The Garden (Unfinished)

The Garden

By Varo Borja

Chapter 1

The stars silhouette two bodies digging, digging furiously neath a crescent moon, the birds are silent and the mosquitoes buzz around the diggers, furious gales of micro marauders, seeking blood beneath flesh, a constant impediment to the work in progress—shovels clang and handles creak, a brook rippling nearby gurgling on towards the sea in an uninterrupted, serene stream of clear, life giving water. A raven flies across the moon, an omen not heeded, a seal unbroken. One of the diggers pauses to remove a handkerchief from his back pocket—he wipes the night sweats away, gazing at the moon and cursing silently beneath his breath. The work continues.

Her name was Dahlia. She came from a village in Carteret County where the copperheads crept through the underbrush and where the night was still cold come mid May. She fetched water and chopped wood. She milked the cows till their teets wouldn’t give another drop, then she’d slit their haggard ankles for blood to keep her and her baby from starving while the blue coats ravaged the towns and the home guard pillaged the countryside. She’d kept a garden with maters and taters and a little bit of corn, but the corn got confiscated by the home guard for home brew whiskey and the maters and taters dried up like the dust of the road that them son of a bitches in Drake’s platoon patrolled every day instead of going off to fight the North like Johnny did. Johnny was her sixteen-year-old husband who lay mangled in a mass grave somewhere this side of Vicksburg. X marked the spot where Johnny lay, half his face gone to a smoldering piece of grapeshot, the other gone to the indomitable dust. X for the flag of the fallen, rebel pride red with the blood of the children of antebellum rancor—slave blood also, fed by the same earth to which they were bound and which poured out of lashes well laid on for trespassing on the Eden of the white man—stealing a biscuit or the virtue of some lilly of the valley redolent of powder and laudanum, wrapped in calico and lace and heavy with a child that would be hushed and shushed and sold to a convent for sixpence. Blue, blue also with the tears of a million women just like Dahlia or worse, cried like the river running slowly down to New Orleans, carrying bales of blood bought white riches. White also, white stars symbolizing a pipe dream manufactured from the spine grease of blackest Africa, white hot fire in the bellies of a bullied generation of brutish gentlemen determined to see the thing to the end and selling their very souls for a chance to govern themselves, to maintain a status quo landed aristocracy built on manners and bullshit. Dust and ashes, and a pale moon without comfort, solace or a season to grieve—shit outta luck with a baby eaten up with the cholic and a bottomless belly which her milk couldn’t sate, selfless bile and a vinegar highball, the wine of regret at a tender age, nearer to death than the thin gray wraiths trickling down the road in rags and bandages, half of them shorn of legs and arms and all of them looking for succor from the soon to be reconstructed corpse of a once proud land.

Dahlia struggled for life like the desert struggled for rain—an occasional kindness from some would be suitor would keep her going until the corncrib was empty again. Her baby that she’d never named died on an August afternoon, his ribs showing like a Mannerist Christ child, elongated and fleshy substance that just gave up in its grasping for sustenance, a pieta redolent with pathos and her tears streaming down on his head, then drying into a hardened resolve, turning first from utter despair to anger to a deadness within her that couldn’t be revived by the blood of anyone on any tree set upon a hill which meant nothing to her now anyway. She started walking the road after that, lurking in the shadows and becoming the substance of dreams or the nightmares of children tucked away beneath covers that never knew the embattled night terrors of worry, anxiety, remorse or dread. She’d pass the stragglers in the night--worn out gypsies from the war and half crazed, half caste colonels on old ragged roans littering up the byways with their brokenness in full view even beneath a sky with no moon and barely a star to guide them home. One eye that she didn’t escape was the captain of the ill-named home guard, Drake. Half demon, half vulture perched above the heads of the simple country folk with his two big Colt pistols that he could use to full advantage whenever his purposes boded dark and ominous which was any time that he was awake. He could shoot the eyes out of coon at fifty paces and he’d indiscriminately murdered and raped his was to the throne of the county—throats slit beneath coverlets, secret hangings in the afterdark woodlands reminiscent of black Sabbaths, a bullet in the back or a dagger in the dusk were his tools of the trade, all presided over by the man in control of the spiritual clime of the countryside: Reverend Powers. Reverend Powers was a black robe Baptist who had appeared, it seemed, from thin air one Sunday riding a pale horse with his three wild niggers in tow, toting all sorts of flim flam finery from his fictional homeland of Alabama. No one really knew where Reverend Powers had come from, but with his fiery sermons about the continuance of the war effort and the evils of fornication and abolition and the mongrelization that would be imposed upon God fearing farmers by the Northern, atheistic usurpers to the rightful place of the white man, he had struck a chord of terror into the heart of the locals that appealed to their darkest dreams and most perverse wishes to preserve the chastity of mother South from the advances of her rapist Brother. Reverend Powers had had his eye on Dahlia as well—he called her demon possessed and lunatic and in need of the saving grace of the lamb, but in his heart he desired her with a voracity comparable only to that of a starving lion.

If Reverend Powers was the will of the dragon devouring the county from the inside out and Drake was its teeth, then its claws were the ever present threats of hunger and pestilence, the fruit of a tree of thorns nourished by the blood of innocents and the cries of the fallen. Dahlia was the maiden offered up for sacrifice—bereft of purpose and the capacity for hope, succored only by the dew of the fields and the kindness of strangers whose hospitality was already stretched to a thinner strand than could withstand the fresh onslaught of refugees and ragamuffins pouring into Carteret county riding the red tide of defeat.

Sing a Song of Sixpence

By

Varo Borja

We had a good thing going. Twenty, thirty bucks a day, or just enough for a twelve pack of the Beast and a couple packs of Pantry brand. Mitch did the hustling, I just played guitar and looked young and heartbroken.

One time J. Edgar came down the street looking all spiffy in his Salvation Army duds and demanded to hear one of those old mountain tunes that brought tears to the collective eyes of the locale and made the Floridians dole out pocket change like kids at a candy store. I played a tune by the Velvets instead, half in mockery of the sun shining down on my mauled feet and half in jest at the impropriety of J. Edgar and his gutter bravado senselessness.

