The Book of Duels Read online

  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

  Megan Garriga, 32,

  Laboring Mother-to-Be

  –midwife said, Reach up and feel his head. He should be here by now, been dilated nine centimeters for more than ten hours and I’ve paced and squatted and showered, bathed, puked, and danced with Michael and rocked on the ball while breathing breathing breathing—It’s hard work, it hurts like hell, and I can do this, it’s hard work, it hurts like hell, and I can do this—he should be in my arms already yet I’m still surprised when my fingertips go inside and trace the wet curve of the not-yet-crowning scalp—he’s there, he’s really there, and I feel triumphant, strong for the next wave, so I lean back in this pool of water, my arms and legs straight out, floating, my feet spongy and fish white and wrinkled and I am weightless—a storm is blowing outside and I want to fall asleep but my body begins to flex again and I rise to meet it, squat and set myself ready for the work—I lean over the round edge of the vinyl tub and I am naked in front of people I barely know, modesty a luxury that passed hours ago, and now I lock eyes and hands with Michael, his voice smooth as he tells me that he was born in a storm just like this one and I am seized suddenly and want to crawl out of my body—why won’t he crawl out of mine?—Michael’s voice calls me back from the edge, sounding the same as it did years ago when we lived seven hundred miles apart and he wooed me over the phone for hours at a time and I fell in love with him over those wires, stretched bellying between poles, and as long as his voice stays strong and calm I know everything will be all right and I can’t even imagine my baby’s face, only the feeling of holding him, dense and small and warm against me—I bend my hand into the imagined curve of his tiny butt, his ghost legs curled into my chest—and I look up to find Michael’s eyes and I find them and I want to give him our son in this rainstorm, and I breathe out, the wave receding, and try not to throw up as I burp twice in a row for the millionth time today and the rain keeps pounding the porch’s tin roof and I reach inside again to feel his head but he hasn’t moved a bit, still a full finger’s reach away.

  Michael Garriga, 39,

  Father-to-Be

  Megan’s labored now for more than a day, insanely drug-free, and our heads are pressed together and my arms drape her and we both moan through the pain—hers unknowable to me and mine a mere helplessness—I have manned the stove top all day to keep the pool water warm and it is dusk out and rain bangs the windows and we are in a lull now and Megan’s half asleep and I say, I was born during a storm like this, which is an absolute lie, but I don’t know what else to do—I want her pain to ease and it seems like the thing to say and she is naked in the pool on the verge of another contraction, they’re coming one on top of the other now, and earlier I feared she’d lose control in the shower, in the tub, on the bed, on the ball, but she never did though I am on that scattered horizon myself, and I have fed her frozen grapes and Gatorade and coconut Popsicles and the leaves are turning in the wind, their underbellies prone, and she’s pushing again and I moan with her and the windows are streaked with dirt and rain, which run down in a slurry, and stalks and sheets of lightning brighten the sky and she’s draped over the edge of the pool, her breath slowing, and she is pale and glazy-eyed—a great thunder shakes the house and the sky goes bright and the candles all flicker in their stands
, What if she’s electrocuted? and I hold her against my chest and the midwife, lounging on the couch, says, Y’all are doing great, and I want a bourbon so bad and it’s right there in that cabinet but what will the midwife think, what will Megan?

  Another wave is on her and we’re breathing again, and what if, once here, the baby learns what a selfish child I am or, worse yet, what if he rightly hates me—what if, after all of this agony and planning, he’s stillborn, has Down’s, is deaf? How will I deal with that? As this fear washes over me, Megan grabs my wrists and I roll my forehead against hers, Breathe, baby, just breathe and stay in this moment.

  Baby Boy, Several Hours Later,

  Tallahassee Memorial Hospital

  In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness. I will cause breath to enter you and ye shall live.

  Waiting for Godot and Ezekiel 37:5

  We have always been alone in this dark wet world, floating, but then a strong force urges us toward the light and our head’s crimped against something bone hard and hurting and the rhythm of our life—the old bum-bum bum-bum—has lately gone wild like bumbumbumbumbumbum, and just now we’ve gone numb and distant moans have grown loud and terrifying, something beyond the great void calling us, insistent, irresistible, and there are convulsions all about us and piercing beeps and loud voices drown out our rhythm, our beat is gone, and we are lifeless when a suction grabs our skull and we feel like we’ll be ripped inside out and the flesh tears about us and we head into the light, water spilling over our skin, and I am separated from we and I burn in light and my body is so heavy my lungs will collapse and something sucks my nose and lungs and I am screaming to drown out the deafening noise about me, my eardrums set to burst, my lungs will implode and the light sears my eyes even as I shut them, a red red burning through, and I am dying, no doubt, I am dead and I scream, Help, help, help! but who is there to hear—then I smell a sweetness, a rich odor, and open my eyes and all is blurry and there’s a hazy angel before me, wings of the whitest gauze spread before me and the smell is intense and I go to her and open my mouth to say something, anything—her skin is warm on my freezing skin and there’s our old heartbeat again—bum-bum bum-bum—and the wings fold about me, enshroud me, and I open and close my mouth, hungry to live, and that smell overtakes me and calms me, the sounds have receded to one soothing shhhhh and my mouth wraps around a nipple and all is quiet again, warm and safe with us, in this motherly heaven.

