This is without a doubt the strangest story I've ever written. With Jack and Cyndi, I let the narrative stretch as far into the absurd as it felt it needed to go. The only editing I did was to ensure the story could be comprehended without any additional explanation from me. I feel that despite its absurdity, it retains its humanity. It was my most raw, most uninhibited experience writing anything - one in which I consciously related my own frailties with allegory.
Ever since I first saw the Broadway show Into the Woods, I've thought about writing my own sequel to Jack and the Beanstalk, one involving the magic-bean-buyer and the Giant's widow. It started out as a kid's story, but quickly grew into a serio-comic tragedy far more appropriate for adults. My wife has said I should craft an anthology of such "adult versions" of fairy-tale sequels. The first twenty pages are pasted below:
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JACK AND CYNDI
By Rod R. Surratt
Here’s how you know you’re an alcoholic. See the apothecary’s bottle of Day-Cure Cold and Flu on the bar-top in front of you - between the mixed nuts and the standee of signature cocktails? Its warning says: This elixir causes liver damage or death if more than three doses are combined with an alcoholic beverage. If you’re rationing half-doses of this orange syrup so you can fit in two fingers of whiskey this evening without dying, there you go, pal.
Now you took that medicine because drinking too much made you sick. Not nauseas - it gave you a cold. So when you sabotage Day-Cure with the same booze it’s trying to help you recover from, don’t be surprised if the bottle officially hates you.
“Once more. Please.”
You promised, Jack.
I twitch a little as Day-Cure responds; barely a whisper under the clinking glasses, the band’s echo, the chattering conversation. I’ve talked to myself for years - inevitable compulsion when friends grow weary of carrying you home - but never expected an answer.
“I know,” I whisper back. “Now’s different. Just fix me one more time, buddy.”
Don’t ‘buddy’ me, all right? Friends don’t do each other like this. It’s not just the rot-gut we’re fixing; you’re still poisoned by that green sludge. That’s why you’re sick.” With alarm I realize Day-Cure hasn’t spoken. The voice is coming from my body - a resonance in my chest, sounding tired, irritated... and female. Why’d you drink that gorpy trash?
“Thought it would help.”
Four nights earlier I visited the apothecary - the one who gave me my Day-Cure this morning - and whined about my lack of inspiration as a painter. I needed a muse. From his battered cabinet, Jerry pulled a trapezoid-shaped bottle which gurgled as he hefted it.
“This has inspired artists for generations. Surprised you never heard of it.”
“What’s it called?”
“Obsenj.”
“So gimme a sample.”
“No-no.” He pouched his lower lip, gripped the rail on the hexagonal counter of what he called Mixing Slab A.
“You wouldn’t be able to ride back to your own province. Take it at home. It causes visions.”
“Oh, visions of course.” I rolled my eyes, nipped from my flask. “Convenient, Jerry.”
“I guarantee it or a full refund. You will see something others don’t.”
“Shooting stars?”
Jerry’s jowls naturally pulled down the corners of his mouth, and if he ever found me amusing, he never let on.
“That wouldn’t be inspiring, now would it?”
“How much, shyster?”
“Forty gold, one-twenty-five silver.”
“Bit steep for a man with his hand in the King’s pocket. Livin’ the high life on the people’s tax money.”
“What are you gonna start a petition? His Majesty pays for expenses, not luxuries.”
I pulled the grocery money from my pocket with eerie familiarity. Mom had sent me to buy milk and meats for meals this week and I’d squandered such funds before. “You’ll take eighty-five Queen Silver, won’t you Jer?”
He cupped his hands like a hobo pleading alms. “Promise you’ll go easy with it. It’s really potent.”
Like telling a bee to go easy on the flowers.
So! Obsenj! Let the inspiration begin! Its color iguana green, the instructions said to melt sugar in a spoon over the glass, which changed the taste from rubbing alcohol to black licorice mouthwash. Took a sip, dappled my palette and stood before the blank canvas.
“White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge...,” my dead, post-impressionist mentor voiced inside. “To bring order to the whole - through design. Composition.” And pure genius Jack, which I have and you don’t.
“C’mon George, you misanthrope. Invade my hands.”
But dead George didn’t invade and I saw no visions. Not even a change in tint.
“Thanks, Jer.” I doubled the Obsenj dose in my mug and sank it. Still nothing. After three glasses, only a familiar buzz.
But that night…oh that night, after a scuffle with Mom over the “lost” grocery money and a milk-less dinner of lamb and carrots, I tossed in my single bed in the loft and Obsenj took hold. Jer failed to mention the visions appear only because you’re deathly ill.
“Why’d you drink that?” I asked aloud. Sweat ran in streams. Chills sent me into a convulsion, no matter how many quilts I pulled around myself. The Body fighting to push the poison out through my pores, because nothing else was working.
It looked and smelled like insecticide.
My stomach gurgled loud and painfully, as if my guts were struggling to free themselves from entanglement in barbed wire. Above, the wind rattled the triangular slope of the rafters so hard, even the pots that lined the loft to catch rain vibrated.
“I’m not wrong for wanting to be inspired.”
No, Jack. In fact, you’re a saint for using Mom’s money to feed your addiction. And you’re a martyr, not a sucker, for trading a dairy cow for ‘magic’ beans, then squandering a fortune with gambling debt. Money that could've given your long-suffering mother a better life.