When Pat went to jail for knifing that frat boy we threw a little party. Two cases of the finest swill that could be bought for ten bucks and a blowjob from that big tittied freshman (what was her name?) that was always lurking around the corners of King Street. Pretty much any corner you went around. I got sick and slept in the rain that night, damn near catching hypothermia but I guess the booze beat off the cold. My old Gibson got soaked but a few wipes with an oil rag from behind the Shell station and a quick tuning did her up just right.

You wouldn’t have much to do with me then. Sure, you’d invite me to one of your protests and feign a little concern at my state of affairs and the state of the nation, but mostly you just kept on fucking that hippy (whatever hippy it was at the time) with his gold card and his Daddy’s Jeep Cherokee. I was down and out and you were doing it up somewhere in the hills, dancing neath the pale moon and pretending to care about something worthwhile.

Your brown eyes were with me most of the time out on the street and occasionally inside some girl, barely twenty and full of bullshit and the bleeding heart. Big, gold flecked and sad eyes that haunted me in my cups and out, keeping watch over me in the twilight of my youth. Did you care? Were the stars out of order on the night that you told me not to come back to the farm because Tasha’s horoscope had warned her to make better use of her time and resources? I guess love bought with a bag of B.C. and a poem scrawled on a Styrofoam cup (so it would last forever) doesn’t merit marriage, two point seven kids and a picket fence but it damn sure felt right. It damn sure felt like it at the time, but youth has a way of breaking mended fences and letting the sheep out to pasture with the wolves. I saw you today. Not you, really, but a girl that looked just like you. My heart skipped a few beats and I had a hard time focusing on my girlfriend sitting across the table from me. The power of the past doesn’t always fade, even with time. You’re married now with two kids, I hear. I’m glad for you. We all gotta grow up sometime, even me. I just wish growing up didn’t mean growing apart.

Dolly (Unfinished)

Dolly

By
Varo Borja

Red Charles of the Ritz looks lovely with a black eye. And a busted lip. My name is Dolly. Dolly Divine.
My cigarette tastes like blood and candy and I’m coming down off that cheap cocaine that the jackass in the next room fed me to get in my pants. Haha. He doesn’t know that I have his wallet stashed in my pretty pink panties and no time to waste with 35 year old, small dicked used car salesmen who can’t get it up unless they’re beating on a woman and cheating on their wives with everything in a skirt. So I grab my pink purse with the silver sequins and I hit the door. I’m down the stairs of this dive in a wink of the eye and out on the street again. The night air is cool and damp, but reassuring. It hides me and my bruises and my bad teeth and my bad dye job that I shoplifted from Walgreens. My heels are too high and they hurt my feet so I take them off and go barefoot. Barefoot and pregnant. That’s what Daddy said. Ever since that nigger raped me back in Memphis last year though, the doc at the emergency room said I could forget about babies. So I came to L.A. All 85 lbs of me with a duffel bag and a dream. I wanted to be a movie star. Just like Marilyn Monroe. Little did I know that there wasn’t much need for movie stars anymore. At least ones from Mississippi. That’s what that man in the white limousine said. He said that I could make it in the porn business. I’d never even seen a porno (besides Daddy’s magazines under the mattress) until I came out here and was in a couple of them. Well, I wasn’t really in them. The man in the limousine said that since I was sixteen that I’d have to be a fluff girl. You know them ones who stand out in the hallway while they’re shooting and keeps the stars erect. The ones that they send out for coffee and cigarettes and that they beat up on when they’re bored. I’ve been beat up a lot. Daddy said that I deserved it. When a man hits me I feel like I’m getting the best of him, and then when I spit blood on the floor and pretty myself up again he loves me just like Daddy did.

The neon lights on sunset remind me of those country western songs that I used to hear on the radio on warm summer’s nights back in Mississippi. I’ve been here in L.A. for a while now, but I still can’t get over them neon signs. One day my name will be written on one of them. I can see it now. Dolly Divine, mistress of the night. I like that. Mistress of the night was one of them dimestore novels that I read when I was a kid. Well, I guess I am still a kid. But L.A. has a way of making you not feel like a kid. A way of making you tough on the outside and all cold on the inside. A way of growing you into a stone statue like them Confederate ones back in Vicksburg.

I’m hungry. I stop walking down Sunset for a minute and pull that hard dick’s wallet out from underneath my leather skirt. 50 bucks, a couple of credit cards and a photo of one of his kids. She looks all pretty with her high school cheerleader’s uniform on and her braces and her face free from blue-black love taps. I stand for a moment and gaze at the photo. I look into her soul. Yeah. She’s got scars. They’re just not on the outside.

I walk into a 7/11 and grab a bag of chips, a Snicker’s bar and a big gulp filled to the rim with 44 oz of Mountain Dew. I walk to the counter and the Arab clerk eyes me suspiciously as I pull out my newly won plastic money and slap it down on the counter next to my dinner like I own the place. I give him a wink and a half caste kind of smile that doesn’t show the bad part of my teeth and say “Its my Daddy’s” and he swipes the card. He hands me the little slip for me to sign and I scribble the name of the jackass that it belongs to in a really feathery way like I think a man of his upbringing might, and then I grab my loot and I’m back on the street.

I sit down outside of the 7/11 on the curb that smells of gasoline and stale piss and I open my chips and nibble a little bit. My stomach hurts nearly all the time, and even though I know with my head that I’m hungry, I can’t seem to stomach all the food. So, I toss the Snicker’s bar and the half empty bag of chips to a bum lying on his back in a liquor soaked fantasy land by the blue and white payphone (I keep the Mountain Dew; I hate water and coffee and Mountain Dew reminds me of Mississippi) and then I start to walk down Sunset again to look for someone to take me home so I don’t have to sleep in some alley that smells of the bums and the dregs of some B movie horrorshow.

