THUGLIT Issue Seven (8 page)

Mitch finds his brother at the back of the house, door to the yard wide open. He
's staring outside through the screen door, dressed only in a pair of sweatpants and socks, ribs tightly wrapped and shoulders too angular in the faint light cast over him from outside. Mitch approaches him from behind as if this man's not his brother, as if Cole might turn around any second and jump him.

"
Cole?" he says, stopping a few feet away.

"
Bud's here," says Cole. Matter-of-fact. Fearless.

"
Where?"

"
Out there."

Mitch
's brain freezes for a beat. First question that occurs to him: "Did he see you?"

"
No," Cole says. "Didn't even knock on the door."

Mitch goes into his bedroom and takes his pistol out of the top drawer in his dresser—the same one he used to kill Ruby Jean. He
's been meaning to get rid of it, but he hasn't saved up enough money for a replacement.

"
You stay here and keep the doors locked," he says to Cole, maneuvering past him.

"
Mitch."

Mitch pauses to look at h
is brother in the dark. "What?"

"
Let me call the cops."

Mitch shakes his head.

"This ain't you."

"
It's got to be, now."

"
None of this would've happened if it weren't for me," Cole says. "You've done enough. Give me the gun."

"
No way in hell."

They hear a shout from somewhere outside, incomprehensible
through the rain and distance.

"
For the love of Christ, Cole, just listen to me this once and stay here," Mitch says, before pushing the screen door open and leaving his brother behind.

Bud Wolfe
's standing in the vacant lot behind the Rose brothers' back fence, feet planted wide in a power stance. His clothes cling heavy to him, soaked through, hair darkened and stuck down to his forehead. The lights on the backs of both houses make the sight of him clear. The night is coal black behind him, and standing there with water streaming down his body, he looks like some agent of death and judgment dispatched by a wrathful, bloodthirsty god.

"
Didn't I tell you to stay off my property?" Mitch calls out to him, past his own yard now and at the edge of the vacant land. He's got the gun in his hand alongside his thigh.

"
She didn't run any farther than this, did she?" Bud says, spreading his arms out. When Mitch doesn't respond, Bud drops them again. "I found Ruby Jean in the lake—you murdering son of a bitch."

Mitch stares at him for a silent beat, eyelashes separating in wet clumps.
Tonight's the first rain in weeks, and it's been ungodly hot. The water level must've dropped in the lake. It wasn't high to start, and Mitch left Ruby Jean's car closer to dry land than he should've. "What do you want?"

"
I want to take you back to that lake and put your dead ass in the seat next to her…but I'll settle for packing you into this mud."

Mitch doesn
't move. If he runs, Bud might shoot him in the back. Mitch isn't about to lead the bear in Cole's direction anyway.

"
You come here and take your beating, or I'll have everybody in this bumfuck town out at that lake to see what you done," Bud says.

"
Not if I shoot you first," says Mitch.

"
I don't think you're that dumb." Bud takes something off his waistband and throws it on the ground between them. "Put your gun down and we'll see if you're as good at harming a man as you are a woman."

Mitch considers shooting Bud. Maybe dead. Maybe just enough to keep him where he is, until the sheriff comes. But he
's already got one dead body a stroll away from his house, bullets matching his gun still in her. He doesn't know if he can contain any more criminal secrets, if he can cover them up enough to stay out of prison.

The coonhounds growl and bark and
rattle the gate on their fence as the two men beat each other. After ten minutes, Mitch lies on his back in the mud, one eye swollen shut, rain washing the blood off his face.

"
The funny thing is," Bud says, looking down at him, "I do believe my wife got what she deserved."

He lifts his
right foot over Mitch's skull.

A flash of ligh
tning cracks through the storm.

Mitch rolls o
nto his side, as Bud collapses.

Cole
's standing in the gateway of the backyard fence, strong hand curled around his own gun. He lowers his arm and doesn't move for several seconds, as thunder growls in the distance. The neighbor's hounds start to settle down a little, as if they can sense the fight's finished.

Cole gives Mitch a hand up, and they drape arms around each other
's back on their way into the house. They drip water and track mud on the floor, as Cole leads his big brother to the master bathroom. Mitch sits on the lip of the tub and tries to catch his breath. Cole washes his hands in the sink and glances at himself in the mirror.

