by Casey DW Jones
Content Warning: Depictions of physical violence, addiction, mental illness.
My scrolling thumb twitches to a stop: High Plains Convenience Store Killer Executed. I fetch a bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet and sidle up to my seat at the kitchen island. I gulp a shot, pour another, click on the link, and study the face of Greg Braun. He’s much different than my memory of him: older, skinnier, cheek bones more pronounced, hair buzzed to short gray stubble. But his flat blue eyes are as terrifyingly empty as I remember them.
The day we met, I was two months shy of thirteen. Wired on Cool Ranch Doritos, a Mountain Dew Big Slam, and six Mini-Thins. Pushing a shopping cart weighed down by four 50-pound bags of dog food into the checkout lane at the Garden City Walmart. Wheel shrieking like a snared jackrabbit. My five-year-old half-brother squeezed my wrist every time a stranger passed. His legs wedged in the fold-out seat of the cart. Ever since his dad left us the year before, Taylor stuck to me like a sand burr.
Mom labored up to the checkout with a cart stuffed with toys, junk food, cheap summer clothes, self-help books, CDs, and empty wrappers from the snacks we hadn’t paid for yet.
“How we affording all this?” I whispered. She might as well have had “insufficient funds” tattooed on her forehead.
Mom whipped out a wad of cash from her flamingo-dotted halter top. She made sure Verda, the elderly cashier with a permanently raised brow, saw the money.
“Where the hell did that come from?” I said, scalp tingling, vision checkering yellow and purple from caffeine and ephedrine. We had been there since nine o’clock that morning, five hours and counting, soaking up the AC, like everyone else on the scorched plains of southwestern Kansas.
“Coop,” Mom said. My seventeen-year-old brother had landed a job harvesting hay for the summer, which meant he was always gone. Lucky bastard. I asked his boss if I could join his crew, too, but he said to come back next year, when I had filled out some more.
“Coop shouldn’t have to pay for this crap,” I said. Mom hadn’t been able to keep up with her caseload at the public defender’s office after she fractured her spine last year. They moved her from full-time to contractor status after a few months. Her clients and billable hours had been dwindling as she battled for her long-term disability status and struggled to get out of bed.
“I’ll pay him back,” Mom said.
“Sure.” I said and chucked a giant stuffed pig on the conveyor belt. Mom bought for Taylor on the condition he’d stop sucking his thumb. “I totally bet you will.”
“I have a coupon for that.” Mom tapped a block of pepperjack cheese with her cane. I reached a hand down my athletic shorts. I wasn’t gonna tell anybody about the wiry hair I discovered near my balls that morning, but I couldn’t stop scratching it.
“Look, Ezra,” she said. “Once I get my settlement, we’ll be fine. Until then, maybe you could ask your father for some help.”
“He didn’t even call me on my birthday,” I said. “Or Christmas.”
“I know,” Mom said, and her eyes narrowed. “He’s always been behind on everything.”
Taylor threw a bag of King Size Twizzlers on the belt. Verda eyed Mom. I grabbed a roll of Sprees and tossed them on for myself. Mom looked at Verda and shrugged. Taylor cheered.
On our way out, Mom stopped in the lobby, near the Bear Claw machine. She looked every one of her forty years as she fumbled through her purse for her cigarettes. Her bleached hair was wiry as steel wool. Scowl lines rutted across her forehead and wrinkles radiated out from her lips. Her neck and upper chest were splotchy and mottled from sun damage.
She dropped a tube of lipstick, and a Mexican man stopped to pick it up. They began talking in Spanish. I could tell he was a client of hers, the way he treated her with respect.
“Our ice cream is melting,” I said. It was a twenty-mile drive home but, more importantly, I didn’t want anybody else to see me with my family. Molly Stevens walking down the toiletries aisle while Mom sniff-tested deodorant for me was embarrassment enough for one day. After Mom wrapped up her conversation, she slid a quarter into the Hot Tamales machine.
“You want some?” she said. I sneered at her nicotine-stained fingers and the bright red candies in her palm. “I don’t know why I bother,” she said. “Taylor?”
“Too spicy,” he said and sliced open the pack of Twizzlers with his teeth.
Outside, heat vapors shimmered off the parking lot’s black tar. The astringent odor of Sea Breeze leaked from my pores. I used it religiously, even though it had failed to clear up the constellations of acne across my face.
