Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [49]
—Damn government, Lit said, working the cracker with elbow and shoulder action. Feeling all wretched because you fight for your country and then you come home wrung out to alleged peace, and they leave you to your own poor devices to find the daily fire. Sad times when heroes pay high money to bootleggers.
—Hell, I’ll do it for you, Bud said. I thought maybe you enjoyed the challenge.
He took the inhaler from Lit and dropped it on the concrete floor and stomped it flat. He stooped and picked the ribbon out of the bits of broken shell and flicked dirt off with a middle finger and then blew on it and handed it back to Lit.
Lit meticulously twiddled the paper into a perfect tight spiral, reflecting how he intended his thoughts to go for the rest of the day. Delicately, he placed the spiral on his tongue and swallowed, tasting the delicious eye-watering tang all the way down.
When his eyes quit watering, Lit said, Coffee’s not the same thing at all.
Bud said, When they make coffee illegal, you come to me. I’ll have it.
—For a price.
—Damn straight. Name something worth having that’s not got a price. The first rule of life is, you got to pay. In my opinion, the more that’s made illegal, the more capitalism works as it was intended.
—That doesn’t really move me one way or the other, Lit said.
—You know, you don’t need these inhalers. It’s not really my line of work, but I can get you pills if you want. White crosses and that kind of thing. Trucker stuff.
Lit glanced skyward, said his thanks to the divine light suddenly bathing him.
RIGHT AFTER HOOKING UP with Bud’s wonderful constant resupply of uppers, Lit stayed awake for three days and nights. Work hours, people driving through town five over got all kinds of angry barking shit right in their faces to go along with their speeding ticket. Later, about three in the morning, the TV test pattern accompanied by radio music seemed pretty fascinating after some beers cooled Lit down without having the power to put him all the way to sleep, which would have taken a fist of army downers to accomplish.
—Need me some no-go. Mucho, mucho no-go, Lit repeated to himself, until he found the rhythm in the words, and it seemed like a good start for the chorus to a country song, except you probably needed to figure a few more lines. And a bridge. Songs needed bridges, but Lit wasn’t certain what they were. He decided maybe Bud would be a good place to start looking for a cowriter. Bud looked pretty musical, especially his hair. And even if they couldn’t make up a hit song together, Bud could for sure get some downers.
CHAPTER 3
IT TOOK LUCE A WHILE to believe that the children were not mean, they were scared. Or, maybe, to hew closer to the harsh truth of a bad day, they were not just mean, they were also scared. The scared part was what they guarded against showing Luce or anybody else outside the pair of themselves. Luce thought of her new understanding as a hypothesis. They want to travel on, put an end to days where every moment begins in fear. Shift the load somewhere else. So they strike a wood match and hold its power between thumb and forefinger. Which leaves about five seconds to decide how best to be its agent. No wonder flammable things like nostalgic cheerleader outfits and wonderful old farmhouses got lit up and burned to ashes.
Give anger a furious voice, why not? The argument for finding joy in those strong blazing minutes of destruction was not lost on Luce. Afterward, though, nothing but a black circle in the green woods to show for it. And the after is what she couldn’t quit worrying about.
Left to the thoughts that arise from fire, maybe in fifteen years the children would be making everybody who brushed up against them scared or hurt or dead. End up in Central Prison, sitting on the wrong side of the green porthole, buckets of acid between their feet, eyes as blank as burnt holes in carpet. So, like prep for a