Charles Hawes
Fiction
So I’m ready to meet my friend to talk things over, here at Kelly’s, the Irish pub where every two drinks gets you a little red poker chip you can exchange for a third drink free, and if you need any clearer picture of the place it’s right under the green awning that spills out like a big ghastly puddle over the side of the street and where inside are three stools occupying the near and utter dark dankness, or the near and utter dank darkness, and where I am occupying a middle stool. At this point I’ve already had two drinks (plus the free one) waiting for my friend, fiddling my thumbs so to speak since in any minute he’ll get here and I’ll have to let the poor guy down—all the while hoping that maybe he has been hit by a bus, or drowned in the East River, or shot—but then he texts me he is running five minutes late and I figure by now he’ll be on the safe stretch of the boulevard and all the opportunities to be struck or drowned or shot have surely passed. You see the trouble began when my friend started dating a woman from Alaska named Kerry, well, if we are being precise the problem started long before that, around when we became friends in first or second grade, and the trouble started well after that as well, once my friend proposed to Kerry and set the whole dastardly affair in motion, but right in the middle of those two vectors in the space time continuum, well, this Kerry started introducing my friend to Nature, what with Alaska and its tundras and its mountains and Eddie’s—my friend—Eddie’s heart pretty soon becoming enamored with Alaska and enamored with Nature, and furthermore enamored with Kerry, and Eddie pretty soon having to make the ten hour flight to Juneau just about every month, spending all his hard earned money and God given time off with Kerry and Nature, and pretty soon my friend is proposing to her and FaceTiming me crying and sniffling and pretty soon I’m crying and sniffling and he’s saying well, he reckons I’m his best man because well, why wouldn’t I be? So all of this is great so far, fine you see until my friend gets it in his head that as an awesome bachelor party we should go on a hunting expedition, a hunting expedition of caribou in the Aleutian Islands, the remotest island chain in the world, and to get to these islands we must take a treacherous flight above the coastal mountain range into Juneau, and then the even more treacherous flight over Denali, and this is to say nothing of the actual shooting or stabbing or clubbing of the caribou, who are really just reindeer, as my girlfriend pointed out, Santa’s trusted valets.
Well, my friend shows up and I buy him a couple of drinks (but not the third free one) so he can catch up and pretty soon he’s going on about how exciting the trip will be and I’m nodding along and he says It’s going to be an adventure and I say Sure, it’s going to be an adventure and he says We’re going to brave the treacherous flight into Juneau, and the even more treacherous flight into Adak, and I say Well yes we must brave the treacherous flight to Juneau and the even more treacherous flight to Adak and he says We will hunt them by the spoors of their droppings and I say We will hunt them by the spoors of their droppings and he says We will carry hundreds of pounds of caribou back to the camp And I say yes hundreds of pounds of caribou and he says We will sleep in the permafrost and I say yes The permafrost and he says Shitting in sawed holes in the ice and I say yeah Shitting in the ice and he says Adak was a strategically important island chain in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War, there are Rommel spikes and unexploded ordnance littered about the trails and I say Oh yes cannot forget the Rommel spikes and the littering of the unexploded ordnance and shitting in the permafrost and Well what about the bears? and he says No bears.
Now we’re four drinks in (plus two freebies each) and I get to prodding. I go What’s so special about these caribou anyway? Don’t we have caribou upstate? and he goes These caribou were introduced to the island in the 50’s and have no natural predator; they’re fatted off an abundance of willows and sedges and flowering tundra plants, which is why we will have to take several trips to carry the heavy loads of their dismembered carcasses back to camp, to which I go How do we get these dismembered carcasses of caribou back to Queens? And he goes By mail. And I go How will I store all of the caribou meat in my apartment’s freezer? How will I eat all that caribou? My girlfriend is a vegetarian. Most of my meals are takeout. And he goes Caribou is good lean meat, you’ll learn to make chili. You’ll love it.