I swung open the rear doors to our Econoline van, the newest in a long line of family junkers. Mom claimed she got it from a client, in lieu of payment. My pillow, stuffed in a Return of the Jedi case, tumbled out and plopped into a dark puddle of bubbly goo near my feet. I had been sleeping in the back of the van ever since I woke up with a skink on my face a couple weeks ago. At night, the wind whistled through the cracks and shook the whole goddamned shit box to its rusty bones—and if the coyotes weren’t yipping, our own pack of dogs was stirred up—but at least it didn’t smell like rot and mold, like our trailer. At least I didn’t have to hear Mom snoring in front of the television. At least the bugs and rodents and lizards stayed off me.
“Fuck me,” I said and tossed my pillow back inside. Taylor jumped from the shopping cart onto the van bed. The seats were stuck down, making the bed permanent.
“TV,” Taylor said. A black-and-white television hung between the two front seats. I crawled in and turned it on. Taylor settled in.
“Rush Limbaugh?” Mom said.
“It’s either that or soaps,” I said. “It doesn’t matter to him.”
“It matters to me,” Mom still clung to the hope that she wasn’t raising a brood of rednecks. We had moved out here from Topeka six years ago with Taylor’s Dad. Lakin, the town we lived near and where we went to school, made Topeka look like Paris.
I changed the TV to Days of Our Lives. Marlena was still buried alive.
“Ezra, load this shit up. My back is killing me. I’ve been on my feet all morning.”
“And whose fault is that?” I muttered.
I got a couple of the big-ass dog food bags in the back of the van, but by the third one, I was maxed out. I balanced the bag across my twiggy thigh, but it wobbled as I hoisted it higher.
“It’s probably not too late to sign up for summer weights,” Mom said.
“That’s only for football players,” I said.
“Coop got really strong his first summer doing weights, and football gave him his work ethic.”
“You’re gonna lecture me about work ethic?” I said. “And I’m goddamned proud I’m not Cooper. My record is clean – and he got kicked off the goddamned football team. Remember?”
The bag of dog food slipped off my thigh and crashed onto the blacktop.
“Do you need to run back inside and ask for help?”
“Would you get off my ass?” She cracked my arm with her cane and said that would be the last time I disrespected her. We both knew that was a lie. I told her a goddamned caning wasn’t going to help anything and I propped the bag against the bumper. This time I scraped my shin on the scalding trailer hitch and let out a big “Motherfucker.” Taylor giggled and repeated the word.
“You need a matching welt?” Mom said, as Molly walked by with her dad, Judge Stevens. He pushed a flat cart with a large TV on it. Molly was wearing short cutoff jean shorts and a halter top, her bronze summer skin gleaming.
“See you Tuesday, Your Honor,” Mom shouted.
“Hope you’re prepared this time,” he said.
Molly smiled and waved at me, setting my body on fire, and skipped toward their brand-new Suburban, her hair dancing like dangling shocks of shiny golden wheat.
“We have too many dogs,” I said once the Stevenses were gone. Those four bags would barely last two weeks, between the thirteen-some dogs that roamed the acreage around our trailer and into the scrubby pastureland beyond.
“Those dogs keep us safe.” Mom said. “There are all kinds of nasty people running around.”
“I know. I watch the news,” I said. “Can you please go smoke somewhere else. I don’t need an audience. Or emphysema.”
Mom glared at me and hobbled to her side of the van. Once I was free of her gaze, I easily loaded the last of the dog food. I skated the shopping cart back to the corral and pushed Mom up into the captain’s seat.
“Buckle up,” Mom said. “And Taylor, it’s helmet time.” Taylor strapped on his Kansas City Chiefs football helmet. He cuddled the stuffed pig, which he had already named Fudgy Wudgy, and sucked his thumb.
I acted like I fastened my seatbelt, but I didn’t. A fiery death sounded better than wasting away in my current reality. The air-conditioner in the van was busted and I had already sweated through my shirt. It felt good to get moving, but just a few short seconds later a horn blared. Mom nearly hit another car reversing out of its spot. At the next intersection, where the parking lot meets the road, Mom rolled through the stop sign. A yellow Subaru hatchback to our left blew right their own.
At first, the pain in my skull didn’t register. Survival juice pumped through my veins while Taylor’s screeching bore through my ears. Cracks webbed out from the spot where my head struck the windshield. A goose egg had formed on the top of my skull, tender to the touch. Taylor kept shrieking. He had rolled into the crack between the bed and our front seats. Mom told me to help him and then go grab some frozen vegetables to put on my head.
“By the way, that repair bill is coming out of your allowance,” she said.
