There is nothing that brings perspective like a good, public cry and, in the aftermath, I seek out a familiar place to console myself. I go to a diner, a chain diner, one of those 24 hour places that keeps your coffee topped off and doesn’t ask why you’re there alone and still a little teary-eyed. A place where nobody knows your name and, under most circumstances, will never ask. A familiar place, no matter where you are.
‘Familiar’ is a funny word in this context.
The noun, I mean.
Traditionally a witch’s demon friend, a cat, a raven, an imp- could be anything, why not a diner if it serves the same purpose? Baba Yaga had something like that, a mobile home. I have the chain diner which cuts to the chase and exists everywhere at once- multiple entrances to what is, basically, the same place.
Didn’t even have to do away with the chicken legs.
The diner suckles on my wallet like an extra teat and offers me sanctuary in exchange, a barter I’m happy to accept in most circumstances.
These are not original thoughts. Well, they come from Shitholes.
So maybe they are.
‘‘Autumn by the Wayside,’ endeavors to remain solidly in the realm of non-fiction, despite our eccentric choice of content. That said, the author must occasionally allow for the printing of rumor, superstition, and that which borders upon conspiracy. The following represents such speculative research.
It is said, in certain circles, that the cowboy paths of old have collapsed into ley lines. Like all things, strange and otherwise, the lines are governed by numbers and fueled, in part, by money. In our civilized present a wanderer may forsake the deserts and travel in the relative comfort of a diner booth, penciling coordinates onto a slip of paper and paying fare. When your number’s up, well, step outside.
The trouble with Keno Coordinates, I’m told, is that nobody seems to know any that work. This dubious method of travel is kept by that most passive gatekeeper, the friend of a friend, whose mysterious absence seems only to add credibility to what they guard. It is the friend of a friend who knew a couple strings of Keno Coordinates and who would, on occasion, simply disappear. It is the friend of a friend, and perhaps a word of warning here, who would invariably never return. I would enjoy your coffee, reader, and think little of things that could not happen.’
It could be that the author is a better, saner me, a me whose body remains unbroken and womb-smoothed. A scarred creature like myself, with an arm that can barely lift a warm mug, represents a divergence from the man in the picture, or, the way I remember the man. As the back cover has faded, cracked, and torn away, I have only my memory to go on.
It did look like me, once.
The divergence is why I can enjoy my coffee and think of things that seem unlikely happen. I am not limited by the author’s hesitations or by the smoothness of his unbroken skin. It is not enough to approach the unknown; if I want to understand the book then I will need to prod the unknown with a short stick and be ready to run. The once placid sheen of my exterior has already been disturbed, further ripples will likely go unnoticed.
I have not slept.
The waiter mops a puddle of coffee from my table and I switch back to my healthy arm. He takes the money and the ticket I hand him and he enters the numbers into a machine. My burger comes in record time. I order a slice of warm pie and match a few numbers to the screen, a few of many. It is too dark outside to see anything.
I pay up and exit the diner into a place that is distinctly unfamiliar to me. I shake away dreary thoughts and stretch my tired limbs. I double-knot my shoes and take several deep breaths.
Shitholes has, of late, entered the curled stage of a paperback’s life, lending itself to the ass pockets of tired jeans. It ages well, looking less like a serial romance or gas station horror, more like the sturdy manual to some gray machine. Sun-faded, water-worn, and dirty, I shake it occasionally to find discarded dollars, receipts, and notes that I’ve written myself but forgotten. The notes read like a concerned mother: ‘don’t forget to water the fern,’ ‘buy sunblock, batteries,’ ‘call home.’
Sometimes, on the backs of these notes, I find words of encouragement. Other times, I find derision. Good or bad, I read them and then throw them away and start over. My system of bookmarking Shitholes needs work, in that regard. At some point too many bookmarks is the same as none at all.
I find a stick of gum in my pocket and I chew it into shards and eventually into mash. I write, on the wrapper, ‘use fewer bookmarks,’ and I flip through Shitholes until I find the entry I’m looking for.
“Have you, reader, ever considered the curtain? A piece of cloth, a veil, to obscure or cordon off, the curtain, I put forth, is more metaphor than reality. Consider the example at hand: ‘The Tape Hub,’ an independently owned video rental store, the last of a dying business. More specifically, consider the room to the right of Comedy, unsigned and… curtained.
