Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
Limestone Bones
Kilkenny, West Virginia, 16 March 1976

“Take the dog with you, Little Clay.” Lefler
leaned against the doorframe and crossed his
arms on his skinny chest. Blue workpants
drooped from the greasy bulb of his potbelly. A
drop of blood slid from his nose onto his dirty
thermal top. “I ain’t feeding him.”
The boy glared as he worked the math in his
head again: Twenty-two eight times comes to
one-hundred and seventy-six. The boy was one-
hundred and seventy-six months old. The
twenty-twos pointed to his leaving more clearly
than the stars glowed overnight in the March sky
above West Virginia. The numbers marked the
hidden bones of the world. The boy snapped his
fingers for the dog. Thunder crawled from
beneath the porch and circled, dwarfing the boy
that destiny meant to remain small. He wore a
greasy feedcap jammed onto a short thatch of
dark hair with the bill turned down to cover a
square, unremarkable face, cutdown jungle
fatigues, and a frock coat with laceup brown
brogans. The boy carried an Army rucksack on
his shoulder and a shotgun broken open in the
crook of his right arm.
“Don’t be back,” Lefler said.
“I said it. Forty-four months is enough of you.
I’m gone,” the boy said, even though the words
didn’t need repeating. He wasn’t going to take
them back. Binding words couldn’t fit back in a
hillbilly’s mouth without choking him.
Lefler scowled like a man studying a bad
bargain. Truth told, the boy knew the man had
tried to be friendly. He bought baseball gloves;
he bought the bloodhound puppy when it was no
bigger than a teddy bear, visited the school, and
sat at the breakfast table to listen. But he was
too tall and blond, too heavy, slow, and stupid;
the boy never saw any kinship with his mother’s
second husband. The boy just didn’t want to be
friends with the poison poured on the open
wound in his heart.
1
Stories
The boy remembered the slope he had slid
down to hate Lefler, long before he recognized
the numbers. Lefler came home with his mother
after the wedding. “Your daddy’s dead, boy,”
he said, “and your momma needs a man. Past
time you bit on that.”
That was the first time the boy hit Lefler. The
boy missed drawing blood, but got better as the
months passed. He didn’t want a man to replace
his father; he wanted his father back. His father
had promised to come home in two years—after
two tours in Nixon’s army—but he was killed
after twenty-two months. Then twenty-two
more months passed before his mother married
again, right on the boy’s birthday. Vietnam was
over.
Sometime after that, the boy saw the meaning
of twenty-two. He had been eighty-eight
months old when his father volunteered for
Vietnam. The revelation of the numbers framed
his life into unchanging inevitability, no
different from the towering weatherscarred
limestone of Drip Rock, where the passing
seasons changed appearances but not realities.
The first eighty-eight months of the boy’s life
ended when 1968 died in the November that his
father left for Vietnam; the second eighty-eight
months wanted to mark another change, in
March of a newborn 1976.
The hillside rose sternly above the dirty yard
surrounding the boy’s mother’s house. Drifts of
fallen leaves lined the baling-wire fence around
the yard. A slick sheet of dark mud ran
downhill from the porch to the road that snaked
downhill before vanishing into broad, dark oaks
at the hill’s knobby knees. After the boy turned
and took three uphill steps, the screendoor
slapped shut. Lefler had vanished inside.
The boy was a tiny speck on the vast wrinkled
face of Mingo County, West Virginia, blending
smoothly into the gaunt, snowpatched
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
wilderness. Downhill led to Kilkenny, where
schoolboys crowded around flickering
televisions to study Bugs Bunny and Gilligan’s
Island and fought over plastic toys while
dreaming of picket fences in Neverland. Uphill
led to Drip Rock, where West Virginia looked
up into the sky to wash its dirty face in the
falling rain.
Thunder dropped his nose to the stones
repeatedly along the trail, but the boy ignored
the hopeful efforts and halfhearted tailwags.
Thunder had double doses of the ills that made
bloodhounds generally disreputable for stupidity
and bouts of temper; the boy bore the dog like a
curse about his neck. The boy marched hard
uphill.
Cold wind seasoned with woodsmoke rushed
into the boy’s face when he crested the hill.
Muddy pastures rolled below him, twisted
among the rumpled blanket of timber. Rail
fences marked rough edges. A white clapboard
farmhouse sat on a flat of the rolling hillside.
Uncanny even at a distance, Danny Rice looked
up from his porch at the boy. The boy imagined
a flash in the round man’s blue eyes; when he
saw the boy, Rice always reacted as if he had
been waiting overlong for him to come back into
the room.
A half lifetime before then, Danny Rice had
been the second man the boy found waiting for
him after his father’s death, perched on the nose
of his rusty Ford pickup above the mud and
snow after school.
The first man hid his empty eyes behind dark
glasses. He wore a dress uniform and a red
handprint on his cleanshaven face. He watched
the boy carefully as he doled out the news.
When he climbed back into his mudspattered
car, the boy saw the man couldn’t lift his left
arm above his waist and he leapt to
understanding: The man was a broken soldier
sent to fight an easier war, but without the arm
he needed to stop an angry hillwoman’s
copperhead slap. The boy laughed because he
just couldn’t cry.
Danny Rice came home two months later; he
had sense enough to stay out of the woman’s
2
Stories
reach. He didn’t step into the house until the
winter of 1970 passed. Two years across the
water hadn’t marked Rice; his worn uniform
passed for ordinary hillbilly makeshift, and he
looked like a long line of yesterdays, only
missing the smile. He slid from the nose of the
truck and caught the boy’s shoulder after he
threw the first punch. Rice smothered more
punches and kicks and an incoherent scream of
anger with a crushing embrace. The big man set
the boy down again at arm’s length when he
stopped struggling.
“I’m here because he ain’t,” Rice said. Silent
tears dropped down his face and his gaze drifted
before he added, “I’ll be here because he can’t.”
In the months that followed, more men from
his father’s unit came to pay respects. The boy
found them waiting when he came home from
school, sitting on tailgates or straddling
motorcycles, wearing short beards and fatigue
jackets, their hollow eyes covered with dark
glasses. They chewed tobacco; they smelled of
aftershave and marijuana. They stuffed money
and phone numbers in his pockets, eating him
with hungry eyes while their sight wandered
inward to their memories. One black man,
Micah Brown, waited anxiously with Danny
Rice a year later, snapping upright like an
undone knot when he saw the boy. He said what
they all said: “You’re Little Clay.”
The boy strode up onto the farmhouse porch,
avoiding Rice’s eyes. He unslung his rucksack
onto the footworn boards.
“Those ain’t your school things,” Rice said.
“I ain’t going,” the boy said, looking up into
the man’s blue stare. His square young face
hardened with a determination the man found
familiar.
“You aim to sleep here?”
The boy nodded.
“Then you’ll be earning your keep if you ain’t
going to school. You’re gonna be better off with
your momma. You know that, right?”
The boy shrugged.
Rice frowned, a scarlet flush creeping onto his
face. The wind sighed in the eaves of the porch.
He pulled a flask from his trouser pocket, took a
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
drink, and motioned the boy to sit in another
chair beside his. He handed him the flask; the
boy drank a mouthful of raw whiskey before
handing the flask back.
“You’re gonna tell me something about it,
Little Clay. I ain’t playing fool when your
momma comes up here.”
The boy stared out across the muddy yard into
long-familiar oaks. In other days, the boy had
split half of the stovewood in the long woodpile,
after losing a bet to Rice’s redheaded sons. He
had lived his life running to and from the white
clapboard, but on the cold March morning he
felt like a stranger. He clamped his teeth hard
on explaining that twenty-two and twenty-two
made forty-four. The numbers meant less to
Danny Rice than they did to Angel Walker—and
for him they meant nothing. The silence
stretched too long; he sensed the man’s
impatience and said:
“Lefler pisses out fires.”
Rice frowned, but said, “Some white men are
ignorant. That’s a hard lesson, but it ain’t
enough to leave your momma.”
Ignorant fell short of describing Lefler; the
man belonged in the Nightlands. The boy dug
for clear words to show the poison eating
through him. “Three times I’ve walked into the
bedroom while he lay drunk and snoring and set
the muzzle of my shotgun to his head. One
night I’ll kill him for her wanting him.”
In his mind’s eye, the boy saw his mother,
pale in the darkened room, her face wet with
tears and dark with bruises, silently imploring
with outstretched hands. She closed the door
behind him each time, and he could hear her
body settle against it as she began sobbing
quietly in the darkness.
Rice took another drink. His blue eyes bored
holes into the same shadows the boy watched
beneath the oaks. “Alright,” he said.
“He lays drunk the first weekend every month
from drinking my dad’s check. I’m done
abiding it.”
“I said alright.”
“Danny—“
“You stay from down there, Little Clay.”
3
Stories
The boy nodded.
“Take your stuff up to Angel’s room. You can
sleep up there. Tonight’ll be soon enough to
settle what you aim to do.”
Upstairs, the boy stared from the loft window.
The sky brightened as the sun rose higher, but
the glass glowed with cold. The boy had slept in
the loft often enough, clinging like a burr to
Angel Walker when he moved down from his
hillside shack to live with Rice. The unlikely
pair had fused together in lightningstrokes of
misfortune, then polished into jewelwork over
time. The boy ran back downstairs and dodged
through a swirl of Marlboro smoke to take a
thick biscuit from the skillet on the stovetop and
a hug from Big Dee, Rice’s wife. Thunder
wandered into the yard when the boy came out,
prodding him with his heavy nose as he rolled
one of the motorbikes from the openfaced shed
facing the driveway. The bloodhound woofed
impatiently when he rode away, then slid back
under the porch where Rice still sat.
#
A table topped the ridge above the valley, still
beneath Drip Rock but awesomely higher than
the tablecloth of creation spreading past the Tug
Fork into Kentucky. A low house stood half
drunkenly against the mountainside with a thin
stream of blue smoke creeping from its chimney.
Two more motorbikes waited on the gravel in
front of the porch. The boy frowned when
Rice’s daughter, Debra, opened the cabin door
and peered out. The slim, sandyhaired girl
grinned and spoke back into the cabin. Angel
Walker gently chucked her on the head as he
brushed past her onto the porch. The girl’s
thunderous scowl went unnoticed.
“You must’ve told her you were coming up
today,” Angel said before he smiled. The
Cherokee halfbreed’s copperdark skin made his
green eyes seem startlingly bright. At
seventeen, he was already six feet tall. The girl
barely came to his armpit, even wearing boots.
The boy was a few fingers taller than the girl
once he stood on the rough plank porch. Angel
wore old fatigues and a greatcoat, but the girl
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
only wore blue jeans and a green ski jacket. Her
face was bright with the morning’s cold.
Little Clay scowled furiously, but the girl
answered with an irresistible, impish grin. Her
eyeteeth crossed her lip like fangs. She knew
the numbers; she even had numbers of her own.
For a long time, the boy had accepted the girl as
part of God’s determination for his life, his due
fate for dogging Angel’s footsteps; God
determined the world in an orderly pattern,
laying it down in the passing days the same as
leaves fell.
Little Clay was torn about the girl. She had
already been waiting beside him in his earliest
memories, before the Rice brothers and his
father had gone to Vietnam, before he looked up
to see Angel Walker standing over him on a
hillside. The girl was three years younger than
the boy, but they became the Littles together—
Little Clay and Little Deb, or even Dab—
enduring a trumped-up marriage before running
off for a puddle-splashing honeymoon spent
reciting the alphabet. As years passed, he
showed her how to skip stones, and then she
threw frogs against trees, and now she stole
kisses and made his face burn.