The Rooms (Unfinished)

The Rooms (Unfinished)

by

Varo Borja

Anna sipped her vermouth silently pretending all the while that it was the blood of the man who had left her in this dive holding the check and none of the cards. She wore a black dress, silky and soft and high, high stiletto heels that made her wince just a little when she stepped to the left and out of the narrow confines of the perspective into which she had been placed. Slow jazz reverberated in the smoke filled air as some half caste gypsy savant blew timorous notes from his tenor saxophone, serenading the last call lowlifes and fat businessmen in cheapish business casual attire slovenly slurping the mid grade whiskey that they couldn’t even taste anymore because they had drunk for abandon and the release that a night out of town and away from three kids and a sagging bottom wife could afford them. The signs were good that Anna would be able to scrape one of these fatted calves from his barstool, get him to pay the check, and sneak out of his hotel room while he was puking his guts out in the bidet or the sink or the bathtub. At one time Anna had been a looker. Hell, she still was but she was past the point of her ripest maturity and her 34 DD breasts had turned to 36 E’s over the last five years and her ankles were a bit larger than when she had won that swimsuit competition in Austin years ago. Her dark hair was still as lustrous as ever though, and her almond eyes still could be playful, or conciliatory, or knife like, depending on the situation and whatever was expedient. She’d had her tubes tied years ago after she’d had her third miscarriage and swore that she’d never get pregnant again, regardless of how much her biological clock demanded the retribution of her sex. Anna’s skin was still very good also, and she took care to keep out of the sun and always found time to cleanse, exfoliate, and moisturize her way into keeping the dogs of middle age at bay.

“Hey honey. Wanna buy me drink?” Anna said as she sauntered over to a 300 lb. man tanned hulk in a Brooks Brothers sport coat.

“Suuurrreee. Take’ll ya what? Vurmooth?”

“Sure, sweetie. You look right handsome tonight. You in the for the conference?” Anna could lay it on thick when the need arose, there was always a conference, and the bartender, Fat Mike was giving her the sign that it was now or never.

“Yayah. Its aw-full-ee hot in here, ain’t it?”

Anna noticed the absence of orangish goo around the barbarian’s left ring finger, indicating the fact that his man tan was recently acquired and hadn’t yet penetrated the bonds of matrimony.

“Why yes it is, darlin’. Don’t ya think that we should go somewhere cooler? Say, your room at the Clarion?” Anna prayed silently to the virgin that his room was at least at the Comfort. She threw in an extra Hail Mary for a suite at the Quality.

“Ummm. I’m stayin’ at the Sleep o-vur on Bristol. You wanna cum?”

Anna cringed. These days it was tough to find a man with taste, let alone decency, but she was in dire straits and in need of a lift to her apartment on Manchester. Bristol was a block away and if she took her stiletto’s off, she could easily sneak out with the buffoon’s wallet and make a B-line to her own bed where Max, her black manx patiently awaited her arrival.

“Honey, you’re sweet as apple pie. Anybody ever told you that your jawline resembles Matt Damon’s? You could pass for him any day under the sun.” Anna silently snickered to herself and ran her hand across the prodigious back of the lamb being led to the slaughter.

“Nah. You ain’t a hooowar are ya?” said Mr. Sleep.

“Honey, I’m anything you want me to be, and a hell of a lot that you can’t handle. We ready to blow this pop stand or not, sugarbritches?” Anna loathed being called a whore and her saccharine seduction was wearing thin at the seams, much like Mr. Sleep’s overstuffed, badly cut blazer.

“Okay. But you gotta drive. I’ve had too drink toooo much.” Mr. Sleep stood up slowly, bracing himself on Anna’s left breast and tottering ever so slightly, much like a weeble wobble that’s had a few too many Jim Beams.

Anna and Mr. Sleep (Anna never bothered with names. Her only concern was the size of a man’s wallet and the time it took him to pass out. She did have the last vestiges of a conscience, and the less she actually knew about her prey the better.) made their way to the door after Sleep fumbled about with the tab, spilling the contents of his overstuffed wallet out onto the bar and only being able to reconcile his debt with the help of Fat Mike and…

Now I Lay Me Down

Now I Lay Me Down

By

Varo Borja

Baxter clocked out at the furniture factory about 11pm. His shift had lasted for 12 solid hours, and when he got to the Gaslight all he could think of was the bottom of a Dickel on the rocks, straight with a Bud chaser and the long, lovely arms of the bar wrapping around him in the afterdark of his worn down life. The Gaslight was Baxter’s haunt of choice for the evening and had been for just about every night for the past five years. He was a regular, complete with his own barstool and a tab that he paid every Thursday when he got his slim subsistence from Thomason Furniture, Inc.

Exiting his orange ’73 Dodge Roadrunner, Baxter extracted his black plastic comb from the back pocket of his tattered Levi’s and slicked back his overlong, dingy hair until he looked like a used up cross between James Dean and Ronnie Van Zant. He had a two-day old stubble of a beard and his eyes still had the look of the jungle to them. He hid this as best he could through occasional jokes and jabs at his coworkers and codrinkers, but Baxter definitely still had the thousand-yard stare. He had served four tours in Nam as a Navy Seal, and he had the tattoo and the grayish pink bullet wounds to prove it. Baxter was not a big man, but his was a barely concealed fire. A hideous demon just below the dam erected by numerous sessions with the corpsman-therapist at the VA hospital in Johnson City beat against Baxter’s breast and tormented him on a daily, if not hourly basis. Baxter was a man not to be trifled with, and he had found nothing in the world to live for but the backbreaking labor of a tenon machine operator and the occasional jaded touch of a barfly harlot to soothe his latent aggression and disillusionment with life in postwar Americana. Baxter lumbered up to the double doors of the Gaslight and entered with a great sigh of relief and the feeling that an orphan might experience on being returned to kith and kin.

The scent of stale beer and hot women struck Baxter like a fist as he entered the bar, accompanied to the sound of Melissa on the jukebox and the greeting gazes of half a dozen war buddies and a few decked out and perfumed ladies of the night. Baxter stretched for the ceiling, savoring the cigarette smoke and loud music, feeling the good tiredness that only the manual laborer knows and maintaining his rebel without a cause posture. He sidled up to the bar where a glass with twelve-year-old George Dickel waited expectantly nestled up beside a perspiring twelve-day-old Budweiser.

“How’s it goin, Bat?”

“Not bad, Possum. Long day. I’m ready to unwind,” said Baxter to the corpulent bartender who presented him with a half toothless grin while wiping at a spot on the bar with lackluster precision.

“Where’s Owl been the past week? He owes me about 50 bucks on his tab, and I ain’t coverin’ that shit when Top collects this week. Is he fucked up again on that black tar shit them niggers sell down in Blacksburg?”

