Page 42 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. V #3

The Devil Will Find You
The rusted Chevy pickup slid to a halt, as if just The door squealed in protest, like he was prying stalling out. Benson dropped his thumb, though open a crypt. A cloud of blue cigarette smoke
the pickup wasn’t at all what he’d had in mind, rushed at him as Benson climbed into the pickup. with bald tires, rusted panels and doors, and
the stink of horse shit and moldy sawdust ris- ing from the bed. Plus the engine was out of tune. The tail pipe spewed out alternating puffs of black and blue exhaust. But he was sick of standing around these four corners, looking at the same crummy old Vermont cornfields and pastures and grazing cows. The old man behind the wheel had been adjusting his rearview mir- ror, and now crooked a finger at him. The kid stepped to it.
“Howdy,” he said.
Before the rusted pickup, a dozen cars had gone by, and Benson had taken these rejections per- sonally, particularly if the car was driven by a woman; he thought of himself as an attractive young man, a lean and mean sort like his father, an outlaw, only his legs and chest and arms had yet to entirely fill out. Spindle-legged, black patches of fuzz where the mustache was sup- posed to sit, a cap of brown hair like the Dutch Boy’s on the paint can. But a girl in middle school had told him once that he had a face like a fox, and he believed her. And his mother used to tease him: “Benson Loso, you’ll be a terror
“You headed toward Wells River?” Benson asked after an interval.
in blue denim someday!” and damn if it hadn’t come true.
The old man was by this time in between first and second gear and appeared too distracted by his work to answer. The kid used the opportunity
to get his first good look at the old man, which made him feel a lot better. Just an old dairyer sonofabitch gone to seed, was all he was. Benson had grown up around the type, and their sons and daughters, too. His own father was a garage mechanic over in Riverton and he’d told Benson since he was a boy that it was perfectly fine to hate them hicks, who wallowed around in shit all day and didn’t know enough to come in out of the barn once in a fucking blue moon. Peasants, his father called them. He sneered at them because they always worked on their own vehicles. Of course, he sneered at anyone who didn’t, too.
At that lonesome intersection, he’d paced the side of the road for a whole hour, kicking at
the road dust with his Frye boots, itching for a mirror; there could be some physical disfigure- ment he was unaware of that would explain all this rejection: a giant booger up his nose, or a big, juicy, red pimple, like a third eye, sprouted on his forehead. Hell, maybe his hair had gone electric again and frizzed up on him. How could he tell without a mirror?
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Besides, milking cows was women’s work, Ben- son’s father would say, his eyes going all narrow, while sucking down a beer after supper in their eight-by-twenty-four mobile home, in Mekkel- son’s Trailer Park. He’d say: What kind of self-re- specting man would squeeze tits for a living, get all that government subsidy and call his work-
“How do,” said the old-timer who stared at Ben- son with no pretense of doing otherwise. Jesus
H, what is it? thought the kid, is my face crawling with them scabies sores, what? He settled him- self gingerly onto the torn black velour seat and slammed the door shut, or tried to. It came out so thin, it made him feel like a weakling. He hated that feeling.
stEvE younG