“The beans worked,” I stuttered, my body shaking so hard my neck cracked as I contorted and writhed. Poison coursing through my veins. “It’s not my fault. Jerry -”
Right. Blame the pusher, who warned you not to take too much. As I voided everything in my stomach from both directions like a man hit by a cannonball, I realized the worst part of the chills: they had nothing to do with feeling cold. The quilts remedied nothing. I began to grunt and moan in agony.
Mom mounted the stairs, sighing in her resigned way. “You have to do that so loud?”
“Mom. I’m dying.”
The flame of my bedside candle stretched her shadow across the wall into the familiar size of a lady Giant. Even within her silhouette, I saw her mouth twitch in disgust. “So melodramatic, Jack. What’s it this time?!”
“I can’t stop shaking. I’m gonna snap my spine.”
“Yeah - what’ve you been drinking?”
“Nothing. It’s some kind of bug.”
“Right. A worm in the bottle.”
“Please do something.”
“Hm, what do I have? Nope. All outta milk. What’s that smell?!”
“I had an accident.”
“You are an accident.”
“Water. Please.”
She descended, returning with a mug and held it to my mouth. I sputtered, shaking, spraying it in her face.
“Thanks for sharing.”
“I can’t hold still.”
Mom’s eyes fell and her veneer of resentment followed. She ran her fingers through my soaked hair. “My God, son. You’ve reverted to infancy. Why are you killing yourself like this?” A choked sob and sniffle. Her tearing eyes glimmered. “Is life with me so terrible you choose suicide, too?”
“I’m not leaving. I just want to be inspired.”
She kissed my forehead, then reached for the sheets, which I grabbed in a trembling fist.
“No. Just more water.”
After she left, I had my vision, as useless as a crippled steed. Eyes blurry, mouth ajar, leaking everywhere, I felt a draft and saw a huge hole spread in the ceiling with a crash of splintering wood - a full quarter of the room. Sprouting up from the carpeting...the beanstalk.
One seriously ugly memory. Now, back at Remy’s Roadside Tavern, four days later, I sit at the bar and watch Day-Cure glare at me with disgust. It had gone to work immediately, coating my stomach, sealing rips and tears. Must’ve felt like making beds in a burning house with all the whiskey I poured in to wash away repairs.
But for now I drink only tonic water, not raising my head to the other patrons. They all know this twenty-three-year-old degenerate gambler waiting for his loan shark, as the sun sets like molasses outside and the wild peacocks begin their twilight warbling howl.
Behind me, green-felt gaming tables give way to the dance floor and stage, where Denny’s Troubadours fill the place with fluttery music. Pudgy, brick-faced farmers slap dominoes down on gnarled hay-crates, their stools nudged by the rumps of gyrating couples.
Outside, I hear the whinny of someone hitching a tired mare. Somebody who rides their steed too far without water, which can only be Gia. And in the lady strides, all cleavage and hourglass swagger, throwing both swing doors open before her, muddy spurs clinking on dry-rot boards, her short, burgundy hair pulled back in tight twin crown-braids. Little platinum chains, with sunflower seed-size diamonds inlaid in every loop, run from
each nostril to each ear lobe – extravagant aesthetic, sure. But it also looks like reins attached to her face.
I meet her eyes - salient under black eyeshadow, which she wears to hide the dark circles of insomnia - and Gia drops into the chair beside me.
“Sore throat, Jack?” A heavy breath in my ear as she taps Day-Cure with one jade fingernail.
“No, I just keep it around in case I run into somebody who makes me sick.”
“Anyone particular?”
“Y’now, one of those pig-faced pincushions Tess Rothman calls Enforcers.”
“No need to charm me, love, I work here.” Gia waves two fingers to signal Remy, but he has his back to us, waving away gnats to pluck a mushy, long-marinated olive from his condiment boats for a Dirty Martini. He gives the olive a spit and polish, wiping its dead bugs on his sweat-stained cuffs. Gia whistles and he pours her rot-gut and ginger into a highball. “And if past is precedent, you don’t remember how deep you are in the hole.”
“Number doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, you know I don’t have it.”
“No, you don’t look like a guy with thirty-two hundred Queen Silver on him.”
“I don’t suppose Rothman would consider indentured servitude.”
“Tess Rothman doesn’t need slaves, and drunks like you aren’t worth much for labor.”
“Right. Who needs a servant when she’s got a prize pony like you to run her errands.”
“I do far more than run errands. And if you had the eyes to spot a prize pony, I wouldn’t be here.”
She knows me well. But Gia conveniently forgets the three times I bailed her out of her own Blackjack debts - back when we played the same tables and she still went by Jay Childs; just as she forgets the night she fell asleep in my arms after hours at Remy’s in front of the fireplace, when her hair still smelled of the Strawberry Chardonnay in her shampoo and not her three-tone hair dye. Long before she became Tess Rothman’s Chief Enforcer or pierced her pretty face in eleven places to join the Ash People cult.
Gia looks up as Remy fills two beer pints with Red-Horn. Coming off the tap with its low-pressure rusty pipes, it sounds like a toothless old man retching.
“And before you get all devil-may-care, do-what-you-have-to, Gia on me, realize taking your life is only the first step if you can’t pay, Jack.”
“Appropriately vague threats from someone whose very name sounds like indecision.”
“Don’t you think Rothman knows death threats are meaningless to someone who has nothing to live for? Forty-eight hours, smart-ass, I’ll dispatch you and your debt falls to next of kin.” This straightens my back and Gia catches it, answering with wide eyes. “I don’t want to do that. Your mother must be a patient woman to put up with a misfit, two-time loser investment-toilet like yourself. I mean that sincerely.”
“I admit to some poor choices. Thankfully, none of them involved puncturing my face.”
