Haints Stay

Cover

Title

Copyright

Beginning

Acknowledge

Also published by Two Dollar Radio

Cover End

COLUMBUS, OHIO

For more information visit us here :

TwoDollarRadio.com

Copyright © 2015 by Colin Winnette

All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or
part in any form.

ISBN : 978-1-937512-32-3

Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

Author photograph :
Stacia Torborg

Cover :
The Vanishing Race - Navaho
, Edward S. Curtis, circa 1907-1930.

Book design and layout by Two Dollar Radio.

No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes
used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the
publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are
products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This book is for bug.

BROOKE AND SUGAR WERE ON A BRIDGE
between a field and a crowded wood. They had lost their horses days ago and
had been walking for miles on end. The bridge was where they decided to break. Out
in the open. A kind of celebration.

Sugar unpacked a few slices of bread and a brick of old cheese. He tore
chunks loose with his nails and set them on the open face of the bread at his side.
Brooke spat between his knees and took pleasure in the smacking sound as his saliva
met the water below.

They had finished a job. They were emptied of bullets and powder. They
were satisfied men. They were on their way to collect the next few months’ security.
To be cleaned and taken care of. They would be treated well again, their shoulders
and their genitals rubbed. They would smoke and bathe at the same time. Sugar would
buy dinners and drinks and comb his hair with scented oils. Brooke would gamble and
win and lose, but no one would be after him. He would buy a new knife. They were
victorious and cheerful as ever they could be.

It was another day or two before they reached the town. They camped
out in the open, unsheltered. Sugar smoked on his back with a strip of fabric
covering his eyes. Each night, Brooke counted the stars until he fell asleep and
woke blinded by the one.

As they neared the town, they smelled smoke. Not the
welcoming kind, the tin-chimney and clay-pot kind, but an acrid, overwhelming kind
of smoke. They continued. It was only a few minutes before they noticed the thin
gray funnels rising up and opening out to the clouds above them.

In essence the town remained, but its landscape had changed. Jenny’s had
been razed. People moved past the bar as if it were nothing to see at all. And there
wasn’t much. What remained of the walls was blackened and halved. A streaked set of
spiraling stairs near the center of the lot wound upward to nothing. The pole at the
banister’s base supported the charred head of an eagle.

The bathhouse stood fine as it ever had, only a man now hunched at the
doorway. They didn’t know him. He had the clean, fat look of an out-of-towner. He
wore a thin-brimmed hat and a charcoal vest.

“I’m Brooke,” said Brooke, “and this is my brother Sugar.”

Sugar nodded, put out his hand.

The clean, fat stranger nodded and opened the door to them.

Sugar lowered his hand, slid it into his pocket. They were used to
disrespect. They did not take it personally.

Brooke followed his brother into the lobby of the bathhouse. It was
cleaner than usual and bustling. They positioned themselves in line behind an
elderly man hunched against a thin cane. He smiled at them and Sugar smiled brightly
back.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “Was there an accident at the

bar ?”

The elderly man shook his head. He stuck out a nub where his tongue
should have been. He turned from them and arranged himself against the cane
again.

Sugar tapped Brooke’s elbow, stuck out his tongue, and
pointed at what the elderly man had been missing. Brooke nodded. He saw what Sugar
saw, just the same as Sugar saw it, but Sugar insisted on telling it back to
him.

“You’re the two boys without a father,” said a very thin man, suddenly at
their side. He too wore a vest and a thin-brimmed hat.

They nodded. It was how people chose to see them. The truth was they had
plenty of fathers, but that wasn’t what people meant when they said
father
.
They had that kind of father too, the kind that gave Sugar his thick hair and Brooke
his crooked nose. There was a single man responsible for the husks of both brothers,
only no one knew which man he was or had been and Brooke and Sugar did not care for
them to.

“Come with me, then,” said the man at their side.

They followed. With the bar gone and their payment delayed, at the very
least, they were willing to investigate whatever new opportunities were presented
them. Things changed in town. They changed often. There was no use fighting it. What
they did was, they found a way and worked it until they found a new one.