  Occupational Hazard or Ars Poetica: Shoulder Angel v. Shoulder Demon

  The Last Temptation of the Author, Right Here, Right Now

  So I’ll meet you at the bottom if there really is one / they always told me when you hit it you’ll know it / but I’ve been falling so long it’s like gravity’s gone and I’m just floating.

  Drive-By Truckers

  Angel, Left Shoulder

  He keeps muttering, Without regret I’d have no memory at all, without regret I’d have no memory at all, and I see an opening to save his soul, lace my fingers and unhinge my wings, inch up to my tippy toes on his shoulder bones, shut my eyes and lean soft into his ear: Remember the bad health and poor choices, the broken van you could never really fix and the depth of that ditch; remember when you head-butted that stop sign and how your scalp bled and itched for weeks on end; remember crashing from your back door and pitching face-first into the rocks, the blood down your shirtfront and your neighbors, smoking dope on their back porch, chuckling at you; remember sleeping with your best friend’s girl and how you’ve never forgiven yourself for his suicide—the concussions, the arrests, the near arrests, the times you should have been arrested so the police could have put a stop to you; remember getting caught when you shoplifted a candy bar even though you had a pocket full of cash and when you were arrested for DUI on a Friday night and couldn’t make bail till Tuesday late because of MLK’s holiday and you cursed that great man for his honor; remember the affairs, the near affairs, and the times you should have just fucked off; remember that four-day binge in which you drank only rye and woke up screaming from dehydration, and in the mirror by moonlight, you saw your skin puckered and wrinkled like some ancient ghoul, your fingers seized into knots—and if that wasn’t rock bottom, then tell me what is—but you just added water with your bourbon next day and said, Lesson learned; remember the baby you had aborted and, afterward, the dream you had of that baby, the little girl who lacked bones in her thumbs but she was still just so beautiful; and remember weeping, apologizing to a picture of your own self as a baby, You had so much potential, kid, and now you have your own living baby and will you ever stop apologizing for that—I feel his shoulder tense, muscles hunched like a bull’s hump, and my halo dims and the light fades from my robes but then:

  You are loved by God and you are loved by me. Nothing. Your wife loves you, your family loves you, your mom, your friends, and your baby boy too. Not a thing. He has settled into his enormous selfish loathing. And you, you love you. And. You. Love. Them. All. And my robes begin to pulse once more and I am radiant, my wings unfurling about me, brilliant and wide.

  Demon, Right Shoulder

  I rub my hands together, one over the other, cold on his cold shoulder, a shiver runs up my tail and the knuckles of my spine and I think of the lukewarm response Master gives when I fail, He always leaves me in the waiting room—with a worm, a toad, an asp—never opens the door to the inferno where the flames warm the flesh and the cries of humans send the spasms through me and I wait and smile and try a new tack: You are so sexy when you sit on the far end of the bar, stirring the bourbon over ice with your fingertip—every woman looks your way, you charming devil you, the one in the lemon-yellow low-cut number wishes her man had your lips, they all want to run fingers through your hair, and they care what you say and even listen to you sing—and every guy, forget it, every guy wants to sit next to you, listen to your stories and jokes that they will later tell their friends and pretend they made up. What an interesting life you’ve led, pal. Your students just adore your yarns about bar fights and lost weekends in New Orleans, bootlegging uncles, and the myth of the muse in the rye. Your inherited birthright is a long tradition built by writers even more gifted than you, few though they may be: shoot it down, watch college ball, ask the girl in the wheelchair to dance, shoot an arrow into your ex-wife’s front door, buy guns every chance you get—LeMats, crossbows, dynamite—buy that Sterling MK6 semiautomatic—you need all that danger a finger’s length away because those fools need something, someone to talk about and that might as well be you—now it’s time to get to work, the computer’s buzzing upstairs and the notebook’s blank and the pen’s resting cool on your desk and goodness knows the whole world is waiting to read what you have to write, but first you have to clear your mind with a drink or two—

  He does not so much as flinch this time, he knows these lies too well—Y’know there is no God, don’t cha? There is no hell. No Heaven either. Nothing waiting for you after this. This flesh and time is all you have. I am warmed by his cocked head like a crack in the door, like the heat of the torch set to a martyr. What I like about you is that you’re your own man, the rules don’t apply to you and you don’t do what people tell you to do, and he cracks a smile, the crack fissures through his whole body, and he reaches for the bottle and cracks the seal and twists off the top and holds the bottle straight out over the sink and lifts a glass from the counter and I fold my hands together, prayer-wise, and he holds it and holds it still.

