DEATH TO THE DAYLIGHT PEOPLE by Josh Bell
Dear Harold and Sam:
The feet of the daylight people squeak in their shoes and their faces are round and white like paper plates and you shoot one daylight person and three more pop up, each one cleaner than the first. There must be no end to them. They must wash each other’s backs and feet by lantern light. When the wind blows across the river, from their side to ours, it smells like soap. (I do not want to guess what it smells like to the daylight people when the wind blows the other way.) I’m not sure if the daylight people are born. I only know they die when I empty my gun – oompah! – over the hummock. The daylight people will not cease until we’re all bathed and powdered and ready for bed. I imagine the oils and the towels. I imagine the bodies of their mothers soaking long and hot in tubs. Even the flame from the barrels of their karen- guns, when they kill us from across the river, looks clean and shapely, little teardrops of happiness. Even the dirty songs they sing in the evening around their campfires – we can hear their sweet voices filter down from the bluffs – exude a nice athletic sexuality one could not begin to dream of, not on this side of the river, where one half of you gets it from the gutter while the other half of you gets it from the back seat of a truck, simultaneously, and you’re lucky if you get paid. You know what I’m talking about, the things that go on over here, the things we’re fighting for. It’s hard to write songs about it, hard to find rhymes. It’s hard to be a bringer of death under such conditions.
***
It was hard to be a bringer of death under such conditions, the bridge, the river, the daylight people across it, the sun rising behind. At night the daylight people edged their witches in close to the line, to bring on sleep in us, to lay the daylight curses in you, like so many eggs. Dear Harold and Sam: these were witches in white cloth wraps like grandmas and I’d say one witch installed for every hundred yards of line, each witch aimed at us from the bluffs, spider hands upraised, their longish thumbs almost like an extra finger. They had the high position, from which to blast down their signal with their organized minds. Our guns would not reach them. They seemed to intuit exactly, these witches, how far our guns could reach. I really wanted to shoot a daywitch, just once. I wanted to be known as witch- killer, like my bestie, White- Out. Dear Harold and Sam: you know who WhiteOut is, you knew her before I did. White- Out did not fear a witch, not like me. I feared a witch but at the same time I wanted a witch to float over the river to me, feed me cereal and tell me tall tales, take me away from it all. We were all exhausted, anyway, from being up the night before. We didn’t like bedtime. To prevent our succumbing to the witch- signal flooding the airlanes, the Line Bosses would crawl along behind the hummocks in the night, giving us the propaganda the best they could, handing out wasp- leaves for us to chew against the invisible narcotic of witch- vision. Succumbing was a big problem. The daylight people positioned spotters across the bridge, keeping look- out for those of us nodding off to the witch- signal, then send a swimmer across the river, to cut your throat or open a porthole in your face with one of their shoosh- guns, then disappear from whence they came. It really messed with morale. The wasp- leaves worked for awhile but sooner or later a body needs sleep, even the filthiest of us. You were left with thistles in your gums and craving more waspleaves, that’s about it. I, for one, always succumbed to witch- vision, no matter how many leaves I chewed. I didn’t expect to live very long. I just knew I would wake up with a porthole in my face. Each night I was always one of the first to succumb, no matter how I tried. My left foot would twitch, I’d yelp, the taste of witch- signal in my nose, fake peach and soap. Then the daylight people would storm the bridge, their faces like hundreds of little white suns, my bestie White- Out jabbing me in the side with her pistolette, saying how the poets lied about sleep, saying how sleep is not at all like death, saying only death is like death, saying wake up and die motherfucker.
***
During the day you’d see carp and buffalo fish nosing the river’s surface, sometimes, the V wake of their tails in the shallows. I liked their solidness and girth, these big fish, the weirdness of their soft mouths, too much like ours. A guy in our unit from Carolton – his name was Highlight because of his hair – sometimes saved back toasted white bread, after chow time, to bait the carp, boredom mainly, waiting for the daylight people to finally come kill us. Highlight and some of the other guys would toss the bread out, over the hummock where we formed our line, upstream a little bit to account for the current. When the carp rose for the bread, Highlight and Crewshutter and some of the other guys would pop off small arms fire at the fish. You don’t think about it with fish, but they bleed, those big carp and buffalo have a lot of blood in them. The daylight people, on the other side of the river, would boo whenever a fish got shot. They didn’t kill fish over there. I hated to see it myself. It didn’t fill me with camaraderie, big old carp with its scales made out of gold, its body torn open, only its swim bladder keeping it afloat, little pale balloon in the sunlight for the first and last time, Highlight blowing over his pistol barrel like he was from the Wild West. Most of what I saw and tried to love, other than the bestie White- Out, was nonsense. I guess we had language and small tools and things like that, okay. But even after Death got added to the garden, the difference between man and fish – as far as I could tell – was otherwise zero.
