You've Got Something Coming

  Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Starke. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  You’ve Got Something Coming is a work of fiction. All characters that appear in this book are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead in entirely accidental.

  ISBN (print): 978-1-936364-32-9

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-936364-33-6

  Black Heron Press

  Post Office Box 13396

  Mill Creek, Washington 98082

  www.blackheron.press

  HORATIO HORSFALL CHILDREN’S HOME OF KLAKANOUSE, WISCONSIN

  Trucks waited outside the children’s home. He had on a dark workman’s coat and carried two used hearing aids in his pocket. He’d been sitting on the ground for a half hour with his back to the bricks, opening and closing his hands, looking at his knuckles worn down from all the boxing.

  The front door swung open. The late-night dishwasher looked around.

  Trucks put his gloves back on, stood, and walked over through the dark.

  The dishwasher told him how to find the room.

  Trucks nodded and walked on. He zipped his coat down. Then he zipped it back up. He was nervous. He’d lived in places like this as a kid. They all smelled the same, like faint lemon and must. There were nightlights in half-moons lining the long hall. They blinked as he moved forward. Door after door.

  He stopped outside the room. What he was doing here would change everything. He knew that. All the money he had now was in his pocket. Thirty dollars from the fight he’d taken that night. He got clipped behind the ear with a phantom hook. Never saw it coming. It wobbled him, and he’d reached for the ropes and fell. The sharp headache, the blur, the hot lights. He didn’t get up for the count. Someone from the crowd threw a beer on him. Trucks sat drenched and sticky while the ref came over, tugged on his eyelids with his thumbs.

  Trucks opened the door and walked over to the corner bed. He got down on a knee. Moonlight cut through the window. With all that snow, it was nearly blue outside. He hoped she wouldn’t see his busted face.

  “There are no stars, Pepper Flake.” He didn’t finish the quote. He couldn’t remember how it ended. It was something an old boxing trainer used to say to him. Trucks didn’t know why it came to him now.

  Claudia was asleep. Trucks watched the ebb of her chest. Her fluttering eyelids. He ran his thumb over her eyebrow the way so many cut men had done for him, closing his gashes, sweeping away the dark blood.

  His little girl’s birthday was today.

  Trucks gently squeezed Claudia’s bicep. She squirmed and blinked out of confusion. She recognized him soon after, though she looked uncertain if he was an apparition or the truth.

  “It’s me,” Trucks whispered. He didn’t want to wake the other girls.

  Claudia turned from him. Trucks sat on the edge of the bed and patted her back. Claudia pulled away and scooted to the wall.

  “I told you I’d come for you. Didn’t you believe me?”

  Claudia didn’t answer. Trucks remembered the used hearing aids and pulled them out of his pocket. He looked down—two russet pea pods on his palm. He’d bought them at a thrift store after he found out from the dishwasher that Claudia was losing her hearing. Trucks knew the overrun children’s home wouldn’t cover it.

  Claudia looked over her shoulder.

  Trucks moved closer. He held up the hearing aids. Claudia rolled away again.

  “I cleaned them,” he said. Trucks always carried a sachet of antibacterial wipes. An obsessive habit. He tapped her on the shoulder until she turned toward him. She crossed her arms over her chest and kept her eyes shut. Trucks clicked the hearing aids on and hooked one to each ear and inserted the earmolds.

  “Check,” he said.

  Claudia shook her head. Trucks raised the volume dial of each hearing aid.

  “Cross, hook, hook,” he said.

  Claudia shook her head again. Trucks turned the dials up.

  “How about now, Pepper Flake?”

  Claudia opened her eyes.

  “You could have maybe died,” she said. “You were gone forever.”

  Trucks looked at the floor. “You know I’m not really the dying kind. I told you that.”

  “Can you promise again?”

  “I can promise.”

  “Then promise. And don’t die.”

