R. P. Singletary
Pop!
Loam of nourishment near to worn out the field him and what left a the woods, Johnnie-Bo Hansom ignored his bean row, his mind rutting on tractor repairs. Like car parts, nothing didn't come cheap and if he'd anyone else to barter with that day, well of course of course it all would've turned out a wage different, especially with handy Bob Greene Jr. around. He kinda reckoned he was-- in a way.
“You don't yet?”
The words from Mama Hansom resounded differently each time in the close of oak trees ancient and garrulous on their long-peopled property now subdivided, unanchored trailers poking in here and there especially in the colder months with the leaves down, you could see the sadness a the others. In the summer, Johnnie-Bo and Bob Jr. both would swerve and almost hit oncoming traffic to avoid a snap of a late-spring snake awakening in search of a drink. Both boys featured years back on old media and replayed, reposted across much a the world's internet: They was one a them bum-kins, a word never come to coddle or lament over how others, cityfolks or newscasters from-off, might use it after a hurricane to lampoon for all to hear a sad translation of ruralspeak most forgot. Paltry pittance of woebegown state, a former nation, state of minds:
“Ya done yet?”
Johnnie-Bo heaved the muleless makeshift plow and celebrated his solitary work with a well-deserved Yea-Haw, praising another callous on his left hand to match the half-dozen that made for a right. Bob Jr. had liked hard hands on his back. Hungry squirrels scattered. A white-tail flickered farther afield, back side of barn unawares.
“Y'all did it?”
Knew nothing better, the mother and son a Handsom team, both bandied the two bum syllables kin about, unabashedly even when it was the three a them and no father figure rightly understood the games between them. – Or knew worse, him this time paying Mama no mind this fourth time she hollered hopeful; he could be a meansumbitch who couldn't well know he hated life itself more than any place to live. Not because of his inability to feel another sensation, but because he knew this much: it would all, all end, where it all, all started. And without one whimper of control on his end a the stick. Maybe his missed his papa too.
“I knew it!” she said, and he heard the beating a the rug hung across the biggest azalea close to the kitchen door, its tatters clinging a bit to an adjacent boxwood or two. He knew the look and the sound as good as a beating to his own bottom down past the back steps.
The sky to the east over FDR's thousand-acre lake tickled his ear and twisted to hide like the last girlfriend Emma-Jane Dintzling without a second pass, after she ran into her competition Bob Jr. holding a wrapped box of woodsy cologne that last visit before Christmas, its scent wanting to make the poor girl gag until Easter the following spring when her folks took her away, finally bringing her some peace. This year they might make decent soybeans for first in a long set of rainy promises if fulfilled, but it would be them two to take to market and do all the fuss with harvest at hearth: Johnnie-Bo and his mama for the long haul at this point.
“It could be easier,” whimpered low through the uncut sedge hissing long against the maternal refrains cast now from the screened porch back on the yard side a the Hansoms' central acre. Johnnie-Bo carried Bob Jr.'s scent in life from beyond, and he could see the old home place across the two-lane, more and more sprawl flea-itching to flee nowhere faster but a mite closer to Charleston always sounded both better-and-worse, somehow meant something to the boys before become men. Diddy never understood, old age having gated up days of youth like the boarded-up church spent of religion once the lightning popped the other year a the reunion.
“It could be,” he answered still unrealizing it was not talk to his thought, or memories. His diddy cropped up again and as of late during this earthen angle from sun, some anniversary of birth or death, but in his Hansom-trait haze-buzz of familiar sweat Johnnie-Bo couldn't recall which, and remained proud in the thin edge of manly manual finesse encouraging the incline of day. He gingered the moneymaker's handle, riding the common bumps in the clods of Eden he refused to leave for some reason other than long-gone Bob Jr. “It could well could be.”
They ate buttered beans, white rice, heavily salted all with some meaning of meat attached, flakes of aluminum from the pot scorned and not always set aside from the heaving across the chipped supping plasticware.
“Drink ya swee'tea,” his mama said before collecting their plates and knives and forks. She always set a knife at each place setting for every meal, breakfast too all be it often cereal flakes or fruit bran, and always a spot for Diddy and Bob Jr. though he never came back from the war.
“Easier,” hummed in Johnnie-Bo's right jaw. He finished chewing and went for a smoke outside. No matter the TV antenna down from last week's storm, all three channels from the Holy City seldom offered much fun by his recollection no count.
The snake sat curled an inch from the sweeping decline a the paint-flecked rocker.
“All this.”
A falling ember wanted to singe the rattler in presage. Luck or easy to miss, it was not the size of a man's forearm, and when J-B saw it, just as he was about to split it in half, he caught himself. Not that he feared a strike, the boots a past personal recovery, the very cause for his diddy's demise, but strike a bargain with a voice?
“Don't do it, Bo.” It felt like Bob Jr. calling, you need some help, man.
J-B eased back from squishing out the venom and into his exposed calf. He'd forgotten he was wearing short pants, the single pair of bleached dungarees stared at him eye-level on the rusted wire after a wash they had argued over, the slithery thing odd equidistant nimble, soon a lick away from his bare and hairless chest, the creature drunk in curious motion. Across a peeling banister a musky shirt fought with the breeze battering worse the lose screws a the broken screen door. His mama doing the two dishes for an hour longer.
“I knew you had sense, boy.” The snake fed a line straight from diddy's playbook of agricultural and astronomical mechanics. Practically belittling, but antagonistic in a toysome way as if to say we all God's chil'ren ain't we
“A good mess could be better than rainmade wellness. Ya wore out like the rest, deserve so much mo', Bo.” And away toward the slope-end hole but stopping before where the water usually went out.
Slow to process, J-B rocked again now that nothing blocked his full tilt. He closed his eyes, the starchy dinner pasting down his tummy, energy robbed from homing safety. He was not afraid of no snake.
“If you was to let me have another night with maw. I might forgive ya, yours, ways.”
No coffee awakened, the storm passed after a brutal night, hail he never forecast. He saw damage on the tin roof. Somethin' else, always somethin' else. The crispness a the morning thin, he'd slept late: Concerning, no grease filled the house, neither a stench of bacon burnt the one way his parents ate the stuff, Mama sure to be gone, left the 'larm clock roamin'
The snake skin saddle shucked, it was not until well past noon as thunder tapped above the far of moss hung close that Johnnie-Bo, full of emptied coffee pot and can, knew how would have to fix a firstly meal for self. Tough. Foot. Crunch. His right step upon something on the vinyl and he toed it away, hiding thoughtless whatever beneath the undervarnished pine cabinet he like his diddy never wished a purchase. The man knew there ought to be at least one tart tomato on the heirloom vine, and he didn't anticipate any vermin in the garden beat up by the heavens. He'd be sly and quick in his touch because of all the caffeine, and fruit would go good with either eggs or squash, whatever the meal. Bob Greene Jr. being a gardening man, didn't care, as long as home, ground, grown, and suited: J-B any more. As of late-- Without any more much given. A first all out, by himself.
***
A rural native of the southeastern United States, R. P. Singletary is a lifelong writer across fiction, poetry, and hybrid forms and a budding playwright with recent fiction, poetry, and drama published or forthcoming in Litro, BULL, Cream Scene Carnival, Cowboy Jamboree, Rathalla Review, The Rumen, Wasteland Review, The Wave - Kelp Journal, the coalition (Coalition for Digital Narratives), The Collidescope, Ancient Paths Christian Literary, EBB - Ukraine, D.U.M.B.O. Press, and elsewhere.
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