***
Nights were the worst, the witches in the bluffs. The witch- vision picked away at you, little doubts, failures of masculinity. You’d fall asleep so hard your fingernails would grow at mushroom rate. Even your teeth felt longer. Then the daylight people would storm the bridge, etc. If you were even awake you’d have to kill them with the witch- vision superimposed over your slaughter, confusing it, firing your weapon both through and at your dreams. The witches of the daylight people were too high- class and subtle to send you nightmares, nothing obvious or over the top like killing your own mother or biting into a small child, the kind of dream where – when you woke up – you’d suss out the vision as an imposition of witchery, say to yourself, That wasn’t me, that was a dream. No, these were dreams that worked at you all the next day, unsussable. You thought they were your fault, these dreams, one where I looked down at a crossroads and my penis had two heads, for example, one head pointing to the left and one pointing to the right, the sum total of the dream being me standing there not knowing which direction to go, to the left or to the right, wishing there were a third head, a third direction, that indecision staying with me through my waking day, the kind of thing you might dream, yourself, even if a witch was not involved. That was the genius of it. Or the dream where I was holding hands with my bestie White- Out in a mansion with many rooms. In the dream the bestie White- Out said, “Hey, there’s another room over there,” and we’d walk into that room, and in that room would be my bestie, White- Out, with whom I thought I was holding hands. In the dream I’d look down at my hand but no one was holding it. I’d have to walk into the room alone. I’d walk over to the new White- Out, the one who’d been in the room already, and she’d stand up and say to me, “Hey, there’s another room over there,” and I’d say, “No, I want to stay in this room with you,” and she’d say, “Come on, let’s go,” and I’d hold hands with her, walk into this other room, and there she’d be, already sitting in that room, and I’d look down at my hand, again, but no one was holding it.
***
One night, early in my days as a killer of daylight people, back when I didn’t know anything and anyone, back before the bestie White-Out, the Line Boss DC came crawling down the line with wasp- leaves in his pockets, the moon up above like a garden light, the soft sounds of daylight people singing across the river. We were all jostled and dirty and packed into the mud hummocks like sand fleas. There was a rumor going up and down the line the daylight people would try to push for the bridge that night, etc. They were putting their witches in position, smoke floating over the river, the smell of lather. No one knew what kept the daylight people from taking the bridge, or why they hadn’t already. The daylight people were stronger than us and there were more of them and they had better clothes and hairstyles. It was said that they did not mean to take the bridge at all, that the army of daylight people across the river from us were just keeping us occupied while the main offensive against our lives and liberties took place elsewhere. I didn’t know what I believed. I looked to the Line Boss for direction. The Line Boss DC was a handsome man with a head well- shaped like sculpture and he came down the line that night, saying, “Gentlemen, it’s not about death to banker’s hours. It’s not about keeping our homes free from washtubs. It’s not economics and it’s not about country. Look to your left, look to your right, look at each other. You’re fighting for the man next to you.” And I did what he said, for he was the Line Boss. I looked to my right and I saw a dead man, a porthole where his face had been, shooshed out the night previous. I looked to my left down the hummock and saw Tall John, a former stripper with white teeth that glowed in the dark, Tall John being the one who started everyone calling me the Blow Job King. I didn’t want to fight for the likes of Tall John, nor for the dead man, either, whose name I didn’t learn. I understood to be a killer I would have to find a bestie. Then position myself next to that bestie on the line. Then look to my right or my left and see that bestie. And then have something to murder for.
***
My unit was the Heart Pigs and we were useless as a unit (oompah!) and our Line Boss was the man DC. DC was a known coward, wellliked by the Heart Pigs for keeping us alive instead of murdered by daylight people, for he talked a good game but would not take risks with us or himself, not like the Line Boss of the Meeming Screamies, who volunteered his boys for every mission. Our DC was a graying exhausted man with a face that belonged on ancient coins and it was his good looks and kind eyes that had gotten him so far up the chain of command, that and how DC was one of the few of us impervious to witch- signal. DC would say of the witches, “Witches are ladies and ladies do not charm me.” DC would pat us on the heads and pull us back from the line for R and R whenever he could, handing out pills for us to use on R and R so that we would feel loved by him when we weren’t around him, love in the blood, love in the blood, DC said, keeping one or two of his favorite Heart Pigs with him in his hotel room at the commandeered Motel 6. It wasn’t that DC played favorites, he just had favorites. I was not one of his favorites, but still DC was kind to me. Like I said I was new to the unit, fresh from the farm, too wide across the shoulders and milk- fed to be a favorite of the Line Boss DC. DC told me he preferred a skinny soldier for his favorites. He told me in his tent, “Come back when you’ve lost a little weight.” He said, “I like the sense of a certain privation.” So, until I got skinny enough, or otherwise figured out what the word “privation” was, instead I’d go drinking and whoring with the other unselected Heart Pigs, in a tavern on Wabash Avenue called The Birdhouse, back from the line about a mile from the bridge, where the witch- signal could not trouble our merriment.