“What allowance?” I said and crawled in the back seat. I unwedged Taylor, then I found a bag of frozen peas. I hopped back into the front, buckled up, put the peas to the pain, and said let’s just get our asses home. But the driver of the Subaru had other plans. Even though we had avoided a collision, he refused to leave the intersection. Mom waved at him to go. Instead, he banged the steering wheel with his hands and flung open his car door. He stepped out, his short and stocky frame bobbing toward Mom in a wobbly, determined gait. He wore a green fisherman’s vest and brown-tinted glasses with big round frames.
“What the fuck was that stunt?” he said into her window. I could only see the top of his head, covered by a yellow beanie. “Are you fucking high?”
Mom tilted her head down toward his face. “I had the right of way,’ she said.
“What did you say?” The man’s face was taut and red, like he had an awful sunburn.
“I said, I had the right-of-way.” Mom blew a laser of smoke down toward the man’s face. “Where’d you get your license, anyway, the bottom of a Cracker Jack box?”
I scooched over and lifted myself up on the console to get a better view. The man clearly couldn’t compute a woman like Mom. His eyes rolled into his head. Sweat trickled down his face, onto his neck and wound through his wild chest hair.
“Listen, you bitch,” he said. “I don’t know who the fuck you think you’re talking to. But you have no idea who you’re messing with.”
“Mom,” I whispered. “Just let it go.”
“Why don’t you enlighten me,” Mom said back to him.
He paused and looked at me with flat blue eyes and pointed his finger in Mom’s window. “Get the fuck out of the car now, or I will kill your stupid weaselly kid while you watch.”
“Come on, let’s go,” I shrieked. Taylor screamed. I turned around and took his trembling hand in mine.
“Listen,” Mom said, suddenly calm and pleasant. “I don’t want this to escalate. So why don’t you go back to your car, and we can all get on with our lives. Please? Our ice cream is melting.”
“Not until you apologize,” the man said.
Mom snuffed out her cigarette in the ashtray. She cranked up her window and locked the doors with a dexterity I hadn’t seen from her in years. “Fat fucking chance,” she said.
The man smacked at the window and rattled the door handle. She punched the gas, and we weaved through the intersection, around his car, while he ran alongside us. Mom turned sharply and he lost his grip on the handle. I tracked him in my side mirror. Long tendrils of spit flew from his mouth as he stomped back to his car and began his pursuit. He had caught up to us by the time we hit the first stoplight.
“He’s right behind us,” I said. “Get away from him.”
“What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do?” Mom said. The engine groaned under her foot as she crossed into the wrong lane and ran the red light. We only got a black up the road before we got stopped by another red light, with him right behind us again. He laid on the horn, creating one long blare, while standing outside his car and flipping us off.
“Why do you always have to push things?” I said.
“This is not the time for playing the blame game.”
“Make him go away,” Taylor said.
“We’re trying,” I said but I was frozen with fear. Coop would’ve hopped out of the van and knocked the crap out of him. But me—I crawled back next to Taylor and made myself small.
“He’s walking toward us,” Mom said. “Stay down.”
“Go,” I said. “Run the fucking light.”
“I can’t,” Mom said. “We’re packed in this time.”
I crawled over the dog food and shopping bags and pulled the rear window curtains apart. The man was standing there, face a red ball of fury; pink, sweaty jowls flapping, tapping a heavy-duty flashlight against the small square window.
“You think I’ve never killed a kid before,” he said. I reached in a shopping bag looking for anything that might be useful. All I could find was my roll of Sprees.
The man smashed the back window with the butt of his flashlight. Glass flew at me and he reached his hand in through the window, fumbling for the door handle, just out of his reach. I scurried back toward Taylor. The man rapped the flashlight on the side of the van.
“Goddamnit, stay down,” Mom barked. I sunk back down by Taylor as Mom’s window shattered and the man pulled at the lock. Mom beat on his hand with her cane but he got the door pried open. “Get the fuck away from us,” she screamed and clawed at his face and gouged his eyes with her thumbs. He sunk his teeth into Mom’s hand. Taylor couldn’t help but match her scream with his own. My eardrums felt like they might explode.
I looked at the roll of Sprees I clutched in my hand. Then I heard a sharp whooshing hiss, like when the roller coaster ride is over and the bars unlock.
It was the man’s turn to scream. “You bitch, you pepper sprayed me!”