“You’re supposed to be at school,” the boy
said.
“I’m cutting,” she said.
Angel chucked her again.
“Quit it!”
“You’ll get a whipping,” the boy said.
She grinned. “Not like you’ll get.”
“I’m quit, not cutting.” He scowled because
she already knew that.
“What’d Danny say?” Angel asked.
“I didn’t tell him I was running west,” the boy
said.
Angel glanced at the motorbikes. “You saw
him.” A puzzled frown made his words half-
statement, half-question.
“I’m in the loft with you,” the boy said
impatiently.
The girl squealed, and then clapped both
hands over another huge grin.
Little Clay’s square face reddened.
4
Stories
“I think I’ll be staying up here,” Angel said.
“I ain’t gonna be down there when Big Dee
comes in folding her belt.”
Inside the cabin, they drank coffee. Angel and
Little Clay counted bullets, then spent several
minutes tucking pistols out of sight and drawing
them. They walked behind the cabin and
quickfired the pistols, splintering upright logs
into kindling. Angel fired two pistols at once—
a pair of .45 caliber Colts—while the boy used a
.44 caliber Ruger revolver. Little Deb threw
sticks for them when they began to slowfire,
taking turns drawing. The tall Cherokee was
faster, but the boy never missed. They walked
back inside and cleaned the pistols. While they
waited for fresh coffee to boil, the girl read a
book, looking up to watch them when they
spoke.
“You could practice more if you used a Colt,”
Angel said. “Them .44 Magnum bullets cost.”
Little Clay shrugged. Twenty-two and twenty-
two makes forty-four, he thought, but he didn’t
say anything. Angel carried a grudge against the
truth that the boy ignored in favor of peace.
Angel’s father, Major Walker, drifted into West
Virginia after the Second War, fought again in
Korea, and then returned to settle. The old
Cherokee married whiskey after Angel’s mother
left him with an infant boy that grew up
determined to distrust him. Little Clay learned
the numbers that explained the world from the
old Cherokee, but Angel claimed the old man’s
stories shifted when mouthfuls of whiskey began
melting the truth. The girl stared at Little Clay
hard for keeping silent because she knew the
numbers; she knew why he used a .44 caliber.
“The revolver don’t leave nothing behind,” the
boy said finally.
“You can’t be worrying about that going on
the road.”
The girl sucked her tongue and stared down at
her book.
The boy loaded the pistol, then tucked it in his
waistband. “I got it, Angel.”
“This’s my trail, Clay,” he said, with a frown
marking his face for knowing something quick
had passed between the boy and the girl.
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
# “The school called,” she said. “Ms. Walls said
That night, while Little Deb hovered in the
kitchen doorway watching, Little Clay washed
the dinner dishes. Angel had rode down from
Drip Rock with them to add his words to the
boy’s talk with Rice. The boy was nervous
anyway. He knew Rice had asked him why he
left home for more than idle curiosity. Rice
loved the boy’s mother like a sister, the same as
he loved the boy like another son, a love equally
knotted up in guilt about his father’s death. Rice
and his father had been friends long before
Rice’s little brother Clement was drafted; they
volunteered and went overseas to serve with
him. That love was hard and serious; Rice
accordingly did what he thought best for Little
Clay, not always what the boy wanted. While
quitting school for work was West Virginia
normal, every schoolteacher in Mingo County
had decided that Clayton Montgomery Guthrie
was a special project headed to be governor of
West Virginia, if not president of the United
States. Little Clay would have rather been a
blue-ribbon winner at a hog-kissing contest. He
heard his mother’s GTO pull up in the yard
while he was drying his hands from the dishes,
and then her doomsday call for his presence that
made six syllables of his middle name. Little
Deb’s eyes widened in the kitchen doorway
before she vanished like a crawdad.
Rice appeared in the doorway. “We’ll leave
that talk for tomorrow. If you’re still alive
then.” He flashed a grin, but Little Clay could
see the measuring challenge in the man’s eyes.
The boy walked into the living room at the
same moment his mother burst through the front
door without knocking. She wore jeans and a
paisley shirt with the long sleeves rolled up
above her elbows, and her hair pinned up from
cooking and washing dishes. Like always, she
stood plain, true, and upright. Rice’s redheaded
sons drifted up the stairs, but Angel twisted the
cap from a beer and sat down on the arm of the
couch. Rice slipped through the door behind the
boy and settled in his armchair in front of the
television.
5
Stories
you missed. I ain’t stopping you from leaving
home, but you’re going to school.” Her gaze
darted around the room, but she walked steadily
toward the boy. He waited. She stopped in
front of him.
“You can stay here with Danny,” she said.
“You’ve done it before. And I can see
something’s been bothering you since you came
back from Alabama last summer. But you’re
going to school.”
“I ain’t going back to school.” The boy
caught his mother’s wrist when she swung, and
kept a firm grip to keep her from swinging
again. Ordinarily he took it on the chin. That
made her madder than anything.
She tried with her left hand, and he caught that
wrist. He squeezed hard before he tossed her
hands back at her. He felt eye to eye to her for
the first time ever, but decided that she might
still be taller. She stepped back, redfaced and
fighting tears. “Is this something from Micah?
What did he say to you?”
“This ain’t from Micah. He told me to stay in
school, too.”
Micah Brown was the youngest son of a
sharecropper. He lived in Dothan, Alabama
when he wasn’t on the road working. The boy
had spent a month of his last summer working
around Dothan, where the Browns owned almost
two thousand acres in spite of the hard-eyed
white men around them.
“Which one of the bastards—“ His mother
aimed a glance at Rice, but the boy had too
many uncles. Rice was only the nearest at the
moment. She clenched her fists, looking vainly
for something to strike. “That old bastard
Kenny ain’t welcome in my house no more—“
“Mom, it ain’t from Kenny. There ain’t a
thing in school for me. I ain’t gonna sit in there
all my life and measure triangles and recite what
I read from books.”
“Clay, you’re fourteen.”
“Almost fifteen,” he said.
“Ms. Walls said you can go to college—“
“I ain’t going back to school!”
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
“—you can go to college,” she repeated. “I
already got three brothers can’t write nothing
but their name on the back of a Consolidated
Coal paycheck. You can go to college—“
“I don’t want to work in the bank!”
With studied attention Rice and Angel
watched the television, where a fat man in a
floral shirt agonized over buying a vowel. More
words fought to free themselves from the boy’s
mouth, but he would have clamped them back
even if his mother hadn’t been listening. The
numbers bore brutal witness to all the old
Cherokee had said. God had divided the world
into parts; some things shouldn’t mix and some
things shouldn’t separate; what crossed was
poisoned past most healing. Fathers couldn’t
leave wives and sons anymore than mothers
could leave husbands and sons. Other men
couldn’t poke themselves into an empty place.
The simple truth couldn’t be mocked with
reasons.
The boy knew his mother didn’t understand
this. She would measure him by whether he set
foot in the mines or how much money he had in
his pocket. He saw the emptiness on his
mother’s face. Past her breakneck green eyes,
years of worry, hard work, and frustration had
worn her down to the plain shape of her own
mother. The boy heard the undertone in her
excuses about Lefler: she didn’t think she could
do better. She never saw that thinking in better
or worse only missed the problem: death had
taken from her what her heart kept reaching for.
The boy didn’t figure her willing for something
less was reason enough to go along. The long
shadow his father cast in his uncles’ eyes gave
the boy high standards.
“You’re fourteen,” she repeated. “You know
you could graduate next year? One more year!
If you’ll just finish the few months left this year
—“
The boy shook his head. “I’ll be fifteen in
four more months. Dad was fifteen when you
married him.”
“He had a job at the sawmill—“ She stopped,
her mouth working soundlessly, the rest of the
6
Stories
sentence unspoken and unneeded. His father
had had a son growing already. “You ain’t . . .”
The boy shook his head again.
“You ain’t found work yet, Clay, so how does
it make sense? You’d still be better off at home
—you know, Lefler could—“
“Lefler could what? He can’t use a stick ruler
without marking it with his thumb. Or set level
steps without tucking rocks under a riser. He
might could teach someone how to lay drunk, or
—“
“Little Clay, that’s enough,” Rice said,
without looking away from the television.
Hollow-voiced, she asked, “You’re staying in
Kilkenny?”
“I’ll be here,” the boy said. “When I ain’t
running west for Danny.”
Angel burst out laughing, but the big, round
man didn’t move.
She glared at Rice. “You son of a bitch,” she
hissed. “This is what you think of him?”
Rice turned and jabbed a finger at the boy. “I
ought to be whipping your ass about now. I
warned you earlier about playing me fool.”
“You run me upstairs before I finished,” the
boy said sullenly.
Rice turned back and glared at the television.
“I did.”
“That’s what you got to say for yourself?” she
demanded.
“Harley, I just heard it myself!” Rice cried.
“You can’t let him do it!”
The boy watched the words settle on Rice
without marking him. The boy understood what
his mother meant in the same slantwise way he
understood what the teachers talked about in the
schoolrooms. The boy laid hands on anything
he wanted to understand quickly, because secrets
poured through skin. Wet and fire belonged in
the real world the boy’s brogan’s walked on.
His mother was looking out into another world
that could only be talked about—history, math
and literature, politics, law—and the quickest
way to understand that world was talking and
reading. The boy liked reading, but he had no
doubt which world stood first: the one with
whippings. What his mother wanted fit in the
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
other world, with oughts and judgments that a
hand couldn’t close around.
That talk-about world took the boy’s father. A
piece of paper came from Washington DC to
explain that Clement Rice had been chosen to
serve in the US Army, and landed in the real
world where Danny Rice and Clayton Guthrie
couldn’t bear to see the younger man walk away
alone into danger without feeling like their guts
were drawing from their bodies. The two
worlds mixed into deadly poison.
When visiting his uncles, the boy discovered
that the talk-about world loomed larger outside
West Virginia than the firm ground he stood on.
No matter where they came from, his uncles
knew the difference, but the boy understood that
they had learned the difference in Vietnam. In
the hills, a man did what was necessary to
survive, choosing among the coal, timber, land,
and liquor that West Virginia offered as means;
beyond that was the talk-about world. Another
choice opened when the men began coming
home from Vietnam—drugs—but that felt no
different in kind from liquor to hardened men
that needed to feed families. Such men gave
little thought to the talk-about world, where
Windsor knots outnumbered halfhitches and
fences couldn’t stand up unless they had paint
on them. Necessity led the men to march over
talk-about laws without shame, and even
sometimes to go in thoughtless habit beyond
what was necessary; Little Clay’s mother knew
it. The truth was beyond the reach of the simple
words they owned to express. A hundred years
of coaltrains trying hadn’t carried away the hills;
a hundred more wouldn’t carry in enough words
to cover them.
The boy watched his mother’s thoughts settle
as she studied his determined face, like red
leaves falling to land in silence. He stepped to
her side and kissed her softly on the cheek. “I’ll
be careful,” he said.
“Come by Sunday,” she said. “I’ll put some
pie aside for you.”
After the GTO cranked and rumbled from the
yard, Rice twisted a beer open and said, “There
should be a whipping somewhere for you, Little
7
Stories
Clay, but you’re charmed. Just like your daddy.
I never knew how he did it either.”
“I’ll take her some squirrels,” the boy said.
He shrugged, hiding relief behind a blank face.