She grips my free hand on the bar top - long fingers dry and calloused. “We’ll auction your mother’s house first. I doubt it will fetch even a thousand. With luck she’ll end up with room and board as a laundress in a sanitarium, cathouse. But she’ll be carrying the remainder of your debt, plus the vig. And be stuck there. Ask yourself if she should suffer any further because her son squandered a fortune in smelted gold backing the wrong horse ad nauseum.”
I pull my hand away and Gia gives my shoulder a neighborly fist-nudge. “Don’t get mad yet...Tess isn’t wholly without heart.”
“Here I thought this was her good side.”
“We don’t wanna hassle with the real estate. Long term investments are a pain in the ass. Look what happened to our investment with you, right? I convinced boss-lady to approve this wager: you come up with half, in forty-eight hours, sixteen hundred, we’ll call it a wash - glad to be rid of you. I’ll put you down easy and you have my word your mother won’t be touched.”
“‘Put me down easy?’”
“You’re eight weeks delinquent, love.”
“Yeah, after fifteen years of her collecting money from me. That’s got to count for something.”
Gia leans in. A confidante’s whisper between two people who hate each other. “C’mon, man. You know what a tight-ass she is since her boy died. My hands are tied. There’s simply no version of this that ends with you getting out alive. Tess can cut the debt in half or spare your life, but both at the same time?” She curls her upper lip. “Bit too much mercy to uphold a reputation. I’ll make it clean so Mom can have an open casket. And hey, wouldn’t you rather leave this world knowing you did good by her, just once?”
I nod, my chest constricting with resentment. Gia’s not just tempting fate with those chains that drape her face in a reverse double-arc. I have to clench fists on my glass to keep from tearing at her profile.
That’d be my worst mistake so far. I’d seen her punish delinquents before. Give you far more than a snuff and an eye jammy. Last guy, she dry-gulched the windpipe, kicked the stool out, dragged him by the short and curlies to the supply closet, her thin but sinewy arms bulging against the man’s weight, chains and spurs jangling with every backwards step.
Gia swivels in her chair, sipping whiskey-ginger. “So who can you tap, Giant-Killer? I know - make it fall from the sky again, like you did last year!”
I’ve heard this tired joke in reference to the giant and beanstalk a dozen times since the big guy fell. “‘Least I played a hand at a fortune. Takes more guts than a luxurious thug career, putting people ‘down easy.’”
“Oh, I love it!” Gia laughed, chewing her ice. “The barfly’s hero story! Now Jack’s a hero for being a burglar, then creating an eight-point-five earthquake and a biohazard!”
“Nobody measured any earthquake! That’s media hype and spin.”
“No, you’re right! That’s not the best part. The best was destroying your stairway to heaven - which would’ve made you rich, by the way -”
“Right, better to let him step off carefully and stomp the whole province into obliv - ”
She rides right over me. “Far wealthier than a melted-down tooth filling.”
“Cuff link!”
“And send a body of such mass crashing down, it creates an uninhabitable gaseous fallout and an immobile corpse that rots in the sun over a stretch of three square miles!”
Gia pinches her pierced nose, vomiting air. Her face chains rattle like a frantic convict in a dungeon. Remy gives me a sympathetic smirk. “You’re right, Jack.,” Gia says.” I’ll never achieve such greatness. I’m actually in your debt. We all are. You gave this kingdom the greatest fertilizer since bone meal and egg shells, and aside from a wasteland -”
“For someone so sure about death threats,” I cut in,” you should be cautious around a man with nothing to lose. It’s a long ride back to your border and you don’t know this province as I do. We done here?”
Gia upturns her highball and stands, swatting me on the back. “You bring it, love. Find Mom’s best steak knife and carve me a new smile, ear to ear. That’d be the highlight of my boring week. See you in two days.” She tosses a silver up on the counter. “That’s for me and whatever the brave hero has tonight, Remy. He’ll be bloated and slurring within the hour.”
She strides out, but I follow her ten minutes later. I have no intention of drinking on her dollar. Outside Remy’s, under a sliver moon in the dark, I lean my head against my gelding and feel a ticking clock in my chest where The Body spoke just hours before. My stomach feels sideways, quivering.
Feel that, Jack? The Body asks. You’ve felt it all your life but you don’t listen. Not to me. You listen to that voice in your head, with its merry-go-round of anxieties and regrets - always caught up in the future or the past. I sense The Body shaking her head. You know that voice – your ‘mind’ - couldn’t do what I do for five seconds? Left up to you, every perfect system I maintain, that you pollute, would collapse before you gave the first order!
“You’re starting to sound arrogant.”
One of us has to compensate for your bottomless self-pity.
Before Dad leapt off the barn loft with a noose around his neck, he said the best death was ‘the unexpected.’ I’d never let Gia see me beg, but if I’m to join Dad in the plowed-earth plots behind the house, I don’t want to see death coming. Don’t want to count the hours until I see Gia again, or see the contempt in her eyes that says: I knew you wouldn’t run. Because you have no one and nowhere to run to.
“Maybe I do,” I whisper to the horse I’ve never bothered to name.
A forty-minute ride later, straining to see the path between the Tamaracks under thin moonlight, I hammer my fist against the door of Jerry’s three-room winter cabin. Here, on a royal budget, he crafts faster-burning gunpowder, combat gas, and King Bartholomew’s highest priority: single-malt whiskey.
The door flies open and a hand flies out - not to shake, but to grab a fistful of my shirt and pull me up to my toes on the landing.
