Bread and Blood (pt 3).

He finishes shoveling the last of Mrs. Moran’s driveway; he’s already done the entire block and every driveway too, everybody watching out their windows and Mrs. Moran yelled twice that she was going to call the cops but Dixie doesn’t stop until it’s all gone, and then he throws his father’s shovel as hard as he can – it lands with a bang in the alley behind the back fence and Dixie rubs sweat out of his eyes, his sides heaving, his hands cramped into hooks. He looks for his smokes but can’t find them and lights out for the liquor store, boots snapping on cold concrete, steam coming off of a shirt tighter than skin like he is on fire. It smells like bread, and burning houses.

It doesn’t have a name, it’s just called LIQUOR, and Dixie blinks stupidly under the grid of fluorescents when he comes in at the pair of guys behind the counter, guys who look too much like Charlie and Mr. Friend who used to give Dan Gamble money to do stuff for them, to be anybody but related. Your face is my face, his dad used to tell him when kids wouldn’t play with them, don’t think anybody’s going to forget that.

These guys can see his dad as plain as he sees theirs, sitting up from where they were watching tv and playing cards. Help you with something? one of them says, wearing flannel and trying to grow a kid’s beard. Dixie doesn’t say anything, going to the cooler and pulling out a six of Budweiser and tapping the counter Marlboro sign, holding up two fingers. Shit, he mutters, realizing that he left his money back in the truck.

You look like somebody, flannel shirt guy says to him; he spits chew into a coffee cup.

Shock is unfamiliar to Dixie; in his own lands nobody speaks to him, like this, or ever, or at all. A guy named Dale used to own this place, he tries to say. He still around?

That old fuck? The other one who has to be Mr. Friend’s kid (Dixie’s sure when he rolls his eyes and cracks his neck just like his old man), says, He’s dead. Somebody robbed him like, what was it, three years ago?

I think five, the other says, and Dixie notices the vein on the underside of his jaw jumping and relief floods him, because they’re tensing up like they’re ready to jump and there’s nothing on this planet that he understands more than that – he can feel it from his toes climbing north through him, the power drawn from fuck knows where but it it’s in every little atom of him now and with that he can break any god damned thing he wants.

But then it stops; Dixie’s mouth falls open and he looks at his hands that are drooping at his sides – there was lightning in him that’s been replaced by things empty and deep.

Mr. Friend’s kid tilts his head, looking down his nose. Everything okay, big guy?

How come, Dixie starts to say, and covers his mouth with his hand. He was starting to ask them why they weren’t afraid.

He puts the beer down and backs away from them, bumps into a tower of potato chips and flinches, and bolts, throwing open the door and throwing himself into the dark. That’s what you get, he thinks, charging past storefronts gone out of business, punching the air, uppercuts, right crosses, combinations. That’s what you get you old faker, and that’s what you deserve.