The truth of his intentions was different than the
truth about the world’s necessities. The
numbers marked the medicine bound to draw the
poison from the boy’s life. Somewhere west—
in the Nightlands—the boy meant to search
through death and darkness and take the
medicine that would heal his life.
“Angel, you talked all this up,” Rice said.
“Can’t nobody else walk into Oakland with
me,” he said.
“With two of you going out, I’ll call for
more.”
Angel grinned. “We got it.”
#
Eight days had passed before Angel and Little
Clay rode the Norfolk & Western down to
Huntington. The heavy cars of coal thundered
over the weary rails, rushing for escape on
downhill turns, smothering conversation outside
shouting, or in the fits and starts of railyards and
trackside pauses. Downhill trains had right of
way; the ride to Huntington flashed by in one
long cold sleepless night for the boy, spent
studying his memories of every railroad
conversation he ever had with Angel.
More than a year past, the tall Cherokee had
admitted that Little Clay was surer on the West
Virginia hillsides. The boy won three rounds of
heart attack, a game Angel invented himself
years before to sharpen their woodcraft. They
took turns at catching an unhappy rabbit
barehanded, snatching it startled from the grass
by its ears. The game turned harder as the rabbit
got progressively more spooked. That world
suddenly belonged completely to the boy, from
angles of sun and wind to the enveloping power
of darkness. Angel swore that some power had
come from the boy’s father; Big Clay led the
trails in Vietnam without ever failing.
The railroad patterns slipped smoothly into
Little Clay’s understanding of the world with a
hiss of brakelines, the sharp smell of old iron,
and a clang of locking couplings; the trainmen
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
and railroad cops, tramps, loading and service,
yard towers and whistles were far simpler than a
winding stream. Brakemen and engineers
bothered tramps only if it involved a schedule or
equipment; the cops worried about cargo. The
tramps had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude more
concerned with handouts than trains. Angel and
Little Clay rode north into Ohio without a pause.
“The ride changes west of the Mississippi,”
the halfbreed Cherokee said while they lurked
outside the Norfolk yards at Portsmouth, waiting
for darkness to offer cover for boarding. He had
his eyes on a long stretch of Pacific cars,
expecting them to roll empty back across the big
river.
“You said more tramps,” the boy said.
“Mostly shifting around, copping handouts.
And Mexicans coming up for the season.”
Angel carried a rolled bundle of cardboard
into the yard for bedding. They settled in an
empty Burlington boxcar.
“Except for waiting in Oakland?” the boy
asked.
Angel’s face grew guarded in the moonlight
slanting into the boxcar. “The connect moves
after we set up. So we wait, and watch around
the clock.”
Little Clay shrugged.
“And think through what’s next,” Angel
added. “I ain’t running west the rest of my life.”
The boy smiled. He recognized questions
when he heard them, especially when they were
covered in the Cherokee’s artful solemnity. The
boy always had ideas: he had a raccoon spirit,
full of tricks that tumbled out under pressure.
Angel asked casually, and then chose the ideas
that suited him. “How long is the rest of your
life?” the boy asked. “Maybe if you knew that,
you could plan ahead better.”
“Longer than yours if you keep sleeping at
Danny’s.” Angel grinned.
“What?!”
“Deb’s a good Cherokee. When she starts to
bleed, you’ll have to push her away from your
bed every night. What do you think Danny’ll do
about that?”
“She’s eleven.”
8
Stories
“She’s almost twelve, and you’re almost
fifteen—you said that. Remind me when your
father married?”
“Mom was fifteen, too,” the boy snapped, too
angry over the jab because he knew the truth.
The girl wasn’t bleeding, and he already had to
push her away from his bed. She was
determined. He could buy a night’s peace with a
few kisses, but those were becoming more
enjoyable than he thought they should be. He
was torn. The girl’s blue eyes saw deep into
uncertain futures; she planted herself securely
beside him no matter where he imagined
himself.
“Deb’s pretty,” Angel said after slipping to the
door of the boxcar for a look out into the yard.
Brakeman’s lanterns floated over the tracks like
fireflies.
“She smells like rainwater,” the boy said
softly.
The tall Cherokee grinned. “Old man Rawls
said Deb looks like her grandmother come
again. He said Big Dee missed the looks.”
“Be damned!” Big Dee was as pretty as every
other woman in Kilkenny was plain, wearing the
originals of the bright blue eyes and impish
smile she gave her daughter on her birthday.
“Just don’t let Danny catch you.”
The boy shrugged.
“You ain’t a bit worried about that, are you?
You’re scared of the girl!”
“You ain’t?” His own sideways admission
startled the boy.
Angel laughed. “Scared of choosing the
wrong time. That would be now. I ain’t got
your uncles, and so I set my feet careful.” He
raised his voice to be heard as the slack drew out
and the train crept into motion.
They rode the Norfolk & Western on a zigzag,
aiming west. The countryside unrolled like a
dark banner, slashed with carlights and small
towns. The thundering motion freed Little Clay
from the here-and-now; his sharp senses
ordinarily chained him into a circle bounded by
his sight and hearing, but he was ripped free and
tossed into a world where only his memories
held shape. In the sunshine, endless open fields
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
or walls of brush and trees were suddenly
slapped aside by carlots, feedlots, and
checkerboard suburbs. The train dropped into
sideholes to dodge other trains and drifted to
calm in yards to change cars like a fussy
bargain-hunter. Along the way, the boy tore at
riddles, bolted into yardside camps for rest, and
fell victim to the rhythm set by the trains.
The boy knew Angel envied him his uncles—
not his mother’s brothers that said the same
things over and over, like three men sharing the
same mouth. They reminded both boys of three
walnuts on the lee side of the same hill, all
growing the same. They knew about coal and
bills, and spent their nights on dreams of
choking. Both boys looked them over.
Angel envied Little Clay the eleven uncles
born at Dac To. When Major Walker died, his
halfbreed son became family for the surviving
Thunderbirds, but he felt like he was clinging to
bare rock with a hard wind blowing against him.
He feared to pull free. Little Clay’s uncles
looked more like certainties. Each time the boy
came back to the hills from time spent with an
uncle, he carried a new gift—a pistol, halting
Spanish, or a new spinning kick to whip above
Angel’s head. The men pored over him like a
prized possession, measuring his height, stuffing
his pockets, and celebrating his exploits. When
they saw that the boy shared everything he had
with Angel Walker, they brought two of
anything to make sure each boy had one.
But Angel possessed one thing the boy hadn’t:
freedom. He was three years closer to manhood
at his father’s death, and the men didn’t crowd
around him determined that he should do as he
ought, or they thought. He stood outside the
cabinet shop until Trey Rawls put him to work,
but took up with Danny Rice as soon as the big
round man pressed pistols into his hands. He
saw an open door in front of him and walked
eagerly through.
“I ain’t gonna run west forever, neither,”
Little Clay said as the train waited in a sidehole
approaching Indianapolis. Thin clouds raced
overhead in a cold blue sky. “It’s a quick
answer for what I need doing.”
9
Stories
Angel shrugged. “You wouldn’t have to do
it.”
“That means something?”
Angel shrugged again, staring through the
door at a tractor-trailer blowing black smoke as
it pulled away from a loading-dock beyond the
highway running parallel to the track. “We ain’t
boys no more,” he said. “Ain’t no more free
summers. All this shit counts now, Clay. You
get it?”
“If you’re racing something.”
“I got to race for it. It ain’t coming to me. I
can’t mess it up and just go on.”
The boy watched his friend study too hard on
the highway in front of him, avoiding his eyes.
The boy sensed a thousand trails leading out into
the world, each lined with footprints he might
make in the future. A scowl deepened on his
face as he clawed to understand Angel’s fear.
“So what would you do after this?” the
Cherokee asked later, as if the time and distance
had never stopped them talking. He searched
around the collar of his fatigue jacket with a
brown fingertip. “I don’t figure you take up
with Clem. He’s the one of the eleven-born
can’t stand the sight of you.”
The boy shrugged. If Clement Rice hated
him, he hated the man back double. He had
other uncles.
“Kenny loves you to death.”
The boy shook his head. Antonin Kinitny
loved him mostly with stern words, iron-hard
fingers, and lightningfast kicks. He came to
West Virginia more than the others mainly
because he wouldn’t stay anywhere for long.
“Or maybe you could go up there to Chicago
with Bennie.” Benjamin Fox, the boy’s
wealthiest uncle, had a partnership in a LaSalle
Street accounting firm and a Gold Coast
mansion, but he had pulled triggers on two tours
with the rest of them.
“I don’t want to be no banker,” the boy said
mulishly.
“And you don’t want to go to school,” Angel
said. Night crept into the cold sky above them
and stars bloomed above the horizon while they
sat in silence. The train hissed and cracked like
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
an tired old man stretching his joints, then
drifted into motion, searching for a drink.
“That’s why you’re here right now?” the tall
Cherokee demanded. “From not wanting?”
The boy scowled. “What’s that supposed to
mean?” He couldn’t tell Angel why he had
come, because Angel didn’t believe in the
numbers.
“It ain’t supposed to mean nothing. You ain’t
always got to take it for a kick, Clay. I ain’t
always out to get you.”
The boy snorted. “If that ain’t salting an
upcoming lie with some truth—“
“You listened good when Pop was talking?”
Angel called his father ‘Pop’ with a faint sneer
that had never changed, as long as the boy had
known him. Even after the old man died on a
cold hillside running from ghosts, the sneer
didn’t change.
The boy had listened better than Angel. The
older boy had no faith in the old stories his
father told. The old Cherokee had taught them
both how to walk on the wind and listen to
shadows, but only Little Clay had cared about
the old stories. He had listened hard, and then
recited the words on his fingers at night.
The halfbreed cupped his empty hand. “You
can make something with this?”
“You got nothing there,” the boy said. “Then
nothing.”
“That’s it—nothing. How are you gonna
make your life from what you don’t want to
do?” He pitched his voice to get above the
rising thunder of the train.
The boy felt he had turned around and run into
himself in a hurry to get away; he was running
west for more than nothing, but had the same
empty hand to explain why he wanted nothing to
do with school. He kept quiet, studying the
passing of the moonlit brushline screening the
train, echoing the procession of ghosts in his
head—that was always the easy answer: watch
the chances slip past until they were gone.
After the boy’s father left for Vietnam, Little
Clay held grudges against the boys in his
grammar school; he had none of the give in him
that led to compromise and friendship. He spent
10
Stories
his time on the hillsides alone; that made him
fair game and he spent plenty of time running
from school.
Before the first Christmas break with his
father gone, the whole schoolhouse emptied to
chase him on account of a few quick punches
between classes and some boasting. The boy
darted through thickets to foil the rocks
whizzing behind him as he ran for a hillside; the
mob of boys almost surrounded him. He burst
wildly downhill to escape, tumbling drunkenly
to reach a lower trail. The boys slashed
downhill behind him in the fallen leaves frosted
with snow, whooping in triumph.
Little Clay scrambled to his feet as Angel
Walker appeared on the lower trail and threw
punches, dumping two younger boys from their
feet. The halfbreed Cherokee was a year from
middle school—too big to fight—and the mob
scattered. They shouted threats and threw a few
more rocks as the mudcovered boy retreated in
Angel’s shadow.
Little Clay followed Angel to the shack he
shared with his father. After the boy cleaned up,
he warmed up at the potbelly and had a peanut
butter sandwich, then explored the sheds
surrounding the shack. A rough maze of
frostdead garden among the sheds hid clusters of
chain, old tires, and piles of stones, neatly
stacked and sorted by color. He found hanging
springtraps, bicycle parts but no bicycle, frames
of drying squirrelskins, and bundled herbs.