***
But this is a story about White- Out, above all. Dear Harold and Sam: how I’d come to be White- Out’s sidekick is: I helped her write a letter to one of her boyfriends for her. It is not news to you, Harold and Sam, that White- Out had boyfriends. This was at the tavern called The Birdhouse. Amongst the Heart Pigs the girl White- Out was respected as killer of the enemy and even known as dangerous to friends if you got on her wrong side, the best shot in the unit, a dead- eye across the river, a little weird even for a girl, a little too into singing songs to herself, the only one of us who had ever killed a daywitch, a witch who’d floated down too close to the river to take a piss in the night, her witch- face exploding into dandelion seeds as she squatted, finding her way into – but not out of – White- Out’s sights. White- Out was very tall and I liked her blond hair and gray eyes and she carried with her, in addition to the karen- gun we all carried, a long gun with a scope. She kept it strapped across her broad back. The Line Boss DC liked to send White- Out to the rooftops just back from the line, to put a damper on the daylight people from above. White- Out’s gun had the longest reach in the unit, probably in the whole battalion. White- Out kept to herself and had never said a word to me. And though she was respected, no one really seemed to like White- Out, or at least everyone kept their distance from her, due to how White- Out was a girl, of course, and at the same time taller than any of us, and also the size of her skull, which was a monument, plus due to how White- Out had cut off the pinky finger of the Heart Pig morale officer, a guy everyone called Lucky Daryl. Lucky Daryl had made a comment about White- Out’s forehead being the size of a drive-in movie screen. And then Lucky Daryl had nine fingers. You didn’t want to fuck with White- Out.
***
But what did I know? She was sitting alone in a back booth, a battered pencil in her hand, writing, a look of concentration upon her face, no one in The Birdhouse but soldiers off the line and locals there to fleece them. I’d been sitting with Tall John and some of the other Heart Pigs, Crewshutter and Lucky Daryl, Die Curious and Red Delicious, other people I didn’t really like but wanted to like me. They’d each been talking of their girlfriends back home and how far they’d gotten with them sexually. I was dreading this conversation because I had no girlfriend back home. So, before it became my turn to lie, I stood up with my very tall beer can and worked my way through the dancing boys and girls, hired entertainment at The Birdhouse, toward the booth where White- Out was sitting, my facial expression saying to the Heart Pigs, “Fuck you guys anyway.” When Tall John and the other Heart Pigs got the sense of where I was headed, you could hear them hooting and hissing behind me, saying how the Blow Job King had himself a love interest, saying White- Out was so tall I better find a step stool if I was going to get it on. I sat down in the booth across from White- Out and I tried to pretend I didn’t know we were being hooted at. White- Out’s forehead was large, yes, but something about the expanse of it comforted me. And I said to her immediately, for I wanted a bestie, “I think you’re trustworthy and brave.”
***
The girl White- Out raised her eyes and got a look at me. Her gray eyes were as big as her hands. She said, “You’re the one everyone calls the Blow Job King.”
“I don’t know about everyone,” I said.
She said, “How many blow jobs before they king you?”
“One,” I said.
“One?” she said.
“Three,” I said.
***
Her face was a large face and her ears too small for it. Dear Harold and Sam: I thought she looked lovely, even with the soot and charcoal she rubbed into her face and forehead, you know, in order to keep herself from being an easy target on the line. The forehead was large and my guess was she kept a large brain safe behind it. Rightly she feared that a daylight person, across the river, would see her grand forehead, aim for it. I tried not to stare at the fetching forehead and we drank for awhile awkwardly and we talked of small things, our points of origin, how neither of us had ever owned a pet, how we both had herpes but neither of us had ever voted. You could hear the nucka- nuck of small arms fire from the line, plus the sound of a poorly planned parade in the streets outside The Birdhouse, a march out there played on what sounded like pots and pans. Across the bar floor the other Heart Pigs started picking out their prostitutes, boy ones and girl ones, sun ones, moon ones, then disappeared into the upstairs rooms. WhiteOut asked me if I would be contracting with a prostitute and I told her that I had thought about it carefully but had finally decided not to. Then White- Out surprised me by putting her boots in my lap – size twelve – and talking to me about the letter she was writing to her boyfriend, a pacifist who’d stayed on the farm back in Floyd’s Knobs. She seemed to love this boyfriend very much.