A head emerges from the dark, a foot taller than my own. Hired muscle - a tribal-tatted juggernaut named Cameron, provided by His Majesty, like Jerry’s two female ‘assistants,’ to protect the royal investment.
“What are you doin’ knockin’ like the goddamn constable?! You woke everybody up!”
“I’m Jerry’s best customer. I need to see him.”
“Put him down, Cam.” Jerry sighs behind him, and an oil lamp flares up beside the apothecary’s stocky, hunched form in pajamas. “Sorry he woke you. Go back to bed.”
“You know the protocol,” Cam sniffs, setting me down. “I monitor all transactions for your protection.”
“I’m sure whatever business Jack Hubbard wishes to transact at this hour is vital and private. Of no political significance to the Royal Family.”
“See?” I interject. “I’m his best customer.”
“Most steady customer maybe. You’re not anyone’s best anything.”
Cameron sniggers and his shoulders go lax with contempt. “Can’t do it, Jer. I’ve got my own commitments.”
Jerry pulls a key from his pocket. “The king’s eyes don’t breach these walls. Make an exception in exchange for a laced cigar from the lock-box.”
Alone again among the counters and shelves of what Jer calls Mix Station A, glass rectangles on walls, full of roots
and dried skins, my dealer fills two coffee cups from the pot his girls keep fresh and full.
“You read my mind.” I sip it nearly scalding.
“Wish I could, kid. I’d fill up whatever hole you got in ya so you’d stop knocking on my door. I don’t need your business enough to meet you in my jammies and slip-ons.”
“What about your luxuries?”
“I somehow doubt that’s what you came to bring me.”
I nod. Even a shyster like Jerry deserves better than the tip-toeing sycophant approach after hours. “I need help.”
“Tell me about it. I’m out of ideas. Actually, don’t tell me. The story’s getting stale.”
“One last time. Whatever happens, I guarantee you’ll never see me again after tonight.”
“Is it rude to say that’s a relief? What - you want me to put you out of our misery? Pity isn’t gonna drive me to charity, kid, and I doubt you’ve got anything - animal or mineral - left to barter with.”
I pull the hemp-braided wine bottle from my coat pocket - one I’d stored in my saddlebag until now for immediate celebration on that pipe-dream day when I cashed in the big winner.
Jerry smirks. “Oh god. Red Topher Mattix Year Four? You weren’t lying.”
“Last of its kind. And it’s peaking.”
“You think I don’t know that? How much do you want?”
I anticipate a long transaction here. “Sixteen hundred.”
“And the bottle comes with a vineyard and a villa, right?”
“You gift wrap this for the king, he’ll double your budget, with perks.”
“My budget and perks under Bart are fine. And I don’t have sixteen hundred of his money or mine, even if I wanted to pay eight times what that bottle’s worth.”
It was worth a shot. But then I see Mom at dinner, drinking lemon water instead of milk. Spooning soup into my mouth when my hands shake too much to hold a spoon. Whenever I try to dry out and fail. Mom, who never gives up hope that the latest remedy will be my last.
“Waste of time for both of us, then. So long, Jer.”
Jerry grabs my wrist with one bloated, pink hand. “Wait a second. What did you mean – never see you again? This trouble you’re in. It’s gonna get you killed? Because I don’t need your death on my conscience.”
“It’s a foregone conclusion. I just want to protect my kin from my debts on the way out.”
“If you’re gonna die anyway, you won’t mind the trouble this… potential remedy will bring you. Gimme the Mattix.” I comply, and Jerry retrieves a handful of what sounds like coins from a ceramic dish within the highest mounted glass box behind him. “Open your hand.”
At first my mind refuses to recognize what he drops in my palm. It’s far too absurd. “Oh my god.”
“Recognize those?”
Three beans, large as acorns, bulging purple like beets. “You said the first three were all you had.”
“And I lied, like you did when the King’s Guard interrogated you about where you got those first three. You could’ve buried me. What’d you say?”
“‘Found ‘em growing wild among the chickpeas, ‘Majesty. I hoped they’d produce decent-size tubers after our disappointing harvest.’”
Jerry spikes our coffees with dark cream liqueur. “That shocked the hell outta me. I thought for sure you’d squeal and we’d both be decapitated.”
“Bart had to keep me around for posterity - historical record.”
“You did your time like a man and kept your mouth shut - that’s the only thing I like about you. Never said my name toshave a single day. That’s why I’ll trust you with this now. That, and you’ll be dead in two days. Now drink up, good luck and get out. Shoot for early morning this time – the winter mist should obscure the stalk until noon. Make sure you chop this one down whether someone’s chasing you or not.”
I set my coffee down, overcome by a desire to feel sober. “He had a wife. That’s all I remember.”
“What?”
“I remember the climb and the break-in, but nothing else. Not until he was chasing me down that stalk.”
“Near-death experiences can do that. We block it out.”
Actually, the adrenaline of running from clutching hands had sobered me up as I fled. The rest of my sojourn in what Mom called The World Above had been a familiar drunken blackout. But as Jer says, that story has long grown stale.
Clutching the beans in a fist on Jerry’s landing, sliver moon looming over me with its sideways smile like an escaped lunatic, I promise myself: I’ll stay sober for my second trip up there. Mom deserves that much. Sober, and to hell with the shakes and tearing eyes that comes with it, the flood of irritating color and clarity that spills into the world after eight hours without a drink, the stuttering heartbeat and tremors that arrive after twelve, or the voice in the head that flails around like a mustang trapped in a burning barn at hour fourteen.
“Soldier through it.”
The Body sounds uncharacteristically tentative. You know Gia’s setting you up, right? She has no reason to give you forty-eight hours.
