Sunsets and Silencers

"The Roses in Toalah"

Fiction by Micah Dean Hicks

In Toalah, a small town in Arizona close by Interstate 40, the old men gathered in the hot dairy bars under whirring fan-blades, spat blots of tobacco into empty coke bottles, and talked about Bryan Long. They'd been watching him through the window glass of barber shops and gas stations and talking about him all his life. Bryan was the tallest man they'd ever seen—ten feet—and they argued about whether he was a giant or not. But they all agreed that whatever he was, Bryan wasn't good for much.

            Bryan lived with his mother down a dirt road on the edge of town. The house was unpainted and loose shingles flapped on the roof. Inside, the ceilings sagged with water damage and there were holes in the floor covered over with plywood and thin carpet. This morning, Bryan got out of bed, squeezed into his old clothes, and came into the kitchen. His mother gave him a box of granola bars and a piece of paper with directions on it, a hotel under construction. Today, he would try being a carpenter.

            He drove to the hotel in his green Dodge. When he'd first gotten the truck, he tore out the seats and dented the roof up. People saw him driving around Toalah with one arm hanging out the window, two fingers on the stick, and knees shoved up against his chest.

            At the hotel, they gave him a belt of tools and showed him what to do. He carried the sheet-rock panels lightly, but was clumsy with them and broke several to powder. He fumbled with nails between his big fingers, and falling against a new door frame, he tore it loose from the wall. He was fired before lunch.

            The next morning, he got dressed again and came into the kitchen. His mother was smoking. She handed him a package of cold Pop-Tarts and another address.  Today, he would try being a plumber. His boss had him digging ditches for water-lines, and Bryan had to get down on his knees to use the pick, but things were going well. Then, walking across a yard, he stepped into a hole and felt something crack in the dirt under his shoe. Water came welling up, and he was sent home.

            The next morning, his mother woke him up and sent him to the sawmill. For hours, he caught planks of raw lumber coming off the belt and stacked them. They didn't have any gloves big enough for him, so he wrapped oil-rags around his palms. Even so, at the end of the day his hands were shredded with splinters. Three times, he turned too fast and hit one of his coworkers with a board, and he got into two fights—the second man needing an ambulance. At the end of the day, he was called to the supervisor's office, dropping his shoulders and wrapping his arms around himself like a buzzard to get inside the close office. The supervisor, a small man, grinned at him and finished a cigarette before he spoke. He told Bryan that he'd done great and said he'd see him back again tomorrow. Bryan's hands stung on the steering wheel the whole way home. He told his mother that he'd been fired. She left in her car, and he didn't see her the rest of the night.

            When he got up the next day, she was waiting on him again. “Go see your uncle Ricky,” she said. “Tell him his sister-in-law needs him to give you a job.” Bryan nodded and got his keys. The truck wouldn't start at first, but he got it after a few tries.

            The highway going out to the Long's ranch swung through the desert, a thin gray stripe of asphalt dipping in and out of black, yellow, and white nodes of rock. Soon, Bryan came to a billboard with a picture of Ricky's wife on it: Welcome to Toalah! Home of Martina Long, Miss Arizona 1993. Ricky had one up on every road going into town. Marti's face grinned back at him from the sign, put up fifteen years ago. She was gorgeous, even now, and he liked seeing the billboards. With her soft face hanging over the road like a cloud, she seemed even bigger than him. Aunt Marti had always liked Bryan. Maybe he would get her to ask Ricky?

            There were work trucks parked all up the long driveway to Ricky's house, Long Contracting on some and Toalah Landscaping on the others. It may as well have been the same. Ricky Long owned almost everything. Bryan parked, squeezed out of his truck, and walked up the hill. The house was red brick, long and low. Workmen were everywhere and backhoes groaned, finishing a trench that went all the way around the house. It was a moat sixty feet wide and twenty deep. Men with ladders passed rosebushes down to each other and planted them along the bottom.

            The front door was propped open, so Bryan scuffed the clay off his shoes and stooped through the door. Thankfully, Ricky had high ceilings. “Uncle Ricky! Aunt Marti!” he yelled.

            “Back here,” Ricky said.

            Bryan walked into the kitchen. Ricky stood against the counter fixing himself a cup of coffee. Sheetrock dust speckled his thinning hair, beard, red shirt, and jeans.