"
What the fuck are we going to do?" Mitch says, gasping. He can feel adrenaline coursing through his blood and the shivers starting in his muscles. His head's pounding, and his face burns. His dirty knuckles sting.

"
Clean up and dry out," Cole says, voice almost too low for Mitch to hear him over the storm. "We'll take out the trash come sun up."

He turns the hot water on in the shower fo
r Mitch and leaves him alone.

by Benjamin Welton

Sid Hartsell had been throwing hot that year. The other boys in
Harrison County couldn't keep up with him, and when he threw that trademark Canadian palmball of his, hitters started going down like flies. Everyone in the small town of Quiet Dell knew that Sid Hartsell—old Andrew Johnson Hartsell's boy—was destined to skip the minor leagues and go on into the big show. The only point of contention argued over at Bob McKinley's country store was which team in particular was going to pick up Sid. Hank Kunkle was of the idea that the Pittsburgh Pirates would chose someone from their own neck of the woods, while his main adversary across the aisle, Vernon Roberts, was in favor of the New York Giants. Roberts, a man who had taken the bar and passed it without a day in law school, fancied himself an educated man, and because the Giants were the home of the great college boy Christy Matthewson, Vernon figured them to be the only team worthy of having such a fine, smart West Virginia boy like Sid Hartsell.

Despite
Vernon and Hank's solid belief in their own correctness, neither the old boozer or the sham lawyer knew that much about Sid Hartsell. For starters, the boy had no intentions of sticking around Appalachia, so even if that that team from the City nabbed him, he would more than likely say "no" in order to find a team in finer climes. Conversely, Sid Hartsell was a true-blue backwoods boy, and he considered a book a monumental waste of time. I should know, it was my job to cover him for three seasons. The name is Thaddeus O' Connor, pleased to meet you.

I am sort of a gadfly around these parts, and much of my conversation comes from two sources: one, my love of aimless perambulations among the forests, hills, and backroads of this fine state, and two, my four years spent at Gettysburg College
—one of America's premiere institutions of higher learning. I take great pride in being a learned man, and that fact makes me terribly unpopular around these parts. West Virginians and hill people more generally respect only men who've risen from the bottom on the merits of their pluck and relentless determination. "College boys," on the other hand, are either the spoiled sons of formerly out-of-state merchants or are viewed with a sense of mysticism. A college education is viewed as somewhat magical to people without one, and since most people in Quiet Dell stopped attending school sometime before the eighth grade, they consider me a wizard cut from the silken robes of Merlin.

Unfortunately, I am all too human, and my days in
Pennsylvania caused me significant financial harm. My weakness is gambling, and like the great Virginian scribbler Poe, it has caused me no undue harm to kith and kin. After spending away the last bit of my money on a graduation celebration, I was forced to recognize the necessity of moving back to my place of birth. Quiet Dell is as unassuming as its name would lead you to believe, and stunningly, it might even be more quiet that your wildest guess could imagine. The fact that a high school ball player was the main point of interest should let you know immediately the type of place that Quiet Dell is.

This all changed the year that the war broke out in
Europe. I heard that the summer of 1914 is considered the last great moment in Continental history—a time when the women were beautiful, the drinks were cold, and the future seemed unclouded. This was not the case in Quiet Dell. The summer of 1914, which was one of the hottest on record, is considered a tragic time in our history. It was the time when Sid Hartsell fell from grace, and when Alfred Holmes came to town.

In June, I was working in the press office as usual. Since moving back home, I had taken up work as both a reporter and an editor. Our local rag, the Mountain Times Informer, had been a mere bit of toilet tissue when I first came aboard. Within my first year, the former owner—the octogenarian Abraham Easton—passed away, leaving a vacancy open. I took the role without much of a challenger, and quickly set about reforming the Mountain Times Informer. It was my vision to not only have a newspaper dedicated to meeting the local needs—sports, pot-boiling gossip, and news of the coal mines—as well as providing a form of cultural enrichment. Under my care, the Mountain Times Informer began covering stage dramas, offering book reviews, and leading the way in film criticism. For these radical changes, I was called everything from a "no good city punk" to a "blasphemer." Many of the old writers left under a boycott. This proved no problem, for I soon filled their vacancies with men that I had recruited from the state university in Morgantown. I decided to keep one writer from the Keaton era, Stanley Woodside, owing to his abilities as a copywriter and his liberal politics. By the summer of 1914, the Mountain Times Informer was considered an oasis of culture in a desert of ignorance.