“I know,” I say, having no idea what Gia’s trap might be. “What do you think?”
____
(*Please contact me if you'd like to finish this story. I'll send you the PDF.)
Ever since I first saw the Broadway show Into the Woods, I've thought about writing my own sequel to Jack and the Beanstalk, one involving the magic-bean-buyer and the Giant's widow. It started out as a kid's story, but quickly grew into a serio-comic tragedy far more appropriate for adults. My wife has said I should craft an anthology of such "adult versions" of fairy-tale sequels. The first twenty pages are pasted below:
------------
JACK AND CYNDI
By Rod R. Surratt
Here’s how you know you’re an alcoholic. See the apothecary’s bottle of Day-Cure Cold and Flu on the bar-top in front of you - between the mixed nuts and the standee of signature cocktails? Its warning says: This elixir causes liver damage or death if more than three doses are combined with an alcoholic beverage. If you’re rationing half-doses of this orange syrup so you can fit in two fingers of whiskey this evening without dying, there you go, pal.
Now you took that medicine because drinking too much made you sick. Not nauseas - it gave you a cold. So when you sabotage Day-Cure with the same booze it’s trying to help you recover from, don’t be surprised if the bottle officially hates you.
“Once more. Please.”
You promised, Jack.
I twitch a little as Day-Cure responds; barely a whisper under the clinking glasses, the band’s echo, the chattering conversation. I’ve talked to myself for years - inevitable compulsion when friends grow weary of carrying you home - but never expected an answer.
“I know,” I whisper back. “Now’s different. Just fix me one more time, buddy.”
Don’t ‘buddy’ me, all right? Friends don’t do each other like this. It’s not just the rot-gut we’re fixing; you’re still poisoned by that green sludge. That’s why you’re sick.” With alarm I realize Day-Cure hasn’t spoken. The voice is coming from my body - a resonance in my chest, sounding tired, irritated... and female. Why’d you drink that gorpy trash?
“Thought it would help.”
Four nights earlier I visited the apothecary - the one who gave me my Day-Cure this morning - and whined about my lack of inspiration as a painter. I needed a muse. From his battered cabinet, Jerry pulled a trapezoid-shaped bottle which gurgled as he hefted it.
“This has inspired artists for generations. Surprised you never heard of it.”
“What’s it called?”
“Obsenj.”
“So gimme a sample.”
“No-no.” He pouched his lower lip, gripped the rail on the hexagonal counter of what he called Mixing Slab A.
“You wouldn’t be able to ride back to your own province. Take it at home. It causes visions.”
“Oh, visions of course.” I rolled my eyes, nipped from my flask. “Convenient, Jerry.”
“I guarantee it or a full refund. You will see something others don’t.”
“Shooting stars?”
Jerry’s jowls naturally pulled down the corners of his mouth, and if he ever found me amusing, he never let on.
“That wouldn’t be inspiring, now would it?”
“How much, shyster?”
“Forty gold, one-twenty-five silver.”
“Bit steep for a man with his hand in the King’s pocket. Livin’ the high life on the people’s tax money.”
“What are you gonna start a petition? His Majesty pays for expenses, not luxuries.”
I pulled the grocery money from my pocket with eerie familiarity. Mom had sent me to buy milk and meats for meals this week and I’d squandered such funds before. “You’ll take eighty-five Queen Silver, won’t you Jer?”
He cupped his hands like a hobo pleading alms. “Promise you’ll go easy with it. It’s really potent.”
Like telling a bee to go easy on the flowers.
So! Obsenj! Let the inspiration begin! Its color iguana green, the instructions said to melt sugar in a spoon over the glass, which changed the taste from rubbing alcohol to black licorice mouthwash. Took a sip, dappled my palette and stood before the blank canvas.
“White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge...,” my dead, post-impressionist mentor voiced inside. “To bring order to the whole - through design. Composition.” And pure genius Jack, which I have and you don’t.
“C’mon George, you misanthrope. Invade my hands.”
But dead George didn’t invade and I saw no visions. Not even a change in tint.
“Thanks, Jer.” I doubled the Obsenj dose in my mug and sank it. Still nothing. After three glasses, only a familiar buzz.
But that night…oh that night, after a scuffle with Mom over the “lost” grocery money and a milk-less dinner of lamb and carrots, I tossed in my single bed in the loft and Obsenj took hold. Jer failed to mention the visions appear only because you’re deathly ill.
“Why’d you drink that?” I asked aloud. Sweat ran in streams. Chills sent me into a convulsion, no matter how many quilts I pulled around myself. The Body fighting to push the poison out through my pores, because nothing else was working.
It looked and smelled like insecticide.
My stomach gurgled loud and painfully, as if my guts were struggling to free themselves from entanglement in barbed wire. Above, the wind rattled the triangular slope of the rafters so hard, even the pots that lined the loft to catch rain vibrated.
“I’m not wrong for wanting to be inspired.”
No, Jack. In fact, you’re a saint for using Mom’s money to feed your addiction. And you’re a martyr, not a sucker, for trading a dairy cow for ‘magic’ beans, then squandering a fortune with gambling debt. Money that could've given your long-suffering mother a better life.
“The beans worked,” I stuttered, my body shaking so hard my neck cracked as I contorted and writhed. Poison coursing through my veins. “It’s not my fault. Jerry -”
Right. Blame the pusher, who warned you not to take too much. As I voided everything in my stomach from both directions like a man hit by a cannonball, I realized the worst part of the chills: they had nothing to do with feeling cold. The quilts remedied nothing. I began to grunt and moan in agony.