The small gaps on either side provide the narrowest of glances, a flash of color, old carpet, dim lights. The curtain provides no physical barrier and it offers no instruction. The only thing required to pass through a curtain is a willingness to see what is on the other side.”
“You can’t just read in here, sir.”
I startle at the voice, the high, nasal tones of a teenager.
“I was trying to remember the name of a movie,” I tell her, “Is remembering allowed?”
“Do you have a membership?”
“Not yet.”
“You need to start one before you can rent.”
“I want to make sure you have the movie I’m looking for, first.”
“What’s the name of the movie?”
“I’m still trying to remember.”
She knows, somehow, that I’m lying but leaves me to my browsing and I pocket Shitholes in an attempt to meet her halfway.
I was done reading anyway.
The problem I face currently is that there is no curtain to the right of Comedy, no curtain anywhere in the store, as far as I can tell. I’m not naïve to the sort of set-up Shitholes describes, we’re talking about the porn section, the guiltiest room in small-town America. Well, a decade ago maybe. The internet has brought our guilt back to the bedroom, as god intended. If video shops are a dying breed then porno-closets are their vestigial appendages and I’m starting to think ‘The Tape Hub’ gnawed off its own some time ago.
That is, until I notice marks in the carpet. The place has seen a poor man’s renovating and shelves have been moved. I take a look around with fresh eyes and eventually I spot the curtain- behind the counter. The girl from before has re-stationed herself there and she watches me with an amount of boredom.
“Remember that movie?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her, making as if to browse the end displays on my way to the counter, “I was actually in here a long time ago…” I lie, “And I feel like things have moved around.”
“I’ve worked here for three months.”
“You didn’t come in before that?”
“I don’t rent movies from here now,” she says, “And I could do it for free.”
“Is that curtain, there,” I point, “Open to customers?”
“You want a tan, dude?”
“There are tanning beds back there?”
“Yes.”
“Uh…” shit, this has gone south, “Anything… else?”
She looks at me for several seconds without saying a thing.
“You can go and look,” she says, finally.
I walk past her, trying to summon the gait of an exasperated customer and not someone who has just indirectly asked for porn from a minor. The shame lessens with the protective obscuring of the curtain between us. I find myself facing a bathroom at the end of a short hall and two rooms, further curtained, on either side. To the left I find the tanning beds and, to the right, I find the porn.
It’s a small room, and dark until I switch on a light, aptly dim. An impressive amount of smut lines the walls, cases crammed in and overlapping. The titles themselves seem run-of-the-mill, not that I would know any different. A lot of big tits, a lot of faux-reality titles, and a lot of ass stuff. I make out a few strictly male productions in one corner but see lesbians peppering the room at large. If there was ever a method here it has long since fallen into disuse.
Finally, and to my mild surprise, there is another curtain, a thin one, on the far wall. A strip of darkness underneath suggests a room beyond.
“You’re into some weird shit,” the girl says, as I move to pull back the second curtain.
“I’m not…” I begin, “I was just looking.”
“Cool.”
“Are you even allowed back here?”
“I work here.”
“That…”
“You think the little brown bag for hiding your case means I don’t see the title flash when I ring it up?”
“Words are different.”
“Depends on the words.”
Finding I can’t disagree, I wait for what she has to say.
“Are you going back there?” she asks, after a moment.
“I was considering it.”
“Well?”
“Well, are you going to follow me?”
“Look,” she sighs, “Just don’t do anything creepy, okay dude?”
She leaves me feeling distinctly creepy already.
Past the second curtain is another room, dimmer and even closer than the last. The walls, again, are packed tightly with pornography, floor to ceiling, and, absurdly, there are two narrow curtains to the right and left: two more rooms. I choose the left, noting that the content of this place is becoming more graphic, more niche, as I travel between rooms.
A man, I think, or a woman brushes past me as I move through the curtain. I linger on the threshold and look back to the room I was in before but they have gone, already. There is a fan whirring in the new space, hardly more than a closet. The videos here seem focused on car accidents and, loosely, on strangulation. There is another curtain ahead, cut from a heavy cloth.
Someone is crying inside.