“I think he’s secretly a day person,” White- Out said, almost shyly. She took her boots from my lap and stood and came around the booth and sat down next to me. She put her hand on my knee. “In his heart, I mean,” White- Out said. “Only he doesn’t want to tell me. He likes trees. He likes windmills.”
“There are a lot of people like that,” I said. I scooted down to give White-Out room on the seat. She scooted down along with me to stay close. I scooted a little more, til I was touching the wall with my shoulder. She scooted close again, so she had me pinned against the wall. She took my hand in hers.
“But I love him,” White- Out said. She pressed my hand as if she were counting the bones in it. This friendship was moving fast. She held up the cocktail napkin upon which she’d been writing. “I want to tell him how much I miss him. But when I write that down, it just seems dumb.”
“What do you miss about him?” I asked her.
She thought. She said, “I miss how he doesn’t care how tall I am. I miss how he doesn’t cry when he comes, which is something I can’t say about boys around here.”
I said, “That’s beautiful. Just write it down.”
She wrote it down. She looked at what she’d written. She looked sideways at me and she smiled.
***
Then White- Out told me she could tell the difference between daywitches, that each witch had a certain flavor of dream they’d send you, like a signature.
“I didn’t know there was a difference between witches,” I said.
“The two witches nearest the bridge are the strongest witches,” WhiteOut said. She put her arm around my shoulders. She unbuttoned the first two buttons of my shirt and slipped her hand inside. Her body pressed me against the bar wall. I felt small, portable. She pinched my nipple and she said, “I call these witches the twins. One sends you dreams that taste like vegetables. The other sends you dreams that feel all furry.”
“No one’s ever pinched my nipple before,” I said to White- Out.
“You seem okay with it,” White- Out said.
“And I never noticed this thing, about vegetables and fur, when it comes to witch signal,” I said.
“You’ll notice it now,” she said.
“I will pay more attention.”
“Do your pants zip or button?” she asked.
“You have a boyfriend,” I said.
“And don’t you forget it,” White- Out said.
***
You need to get yourself a war friend. Your life changes for the better and you learn a lot of things about the world. One of the first improvements was that White- Out arranged it so that I would no longer give blow jobs for free. One day she gathered up the other Heart Pigs in a semi- circle near the cookfires, back from the line a bit, on the football field of the old college, the bluffs of the daylight people just visible beyond her high shoulders. There was the male cook Jezebel and the female cook Earnwright. There was Tall John and Lucky Daryl. The weird kid with the inverted tooth, Max. There were the Line Boss DC’s two current favorite Heart Pigs, the lithe blond named Hazel and the lithe blond named Guildenstern. There were a couple of other fellows from some of the other units, The Karate Kids and the Meeming Screamies. White- Out stood taller than any of them, unloved but highly respected, which I decided was a kind of love. Her karen- gun looked small like a toy gun strapped across her middle. She lifted her large palms outward and said, “The Blow Job King is no longer a given. How long did you think you could go without paying your respects?”
The fellows all grumbled to hear this. Crewshutter spat, not at me, but in my direction. Tall John kicked at a ball of mud and raised his hand. White- Out pointed at him. Tall John said, “I’m the one who named him the Blow Job King. I should get a discount.”
“No discounts,” White- Out said.
***
I learned White- Out loved the pacifist boyfriend in Floyd’s Knobs very much. I learned also that the boyfriend in Floyd’s Knobs was not her only boyfriend. White- Out had boyfriends in six different cities and she was, as you well know, married to two men. White- Out told me how these two men, her husbands, Harold and Sam were their names, lived together on a chicken farm in New Harmony. They counted eggs and waited patiently for White- Out’s return, for she was wife to them both and beloved, chicken- plucker and head of household, the one who passed out the dinner rolls. White- Out told me when the fight against the daylight people was over she would take me to the farm in New Harmony and introduce me to Harold and Sam. “Then we’ll see how it goes from there,” White- Out said, taking her boots off, putting her feet in my lap. We were best friends in the bar, in the streets, on the line. For White- Out, I decided, I would fight a war against God if I had to.
***
One night on the line I said this same exact thing to White- Out. WhiteOut said, “It’s like we’re fighting a war against God already, or hadn’t you realized that?”
I said, “How so?”
She pointed across the river. I curled up next to her like a plant. She slipped her hand inside my shirt. I could hear Tall John snickering down the line, whispering I was pussy- whipped, but I didn’t care. I could see his dumb face white in the dark down the mud line and I stuck my tongue out at it. White- Out said, “Over there, on that side of the river, the daylight people: they are clean. They bathe each evening. They stand facing each other and they throw balls back and forth in a game of catch. They have projects. They are fruitful. They don’t laugh at each other when they are naked. They’re the forces of the day. We’re the forces of the night.”
