The Shit

They called him The Shit. They said it smelled like he needed to take one. There wasn’t much he could do about it back then. His mother refused to buy him Axe body spray, and the water was always being shut off.

Some people still refer to him as The Shit. They don’t use it like they did in elementary or high school. Now, it’s just what they know him as, like an emcee, or some self-mythologizing gangster.

When Rob Little called him The Shit, he meant it to be derogatory. But that was the way Rob spoke to everyone. He was the star of Muskogee. Not that he had any real talent, just that most of the women found him captivating.

Rob preferred women that were already involved in relationships. They didn’t even have to be especially attractive. Like Angela, with her limp blond hair, and thick ankles. She was with Gary, who drove a truck and was on the road two weeks out of every month.

The Shit had been looking for Rob. Many people had. The IRS, underage girls, men with ruined marriages, kids that didn’t know their father. Of all the many people and agencies looking for Rob he had been least fearful of the small boy he used to go to high school with that everyone made fun of. Yes, Rob took money from him, but all he ever did was take from people.

In class once the music teacher, Mr. Boner told The Shit in front of the class that he had fingers perfect for the piano but lacked the mental capacity to play. His hands became one more thing to be self-conscious about. He took to wearing leather work gloves even in the summer.

Occasionally, The Shit still put on gloves, but with thermoplastic impact protection. He has them on when he walks into Gary’s rented room; Angela on the couch, a hand wiping at her mouth, and Rob Little zipping up his pants.

Rob smirked at his old classmate. The Shit swung his hand like a tennis racket. The smirk Rob held vanished in the pool of blood he cupped in his hands, his mouth like a menstruating vagina.

Angela stayed on the couch as if passively watching something on television. She seemed unafraid, uninterested. He hit her as well.

Gary hated the drive to Houston. He felt drunk on caffeinated sugar. Pressurized bubbles played hopscotch in his stomach. It was the way he always felt coming back home.

Eight on Saturday night and he pulls into the lot of the motel room he rented behind the only gentleman’s club in Muskogee. He burst into the club a few minutes after arriving. He watched a sickly woman gyrate on stage. He looked at his own reflection in the mirrored wall behind her as he called out for someone to alert the authorities.

Women stand in the street in clear heels weeping. The police form a barricade. They look at the women and say crude things out the sides of their faces. Gary tries to overhear what the ones in charge are saying. He hears a familiar name mentioned.

When the story comes out, it is all about Rob. They embellish his accomplishments in athletics, manufacturing an injury for a lack of college scholarship. It’s as if the commercial he appeared in for a local chicken restaurant was some type of career. They didn’t even mention Angela.

The woman from the office tells Gary he needs to find new lodgings. People mill about outside and watch him through the window. He tries to draw the curtains, and the rod comes down.

Thinking about Angela, he remembers her giggling on the phone at night. He told her that Rob had fifteen other girls giggling on the phone at night. “I consider that quite impressive,” was her response.

Gary carried a couple half full boxes to the truck. He thought about the name he had heard the officer’s mention.

One morning in high school Gary had gone in early. In the locker room he found he was not the only one to get there before the sun. The boy they called The Shit stood in front of Rob Little’s locker using Rob’s shoulder pads like a commode. The sound was like a dog left inside all day. Gary always wished he had the type of boldness that boy exhibited that day.

It takes only a few minutes to fit all his belongings in the truck. He leaves all Angela’s things.

He could have gone a hundred miles, gotten a room in some other drowning little town, but he doesn’t. He heads down a drive that he had only been down once before. There is debris in the overgrowth, and various rusted items propped up like street signs. The two-story house at the end of the drive looks covered in soot.

It was a Friday night some years back, when he had been to the house before. Two other unpopular boys like himself overjoyed to be in a football player’s car. They were to be pawns, front line grunts. They toted along a package of toilet paper and cartons of spoiled eggs. They never even made it out of the car as a hard-looking woman emerged from the house with a shotgun and tried to blow out the rear window with birdshot. The football player tried to get them to pay for the damage.

The Shit pretended not to recognize Gary as he stepped outside. An uncomfortable heat emanated from behind him in the house. Gary studied the face of his one-time classmate. He recalled the various rumors, illicit drug manufacturing, illegal weapons. He still looked like the same dirty little boy to Gary.

“What is this then?” The Shit asks, stepping aside offering entrance. Gary wants to instantly flee. Whatever feeling had pressured him there was gone. Stepping inside he sees expensive looking items stashed in corners and laid out on a big wooden table missing a leg.

“Was it the two of them together? Is that the worst of it? I mean he was an attractive man, and she had her qualities.” The Shit paused. Someone else was in the room as well and chuckled from the shadows.

“You know, we as a species consume a vast amount of pornography. So, it’s safe to assume that we all enjoy watching people have sex. Maybe you should have tried that. Might have worked out better for all involved.”

“No, that wasn’t it. Honestly, I don’t even care. She knew she could do what she wanted,” Gary says. It feels strange to hear himself speak truthful words to a person he barely even knows. “It’s that I was nothing to her.”

Gary rents a room in the basement of a home owned by an eighty-six-year-old woman. It is close to the club, so when he is not on a run he can wander over in the night and stare at the lights of the motel behind it. He drunkenly walks in front of the cars of customers cursing that name they are all familiar with.

He doesn’t miss Angela. He feels nothing for Rob. He is just lonely.

Three weeks removed he stands on the sidewalk with the remnants of a twelve-pack swinging from the cardboard box. Lights sweep over him. He drops the open can in case it is the cops. It isn’t. It’s a man, a stranger, asking him to get in the car, which he does obediently.

The dirt road looks more ominous in the full dark. The Shit sits in a frayed lawn chair. He wears boxer shorts and a torn green sweatshirt. Gary falls onto the ground beside him, feigning the inebriation he desperately wants to feel. The Shit tells him they are celebrating. They share pills and tequila. There is a fire in the yard just a few paces from them. The man that drove Gary melts cheese on tortillas over the flame. Another man crouched beside him spits from a clear bottle into the fire and it leaps up like an excited dog. There are women there as well, dark rings under their eyes, limbs the size of cracks in a windshield.

The Shit touches him gently. Gary’s head is heavy and warm.

“So, you really don’t care?”

“No.” Gary says. Not that he knows what he is being questioned about, but then again, he does.

“You don’t care that your girl got snuffed? You just wanted her to think better of you? That is kind of pathetic, isn’t it?”

“No.” Gary says, because he can’t think of another word.

No, that was not the way it was. He should have made them stop. He should have told Rob about the piss in the locker room, and about Angela and how it all made him feel so fucking small. He should have done anything other than come here.

“You are shit.” Gary slurs.

“There it is.” The Shit says looking pleased with himself.

The man with the bottle crawls toward them like a spider. He spits clear liquid into Gary’s face. He spits and coughs as The Shit stands walking over to the fire like a gentleman, a slim stick in his hand. He touches one end of the wood to the fire and holds it like a torch as he walks back over to Gary.

They find the charred remains in the street by the club the next morning.

“That’s the last one then?” the man asks.

“Not sure, have to go look at the goddamn yearbook.”

When it is over he will go by another name.

MIKA NADOLSKY’S short fiction has appeared in Suburbia Journal, Quartz Literary, Half and One, and Free Spirit.

Get new stories, sports musings, or book reviews sent to your inbox. Drop your email below to start >>>

NEW book release AWRY by duncan b. barlow. Order the book of stories of which Brian Evenson calls “meticulous and precise, painful and surprising.”