The Deadheart Shelters

Swallowdown Press

PO Box 86810

Portland, OR 97286-0810

WWW.SWALLOWDOWNPRESS.COM

ISBN: 1-933929-04-9

Copyright ©2010 Swallowdown Press

The Deadheart Shelters Copyright ©2010 by Brandon Forrest Armstrong

Cover art copyright ©2010 by Dana Terrace

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental or for satirical purposes. This is a work of fiction.

This is how I remember what got me here. I hum my mind into a soundproof place, a gun-dark ocean with cardboard skies. I rewind it back to when I could feel the world on me like ant limbs.

First I think of the geese.

When I was a boy, they worked me less. I had time for other things. I would sit in the moss waiting for the older ones to come home. I would watch the sun fragment in slow motion like an egg with corn syrup yolk. Then the geese would start calling and put cleaning fluid in my head.

From then on the evenings were like battered cars—tired and waiting for the next day to start, watching the older ones ease themselves out of feeling like battered cars to be fresh tomorrow.

Then all our young faces got old, and the old faces got older or left. I stopped hearing the geese. We have all grown into new faces and now I go fishing in the mind that is soundproof and gun-dark to remember them.

There was a slave named Clyde, whose eyes were once bright like suns almost-risen over hills; that indirect way. A perpetual dawn.

Clyde used to say that Thomas was his brother and we all felt that way. Thomas was the one who said “Why” when we all thought “Okay” was enough. He never grinned. He loved Clyde and maybe nothing else. It was strange how it happened but that’s how it was.

Thomas would always get lazy on the job, finding ways to circumvent it. He often involved Clyde in his dodge attempts. When asked to pick apples from trees you’d see them distantly, throwing the apples back and forth, or squeezing them above their mouths to get the juice. Things like that. Once in the alligator fields they hid curled up inside the bone cage, and then sprang out, covered in crushed berries, to surprise us.

Of course they’d get punished. Clyde too, that wounded animal. I wonder if they said to each other after “But I’d do it again” or if it was something they just knew.

Then Thomas went too far. We were asked to kill chickens with hatchets and he wouldn’t even touch them. The master was there—the coops are right by where we lived and didn’t require much walking to. Thomas’ refusal almost seemed weak, but maybe it only seemed that way. “That chicken hasn’t done shit to me,” he said. “And I ain’t the one eatin’ it. You want chicken so bad why don’t you chop it yourself? Afraid to lose your appetite?”

The master struck him in the face. Thomas became utterly expressionless and turned his head back. They stared at each other, the master with a big grin and Thomas with nothing. “Kill the chicken, boy.”

“Not your fucking boy, old man. I’m a child of the planet and I belong to no one.”

The master hit him over and over again, getting him on his back so he’d spit up blood and teeth to his side and it’d stay there next to his mouth. “Think about it, boy! You belong to me!”

“Fuck you.”

I thought Thomas might die there, and thinking back, it would have been better.

But he lived. Long enough to be blacked-out by punches and woken up with cold water from the hose. We were all watching, dumbfounded and silent out of self-protection.

“Thomas,” the master said as the beaten man’s eyes shot open blinking. “You
belong to me
. I know exactly where you came from. I raped your fucking mother myself.”

The hatchet Thomas had refused to hold was lying by his side, and he grabbed it. That was his suicide-decision. It doesn’t matter whether he would have swung it or not, the holding it was the mistake. He got shot in the arm. His hand twitched and let go.

Then the master flipped him on his stomach and hit him in the back of his head with the pistol, so he’d black-out again. He was lifted by the arms in the mouths of the dogs; there was an imprint in red where his face was down on the ground. He was drooling through the holes made in his lips and one of us vomited. The master put a black sack over Thomas’ head, gave one quick glance to us, motioning to follow, then led with the dogs dragging Thomas between him and us.

We watched all of this too.