I enter, carefully, and see the room is lit by a flickering television. A woman cries on the screen for several seconds before it switches to a man, moaning despair into a pillow. They are both nude. The titles on the wall are all of the same genre: ‘The Boy Who Cried Daddy,’ ‘Sobbing Skanks 2.’
The next curtain is damp to the touch.
This room has a fish tank in the center; neglected and dirty goldfish swim inside. The room is nautical-themed and humid, somehow pleasanter than the last. There are two curtains once again, one cloth and the other bead. I push past the beads with a rattle and find another television.
This room is all ‘caught on camera’ stuff, black and white videos of people screwing in bushes or in cars. The TV, though, appears to be a live stream of the room with the tanning bed.
And as I watch, the bed opens.
A man emerges, a man with a sagging pot-belly and jeans. He heaves himself onto his feet, shaking his naked, drooping front as he does. And then he exits and, because this is an angle very much meant to let me know, I see him pass through the hallway and into the curtained porn room.
I hear rattled breath, my own, and am frozen. I remember the rest stop and the way I could run when I wasn’t limping. Finally, I move, keeping the sound of the crying actors to my back.
I pass through curtains: silk, net, plastic. I feel other bodies here but I never see their faces. Rooms become tight and then widen. Some are as long as hallways, other are short so that I have to crouch. Genres change, and mediums. There is a room for laserdiscs, for flipbooks, for thumb drives scattered on the ground like startled roaches. As soon as I pass through I hear someone behind me, dragging brown, dusty shoes through the cheap plastic. There is a smell, like sweating skin, and an intimate clamminess.
I come to a dead end, a curtain with a wall behind. I hide there as the man enters. No doubt he hears the rustle of the thin fabric, no doubt he sees my boots sticking cartoonishly out from under it. He steps forward and pulls the curtain back.
It is the teenager.
She eyes me with confident disgust, my actions, no doubt, fitting well within her definition of ‘creepy.’ In my relief I move awkwardly and knock cases from the wall. They clatter to the ground, piling at the soles of her sneakers.
“That’s a real pro-job!” says the Red Neck Shaman, “A real fiberglass beauty.”
The whole upper part of him has disappeared into a metal crate, one of several. There is a sound of rummaging, of a great deal of metal turning over and over. A rusted handsaw pushes over the edge and clatters to the ground.
‘Not that one,’ I hope, quietly, ‘Not that one.’
A cold draft pushes under the sheet door and across my naked upper-half. I shiver and rattle the ramshackle table I am attached to, attached by a metal vice pressed deeply into the cast on my arm. It has cracked under the pressure already, which I take as a good sign. If the cast will give easy under the vice, then it shouldn’t take too much sawing.
“There are well-intentioned denizens that live by the wayside, people and businesses that mean little harm and, in the grander scheme, do little. ‘The Red Neck Shaman’ is one of these people. Questioned about the authenticity of his title, ‘shaman,’ the man will agree with the common definition and say little else. When asked about the ‘red neck’ portion of his offerings, he simply calls your attention to the headquarters of his business, a rented storage shed, and the source of power for his more intricate tools, a car battery. The Red Neck Shaman’s services are worth more than his asking price but his asking price, reader, is very little to begin with.”
The Red Neck Shaman, still hidden in the steel box, goes very still, leaving me with the sound of my breath and the squeaking of my nervous sneaker on the cement floor. He hangs there, bent limply in half at the edge of the thing, moving not a muscle. I bring my hand, my good hand, to the vice and consider releasing it. The iron there is thick and cold and, to my surprise, vibrating very slightly. As soon as I feel it in the vice, I feel the same vibration in the metal of the chair, in the air around me, in my skeleton, deeply buried under flesh and clothes.
“Found it!” the Red Neck Shaman says, animating suddenly.
The hum has gone and the skeletal man in red flannel emerges with a hack saw, no less rusted than its cousin on the floor. Thankfully, he unfastens the blade and pulls another out of plastic, settling on an old stool to switch them out.
“Was that hum the spirits?” I ask, wincing at the potential idiocy of the question.
“That were them!” he says, “Some like to misplace my tools, others like to find’em for me.”
“In that regard…” I begin, “Are the spirits usually more helpful or… mischievous?”
“Spirits’s mostly just folk like you an’ me that’s passed,” he says, “Plenty’a assholes among’em.”