  Trucks looked in her eyes. Then he looked at his hands. He made a fist with his left and rubbed his right across his wounded knuckles. Then he looked out the window. The clouds had shifted. His face was so visible against the harsh moonlight.

  “You’re all hurt again,” Claudia said. “They won’t let me go home if you don’t stop. You promised.”

  Claudia turned back to the wall. The boxing wasn’t the whole story, but she didn’t know that. Trucks thought he could hear sniffles. She was crying into her wrists.

  “And you missed my birthday,” she said.

  “It’s barely past midnight. We can still call it your birthday. I’ve got a gift for you outside. A really special one. They said I could give it to you if I came at night so it wouldn’t make the other kids jealous.”

  “You’re lying,” she said into the wall.

  “Honest,” he said.

  Claudia rolled back. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.”

  Trucks held out his hand. Claudia was reluctant. Still, she threw off the covers and sat up. Trucks noticed how much longer her hair was now, how the curls had grown thicker in his absence. Six months had been too long.

  “Come outside,” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Trust me.”

  “Maybe.”

  Trucks got up from the bed and looked out the window into the cobalt night. A thick birch covered in snow.

  Trucks turned to Claudia. He offered his hand again. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet. Then he picked her coat from the bedpost and she put it on. Her winter boots were by the bed, and she slipped into them and loosely tied the laces. Trucks bent down and tightened them.

  “Let’s keep quiet and not say anything else until we’re outside, okay?”

  Claudia nodded.

  They’d have to forget about rifling through drawers for spare clothes. It was time to go.

  Trucks walked to the bedroom door. Claudia followed a few steps, then stopped. She glanced at the three girls, asleep in their beds. Then she walked over to their bedsides, touched each girl differently—on the ankle, the forehead, the hand. Then she came out of the room with a sad face. Trucks tried to hold Claudia’s hand, but she pulled away. Together they walked down the long hall, past the blinking half-moons and ever closer to the cold world that would reveal itself just beyond the front door.

  HITCHING OFF 90

  They were lying in the bed of a fast-moving pickup under a woolen tarp for dead cattle. The tarp went up to their necks. It smelled awful. After a while, they got used to it.

  “We’ll stay together this time?” Claudia asked.

  “Yeah,” Trucks said.

  They watched the pale night sky, still lit from the snow.

  “Till the end?” she asked.

  “Till the end,” he said.

  They looked up into the moving dark.

  “They won’t find us where we’re going. Nobody will.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nevada’s way out there. We’ll keep our distance. We’ll be all right.”

  “What’s it like there?”

  Trucks had Claudia against his side and pulled her closer. His hands stung. He’d
given her his thick gloves. They were too big on her, and they’d had a nice laugh about it. Trucks and Claudia had walked to a highway junction where the old road met the interstate, and they’d stood in the deep snow with their thumbs out. When Claudia started shivering, Trucks picked her up and held her, his knuckles and temple aching from the fight the night before. Then it was just him holding his sleeping girl with a cold thumb out.

  The pickup roared and rattled on I-90, past the Dells and Lacrosse and into Minnesota territory. Could he smell the frozen-over Mississippi? No. Surely not.

  “Maybe you should sleep some more,” he said.

  “If you tell me about Nevada I’ll maybe fall asleep.”

  Trucks gave her a squeeze.

  “Is that where Mama is? Waiting in Nevada?” she asked.

  Trucks didn’t say anything. He opened and closed his fist. Ran his knuckles back and forth against the tarp to feel that burn.

  “Is she there?” Claudia asked.

  “She’s not in Nevada, Pepper Flake.” Trucks looked at Claudia. “You should close your eyes. Try to get some rest before he drops us off.”

  “Where’s he dropping us?”

  “I don’t know. He said maybe Sioux Falls. It’s in South Dakota. Do you know where that is?”

  Claudia looked at her big-gloved fingers. She counted on them as if it would help her identify where South Dakota was.

  “No,” she said. “Do we have to hitch there? I don’t wanna hitch anymore. It’s freezing.”