“I’ve never thought of it that way,” I said.
“It’s that way,” she said.
“Against God,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“I don’t like our chances,” I said.
“We have no chance,” she said. I pushed my boot heels into the mud so I could get myself closer to White- Out. She let me push against her. She asked, “How many blow jobs did you give today?”
I said, “One.”
“One?” she asked.
“Three,” I said.
***
White- Out was good across the river with the pistolette and karengun, but her great pleasure was the sniper rifle. The gun was long and oiled and White- Out named the gun after her father, Clarence. She loved her father, Clarence, who was dead. She loved her many boyfriends and her two husbands, Harold and Sam, and she dictated to me correspondence with these men. I wrote to them all for her. On R and R at The Birdhouse, in our little booth, with the nucka- nuck of small arms fire coming from the river, White- Out would say to me, out loud, “Dear Paul, you have steady hands and you are not frightened of me when I move around in the dark,” and I would write that down for her. White- Out would say, “Dear Clancy, I met a guy who reminds me a lot of you and I slept with him,” and I would write this down for her. White- Out would say, “Dear Eric, I’m in love with you just as much as I’m in love with your sister.”
“Sister?” I would say.
“Sister,” White- Out would say, and I would write it down for her.
***
With the blow job money I made, White- Out would go to the temporary PX and buy pink cigarettes and cream- filled cakes and a pint or two of yellow liquor. When the Line Boss DC would send White- Out to the rooftops with her sniper rifle, she’d take me along with her to watch her back and check her feet for sore spots. Down from the hummock- line and the bridge we’d go together, back down Wabash Avenue a few blocks, saying hidey- do to the local citizenry, through the fluctuating doors and into the abandoned lobby of the old- timey hotel, with its ancient “Free Cable” sign and empty candy jar, up the long emergency staircase, fifteen floors to the rooftop level, where we’d spread out a little blanket and have a picnic in the sun, just the two of us, eating and drinking while White- Out plinked at daylight people with the sniper rifle named Clarence. The hotel overlooked the downtown area, positioned nicely to give White- Out a shot off either side of the bridge. The hotel rooftop was easily my favorite part of the war, getting drunk on blow job money, checking White- Out’s feet for sore spots, far from the other Heart Pigs and their night- boy games. Her boots didn’t fit her large feet right and it always hurt her feet to come up all those emergency stairs. The heaviness of her bare foot in my hand made me thankful, though seeing the actual soles of her feet troubled me in a heart- sick way. Feet are meant to be connected to the ground, is my way of looking at it. When you see the bottom of a person’s foot, there’s something almost too vulnerable about it. Death comes sneaking around. You only see a foot like that when you are lucky, and then you have to question your luck. And I sometimes grew sad to have such a friend as White- Out, her feet in my hands while she pulled Clarence’s trigger. So many people had to die in order for my happiness to work its way through history to find me. And who was I? It’s like the whole war had been invented to put me on a rooftop with my bestie, the sun out like a voyeur, soaking all my happiness up second- hand.
***
I mentioned this to her, up on the rooftops one day, how the war had been invented for us to find each other. White- Out said to me, simply, “You’re right about that.” I was scanning the bluffs with binoculars while White- Out scanned the bluffs with Clarence’s scope. The bluffs from that distance looked like they were made out of chalkboard material. It was the bluffs on the far side of the river, the bridge, the hummocks on our side of the river, Wabash Avenue leading from the bridge and right to the foot of the hotel. Behind us was the park and the women’s cemetery. In front of us, in between the hotel and the bridge, the downtown area lay stretched out beneath, like a plan. From that high perspective I could tell how thought had gone into the layout of the town, whenever they’d built it, the patterning of the grid, which I never thought about when I was down in the streets, where everything seemed improvisational, where streets seemed to exist because I turned and walked down them. Up on the roof the breeze blew oddly, bouncing all around you like a dog. It was my job to think about the wind, to look for day- faces on the leftward side of the bridge. White- Out unwrapped a cream- filled cake and bit into it. I said to White- Out, “You see that little shrub, just down from the water pump?”
She set half of the cream- filled cake on the rooftop ledge and shouldered Clarence and scanned, the weird breeze fondling her blonde hair. “Check,” White- Out said.
“You see how there’s a guy hiding behind it?”
“Check,” White- Out said.