They were seated before an oak desk and the tiny man behind it.

“You see the bar ?” said the tiny man. “Do you know who burned it ?”

Brooke and Sugar watched the tiny man smile and lean back in his desk
chair.

“Me,” said the tiny man, “and the women inside and the men inside.
Your
man inside. Your woman inside.”

The tiny man pointed at Sugar. He had soft eyes, the tiny man behind the
desk. Soft and black, like pencil lead.

Sugar shifted in his seat. He brought a strip of fabric
out from the front pocket of his tattered suit and wiped his brow theatrically. A
signal to the man that he meant no harm, that he was willing to appear intimidated.
It wasn’t their show, and they knew it.

Brooke examined the desk : a jar of pens, an ivory letter opener atop a
stack of papers, an ashtray containing one smoldering cigarillo.

“You think I’ve got ideas I don’t,” said the tiny man. “I know this won’t
stick. I’m not here to stay. I’m a link in a chain of things I’ve got no idea how to
stop or predict.”

He barely occupied his chair. He was like a cat in the lap of a giant. He
was sweating too, and Sugar thought to pass the fabric to him in a gesture of
brotherly goodwill.

“But I’m here for now,” said the tiny man. “And you’re the first problem
I can see coming.”

“Because we’re owed by the bar,” said Brooke.

“There isn’t a bar,” said the tiny man. “Not anymore.” He laughed and
tilted back in his chair and laughed some more, his hand at his belly. Darkness and
rot freckled the inside of his mouth. His teeth and gums were lit by the room’s
light as he laughed and held his mouth open like an offering.

Sugar smiled. Brooke examined a nearby shelf, the spines of the books
there and the dust that had long ago settled on them. The dust of another man’s
body, another man’s toil and time.

After a moment the tiny man regained his composure and opened the drawer
to his left. He slid the letter opener from the exposed desktop down into the
drawer.

“Money,” said the tiny man, “or some other thing that will make you
resentful of the bar going down. Maybe you two like to drink. Maybe you two like
women. Maybe you’re sentimental.
I can’t have two thorns wandering
the streets, looking for a reason to stick in my side.”

The tiny man seemed to relax then.

“So,” he said, settling back into the enormous-looking chair and letting
his thin arms dangle from either side, “how can I trust you two to keep your heads
about you ?”

“Do you read history ?” said Sugar.

“Yes and no,” said the tiny man, a smile creeping back into his lips. “I
don’t read much, but I know a few things. History, as you put it, it’s
slippery.”

“Well I’m a student of history,” said Sugar, “and any observant man can
see that power is like a gold coin. Some men squander it, throw it away on nothing
worth noticing. Others simply lose it to a world that’s much hungrier for it than
they are. Others still dedicate their lives to holding onto it. And some die, coin
in hand, surrendering it only to the men who bury them.”

The tiny man inched forward in his seat, eyed Sugar for a point.

“My brother and I,” said Sugar, “it makes no difference to us what the
world does with its money.”

“You’re too… uh, historically read, huh,” said the tiny man, “to get hung
up on something like an unpaid debt ? Or an ignorant, rot-mouthed cunt taking the
reins ?”

“No,” said Brooke, “but we’d settle for a modest homecoming of sorts.
We’d like a bath each. We’d like the promise of a bed or two with a window, at least
temporarily. The peace of mind to rest. We’ve been traveling for days. We lost our
beloved horses with many miles still between us and here. Give us the opportunity to
get fresh, to adjust. We’ll keep our pampered heads about us.”

Sugar placed the fabric back into his front pocket. He crossed
his legs and eyed the tiny man, who looked at Brooke as if he were
still speaking. Finally, the tiny man nodded and a hand set itself on Brooke’s
shoulder.

Brooke had the ashtray from the desk in his hand then and was already
withdrawing the blow he’d spent on the broken-nosed thug behind him. Blood spilled
from the thug’s nose. He clutched his face as if trying to collect the blood that
gathered there.

Brooke set the ashtray back on the desk and Sugar settled himself into
his chair.

