped inside my Lucchese boots and drove to five different stores before I arrived here to find the last doll left on the bottom shelf and so I reach for little—what’s her name?—Chelsea Tammy, with her red yarn hair and dimples, when some guy decked out like Rambo in fatigues and dog tags and lank hair tries to take her from me. I say,
Sir, I believe you’d be more fit for Raggedy Andy
. My kid may not have her father now but she’ll damn sure have whatever else she wants—when he reaches for my tie, I slap his hand away.

Buddy boy, I did not grow up picking cotton in northern
Alabama, did not join the National Guard to pay my way through undergrad and law school at UGA, did not woo a woman as beautiful as all the gold in Fort Knox, did not join the bar to gain a foothold in society and earn the respect of men better than your vagrant self will ever be, and certainly did not suffer through a very messy and very public divorce, which left me bankrupt of money and wife and child, just to lose what my baby girl wants now. Not to you. Not to anyone. I say,
Unhand me, sir
, and then, as his grip tightens around my throat, I squeal,
Or I’ll sue! I’ll sue!

Sam Bowling (a.k.a. “Pin”), 31,

Vietnam Veteran & Divorced Father of an Eight-Year-Old Daughter

 

I
yank him to me and grab hold of his neck right below his bobbin apple and squeeze and it feels good and I am back on R and R in the Thanh Hotel, downtown Saigon, ’72, and Chi will be my girlfriend for the week and she feeds me shrimp dumplings dipped in fish sauce and I drink cold beer in a glass and she rubs lemongrass oil into my feet and palms and massages my manhood until it blooms and bursts and she takes me to a deep hot bath, my first in months, and then to a sauna and I am limp and the air is full of vanilla and walnut and in here there is no smell of decay nor earthen rot that seeps into your pores and will not wash out with Lux soap and a trickle shower and she brings me to a bedroom where I lie on fresh linens and incense burns in a little clay pot and I inhale the vapor of opium and follow the lazy whir of a ceiling fan until my eyes grow heavy and I fall into a sleep—a far war’s cry from my rucksack in a fresh-dug ditch when I’m out in the bush, and I dream of childhood Christmas with luminaries down our snow-dappled driveway and waking up to the rich smells of bacon and biscuits and coffee percolating on the stove top and my mother in an apron and my father at the table reading the
Herald
in his black socks and there is only one present under the tree and it is for me and I crawl underneath and reach and open it and a rat lunges at me—I awake in Vietnam and I sit up and see the red stains on the white sheets about me and they are the color of old blood and I know I am killed and I scream, and lying next to me is Chi, my assassin,
and she screams too until I wrap my hands around her neck, the white gold of my wedding band bright against her dark skin and the veins in her temple stand out and I remember crawling in one of the Cu Chi tunnels expecting to find a punji stake-pit but instead finding some dink bastard who had me dead to rights with his pistol and he pulled the trigger but nothing happened and I grabbed him by the throat—didn’t even shoot him, just squeezed the life from him—even when I realize the blood is just the red clay come leached from my open pores, I keep right on squeezing her—

Just as I do this yuppie bastard here: one hand on his throat and one on the box with the doll inside and what can they do to stop me from killing him as dead as all the others I’ve buried in my brain?

Chuck Simpson, 19,

Stock Boy & Drug Dealer

 

I
came from hiding another stupid fat-face doll out back behind the Dumpster—that makes seventeen total, and at forty bucks a pop, that equals . . . shit if I know, like a thousand bones, I guess, way more than I make at this job or peddling dime bags to my sister’s pals, though Megan looks long at me when I give her the shotgun and our lips damn near brush—I’ve carried a crush on her for years and will make my move when she starts high school next fall—back inside under the fluorescent lights I hate myself for humming along with “Karma Chameleon” for like the tenth time today and I walk down aisle eleven past little baskets of cinnamon candles to see Jimmy, the boss, yelling and waving all crazy—he’s been side-eyeing me all week and I guess he’s caught on to my trick and now the jig is up, as they say in the movies—he’ll fire me on Christmas Eve of all dang days and what will I tell Mom as we sip the brandy with apple cider she simmers in the Crock-Pot and smoke our cigs on the front porch and wonder again what happened to Pops and where he’s gone but we won’t say nothing as we slurp hooch from our coffee mugs until we’re tight—dang, man, that’s just paranoid pot talk—I turn the corner on aisle six, pig-eyed and slow, and there’s Jimmy deep in a melee like the bad guy who jumps in a match to help Ric Flair beat Dusty Rhodes—and I run past Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly displays, stunned that this is my life—two dudes on the linoleum wrestling over a toy and Jimmy in the middle of it—the one dude looks like my dealer and the other is a dweeby hotshot, the kind who acts like he owns the world and
is about to start charging me rent, but Jimmy is my dweeb and I’d like to clean his clock, but he’s got his knee in this dude’s back like the cops did me junior year in the school parking lot as I was rolling a lousy doobie and now I know Jimmy’s not my manager at all—he’s a narc, and that’s for dang sure.

I ease around the scuffle and pick up the doll they’ve dropped and head to the back to gather my thousand dollars in the Dumpster and Jimmy can’t fire me now ’cause I quit—Zeppelin’s on my car stereo and I’m already at Aladdin’s Castle playing Joust or Dragon’s Lair, high and happy these holidays, and it’s gonna be a good Christmas, Mom, because even though I’m a dropout, I ain’t no dummy after all.

The Magic Hour: Garriga v. Garriga

Inside a Pool Set on the Living Room Floor and, Later, in the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, Tallahassee, Florida,

June 26–27, 2011