***
Clarence bucked against White- Out’s shoulder and we watched the face of the daylight person behind the shrub turn into a dandelion puff and blow away on the breeze. I rested my binoculars on my chest and leaned my back against the rooftop ledge and looked up at the sun. I liked the heavy pull of the cord around my neck with the binoculars hanging from it. I could feel a straight line drawn from the weight of the binoculars, down fifteen stories, right to the center of the Earth, which is where we were all headed. “You say I’m right about it?” I asked her.
“About what?” she said. She put her back to the ledge and lit a pink cigarette. There was a little dollop of cream on her upper lip and I watched the triangle of her tongue find it.
I said, “How the war was invented to put me on the rooftop with my bestie White- Out.”
White- Out said, “You’ve got that right. Only,” she said, “you’re wrong to be sad about it.” She blew out a cloud of pink smoke and she passed me the cigarette.
“All these people had to die,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. She said it like she’d bitten the word off of a larger word. I didn’t want her to be angry with me. She said, “A long time ago, your mother gave birth to you.” She picked up the cream- filled cake from the ledge and put it in her mouth. She asked me to show her my bellybutton. I lifted my shirt and showed her. She put her finger in my bellybutton. She left a trace of cream filling there. “Then there was a war. I walked a long way to find it. You walked a long way to find it.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” I said.
“Go sit on the other side of the rooftop for a while,” she said.
***
Another day, same rooftop, more blow job money.
“When did you know you were a night person?” White- Out asked me.
I’d been worried about this question. I wasn’t sure I was, truly, a night person. I tried to answer truthfully. “Before I met you,” I said, “I did
prefer night- time. I preferred having dreams to being awake. I preferred dinner to breakfast. It was all very clear.”
She squeezed off a shot and I lifted my binoculars in time to watch a daylight person fall from the bridge into the river.
“And now that you’ve met me?”
“Well,” I said. “I know it’s not right. But I think about the sunshine more often. I think I could enjoy a hammock. I think I might like to go to a beach.”
“Don’t talk that kind of talk to anyone but me,” she said.
***
In a way, though, I thought the Line Boss DC would be proud of us. We had found a friend to be honest with. As long as we killed day people, we didn’t have to be patriotic.
“Do you think they pay for sex on the other side?” I asked White- Out.
“No,” she said. “If anything, they exchange goods and services.”
I thought about that. “I’m happy to be where I am,” I said to WhiteOut.
“I’m happy too,” she said. She said, “You know what I like to do when I’m happy?”
“I do,” I said. I laid down on the blanket, the gravel of the rooftop pressing up through the cloth of it. I unbuttoned my jeans so that White- Out could watch me masturbate. There was a war going on. My masturbation was something she liked to see. She said it made her brainwaves flatten out. She said how when she watched me she liked to think about those people in the world who look past death and choose life. She took a swig of the yellow liquor while she watched me, the sun up behind her large head, like her blond twin. I settled in to my position. She ate a cream- filled cake. Her eyes were gray, like soft rocks. The breeze blew through her hair and toward me. She smelled like sweat and tobacco. And when I was done, she flipped a coin of blow job money onto my stomach, as a reward. She said, “That was real peaceful. Thank you.”
***
That last night we were back on the line with the other Heart Pigs, dusk, the daylight people moving their witches up. I no longer bothered to space myself out on the line like we were supposed to. I placed myself directly next to White- Out, right at arm’s length. The vegetable witch was up and sending signal and there was a new witch to contend with. Or so White- Out said. She could feel a new witch over there, a powerful new vibration. White- Out was trying to get a feel for the signature, her big eyes closed. Her eyelids had more surface area than most eyelids, like pink lawns. Tall John and the Heart Pig they called Dr. Marfan had nicked a roll of measuring tape from a wrecked tailor’s shop on Third Street. To kill time, the Heart Pigs were giving themselves hard- ons and measuring, tossing the tape down the line to the next guy. Dr. Marfan and Tall John had been surprised to discover their penises were the exact same length and girth, down to the eighth. They guffawed and proclaimed themselves dick twins and gave each other air high- fives. Tall John’s sidekick Crewshutter measured out larger, but he looked glum in the face about it. Crewshutter couldn’t be dick twins with his bestie, which was what he most wanted. He was jealous of Dr. Marfan. I myself didn’t want to do this night- boy game of measuring penises and I knew I wouldn’t have to because I was sitting next to White- Out. The Heart Pigs wouldn’t think of tossing the measuring tape in her direction. In the middle of this White-Out opened her eyes and said to me, “Elements.”
I said, “What?”
She closed her eyes again. You could see the white robe and upstretched hands of the new witch, across the river, up in the bluffs. To me she looked like all the other witches, but I trusted White- Out’s sense of things. “Elements,” White- Out said. “Air and fire, I think.”