“Shit man, I don’t know. Owl didn’t show up for work this week, and I be damned if I’m goin down to the lake to drag his ass out again. He may have had it bad at Dak To, but I be a shithouse rat if I cover that fifty for his ass,” retorted Baxter as he polished off the first of what would be many whiskeys. Baxter knew that he would cover the fifty as soon as he got paid next week; he always did. Baxter’s band of battered bastards from the nether regions of Nam was a tight group. They always stuck together, even when one of them wasn’t packing his own gear or pulling his own weight, like Owl. The men who had been in country always had a couple of bucks to spare for a brother down on his luck, and Baxter was no exception.

Baxter reached into the sweat stained and grimy front pocket of his dime store wifebeater and extracted a crumpled pack of Marlboros. Lighting one up and feeling the sultry smoke fill his lungs, he realized for an instant how tired he was and how futile his life had become, but this passed in an instant when the desire for another 8 ounces of the brown stuff crowded his existential awakening to the side like so much dust blown in the wind.

“How bout another one, there Possum old buddy? Hey Brubaker, where does a man get a drink around here anyway?”

Brubaker, one of the resident sots of the establishment was another Nam vet who had served with the 173^rd Airborne. Brubaker was another of the former GI’s who was down and out and drunk all the time. He just couldn’t seem to get it together, and he lived off a small dole from Uncle Sam and spent damn near the whole thing on cheap whiskey and Lucky Strikes. He nodded and peered drunkenly at Baxter and then collapsed face first on the oak veneer bar.

“Hold your horses, Bat, I’m comin’” said Possum as he managed to move his great weight to the bottle of Dickel and give Baxter a generous helping of the fiery poison.

As the record changed on the jukebox, a small, ratlike figure clothed in a tattered Army Jacket and jeans entered through the double doors and scurried up to the bar, fingering in his pocket for a moment and producing a small, round white poker chip with the letters AA emblazoned in cheap gold lettering in the center.

“Well I’ll be damned, if et ain’t Shitbird. Back from the VA, huh?” said Baxter in a mocking tone, gliding along the edge of the buzz produced from his first two drinks.

“Gimme a goddam drink, Possum. That AA shit is for gooks and goners,” said Shitbird with the nervous anticipation of the alcoholic about to be in his cups.

“Well, I guess one won’t hurt ya. I know, I know, the first one’s on the house for a white chip. Jesus, slow down Shit, there’s more where that come from but you ain’t sleepin’ in the back this time. Two o’clock’s lights out for this saloon. Top will have my ass if he catches you drunk in his office again.”

Top was the owner of the Gaslight. He stood about 6’7” and dressed out at about 300. He was a likeable man, but when angered he could commit the most unspeakable atrocities upon all those present. Like Baxter and Shitbird, Top had been in the war, but he had achieved the rank of First Sergeant in ’68 right before the Tet offensive, consigning him forever to the ranks of the Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. For an enlisted man, Top had made good in the Army and now in private life he owned a couple of car lots and the Gaslight. He was not above ostentation— he drove a sparkling white Cadillac and showed his gold-toothed grin to everyone he liked and the back of his hand to everyone he despised. Top showed a mutual respect to the Nam vets who frequented the Gaslight though, and had more than once slipped them a twenty when they were down and out. However, Top was a family man, and his wife didn’t let him out to play with the boys at the bar and talk about the good old days. He was rarely ever present at the Gaslight past 7:30pm, and tonight was no exception.

“Top’s a big softy, Possum. You don’t know him like I do. Top may have made First Sergeant, but he was in the shit back in ’67 with the rest of us. Whaddayou know about that anyhow, Possum? You were 4F in ’67 and workin’ down at Hollister’s then. Gimme another goddam drink and quit your bitchin’ fat boy” said Shitbird, darting his rodent’s eyes around at the fellow topers present as he anxiously awaited another round.

“Yeah, whatever Shit. Just don’t raise no hell. Hey Walter, did you ever see such an ungrateful little drunk?” said Possum as he poured Shitbird another round from the inexpensive brand saved for deadbeets and drifters.

Walter was the oversized doorman; a former Force Recon marine who had done two tours in country and could crush a Campbell’s Tomato soup can, unopened. Walter said very little, but his 27-inch biceps made it so that he didn’t have to be very vocal to transmit his unquestioned hegemony over all present at the Gaslight.

“Don’t gimme that fuckin’ horsepiss, Possum. Gimme a shot of the good stuff. I just got my check and I’m splurgin’.”

“Alright, Shit” said Possum “I forgot it was the first of the month.”

The night rolled on to the sound of Skynyrd, The Allman Bros., Creedence Clearwater, and Cat Stevens as the wounded warriors drank and lied and drank and lied and laughed about the “bad old days” until like Brubaker, Baxter and Shitbird were wasted and sentimental. About 1:30 a couple of fine young things in tight leather and stiletto heels sidled up to the pair of intoxicated anti-heroes and asked them if they cared to partake of a certain white powder that one of the tarts had in her purse. Baxter candidly refused, saying that he would stick with the liquid poison, but Shitbird greedily acquiesced to their query and the trio headed for the ladies bathroom. Baxter peered through his tin stamped, bleary beer goggles at the bar and tried to remember if he had enough gas to get home. He stumbled over to the jukebox, swerving mightily and careening off the table of a pair locked in the amorous clutches of heavy petting. The young brave with his hand down his lover’s pants immediately rose and demanded satisfaction from the drunken S.O.B. that had just disturbed his passionate pursuit. Baxter laughed in his face and then took a big gulp from his lukewarm Budweiser, spitting the contents onto the jacket of the erstwhile-offended Romeo. Then, with a movement that betrayed Baxter’s drunken state, he did a quick downward snap kick, breaking the knee of the unlucky lover and sending him crashing through the Formica table and onto the floor. As Romeo lay on the floor gibbering and cursing at his misfortune and his broken kneecap, Baxter straddled him and began cursing in Vietnamese, slapping the unfortunate man senseless. About this time, Walter seized a Louisville Slugger from behind the bar and swiftly cracked the bat over Baxter’s back. This floored Baxter for only a moment, and he came up from the floor as quickly as he had went down. Walter certainly had the advantage since he was sober and in full control of his wits, but Baxter had a fifth of a gallon of fire water in his gut and he was rapidly becoming dangerous. Possum had not been idle either. He had telephoned the local police because he knew this situation could very quickly become deadly. Both men in question were confirmed killers, and if the fight escalated, which it was bound to do, one or both men could end up six feet under. Possum had been lifelong friends with both men, and didn’t want to see them hurt or dead.

