Low Dug Clay Pit
ahora, con puntuación

A low dug clay pit, maybe the size of a double-wide trailer, a low dug pit most of which banked up and into the piney wood that splotched the landscape here and there, wide and thin, thick and narrow between and amongst fields and pastures and junkyards and pecan orchards, both functioning and abandoned, west and down south of Cuthbert, Georgia.
A low dug clay pit sits off some labyrinth of dirt roads, off Highway 266, off a timeline that’s not now but it’s not not now.
A low dug clay pit sweats beneath a late morning August sun that works hard to burn off what’s left of the earlier heavy dew. A keen eye might see or sense the air absorbing the dew, the moisture, absorbing it and becoming heavier with every minute, with every breath, heavier about the shoulders, heavier on the lungs.
The clay in the exposed pit warms, turns crusty at the edges, crusty yet moist and cool and slick and sculptable just below the surface.
If there were a wind or a breeze or a black bear’s breath it would not matter, the peripheral clusters of young pines protect the pit, densely packed, each desperately fighting to extend their roots deep and wide into and below and beneath the clay.
Oh, there is water, water everywhere, yet not a drop to drink, these trees gasp for droplets of water as one might for air.
Each tree fights the other for survival, stretching upwards for advantage, their respective branches slap-boxing with each other. These tall, skinny, malnourished welterweights slug it out, their branches all tangled up in the clinches against the rope, their needles spread open toward their fiery master above.
An imported neighbor heightens their botanical angst, creeps up from below, from the forest floor, broad green kudzu leaves wrapped like christmas lights around the trunks and branches of several young adults off away from the road. These pulpy snakes crawl up from within with voracious appetites, dragging the weak down, toppling them into waiting arms.
Only a few, only the strong will remain to feast upon the rotted flesh of those who fail to break through.
Yeah, if there were a wind, it would not matter. The air, it’s oh, so still anyway, a still warm pond thick with being.
The morning grew hotter and more humid, smelling of pine and clay and the oily overtones of a still warm ’66 Impala SS, it’s blue body dusted with a fine, rusty red clay, its finish puffed up and billowed and settled, gathered while speeding, slipping, spinning atop and across these dirty dirt roads.
The Impala sits parked on the edge of the pit, about two feet above. An open cardboard box indicating it had once held 48 sixteen-ounce bottles of Heinz ketchup sits next to the Impala. The box contains implements of destruction of all varieties and taste, including firecrackers, M80s, Silver Salutes, a box of strike-anywhere kitchen matches, the kind with the white tips, a couple of Bic lighters, a tube of BB’s, a wire clothes hanger with a large twisted, knotted green Hefty bag tied to its hook, a box of twenty-two shells and a smattering of individual 12-gauge shotgun shells.
A BB gun, a twenty-two rifle, Bobby’s new Browning 12-gauge pump and an Army-Navy Surplus folding shovel leaned across the box.
A second box next to it, also open but mostly empty, contained maybe a few assorted differently sized plastic wheels, some with axles attached, some golf-ball-sized globs of melted plastic, the headless torso of a toy army man and a once wet but now dried and partially burned-around-the-edges two-year-old Penthouse Magazine.
The three of them lean back against the hood of the car, all in a line, all gazing down at the pit. Mickey keeps his hands in his pockets, Pete smokes a Marlboro, and Bobby holds a perspiring paper bag beneath one arm. He reaches in and pulls out a sweating beer and hands it to Mickey. He hands one to Pete and takes one for himself, then leans over and slides the bag beneath the shade of the car, standing back up and momentarily holding the cool beer to his forehead.
They all three snap the beer’s pop-top, one after another, Bobby first, then Mickey, then Pete. Each tossed his tab off into the bushes, one after another.
They drink.
Bobby is sixteen, Pete is fourteen, Mickey is twelve. Ozzie Osborne croons, sings of generals gathering in their masses from the Impala’s 8-track stereo.