Major Walker, an old brown man with round
ears and a narrow face, sat hidden in the dapple-
light falling through a broad white oak onto a
hickory hedge, drinking from a jug. He watched
silently until the boy finally noticed him, then
said, “Angel, get your raccoon-boy out from
here.”
Naturally, the boy went back. He understood
even then that the world served a purpose
beyond him, even if it seemed to Angel that it
bent in his favor. Little Clay didn’t feel better
off without his father, a sneaking thought he had
about his friend, but he did know the world had
an orderly pattern. Life wasn’t chance, anymore
than rocks slid uphill. The boy knew he was
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
pushing at the boundary of the world by running
west; he just hoped to squeeze out the medicine
he needed before the world pushed back. The
Norfolk & Western train rolled calmly into a
yard and settled with a tired squeal that jolted
Angel awake.
“I reckon you’re gonna be running west until
you figure a better way to get it done,” the boy
said quietly as his friend uncapped his
waterbottle. “You thought of that?”
“I guess somebody’s got to do it.” But then
Angel’s sour look lit into a grin. He punched
the boy lightly on the shoulder.
# After a few days of growling drunken curses
Twelve days had passed before they reached
the yards at East St. Louis, then crossed the big
river. They hiked north, edging along the
heavily patrolled Missouri yards, and they
lurked beneath a highway overpass until they
could dodge the trainmen and catch a car. They
rode west in spurts, crossed into Utah jolting
like a rollercoaster in an empty Union Pacific
boxcar, before haunting the yards again to
switch for the run from Reno on the Southern
Pacific. They settled into silent riding, thinking
about the business ahead.
Twenty-one days had passed before they
rolled to a halt in the Sacramento yard, the heart
of the iron crossroads in the Valley, where San
Francisco’s deepwater port poured out the traffic
of Asia. They dodged guard dogs and darted
onto an empty bound for Oakland, where a
patchwork of yards nestled against the city.
The Oakland yards lacked the scrubby brush
margins where tramps ordinarily camped; the
city pressed tight up against the rails and yards.
Chainlink fences, barbed wire, and lines of
cameras surrounded crummy buildings, litter,
and glass-covered asphalt. Angel studied the
dark corners and boltholes on their way out,
using his chin to point out grim, silent tramps
clutching their bundles tight. Tractor-trailers
growled in the corridors among the warehouses
that huddled against the railroads like silent
congregants in the communion of commerce,
swallowing and belching without a pause to
wipe their docks. Traffic sluiced the streets to a
11
Stories
tune of changing traffic lights. Everyone was
eager to leave the din and rubbish of Oakland
behind.
Little Clay’s trips to cities had been rushes of
visiting, shopping, and hurrying. He felt like a
piece of luggage when he visited a city uncle.
He found cities different from the hillsides
because of that need to go-somewhere, be-
somewhere or do-something, wired into them by
the press of too many people reaching for too
many things. The boy had been cured of that
years before, when Major Walker adopted him.
#
at Little Clay and threatening to nail a fresh
raccoon-hide to the door of his shack, the old
Cherokee put down his jug, stood, and raised his
hand commandingly. “Nephew, come here.”
The boy drifted closer to the drunken old man,
then too close, and was caught by a snakelike
lunge of his arm. Angel laughed while the old
man switched the boy in a circle with a hickory.
The boy tried some punches, then threw dirt, but
still ended up with a whipping.
Walker smiled. “This here raccoon-boy might
do, Angel,” he said. He pushed the boy down to
his backside, told him to sit still, and began to
talk. The boy discovered over several months
that the biggest lessons used the fewest words.
“Be still,” the old man said, and then
disappeared on the hillside. From hiding, he
stung the boy with pebbles whenever he moved.
In the beginning, that was often. After the boy
gave up trying to sneak away and tried to be
motionless, the old man counseled him:
“There’s what’s outside you, and then there’s
what’s inside you. What’s inside the raccoon
makes him catch the trouble. Be still.”
The boy’s thoughts gleamed like thousands of
stars; every thought was a thing he did or
wanted to do. The world outside him was just
the same. Every motion reflected some inward
need or urge. He shifted to relieve the pressure
on his feet, and the wind sighed for needing to
go around the branches.
The old Cherokee waited with his pebbles. If
he wanted he could’ve scolded the wind. Being
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
still was the hardest thing the boy learned,
because it went directly against his nature—he
didn’t want to be still. In seven seasons, the boy
learned to walk on the wind around the old man,
unscathed by pebbles, a thing that needed not-
wanting to be-somewhere or do-something.
# The Cherokee nodded. “The men working at
But everything about Oakland in April 1976
boiled like a shallow pan. Men rushed
heedlessly after what they wanted to do. They
gathered on corners with bottles of wine and
twisted cheap cigarettes to fill empty time.
Along the railroad, the boy had seen that tramps
came close, sometimes, to the relaxation of
stillness, but they still longed for the things they
had walked away from; if they meant to be
outside the rush, they still crept back to pick
away the crumbs clinging to the edge of
excitement’s plate. They couldn’t stop reaching
for what they didn’t have, for any other thing
they could see around themselves. The boy
nailed the thoughts together: running from what
you didn’t want matched wanting what you
didn’t have.
The handoff in Oakland was a blind
rendezvous. Rice’s pickup displayed a flag to
signal for General Khun’s runner; when a
second flag appeared, they converged to pass
sealed packages of morphine. The General used
a different Vietnamese courier every time—the
drug-run was a golden immigration-ticket—but
the Viets walked as if rifles were aimed at their
backs. The General had sharp eyes, a long
reach, and he fulfilled every promise. On the
trip back, Angel and Little Clay had to shed any
followers.
“We buy our food before we raise the flag,”
Angel said. “I found a good place to watch the
flag and the yards.”
“There’s a lot of cameras around here,” the
boy said.
“They’re watching the warehouses. The cops
break up parties when they cruise, but they
won’t notice us at all. We’ll set up after
nightfall.”
They hiked out to a grocery, bought chocolate
chips, shaved coconut, tubs of Quaker oats,
12
Stories
frozen apple juice concentrate, and sticks of
sausage. They filled their water jugs. Walking
through the warehouses, the tall Cherokee leapt
up to snag a sweatsock on the barbed wire
gleaming atop a section of fence on a lot.
“That’s it?” the boy asked.
the warehouse take it down sometimes when
they notice, but only during daylight. We put it
back if they do. Then we watch at night. Once
the courier hangs another sock beside it, we
come down and take the packages.”
Little Clay shook his head.
“I suppose you have ideas already.”
The boy shrugged. “This ain’t easy. Danny
thought this up because he knows to fix
problems I don’t know about. He ain’t stupid. I
know it’s complicated.”
On the way back, Angel stopped in another
store for a bottle of vodka, and coached the boy
on their approach to the perch.
“We creep in because it’s above a street
hotspot,” Angel said. “I think it would be easier
to come in from the other direction, except we
don’t fit.”
The railyards had been cut into Oakland
before waves of suburban sprawl, crime, and
gentrification turned the cityscape into a
jumbled checkerboard. The higher vantages in
the city were more expensive. A gated
community sat on a hill outcrop overlooking the
Pacific yards; underneath the hill, warehouses
and masses of old rowhouses surrounded a strip
mall and a U-Store It made from an old
slaughterhouse. Angel camped in a hilltop
backyard in the gated community with a view of
the railyards; it had a pine tree that allowed
spotting for the signal-flag.
They walked in through the ranks of
warehouses, watching carefully before slipping
through the light cast by streetlamps and
security lamps. The hill loomed over them
when they rounded the end of the strip mall.
Laughter and woodsmoke oozed from the alley.
“That’s the problem,” the tall Cherokee said.
“There’s a blind lot behind the stores—some
dumpsters, a turnaround, and a gate in the
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
fences. There’s usually men camped back there.
We got to walk wind to get in and out.”
A concrete retaining wall reinforced the base
of the hill behind the mall, squeezing a long
crooked service alley between the hill and the
mall. Wide curtains of vines drooped along a
hurricane fence tacked atop the retaining wall.
They climbed over the wall, disappeared onto
the wrinkled face of the hill, traversed, and
slipped over the fence into the high backyard.
Two Dobermans rushed the fence to greet
Angel. He fed them bites of sausage and
scratched their ears and muzzles until they
shivered with ecstasy. The boy made quick
friends with them. One tall pine tree towered at
the fence edge of the deep yard. The ugly
industrial underside of Oakland vanished behind
a thick windbreak of young pine along the fence,
but a trick of the wind carried laughter and
woodsmoke up the hill to scuff at the pines
before it swept up into the sky. Angel and Little
Clay nested in the carpet of coppery needles, and
the Dobermans stretched out beside them for
some overdue scratching.
Before twilight, the tinny sound of a radio
joined the laughter and conversation riding the
wind uphill. The tall Cherokee growled soft
curses. “We got a loud night coming, probably
some fighting.”
Little Clay crept to the fence and peered down.
About a dozen rough men dressed in castoff,
with skin in a dozen shades of weatherbeaten,
dirty, and dark, crowded around three small
fires. Tramps usually built their shacks in the
brushlines, but Oakland was packed tight around
the railyards. He could taste their suspicion and
unfriendliness even from a distance; they were
stained with the bitterness of the dispossessed,
equally at war with cops, weather, civilization,
and sobriety.
“They ain’t worried about getting the cops in
here?” the boy asked.
“Not so much,” Angel said, squatting beside
him. “Especially that one—red muffler.” He
pointed. A broadshouldered black man wore a
top hat and red muffler over layers of grimy
fatigues, like an out-of-season snowman. “That
13
Stories
one’s Stepnasty. I’ve seen him on the rails a
dozen times, even as far east as the St. Louis
yards. Ugly runs deep in him. He plays that
damn radio all hours, blaring commercials and
all. Some of the tramps call him Ticktock—it’s
a clock.”
The boy grinned, but Angel shook his head.
“You’ll give up laughing about him sometime
tonight.”
Later that night, the men below scuffled over a
bottle of wine while the boy spent his turn in the
pine tree, watching the warehouse flag with a
slender rifle telescope. The Dobermans padded
along the fence, sensing disquiet in the quiet
slurred conversations and lamplit darkness.
Some stuttered pleas ended in a squeal before
Stepnasty rushed a smaller man across the alley
and threw him against the block wall of a store.
Some kicks sent the man crawling down the
alley before Stepnasty returned to the guttering
fire and claimed the bottle. The dogs growled
softly, but the other men at the fires laughed
hysterically.
Little Clay slept fitfully and dreamed about a
rattlesnake. In the morning twilight, Angel
unlaced and relaced his boots fiercely, but they
didn’t talk. Angel hated bullies, and the boy
always remembered to be glad of that. The boy
could see the stern lines of Angel Walker’s
father in his young face that morning. Major
Walker had joined the Thunderbirds in 1942 to
serve in the Second War. Mostly formed from
the Oklahoma National Guard, the division
filled its ranks with hillbillies and white trash
before pulling triggers in the roughest fighting in
Europe. The old Cherokee talked about Italian
and Korean villages when he had complaints
about West Virginia, mostly when the ghosts
drew thick about him and his breath was heavy
with liquor.
“This ain’t my home,” he said.
“It ain’t?” the boy demanded.
“My mother was Bird-clan. Her grandmother
was from Qualla. Now that’s called North
Carolina.”
“I thought you were from Oklahoma.”