Baxter was Section 8 though. He was in what his corpsman-therapist would call a paranoid delusional state fueled by about a fifth of whiskey and years of pent up aggression. He couldn’t distinguish his friend Walter Pulaski from the phantoms of his past. Baxter had long ago crossed over into what was known as No Man’s land, and it had only taken a hair to break the camel’s back of his sanity.

As soon as Baxter had risen from the floor, he had swiftly extracted his Gerber boot knife from the top of his worn leather motorcycle boots. The two combatants circled the floor: Baxter with knife drawn and in a defensive posture, seeking for the first opportunity to drive the knife between the ribs of what he thought was a VC operative. Walter was being as cautious as possible, seeking for the first opportunity to diffuse the situation and go home alive.

About this time Shitbird emerged from the bathroom with his two coked out companions and seeing Baxter and Walter faced off in their deadly duel, he immediately ran to where the two men were about to converge and began to try and talk down Baxter with soothing words that might have come from his own mother some winter bedtime long ago when nightmarish djinn had hidden under his bed lustily waiting to inflict their tortures upon his hapless and helpless soul. Shitbird soothed and salved Baxter’s rage enough to the point where Baxter started to see through the eyes of a human again instead of a hunted beast. Baxter glanced quickly at both men, searching for the visage of the Vietnamese soldiers he had been surrounded by just a few seconds before, but they were not visible anymore. What he saw was an angry giant of Polish descent in a tank top t-shirt and a small, haggard friend in an Army jacket and worn blue jeans. Immediately, Baxter dropped his guard and fell to the floor, uncontrollable sobs heaving forth from his sawdust and liquor scented body. Where two minutes ago there had been a trained killer on the verge of committing a terrible crime, there was now a frightened child, seeking protection and his mother’s breast.

Shitbird moved close to Baxter, cradling him in his arms for a few minutes until the police arrived. They immediately inquired as to what the disturbance was, but all present were silent. Don Juan with the broken kneecap started to tell the whole affair, but one look from Walter and he was silent. Possum was the first to answer the police officer.

“Just a little accident. I called because I thought two niggers were breaking in the back. It turned out to be nothing. This man here just tripped over his own shoelaces, and the man crying there, well, his mother died today and he’s right upset. You boys want a drink?”

“No thanks. We’re on duty. Well, I better not get any more calls from you this evening, Willard (Possum’s real name), and if I have to come back down here tonight, somebody’s goin’ to jail. You here me?”

“Sure, Jack. You won’t hear a peep. Scout’s honor” said Possum as he tried to look busy wiping the bar and be as cordial as possible at the same time.

The policemen left and Shitbird drove Baxter home to his trailer in the small community of Sawmills. The coke that Shitbird had done in the bathroom enhanced his ability to drive and they made it home safely. Shitbird helped Baxter into bed and lovingly tucked him in, turning on the box fan and the three nightlights in the hall before he crashed out on the couch, passing out before he hit the pillow. Baxter lay in bed, and though still drunk he began to say a prayer from his childhood that he had religiously repeated every night since he was five years old. He had said it in the jungles of Cambodia, he had said it in the whorehouses of Saigon, and he had said it while in the seclusion room in the State Hospital.

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.”

The sublime state of sleep slowly crept up on Baxter, and he drifted off to a land where children run under a golden sun and lovers lie by crystal clear pools of untroubled water and the dead walk again on an Earth that has never known the horrors of war or the cries of impoverished babes sent to untimely graves in the perfume scented fields of Southeast Asia.

Juggernaut

By

Varo Borja

I lay dying in a pool of translucent fear and my hair feels like straw sat upon a worried brow and I am lying by the porcelain altar of Shiva or Set. I feel the paroxysm of my birthright rising within innards of fiery fulsome fright and it comes and I feel better and then I look at the porcelain tile and see a lone dust mite crawling through paths of urine stained freeways and the internecine ride of the Caledonians on my bathroom’s battlefield and my fingers crush the lone ranger upon this funereal floor where only the strong survive and the involutions of my intestinal hellspawn offerings and oblations to the god of wine no longer bring Bacchus to bear on the heretics running loose in my head and I’ve lost the war but at least the bloodletting has stopped and I can go back to bed.

The bed spins through time and space and I smell the feces from the day before and I reach to the bedside and take a long, liverish drink from the Chevas Regal and lie back on the satin pillowcase and breathe asthmatically and crave a cancer stick. Carol Lynn cries in the kitchen and I crawl back to the bathroom past the window where watchers keep their vigilant gaze glued to my stash of cocaine in the chest of drawers. I take a few toots from my stash only for medicinal purposes and then I crawl past Carol Lynn who is frying tofu and eggs for my children’s consumption to the refrigerator for a bottle of Schlitz and then back to the bathroom for more intensive research on the beneficent properties of cool tile on the forehead of a highly developed drunkard like me.

I’ve done too much coke. I know the FBI, the DEA, the Secret Service, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the cedar woods just outside my bedroom window. I must hide here in my sanctuary where the Virgin Mary lets me rest my tired head on her lily-white feet and escape from the barbarian hordes outside who demand my immediate crucifixion. Jesus must have turned the water into wine on a Friday night because on Saturday I’ve always been too drunk to drink from rhytons filled with seraphimic nectar so I just go for the single malt Scotch straight with a beer chaser. I know they’ve tapped my phone and the satellite signals larrup my fevered brain and I must now have a touch more cocaine because I’ve laved my head in the sacramental holy water and reaped the lenity of my Lord and Savior.

I crawl back to the chest of drawers from the bathroom floor and take another toot for my stomach’s sake and then crawl back into bed, being careful to avoid the view from the window. I try to sleep but Carol Lynn’s unreasonable lists, always lists, keep me awake and I am making a mental grocery spread sheet in my mind and I know we need milk, bread, tempeh, Schlitz, cocaine, toiler paper, and a couple of Blow Pops for the girls because they’re such good girls but they keep playing now in the yard with all those nasty government agents and they insist on screaming and giggling much too loudly for my sensitive ears. I simply MUST have another snort of that delightful white powder that is cut so splendidly with powdered sugar which reminds me that I’m supposed to bake a cake for my daughter’s birthday tomorrow but I just can’t seem to motivate myself so yes I must have another toot and crawl back to the bathroom for more inspiration from the Virgin Mary and her celestial Sesame Street companions.

