Quiet and the Darkness: Stories of Rural Noir by Matt Phillips

Author:Matt Phillips [Phillips, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Roughneck Dispatch
Published: 2024-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

King and Jailer to All the World’s ShitKickers

Lenny Scripps noticed the kid on the ten speed—when the hell was it?—about four in the afternoon, Tuesday last. Another one of those slow days in hell. There’s Lenny out on his front porch, smoking a stale Swisher Sweet and praying for his disability check to come early—fat chance of that. And here comes the kid on the rust-red ten speed. The kid—his baseball cap perched at an angle, low over his eyes—has a plastic shopping bag hanging over the handlebars. His big teenage hands hold it like it’s nothing but pancake mix and baking butter. The bike’s a beater, all ball bearing squeaks and chain drag—stolen, Lenny figured. The kid passed Lenny’s house, headed west into the low hanging sun, and rode right up onto the dead grass in front of Shirley Best’s old place. The house going to shit with Shirley dead—how in the hell long was it?—about six months, give or take a week. Abandoned, Lenny figured.

What Lenny did was push himself out of his cheap lawn chair and limp down the three porch steps. He put one hand into the bulging disc that got him a paycheck each month and grunted all the way down his front walk, tried not to trip on the lifted slabs of old brick and half-ass hardscape. You get to sixty and yard work don’t look so good anymore. Not with a bulging disc, anyhow.

Lenny stopped at the sidewalk, watched the skinny kid slam the bike into the grass and jog onto Shirley’s front porch. What Lenny wanted to do was yell at the kid about nobody being home, tell him to fuck off and sell his candy up where they built all them tract homes.

But Lenny kept his mouth shut, puffed a few times on the stale cigar.

Lenny noticed the kid gave a coded knock, like a pattern he pre-arranged—knock…knock…knock-knock-knock—and the door opened a crack.

The kid looked over his shoulder, up and down the street, and—not giving two shits about Lenny’s old ass staring at him—opened the plastic shopping bag. A hand and half an arm shot out the door and dropped a black item into the shopping bag. It looked to Lenny to be about the size of a softball, covered in some dark wrapping. The door slammed and the kid leaped off the porch.

A few seconds later he was back on the bike and coming toward Lenny, the kid weaving back and forth across the street like he owned it. The shopping bag hung heavy with the object’s weight—whatever it was—and Lenny noticed the smirk on the kid’s face. Like he just got a hand job or something.

As he passed Lenny headed east, the kid said, “The fuck you looking at?”

Lenny grunted, hobbled into the street and lifted his middle finger to the kid’s darkening shape. He removed the cigar from his mouth and said, “Another punk coming in here for weight, that’s what.”

The kid kept weaving back and forth across the street.

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