“Shrikes“
I.
My mother was already an emotionally broken woman in 1976 when we moved from Missouri to a small town in Nebraska. The entire country was in the throes of the bicentennial that summer. I should explain we moved a lot back then and I only lived there for a summer. The point is, she had just turned twenty-seven and she thought her youth was gone, which sounds funny to my ear now that I’m a man in my fifties. She had me when she was a teenager so I remember her what was going on then. A tiny thing at 5’2″ and all of one-hundred and ten pounds. She was a tragic figure in my eyes. All I wanted was to be with her, near her, and love her. I wanted desperately to be loved back, and while she did love me it was always complicated in a way a child could never completely begin to understand.
A year earlier she had left me with relatives in Kingdom County Missouri, not far from Fairmont, a place famously known to have seceded from both the North and South during the Civil War. They even had their own flag and set it out during civil ceremonies on the square and at the cemetery. She had only recently come back for me and I was over the moon about it. The catch was we would be moving to Nebraska to live with Eddie Harrison or husband number two as I would later think of him. I respected him for one thing, and one thing only—he had never pretended to be my new daddy. In fact, he wanted no part of that because he already had three kids with his first wife back in Missouri. He didn’t want me around either and though my mother went along with his wishes and left me in Missouri, I always liked to imagine that the guilt ate her up inside with something like regret.
“Let it just be the two of us for a while,” Eddie said one night when they thought I was asleep. “He can stay with your Aunt Margie. We can always come back and get him in the fall.”
I couldn’t hear what my mother said in reply but a couple of weeks later we visited Aunt Margie without any great fanfare. While I was petting the dogs out in back of the little green house with shake shingles, Mom and Eddie slipped away without even a goodbye to me. A junky blue suitcase, held shut by a length of grimy nylon rope, with my clothes in it was left on the porch. She was in such a hurry she forgot to pack any of my toys. She left like a thief in the night as the TV preacher Aunt Margie listened to said.
Eddie was a lineman by trade. He showed me the spikes he attached to his work boots that helped him climb telephone poles. He climbed up and down the pole as nimble as a gray squirrel. A week later, I was told Eddie and my mother moved out west, so he could make the “big bucks” as he put it. The electric cooperative he worked for paid more by the hour due to hazard pay for working on steel telephone poles on the Nebraska plains. The steel poles conducted electricity and he once told me a gruesome story about a guy his age who was electrocuted on the job. The danger didn’t bother Eddie in the least, nor did working high up in a bucket. It was something he relished. He took me up in the white bucket once and by the time the crew had us 45-feet in the air I was sniveling in terror down in the bottom for fear of heights. He looked down at me from under his white hard hat with a mixture of amazement and disgust. My hard hat was suddenly heavy with shame. It felt like a brick on my head. To add insult to injury, he made the bucket swing with the force of his weight to hear me cry louder.
“What are you, kid?” He asked. He had almost black hair and a dark reddish complexion to his skin. “—a little girl? I ought to eighty-six you out of this thing? How would you like that?”
“I’m scared,” I cried.
“Christ,” he sneered under his breath. He called down to the operator, “Okay, take her down! He’s too scared!”
“He won’t make a lineman,” the voice said.
“What a little pussy!” Eddie turned away from me and spat over the side of the bucket.
My mother’s voice drifted up from below, “You should be ashamed, Eddie. Let him down. He’s afraid. He’s just a little boy.” I imagined her looking up at us with one hand shading her eyes and the other planted on her hip.
“He’s just a little boy,” he copycatted and made a face with down-turned lips. “He has to learn sometime, Patsy. He’ll be a pansy if you don’t stop spoiling him.”