Still, despite this successful growth, our staff was still relatively thin. This meant that I had to cover stories and
"pound the beat" as they say in New York. I gave myself the role of covering Sid Hartsell because the boy fascinated me. Sid Hartsell was a great baseball player, yes, but I care nothing about baseball. What interested me about the case of Sid Hartsell was his scientific complexities and the physiognomy of his features. Despite his dark hair and soft blue eyes, Sid Hartsell had the face of a fiend trapped in a different epoch. His brows were pronounced and had a longitude that nearly stretched to his ears, which were themselves of abnormal height. His cheekbones were high upon his face like an Indian's, and his teeth (especially his incisors) were of a canine fashion. When Sid threw a fastball, the dark, coarse hairs on his arm would wave in the wind, helping the spectator to visualize him as a sort of evolutionary creature, a simian-esque ancestor of primordial time.

Of his personality, Sid Hartsell was also a boy of fierce temper. He came from a rough family wherein the whip was the primary tool of discipline. His father was known to patronize not only the town
's lone tavern, but his heavy feet were often heard climbing the stairs to the tavern's upper floor. On a filthy bed of dusty sheets, Andrew Johnson Hartsell grew to know Emily Jane Snider a little better. This of course was not known to the long-suffering Mrs. Gwendolyn Hartsell, a poor, ignorant girl originally from a mountain family of degenerate stock. Sid Hartsell knew quite well of his father's indiscretions, for the man kept no secrets from his son. In fact, it was rumored that when the boy turned thirteen, his father provided the boy with one-night company in the form of Greta Long, Emily Jane's teenaged cousin.

Rather than be appalled by such sinfulness, Sid Hartsell seemed to be enraptured by his father
's doings. He often told me after our interviews that his chief goal in life was to become a man like his father. Mr. Lombroso would certainly find the Hartsell clan a perfect example of the genetic source of crime, and furthermore, when the news about Greta and Sid came to light in August, only myself, an amateur criminologist, was exempt from the shock of the revelation of young Sid's wickedness.

Whilst Sid Hartsell was throwing strikes and learning to commit crimes along the lines of his father, a new, never before encountered evil was making its way through the one thoroughfare of Quiet Dell. This evil was named Alfred Holmes, and he was the epitome of innocuousness. Alfred Holmes was a man of thirty years with a medium stature and an average build. His hair was of a brown that seemed less like an individual color and more like a conscious combination of blonde and black. His hands were slight and artistic, and his face was mostly flat with little in the way of irksome or protruding features. His voice was soft and only faintly betrayed a Midwestern accent.

Mr. Holmes came to Quiet Dell as a salesman trying to convince housewives to purchase life insurance. Rather than being one of those noxiously smooth creatures that one hears about from time to time, Alfred Holmes was a bumbling salesman with no small amount of awkwardness. The women in town regarded him as a clown, and the men figured him as a threat to nothing. This is why so many of them left their wives alone with the stranger from the West, and this is also why so many of them were crying tears of relief when the summer came to an end
.

The first to go missing was named Louann Armstrong. Her husband, Harlan Armstrong, was away in the Marines, so people in the town did not recognize her absence for quite some time. When they saw Alfred Holmes going to see her, they figured that the salesman had landed on a perfect customer. Harlan Armstrong had fought in the
Philippines, then came home for a brief spell before coming to the conclusion that civilian life did not agree with him. During that summer, he was in California waiting for the next war. He would eventually go to Haiti a heartbroken man.

Louann was frightfully lonely, and seemed to fall under the charm of Alfred Holmes, a warm body in a typically cold house. What happened on that day has never become public knowledge, but more than likely, Louann Armstrong was killed like the others in
Cleveland, Chicago, and Winnipeg. Alfred Holmes would invite himself into the living room, then would ask to see the house. After all, he would assure the lonely housewives that failures in the home were the leading cause of accidental deaths in America. He would assure them that his inspection would both give them peace of mind, as well as a discount of the insurance prices. Seven women believed him, and two of them were from Quiet Dell. Louann was one of the two, and she was probably strangled from behind, and then violated postmortem.