I’m in hell. I’m in hell. The cool, luxuriant tiles are losing their redemptive powers and there’s blood mixed with the bile that I deposit into the crystal blue waters of my wife’s favorite seat in the house. Where is the new wine? Where is the feast they have promised? Where the fuck did I go wrong after graduation from Harvard with my useless degree in Chaos, Comparative Religion, and Thai Stick that forced me to sell my soul to the Goths of the Guatemalan countryside with their wonderful coca leaves and dusky, manscented pagodas of pleasure where the fleshpots of old Sodom would pale in comparison. Enrico will kill me if I turn state’s evidence on the cartel. I’ll be sporting a Columbian necktie to my funeral in some backwater bilgedump in Baha or Cozumel. Fuck. I simply must straighten out my head from all this fretting and fidgeting and find a solution to my existential crises. Cocaine. Yes, I guess that’s the answer. No. I must fight that white devil-in-waiting that lurks in the bottom of the Ethan Allen chest that my mother in law gave as a Christmas present when Carol Lynn and I were young and had the world by the teeth. I had arrived. Now look at me. Fuck. Fuck.

The cocaine enlivens my spirits and I feel I must go for a walk but not now because I must hide and destroy the mental grocery lists of my beleaguered wife here in our red brick Victorian castle nestled ever so secretly in the Maine woods and away from those pesky bastards with badges and warrants and wire taps and satellites but apparently not far enough because now I am besieged with only about an ounce left of my panacea and about half a half a gallon of Chevas Regal; the most wonderfully cheap Scotch that tastes as if the Lord himself had bequeathed it to we mortals instead of the nasty verdict of guilty, guilty, guilty when I go before his sacrosanct white throne and plead for my soul because I am a good boy and always have been I just got caught up with those despicable Central Americans and their wonderful white powder which I simply must have now or I will die.

The smoke from my cigarette curls in the air; wispy fragments descending upon alabaster counters filled with all the necessities of the modern age: makeup from Neiman Marcus, perfume from Nordstrom’s, Q-tips from Communist China. A virtual cornucopia of sanitary solutions for the sensibilities of the modern woman. Too bad there aren’t any get out of jail free cards amongst my wife’s belongings. I am sitting on the toilet now, rehashing my sins of commission and omission. No, I didn’t take over my father’s printing business. Yes, I slept with our Mexican maid Margherita. No, I didn’t take out the trash. Yes, I did wreck the Mercedes into the lake last year, but didn’t Carol Lynn always say that she would much rather have a Volvo? Volvos are designed with safety in mind, are they not? Besides, a Volvo wouldn’t spin out of control at 135 mph and wreck itself, now would it? My scorecard reads zero. I must offer myself to the waiting servants of justice for trial and excommunication from the Republic for which they stand. Yes. I must.

First, I have to get my courage up. I’m going to jail anyway, so I might as well have one last bump of the good stuff. The cocaine feels like fire flowing through my nostrils and into my extremities and I have a solution. If it is battle that the barbarian hordes seek, they shall have it. By god they will. I open the drawer to the nightstand and sift through the unmentionables (K-Y, various and sundry sex toys, and my wife’s diaphragm) until I find the sword of Allah that will reap the harvest of blood and free me from my oppression: my Daisy semi-automatic air pistol. Yes. I shall have my vengeance. I run through the house in my skivvies and fling open the front door where I am literally blinded by the god of the Mithraists, but I will not be daunted. I run headlong at my assailants, firing from the hip. I am the avenging angel from the book of Revelation. When I am sated with bloodlust, I pause to look around at the carnage. Hmm. It seems I have fired my fiery darts at the innocents of the woodland: squirrels, an old growth hemlock, my wife’s Volvo, and the azure shadows produced by the waning day. Feeling foolish and a little tired, I retire to bed with the assurance of a brighter tomorrow. First, I must consult with my wife, for it seems that aliens have taken up residence in the flower garden and turned the dog into a very large sea monster that resembles the Leviathan of the holy scriptures. Yes, and she simply MUST go to Enrico’s and procure me another bag of that delightful white substance.

Havana (Unfinished)

Havana (Unfinished)

By

Varo Borja

Papa strode into Caliente with one thing on his fevered brain: Rum. The stock market was in a frenzy, Scribners was being a royal pain in the ass, and Caesarea was singing like some gypsy half-caste dickering with the Devil over the soul of some gente in the hell of the Havana night. Papa had a thirst for something that only Ibrahim’s intoxicants and a night with Marieta could cure.

Papa weighed in at a sturdy 230lbs., mostly muscle but with the bulge of a Bon Viveur and the salt and pepper beard of a man in his mid forties. He was clad in a pair of khakis sent to him by his aging mother in Michigan, a flowery print shirt that exposed a luxuriant swath of chest hair, and a pair of rope soled shoes that he had taken from a dead Partisan in the Andalusian highlands back in ’37. The kicker to this ensemble, which was visible to all present, was the silver .38 caliber Colt revolver complete with Ivory grips courtesy of an old Berber pirate that Papa had met in Madagascar and bested in a game of Russian roulette. Papa stood a good head taller than anyone else in the crowd, but he was a favorite at Caliente. He spent his money well and with mucho gusto, and he rarely made any messes that the staff couldn’t clean up. Ibrahim, the club owner met Papa two paces from the bar and snapped his fingers for a bottle of his finest concoction.

“Como ethta Uthted, Padre? How ith it chu na come see uth por doth themanaths? Chu working on another, como thi dice, boooook?” said Ibrahim in a thick Cuban accent infused with a false hint of Toledo or Seville.

“Buena noche, Ibrahim. I see you’ve got my poison. I want the table in the back, muy rapido. Comprende?”

