I.
Ludwell is a white-bread nullity set a mile south of State Road 14. Folks break down, pull over - maybe it's a gas thing or a ruptured line or a domestic dust-up - and walk toward it because there isn't another town within thirty-some miles. Light bends oddly through Ludwell, makes regular things queer-angled, geometrically uneasy; buildings shake in a grey quiver of air, and after some effort one recognizes them as new or wildly old, ontologically challenged, some say, a whole lot of scraggled malaise stretching on its toes to be a thing. Brown grass crackles at Ludwell's edges and flies buzz through on their way to some other place, their vibrations adding to a seldom noticed background radiation - a raw white noise - which perhaps an astute hooker or ginned-up factory man might, from alehouse to alley, mistake for character. Just flies, though. The flies. Only ever always.
Most new folk come to have their broke down suck-ass cars repaired. A few say, 'fuck this place,' and keep walking on through, across a sly of burnt up earth and into the foothills that lie further south, a sprawl of roughness and rattlers, quicksand and sheriffs' tape. Not Carl. Carl was born there, a Ludwell original, irked and squeaked from his passed-out mother right there on a rain-mat, or maybe it was a regular floor mat, the weather being normally not rainy in Ludwell, at the entrance of the 'Chew-and-Screw', the town's famous hardware store-slash-delicatessen; in fact, the mat is still there, the 'meat-and-potatoes' of most Ludwell walking tours.
II.
Dawn, a girl some remember as the black-eyed and foul-mouthed salutatorian from Reading Camp, is behind the A&P, smoking cigarettes and discomfiting cats; she has a thing for them, a weird uncle's avidness for proximity. She lures them closer with stuff feral cats like: a dead mouse, Big League Chew, cool ass shooter marbles, and then she grabs them up in the butterfly net she found in the ravine. Cats hate Dawn. It is a sunny day, a day made of gold, she says. She says this to Terrence who isn't listening. He's stealing small moments from what should be a school day. Terrence - her step brother or cousin, or the befucked combination of the two, club-footed for sure, black hair sweat-glued to an acne constellated face and in a set of fingerless donation-box mittens - runs circles in the street and smashes together two metal trashcan lids while Dawn yells, "Cat-Cat-Cat-Cat". She bangs at a wriggling net with a fence picket.
Children of Ludwell play and play!
Terrence, never mindful of cars or trucks or anything as pedestrian as survival etiquette, stops in the road, or glorified alley, to pick up some coins. The coins are brown. In Ludwell, dullness is a color, resplendent and vibrating. Great, more stuck together coins, he thinks, this penultimate thought earnest and sarcasm-free. Look at this shit, Dawn. "Cat-Ca - c…," he starts to hear, and then doesn't. In his back pocket was a comic book. Terrence doesn't approve of how cool Carl's van is, never will, how high it rides in the seat, the white-light motherfucking righteousness of its tape-deck.
Carl couldn't find something.
III.
In Dana's Diner a man eats chicken, leans into it and takes as near as can be discerned a harmonicist's approach, two-handedly pressing the meat into his maw and applying a slow torque, the gentle axial rotation of a true artist; he pauses, at times, to apply pepper and to drag across a fork-punctured paper plate of sauces the gnawed breast. There's a ball-cap, blue and salt stained, a tee-shirt stretched like drum skin across a soured and mole addled torso, acid washed denim shorts; in his rear pocket a flip-phone buzzes with missed texts and a blurry off-plum crotch shot from Holleen, an older woman who at a bus stop once wondered out loud just what the deal was with that van.
He showed her.
This grainy photo, which might have passed for a pic of a pirate's chin, along with the one he'll send back of himself, from the driver's seat of said van, will threaten to choke up what's left of his meager data plan. Not much sideways of sorry can ever come from data plans like his.
