The Second Time Around by Steve W. Jenkins

Steven W. Jenkins is an artisan who handcrafts split bamboo fly rods by trade. When time allows he pens short stories and novels of horror and speculative fiction. His first novel, Cold Hunger, has been self-published. Details about the book can be found at www.coldhungerbook.info. Steven requests that those kind enough to read his stories forward a brief and honest critique of his work to rodmaker@sopris.net.

Dark as thick as balsam pitch hung around the 1990 Ford F-100 pickup. He could hardly see the fragile hands pinned to the steel bed of the cargo hold, but noticed that the left one was missing the tip of the middle finger. That didn't bother him as he ground his fat hips in and out between the writhing girl's thighs, looking into two desperate dark eyes above a mouth stuffed with his snotty handkerchief. When he finished, he kicked the girl over the open tailgate. She just lay there on the ground, sobbing in the blackness. He scrambled into the cab, started the truck and drove off into the warm Colorado night.

"Some job this turned out to be," Billy Wilier moaned, tugging at the collar of his over- stuffed flannel shirt. "First the rain and now we're stuck in this shit hole."

Wayne Fox stared across the table at his scowling partner. In the weak beam of the flashlight, Billy looked like a bloated statue of Buddha trying to pass a huge wedge of sharp Cheddar.

"Relax, Will," he said. "I know you'd rather be putting Kingsley in the ground than digging up one of his in-laws, but its good money. The rain will let up. We'll figure a way out of here in the morning, then roll back to town richer men."

"It's bullshit," Billy replied. "This place gives me the friggining creeps. Kingsley hires us to come up here and haul out a box of bones. Just so he can build himself another hotel for his wintertime skiers. This ain't our kind of work, Wayne. Besides, that box will be floating down the Cheyenne River before we can get it out of the ground."

You silly old fart, Wayne thought. Can't you even get a sentence out of your mouth without the "f" word being in it?

"It won't float anywhere," he said. "Who knows? Maybe we'll find some silver, or gold, buried under it."

Billy leaned back in the chair. Rickety legs threatened to buckle under his overbearing weight. "We do that and I'm out of here. I thumb my way to Vegas and find the prettiest friggining stack of woman and do her all night. Hell, you could have the business then."

The Ford cube van with "A COUPLE OF GUYS AND A TRUCK: WE'LL MOVE ANYTHING FOR A BUCK" stenciled on the side was a half-mile to the north, mired to its axles in mud. They called it "the business" since the cash they earned hauling pieces of discarded furniture and construction debris in it was their bread and butter.

Wayne bunched a mousy face. "Okay, Bill. You think we'd better bed down for the night?"

"Yeah," Billy groaned. "I can't wait to sleep in this flea-trap. I bet it ain't seen a soul since Old Bone's out there took the big bite." He grabbed the flashlight with a bulbous, lily-white hand. "I'm gonna go crap first."

Wayne nodded dumbly. He watched Billy waddle out through the rickety door, leaving him in darkness.

They nearly had the pine box at the base of Big Scraggly Mountain loose when the Colorado sky lay open with a wicked thunderstorm earlier in the evening. Billy and Wayne retired their shovels and sloshed back to the truck. When the storm didn't break, they played Ro-Sham-Bo. Billy won with a flat hand over Wayne's clenched fist and insisted they drive the seventeen miles back to Badger. Halfway across the soggy meadow the van sank, leaving them to hike the miserable distance back to the one room shanty.

The body they were hired to exhume was that of the Kingley's sister-in-law. Angel died in January of 1998. She was mending fence on the north edge of the pasture, when Big Scraggly let loose an avalanche that buried her twenty feet deep in snow. She wasn't found until six months later when the July sun melted her icy tomb.

Alone in the gloomy shack, Wayne thought about how cold and flat she must have been.

Billy waved the flashlight aimlessly around the coffin-sized space; his wet Levis bunched around muddy, Bass work boots. Rain pelted the tin roof of the forsaken outhouse like birdshot fired from a twelve-gauge.

"God damn, Kingsley," he mumbled under the clatter. "Thinks he owns this valley. Why don't he come out here himself and dig up his dead?"

Billy searched for some paper to wipe with. There was none. He reluctantly retrieved the soiled hanky stuffed in the pocket of a red flannel shirt and used it. About the time he'd wrestled back into his jeans and stood the flashlight died.

"Shit," he cursed the dark and tried to push the door open. It wouldn't budge. Billy leaned back and then bullied it with a fleshy shoulder. The rectangle of wooden slats creaked, but didn't move.

"Come on, Wayne!" he hollered. "Enough of these kid jokes! Let me out of here!"

