Big Maria
Authors: Johnny Shaw
“Johnny Shaw has an incredible talent for moving from darkness to hope, from heart-wrenching to humor, and from profane to sacred. His latest,
Big Maria
, is an adventure story that’s equal parts Humphrey Bogart and Elmore Leonard, with just a little bit of the Hardy Boys thrown in. I loved every page.”
—Hilary Davidson (author of
The Next One to Fall
)
“[Johnny Shaw] is excellent at creating a sense of place with a few deft strokes...he moves effortlessly between dark comedy and moments that pack a real emotional punch, and he’s got a knack for off-kilter characters who are completely at home in their own personal corners of oddballdom.”
—Tana French, author of
In the Woods, Faithful Place
“Johnny Shaw calls
Dove Season
a Jimmy Veeder Fiasco, but I call it a whole new ballgame; I enjoyed this damn book more than anything else I read this year!”
—Craig Johnson, author of
The Cold Dish
and
Hell is Empty
“Johnny Shaw’s
Dove Season
may well be the best debut this year. It has the warm wit of Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard novels, the effortless cool of Elmore Leonard and just a sprinkling of Crumley’s border dust. Here’s to many more Jimmy Veeder fiascoes to come.”
—Ray Banks author of
Beast of Burden
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2012 Johnny Shaw
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
City of Gold
Words by Fanny Crosby, 1875
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612184395
ISBN-10: 1612184391
For
The Fellas
PART ONE: LOSERS
ONE
I
t didn’t take much imagination to guess what the other kids had called Harry Schmittberger when he was a boy. Forty-some-odd years later, the nickname still hounded him.
Deep down Harry knew that if he had been born with a different name, his life would have turned out better. If not better, different. Brock Brannigan. Declan Fisk. Rocco Cabrelli. Brace Godfrey. Names of people real and imagined. Names that conveyed virility and strength and power. Names that affirmed manliness, if not greatness. But like the pitiless parents whom his birth had forced on him, his name was another entry on Harry’s growing list of life’s unfairnesses.
Harry approached the sometimes-nickname with equal parts hate and acceptance, a perennial throughout his life. As he had moved from school to school then job to job, there was always some jackass who thought he was clever. Some clever jackass who thought he was the first to coin the obvious.
What Harry couldn’t figure out at that precise moment was why someone was in his bedroom shouting that name at him. Had he riled anyone recently? Probably, but who could remember? He wanted to sleep, but the angry, loud voice wouldn’t let him. The angry, loud voice just kept screaming that nickname. Angrily. And loudly.
“Shitburger!
“Shitburger!
“Shitburger!” the angry, loud voice repeated. “Get the fuck out of my stall.”
Harry opened his bloodshot eyes to slits. He wasn’t in his bedroom. He wasn’t in his trailer. He was somewhere wrong. It was a small room. Not a room. More like a closet. He searched for clues. His eyes alighted on a childlike drawing of an enormous penis ejaculating onto equally monstrous breasts. Written beneath the drawing was a scrawl. “OOOH BABBY.” Not the work of a master, drunk-rushed and uninspired, but the anatomy was recognizable. It told him he was in the men’s room at the Horseshoe Lounge.
“I got other customers need to use the head.”
Harry’s predicament quickly revealed itself. Harry had passed out sitting on the toilet mid-crap, his pants at his ankles. If that wasn’t bad enough, he had thrown up into his own pants. Chunks of steak and bits of maybe-cauliflower pooled in the crotch of his underwear and spilled into his crumpled pant legs.
Harry mumbled, “I need to chew food better.”
“What?” The angry, loud voice grew angrier and louder.
“I don’t eat cauliflower.” Harry curiously flicked at a white chunk. “Potato?”
“You got like ten seconds, Shitburger. I’m done fucking around.”
“I need good, better pants,” Harry mumbled. His liquored confusion shifted closer to fear.
“What you need is to get the fuck out of there. The fuck out of my bar.”
Harry could not think of an out. He started to cry. Softly at first, but it quickly grew past mere sniffles. He didn’t deserve this. Why did stuff like this always happen to him?