He looked at something down on the ground and spat over the side. I will never know why he was so disgusted, but then I was afraid of everything. My fear incited something in himself he didn’t like. Back in those days, expressing feelings of uncertainty meant you weren’t a real boy. You were expected to do everything without fear. Shake hands with grown men. Dive into the pool head first. Handle snakes. Get filthy. Pull girl’s hair. Fistfight other boys your age if provoked. Carry a pocketknife. Shoot a deer rifle. Cadge an occasional cigarette or beer. Sneak looks at your old man’s nudie magazines. Even if you got into trouble for some of those things, that was what real boys did and getting into mischief was to be expected according to men like Eddie. He referred to himself as a real man because he had done all of those things and more when he was coming up.
“You got to be tough in this old world, son.” Understand, he wasn’t calling me his son. The word was used in the diminutive. I was a boy. I might never become a man if I didn’t take heed.
They tried to make it up to me by taking me downtown where we watched the 4th of July fireworks. The stage near the courthouse, on the square, was decorated with patriotic red, white, and blue bunting, had a band that played The Star Bangled Banner. People had been saying all day that we lived in the greatest country in the world. Most of us kids believed it was true. The fireworks erupted into the sky and recalled ancient canon-fire, the proof-giving bombs bursting in air, from the virulent battles of 1776. We had even more reason to celebrate then since Vietnam had ended but it was still on everyone’s mind. One war was about fighting for capital F Freedom and the more recent one about something impossible to square with such an abstract ideal. But I understood very little of all that at the time. Everyone was excited and that was enough for me.
I remember running that day with all the joy of childhood in a fallow cornfield, broken stalks crunching under my tennis shoes, after a small firework had been set off and chasing down a green Army paratrooper in my outstretched hands. Other boys were doing the same simultaneously, and we knew we were Americans in that moment.
What made my mother a broken woman? What broke her you might wonder? Not any one thing. Her mother had died in childbirth when she was a young girl. She and her siblings had been sent to live with their grandparents after she died. They lived in a country farmhouse without indoor plumbing. They had to heat water in the tub just to take a bath. They even had to use an outhouse to take a shit. Her grandpa used a block of ice he bought each week to put in the icebox to keep food cool. This was a step up from the shack she had grown up in where her daddy had cut a hole in the big room where the woodstove was, to park his vehicle so it would start in the mornings. The way Mom described it, the house itself was little more than a converted chicken coop with daylight visible between the boards. She had happy memories of living on the farm, though they didn’t farm anything except for a vegetable garden. They had horses, a couple of mules, some Herefords, pigs, and chickens. Her grandpa had been a tenant farmer when he was younger and continued to use Missouri mules long after tractors made their appearance around the county as he simply didn’t have the money to buy one. The old man refused to put one on credit for fear of the financial hole it would have put him in. My most vivid memory of him was as an old man, nearly 80, with a wicked sense of humor who was always forbidding me with a glint in his eye and a smile on his lips to eat his bananas. He needn’t of worried since I only had eyes for my great grandma’s sugar cookies. Anytime he walked by my great grandma, he would pinch her butt and give me a wink.
“Oh Pap!” She’d holler at him. “Not in front of the boy!” She was as bowlegged as she could be. She had been in that painful condition since the 1950s according to the old black and white photos I found in her album. When I stayed the night she would get out a bucket to soak her feet in and massage her legs with rubbing alcohol. I even found a couple of old bread rationing coupons tucked away in the pages of the album from the second world war.
Mama’s daddy, my grandfather, was a guard at the Missouri State Pen in Jeff City where he died suddenly on the job of a heart attack when I was a young boy. A couple of years after his wife died in the mid-1950s, he remarried a young widower, Helen Dupre, who was terribly nasty to her husband’s kids. An especially cruel woman as anyone who knows her would attest including her own natural children. She despised my mother in particular because she was the spitting image of her own dead mama. Helen had known my grandmother and was bitter about it, perhaps she felt second-best in his affections. I remember my great grandma saying my grandpa had been what they called a “blue baby” when he was born. She bundled him up and held him close to the woodstove. Years later I discovered that he had had a congenital heart valve problem that would have been easily corrected at birth these days. She loved her daddy like no other and after he died she got a case of the high lonesomes even surrounded by siblings and the rest of the family. Like any death in the family, it is tragic because a sudden death seems to be done to you personally, by an unseen hand, even though everyone assures you that there is a reason for everything. More recently, I find this explanation wanting in both imagination and accuracy.