Mom mounted the stairs, sighing in her resigned way. “You have to do that so loud?”
“Mom. I’m dying.”
The flame of my bedside candle stretched her shadow across the wall into the familiar size of a lady Giant. Even within her silhouette, I saw her mouth twitch in disgust. “So melodramatic, Jack. What’s it this time?!”
“I can’t stop shaking. I’m gonna snap my spine.”
“Yeah - what’ve you been drinking?”
“Nothing. It’s some kind of bug.”
“Right. A worm in the bottle.”
“Please do something.”
“Hm, what do I have? Nope. All outta milk. What’s that smell?!”
“I had an accident.”
“You are an accident.”
“Water. Please.”
She descended, returning with a mug and held it to my mouth. I sputtered, shaking, spraying it in her face.
“Thanks for sharing.”
“I can’t hold still.”
Mom’s eyes fell and her veneer of resentment followed. She ran her fingers through my soaked hair. “My God, son. You’ve reverted to infancy. Why are you killing yourself like this?” A choked sob and sniffle. Her tearing eyes glimmered. “Is life with me so terrible you choose suicide, too?”
“I’m not leaving. I just want to be inspired.”
She kissed my forehead, then reached for the sheets, which I grabbed in a trembling fist.
“No. Just more water.”
After she left, I had my vision, as useless as a crippled steed. Eyes blurry, mouth ajar, leaking everywhere, I felt a draft and saw a huge hole spread in the ceiling with a crash of splintering wood - a full quarter of the room. Sprouting up from the carpeting...the beanstalk.
One seriously ugly memory. Now, back at Remy’s Roadside Tavern, four days later, I sit at the bar and watch Day-Cure glare at me with disgust. It had gone to work immediately, coating my stomach, sealing rips and tears. Must’ve felt like making beds in a burning house with all the whiskey I poured in to wash away repairs.
But for now I drink only tonic water, not raising my head to the other patrons. They all know this twenty-three-year-old degenerate gambler waiting for his loan shark, as the sun sets like molasses outside and the wild peacocks begin their twilight warbling howl.
Behind me, green-felt gaming tables give way to the dance floor and stage, where Denny’s Troubadours fill the place with fluttery music. Pudgy, brick-faced farmers slap dominoes down on gnarled hay-crates, their stools nudged by the rumps of gyrating couples.
Outside, I hear the whinny of someone hitching a tired mare. Somebody who rides their steed too far without water, which can only be Gia. And in the lady strides, all cleavage and hourglass swagger, throwing both swing doors open before her, muddy spurs clinking on dry-rot boards, her short, burgundy hair pulled back in tight twin crown-braids. Little platinum chains, with sunflower seed-size diamonds inlaid in every loop, run from
each nostril to each ear lobe – extravagant aesthetic, sure. But it also looks like reins attached to her face.
I meet her eyes - salient under black eyeshadow, which she wears to hide the dark circles of insomnia - and Gia drops into the chair beside me.
“Sore throat, Jack?” A heavy breath in my ear as she taps Day-Cure with one jade fingernail.
“No, I just keep it around in case I run into somebody who makes me sick.”
“Anyone particular?”
“Y’now, one of those pig-faced pincushions Tess Rothman calls Enforcers.”
“No need to charm me, love, I work here.” Gia waves two fingers to signal Remy, but he has his back to us, waving away gnats to pluck a mushy, long-marinated olive from his condiment boats for a Dirty Martini. He gives the olive a spit and polish, wiping its dead bugs on his sweat-stained cuffs. Gia whistles and he pours her rot-gut and ginger into a highball. “And if past is precedent, you don’t remember how deep you are in the hole.”
“Number doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, you know I don’t have it.”
“No, you don’t look like a guy with thirty-two hundred Queen Silver on him.”
“I don’t suppose Rothman would consider indentured servitude.”
“Tess Rothman doesn’t need slaves, and drunks like you aren’t worth much for labor.”
“Right. Who needs a servant when she’s got a prize pony like you to run her errands.”
“I do far more than run errands. And if you had the eyes to spot a prize pony, I wouldn’t be here.”
She knows me well. But Gia conveniently forgets the three times I bailed her out of her own Blackjack debts - back when we played the same tables and she still went by Jay Childs; just as she forgets the night she fell asleep in my arms after hours at Remy’s in front of the fireplace, when her hair still smelled of the Strawberry Chardonnay in her shampoo and not her three-tone hair dye. Long before she became Tess Rothman’s Chief Enforcer or pierced her pretty face in eleven places to join the Ash People cult.
Gia looks up as Remy fills two beer pints with Red-Horn. Coming off the tap with its low-pressure rusty pipes, it sounds like a toothless old man retching.
“And before you get all devil-may-care, do-what-you-have-to, Gia on me, realize taking your life is only the first step if you can’t pay, Jack.”
“Appropriately vague threats from someone whose very name sounds like indecision.”
“Don’t you think Rothman knows death threats are meaningless to someone who has nothing to live for? Forty-eight hours, smart-ass, I’ll dispatch you and your debt falls to next of kin.” This straightens my back and Gia catches it, answering with wide eyes. “I don’t want to do that. Your mother must be a patient woman to put up with a misfit, two-time loser investment-toilet like yourself. I mean that sincerely.”
“I admit to some poor choices. Thankfully, none of them involved puncturing my face.”