"Sweet Creamy Christ," he says. "This chicken is the 'Sean Connery' of the whole goddamn bucket!" His girlfriend, Vegan Tara, twists up her straw tight from both ends so that all the air gets trapped in the middle. If she had been reared on Betamax bootlegs of Bond movies, like Carl, then she would have noted the half-eaten 'Roger Moore', and the 'George Lazenby' of drumsticks, a single bite taken, sitting in mustard and nourishing a 25-Watt bulb-sized horsefly. Vegan Tara holds the twisted straw toward Carl. If someone flicks a straw like that just right, then what you hear is a loud crack that makes people like Carl angry. Nobody but Carl is there, though, and so nobody gives a crimson shit about that straw, or the trapped unburst happiness of air. She drops it on the floor and itches her forehead with liquor store lotto-line zeal. Nobody sees the dust. Nobody sees the skin peel back like pencil shavings and curl off into a ketchup blob on her orange eat-in tray. Vegan Tara is 'Vegan Tara' because she only ever eats carbs. She stabs at the paper plate for a fry and misses. Her mind is smoke and crackle, flowers and fog.
IV.
The suburbs of Ludwell, if one could ascribe such frivolousness to a town of its size and carriage, comprise a mange of lean-tos and trailers, craftsman sheds, sincere Apartheid-style corrugated metal structures that seem to sigh whenever the lights go out. They sit way off toward a stand of oak and poplar, a far walk to the town's prized Dixie-cup factory, but a short walk to Dayton's Ravine, a glorified ditch rimmed with newspaper and beer cans and other miscellaneous domestic scutter. In front of one trailer, the Barlow's trailer, Trailer # 9, rests overturned in the yard a green rusty tricycle; between tree and trailer, white t-shirts riffle in the coppery wind, yellow on the line; above, a bra caught in a tree flaps like mad while below a gummed-up bird writhes in a dry birdbath. From the ravine limps a shipwrecked seeming coyote, trapped and hobbled by an old toilet seat. Look - over there is the first Mrs. Barlow's empty wheelchair, her once famous ashtray still duct-taped to an armrest! Nature pushes limits.
Inside, Fidge's dad, Mr. Barlow, holds the lima bean colored receiver and yells at a shit-for-brains girl from the power company. He will pay her when they all get to the red 'X' on their kitchen calendar, no sooner, thanks and goodbye. The lights flicker when he hangs up but that's because the washer and the big-screen are running at the same time. Fidge's new mom, Holleen, is trying this multitasking fad her friend Wenders told her about. It was from this magazine she saw in the checkout line, but Wenders was at a loss for how to be good at it because she had to stuff it back into the rack when it was her turn. She did remember to fold the page, she said, for when it came time again for her to re-up on her nicotine patches. Holleen paints her nails while a toothbrush dripping foam protrudes from her face. A wicked e-cigarette glows in her non-dominant hand. Fidge's dad sees this and thinks 'multi-tasking' is just another big term for being sexy indoors.
V.
Some suburbanites have complained that the flies spawned in the furnace of the ravine aren't normal. People tell the sheriff that they swarm like bees, congeal into balls that seem to roll above the dirt to knock over rats and cats and other small pets. Terrence's mom, Wenders, said that these "flymble-weeds", she called them that, that one of those came rolling after her boy who was out having a John Wayne style frontier camp-out with Fidge Barlow. Fidge couldn't corroborate, she went on, because he had gone home with another night-fit, the coward. Mel Scruggs didn't speak to the authorities. He saw Terrence run. Mel Scruggs had rooted for the flies. Always has. He would take up his rake Saturday mornings all summer long, and if asked what he could possibly be raking from a treeless yard in summertime, he'd say this: squirrel bones.
VI.
Vegan Tara is preggers. She said it to Candy during break at Walmart. If she keeps it, she'll name him Van Morrison. And then probably add her last name to it because Carl ain't marry-able and sucks at the rhythm method, despite his always fondling air-drumsticks and foot-stomping to John Cougar at stop lights. Candy told her she was done up real-bad. Like bad-bad, she added. Candy has good emphasis because of her time in the school forensics club, drives things in true directions, even if one doesn't and can't abide what it says about a person or a thing. Tara knows this, and watches Carl work his poultry, smacks her lips with daydream.
Dana hasn't yet come back to give her that re-fill of Tab.
"You love me, Carl?" she asks.
She gives up manners, grabs a fist of fries from his tray, holds them like a bouquet. Carl bites into a chicken bone. This won't be the direct cause of a loose and wildly unmoored incisor, but it doesn't help. He reaches across the table and gives her a flick on the tip of her nose. This he finds funny.