            The old men clicking their dominoes in the coffee shop always thought of Ricky this way, covered in dirt and dust, tiny black eyes and rows of gray teeth. He was always going somewhere and doing something. It made them nervous.

            “You want something to drink?” Ricky asked. He handed Bryan a can.

            Bryan's big hand wrapped around the metal, covering it in his fist, but he didn't try to open it. “What's Aunt Marti up to?”

            Ricky dropped his cup and spoon in the sink a little too hard. Bryan winced.

            “Hell if I know. We got into a fight, and she left this morning. I'm stuck here with all this,” Ricky waved at the window, “and don't have time to go find her ass. Hey, you want to  make some money?”

            “Yeah! That's what I came to ask you about. You need me to help with the ditch?”

            “It's a moat.”

            Bryan looked out the at the yellow backhoes stiffly dipping into the dirt. “Why do you want a moat?”

            “This is just the first one. I'm going to have more. Everything that's mine is going to have one of these around it. Why not?”

            Bryan nodded. “So you might have a job for me?”

            “I doubt it. Unless you want to go find Marti and bring her ass home. I'd give you some money to do that.”

            “Go get Aunt Marti? What if she won't come?”

            “Then, make her come. I'll give you a few hundred dollars.”

            “Do you think she's still in Toalah?”

            “Where the hell else would she be?”

            “Would you have a regular job for me after that?”

            “We'll see.”

            Bryan thanked his uncle and went back outside. Already, the workmen were laying lattice down along the sides and fitting the roses in tight clumps. Bryan turned the key and tapped the gas until the engine turned over. Rockabilly came wailing out of the speakers in an explosion of static. He still had the coke in his hand. He picked at the tiny tab, but couldn't get his fingernail under it. Frustrated, Bryan squeezed the can too hard and it split open. Coke spewed over his shirt.

            “Goddammit.” He reached out the window and threw the can into the back of the truck. Tonight wouldn't be too bad. He had money coming to him, so he could afford to buy a few drinks. He hoped Marti wouldn't give him any trouble. He didn't know what he would do if she did.

            Laughing without making sound under their ball-caps, the old men would remember that night for years. They saw Bryan in every bar in town. He drank glass after glass, won games of cards, and with those clumsy fingers even threw darts. He took in liquid like a refinery. He ate ice chips by the pitcher-full. The old men, clearing their throats, said it must have been a trick to keep him sober, but not all of them believed that. He was a giant of drink, and that night Bryan had fulfilled their hopes more than he ever had before or ever would again.

            Six hours later, he'd been everywhere in town, but no one had seen her. He kept driving, the road getting darker as he slipped away from businesses and streetlights. A few more miles would take him down past the truck stop and out of Toalah.

            He saw a glowing pink smear on a hill up ahead: Sweete's Cabaret. He pulled into the club's drive and parked. All the cars in the lot were candy-stained in the pink lights, and something breathy drifted out of the speakers under the eaves. The doors were black glass. Bryan crunched across the gravel, pulled open both doors, and stooped inside.

            There were two pudgy bouncers standing in the front room, both of them stopping to stare at Bryan when he came in stinking of beer, but clear-eyed. A topless brunette with black stockings and a tattoo on her back leaned over the front desk arguing with Mr. Sweete about her schedule.

            Bryan paid, and the girl seated him on the edge of a side stage that wasn't being used that night. He ordered a pitcher of beer and watched the girls. The stage would flare blue when a new performer came out, then die back down to pink. Lace and glitter shimmered on bras, thongs, and garters in the stage-light, an oil-slick of neon colors.

            The stage went blue again, and Bryan watched. Coming out, the woman was tiny, delicate looking with small arms and shoulders. Bryan's mouth went dry. From his seat in the back, the woman looked small enough to cup in his hands. She wore a black tank-top and thong, came strutting out to something slow and sad sounding. Her hair was dark and swept down over half her face. She dragged her hands up the sides of her hips as she walked. When she raised her head and looked out at the audience with those big eyes, Bryan knew.

            Sweete's voice came over the loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, her first time appearing on stage and only at Sweete's, former Miss Arizona, Toalah's own Martina Long!”

            Bryan was up before Sweete had finished, pushing through tables and chairs on his way to the stage. “Aunt Marti?” Standing on the stage, she was as tall as him.

            Marti eyes got wide, but she grinned. “Bryan!”