Perhaps the troupe of men acrobating through her life caused those tragic features to take up permanent residence as dark circles and crow’s feet creating a mournful pout. Maybe these forlorn expressions were what had attracted these men to her in the first place. Men who had their own tragic memories of depressed mothers they wished to have saved and caused them to think they could still save their own mothers and their own unhappy childhoods by saving my mother before disappearing into a mist of non-remembrance after they had realized they couldn’t save her any more than they could save themselves. Their abandonment of her and me, a symptom; ultimately a failure of ego and self-respect. Most of them had already failed in love before her.
II.
It was a night that Eddie came home later than usual. He had been out drinking, his favorite pasttime, and he smelled of Pabst Blue Ribbon. PBR was like an aftershave on him. It was his chosen elixir to achieve an altered state of consciousness. He had went directly to the bathroom as soon as he hit the door and vomited beer and chili mostly into the sink and toilet. It was a godawful smell I will never forget and a far cry from the ecstasy he sought in drink. After he passed out on the bathroom floor for a while, he woke up and started staggering around the house. It was a clinic in what it meant to walk in post holes. He was also a mean drunk. I heard the two of them arguing in the living room. The sound of a lamp being knocked over jolted me from bed.
I remember getting out of bed in my red feetie pajamas, and stood in the doorway rubbing my eyes. I had seen Eddie smack her face with the palm of his hand very firmly. He had slammed her against the paneling where he towered over her. I didn’t know what they were fighting over then or now, but between men and women it is usually infidelity or money problems. In this case, it was likely plain drunkenness. Now they were both staring at me like I was some sort of referee who might give them instructions like returning to neutral corners.
“Just do what your mother said!” Eddie hollered. “Get your little sissy ass outside now or you will be next!”
“It’s okay, honey,” my mother said over his shoulder. “Mom’s okay. Why don’t you just go outside for now. It’s warm and there’s a full moon.”
“It’s nighttime . . .” I protested weakly. “It’s dark.”
“I’ll come get you later,” Mom said.
“Okay,” I sobbed.
I went outside and walked down the cement blocks we had for steps. A thudding sound followed by a crash as soon as I shut the door. Much to my surprise the moon illuminated the yard and the golf course just on the other side of the fence. The air was very warm despite the late hour. I could see a couple of errant golf balls, which I collected for fun since it was a regular occurrence to find them in the backyard. I had even found three wondrous blue robin’s eggs in a nest on the ground a week earlier. It was hard to believe the eggs were so blue, like Easter eggs. An orchestral night of frogs and insect sounds followed me like eyes as I shuffled down the lane.
The gravel road looked yellow in the moonlight. The face of the man on the moon was scowling down at me. The sound of Eddie and my mother arguing receded as I walked down the curving road to a copse of rorshach thorn trees. I looked closely at one of the thorns and touched it with my fingertip since I had never seen trees like this before. A sharp pain and a dark bloom of blood appeared at the site of the prick. I squeezed my fingertip, then stuck it in my mouth and sucked at it until I came to the next thorn tree and found a small bird. It might have been a chickadee but difficult to tell in the darkness even with the moon, impaled on a thorn next to other unfortunates.
When Eddie wasn’t flat out drunk, which wasn’t often, he could be decent. Life had made him so miserable, he could not confront it sober. He had recently told me about a pair of shrikes, bellicose little butcher birds, he spied on from the kitchen table with binoculars. He handed them to me and I watched them for myself. They looked so close now as he adjusted them with the roller I felt I could reach out and grab one from the air. The shrikes impaled smaller birds, lizards, and insects in the thorn trees. I hadn’t thought about it much at the time, but here was the evidence. The birds were small but cruel to my little boy’s mind. Eddie took the binoculars back and smiled so grimly that my hands began to tremble. I remembered him hitting Mom at night when he would get drunk on Saturday nights. It made me want to see him impaled on a thorn tree.