“How did you get into this line of business? Shamanism?”
“Done what they told me an’ started makin’ money doin’ it.”
I try to stretch but the vice grip restrains me. The hack saw is coming together quickly in the man’s callused fingers.
“How specific are the spirits when they talk to you? What do they say?”
“You heard’em just now.”
“But it just sounded like a hum to me.”
“Gotta tune it in jus’ right.”
“You mean like a radio?”
“As good an’ analgee as any.”
“Could you actually use a radio to hear them? As a medium?”
“Not ‘less they got miker-phones in the life beyond. Otherwise I’m all the medium you ought need. Now…”
The Red Neck Shaman examines the assembled saw in the dim lantern light and shrugs before wheeling over on the stool.
“Real pro-job,” he observes again, flicking the cast with his broken fingernail, “Makes a man wonder what a feller like yerself’s doin’ comin’ to a feller like me.”
“The spirits can’t tell you?”
“They said ain’t none my business but it don’t stop me from wonder’n.”
“Trouble with insurance.”
The old saw blade clatters off the table as the Red Neck Shaman looks on.
“Good n’ bad spirits alike don’ take well ter lying, sir, but I’ll leave yer business yers and get to mine. Do this right n’ you ain’t gon’ feel a thing. Do it wrong and you feel a bunch.”
The blade’s teeth bite into the cast and my arm moves painfully back and forth despite the man’s attempts to hold it in place. I wonder, too late, if I should have given the bone more time to set.
I grit my teeth.
“Wouldn’t ‘medicine man’ have been more apt?” I ask over the sound of sawing.
“Medcin’ man’s a term steeped in genner,” he grunts, putting his weight into the motions, “Don’t set much an example to my daughter, fer instance.”
The saw’s teeth graze my skin and the Red Neck Shaman halts himself before I can warn him. He clips the connecting bridge at my thumb with bolt cutters and the cast splits up to my elbow.
“We’re gon’ have to get a tad intermate fer this next part, I’m ‘fraid,” he says, pointing to the length of plaster that extends up to my shoulder. “I’ll take’er slow.”
Smelling of moonshine and exhaust, the man hacks away at the plaster from a position over and behind me in the chair. He mutters to himself and to me and to the spirits, invisible, as he works.
I try not to let my teeth chatter.
Slowly my arm emerges from its cocoon- hardly a butterfly but free, after a long time, from constraint. The tender skin feels out currents of air, otherwise unknowable. Perhaps these are the man’s spirits, coming to observe their colleague’s work.
“Stinks t’high heaven, don’it?” he says, pausing thoughtfully before adding: “Spirits say that’ll be ten bucks.”
“‘Charlene’s Haunted Crafts’ is, by no means, truly haunted. It is a Halloween store, open year-round and run entirely by the owner, an old woman named Charlene. Charlene takes it upon herself to dress as a witch might, a stereotypical witch I should say, donning a pointed hat, a velvet cloak, and a tiny pentacle pin. She maintains a distinctive character while inside the store, responding to jokes with a shrill cackle and speaking to her fat Maine Coon as though it weren’t sleeping. There are cracks in her façade if you know where to look, the witchy guise a gaudy plastering on a thing much stranger than it seems. Look carefully, reader, or do not look at all.”
One might have expected that ‘Charlene’s’ would be the sort of business that is open four days a week from 11 to 4:30 (and closed at noon for lunch). Without that personal foresight, my first visit to the little shop consisted entirely of staring in through the display windows at the tiny, orange-painted trinkets there. Having had my fill, I hefted my pack and limped off to find my own lunch.
Returning in the late afternoon I find Charlene at the register, hunched over a wooden jack-o-lantern and a small pot of black paint. Her Maine Coon watches from a shelf above, flicking its tail in tandem with the brush strokes and sniffling at the cobwebs it inadvertently pushes into the air. Neither pay me much mind as I walk the aisles and eye the layers of thick, white dust.
It is uncomfortable for me to be in a shop, on my own and without any reason but to browse. Small wooden pumpkins are low on my list of needs. I don’t have a house or a truck to celebrate Halloween in and my pack doesn’t exactly want for more weight or sharp edges. The thing is, I used to work in a little shop like this and even I could tell when somebody was looking with no intent to buy, I could tell just about right away. If Charlene has been running this place for as long as I assume she has, she probably felt me coming down the street.