***
I closed my eyes, to see if I could suss the new witch. But before I could, one of the Line Boss DC’s favorites, the lithe blond Guildenstern, came crawling up to us through the mud. He was a beautiful boy and he had a tattoo on the back of his hand with a heart that said “Rosenbloom,” a friend of his who had his face shooshed out during the early days of the stand on the river. He stayed low in his crawl and he tapped one of White- Out’s large boots. He wasn’t happy about having to crawl through the mud, but what could you tell him about it? We were night people. A certain amount of filth was to be expected. Guildenstern made a face at White- Out and he said, “DC wants to see you.”
***
The field headquarters of the Line Boss DC was a three- man tent set back from the line, dead center in the home end zone of the old college football field. It was a small tent but DC had it kitted out nicely, a lot of red velvet and blanketry, a hookah and a solar- powered lava lamp, an LED disco ball, a couple of plastic ferns placed outside, stolen from the waiting room of a doctor’s office. You had to sit in the mud at the mouth of the small tent to meet with DC. White- Out and I sat down and Guildenstern opened the tent flap. DC was sitting inside with the other lithe blond, Hazel, playing a card game. Hazel and Guildenstern air- kissed and Guildenstern strolled off toward the cookfires over at the fifty- yard line. In the tent DC smoked a small knotty- looking cigar and its smoke filled the tent and smelled like grapes.
“End of the line,” DC said. There was a half inch of ash on his cigar and he leaned across and tapped his ash into Hazel’s shirt pocket.
“End of the line, sir?” White- Out said.
DC nodded and played a card. Hazel looked at the card and said, “Fuck.” DC’s handsomeness was broad and comforting and you could see he would win the card game. He lay his cards face down and turned and looked at us. He said, “You boys are some of my best boys. Even though one of you is a lady and ladies do not charm me.”
“You don’t have to say that every time we talk,” said White- Out.
“In short,” DC said, “I called you here to tell you we’re going to be defeated tonight.”
I looked at White- Out but she didn’t look at me. “How do you know?” White- Out asked.
The lithe blond Hazel chuckled as if this were a dumb question. He patted at his shirt pocket to make sure DC’s cigar ash didn’t catch him on fire. DC shushed Hazel and pulled a piece of paper from a stack of them and held it out toward White- Out. White- Out read the piece of paper and she handed it to me. It was a message from the day people. The paper was a thick and fine paper and it smelled like lilacs. The note read, “It’s been fun, but we will defeat you tonight. Signed, the day people.” I handed the piece of paper back to DC. “They have very high- quality paper,” DC said. He sniffed at the note and touched his tongue to it.
“Nothing but the best,” Hazel said meanly.
“I thought I felt some weird mojo on the line,” White- Out said of the note.
“Mojo,” Hazel said.
“Yeah,” DC said, cutting his hand in the air. “As a deal,” he said, “it’s all done.”
White- Out and I sat there looking at Hazel and DC. Hazel and DC sat there looking back. When it was clear there was nothing else to be said, they started playing cards again.
“Oompah,” White- Out said.
***
With the last of the blow job money White- Out bought some creamfilled cakes and a bottle of yellow liquor. At a drugstore she bought some hair ties with jeweled butterflies on them and she bought some lick-on tattoos and she bought a pack of pink cigarettes. And we took Clarence and the other guns with us. And we packed some extra ammo and a couple of grenades into the picnic basket. And we walked the fifteen stories up to the rooftop of the old- timey hotel, where we’d make our last stand. It was night and at that distance you could just feel the little flippery edge of the witch- signal. We stood on the ledge, both breathing hard from the emergency stairs. We looked over the city to the river. Among the bluffs and treeline on the far side of the river there were amassing so many daylight people that, with their clean skin and hair, they looked like false dawn, a glow in the teeth of the bluffs like they were a sun rising directly out of a huge mouth. White- Out took my hand in hers. The dog- like wind played WhiteOut’s fine blond hair this way and that. She said, “When they come at dawn, I’ll shoot as many as I can. They’ll come across the bridge,” she said, pointing at the bridge, there like a small lit tongue saying “ah” over the river, “and then they’ll come over the hummocks. I’ll shoot them on the hummocks. Then they’ll come down the street. I’ll shoot them in the street. By that time,” she said, “they’ll know where we are, and they’ll come up for us. What you’ll do,” she said, pointing at the cross streets just below us, “is watch for them to get that far. When they get that far,” she said, stepping back off the ledge and sitting down on the blanket, “you’ll take your karen- gun and my pistolette and you’ll kill them when they come up the stairway.”
“I understand,” I said.
“And when I hear you’re in trouble,” she said, “I’ll come to you.”