Lighting was all that answered. Billy recoiled from the blinding shards of light that flashed through the dilapidated structure's seams and then thrust his bulk headlong toward the door again. "Move your skinny ass away from the door, Wayne!"

He tried a third time. Flesh to stone; the impact stunned him. The unyielding panel of wood might just as well have been chiseled from the rocky earth that the privy was perched on-a solid enclosure cinching him in a tomb as dark and cold as space. In the minutes that followed Billy continued to bash the suffocating door, his angry demands slowly turning to howls of terror.

By the time Wayne heard the wailing and made his way to the closed privy, Billy was inside bawling like a kindergartner on his first day of school. Wayne opened the door. Billy spilled out into the night; his arms waving like a frantic bird beating its wings. He lunged for Wayne.

"What do you think you was doing holding the door closed on me like that?"

Wayne backed away. "Whoa, buddy! I just opened it for you, being since I just got here."

Billy stopped short. "Bullshit, Wayne! You were out here friggining holding that door closed on me."

Wayne lifted wiry arms. "Right, Will! I was holding the door closed on your fat ass with these!"

Billy stared down at him. With a soaked, white, tee shirt clinging to his puny form, Wayne looked like a five-foot, drowned mouse. Billy's face went two shades past pale.

"What the fuck was it then?" He asked.

Jaw wagging below a dumb gape, Wayne stepped to the narrow door and examined both sides. There wasn't any sort of latch. It swung loosely back and forth like a limp dishrag. "I don't know, Will. Maybe it was the wind or something."

Silent, they walked back through the mucky lake of mud that separated the outhouse from the dark hovel.

It was a good while until Billy thought he'd fallen asleep. Stretched on a threadbare mattress that leaked dirty, brown feathers and smelled of urine, he lost Wayne's rattled snore in the sound of a new wind blowing around the shanty.

The air inside went bitter.

The slow, metal click of a zipper undoing came after the pop of a snap released. Delicate fingers brushed the frayed, elastic band, printed with HANES and slipped between Billy's jeans and shorts.

"That's good," he mumbled, trying to find a face in the blackness. "Keep on going and you'll find it."

An alluring tone replied, "I hope so, Billy. It's been too many years. You know what they say about the second time around."

"What's you meaning 'bout the second..."

The kiss that interrupted him was irresistible. Billy immediately forced his thick tongue to the back of woman's throat. It touched very cold there, sticking like he'd licked the bottom of a metal tray of ice cubes. He couldn't pull away. When the woman started to rise and he had to follow.

"What the hell is happening here, " he whined.

Walking backward, she led him toward the door, his flabby arms flailing like they had earlier when he spilled out of the privy.

Wayne's rattled snore returned to Billy then, interrupted by the sound of the door closing behind him.

Locked nose-to-nose with the woman, Billy stumbled along as she dragged him through the muck. She stopped in front of the privy. The dark eyes he was forced to stare into were somehow familiar in the dim light of the July moon. He watched dumbly as they began to change. Thick black lashes curled into singed, ashen wisps that fell out and floated earthward. Soft mahogany lids peeled back, revealing salt-hued rims that housed wrinkled orbs the color of raw squid. The opaque balls spun crazily for a moment, then popped with the sound a plum makes under a slow rolling Goodyear. Billy pinched his own "baby blues" closed and emitted another, tongue-tied whimper. When he blinked them open, he was staring into the empty, dry sockets of Angel Kingsley. The woman-thing clenched her bony jaw, severing his tongue with jagged nubs of decayed enamel. He collapsed back into the outhouse, choking on the gushing, scarlet flood raging down his throat.

Fat Billy Wilier could only stare at the spindly, chalk-form before him. Busy gnawing the ragged flap of flesh, it reached down and shoved his heavy boots inside with a skeletal hand missing the tip of the bone of its left middle finger. The scolding hiss of an enraged soul blew from its mouth in a frosty haze. "You won't be doing much screwing anymore, will you, Billy Wilier?

The awful thing kicked the privy closed and sat, bracing itself against the door as it had earlier. It laughed on the wooden sill in grinding dirge waiting for Billy Wilier to bleed to death inside.

The rickety door to the outhouse suddenly burst open in an explosion of jagged shards of gray timber, forcing the decayed specter of Angel Kingsley from the sill onto the mucky earth before it. Billy Wilier spilled out, his rotund body dancing a depraved jig. His face was that of an insane Cabbage Patch doll, spewing a viscous spatter of blood as he tried to speak. The words came in a nearly indiscernible muddle of syllables. " Ya dink ya won, bish. Tae this."

Dying, Billy lurched toward Angel's remains and gathered them in his heavy arms He took the bundle of bones and stuffed it through the oval hole carved in the privy's wooden seat. His last words escaped with a flood of frothy crimson. "Tha be a hanky down tha fo ou too."