[Florence Jellem]

FLO'S STORY CONTINUES...

They drank in silence for a time. Dennis's friends had congregated around a video game in the rear of the bar. They were all drunk on cheap beer and champagne, and were slapping buttons and thumping joysticks, heehawing and guffawing like the buffoons that they obviously were. The priest had slipped out of the bar with the boy in tow, headed God knows where -- perhaps to the confessional booth. Dee Dee glanced out the window behind her. It was already dark, and the short January days depressed her. She saw the snow whirling down, illumined by flashing neon signs from nearby storefronts. There was a junkyard across the street, and, next to it, a Walmart Superstore -- where, she knew, the zombified employees who had been indoctrinated since birth to adore Jesus and vote for Republicans and who toiled for sub-minimum wages were chattering away like wind-up toys: "How may I help you? How may I help you? How may I help you?"

"God," Dee Dee said, finishing her rum and Coke. Banging down the glass, she gave Ian the high sign for another.

"What's wrong?" Dennis asked.

"The question isn't, 'what's wrong.' The question is, 'what's right?' I don't even …." Her voice trailed off, and she nodded resignedly at the window and the big-box suburban wasteland beyond.

"I don't think I even know what state I'm in anymore, except for a state of confusion. I mean, I live in a town called Freethought-Forumistan. How crazy is that? Where are we? Is this … I don't know … Mississippi? Louisiana? Southern Ohio?

"Southern Ohio? Don't talk nonsense."

"Yeah, southern Ohio … somewhere in that nightmarish stretch along the Ohio River between Stuebenville and Cincinnati … some place like that, some place that time fucking forgot. Not just a place of thieves and slugabeds, horrible as that is but … but a ravaged teabilly hellscape where brainless, toothless, hee-hawing, stump-jumping hicks gather at the local post office on their Hoverounds to collect their government checks and complain about the evils of government. … What? what's wrong? That look on your face."

"What you just said … about the ravaged hellscape and all, and the stump jumpers."

"Yeah?"

"You make it sound like that's a bad thing."

"It's not?"

Dennis banged down his glass and said, "Listen, Dee Dee, I am a teabilly stump jumper. So's my pap. And while I'm not toothless yet, my grandpap is, and he's an old John Bircher who fought against the fluoridation of water and cheered when JFK was shot. Look, I know I quoted Springsteen earlier, about this town being a death trap, and a suicide rap. And today I'm twenty-one with my whole future in front of me, and I ought to get the hell out of here while I'm young. Only, I won't. I know exactly what's in store for me. And it ain't pretty. But there ain't a goddamned thing I can do about it, either. Character is destiny … bartender! More champagne, for me and Dee Dee."

Ian shuffled over and poured the drinks.

"Listen, Dee Dee," Dennis said. "Let's get shit-faced drunk right now, to forget who and where and what we are on this cold January night. Afterward, I'll drive you home. Deal?"

They clinked glasses. "Sounds like a plan to me," Dee Dee said. But here voice was strangled with misery.

They drank.

A few hours later they left the bar, the little bell above the door ringing as they stepped out into the frigid January gloom. As soon as the bell rang, Dennis blacked out and slumped to the snow-covered pavement. Dee Dee slapped him awake before The Sopranos credits could roll.

"God, you must weigh a ton," Dee Dee complained as she dragged Dennis to his feet, his legs rubbery. She draped one of his arms around her shoulders and the two of them weaved and staggered and shambled out to the parking lot, the ice-slick macadam looking positively lunar under the sodium-vapor lamps.

"I don't think you're in any condition to drive," Dee Dee said, her breath coming out in alcohol-tinged plumes. "I took a cab here, and I can take one back home. You should take a cab, too."

"Bollocks," Dennis roared, though he slurred his words now, and what he said sounded more like "bald locks." "Where do you live?"

"Tbat's another thing," Dee Dee said gloomily, as the two of them staggered arm in arm like misfired robots toward Dennis's pickup truck with the Confederate battle flag hanging limp from the antenna. "I live in a neighborhood called the Sexuality Forum. What the hell kind of name for a neighborhood is that? It's embarrassing. Why can't I live in a normally named neighborhood, like Edgewood or Kenmare or Pleasant Valley? Something inoffensive and soporific."

"Sexuality, sexuality, sexuality," Dennis muttered with a drunken leer. "Yeah, I like that. I like sexuality. … Well, that's only a few forums down. We're in the Philosophy Forum now. I'll get you home to your forum lickety-split."

"But you're drunk!"

"Bald locks!"

At the driver's side door, Dennis fumbled in his coat pocket for his keys. Fishing them out, he promptly dropped then. They glittered tantalizingly in the snow. Dennis lunged downward for them, but tripped and fell, landing on his hands and knees. His tongue rolled out of his mouth like something unhinged. A snowflake landed on it, and he ate it. "When I was a kid," he said, "I always enjoyed eating snowflakes. I wish I were a kid again, instead of a legal adult." He burst into tears.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Dee Dee murmured, pulling at her hair in frustration. "Get up." She grabbed him by his coat shoulders and laboriously yanked the weeping degenerate to his feet. He kept sobbing and flicking out his tongue to catch more snowflakes. "Sexuality and snowflakes," Dennis sang out, "make the fucking world go round!"

Dennis grappled open the door and slumped behind the wheel. Dee Dee entered through the passenger-side door. "I don't know about this," she said, looking dubiously at the drunken Dennis as he tried, but failed several times, to insert the key into the ignition.

Finally he managed to start the truck. He put it in reverse, and stamped down on the accelerator. With a squeal of rubber, the truck lurched backward at a high rate of speed. The rear bumper bunted aside a garbage can. The can flew through the air, disgorging its contents and strewing the macadam with rubbish.

"Jesus Christ!" a big-eyed, frightened Dee Dee yelled.

"Yee-haw!" Dennis rejoined, putting the truck in drive and thumping a fist on the dashboard. "Here we go, baby! The Stumpjumper Express!" He stamped down on the accelerator again and the pickup lurched out onto the street, the high beams turned on and punching double holes of light through the swirling snow. The bobbing lights landed fleetingly but with premonitory vividness on the wrecks in the junkyard across the street. Then Dennis yanked the wheel violently to the left, and the truck screeched down the road, the Confederate battle flag on the antenna snapping to attention and waving crisply in the frigid January gloom, the snow coming down heavier than ever now, coming down in slow, lazy death spirals. Dee Dee gasped. Her soul swooned slowly as she heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

TO BE CONTINUED