Mom kicked him in the chest and throttled him with her cane. His body thudded on the blacktop. The traffic light turned green. Mom slammed her door shut, and the tires barked. “You sure fucked with the wrong bitch today,” Mom shouted through her busted window. I scurried to the back of the van and peered behind us. The man scratched at his own eyes and flailed, punching and kicking at the hot blurred air, and grew smaller behind us.
Taylor ripped off his helmet. I gave him a hug, and told him we were safe now, he didn’t have to hide on the floor anymore.
“Do you need some candy, pookie?” Mom asked him. She picked a piece of glass out of her halter top and flicked it out the window.
He nodded. I snapped the rod of Sprees in half and gave Taylor a handful. He put a red one in his mouth and sucked on it for a few seconds. Then he crunched the disc with his back teeth and swallowed it. “Here,” he said, handing two yellows back to me. “I don’t like these.”
I put one in each cheek and let them dissolve.
“You good now, sweetie?” Mom said to Taylor.
He nodded and pinched the skin on my bicep. “I have my candy and I have my Ezra.”
“What should we do now?” I said. My heart thrummed against my sternum, still. “Go to the police station?”
“Nope.” Mom chuckled. “We’re going home. Half the cops here would be quite happy if that son of a bitch had killed me. They’ve hated me since we moved to this fucking cow pen.
Does anybody mind if I put on my music now?”
She lit a cigarette and turned on the Oldies station. She cranked the volume, drowning out the closing music to Days of Our Lives. She sang along to House of the Rising Sun, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.
When we got home, I carried all the shopping inside. Several of the bags had broken glass mixed in with them. Mom said she would shake all our new clothes out in the bathtub to get the glass out, but she never did. I would do it a couple weeks later when it became obvious it wouldn’t happen otherwise.
That night, she cooked us one of the good frozen pizzas with the rising crust and asked us to crawl in her waterbed for a family movie night. She swallowed a few pills, had a couple smokes, hugged me and Taylor and told us we were the most important things in the world to her. Then she crashed.
I lay there till Taylor’s grip on my arm loosened. Then I went out to the van. I cleaned out all the broken glass with the shop-vac and taped garbage bags over the busted-out windows. Around ten o’clock, a low-pressure front gusted in, on down from the Rockies. Lightning forked to the west like electric dandelion heads. Soon, it pissed down rain.
Coop’s truck buzzed up the lane not long after the first raindrop. I suspected I’d see him; it would soon be too wet to cut hay. He didn’t stay with us anymore. He’d check in with us, sure, and then get into it with Mom, before he shot over to the Sandpits, where his tent was pitched. We fished together over there, and I used the showers at the campground when our well water was especially skanky.
I crawled out of the van to greet him. He hit me on the arm and gave me a plug of Redman. We leaned against his truck spitting, feeling a rare rain wash over us. He told me a story about one of his crew hands who ran out of gas. Nobody answered his radio calls ‘cause he was always a dick, so he had to walk twelve miles all the way back to the pumps. I didn’t want to tell Coop our story from that day. But he eventually noticed the busted-out windows on the van.
“What in the cornbread hell?” he said. I told him everything, exactly how I remembered it. Coop didn’t have much sympathy for me. In fact, he got on my case. Said it was time I manned up now that he was working all the time.
“I was protecting Taylor,” I said. This was true, even though Coop’s criticism filled me with shame.
“I can’t be around all the time anymore, which means you need to look after everyone,” Coop said, towering over me like he had for as long as I’d known this life. Lightning strobed out west and lit up his face, hidden under his green Dekalb hat. He looked tired but terse. Eyes bloodshot, big bags underneath. Pupils like black frisbees. “Including Mom.”
“Shit. It was half her fault. Running her goddamned mouth, like always”
“Don’t matter. Still your mom. Still your job.”
“Coop. This guy, though. He was … different. Had these crazy blue eyes. Like actual crazy, you know? Like someone from Unsolved Mysteries.”
“Sonofabitches like that everywhere,” Coop said. “Mom’s kept you in a bubble most of your life. Shit. Maybe it needed to get popped.”
“You fucking seen this dump lately? Mom’s bubble is trying to kill me. I’m tired of living like this.”
“I know. I know. I hear you. Listen to me, though. Just keep your head down. Work on your grades like you’ve been. You’ll get out of here in a few more years.” Coop spat at my feet and poked me in my breastplate. It hurt like hell and made me feel small. “But no matter what you end up doing with your life,” Coop said, “even if you’re pushing papers, you need to learn how to push back.” He walloped me on the shoulder, and I fell sideways. I punched back at his shoulder, but he dodged my jab. “Shit,” he chuckled. “I’ve been driving a tractor for nearly thirty-six hours straight and you still can’t tag me. When are you going to man up? Huh?”