Alfred Holmes
's next victim was similar to Louann Armstrong in that she was also waiting on her military man. Except for Mary Wyndham, her man in uniform was never coming back. Jefferson Davis Wyndham had been a sergeant in Cuba in 1898, surviving Spanish bullets and Army beef before malaria took him to eternal sleep. Ever since the telegram had arrived at her doorstep sixteen years before, Mary Wyndham had been living in a black-colored world with little sunshine or aspirations for hope. Her Baptist faith took on an increasingly somber mood, and by the time that Alfred Holmes had arrived at her door, people in town were glad to see a man in her life, even if that man was only passing through.

Again, according to his tradition, Alfred Holmes more than likely invited himself to an impromptu tour of Mary Wyndham
's house. The obliging widow said yes, and while she and Holmes were inside of one of the house's bedrooms, she was attacked from behind, strangled, and then ravaged after her last breath. Alfred Holmes usually kept pretty clean crime scenes, and the house of Mary Wyndham was no different. In fact, the only reason why Alfred Holmes was ever caught was because he made the foolish decision to try and sell some items from a victim's home to a Winnipeg pawn store. The Canadian police not only caught him, but found out that he was an American using the false name of Leonard Powers. When they threatened Holmes with deportation, he revealed to them why he was so scared of going back to America. Mistakenly believing that the Canadian justice system was more lenient, Holmes's confession ultimately granted him a broken neck at the end of a rope.

In Quiet Dell, the crimes of Holmes only came to light when a murder he did not commit was discovered. In July, after the disappearances of Louann Armstrong and Mary Wyndham, people in the town were starting to get suspicious. One of my more eager reporters hinted at white slavery, while old Stanley Woodside suggested suicide. Either way, the mood in the town had grown considerably darker. This was no different on the baseball field, for during the summer months when Coach Adolph Simpson made his Quiet Dell Polar Bears practice twice a day, teammates had begun to notice that Sid Hartsell wasn't throwing with the same amount of gusto or verve as he once had. To them, Sid was listless and uninterested in his sport, his art, his ticket out of West Virginia.

During one training day, Sid gave up two home runs
to Fitzroy Baker, the third baseman who had only one home run in his whole career. After smashing his second out past the tree line, Fitzroy told me that it felt like Sid was handing his pitches right down the middle, as if he was no longer interested in making batters look foolish. Sid was the one beginning to look foolish, and his sloppy pitches had the sports fans of Quiet Dell nervous.

Sid
's increasingly poor performances were later to be revealed as the result of his continuing affair with Greta Long, the girl who had been paid to steal his innocence. Greta and Sid had been meeting secretly since the late spring, and during their early morning assignations, Greta and Sid did more than talk about the price of bread. Before long, a rumor started to spread among the more lowly women in town that Greta was pregnant, and that the father was Sid Hartsell. The high school, team, and the men in town told these clacking hens to keep their mouths shut. Vernon Roberts even threatened some of them with suits of slander. The rumors persisted though, and Sid Hartsell was showing the deleterious effects of too much gossip.

To make matters worse, Greta, a once demure and agreeable lass, was beginning to show signs of greed and malice. Not only was she going to keep the kid (which was against Sid
's wishes), but she was going to make sure that she and the kid would be wonderfully provided for with the help of Sid's major league money. Greta blackmailed Sid with the idea that if he said no, or if he went against her wishes in any way, then she would tell the Mountain Times Informer all about the activities of the Hartsell family.

This was no hollow threat, for
Greta contacted our office one night in a drunken stupor with shouted nonsense about the doings of the Hartsell men. Under the influence of John Barleycorn, Greta not only told us that she had a major secret about Sid Hartsell, but that his father was guilty of rape. I sent Greta home and told her get some rest, while still making a note to remember some of the drunken girl's outrageous claims. Despite my abhorrence of gossip, more often than naught, it proves to be true.