The Dogwoods

Southern Gothic short fiction

Chapter 1

“Storm And Memory”

The skies rippled linen veins along the muscle of land, and bled out the first, right rain of summer. The oaks and hickories on the periphery, struggled to hold their heads with the added weight, shaking like armed soldiers in single filed lines, unsure of nature’s order as the road’s leg bent left, and Tevi drove too fast around it. The dark eyed junco’s and indigo buntings scattered from lower branches out of sight. Outside Kelm’s half opened, passenger side window, he smiled, watching the birds flee the weather as rain drops landed and pooled on his arm before rolling off against the door, and the heat was some hell among the down pour.

That season even the rain burned. There and then, one relearned to breathe in and exhale out air thick as grease fat. Through the truck’s custom speakers, hip hop mentored them at sixty miles per hour, following weeded trails to green nothings living nowhere on the outskirts of such barren, county roads. The music bumping through the custom subwoofers Tevi just put in, and their skulls, upstaged the thunder’s own beats close by-a lesser opponent in volume and style.

Tevi took long, secular drags off his Marlboro, dangled loosely between wrong fingers, evicting ash onto the steering wheel and dashboard with each bump and pothole they met. The old south highways in desperate need of tending to but would never see a dime again. The cherry end of the cigarette twinkled and dimmed like the last moments of some trailer’s shit Christmas. With the windows mostly closed, Tevi coughed, and both boys defended against the bacca smoke wafting in their sunned, olive faces like nicotine ghosts haunting their good health. Waving their hands left to right, two clock pendulums almost in sync, Kelm thought it was a real strange way to hold the butt of a cig for a serious smoker like his best friend. Smoke-burned, Tevi shut his eyes behind the wheel, seconds longer than Kelm cared for.

(Speaking over OutKast)

“Shoulda just put a dip in.”

“Shit’s nasty, Kelm.”

“This ain’t,?”

Well….okay, fuckin fair.”

Hugging the edgy, gravelly thigh of narrow blacktop, Tevi made the clunky movements of a boy with less than one year driving proper on legal roads, placing the truck’s stick shift roughly into fifth gear, a wrinkled try that still woke the truck’s power up hill, and Kelm jarred almost to the afterlife in his seat. The boys failed to rap with the song’s pace and eventually both broke down and laughed, talking shit to each other about not making the high school football team that week.

(Turning down OutKast)

“Shit, Kelm. Coach Lindsey ate your ass up, boy. His fat head screamin and spittin summer shit. Never seen all them senior boys laughin so hard. Hungover. Forgettin to put your belt on, going out for a pass and trippin over your gotdam pants fallin to your ankles and bustin your boney ass. Just glad to see you remembered Cass’s Christmas boxers she got you there, Jerry Rice.”

“Heeey, I caught the gotdamn pass didn’t I? More than I can say for you droppin the ball like you’re forgettin Alley’s birthday again. Now that’s catchin shit. Shouldn’t I get extra credit for catchin the pig with half my uniform and me on the ground twenty yards from the end zone? And I’d call seein my ass a blessin and hell, might be the last time anyone chants my name, Tevi.”

Both of them too small and too slow, poor excuses were made as the forest green truck, paint faded, covered in scratches and spots of rust along the edges, raced against the pursuing granite clouds of the afternoon storm, already building to its ire over the lake a few miles away.

Tevi’s daddy got him the old truck a few months back because he would say,..

“Only sissy ass bitches have no wheels, which means no women, and he didn’t want none of them assholes in town, at the factory, or in the lord’s house, thinking he raised some sissy ass bitch.”

So Tevi took the one good thing his daddy ever gave him, even if it had a mind of its own when it ran and when it wanted to rest, and kept it cleaner than a two story church and all it’s Sunday donations.

As the thunder softened, Tevi watched the bolts of lightning laterally scatter in front of them through the windshield glass, as the wipers cleared the waning drizzle. The burst of light reminded him of days his daddy…

”Saturday mornin, drinkin’ by nine. Buzzed and shit out hard by ten. Huntin me down for fuckin existin by dinner.”

Tevi’s old man burned no matter the season.

“Hot fists, cold heart, the dumb ass” as his mama used to cry quietly before she moved on. Tevi had been privy once to her whispers and blood between silences. His mama eventually broke free like only tested bones knew how, but before she took off quick in the truck bed of a brand new pick up one dawn, the still so young woman explained she just couldn’t afford to take the boy that time. She’d be back for him she swore, when she..

“Got a good job that might take some work to find and bit’a money and a brand new place of her own with an extra bedroom for ya and ya things and a big yard fenced up real nice for a dog bigger than both of us and soon, Tevi. Soon.”

Tevi’s mama was gone in winter, but he told himself later he was no goddamn offering to the fire to overlook her passage. He watched her leave that morn, squinting through the kitchen window’s frost as his daddy slept, snoring like a dying devil on the floor, with his right knuckle still iced. Her eye was black and shut but she was smiling through the swelling. Bright as that new dawn’s teeth. Tevi thought she must have weighed two pounds or even less, the way she floated in bare feet and wet pajamas through the deep snow to that man’s ride so damn fast, red paint like flames under the powdered pines, and not daddy’s, thank God.

The man at the end of the drive had a black beard and a nice blue coat, such a warm looking fur hat with flaps that hung over each large ear, and he was smiling just as warm too. His teeth, unlike dawn, didn’t even seem to chatter in the early chill. Tevi wished to meet him badly, before the truck pulled away onto an unreliable road in bad weather. His mama left behind a cloud of smoke and two ghosts without smiles.

If Tevi wept after he could no longer remember. He could only recollect his daddy waking too sober to the news, as much Tevi’s sin for not telling him sooner as mama’s. That coming December would make seventy two months, three weeks, and one day, with still no return to save him. Tevi kept count as if the math might escape him too, and only his bones and blood were there now to whisper how sorry they were between splinters, buried under hard floors of skin, and the cracks of peeling white walls, silent before the lightning finally called to the boy with roaring songs of sparks and seasons with no cold to remind him.