Now we’re about six drinks in (plus the three freebies each) and I come straight out with it: Well what if I don’t want to go on this adventure, what if I’d rather just take you to the strip clubs in Atlantic City, like we’d always planned? And he replies: This will put hair on your chest and I reply What if there’s enough hair on my chest, what if I’m content with my lamb gyro and my little corner of land in Queens and a stripper? And he replies: This is an alien land with a live volcanic range in the Pacific Ring of Fire, where there are nearly as many active volcanoes as full time residents; an untouched Eden whose lowlands are green and unpaved and whose silent cliffs and monoliths are strangely jutted and whose green coats convey a primordial profundity and under the permafrost are the corpses of prehistoric dogs that once roamed the land. To see these islands is to smell and palpate and tread the outer edges of the sublime unspoiled bounty of God’s green earth to which I reply: But what is the price of experience? There is just as much life to be had in our little slot of Queens, in the patch of Socrates Park, where the daffodils rise with the hum and lift of the propulsive seasons and then sink and sift according to the carrying of winged creatures and blanch into gray nothingness at year’s end; this urban complex being just as ancient, just as profoundly primordial as any spot in the world but with the added richness of centuries of human civilization buried on top to which he replies: So you are content with being a house cat. A little house cat bound by the strictures of a furnished apartment with your wares and your relics and to live out a lumpenbourgeoisie life in the even more limiting confinement of your allotted class and finite natural courage? To which I reply: There’s nothing wrong with a house cat. A house cat has nine lives, nine more than me or you after the first and second treacherous flight in Alaska.
The bartender offers us nuts. We refuse and have our seventh and eighth drinks (plus the four frees) at which point my friend solemnly stares into his stein of High Life, as if trying to bore a hole through the ale with his gaze like a modern Moses parting the sea and suddenly my friend lets ooze a few syllables downward, parts of speech that practically gurgle into the limpid yellow panes of ale, and I shake his shoulder and he stares at me with the boring beautiful blue eyes and he says Brother. And I say What. And he says No, her brother. And I say What about her brother? It is his idea. He says. I am terrified of him because he’s a true mountain man. The first time we met he took Kerry and me on a bush flight to a glacier, a bush flight on a rickety prop plane that he owns and operates, and during the flight I nearly wet myself, my thighs were shaking and my ribs were rattling and I felt like I was going to pass out and he kept turning with his grimacing smile and his opaque Oakleys and he’d slap my unsteadied thigh and say “Ain’t this great?” The most I could muster back being a half smirk, my pale sickly skin nearly shedding itself as we flew over a mountain and when we finally touched down I had to clamp my thighs for want of urination and sprint behind a tree and with Kerry’s back turned I unsheathed my Sex to the blinding tundra, curled and frosted like a frozen prawn, and before I was about to release I heard a great foaming roar of evacuation blasting into the banks of melting snow; a furious stream unearthing what was probably years and years of virgin ice, golden flecks and chips of earth spraying into the winter air like a tornado of sawdust, and the brother began making slow circles with the golden rod of his Sex, carving out what looked to be a perfect fishing hole, and not being able to conceal my horror I glimpsed over into the implacable tint of his Oakleys and he opened his mouth and started nodding and raised his lips over his brown teeth to his shining pink gums and said “Ain’t this great?” And in the midst of stage fright I nodded and again he went “Ain’t it?” And I went “Yeah,” and he went “How’d you like to go caribou huntin’ sometime,” and I went “Caribou hunting? Sounds good,” and he went “Caribou huntin’ in the Aleutian Islands. We’ll do it for your bachelor.” To which I went “Yes,” and he went “You havin stage fright over there?” And I went “No!” Eagerly shaking out a few sprinkles as if from a gently tipped watering can and then furiously squeezing the rest from my Sex as he went “Shake it more than twice and you’re playing with yourself!” And I went “Haha!” Zipping up a moment too soon: where into my pants I went.
I hail down the bartender to tell him actually we will be taking those nuts, and whatever other victuals he may have lying around, and after a few minutes of contemplating my friend’s dilemma he interrupts my train of thought with a large chalice of dried legumes and salted drupes and a look that belies his secret frustration with the way we have been carrying on, perhaps more than a little dismay at our having ordered our ninth and tenth (plus five free) drinks of the evening, as well as the slovenly manner in which my friend Eddie begins housing handful after handful of peanuts and cashews, a menacing mellifluous grind that is surely an unconscious coping mechanism for the traumatic memory he has just retold.