The Milky Way went on and on the more intensely I stared up into it. My mind churned with the entropy and chaos beyond the sphere. The sadness of the world enveloped me in that moment as a boy. I remember wishing time would pass and that I could suddenly be an adult, a man, and put things right. I could fight him. I would make him scared of me if only I were older. But then a misting rain began to fall and the stars were crowded by clouds. Later, when the moon peeked out again, I saw Eddie’s face glowering down on the world until the dark clouds gathered again.
III.
Four years later, there was another summer when I had watched falling stars with my mother and a handsome younger man named Sterling Forrester who looked like a movie star in his nice clothes and European car. She had divorced Eddie by then. She said Sterling was a graduate student at the University of Missouri. I wasn’t sure what that was, but it sounded important. He was working on his PhD in Psychology. This was the first real intellectual I had ever met besides your run-of-the-mill armchair philosophers that were a dime a dozen in central Missouri.
Sterling’s features, along with his more refined speech, and even his languid movements were from a different stratosphere. My history teacher, Mrs. Hatcher, had taught us about India’s caste system. It sounded unfair, but it was part of their religion. It was clear that Sterling Forrester was from a higher caste than us. Even mom knew it as she gazed at him longingly in anticipation of that day she would lose him to his profession or another worthier, more beautiful woman as he sat at the picnic table blowing up one of those cheap rubber rafts while the wind riffled his hair.
For all of his good qualities, even Mom knew she wouldn’t be able to keep him for long. He would either “trade her in” as he had heard his mom say to Aunt Margie while she painted her fingernails at the green formica table in the kitchen. She held her palm down on the table with her fingers splayed out like a deck of playing cards. She had very nice fingernails, other women always commented on them.
Sterling had driven us out to one of the old clay pits at Finger Lakes in his BMW. We came from a Nova and GTO family, or plain old junkers. We found a picnic table in the shade of pine and scrub trees populating the area. It wasn’t your regular park, it was mostly popular with dirt bikers. In fact, we could hear them not that far away balancing their bikes on the narrow trails or flying over dirt mound jumps like the races on television.
I played in the water on the raft until Sterling had rubbed enough Hawaiian Tropic coconut oil on mom for her to ask for it back. On the orange raft, she spun slowly away from the shore. The water looked green near the irregular-shaped shoreline, and in the middle it was a deep blue. Sterling and I ate the grilled burgers he had made and Backer’s potato chips over paper plates. He drank white wine and hummed an Italian opera as he looked out over the lake. People were playing rock music from their car radios on batt. Every so often you could hear Black Cat fireworks being set off that families had bought from the roadside FIREWORKS tents even though the 4th of July celebration had ended a week earlier. There were fountains, sparklers, rockets, and firecrackers even though it wasn’t dark yet. People were just trying to use up leftovers. Sterling even lit a couple of Black Snakes on a big flat rock.
“Your mom is a great lady,” Sterling said, wiping his mouth with a white napkin. There was something about the languid way he did it that was aristocratic. I turned away from him with my own napkin and imitated his gesture. “You know?” A zipping sound followed by the clap of a bottle rocket seemed to punctuate his words.
“I know that already.”
I thought he would say more, but he seemed lost in his thoughts. I knew mom liked him a lot, but he seemed kind of boring. He treated her well, but he didn’t do much of anything. I wondered what he did for a living. Mom said he was a full-time student.
“What does that pay?” I had asked her innocently.
“Don’t get smart.”
After we ate, he smoked a cigarette with tan paper instead of white. It was European he said, and very hard to get in Missouri. It smelled much heavier than a regular cigarette. Everyone I knew smoked back then just about unless they were religious or sick. He had moved here from San Diego and told us about riding the streetcars downtown and taking the Silver Strand to the pristine beaches on Coronado Island.