***
I sat down on the blanket next to her. “We could just leave,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t possible.
“It isn’t possible,” White- Out said. “This is part of it.”
“This is part of it,” I said.
She squeezed my hand and asked me to take my shirt off. I took my shirt off. She put her hair up with one of the butterfly hair ties and she used a second butterfly to put my hair up with. She selected a heartshaped tattoo from the lick-on book she’d bought and she tore out the paper and she leaned down and licked the heart- shaped tattoo onto me, over my heart. She pulled back the thin paper and the tattoo heart was blue and blurry. “No jerking off tonight,” she said. “We need to keep our teeth sharp.”
***
Toward dawn White- Out said, out loud, “Dear Harold and Sam.” She was scanning the bridge with her scope. She settled and breathed and pulled Clarence’s trigger and her shoulder bucked. I got the notebook and pencil from our picnic basket and I started my dictation. “Dear Harold and Sam,” I said. White- Out nodded. “I miss you both very much,” White- Out said, shucking the spent shell, scanning again. “I think about our home on the farm. I miss being in the small bed with you, Harold. And I miss being in the small bed with you, Sam. And I miss being in the big bed, on Sunday night, with both of you. And I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings to hear this,” she said, leaning Clarence on the ledge and turning toward me, “but often, in the dark, in the big bed, when we are all three in it together, I cannot tell the difference between the two of you.”
***
Like a dream it happened just as White- Out said. White- Out shot them as they came across the bridge at dawn, their very armpits glowing clean in the dawn- light, the overpowering smell of lilac and honey, knots of their bodies, the shine of their smiling teeth as they came across the bridge. My own teeth went slick and electrified. White- Out shot daylight people in the river, where they swam carelessly with their shoosh guns held between their lips. I watched what I could through the binoculars. “Seven,” White- Out said. She pulled Clarence’s trigger. “Eight,” White- Out said. I put a grenade in my pocket and I took White- Out’s pistolette from her waist- band, the metal of it hot from her body. From that distance the war sounded like a sporting event, a dull and slushy roar of voices. I watched the section of line guarded by our fellow Heart Pigs. I couldn’t tell one Heart Pig from another but I could see how they weren’t going to be Heart Pigs for much longer. There were just too many daylight people. I could feel now what I’d probably always understood, how futile our stand had been all this time. In my mind I said goodbye to Tall John and the rest of them, people I didn’t care about, but still I felt bad, even guilty. They were dead now or dying and I still had minutes left to live, watching White- Out be White- Out, the sun making her hair white. I was running on religious time, miracle time. The day people over- ran the football field and they came down Wabash Avenue now, slipping into the street, the pure white of their pajamas, their bright white sneakers, shooting the Heart Pigs and the Karate Kids and the Hoosier Daddys that fled before them, the local citizenry tossing flowers and candy at them as they came. “Twenty- one,” said White- Out. “Twenty- two,” she said. You could see their faces now, in the street below, smiling, white teeth well- brushed for a lifetime. A clutch of daylight people stood in the middle of the cross street beneath us, looking this way and that, their guns at their sides, smoke blowing down the street, the cheers of local citizenry. White- Out said, “Here we go,” and she shot into the clutch of daylight people in the cross street below. I watched a face turn into a puff of dandelion seed and blow off down the street. One of the remaining day people watched his friend fall and then looked up. It was a male. He smiled at us and pointed. “Get to the stairs,” White- Out said.
***
“Get to the stairs,” White- Out says. And I cross the gravel rooftop and open the emergency door. I stand at the top of the stairs, WhiteOut and the open world behind me. I can hear the feet of the daylight people in the stairwell below, squeaking cleanly in their clean shoes. It’s the nibbling, cheerful sound of doom. At long last I understand I am truly a night person. The dread smell of lilacs floats up the staircase and in my mind I write my own letter, to you, Harold and Sam, househusbands of the bestie, White- Out. “Dear Harold and Sam, they call me the Blow Job King. I’ve seen the bottoms of White- Out’s feet and I find them considerable. I have lived on a farm in my life and I know a thing or two about chickens. I will love what you love, and this makes us brothers.” And I sign this letter in my mind and I redo my hair in the butterfly hair tie and I kiss my palm and touch the blurry blue heart tattoo on my chest. I can hear the daylight people jostling up the stairwell, the sound of their guns clinking together like champagne glasses. In my hand the pistolette is still warm from White- Out’s body. I crouch at the top of the stair and cock the pistolette, which turns it into a living thing.
Josh Bell is the author of the novel The Houseboat Veronica (Fiction Collective 2, 2024). His most recent collection of poetry is Alamo Theory (Copper Canyon, 2016).