            “I've been looking for you,” he said. “I came to take you back home.”

            She pushed him back toward an empty chair. “Sit down, nephew,” she said, but smiled at him. It was her teasing smile. He'd been seeing it forever.

            He sat down at a table next to the stage. The music got louder and faster, and Marti started working up the edges of her shirt with her long fingernails. She pressed against the pole and rocked her hips into it, the shirt bunching her hands and coming up, up, up. Her eyes stayed on Bryan's the whole time.

            When she finished her routine, she came down off the stage and sat on Bryan's lap. He tried not to look at her breasts, the sweat beading on them and the way they moved when she shifted into his lap.

            “Bryan!” She put an arm around his neck. “It's good to see you!”

            “Aunt Marti, what the hell are you doing? Ricky will kill you.”

            She frowned. “We're not going to talk about Ricky right now.”

            “Fine. What are you doing? You don't work here, do you?”

            Her fingernails were resting on his neck, and Bryan shivered. “Wouldn't that be something?” She laughed, the same laugh he'd been hearing since he was a kid. “No, I'm just cutting loose a little. They wouldn't let somebody my age do this full time. Not when they've got all these young, pretty girls.”

            Bryan started to say something a few times, but stopped. “You're prettier than anybody, Aunt Marti” he finally said.

            She hugged him, her body painfully warm through his shirt. “You're sweet. And handsome.” She stroked his neck with her fingertip. “You should probably drop that aunt stuff, or it's going to be weird when I give you a lapdance.”

            Bryan nodded. She pressed back against him in the chair, his body cupping hers. She stayed on his thigh for a while, but Bryan squeezed her legs and pulled her into the center of his lap. She ground down on him for the rest of the song, kissing his cheek and getting up when it finished. She looked over to where the club owner was watching them and told Bryan that he was going to have to pay her. Bryan fished through his wallet and found a twenty, glad that he still had one. “I need to take you home. Ricky's paying me to come get you.”

            “I'm not ready yet. If you're still here when I get ready to leave, I'll let you take me.”

            For the next few hours, Bryan watched Marti move through the club. Other girls came up to him, but he barely saw them. He tried to map every line of her body in the candy-colored light. Everyone there knew her from the billboards and wanted a lapdance. She obliged them, pageant smile glowing in the pink light. She went back on stage four times, always looking right at Bryan.

            When the men in the dairy bar remembered this over their empty glasses and full ash trays, they didn't talk about it much. Ricky would ruin anyone who brought it up. She'd set out to hurt him that night, and she'd done it. If they weren't already in love with her, they loved her for this.

            At three in the morning, the club closed. Bryan took his aunt, now in blue jeans and a Sweete's Cabaret tank-top, out to his truck. He took a bucket out of the back and stood it mouth-down on the floor. “Sorry,” he said. They got in. His elbow stuck out into the passenger side, and she wrapped her arms around his. They left the town and drove out into the desert toward the Longs' house.

            Everything was black around the truck. The road came rushing up in the headlights like water. The stars were thick over their heads and the moon hung low in Bryan's mirror. Marti was so small, she barely took up any space in the corner of the cab. The bucket rattled under her when they hit a bump, and she held onto the door handle.

            “I'm sorry I have to bring you back.”

            “Why are you?” She leaned against his arm.

            “I need the money. This is the only work Ricky would give me. After this, I'm hoping he'll hire me for a real job.”

            Marti sighed. “He won't. Not after the thing at Sweete's gets around town.”

             They drove in silence for a little while. Bryan remembered a side-road coming up that went to an empty lot. “Do you want to get out and stretch for a minute?”

            “Yeah,” she said. “Can we, Bryan? I'd like that.”

            Bryan turned off the road and parked the truck. They were on the edge of a bluff, and the desert swept out black and empty in front of them. They got out. Bryan sat in the dirt in front of the truck and stretched his legs out straight. Marti stood beside him, his head resting against her waist. He breathed in her shirt and remembered sitting in her lap when he'd been a kid, the same smell of soap and sweat and skin.

            “Why don't you leave him?”

            She slid against him, and Bryan eased her into his lap.

            “I think I have to practice a couple of times first.”

            His palm covered the top half of her back. “Is this practice?” he asked.

            “Yeah.” She started playing with the buttons on his shirt. She put her mouth against his ear. “I've always liked you, Bryan. You're a good-looking kid.”