  Claudia swung a leg over Trucks. She pulled in closer to collect his warmth. He knew it was about survival, but it still made him feel good. He was barely even thinking about the boxing. Wasn’t counting back combinations in his mind, picturing footwork, or trying to see his punches as lines drawn by invisible string.

  “We’ll take a break somewhere and get you warm. But we have to keep moving. We always have to keep moving until it’s safe. Okay?”

  Claudia sighed. He felt it on his ribs.

  “Tell me okay.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  The pickup rumbled. The tailgate clanked. The driver was an old rancher who’d gone to Milwaukee to purchase vintage rifles and scopes from an antique gun show. Trucks felt fortunate he’d picked them up. Figured it was probably the way he saw Trucks with his girl in one arm, her pink cheek on his shoulder, his busted hand stuck out, that stomach-pit desperation in his eyes.

  “How are your hearing aids holding up? You seem to be doing pretty good.”

  “They pinch my ears. But they’re okay, I guess.” Claudia tapped her left hearing aid. “This one’s blurry.”

  “You mean staticky. And maybe I can get it fixed once we get to Nevada. I don’t know what I can do about the pinching. It was the smallest I could find.”

  “I’m scared the other kids are gonna make fun of me.”

  Trucks could feel her sharp breathing against him.

  “I really am,” she said.

  Trucks held her tight. “The hell they will.”

  HALLOWELL DRUG AND SUNDRIES

  Trucks and Claudia sat on a palate of stacked charcoal bags inside the store. It was early morning and the store was dead. Claudia kicked her heels against the bags. Trucks blew into his hands.

  “I froze out there for you,” he said.

  “But you didn’t even turn into a snowman,” she said.

  “Good one,” he said.

  Claudia had taken off her coat and the too-big gloves. Trucks realized then, as if for the first time, that she was wearing pajamas. A purple long-sleeve top and matching bottoms, the arms and legs cuffed pink. It stood out to him now under all the fluorescents. How cold she must have been out there on the road. What it would have done to her fragile skin.

  Claudia pointed at her hearing aids and made a sad face.

  “They’re too big,” she said. “The other kids are gonna call me names.”

  “What would they call you?”

  “I don’t know. Mean stuff. Like Dooty Ears ’cause the hearing phones are brown.” She pointed to her left ear. “And this one’s still blurry.”

  “Staticy. And you mean hearing aids.”

  Claudia pulled out her left hearing aid and handed it to Trucks. He didn’t know what to do with it. He put it up to his ear and shook it. Then he blew on it. He flipped it on and off. Rolled the volume dial up and down, then put it back where it seemed to work best for her.

  “Give it a try now,” he said.

  He hooked the hearing aid back on Claudia’s ear and inserted the earmold.

  Claudia gave him a half-hearted thumbs-up.

  “Still not so great?”

  Claudia shrugged. Then she put his oversized gloves back on. Trucks smiled. Claudia leaned way back and stared at the ceiling. All those beams and white light.

  “What are those?” she asked.

  Trucks looked up. “Those what?”

  “The triangles on the roof. There, there, there, there. And there.” She pointed all along the ceiling.

  “Rafters.”

  “What for?”

  “They keep the building from falling down. You feeling warm yet?”

  “Why would it fall?”

  “I don’t know. Wear and tear. Avalanche. Tornados.”

  “I think it’d be fun to play in a tornado.”

  Trucks laughed.

  “And to swing on the raffers.”

  “Rafters.”

  “Rafters.”

  “Good.”

  Claudia often stunned him with the simplest things. Her phrasings. A look. Her nuances. He was used to the language of bobs and weaves and slips and counter-punches. The movement was the language, his fire marked his words.

  “So, you warm now, Pepper Flake?”

  “Yeah. I like it in here. I like looking at the raf-ters.”