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
The old brown man sneered. “My spirit don’t
come from the Nightlands. The west is thick
with rattlesnakes, nephew. Remember what I
told you. West is death. I came east to find my
life again. The strongest medicine comes from
calling the contraries to fight for you. But then
you need to watch your feet don’t walk too far.”
# Angel shrugged. “She sounds El Salvadoran,
The tramps stirred sluggishly when a garbage
truck growled through the lot, and they drifted
out as the mall opened for business. Delivery
trucks visited the loading dock serving the
furniture store backed against the lot.
Angel spent most of the day in the pine tree,
sullenly quiet. The halfbreed Cherokee grew
distant when he was moody, angry at the boy
about listening to Major’s stories, or if he spent
any time thinking about his mother. Little Clay
had never grown easy with Angel’s dark moods;
the pain of being pushed away woke his deepest
fears.
The boy fed the dogs bits of sausage and
scratched their ears until they bounded away to
the food bowls on the back porch at
midmorning, and then disappeared for a walk
with the old people living in the house. As a
pall of clouds slowly choked out the thin
sunshine, dread rose in him. The numbers were
stalking him, but he didn’t see them coming. He
had never seen them before they struck.
After the mall closed for the day, a lean young
tramp named B-Nice strolled back down the
alley into the blind lot, leading a stubby,
brownskinned girl along a sprinkled trail of
smiles and encouragement. She wore a green
shawl over blue jeans, and a long rainbow scarf
wound around her head. Two thick braids
swung free from the scarf. They settled in the
shelter cornered between the fence and the end
of the loading dock. B-Nice opened a bag of
groceries, built up his fire, and warmed up some
cans while he chattered at the stubby girl. She
was tired. After some food, she disappeared into
the shelter, and B-Nice came from his corner
with exaggerated quiet. The men in the camp
drifted over one at a time to see the girl sleep
14
Stories
while they laughed quietly and drank. Women
were rare in the tramp camps.
When the Cherokee came down to eat, Little
Clay told him about the girl in the camp, hoping
to start a conversation. After pointing out the
shelter where she lay hidden, he said, “She
looked kinda young.”
maybe Guatemalan. I doubt she’s as young as
you think.”
“More fighting tonight, I guess.”
“Maybe.” Angel hesitated, glancing toward
the distant warehouse. “They could come on
anytime now.”
The boy took his turn in the tree, but spent
most of the time watching the tramps below. In
the telescope, their faces leapt into too-close
focus. The girl came out and sat yawning beside
B-Nice’s fire wrapped in her shawl. The tramps
courted her with loud stories and candybars, but
she spurned their clumsy advances. She
ridiculed Stepnasty for offering wine, then
laughed hesitantly in the sudden silence of the
startled tramps. The grimy men filled the
brooding expectation with earnest drinking,
drifting from fire to fire to avoid Stepnasty. The
broadshouldered tramp strode back and forth in
disappointed agitation tugging at the ends of his
red muffler, pausing only to adjust his radio.
The camp calmed as hours passed. Angel took
over the watch and Little Clay laid down to
sleep, listening to slow conversations and quiet
laughter mixed with the radio from below.
The boy dreamed of cold wind pouring
through icicles hanging from the eaves of his
mother’s house, ringing them like chimes, filled
with a dreadful feeling that he would need to go
out into the night to chop them free with an axe
before they broke the gutters loose. The old
house moaned around him, rocking like a boat.
He jolted awake sweating. Below him, the girl
was screaming out hoarse, tearing screams that
occasionally sank to gasping beneath muffling
hands. The boy slipped his revolver from
beneath his coat and scrambled up before Angel
clamped a grip on his shoulders.
“Let me go!”
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
“And you aim to do what?” the Cherokee
demanded. In the reflected light from Oakland’s
night his eyes were stark hollows in a dark
mask. “Put that damn pistol away! You’ll have
every cop in California here.”
The boy craned his head. The Dobermans
paced mournfully along the fence, growling
softly. He pushed at Angel’s grip fruitlessly.
He tucked his revolver away to get his hand free
for fighting. The Cherokee threw him to the
ground and dove onto him.
“You dumbshit! Get off me!”
“You ain’t going down there,” Angel hissed as
he rode the boy’s struggles. “And get your
voice down. You’re forgetting we’re here for
Danny? I need this trail.”
The fight drained from the boy’s blood. He
had told Danny Rice he would bring the drugs
back. The boy didn’t finish his words with the
customary ‘I have spoken’, but he knew them
for binding words just the same, the same as he
knew the breath from his mouth was a part of
the eternal breath of the world, and what he said
marked what he did, and what he did marked
who he was and would be. The sureness of the
connection marked who was a man and who
wasn’t, leaving no choice there. The girl’s
screams filled the pauses between his thudding
heartbeats while Angel decided that the boy was
done and pushed up from him.
“Angel, they’re—“
“Ain’t no they down there. Stepnasty run
every one of them from down there. Ain’t none
but him and that girl.” The Cherokee’s heavy
breaths carried the words like they were bricks,
more pain to say than hear.
The screams throbbed like live things, riding
uphill on the tricky wind before disappearing
aloft in the darkness, freighted with agony
bound for the Nightlands. Laying still, beyond
sleep, the boy’s heart broke beneath the screams.
He had known all the things his hands could
touch—wood, wind, and water—and the bonds
forged by laughter, food, and even tears. These
things endeared people until they became a part
of each other. He understood why his father and
Danny had gone overseas with Clem. He felt
15
Stories
that connection to Angel, a bond made of soil,
cold wind, and memories of Major Walker.
These things gripped with mighty power made
of the substance of the world.
The screams woke the boy to the higher reality
that Major Walker had spoken about, the light
that cast the shadow that all of the solid world-
things were made from. The screams tore at the
part of the boy that couldn’t be seen, ripping at
the invisible kinship that mocked the solid
things he kenned. He wore the girl’s pain
without knowing her; he could hear Deb’s voice
echoed in the madness.
The old Cherokee’s claim of supernatural
reality had been words before, a talk-about thing
he trusted for who it came from until that night,
when an unseen connection between all the pure,
clean things in the world squeezed the tears and
sweat of agony from him—but he held still with
all the strength of the earth he knew. The truth
of his binding breath was as certain as the pain
he felt; he was caught between them.
The night wore long into morning before
silence finally came. Then the boy remembered
that twenty-two days had passed since he had
left home.
#
When morning twilight leaked into the
darkness above him, the boy slipped to his feet.
The sounds of Oakland—traffic, distant horns
from the harbor, freight whistles from the nearby
railyard—seemed eerie, underscoring the
emptiness of the city. The hillsides in West
Virginia glowed with the music of a thousand
creatures busily living, but in Oakland their
places were taken by asphalt, wire, and heavy
buildings. The boy watched light steal into the
sky and rushed upward from the deep water of
stillness. Angel sat nearby. One of the
Dobermans stretched beside him as he idly
tugged a cropped ear. The boy took a drink of
water, then crept to the fence and looked down
into the silent lot. The fires were out.
The boy checked the warehouse flag before
climbing over the backyard fence and climbing
down. Angel followed him. They traversed the
hillside and dropped down at the alley-mouth
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
behind the mall. They strode down the alley.
Uncanny graveyard silence filled the lot. The
boy walked to the opening of each makeshift
shelter and looked in at emptiness announced by
old bottles and flattened wrappers. Stepnasty’s
clock radio was gone, leaving a litter of heavy
brakeman’s batteries.
“He’ll be catching out, Clay. Bound
nowhere.”
The boy nodded but held his silence. He
found a wad of blood darkened cotton and a
shredded blouse discarded inside the black
tramp’s shelter. Some spatters of blood
darkened the cardboard walls. A pile of ragged
clothes filled one end. The boy found one small,
girl-sized boot rammed into the mess.
The boy studied the ground, found some drops
of blood marking the scrapes of sand and litter.
The girl hadn’t walked out with one bare foot.
The blood led to one of the dumpsters.
Angel twisted at the lapels of his fatigue jacket
when the boy snatched open the sliding door and
climbed up into the dumpster’s opening.
Bloated plastic bags of garbage pillowed the
girl’s body. Scratches and smears of blood
darkened her golden buttocks. Her booted foot
held onto her twisted blue jeans, and the sole of
her other foot glowed like vermilion. The boy
dropped down into the trash with her. Angel
peered through the sliding door; his green eyes
glowed like ice crystals.
# blood was stronger. He called Angel a ghost
A half lifetime before then, after the broken
soldier came to tell him that his father was dead,
the boy ran up the hillside to escape the sound of
his mother’s bleating voice. Up the hillside, he
crashed through the door of the Walker shack.
Major Walker was lying in the floor beneath the
table, sullenly watching Angel wipe the dishes.
He stank of whiskey, but the bottle was on the
shelf, well past his drunken reach. He couldn’t
even find his feet. His dark eyes focused when
the boy scrambled inside.
“Don’t you fetch him the whiskey,” Angel
warned, his voice edged with the anger and hurt
that had long before rubbed down to bitterness.
16
Stories
The old man grunted when he caught the boy,
and stared at his face. He didn’t say anything,
but pulled him down into a ball at his side,
tucked a long crooked arm around his shoulders,
and covered him with some sighs. His long
rough hands clamped the boy’s pieces together
when he dove into a deep, sudden sleep. In the
morning, the old man studied his face again
before smoothing his tousled hair and pushing
him out the door without a word.
For three weeks, the old man didn’t drink. He
prowled the shack at night, and tossed wide-
eyed in his hammock when he lay down. Angel
grew scared. The old man sat through the
daylight, perched on a maple stump above the
shack, and then disappeared at night as the moon
waned down to a sliver. One morning, the old
man didn’t come home. Angel left some eggs
and sausage in the skillet when he went to
school. That evening, he came down the hill and
threw pebbles at the boy’s window. The boy
came down.
“He ain’t come home, Little Clay,” Angel
said.
“I’ll trail him for you,” the boy said.
Angel nodded. He knew he was cursed with a
halfbreed nature, and he would never track well.
The old Cherokee said something was always
calling Angel from the direction he wasn’t
looking; when he was drunk and bitter, he
blamed Angel’s mother, since the woman’s
owl, from being half-white, and how the owl’s
head stayed spinning; just like the owl, his
halfbreed son was Bird-clan, but he wasn’t,
because of the woman’s blood.
They walked uphill to the shack. The boy
tracked in the darkness using his fingertips. The
new moon hung a dark blot across the stars.
Being blind sometimes made better tracking,
because the eyes couldn’t see no conclusion to
leap to. Angel clung to the boy; he was
frightened. They circled three-quarters mile,
drifted uphill close to Drip Rock where the
hillside yawned a wide smokestained limestone
mouth, and found the old man in the bleeding
glow of morning twilight. He lay flat on his
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
back looking up at the naked sky, even though
his legs lay beneath the overhanging limestone
half beneath the earth and half beneath the sky.
His staring eyes were milky with cold. The boy
startled and tried to run away, but Angel caught
him like a snapping trap.
“You knowed he was lying out here!” the boy
shouted.
“I ain’t!” Angel’s bright eyes blurred with
tears. They traded some wild punches and the
boy wound up on the ground. Angel dragged
him over to the old man.
“Let me go! You ain’t supposed to touch no
dead body—“
“Except family!”
The boy stared up at Angel. While it was fact
that the living didn’t mix with the dead—seven
days washing wasn’t enough to clean it—among
the Cherokee, the closest family buried their
dead. Angel snatched the boy to his feet beside
the old man before he knelt beside the body and
motioned the boy to join him. Angel caught at
the leaf-litter on the hillside, crumbling it slowly
between his fingertips and sprinkled his father’s
body. He cleaned his fingertips with his lips.