She grips my free hand on the bar top - long fingers dry and calloused. “We’ll auction your mother’s house first. I doubt it will fetch even a thousand. With luck she’ll end up with room and board as a laundress in a sanitarium, cathouse. But she’ll be carrying the remainder of your debt, plus the vig. And be stuck there. Ask yourself if she should suffer any further because her son squandered a fortune in smelted gold backing the wrong horse ad nauseum.”
I pull my hand away and Gia gives my shoulder a neighborly fist-nudge. “Don’t get mad yet...Tess isn’t wholly without heart.”
“Here I thought this was her good side.”
“We don’t wanna hassle with the real estate. Long term investments are a pain in the ass. Look what happened to our investment with you, right? I convinced boss-lady to approve this wager: you come up with half, in forty-eight hours, sixteen hundred, we’ll call it a wash - glad to be rid of you. I’ll put you down easy and you have my word your mother won’t be touched.”
“‘Put me down easy?’”
“You’re eight weeks delinquent, love.”
“Yeah, after fifteen years of her collecting money from me. That’s got to count for something.”
Gia leans in. A confidante’s whisper between two people who hate each other. “C’mon, man. You know what a tight-ass she is since her boy died. My hands are tied. There’s simply no version of this that ends with you getting out alive. Tess can cut the debt in half or spare your life, but both at the same time?” She curls her upper lip. “Bit too much mercy to uphold a reputation. I’ll make it clean so Mom can have an open casket. And hey, wouldn’t you rather leave this world knowing you did good by her, just once?”
I nod, my chest constricting with resentment. Gia’s not just tempting fate with those chains that drape her face in a reverse double-arc. I have to clench fists on my glass to keep from tearing at her profile.
That’d be my worst mistake so far. I’d seen her punish delinquents before. Give you far more than a snuff and an eye jammy. Last guy, she dry-gulched the windpipe, kicked the stool out, dragged him by the short and curlies to the supply closet, her thin but sinewy arms bulging against the man’s weight, chains and spurs jangling with every backwards step.
Gia swivels in her chair, sipping whiskey-ginger. “So who can you tap, Giant-Killer? I know - make it fall from the sky again, like you did last year!”
I’ve heard this tired joke in reference to the giant and beanstalk a dozen times since the big guy fell. “‘Least I played a hand at a fortune. Takes more guts than a luxurious thug career, putting people ‘down easy.’”
“Oh, I love it!” Gia laughed, chewing her ice. “The barfly’s hero story! Now Jack’s a hero for being a burglar, then creating an eight-point-five earthquake and a biohazard!”
“Nobody measured any earthquake! That’s media hype and spin.”
“No, you’re right! That’s not the best part. The best was destroying your stairway to heaven - which would’ve made you rich, by the way -”
“Right, better to let him step off carefully and stomp the whole province into obliv - ”
She rides right over me. “Far wealthier than a melted-down tooth filling.”
“Cuff link!”
“And send a body of such mass crashing down, it creates an uninhabitable gaseous fallout and an immobile corpse that rots in the sun over a stretch of three square miles!”
Gia pinches her pierced nose, vomiting air. Her face chains rattle like a frantic convict in a dungeon. Remy gives me a sympathetic smirk. “You’re right, Jack.,” Gia says.” I’ll never achieve such greatness. I’m actually in your debt. We all are. You gave this kingdom the greatest fertilizer since bone meal and egg shells, and aside from a wasteland -”
“For someone so sure about death threats,” I cut in,” you should be cautious around a man with nothing to lose. It’s a long ride back to your border and you don’t know this province as I do. We done here?”
Gia upturns her highball and stands, swatting me on the back. “You bring it, love. Find Mom’s best steak knife and carve me a new smile, ear to ear. That’d be the highlight of my boring week. See you in two days.” She tosses a silver up on the counter. “That’s for me and whatever the brave hero has tonight, Remy. He’ll be bloated and slurring within the hour.”
She strides out, but I follow her ten minutes later. I have no intention of drinking on her dollar. Outside Remy’s, under a sliver moon in the dark, I lean my head against my gelding and feel a ticking clock in my chest where The Body spoke just hours before. My stomach feels sideways, quivering.
Feel that, Jack? The Body asks. You’ve felt it all your life but you don’t listen. Not to me. You listen to that voice in your head, with its merry-go-round of anxieties and regrets - always caught up in the future or the past. I sense The Body shaking her head. You know that voice – your ‘mind’ - couldn’t do what I do for five seconds? Left up to you, every perfect system I maintain, that you pollute, would collapse before you gave the first order!
“You’re starting to sound arrogant.”
One of us has to compensate for your bottomless self-pity.
Before Dad leapt off the barn loft with a noose around his neck, he said the best death was ‘the unexpected.’ I’d never let Gia see me beg, but if I’m to join Dad in the plowed-earth plots behind the house, I don’t want to see death coming. Don’t want to count the hours until I see Gia again, or see the contempt in her eyes that says: I knew you wouldn’t run. Because you have no one and nowhere to run to.
“Maybe I do,” I whisper to the horse I’ve never bothered to name.
A forty-minute ride later, straining to see the path between the Tamaracks under thin moonlight, I hammer my fist against the door of Jerry’s three-room winter cabin. Here, on a royal budget, he crafts faster-burning gunpowder, combat gas, and King Bartholomew’s highest priority: single-malt whiskey.
The door flies open and a hand flies out - not to shake, but to grab a fistful of my shirt and pull me up to my toes on the landing.
A head emerges from the dark, a foot taller than my own. Hired muscle - a tribal-tatted juggernaut named Cameron, provided by His Majesty, like Jerry’s two female ‘assistants,’ to protect the royal investment.