“Do you paint all of these?” I ask, circling around to the front of the store and feigning interest.
She does not look up at me.
“Do you…” I begin, thinking my voice had been too quiet, “Do you paint everything in your store?”
Still nothing.
“Ma’am…”
“Oh shut up,” the woman says.
The woman behind me, that is.
I turn and see a squat woman, hardly a witch in baggy jeans and the short, pointed hairstyle tween boys and computer-savvy grandmothers begrudgingly share. She frowns at me, continues frowning, and then turns to the woman at the counter.
The woman at the counter is a doll of some sort, intricate in assembly and coloring but entirely unmoving as she hovers over the craft. The cat above her has frozen, warped, and flattened itself on the wall- a painting of a cat, an optical illusion. I move my head from side to side, step backward to the door but the cat persists in unreality. Now, from this angle, even the woman loses some of her detail.
“I thought she was alive,” I tell the new woman, “She’s…”
I hesitate before saying ‘realistic’ because now I can see the fake rubber skin and the cheap stuffing that pokes out of the seams on her wrist. The cat, above, is peeling from the wall behind them both, painted ages ago.
“In the shadows it seemed like she was real.”
“She?” the woman, Charlene, I suppose, asks.
There’s nothing at the counter but a backpack, a jacket draped off the chair. Two rolls of gift wrap lie where her arms once did, or where it seemed like they were. The cat is a water stain, the ugly type you ignore because you’re afraid of exactly how much it will cost to fix whatever is causing it. It is faintly the shape of a cat, but that could be said of anything of that size. Cats take strange shapes.
I shift onto my bad leg, reassured by the pain, and shift off again. I face Charlene.
“I think Halloween is getting to me,” I tell her, forcing a chuckle.
“Must be, we’re halfway through November.”
“It’s… snow…” I say. I say it aloud hoping it will keep the conversation going.
The shelves are covered in fake snow, not dust, and the jack o’lanterns have stacked into snowmen. I wipe my brow, nervously.
“You can’t use the restroom,” Charlene says.
“What?”
Something meows in the store and I look desperately around. The water stain has all but disappeared.
“You can’t use the restroom. Lay off the smack and get a job, it’s not too late to turn your life around.”
“I…”
“You don’t think so?”
“Well, yeah,” I say, agreeing more that a theoretical version of me, a smack-addicted version, would do well to get off the stuff. That it wouldn’t be too late.
“Off you go, then,” she says, “Best be out before I call the sheriff.”
I leave quickly because, drug-addled or not, I have reason to avoid the law. The air is colder now, the sun well on its way to our neighbor’s morning. I check my watch and see that it is November, that Halloween passed as a ghost might- quiet and disconcerting. I shiver against the cold and the psychic stress of the last few minutes, days, months.
Charlene taps on the window behind me, taps with her costume jewelry rings.
Used to be I could drive somewhere warm and shake all this off.
Hooked haphazardly into a car battery, the old truck radio flickers and seems to lose power for a moment. After that moment, an answer:
“Have you always thought that a thing must be inside your radio in order to hear it?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I am a projection,” the voice says and I can hear the old chuckle in its tone.
“So why project into my radio? Why did you come back after the drive-in?”
“Because I could.”
“You couldn’t before?”
“Not in a sense.”
“What do you mean by that?”
The radio goes dark again, I am cast into the moonlight. In this, the forest that took the use of my arm, I listen to the wind and to the crickets. The radio cracks and the voice returns.
“Do you know of the town, Boone, in North Carolina?”
“No, is it famous for something?”
“It’s not famous for anything.”
“So why mention it?”
“So, could you have gone to Boone before I told you it was there?”
“Yes.”
“And why didn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t know about it.”
“So you could only go to Boone by accident before, and now you can only ever go there knowingly. Now that you know Boone exists, you can go there anytime and as often as you like.”
“You’re not going to explain yourself, are you?”
“There’s not much to explain, owner of the… oh, hmm… I don’t know what to call you; there’s very little to your name anymore.”
“You can call me whatever you want.”
“Well then, traveler,” the voice says, its tone soft and knowing, “Where are we off to next?”
