Free The Bones of Old Carlisle by Kevin E Meredith

Arrowroot across the jaw.
“Wrong answer, Arrowshit,” Pullmon said. “Go in tomorrow and tell
them you meant to put your name on the other list. You know, the list
of people who want gay sex.”
“Well,” Arrowroot protested, “I can’t do that, Lief. I’m not
gay.”
Arrowroot was ready for the slap this time, and it didn’t hurt
much. If that’s the worst Pullmon was going to do, he was ready to
stand here all day listening and getting slapped. Pullmon was actually
pretty funny, he admitted to himself.
“Wait, wait, not gay sex,” Pullmon said, and he turned to make
sure the others heard him clearly. “Hooker sex. You know, whore sex.
Like your momma –“
And that was that. Arrowroot was aiming for Pullmon’s jaw but
struck his nose, breaking it with a dull crack. Pullmon went down to
his knees, covering his face, as if he were praying, or asking
Arrowroot for absolution. Then he held his hands out to look at them.
They were covered in blood, and he started screaming, two octaves
higher than his insult voice. Arrowroot didn’t know if the screams
were a product of pain, fear of blood, or humiliation, but he hated
what he’d done, hated truth, hated everything. He’d only wanted to
silence Pullmon, not break something.
“I’m sorry, Lief,” Arrowroot said with complete sincerity. “But
you can’t say things like that about people’s mommas. You know?”
Arrowroot hadn’t set down his books during the confrontation, and
he turned with three of them stuffed under his arm and walked home.
Pullmon’s screams had turned to human words, a rhythmic “fuck, fuck,
fuck,” and while Arrowroot heard the other kids muttering to each
other, he guessed correctly that this was finished. No one was going
to follow him home or bother him again.
In his mind, he’d left Traxie years ago. The fact he slept there
every night was immaterial, and he’d just made that clear to everyone
else. You can say all kinds of things about Traxie people’s mommas, of
course, but not Karl Arrowroot’s momma, not about that.
Arrowroot won the election, made some new friends, took a vital
step toward becoming his adult self, and earned an anecdote he would
cite whenever his campaign hit a rough patch. “This ain’t nothing,”
he’d say. “I had to break a boy’s nose to win my first race.”
But for days after the fight, his tormented brain crystallized
what had happened down to this simple statement: “Everyone knows my
mother’s a prostitute.”
So when Arrowroot looked up, toward the veranda of the Eden Hotel
that late April afternoon, and saw the girl in the wedding dress
standing next to the closest thing Heligaux had to a madam, his
response was complex, visceral, and not entirely captured by the words
he muttered under his breath: “Well, goddam. Well, shit, goddam.”
He stood back and watched the world’s oldest business transaction
unfold 15 feet above his head. Delilah Homans, who had been arrested
under that name and several others over the years, seemed to be
introducing the girl in the wedding dress to her next client, a man
Arrowroot didn’t recognize.
“This is Mista Franklin,” Homans said in a heavy Bronx accent.
“You gonna take good care of him, ain’t you?”
“Yes?” the girl replied, and it sounded more like a question than
an answer. She was barely 20, Arrowroot noted, well-muscled, darkskinned and, overall, a picture of health and strength. No wonder
Journeyman had been smitten. How could she possibly have ended up
here?
“Good goil, good goil,” Homans murmured, smoothing a flowery moomoo over her expansive body. She was in her 50s, hair dyed bright red
and her face painted to within an inch of circus. “Frankie, whaddya
think? I got the best, don’t I?”
Mister Franklin grunted noncommittally, moving unsteadily toward
the girl, his arms out at waist level. She stood passively as he
embraced her, but when he kissed her she leaned back,