“Do it,” he whispered.
The boy took some litter, crumbled, sprinkled,
and kissed. Then tears poured out like an
unstoppered river from some deep place that had
been filling since his father died. Angel hugged
him while he was blind; the older boy’s voice
filled the world. “I ain’t held your listening
against you, Clay. I was glad you wanted the
part of Pop I ain’t wanted.”
# The tall young Cherokee settled to his knees
Kneeling in the trash above the undressed girl,
the boy borrowed strength to lift her into
Angel’s waiting arms. He leapt free of the
dumpster while Angel laid her on the dusty
asphalt. The girl’s long dark braids made her
resting pillow. Her faint breasts were covered in
raw toothmarks, her face with welts, and her
neck with dusky fingerprints. One of her stubby
hands still clenched around the scraps of her
panties that she fought to keep pulled up.
Angel scavenged the shelters until he found a
blanket to cover the dead girl, and found the boy
17
Stories
kneeling at her side. He stopped and watched as
the boy caught up a pinch of sand and glass from
the asphalt and sprinkled her body. He strode
forward and draped her with the blanket as the
boy kissed his fingertips.
“You ain’t knowed her,” he said.
“Did I got to?” the boy demanded. “Anymore
than she came looking for this?”
“There’s only so much you can do, Clay. You
can’t call account on everything your eyes see.”
The boy swallowed hard. Angel knew some
hard truths better than he did, from watching his
father drink until he couldn’t reach the bottle
anymore, and curse the son that reminded him of
the mother. But the boy knew there was
something outside himself that had called to him
the night before, even though he had put himself
first and refused to answer. He looked down at
the girl and decided that his world was going to
be more than what he could wrap his hands
around. That wasn’t even the same thing as the
schoolhouse talk-about world; this world was
bigger than that, beyond words and touches. He
accepted that he didn’t need to understand the
world, anymore than he needed to understand
why he knew which animal was lurking and
watching him, and even how they came to be
there, when he paused to listen to the shadows.
The boy brushed the dead girl’s dark eyes closed
to stop the end of the story pleading forth from
them.
“She got lost, Angel. She’s illegal. I guess
she saw a cop and ran the wrong way, even
though it seemed like the right way at the time.”
beside the boy and listened. A thousand times
they had done this on the hillsides. The boy
spoke the shadows and Angel listened.
“And she was hungry, and then tired, and she
caught for safety at the first smile she saw after
that. She didn’t mean no harm. She came here
and slept, and then he came at her. And he hurt
her and killed her.”
“Stepnasty,” Angel whispered. “He done
caught out, I bet it.”
“I laid up there when I could’ve come down.”
Angel glared. “You don’t think I know it!”
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
The boy shook his head. He didn’t mean a
reproach and Angel knew it. “I’m gonna kill
him for it.”
“We ain’t got time for—“
“After we get that for Danny,” the boy said.
“Then I’m coming back to hunt him.”
“After,” the Cherokee whispered. He nodded.
Sunshine slanted down into the alley behind the
furniture store, but the morning still felt cold.
# Cherokee’s face shifted toward sullen bleakness
Three days later, Angel and Little Clay took
twelve kilos of morphine from a Vietnamese
courier and then rode out for Stockton on the
Southern Pacific. They reached Mingo County
after eleven uneventful but frustrating days, and
the boy carried the drugs to a cache up Drip
Rock. Danny Rice waited for a week before he
made the morphine into heroin, but by then the
hunters were long gone on the Norfolk &
Western, back across the big river into the
Nightlands.
# Their claim to each other was automatic. The
“You ain’t cold?” Angel asked.
The boy shrugged. The downhill ride into
Provo had felt like a rollercoaster. He had
watched from the door of the Union Pacific
boxcar, eyes slitted against the backblast of the
April wind. The boy never stopped being cold,
but he had stopped shivering days before. He
was made of cold, turning over in his mind a
thousand ideas to find Stepnasty, unaware of the
darkness pouring through him from the
Nightlands.
“Ain’t a thing to see, Clay, watching like
that.”
The darkness was thick in the railyard. A
tenuous string of lights glowed along the train.
The boy crept back from the door. They sat with
their backs to the front wall of the boxcar. They
drank whiskey. The twilight crept slowly above
the mountains to pry at the door of the boxcar
with cold fingers.
“We’ll lay up until summer after this,” Angel
said. “Maybe mark some time watching the
cache.”
“I ain’t.”
18
Stories
“This ain’t on the running, Clay. Running
west ain’t had a damn thing to do with this.”
“It might not, but I ain’t sitting still for a
summer. I’m gonna need to do something
besides drink and sleep.”
Angel laughed. “Pop said that and it settled in
your head. Ain’t all he said been right.”
The boy shrugged. Angel stared, picking at
him with his eyes in the slowly rising light. The
after a while.
“You ever wondered what would’ve happened
if your dad hadn’t died?” he asked. His eyes
searched in the darkness.
Little Clay hesitated. He’d wondered a
thousand times, but he knew the tone in Angel’s
voice when he was asking about the shadows.
He wasn’t making wishes. Both of them worked
from an unspoken certainty of their connection,
clearly thinking they could’ve been born
together, just like their fathers died together.
boy wanted to repeat the question, ask Angel
with his own words, but he knew that wouldn’t
be fair. He had wiped up a share of Major’s
vomit, tugged his boots from his feet, and tucked
his blankets, but he had never had to carry him
the way Angel had to carry him, or sit and
wonder about his mother’s leaving. The boy’s
back was bent with something different.
“You mean, if they never throwed the grenade,
or if he jumped out the window?” he asked
softly.
“If they never throwed the grenade. How
could he be your dad if he jumped out the
window?”
The boy’s laughter dropped quickly to quiet.
On September 16th, 1970, a grenade sailed into a
hootch near Dac To in Vietnam; Clayton Walter
Guthrie dove onto the grenade. Eleven men
survived the blast, Daniel and Clement Rice
among them.
“Then I was going to be a carpenter,” the boy
said.
”I ain’t being funny.”
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
“I know it. I’m saying I wouldn’t be here
now. I think you still would’ve caught Danny’s
eye because of the Thunderbirds—“
“That ain’t what I asked about, Clay. You
ain’t gonna make this about me anymore by
talking about me to turn my ears.”
“What in hell you want from me?! What can I
know about my dad living?!”
“Listen to the shadows, Clay, just like…”
“Like your dad taught me? That works when
there’s something there to hold on to. I knew
about the girl because I could see her, I heard
her fighting for life. How in hell would I know
what would happen if my dad was alive—I
didn’t know him! I know what people say about
him. I can point out his picture if I seen the
picture before. I was seven when he left.”
“You was reading when you was seven. I
remember that big book you was carrying from
school that same day you come up to the shack
the first time—“
“Who cares about a damn book! So I could
read! I can’t remember him!” The boy jolted to
a stop. He remembered the book, Three-toes,
better than he remembered his father. He didn’t
remember learning how to read or learning how
to make his letters—he remembered suddenly
reading, and having to argue with Ms. Steele,
the librarian, who didn’t want to give him books
marked for fifth graders. But his father’s face
was an emptiness, a scratchy chin, the hot sand
feeling in eyes and throat after a whipping or a
night without supper. The sound of his laughter
was missing. He had no idea why his mother
had loved his father, or why she stared at him so
hard at breakfast sometimes that he went to
school with his head hurting.
“I hate him,” the boy whispered.
Angel handed him the bottle, but he didn’t
drink.
“He left her alone, forced to take up with that
sonofabitch Lefler. That man is bone-dumb. If
that’s the sort she wants, then my dad—“ The
boy fell to a halt when the halfbreed started
shaking his head.
“Leave off Lefler. That ain’t what-all you
think.”
19
Stories
“He drinks up my dad’s check every month
—“
“He don’t do it!”
The boy glared at Angel, stone furious for
long moments. The tall Cherokee held up his
hands helplessly until the boy looked away.
“Danny said watch to keep you from down
there if you got in a mood. I see that much.
Danny went down there when Lefler was out
working—before we come out here—and he
asked your momma about the checks. She had
every one of them VA checks in a box, ain’t
cashed none. They keep getting bigger. She
threw them in Danny’s face. Told him to cash
them if he wanted the rest of her husband’s
blood. Then she broke like an oak falling and
cried on the floor.”
The boy drank some whiskey.
“That’s probably what Lefler does when he
sees them VA envelopes in the mailbox.”
The Cherokee waited a while, then said, “It
don’t make a damn if you remember your dad.
You’re gonna know him by what other men
expect of you.” Angel took the bottle and tipped
a long swallow. “Think about me, here. Pop
was a drunk, and ain’t a soul of them white trash
bastards in Kilkenny wants a halfbreed in town.
I see all that. I can’t help but see it. But I stand
up straight and shake their hands anyway,
because they put on their best smile when they
say hello to Major’s boy. Ain’t no matter how
hard they don’t like me, they still expect I’m just
like Major, and they don’t want on the wrong
side of that. They expect you to be just like
Clay.”
Little Clay clamped his teeth on the
inescapable truth: a son could be just like his
father if he knew what his father was like. Angel
scared the boy because he knew Angel came
closest to knowing the truth from gripping it in
the world: How could he know how to be like
his father, Major, the war hero from the Second
War and Korea, when he never knew Major as
anything but a drunk? The boy’s uncles had the
best intentions, but he could never know if he
had missed knowing something crucial to the
man he was supposed to become. The boy
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
recognized his own unspoken fear in Angel’s
clawing for recognition.
But the boy kept his silence; he feared for
Angel. The halfbreed lived close to tipping
because too much waited to knock him down
and not enough stood by to bear him up.
The tall Cherokee waited long minutes as light
brightened into April sunshine beyond the open
boxcar door, then handed the bottle back to
Little Clay. “That would be my point,” he said
softly. “I know why I’m here—from running
west—but I need a firm place to stand. I don’t
see a damn thing out here for you.”
The boy’s face turned mulish. “You saying I
don’t belong out here?”
The tall Cherokee shrugged. “I’ll kill him.
Count on it. Start on what you need to be after,
Clay, and leave this trail to me.”
Little Clay drew a long breath, spoiled by the
ancient stains on the boxcar’s heavy boards. His
relief lasted less than the indrawn breath; he
wouldn’t trade Angel to get to some different
future—it wouldn’t erase the past. He knew the
exhale would last forever; love was better than
life. “Ain’t no grenades out here, Angel. You
can quit worrying.”
“It didn’t look like a grenade, did it?”
“That door’s closed behind me,” the boy said.
“Even if I thought better of it, it still needed to
do it to do the better-thinking. Can’t come
around it to find out any other way.”
“I see that. I didn’t see it coming either. But
that don’t mean you’re bound—“
“I ain’t Peter Pan, damn it. I ain’t gonna stay
fourteen forever. Trouble started when my dad
died. I’m trying to come from the mess, and so I
had to cross lines. This is what came out,
Angel. I didn’t choose now for nothing. Who
would go to school for six months, then quit? I
quit on the moon, even if I’d rather it fell on the
summer.”
The boy shook his head as he watched Angel’s
face twist. “Your dad knew plenty of true
things, even if you didn’t care for them.”
“You ain’t come out here on some witching
Pop did,” the Cherokee said stonily.
20
Stories
Twenty-two and twenty-two makes forty-four,
the boy thought, but he held his silence.