There was no sympathy from the other side of the stall door. “You better not fucking be crying.”
“I’m not crying. You are.” Harry roughly wiped at the tears, stirring them in with the drool at the corners of his mouth. He reached for some toilet paper. The dispenser was empty.
Looking back at the drawing of the dong and boobs, he wondered if people had breast sex in real life or if it only happened
in porno movies. He had once found a woman drunk enough to play along, but she had been so flat-chested that he didn’t consider it official. In fact it had been a complete failure, with Harry doing little more than dragging his rod across her dry sternum until the Indian burn made him flaccid.
The memory faded back to reality. The drawing in front of him pulsed. The stall tilted. Everything blurred. The ground accelerated toward him.
“Ooh, baby,” Harry said softly. And then passed out.
I
t was only midnight, but Harry’s night was over.
He woke propped up against the Dumpster behind the bar. It wasn’t the first time that Chico had thrown him out like a sack of garbage. It’s like the guy had something against him. At least Chico had left him sitting up. Not quite recovery position, but he wasn’t going to choke. That was the ceiling of personal service that the Horseshoe mustered for its regulars.
Someone had pulled up Harry’s pants. But from the way it felt down there, nobody had gone the extra mile and cleaned him up. Harry didn’t have any friends that close.
He shifted his hip slightly and the stew of semi-solids sloshed in his drawers. He could smell himself over the curdled sweetness of the garbage. It made him sick all over again. Luckily he was mostly empty and only drizzled stringy spit onto the front of his sweat-soaked shirt.
He shut his eyes and leaned back against the warm metal. The night was hot and sticky. He pressed his hand against the ground to push himself up and got a handful of cricket husks. He wiped them on his pants and watched the insect parts drift in the breeze.
Harry’s benders had grown progressively more destructive since going on medical leave from his job at the prison. His leg had been mostly healed for a month, but he wasn’t ready to go back to work. In fact, he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to go back to Chuckawalla Valley State Prison. On most days it was hard to
tell the difference between being a guard and a prisoner. Leaving work only to return to his empty trailer didn’t seem that much different than the loneliness of lights-out. At least in a jail cell, you didn’t have to walk the length of the trailer to use the can. The work wasn’t any different either. The mental gangrene of repetitive busy work ate away at the core of his being. Nobody had warned him that the bulk of the job was paperwork and data entry. He knew he was meant for more than the monotony of a life as a corrections officer.
Harry had gotten the tail end of the dog his whole life. A losing streak that began at birth. But that didn’t kill the thin sliver of optimism that he held on to. It was deep down, but it was there. Harry was due. He knew it. You can flip a quarter tails only so many times before heads finally lands. He was better than the other losers in Blythe. All he needed was his shot.
Belching acid, Harry decided that it would be at least an hour before he would be up for the three-block stumble to his trailer at Desert Vista Estates. He tried to manufacture the blissful cliff edge of an alcohol blackout, but was too awake after the commotion inside.
To pass the time, he read the bumper stickers on the trucks in the parking lot.
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. MY COLD DEAD HANDS. LET GOD SORT IT OUT.
He counted the Jesus Fish: four. The Calvins Pissing: six. The Truck Nuts: two. Not one coexist in the bunch.
Conspiracy Todd’s ride was the tie-dyed sheep in the flock of mud-caked and lifted trucks. A Subaru BRAT covered in a psychotic patchwork of adhesive rambling.
YOU SHOT JFK. 911CONSPIRACY.COM. THEY CAN HEAR YOU.
A yellow ribbon, but instead of
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS,
Conspiracy Todd had replaced it with
ANOTHER EMPTY GESTURE.
As if on cue, Conspiracy Todd’s voice erupted from the bar, spitty words seeping through the open windows over the whine of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” on the jukebox. Time for his nightly rant.
“Government in up to their ears, my friends. Government and the corporations and the media tangled up like pythons in a knot. An orgy of perversions. People don’t matter. Not the small people. Not the invisible. Not us, you and me.”