"I don't," he says.
VII.
Sometimes Fidge wakes up clawing himself, struggling to get out of the seatbelt, a seatbelt his mom insisted he fasten because "goddamnit, it is the law" and because "dad", she said. She had no choice: her multiple sclerosis made it a necessity, but she often unclipped herself, for the rush of it, she said. Unbelted, she shifted unbalanced in a car, moving from side to side, leaning into Fidge whenever his Dad took a corner. One time, her limp body leaned into Fidge's space so hard that he squeezed the shit out of his paper cone and sent the remains of a rainbow snow-ball into the side pocket of the car door. He didn't look for it, but he knew it was free and melting happily into the hairbrush and onto the coins. Anyway, it tasted like cigarettes. They always did when the windows were rolled up and his mom was flush with Parliaments. This last time, Fidge pushed her back hard against the other car door, too hard he'd admit on another day, that day of black shoes on grim green grass, a day of tickled ankles and un-minced sorrow. Her face said things, and she might have said actual words right then, but her words all washed away; when none of them were looking, a small noise, glass, a lightness, and then a loud nothing or a subtle something - a broke bridge, buzzed dad, a loose mom and child senseless.
VIII.
Carl's van is sweet. Everyone thinks so. There is a game table in the back for games and romantic dinners. An example: Orange Julius burgers with pop and fries - then - crack! - panties fly because when dinner is done that sonofabitch folds down and goes away like it was never there, unprovable even, but, not being picky or even that great a host, Carl doesn't always hide it away; instead, he might sweep it with his arm and have at it like in the movies. One time Vegan Tara had a soda cup lid pressed into her back for a solid day and lost her good inhaler somewhere in that righteous black-lit honey cave, brushed into a corner by the great winds of Carl's foreplay. More recently, Carl nearly lost his 'fucking shit phone' under the brake pedal behind the A&P; he was trying hard to hit send when it fell between his feet. It was true, 'hand to God,' he said, and a guy wrote it down hard on a goldenrod form, some plug-ugly junior deputy, a Gary, who probably couldn't marshal trim in a ladies' jail with liquor and a fistful of pardons.
"Do you love me, Carl?" she asked after an unsatisfactory tussle.
Carl gripped the rear-view with both hands because it's fuck-ass cool to watch the past wobble and retreat into the distance. Dawn, however, remained the same size. Carl didn't answer that time, only turned the ignition, pushed a knob to blast some Nugent. It might have been 'Cat Scratch Fever'.
IX.
Whenever Fidge found coins in any car they would inevitably be stuck together in uneven groups of twos or threes. Sometimes such groups are easily split apart, sometimes not. Fidge is awake. Maybe he had heard his Dad yelling at the lady on the phone, or maybe it was another one of those dreams. He had woken and that was all the truth there was. Fidge thinks how great things will be when his comic book comes in the mail. Any day now. Maybe it will come tomorrow, he thinks. And it does. He will wish he hadn't shown it to Terrence because Terrence is raw little dry-tug of a boy.
X.
Two days from now a deputy will ask what the hell happened. Dawn will stand and remember looking down at a ragged ruined Terrence pushed up against a set of lidless cans and not know at all, the sounds of raw Nugent shrinking round the block. A tan Wagoneer? No. A van? Shit, maybe.
And where's the body?
Fuck-all if I know, Gary, Dawn will say. This ain't CSI Ludwell. Gary will write that down, too.
Dawn likes cats. Terrence was bothering cats, she will eventually admit. Cats hid in dumpsters and shadow. A set of crows hedged, set off to lurk on a line. Dawn won't mention the flies, how they arrived, unraveled, gathered around the dead boy. White noise, Ludwell static, unheard, crackling. They plucked him at his edges and raised him up, twisted boy, pulled him down the street like a wraith pinned to the devil's lorry. The cats watched and, however briefly, sensed what it must be like to be Mel Scruggs.
But for now, an excited Fidge remains on his cot with his clothes torn open, river-wet. The air is cool, and a wind, somewhere beyond Holleen and his father's horse-shit banter, rattles a chime. Across a yard, further, near the ravine, loose paper and leaves fill furrows - things gather, and the flies, wherever it is flies go at night, sleep.