“You come out here for me, listening to me,
when I thought two would be better than one,”
Angel said bitterly. “I drew you out here. I’ve
thought better of it. I want you to go back. You
hear?”
The boy stared out into the shadows like he
hadn’t heard. Angel watched him sidelong,
drank some whiskey, and waited. Some things
took time to become plain, like deep cold
hollows that waited long hours past sunrise
before the sun struck into their hearts to separate
stone from shadow.
“You wonder if Danny said that same thing
across the water when the shooting started?” the
boy asked. “Or Clem? I reckon it passed across
a mind when they were pulling triggers, for any
good it could do after they jumped in.”
“This ain’t that.”
“From being slower? I laid all night thinking
in the stillness while she screamed, and after she
fell silent. That’s slower. But I ain’t never
gonna bother to ask Danny if he’d rather I went
down and saved that girl. I’d rather. Next time,
I’ll spit my bound word out. ‘Cause there ain’t
no next time for her.”
Angel considered. “You won’t be spitting
your word out. You gave your word here.”
Brakemen shouted in the yard. The hunters
listened to railcars shifting as the train rebuilt
around them, punctuated by the heavy iron
couples and hissing lines. They passed the
whiskey bottle after measuring in some water.
Hesitantly, the boy said, “I know you don’t
think much of the ancestors—“
“Don’t make it about the ancestors. I think
plenty of them when it ain’t some drunk bullshit
Pop made up—“
“Twenty-two days! Twice! How’s that
bullshit?”
“What in hell—“
“Listen,” the boy said fiercely. “You know
my dad died on September 16th. Your dad died
on October 8th. That’s twenty-two days later.
Four and seven’s eleven! Two twos is four, and
four is the sacred number—“
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
Angel spit.
“Shut up and listen!”
Angel took the bottle and drank some
whiskey.
“Putting this together took me a while, Angel,
and I don’t think I come on it by accident.” The
boy’s hands took flight in sudden animation,
counting twenty-twos: four twenty-twos of
months from his birth to his father’s enlistment,
one twenty-two of months to his father’s death
—then twenty-two days to Major Walker’s
death—another twenty-two of months until his
mother married Lefler, and then two more
twenty-twos of months until he left home. “It
ain’t no accident we sat on that hill twenty-two
days after I left, the same night that girl died.
On the 7th of April. Twenty-two days, Angel. A
second time.”
Angel took another drink of whiskey, then
muttered, “It don’t bother you you’re counting
all that in white-man time?”
The boy laughed.
“Don’t laugh about it. It’s giving me shivers.”
# overhanging bank. The black tramp hadn’t been
On the trains the boy unmoored from the real
world and found himself cast loose among the
whispering voices of ghosts. His fitful dreams
turned on the echoes of the girl’s cries; her cold,
bloodfilled eye watched from the moon above
him. The boy understood, too late, that he had
poisoned his nature—he was not meant to hold
still. He traveled in a waking dream, wrapped in
the cold darkness of the Nightlands. After the
hunters rode downhill from the Sierra Nevada
on the Southern Pacific, dropped off in the
Roseville yards and sifted through the camps. A
few bottles of wine loosened tongues around the
campfires. Stepnasty had settled briefly in the
Roseville camps, picked some fights and
crumpled another tramp’s nose before riding
north.
North along the Western Pacific line,
alongside the Oroville yards, acres of scrubby
woods winked with small campfires. The
hunters drifted ghostwise among the camps in
the afternoon, searching for the sound of
Stepnasty’s radio. After twilight, a light rain
21
Stories
began falling and they found the black tramp
standing beside a fire built in a cutdown barrel,
laughing roughly as two old men scuffled over a
bottle. His top hat stretched his fire-shadow far
up into the dark sky, a looming giant of discord.
The boy caught at Angel’s arm before he
strode forward. “Not here.”
“These tramps ain’t gonna talk,” the Cherokee
whispered.
“That ain’t my point.”
The hunters faded back from the dim fire and
drifted around the campsite. Fern and young
pines crowded the camp on a dense carpet of
pine needles and dry twigs. A cardboard shack
squatted beneath the drooping branches of a pine
tree leaning over a crumbling embankment,
where the fire barrel floated sparks up into the
cold breeze to sift through the overhanging
branches of the pine. The tramps huddled at the
fire, warming themselves against the slow,
sprinkling rain. A tilted bucket provided crude
amplification for Stepnasty’s radio, beside a
stack of cardboard bedding under the
invited to sleep in the shack.
Drawn by Stepnasty’s cloaking malice, Little
Clay fell into the trance of stalking, circling for
the perfect rush and lunge; the darkness
suggested a joyful snap of teeth and the taste of
blood before struggles and the fitful, unwinding
breaths that mark the way to death. Stepnasty
pulled such wickedness to him like a magnet.
The boy fell toward that darkness, as sweet as
sleep, but he held fast at the edge, anchored by
the girl’s firm grip upon him. Even in the
darkest places of his imagination, he found her
there beside him; all of her pureness was stored
in him against his need. Stepnasty’s fingers
curled repeatedly in the trailing ends of the
rainbow scarf hanging from his neck, but his
calling out to darkness failed.
Angel caught up to the boy in a brake of
young pine. “We’re wasting time,” he
whispered as Stepnasty snatched a bottle from
one of the old men at the fire. “Let’s be about
this. Ain’t nothing to learn from watching him.”
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
“I can’t spill his blood here, Angel. I had to
walk up on him before I felt it crawling along
my bones. He like to spit on my spirit, killing
her. I’m gonna have to cross into the other
world to kill him right.”
The halfbreed stared past Little Clay toward
the winking fire. He felt the same darkness
gathered around them as a keen chill on his skin.
He stared for so long that the boy thought he had
gone to sleep, but then he said, “This here’s your
trail.”
“We got to push him into motion, lift him free
from the earth.” The boy considered. “I’ll play
ghost-devil on him.”
The boy drifted through the ferns like a
shadow, crept down the embankment to
Stepnasty’s bedroll, rummaged his bag, and took
the tramp’s food—a loaf of bread, some sliced
meat, a jar of mayonnaise, and a can of spray
cheese. He slipped back up the embankment,
circled back, and settled to wait for Stepnasty to
get hungry.
The big tramp roared with anger when he
eventually discovered the theft. He immediately
blamed his campmates, two half blind old men
wearing mismatched mission clothes, grime, and
hard use. They protested innocence, but he
searched their bags, tossing the men aside like
dolls when they resisted. He took their food and
paid with punches. They snatched up the scraps
of their possessions and fled from the camp,
pausing to shout insults and threats from the
darkness at a safer distance. Little Clay slipped
back into the camp and took an unopened
halfgallon jug of wine from Stepnasty’s bag
while all the screaming and fighting raged.
Stepnasty moved his bedroll to the cardboard
shack beneath the pine before he settled back at
the fire to eat. The two old men had only had
some crackers, a jar of pickles, and some
ketchup packs. He salted the meal with
complaints while he finished his bottle of wine.
He climbed up into the cardboard shack for his
fresh bottle, panicked and searched several
times, rushing back and forth between the shack
and the embankment where he had bedded on
the cardboard, hissing complaints of disbelief.
22
Stories
Finally, he burst into a paroxysm of rage. He
cursed God and man, ran in circles, fell into the
camp latrine, and hacked down several young
pine trees using a slat torn from a shipping-pallet
that he pulled from the fire.
While the tramp was busy, the boy crept back
into the camp, unwired the brakeman’s batteries
from the radio, and slipped back into the
darkness with the batteries. After Stepnasty
tired, he dropped from his rage and realized he
was surrounded by silence. He rushed to the
radio, swaying drunkenly as he stared down at it.
He scooped it up into the crook of his arm and
turned several circles staring out into the
darkness. He snatched up his fallen slat and
retreated to the cardboard shack to crouch over
his bag, staring from the opening of the shack.
His mouth moved in quiet, inaudible curses and
prayers.
“You gonna go get his hat?” Angel asked.
The boy shook his head. “He’ll run when it’s
light enough, I reckon. You sleep. I’ll watch
him first.”
Angel chuckled, then wrapped up in a blanket
and settled in the pine needles. Stepnasty
shifted back and forth in the entrance of the
shack, crouching, sitting, and sometimes lunging
forth at shadows with his stick. The tramp was
afraid to sleep, and afraid to come out and warm
himself at the fire. Little Clay decided that he
was watching the sky and hoping for the sun to
come early.
#
Before sunrise, the boy caught a few hours of
sleep. The hunters followed when Stepnasty ran
for the trainyard. A handful of tramps took
southbound trains while Stepnasty waited, but
the railyard was mostly empty until the sun
buttered the eastern edge of the cold blue sky.
Stepnasty boarded a northbound train after it
began rolling, watching carefully from the door
of his Burlington boxcar for pursuit, but the
hunters boarded from the offside, several cars
behind him. They had watched him stalk the
train. For a half-hour, the train rolled steadily
around the lake toward the Feather River, bound
past Claremont looming seven thousand feet
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
above the valley, and eventually into the Nevada
desert.
When they pulled into the first sidehole to let
an oncoming train pass, Angel jerked the boy
back into the car just before Stepnasty peered
from the door of his boxcar, looking for pursuit.
“You spooked him damn good last night,” the
Cherokee said. “He’ll be looking back at every
stop. We’ll creep along the offside of the train
again to get on him.”
“How long you reckon he’ll watch?” the boy
asked.
“We ain’t moving this stop. Let’s get up the
river a bit, and we’ll move before the train
crosses the bridge.” Angel laughed. “A bridge.
I been up here before. This might be the
roughest ride there is, Clay. If I hadn’t thought
you was right, before, I do now. Ain’t a soul
goes up here but these trains. We’re fixing to
roll out from the world. This devil chose to run
up here.”
“Now you know I’m right?”
Angel laughed again. “I ain’t never doubted
Stepnasty needed killing, not from the first time
I laid eyes on him—but I didn’t see myself
needing to do it. But I ain’t talking about why
him. I’m wondering about how to go about it.
He’s a witch. Witches don’t die easy.”
The boy was startled. “You don’t believe in
witching!”
Angel shrugged. “You do,” he whispered. “I
believe in you. I saw it last night, while I was
staring into the dying of that fire. I heard the
words the stars been shouting down at me for a
while now: Little Clay ain’t no fool! I knew it
the first time I seen you dart your hand into the
water and pull out with a speckled trout on your
finger—you ain’t ordinary. You believe in
witching, so I can count something to it.”
“You listened to your dad when he was
talking,“ the boy said. “He told you about the
Raven Mockers.”
“How could I help it? About all he did was
talk.”
“Stepnasty might be a mocker, from the little
I’ve seen of him,” the boy said softly. A mocker
stole life from the death and pain of others.
23
Stories
“Might be,” the Cherokee agreed. “I felt like
my head split open last night and the world
poured in it. I could hear Pop talking soft,
making you count your fingers and recite the
stories while I laid pretending to sleep. I guess
he pitched his voice for me to hear it.”
The boy scrambled suddenly for the open door
of the car, but Angel caught his arm and held
him back. “Not yet. But we’ll crack the other
side.”
The hunters muscled the offside door open a
foot, and wedged the track to keep the door
steady. They sat silently for a half-hour as wind
cut through the car from the lake before the
couplings hissed and fired and the train groaned
out the slack.
“You think your dad talked to me because you
wouldn’t listen,” the boy said, pushing his voice
above the rising thunder of the train.
Angel shook his head. “No. I think you came
along to trick me into listening to him.”