“What are you doin’ knockin’ like the goddamn constable?! You woke everybody up!”
“I’m Jerry’s best customer. I need to see him.”
“Put him down, Cam.” Jerry sighs behind him, and an oil lamp flares up beside the apothecary’s stocky, hunched form in pajamas. “Sorry he woke you. Go back to bed.”
“You know the protocol,” Cam sniffs, setting me down. “I monitor all transactions for your protection.”
“I’m sure whatever business Jack Hubbard wishes to transact at this hour is vital and private. Of no political significance to the Royal Family.”
“See?” I interject. “I’m his best customer.”
“Most steady customer maybe. You’re not anyone’s best anything.”
Cameron sniggers and his shoulders go lax with contempt. “Can’t do it, Jer. I’ve got my own commitments.”
Jerry pulls a key from his pocket. “The king’s eyes don’t breach these walls. Make an exception in exchange for a laced cigar from the lock-box.”
Alone again among the counters and shelves of what Jer calls Mix Station A, glass rectangles on walls, full of roots
and dried skins, my dealer fills two coffee cups from the pot his girls keep fresh and full.
“You read my mind.” I sip it nearly scalding.
“Wish I could, kid. I’d fill up whatever hole you got in ya so you’d stop knocking on my door. I don’t need your business enough to meet you in my jammies and slip-ons.”
“What about your luxuries?”
“I somehow doubt that’s what you came to bring me.”
I nod. Even a shyster like Jerry deserves better than the tip-toeing sycophant approach after hours. “I need help.”
“Tell me about it. I’m out of ideas. Actually, don’t tell me. The story’s getting stale.”
“One last time. Whatever happens, I guarantee you’ll never see me again after tonight.”
“Is it rude to say that’s a relief? What - you want me to put you out of our misery? Pity isn’t gonna drive me to charity, kid, and I doubt you’ve got anything - animal or mineral - left to barter with.”
I pull the hemp-braided wine bottle from my coat pocket - one I’d stored in my saddlebag until now for immediate celebration on that pipe-dream day when I cashed in the big winner.
Jerry smirks. “Oh god. Red Topher Mattix Year Four? You weren’t lying.”
“Last of its kind. And it’s peaking.”
“You think I don’t know that? How much do you want?”
I anticipate a long transaction here. “Sixteen hundred.”
“And the bottle comes with a vineyard and a villa, right?”
“You gift wrap this for the king, he’ll double your budget, with perks.”
“My budget and perks under Bart are fine. And I don’t have sixteen hundred of his money or mine, even if I wanted to pay eight times what that bottle’s worth.”
It was worth a shot. But then I see Mom at dinner, drinking lemon water instead of milk. Spooning soup into my mouth when my hands shake too much to hold a spoon. Whenever I try to dry out and fail. Mom, who never gives up hope that the latest remedy will be my last.
“Waste of time for both of us, then. So long, Jer.”
Jerry grabs my wrist with one bloated, pink hand. “Wait a second. What did you mean – never see you again? This trouble you’re in. It’s gonna get you killed? Because I don’t need your death on my conscience.”
“It’s a foregone conclusion. I just want to protect my kin from my debts on the way out.”
“If you’re gonna die anyway, you won’t mind the trouble this… potential remedy will bring you. Gimme the Mattix.” I comply, and Jerry retrieves a handful of what sounds like coins from a ceramic dish within the highest mounted glass box behind him. “Open your hand.”
At first my mind refuses to recognize what he drops in my palm. It’s far too absurd. “Oh my god.”
“Recognize those?”
Three beans, large as acorns, bulging purple like beets. “You said the first three were all you had.”
“And I lied, like you did when the King’s Guard interrogated you about where you got those first three. You could’ve buried me. What’d you say?”
“‘Found ‘em growing wild among the chickpeas, ‘Majesty. I hoped they’d produce decent-size tubers after our disappointing harvest.’”
Jerry spikes our coffees with dark cream liqueur. “That shocked the hell outta me. I thought for sure you’d squeal and we’d both be decapitated.”
“Bart had to keep me around for posterity - historical record.”
“You did your time like a man and kept your mouth shut - that’s the only thing I like about you. Never said my name toshave a single day. That’s why I’ll trust you with this now. That, and you’ll be dead in two days. Now drink up, good luck and get out. Shoot for early morning this time – the winter mist should obscure the stalk until noon. Make sure you chop this one down whether someone’s chasing you or not.”
I set my coffee down, overcome by a desire to feel sober. “He had a wife. That’s all I remember.”
“What?”
“I remember the climb and the break-in, but nothing else. Not until he was chasing me down that stalk.”
“Near-death experiences can do that. We block it out.”
Actually, the adrenaline of running from clutching hands had sobered me up as I fled. The rest of my sojourn in what Mom called The World Above had been a familiar drunken blackout. But as Jer says, that story has long grown stale.
Clutching the beans in a fist on Jerry’s landing, sliver moon looming over me with its sideways smile like an escaped lunatic, I promise myself: I’ll stay sober for my second trip up there. Mom deserves that much. Sober, and to hell with the shakes and tearing eyes that comes with it, the flood of irritating color and clarity that spills into the world after eight hours without a drink, the stuttering heartbeat and tremors that arrive after twelve, or the voice in the head that flails around like a mustang trapped in a burning barn at hour fourteen.
“Soldier through it.”
The Body sounds uncharacteristically tentative. You know Gia’s setting you up, right? She has no reason to give you forty-eight hours.
“I know,” I say, having no idea what Gia’s trap might be. “What do you think?”
____
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