Now—I begin to say—I have spent much of my natural life contemplating the manifold ways that a sequestered urban existence might stunt the virtues that are fashioned out in the wilderness, the bespoke beatitudes that hew closer to the rough and tumble realities of life unmediated than the artificial protocols that have been perfected by the daintier minds of civilization, and that when one has the daily task set out before them to plough the fields, husband the nutrition, slaughter the cattle, churn the fat, erect lodging out of the raw wood and stone secretions of the earth, in what the ancients called techne—or the unveiling of the stored resources of our Terra Mater—that one is entitled to a certain respect, perhaps even a little awe, but nothing approaching this sort of self abasement, having myself long ago ceased to prostrate my own person with the recognition that this urban guilt or emasculated shame or culturally inherited inadequacy is nothing more than a failure to descry our own ineradicable contingencies, the invisible lattices of life that trace our origins and our outward facing identity, but are no more an accurate descriptor of the soul than our height or race or eye color or any other tangible factoid or bureaucratic minutiae—and just as I am finishing what I am fixing to say, the bartender, who has had no drinks in him this evening as far as I can tell, cuts me off when Eddie signals for four (six) more drinks, and begins unpacking his own stored-up thoughts in a blinkless, machine gun cadence:
“Gentlemen, I have been listening to this conversation, or some version of it, for longer than your lives combined, and I am here to tell you that your tales of deceit are as old as the wind. All the middling dictums and the learned talk will never win you the solace you seek. The truth is you are frightened. You are frightened at the prospect of the caribou’s blood. You are frightened at the prospect of your own blood. But you know nothing of blood. For blood reduces to blood. It cannot be decoded by words. And the only meaning in the world is that of the unspilled, all the unspilled blood coursing in the veins of our dying flesh, dying being a mere abstraction—depart, expire, decease—all euphemisms and obfuscations of the real thing, the nameless vituperative violence that will one day be done to us all by external or internal measures and carried out by hanging on the long or short rope of time; the only truth of this life is the coursing blood eventually to be spilled, ours and the caribou’s and every other living vessel, and to understand even for a moment what this means is to rise in rank above the masses, for the great man will understand this truth in society or wilderness, in the slaying of the caribou in the Aleutian Islands or in the desultory slums of civilization; while watching nature devour herself or in studying the finest works of the great masters, the masters who understood that despite all the brilliant and painstaking depictions of manifold life, that the center of the tableau is reserved for the slaughter of the lamb, the innocent lamb that is pricked at the neck, blood springing out of its sinless flesh and despoiling the green earth like a leak from the paltry stream of your friend here’s little Sex, or gushing in thick ropes like the virile flow of the brother’s bigger Sex. This is the only truth in life, Gentlemen, not death, not Atlantic City or the Aleutian Islands or the girth or diminutiveness of any single Sex, but the final spillage of blood that is foundation for any truth, a truth that most men in history have been mired in a prolonged adolescence to forget, an adolescence of delusion fashioned around false mastery in the domain of bloodletting, or the crafting of ingenious morality plays to attempt to stand alone, or distraction by bodily pleasures; all attempts to delude themselves that they have been spared judgment. And now we are in the age beyond individual delusion, we are in the age where the truth is society’s nemesis, modernity meaning the relegation of the world’s truth to the periphery, and all that appears to be differing worldviews or competing political factions are in reality just differently named forces colluding to banish the lone indivisible truth, we moderns’ consolation being the eradication of meaning from the human race, and all the religion and culture and art will become the religion and culture and art of a dishonest people, a sham people, a people that is not making religion but the mockery of religion, not making culture but the mockery of culture not making art but the mockery—”
My phone buzzes. It’s my girlfriend asking where am I, and in looking at my phone I realize the gyro shop down the street is only open for another fifteen minutes, and all we have at home is lentils, so in the middle of the bartender’s frothing jabber Eddie and I scrape together ninety bucks for the $87.45 bill of beer and liquor (not including the cost of the ten drinks—which add up to thirty dollars of unpaid libations) assuming that the two hundred and fifty-five proverbial pennies are worth at least as much as the half- or quarter-finished lecture of the bartender’s, and with our savings intact we stumble to the idling food truck and when the old Greek squints down to ask “what will it be” I tell him Lamb.
Charles Hawes is a writer based in New York. His fiction has appeared in 3:AM Magazine and the Berkeley Fiction Review.
Photo Credit: Kelsey Flaherty is a writer and photographer living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Great Lakes Review and Whitefish Review.