Fair enough, the boy thought. Every breath
he drew tasted of dogwood blooms and killing
frost, their hands clasped like sun and moon in
the ancient do-si-do. The boy knew necessities
from early introductions. Smashed fingers and
burning taught a hand from reaching better than
any warning, even when hard truths on one hand
could mean well for the other. The boy knew
God kept accounts where all the numbers
matched at the end. He didn’t know what his
father had bought for him by the way he lived
his life, but life’s sweetness and hardness both
formed on the bones of death. The boy knew
that much coming in.
As the train pushed higher, the canyon wall
rose to shutter the wide-open door of the boxcar.
The narrow door peered out onto the racing
water, daring the boy’s eyes into falcon-swoops.
Cold daylight burned him raw with watching
before the train holed again.
Angel risked a glance from the wide-open
door, but snapped back quickly; Stepnasty was
watching. Little Clay slipped from the narrow
offside opening onto the crossties, jutting like
ragged teeth where soil and bedstone had
leached down the hillside bound for the river.
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
The connectors hissed and rattled as the hunters
slipped along the outside length of the train,
until they reached the tramp’s Burlington
boxcar. They clung along the outside of a tanker
while they waited through the thunder of the
downhill train. Afterward, they waited tensely
as the lines repressurized and whistled out,
cycling repeatedly through an endless half-hour
of brake-tests. When the train drew out slack,
they slipped beneath and ghosted to the open
door of the Burlington boxcar. The gray wall of
the canyon poured shadows down upon them.
Little Clay pulled himself up lightly into the
door of the boxcar while Angel took the back
ladder and walked the lip forward. Stepnasty
was rolled in a blanket at the front of the car,
laid crosswise and using his arm for a pillow.
The canyon shadow filled the opening, but his
eyes popped open like white teardrops in his
dark face. He scrambled to his knees when
Angel joined the boy in the doorway.
“You all is gonna have to stay in that back
end,” Stepnasty growled. “I’m sleeping up
here.”
Angel shrugged and settled a little back from
the door as the train gathered speed. The old
tramps had a superstition against the backend of
boxcars, figuring a crash was safer if they were
already in front, instead of cast loose to hurtle
forward on impact. The boy watched the
gleaming white of Stepnasty’s eyes as the tramp
settled, pretending to sleep. With the open door
pressed tightly against the canyon, every echo
compressed into the boxcar as powerfully as a
tunnel-ride high in the Rockies. Stepnasty
aimed his wickedness at the hunters with angry,
muttered curses and spells. The boy rearranged
his jacket to get a quicker reach for his revolver,
and turned the bill of his feed cap to hold down
the hairs on the back of his neck. The train
thundered into the Nightlands.
After the dark journey, the train peeled away
from the canyon wall to cross the river, releasing
a crushing grip from the boy’s skull. He stirred
as his ghosts poured back inside. Angel caught
his eye and traced a passage into space with a
swooping brown hand; the bridge was coming.
24
Stories
Stepnasty sat up when the boy climbed to his
feet.
#
The thunder of the ride blended the ghosts in
the boy’s head. His uncles’ voices cut blazes up
the quilted hillside of Major Walker’s drunken
baritone; the truths they told together cut a trail
through the darkness.
The boy’s oldest uncle was Antonin Kinitny,
mostly called Kenny, an unlikely-looking
balding white man with a beak nose and wire
spectacles. When the grenade exploded at Dac
To, he was 41 years old—the oldest combat
medic in MAC-V—and his face already wore
the marks of frustration and despair. After the
war, Kenny strode into West Virginia wearing a
porkpie hat and a Mao jacket. He visited West
Virginia every summer and every winter,
appeared unexpectedly on holidays spent with
his other uncles, and every so often besides
walked from the muddy fields to eat breakfast or
dinner at the boy’s house in Kilkenny—then
leave. Kenny looked fragile until someone
touched him; he taught the boy how to fight by
throwing him to the ground—repeatedly—until
he cried, and then kicking him until he stopped
crying.
On Christmas Eve in 1974, the boy woke to
find Kenny sitting in his bedroom in the dark,
outside the pool of moonlight slanting in
through the window. A lighter flared, revealing
the old man’s face and a curl of smoke. He
smoked Kools down to the filter. He filled
ashtrays on every visit. Cold wind outside
tugged restlessly at the roof of the house. The
boy kept quiet—he kept still—but Kenny knew
he was awake. He was uncanny.
“One time the world ended,” the old man said.
The boy saw him smile faintly in the glow of
his cigarette.
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” he said.
“Rain fell so long that everything washed away.
Water covered everything, except on the highest
hilltop one cherry tree still showed. The water
was killing it at its roots, but the sunshine was
strong, and it put forth a flower, set a fruit, and
clung to life until that cherry ripened.”
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
“Two ravens saw that cherry tree above the
water and swooped down to settle on the tree.
The ravens had been flying everywhere; they
knew the world was ending. You know that
ravens are cunning birds?”
“The ravens saw the cherry right away. Both
of them were starving, because they had been
flying for a long time. They argued about which
of them would eat the cherry, until one raven
pointed out that that might be the last cherry. If
they killed the last cherry, no cherry or no raven
would live after that.”
Kenny smoked. When he lit another cigarette,
the boy’s nerve broke. He sat up in the bed,
hugging his knees. Even on Christmas, Kenny
rarely brought presents. The boy knew he
counted words and actions more than things.
“That doesn’t sound like Noah,” the boy said.
The old man nodded. “Even so. One raven
decided that it would be best to save the cherry,
and refused to eat. That raven fell over dead.
The other raven didn’t need much time to think
about that before eating the cherry. Then before
long it fell and died. After that, more rain fell.”
“Wasn’t no win there,” the boy said. “Once
that cherry was gone, the raven was bound to die
anyway.”
The old man crushed out his cigarette. “Are
you supposed to win?”
“Ain’t surviving the same thing as winning?”
“True: a man fights to survive, not necessarily
to defeat his opponent. But it’s false that life is
a fight. Life always ends in death.”
“So the first raven did the right thing. It was
gonna die anyway, and wasn’t no need to kill the
cherry with it,” the boy said.
“You’re thinking, but you’re still thinking
about winning.”
“Can’t I know the right thing?” the boy
demanded.
“Ask the right question if you want the right
answer. Can we gain life by taking something?
Can we give life by giving something? What is
the something?”
# Stepnasty hesitated, and the boy shot his other
The train thundered onto the bridge, peeling
away from the shadowy southern side of the
25
Stories
graywalled canyon. Walls of sound fell away.
Stepnasty climbed to his feet quickly as the boy
approached.
“I told you to stay on the back end,” the tramp
shouted. The fireblacked pallet-slat dangled
from his hand like a switch, trembling with
eagerness to punish.
“How many more have you killed, before that
girl in Oakland?” The boy’s voice was shaped
by hillside shouting-matches to hold clear even
in echoes—he kept his tone smooth and easy.
Walker pushed to his feet and drifted forward,
opening his fatigue jacket to smooth the reach
for his Colts.
Stepnasty’s free hand lifted to stroke the long
striped scarf he had taken from the girl to wind
around his thick neck, and he settled on a smile.
The unexpected question pushed his evil into the
open. The train jolted unevenly on the bridge,
but all three rode smoothly, like men sliding
downhill on wet leaves without a care in the
world.
“You could be next,” Stepnasty said.
“Your witching’s over,” the boy said, slipping
his revolver free. He fired. The heavy bullet
smashed the pallet-slat from Stepnasty’s hand.
Stepnasty paused to study his empty hand
incredulously, and the boy shot him in the
shinbone below his left knee. He toppled with a
howl. The boy raised a hand to stop Angel from
firing. Two outstretched Colts drooped slowly
to hang alongside the Cherokee’s legs.
“You got another leg, witch,” the boy said.
“What you want?!” Stepnasty rolled to reach
the wall of the car, clutching his shattered leg,
staring past the boy and the revolver, eyes huge
in his dark face. The clatter of the train beat a
counterpoint to the squeaking cries leaking from
his mouth with every breath.
The boy shrugged. “You could jump from the
train.”
Stepnasty clamped his eyes shut and wriggled
up the wall until he was sitting up.
“Take off her scarf.”
shinbone. The train roared out into the
Hello from Wireworld
By The Cockroach, aka Alaric Hunt
emptiness over the river while his cry of agony
filled the boxcar.
“Take off her scarf!”
Trembling, Stepnasty unwound the scarf. His
black fingers added dark blots of blood. The
thin material fluttered in his outstretched hand in
the backblast of air from the open door.
“Take her to the door and set her free,” the
boy commanded.
Stepnasty sputtered cries, but he crawled for
the door and flung the scarf. The wind hurled it
back inside. He curled, hoping, but the boy
strode over to him and began kicking his
shattered legs.
“Get it!” he snarled.
Each time Stepnasty slowed, the boy attacked
his legs. Angel watched, nodding
spasmodically; his pistols rose and settled like
beating hearts. Blood collected on the boy’s
boots. Stepnasty recovered the scarf and
crawled to the door. He slithered a hand from
the car and released the scarf into emptiness—it
corkscrewed into the blue vault of heaven like a
missing teardrop.
The boy aimed his revolver and shot Stepnasty
in the asshole. The heavy bullet kicked him for
the boxcar door; he clawed for a grip at the edge.
The halfbreed raised his Colts and quickfired.
His bullets swept the witch into emptiness.
Angel threw the tramp’s bags from the train
while the boy reloaded his revolver with
trembling hands. They settled, passing a bottle
of whiskey back and forth, but they didn’t try to
speak. The train was roaring through the
Nightlands.
# and Mercer into Virginia.
Mostly, the boy fled West Virginia because of
Danny Rice’s daughter. He rode back from
Feather River clawing to escape the Nightlands,
unwinding from dreams during daylight,
searching the distance for keys to the chains
binding him. His footfalls were as soft as mist.
His eyes fell into eerie hollows. Being forced to
kill Stepnasty in the Nightlands left a stain
26
Stories
behind, a tattered hole from tearing loose the
knot the screams had tied in his soul.
Along the ride, studying the agony he felt over
the girl’s death taught him that Deb’s stolen
kisses blended more than bodies. She had
showed him what was good and pure, like a bee
sharing honey in a tickling walk across the
tongue. But the killing stained the part of the
boy that her heart was reaching blindly to grasp.
He knew washing wouldn’t put the stain aside,
no matter how necessary the killing had been; it
was laid down in his bones just like West
Virginia limestone. He just knew he couldn’t let
the girl reach the stain, because he couldn’t bear
spoiling her. What she had given him would
have to carry him until he could find a way
clean, just like it had carried him past
Stepnasty’s temptations to murder.
So the boy rode back to West Virginia with his
heart full of earnest notions too big for words,
even if he had been willing to talk about the
bloodstains on his boots; too big for words
because the soul is bigger than the body, and a
heart can never contain all the force of life trying
to rush in. The boy didn’t know that a man has
to wait through the storm of his actions, and then
look in the right direction afterward to catch his
bearings: up.
Mostly the girl heard the part about goodbye;
she threw a fit and he had to run like hell to get
away. Danny Rice dug up a coffeecan full of
money and handed him folded wads of
hundreds. In the small hours of the night, he
stood with Angel at the edge of the Norfolk
yards, waiting for a ride east through McDowell
“Little Deb scratched you up pretty good.”
The boy shrugged. “I had it coming. I got
something on me. I guess she could tell it.”
“Where’re you going?” Angel asked.
“Looking for a different something.”
End