  Trucks looked up again. “Think of them like the ribs of the building. Like what you got here.” Trucks poked at Claudia’s ribs, and she giggled. “Come on, Poopy Ears, we need to get you some things.”

  Trucks got down from the charcoal bags and held Claudia’s hand as she jumped. He pulled out his sachet of antibacterial wipes and offered her the pack.

  “I don’t wanna,” she said.

  “You gotta keep clean. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “A thousand.”

  “Just take a wipe and do it.”

  “No.”

  Trucks grabbed Claudia’s sleeves and rolled them up her forearms. She huffed but didn’t pull away. He wiped vigorously from her wrists to her fingertips. One arm, then the other.

  “See. Not so bad.”

  “It smells like Mama.”

  “Shush.”

  Trucks grabbed Claudia’s coat and threw it over his shoulder. Claudia bit into the fabric of her glove. He led them up and down the aisles until he found the toothbrushes. There were lots to choose from. Trucks went for the knockoff brand at forty-nine cents a brush. He grabbed an adult toothbrush, a children’s toothbrush, and an eight-ounce bar of shampoo-soap. He’d cut it into quarters later on.

  “Not again,” Claudia said.

  “What?”

  “It makes my hair gross.” Claudia held up a bunch of curls.

  “When I was growing up, they gave us apple cider vinegar and lard soap. We’re getting two for one here. It’s lime. Look.” Trucks held up the bar. “Double-size bar. Twice as much for the same money.”

  “Yuck. Pick one with a good flavor. I don’t wanna smell like lime.”

  “Fine.” Trucks put the bar back. “And you mean scent, not flavor. So what about this one? It’s chocolate-raspberry. Do people wanna smell like that all day?”

  “I do.”

  “Then grab that one or go through the others and pick one you like.”

  Claudia squatted and sifted through the soap, looking for different scents and calling them out. Cinnamon, mango, oatmeal, orange. Trucks stepped back. He watched her sift. This little girl he’d made. How coul
d it strike him so suddenly, as if it had just happened in that moment, as if he hadn’t been there years ago to palm her ribs with his entire hand? His left. The one that had levied such force in the ring. The one that was waning now with age. Forty-one years of pick up, pull, push, parry, pivot, punch.

  And her. Boom. As if from the sky.

  “I want this one.” Claudia held a mint bar under his nose. Pulled him back like all those ripe-smelling salts.

  “We’ll smell like Christmas mints.” He grabbed the bar from her and held it in one hand with the toothbrushes. “Baking soda next. Then we need to get some food somewhere. How are you? Hungry?”

  “Can’t we do real toothpaste?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with baking soda and water. It’ll make your teeth strong.”

  “But we had real toothpaste at the home. I want the real stuff. Baking soda’s gross, and it goes gooey in the water.” She crossed her arms.

  “I gave in on the soap.”

  “Real stuff.”

  “No.”

  “Come on!”

  “I said no.”

  “Yes.”

  “You turned into a real pain, you know that?”

  “They never said I was a pain at the home.”

  “Well, you’re back with me now.”

  “The home didn’t leave me.”

  Trucks grabbed Claudia’s arm real tight above the elbow. “They took you from me. They took you. I didn’t leave. I’d never leave you. You got it?”

  “Ouch. It hurts. Let go, let go, let go.”

  Trucks let go, and Claudia ran down the aisle and turned the corner. He breathed deep. What had the therapist at the free clinic said all those years ago? Count it back? Find a mental sanctuary? Imagine a flock of birds flying over a pond? Whatever. Now wasn’t the time to get his head right.

  Trucks took off down the aisle. He found her sitting cross-legged in front of a display of antifreeze jugs.

  Trucks inched down next to Claudia and sat beside her. He put the toothbrushes and soap on the ground. Leaned his head back against the cool jugs. They sat for a while like that. Listening to each other’s breathing, eyes closed. Occasionally they’d hear the footfalls of customers trickling in, the squeaky wheels of shopping carts. Time passed like that. It was nice in its way.