  Satan, Eternal, in the Guise of a Bottle

  of Evan Williams Bourbon, Ruminating on the Nature of Art, Love, & Life

  Please allow me to introduce myself, I am the one who made this world the way it is—I am sure by now you will have heard how some other angel forced me from Heaven—Saint Michael, that arch braggart and blowhard, the great liar and exaggerator extraordinaire—don’t believe a word of it, kid—I came here willing, this earth is my haven, though when I first arrived the whole joi
nt was a wreck and you can trust me when I say Pangaea was all one big chunk of crust, an island, surrounded by a single body of water—nothing had been planned, nothing thought all the way through—I took time and considerable pains to cut runnels for rivers, to carve craters for lakes and seas, to vary the vegetation and cross-pollinate and design new breeds because, being the loner He is, He never dreamt of procreation—His ideas on sex are laughable, naïve at best—not for animals, not even for trees, and damn sure not for His people—yeah, yeah, yeah, that whole “be fruitful and multiply” number was a late edit to the story, believe you me—I am the one who invented sex, thank you very much—His plan was for everything to live forever but all that changed when the first dude ate the fruit and passed it off on his lady and now even roses and rabbits have to fuck and die—why? Because misery loves company, because His people disappointed Him, like He knew they would, like I knew they would, and He still did it anyway, and that’s why I wouldn’t bow before them—but I digress—listen, you seem like a smart enough guy, a reasonably intelligent guy, let me ask you this: Does death to everything sound fair? Does that sound like a reasonable punishment sufficient to fit the crime, the sins of the father visited not only upon his son but also on his sheep and lentils?—He didn’t think the whole thing through like I have, even-headed and cool-like—He did not, in fact, even provide for the full color spectrum—sure, He invented rain, but I brought the rainbows—before then, there wasn’t a speck of purple on the planet but then I swiped it across horizons so lovers holding hands could coo and admire my work—instead they say, Oh my God, isn’t that lovely—and it is, but not because of Him, because of me, and they call it the godly color, the royal color—that’s what I do, I bring people together, create spectacles of love like music—oh yeah, He shuns music, has nothing whatever to do with it, hates it as a cacophony—it makes me laugh how every time some fool makes a joyful noise unto the Lord, I can see Him squirm, preparing to send another plague of rats or brew another violent storm to shut them the hell up, but I was the current in Jimi’s amp, the horn in Armstrong’s hands, the strings on Stravinsky’s violin, and I love the baroque as much as the punk and the women in the woods chanting and banging sticks onto rocks while Pan teeters on those little goat hooves of his, eyelashes and flute tunes driving those ladies wild, and I was there, you know, when the Christians drove them from the hills, hummocks, and fields deep into caves where they coiled all manwomanplantandanimal to create a living grotesquery and I’ve been confused with that guy ever since, as if I were some puny goat-god, but nahhh, I’m a man-god maligned by good Christians such as your boy Charlie Daniels who, I’m here to tell you, is a world-class liar—I’ve never even been to Georgia, let alone lost a fiddle match—I was in Mississippi with your Mr. Johnson, and I was his goat hooch laced with strychnine—I was the ale served to kings and their courts during tournaments and the khat in Abel’s mouth, the brandy that steadied the artists’ hands so they could chisel and paint and pick at the strings; I was the ergot-poisoned wine that turned giants into windmills and windmills into giants and called forth from the deep recesses dragons and mystic visions; I was the fermented fruit in your jailhouse, the rye in your brothels, the vodka in cold tsarist Russia, and the tequila in the teenagers who drive and love carelessly in the summer; I was the scotch in Mr. Dickey’s flask at a cockfight outside Macon, Georgia, consoling him after he’d just been kicked off the set of Deliverance. I am always here, even now as you and your friends tell stories of duels in the past, how I taught them mean pride and envy and honor and gave them all a false sense of revenge at the tip of the knife, the sword, the bullet, the tongue, and I can teach you as well, because right now, I am only with you, here before your typewriter, your paper, your pens, all laid out before you on your desk, the dim light of an old lamp, the curtains closed, your family asleep. It’s just you and me, kid.