When we drove back into town there was noticeable tension between Mom and Sterling. He turned on the radio, 98 KFMZ, and Led Zeppelin was wailing, but she leaned over and snapped it off immediately. He glanced at her and his face held the expression of a little boy who had just been chastised for a reason he didn’t fully comprehend. Suddenly, Mom looked much older than him. Still, she looked more like his older sister than a girlfriend. Men often liked to ask me, “Is this your older sister?”
“Would you look at that!?” Mom pointed up in the sky. I had to lean forward so that my head was between them in the front seat, then duck my head down to see between them in order to see it. The balloon was low enough you could see three people in the basket and hear them talking. The sound of a rocket ship blasting off and a huge flame appeared to fill the balloon as it ascended into the blue afternoon sky.
“Very cool,” I said.
“Would you like to ride in one of those?” Sterling asked. “Because I could make that happen?”
Without giving it much thought I said, “Can we, Mom?”
“You can? How’s that?” She asked him.
“They’re giving rides at the fairgrounds for a few bucks. The balloon stays tethered to the ground and they take you up in the air, and you can look around.”
“Hmmm,” she said uncertainly.
“Can we Mom!? I bet the people look like ants.” I took a drink from a can of Mountain Dew and swished the soda around in my mouth to savor the sweetness.
“I thought you were afraid of heights?”
I swallowed my soda pop in one big gulp, “I’m not that afraid.”
“I’ll pay!” Sterling looked at me in the rearview mirror so he wouldn’t have to turn around.
“We’ll see,” she said.
“That means no,” I said. I leaned back into the backseat and crossed my slender arms against my chest.
Now I could see a half-dozen more balloons in the air coming from the direction of the big city park. It looked like they were magically going to sail into the sun itself. Wouldn’t it be nice to sail to another world, where hopefully things were easier?
“There’s more balloons over there!” I pointed excitedly. Sterling pulled into a little drive a farmer used to enter his fields and watched the multicolored balloons drift away from the problems of earth. Something inside me ascended above the horizon along with them. Mom lit a Viceroy using the car’s lighter and then after she lit it with the orange coil bobbing in the fading light and applied to the tip of the cigarette scooted closer to Sterling and laid her head on his shoulder. A length of her long brown hair was flipped over the seat and it still smelled of Prell shampoo. He threw his arm across her shoulders and pulled her into him. He had told me he didn’t smoke, but they took turns smoking her cigarette. He was tall and tan, and she was so small, he made her look like a smoking child with a negligent father. They were suddenly content to be a couple again.
Sterling murmured something to Mom. “Are we ready to go? Have we had enough, Patsy?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s motorvate over the hill.” I put my hand forward like a karate chop between them.
Mom put her hand on his thigh and sat up slowly into her seat. He looked at me funny, and then laughed easily. He shook his head, but with more amusement than disapproval. He leaned over to her and murmured something in her ear. Then he kissed her on the mouth. It made a loud smacking sound.
“Gross,” I said.
Mom pushed him back to his side of the car with an open-mouthed smile at whatever he had said. Grown-up stuff. Her eyes smiled and suddenly everything between them was okay again for now. He turned his head toward her and smiled back, but when she looked away he was still smiling with his eyes but there was now something joyless and condescending in his gaze. He put his arm across the seat and began to look out the rear window to back out onto the road, but he looked at me with a firm expression around his mouth and eyes. He knew I had seen that blank gaze of his but he had to guess at what I might know.
Daren Dean’s latest novel, Shelter Me, is forthcoming from the University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press in Fall 2025. In addition, a new story collection, The New Salvation, will also drop with Cowboy Jamboree Press in Spring 2025. He and his work have been featured in Bloom, Blue Bob Anthology, Bull magazine, HuffPost, Louisiana Literature, Maryland Literary Review, Ploughshares, and many others. The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War, was nominated for the Pen/Faulkner, the W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction, Midlands Author Award, and shortlisted for the Missouri Authors Award. His last novel Roads was a featured review in the spring of 2023 in Kirkus Reviews. The Independent Fiction Alliance recently selected Roads as one of the Top 25 indie books of 2023.
REVOLUTION JOHN. 