            “What do you like about me?” he asked.

            Marti pushed her hands through his hair, linked her fingers behind his neck. “I like how big you are.” She squeezed his shoulders hard. “Someone like you could do anything.”

            Bryan thought of the sawmill. “No, I can't.”

            “Name one thing you couldn't have if you wanted it.”

            He took her waist in his hands. She squeezed the back of his neck, his body folded around hers. She pressed kisses all the way across his mouth. Bryan was astonished at how small she seemed this close to him, like a bird cupped in his hands. His palm stroked her hair and back, her face pushing into his neck. He helped her get the tank-top off again. In the dirt in front of the Dodge, Bryan eclipsed her on the rough surface of the bluff so that she couldn't see or understand anything but him.

            They were slumped against the front of the truck when it started to get light out.

            She stood up and straightened her clothes. “We should go.”

            Bryan nodded.

            They got back out on the road. Pretty soon, the billboard came up again.

            “I hate that thing,” Marti said. “It doesn't even look like me anymore.”

            “To hell with Ricky.” said Bryan. “Come stay with me.”

            “I can't do that.”

            He took her hand. “You can,” he said. “I'll be with you.”

            “I don't know.”

            They pulled into the Longs' driveway. The backhoes and work trucks were gone. There were no workers. Ricky's truck wasn't even there. Bryan and Marti walked up to the house. “What is this?” she asked. “Are those roses?”

            The trench was murky in the early morning light. Bryan could barely see the thorny tops of the rosebushes in the bottom. He stuck his foot down to remind himself that it didn't have water in it. “He said it's a moat,” Bryan said. “To put around what's his.”

            Marti shook her head. “I need to get the hell out of here. Let me get some things.” Bryan followed her through the quiet house, listening for the sound of Ricky's truck outside. She filled a duffel bag, locked the house behind them, and they got back in the truck.

             She was fidgety the whole drive out toward his house. The sun came in bright through the back glass. Bryan held her knee. “You're doing this.” A quarter mile out from his house, they saw the first work truck.

            Ricky had three crews working on the house. One group of men were re-roofing it. Another group trailed long extension cords inside, patching the floor and ripping up the filthy carpet. The third group angled their backhoes into the yard and were gouging out another trench. Ricky saw them driving up and waved. He directed them to park where they'd be out of the way. After Bryan killed the engine, Ricky opened Marti's door and pulled her into his arms. He kissed her cheek and squeezed her against him. “I see the nephew fetched you.”

            “That was an asshole thing to do,” Marti said, but Ricky just laughed.

            Bryan saw his mother and walked over to her. “What the hell's going on?” he asked, yelling to be heard over the roar of equipment.

            “I sold the house to your uncle,” she said. “He's going to fix it up and let us rent it. It's still our house.”

            “No it's not. It's his house. Look at the damn flowers!”

            “I see them. I think it's lovely.”

            Later, the old men would remember that day, how they'd heard about the roses. They were across the street watching everything from an old Volkswagen van before Bryan and Marti ever arrived. Once Bryan got there, they remembered the night before when he was a giant in the bars.  They saw how Bryan looked at Marti across the yard, and how she stared at the ground with Ricky's arm around her. They rubbed their hands together behind the van windows, licked their teeth, and smacked their old knuckles into their palms. Bryan could beat Ricky if anyone could. They watched Bryan walk over, Ricky swallowed in his shadow. They saw Ricky reach for his wallet and press a ball of money into Bryan's hand, then Bryan walk back out to his truck. They drove away before he did, bending their mirror up so that they wouldn't have to see him.

            In the months afterward, Bryan kept trying out jobs, but he didn't go to his uncle's house. He saw roses start small in the trench outside his window, then crawl up the lattice, and eventually latch their thorns into the siding and begin dragging themselves up the house. He saw their long fingers reach up to cover his window.

            After this, the old men met in their diners and gas stations, their barber shops and cafes. They spat into their cups, hit the tables with their fists, and swore at Bryan Long. Outside their windows, rose leaves were staring to cover the glass. One of them said that Bryan could have stopped all of this, that he was made to do it. They nodded and packed their mouths with tobacco, and were quiet. They knew that he never would.

Micah Dean Hicks is a master's student in the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. His work has been accepted to over a dozen journals, including Shady Side Review, Brain Harvest, Prick of the Spindle, Tryst, and the Smoking Poet.