All the pain and anger and upset from my twelve years on this planet channeled through my fist—and the hardest hook I’ve ever thrown collided square with Coop’s jaw. He stumbled backwards into his truck and slid down onto the red dirt.
Normally, Coop would make sure he got the last, best lick in. Instead, he sat there, rubbing his haw, as the rain trickled down. I froze, ready for the full bloody rage of Coop. Instead, a smile overtook his face. “There’s hope for you yet,’ he said.
Coop picked himself up and fetched us two Lone Stars from the Styrofoam cooler in his truck bed. We drank them and listened to the thunder roll across the domed sky. Then he left.
*
A week later, I popped a couple of Mom’s Darvocets and smoked her Salems in the van while I watched TV. For years I’d given Mom shit about wasting her money on something that was killing her, but smoking made me feel alive in a bunch of ways nothing else did at that time. I hadn’t seen Cooper in a few days, since the alfalfa dried out.
After the Night Court theme finished, I turned down the volume on the late local news. The wind whooshed up over the plains. Sand and dirt pelted the sides of the van. Suddenly, a familiar face flashed on the TV screen and my heart dropped into my asshole. I cranked the volume dial. State police had captured a man suspected of killing eight female convenience store clerks across Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. All his victims were bound and shot execution-style. One in Garden City.
The face I would never forget now had a name: Greg Braun.
I climbed up the ladder on the back of the van and stretched out on the roof under the Milky Way. A pearl button moon rising over the swirling sand dunes. I let the moonlight wash through me, and I made a promise to myself as the stinging sand blasted my skin.
I would never cower again. To nobody. I wouldn’t let the Greg Brauns of the world push me around. I would never give up on myself, my dreams, like Mom did. And I would most certainly never give up on life entirely, like my dad did.
***
I set my phone face-down on the table. Shadows from the sugar maples in the backyard twitch across the kitchen window. I swirl my whiskey in its tulip glass.
I wonder if Greg Braun ever thought about me, that little scrawny boy from Kansas, while he sat in prison in Oklahoma all those years. Surely, he did, at least once or twice. Maybe he pictured me while the poison swam through his veins. Maybe all his earthly memories coursed through his brain as he crossed over to whatever comes next after this life. At the very least, he died knowing he didn’t get the best of Mom that day.
With time I’ve grown grateful we crossed paths. Since then—no matter who, or what, has tried to steamroll me—I’ve never backed down. Coop would vouch for me there, but he’s dead now too. Murdered by members of a criminal drug ring at age forty-six, a few years ago. He was ambushed and outmanned, but he didn’t go down without a fight. Of course he didn’t. He was my mother’s son.
Mom wasn’t perfect, and she created far more problems than she solved. She made life hard for Coop and me up until her own dying day, but she also fought for us, in the only ways she knew how to, once the pills took over her life.
I walk gently down the hallway and crack open the door to the girls’ room. They’re sleeping soundly on their bunk beds, The oldest, Vera, on top; Olive, my youngest on the bottom. Three Billy Goats Gruff gently murmurs through a smart speaker. Like Coop, I’m also my mother’s son. Anybody threatening my children would be living on borrowed time. Don’t let this wool cardigan fool you.
Back in the kitchen, I grab a roll of Sprees from the junk food drawer. Tear at the foil wrapper. The first one is yellow. Ditto the second. I pop the candies in my mouth and think of Taylor. He hated the yellows. A few months after the Greg Braun encounter, Taylor’s dad was awarded custody of him, after an anonymous report to Child Protective Services. I will go to the grave believing Taylor would still be alive if not for that. I guaran-goddamn-tee you he would have never been struck by a semi on my watch, even with all Mom’s bullshit.
I throw the pack of Sprees against the wall. Bright yellow discs scatter and pop across the countertops and floor. Olive calls out for me in the once-quiet night.
About the Author:
Casey DW Jones grew up on the high-desert plains of Southwest Kansas. He holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Kansas and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University, where he served as a fiction editor for Water~Stone Review. Casey’s fiction has appeared in Roanoke Review, Sundog Lit, Peatsmoke Journal, New Limestone Review, and elsewhere; and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best Small Fictions. A 2022-2023 fellow in the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series, and a creative copywriter by trade, Casey resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.