“Okay,” said the tiny man, with a grin. “A bath it is.”

The baths were crowded. Men of indeterminate age, but none of them
young, lined the edges. A mix of tobacco smoke and steam crowded the air. Sagging
wooden guardrails led down a row of steps into the water of the communal bath. The
floor and walls wore a yellowing tile.

The heat pressed against Brooke’s and Sugar’s lungs as they moved along
the bath’s perimeter to hang their towels from a row of silver hooks lining the far
wall.

Someone whistled. Others coughed, shifted, and began to whisper.

“I think they like you,” said Brooke.

Sugar smiled and Brooke stepped into the water. The blood on his left
hand lifted and dispersed. He bent at the knees and submerged himself up to his
shoulders. He shut his eyes, listened to the sounds of the other men as they
examined his brother.

“You don’t even smell like a woman,” said a longhaired man sitting alone
in the corner of the large square, now shared by nearly twenty men.

Sugar had seated himself on the bench lining the edge of
the bath. He crossed his legs, then thought again and uncrossed them. He parted his
knees just slightly. He nodded at the longhaired man sitting a foot or so from
him.

“It’s because I’m not a woman,” said Sugar. He snapped his fingers at a
passing boy in white. The boy paused and removed a thin cigarette from a pack on the
silver tray he carried before him. Sugar gripped it with his lip and the boy lit it
with a smile.

“Your charge number, sir ?”

“It’s on your man,” said Sugar, and the boy nodded. He made a mark in a
small notebook beside the cigarette pack on the tray and began again to circle the
bath’s perimeter.

“You’ve got the finer parts,” said the longhaired man. “I don’t mean at
all to pry or stare. I just haven’t seen a woman’s parts… in years, and… well you
don’t expect to come across them in a place like this.”

“Is he bothering you, Sugar ?” Brooke rose from the water before them. He
was lean and cruel looking. He looked as if he should have been covered in scars,
but all of the wounds he bore were fresh. His muscles were mottled with age and
effort.

“No,” said Sugar. He let the smoke drift between his vaguely parted lips.
“He’s just admiring my parts.”

The longhaired man smiled and shifted and put his hands up. “No,” he
said, “I’m just noticing is all. I don’t mean either of you any discomfort or
trouble.” He slunk away to a far corner of the bath and settled between two older
men who were leaning against the bath’s edge, eyes closed, either sleeping or
dead.

Brooke took his spot there in the corner near his brother.

“You should cross your knees,” he said. “In a place like this.”

“You should avoid giving advice,” said Sugar. “You haven’t got the face
for it.”

“Did you notice our friend ?” said Brooke. He ran his
palms along the surface of the water, examined the edges of his scabs as they
softened.

“How long do you think we’ve got ?” said Sugar.

“Get your hair wet,” said Brooke. “Then we should go.”

The broke-nosed thug was bleeding between two gangly men in the bath
adjacent Brooke and Sugar. His eyes had not lifted from their movements.

Sugar crab-walked out from the bench and lowered himself under the water.
He ran his hands back and forth through his hair and could feel the grit coming away
in sleeves. He opened his eyes to see the water had yellowed around him. He picked
at the pieces that clung directly to his scalp. He felt a shiver in his shoulders,
the rare delight of a long-awaited bath. He admired his brother’s legs through the
chalky water. The pressure in Sugar’s lungs grew more intense with each passing
moment. He exhaled and Brooke’s legs lifted suddenly up and out of the bath. Sugar
kicked himself toward the far edge of the bath and rose up and out as well.

Brooke was on top of the naked, broke-nosed thug, pounding his chest and
stomach and face. The sound was that of a cow collapsing into mud, again and again
and again.

Brooke broke the skin of the broke-nosed thug in various patches about
his body. Brooke rose only when the reach of the blood surpassed his wrists. He rose
naked and bloody and examined the room. Some looked angry, put out. Others were
frightened and without a plan. The longhaired man who had been talking to Sugar sank
between the two old men at either side of him, until the water reached his ears. He
eyed the brothers across the surface of the water, bubbling air from his slender
nose.