“Thiiii, thi.” Ibrahim was a host who knew his customers well, especially the big spenders like Papa, and he hurriedly ushered Papa to the back table shielded by palm fronds and out of the lights that made the grease paint on Caesarea’s face shine like the Moorish moon over Madrid. Ibrahim, who was the antihesis of Papa, stood only 5’5” and was openly homosexual. He wore only white silk, single-breasted suits and white velvet penny loafers with a gold coin from old Iberia inserted in each. He smoked from an ivory cigarette holder inlaid with gold, and spoke with a slight lisp so everyone who didn’t know him as well as Papa would mistake him for a Spaniard. Once Papa was seated and made as comfortable as possible, Ibrahim whistled through his two, slightly set apart, gold capped front teeth for Marieta Bonita.

Marieta was mas fina.

Marieta was muy bonita.

Marieta was magnifico,

And Marieta was in love with Diego.

She strolled across the floor like a tan and ebony fox, swaying slightly to the rhythm of the pulsating drumbeat, stopping hearts and breaking necks for a view of her languid loveliness. She was dressed only in a tight fitting linen skirt and a sleeveless, black silk blouse, and Papa’s throat became thick and hoarse at the sight of her. Ibrahim rubbed his hands together and grinned like a gilt gaucho of only the finest stock. He fingered Marieta’s long, jet black hair and snickered like an impish pimp.

“Thee eth muy guapa, no? Chu like thu thit with theeeeenor Padre, mi Marieta Bonita?”

“Si, Ibrahim,” said Marieta with a look of disdain in her honey flecked and amber eyes.

“Bueno, bueeeeeno. Chu lie theeenor Padre, Marieta? Chu treat heeeem ryyyye?”

“Si, Ibrahim,” Marieta was looking at the shoes that her peasant father had made with his own two hands before he had disappeared last December. A tear started to form in the corner of her eye, but it was visible only to Papa and not to her master with the still smoking butt of a Turkish cigarette smoldering in his ivory holder like the dying embers of Marieta’s self respect.

“Bugger off, Ibrahim. Chinga te, and VAMONOS,” said Papa as he cordially took Marieta’s hand and with a reassuring smile kissed it gently and offered her one of the three white wicker seats at the table.

With a bow and a twinkle in his eye, Ibrahim scurried away to chastise the Jamaican bartender for his over zealous distribution of Scotch to a pair of rowdy looking Marines, leaving Papa and Marieta to discuss whatever they wished. Papa gazed hungrily at Marieta, who looked away from him and towards the shadows, trying to hide her tears from the man who had been her benefactor and sometime lover for the past year and a half. Papa knew she loved another. Hell, he was twice her age and more, but she certainly was the most beautiful girl he had ever laid eyes upon, and as he drank Ibrahim’s rum with more force than most men half his age could muster, he began to yearn for her more than for life itself. The band, with the overweight, octogenarian songstress Caesarea Magdalena at the forefront, had segued into a heartrending ballad that brought tears to eyes of the most sober of patrons, and left the more lascivious listeners melting in their liquor. Papa cursed himself inwardly for his lust. He was a married man with two children and he was a public icon to boot. His last novel had sold over 300,000 copies; a statistic in which he took much pride, but he knew his powers were failing. He had always sought after the one, true sentence. One shining example for the entire world to see. He couldn’t measure up. A certain critic, he knew, carried his last novel, and the brilliant marketing of Scribner and Sons had pulled off the miracle that he had failed to conjure up with his old Burroughs typewriter. He needed inspiration, and he had found it. In Marieta Bonita. He was using the time he spent with her to inadvertently boost the morale and rally the troops in his brain for one last, apocalyptic battle with the bastards who said he would never attain the pinnacle, the golden fleece of every writer’s career: the Nobel Prize.

One Way Ticket

By

Varo Borja

The young, mad fools of my generation went to war without a thought for themselves and a satchel full of pride and blazing hearts that weren’t dimmed in the slightest by the fear of death and the grave. I’m lying here, 68 years old last November, and I’m afraid and I can’t remember my wife’s name. She’s lying in the room across the hall, asleep beneath the coverlets and lace and what not that she collects from the dime store in town. She’s sleeping peacefully, mainly because I’m not lying beside her. I haven’t slept amid all that finery since the ‘60’s. Since she got tired of me lying awake all night and counting the dog tags of the Battered Bastards of the Big Red One.

I remember the snow falling, falling in heaps and all I wanted was a bath and a hot meal and a look at some of them French girls once again on the streets of gay Paris where I left my virginity and my pocket watch. I gave it to a French whore because she fancied it so, and I’ve never regretted it, not one bit. I’ve always had a weakness for pretty women, especially foreign ones with their rouge and their perfume that smells of sin and lilacs. Elizabeth. That’s my wife’s name. She used to love me. She bore me four boys and fixed my supper for going on fifty years now, but I’ve never loved her. I loved that French whore because she didn’t ask me to be anything other than what I was. Hell, she didn’t know but two words of English. Lucky and yes. Damn, if a man don’t need a woman that knows just them two words. I wasn’t about to call her yes, so I just called her Lucky. She was the love of my life.

The scar on my belly feels like so much cloven earth and it still hurts sometimes. At night mostly. I know some of my buddies who lost legs and arms talk about phantom pain. You know, the pain of missing something that isn’t there. I can still feel that SS soldier driving that bayonet into my gut, and I can still see the look in his eyes. The madness of war, at first, and then a kind of sadness. The kind of sadness that you might see on a clown’s face at a carnival or something. The sadness that comes with being a pawn in a grand spectacle that is utterly ridiculous and means nothing and goes nowhere. The kind of spectacle that people will give their last dollar and even their unborn children to see, and then leave with a feeling of having been cheated, but not knowing why.

The artillery shells were the worst. Especially the white phosphorous rounds. A man can live with the constant thought of being shot, or stabbed, but the constant thought of being blown to bits or burning alive eats at a man’s very soul. The not knowing, and the very powerlessness of it all. The not knowing amidst all the others not knowing and freezing and going hungry and missing those pretty French girls and missing their Mamas most of all. War is hell, some say. I say its worse than hell. If a man is in hell, then he’s already arrived at his final destination. He can plant his feet and set his face and burn with the best of them. When a man is in a war, he just waits. Waits for that bullet or that piece of brimstone to start him on his journey. He waits amid the cries and the slaughter and the senseless suffering of men that are dearer to him than most of his own kin. The powerlessness of waiting to die rivals anything that the seven heads of hell ever cooked up for the torture of the unredeemed.

