Free Wink by Eric Trant Page A

imagine.
    God gives you no reprieve. He allowed His son to be mutilated and killed, and so great is God’s love that He gave His only son so that you may be saved. Your son died for no great purpose. He died for no reason at all and yet you are charged to bear God’s deepest grief.
    You are not God. No one worships your dead son and let’s not forget God didn’t handle the grieving all that well Himself. After three days, He couldn’t take it anymore and He raised His son back to life.
    One afternoon you’re in the kitchen cutting onions to garnish a pot roast. You’re in a high mood because you’re high, just a touch of the white stuff this afternoon, just enough to get you through the rest of the day because you were up all night with your husband having slow sex on the couch and the bedroom. He loads his manhood with chemicals from a blue pill that keeps it hard for hours, hard as an aluminum bat.
    Your husband is gone the next morning and that is all right. He is a tomcat and tomcats need to prowl, and you are not a prissy piss-pot who is going to micromanage his life. He leaves money for you on the kitchen table beside a cigar box full of pills and other necessities, not the least of which is a pinch of the white stuff, enough to get you through the day and if you ration it, enough to get you through the week or two he is away doing his tomcat things.
    A pot roast is in the oven. It is summer and the house is hot, and you have the window open because when you started the roast, last week’s drippings smoked and blew a metallic-gray cloud out into the kitchen.
    As you cut you hear a crack and a thump. The crack is a gunshot, one you know well because you have shot the gun a hundred times. “You need to learn to shoot, baby, I got bad people in my circles,” your husband tells you.
    You feel the thump rise up from the floorboards of the house, through the soles of your feet, up the back of your legs and into your spine. Still gripping the knife and with electric steps you run into the dining area.
    Your youngest son, the mistake, the goddamned stupid mistake from one night of careless sex that wasn’t even that great is sitting in a chair on his knees, holding the .38 pistol your husband calls Mad Annie because it is a woman’s gun with a woman’s one-pound pull on the trigger. The smoke from the shot lingers around the mistake like a gray, smoldering halo.
    On the floor beneath the mistake is your oldest son. He is eighteen. He is beautiful. He is a god in a god’s body. He rests on the floor beside the chair the way a puppet might fall if you cut his strings and let him drop, arms flayed with his chest on his knees.
    “I didn’t mean it,” your mistake says.
    There are no preparatory classes for how you react in that moment. With one gentle pull of the finger a hammer falls. It slams into a firing pin which jabs the primer and ignites a touch of gunpowder. The exploding gas launches a small piece of lead into your older son’s head and lobotomizes him as surely as any doctor’s knife ever did.
    You don’t hover over your oldest son lying prone on the floor. He is dead and you know it because you have seen enough dead things to know one from the other. You chase the mistake out of the house, screaming after him, waving the knife in front of you as if you can cut through time and space and distance and trade one son for the other, if you can only catch the little shit.

Chapter 12   Peaches
    The sun rose out of Beaumont and began its descent onto Houston.
    Marty moved the toddler chair to the west side attic window and kept carving on the piece of Bois D’Arc wood. He alternated between the rough grit sandpaper, the smooth grit, and the Old Timer carving blade. He decided after he smoothed it and formed the finger grips that he should carve something into the handle.
    His first thought was a snake. He could make Jim Bowie his snake-hunting knife, but then he decided that even though the blade was