In the morning I’ll have to get up and plow. Plow that damn frozen earth so I can plant taters and what not in the spring and then dig the same damn ground again in the fall. I’m sick of it. I’ve been looking at the backside of that mule now going on thirty years and all I can think of is Lucky. Lucky with her golden brown hair and the twinkle in her eye and the way she said nothing at all but said everything in the process. I miss my youth. I gave it away for a busted up homestead and a broken back and now I’m old. My gout gets to be something awful sometimes and I find myself reading the obituaries every night now before I go to bed. That can’t be good. Reading about death and then dreaming about death and then waking to a living death and the backside of that old gray mule.

I love the smell of gun oil. It tastes like tin and hog grease but it smells like a new day. I took good care of my old M1. I smuggled home a Mauser and a Hitler Youth dagger but I’d give them and a week’s wages for that old M1. The Quartermaster made me turn it in when I got back to the States. I told him to take good care of it for me. Lucille. That’s what I called her. That M1 killed more Germans and I-talians than the cholera but it kept me warm and safe many a night lying in the frost in some god-forsaken foxhole in the middle of the Low Country. I’d kiss that rifle if it was here with me now. I’d sure as shit rather kiss Lucille than I would that hag in there in the other room. Jesus. Where did the time go?

When we hit the beach at Anzio I damn near pissed myself. I probably did piss myself but I was soaked to the gills in seawater and I was too damn scared to be wondering if I’d pissed myself or not. I saw Charlie Trumbull get his head blown off three feet in front of me. I tasted brains and seawater for a week after that. Everything I ate, from C rations to K rations to candy bars tasted like brains and seawater. I’d just spit it out and drink coffee. I didn’t start taking sips from Joe Sweeney’s canteen until after Normandy. By then I wasn’t afraid of death or hell or Jesus or Jeremiah anymore. Once a man sees so much blood and guts and the grease of the war machine gets into his very bones the preaching and pleading of his childhood just kind of slip away. Like so much sand. Like so much seawater.

I can’t take this anymore. We were heroes. Weren’t we? The papers said so. The radio said so. The politicians said so. Even the hag in the other room says so at every goddamn Rook game she plays at. “William got five Purple Hearts and a Silver Star” she says to her hag friends as she doles out the cards. Every year that number of Purple Hearts gets a little larger. By the time I get to be 75 I’m sure I’ll have won the Medal of Honor. I’ll have damn sure earned it too. Too bad about those Purple Hearts. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I have earned a few more Purple Hearts since I came home from the war.

I’m gonna do it. I have two thousand dollars tucked away beneath an old coffee can behind the hog lot. I’ve kept that money for a dreary day through rain, sun, snow and sleet and I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna drive my ass to the airport tomorrow and buy that ticket. One Way, First Class to Paris International Airport. I’m gonna go see Lucky. I’m gonna go see the graves of the men who were the real heroes and take some of the hag’s prize red roses to help them rest a little easier. She won’t miss them. She won’t even miss me. No one will. Not even my kids. I’ll just disappear like a dime store comic book hero and they’ll never see me again. I’ll get lost in Montmarte and get so drunk on good French wine that I’ll see stars again and the flowers in Flanders will welcome me home. I might even smoke some of that Hashish that the Turks sold behind the cafes. Lucky and I will have a grand old time and then we’ll hop a steamer together and sail to the Orient. I always wanted to see the Orient. My brother Jack lost his life there in ’44. Maybe I’ll take some of them roses for him too. Maybe I’ll take a goddamn truckload of roses.

Mama lost her mind when Jack got killed. When she got that letter that said a Jap plane had hit his ship and all hands were lost it flipped a switch in her like a breaker with too much juice on it. Jack was her pride and joy. She struggled through fifteen hours of labor with him and damn near died herself. She always babied him. If there was two biscuits left on the plate she’d give Jack both of them and the last slab of bacon in the house to go in between them. “Jack was a blonde haired blue eyed angel straight from heaven” she’d say. They gave her shock treatments in the State Hospital but she didn’t even budge. She was in a nursing home for thirty years until she died of congestive heart failure. I paid for that nursing home with the sweat of my brow and the best years of my body. She didn’t say two words when I got home from Border duty in ’46. She just stared into space like a soldier that’s been on the front lines for too long. I never knew my Daddy. He lost his mind drinking moonshine and died an early death from the syphilis he got in France during the Great War. I don’t know what was so great about it. They didn’t have to worry about Tiger tanks in the Great War . All they did was sit in the mud and fire old water cooled Lewis guns and drink rot gut homemade gin and get syphilis from Moroccan whores.

Jack wasn’t even my whole brother. Mama had an affair with a man from the Home Guard while Daddy was away in France. I was born in 1917 before he left. Daddy had brown eyes. Mama had brown eyes. I have brown eyes. Daddy died in 1920. Jack was born in 1919. Daddy had syphilis. Jack had blue eyes. I guess that blue eyed fella from the Home Guard had a problem keeping his dick in his pants but we’d always find little presents outside our door every Sunday morning. A bottle of milk, a fried chicken, a pan of cornbread, two dollars, or whatever. During the Depression Mama sewed socks till her fingers bled and ironed shirts on the kitchen table to keep body and soul together. Those “presents” never stopped coming even during the worst of it in ’32. I never knew that fella’s name, but I heard Mama say one time that Jack was the spittin image of his Daddy. She must have really loved him, and I guess he loved her too, or maybe he just felt guilty. He must have had a wife and children of his own. Maybe he was married to a hag too, but I guess he didn’t have any medals to speak of for the war except old Jack. Jack and his goddamned big blue eyes.

The sun is coming up. In a minute that rooster is gonna crow and I’ll have to get up and put the coffee on. I should have already been out there and got the mule hitched up but I guess a little extra time beneath the covers ain’t gonna hurt anybody. Maybe I’ll buy that ticket tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Saturday and I can sneak off without the hag noticing anything but the truck being gone. Hell, she wouldn’t notice anyway. She’s too busy snoring beneath those lace coverlets and satin pillow cases to know I’m alive. I wonder if Lucky will recognize me? Probably not. I’m not the boy I used to be that went to war without a thought for myself and my satchel of pride has been eaten away by the moths of debt, old age and inertia but my heart is still ablaze somewhere down in this old man’s chest next to the shrapnel and the memories of what I used to be and the grit it takes to face one more day behind that old gray mule.


--VB