Pete’s head nods in time, his fingers play the frets of his Budweiser and then he finishes his beer. First. He takes a long, sudden pull, looks up and over at Bobby to see if he noticed.
Mickey, he just sips his, the foreign bitter taste cool and wet but not really satisfying. He’d rather have a Dr Pepper or a Mister Pibb.
Before them lay a glorious diorama, a wartime vignette, a slice of history that never was.
The cinemascoped exhibition presented a dystopian time-confused battlefield of three opposing armies comprising a diverse size, shape, color and period, an amalgam of toy soldiers, mostly World War II American, Japanese and German army and their respective tanks, half-tracks, jeeps and cannons, but also cowboys and Indians and knights in armor and Robin Hoods and dinosaurs and assorted jungle creatures.
Sculpted into the far clay banks of the pit lay two distinct sets of soon-to-be conflicting bunkers and ramparts and battlements made of clay, mud, sticks and stones representing some target of desire for a vast advancing army upon the dry plane at their feet setting siege with their own cannons and tanks and grunts and jeeps and giraffes and warriors on horseback.
Snipers perched behind rocks on faux and fragile cliff sides.
Assorted plastic toy army nurses could be seen among the troops, except on the left-side cliffs where Pete had built a walled-in brothel complete with mud beds and a line of soldiers waiting to get in.
They, these young men, had spent the last couple of hours setting up and terraforming the pit, meticulously laying out artillery and cavalry and mechanized units, establishing flanks of charging troops, readying them for glory.
Mickey, he thinks to himself, he says, not really in words, not these words, at least, but his body, his pretercognitive 12-year old self, his bowels, they suggest, they hint that perhaps this is how the gods play with us.
Pete crushes his empty beer can between two hands, chest high, with a grunt. He tosses it over the empty box and into the bushes, walks over and picks up the BB gun, reaches into the box and pulls out the tube of BBs.
He unscrews the top of the cylinder on the rifle, pulls the paper top of the tube with his teeth, gently pours in a trickle of a stream of tiny copperish balls, polished to catch the gleam of the sun and reflect it back at a person. Then, he caps the tube, screws the top back onto the ammo chamber, walks to the edge of the pit and sits down.
His legs dangled over the edge, the BB gun laid across his lap.
Mickey, he wakes early. He always does, every morning.
The summer sun, he, it pops his pecker up, his big wide grin gleaming, telling the world, “Hey, all, rise and shine! Goddamn, rise and shine, all my chirruns!”
Mister Apollo, like the dude in the “let’s boogie” blacklight poster on Bobby’s wall, he’s got that cocky lean-back, stepping long out of the brightness of the sun, scorching his path, giving a nice morning howl.
And the shades only hang over the main window, not the little Victorian window above, not the bar oval pane that transpires heavily, Apollo’s manly boogified heat on her backside flowing through, hitting head-on the humid frigid air blasting caddy cornered across the room from the air conditioner cranked to full blue Frosty the Snowman.
The wet window, she sweats shivering chilly love streams all the way down, dripping little moist tears that tumble, flip and flop to the sill below, leaving little puddles in those slight depressions made by generations of little elbows connected to wrists and palms supporting the chin of this kid or that kid, this time Mickey, laying in bed, his head under where the shades do indeed pull down. He stares out the window at the outside universe, centered, grounded by the grand old magnolia tree in the corner of the yard.
This grand mistress stands massively blooming, opening herself to the neighborhood, to the town, like some meandering suburban brothel, hundreds of open windows, each with virgins wearing white and just that touch of rosy red lipstick, smiling, sitting.
Mickey knows every drop of dew on the surrounding lawn carries her, carries their scent.
Dragonflies and robins and blue jays and hummingbirds and ground squirrels feed and worship at her roots, bouncing and flitting and scurrying and hovering and poking and probing and tasting and nibbling and scratching around their world. All the while, they remain mindful of the Siamese cat that Mickey can not see, that he knows is there on the porch beneath him.
Bobby comes in from his room wearing only a pair of scraggly white briefs, his morning wood poking its head out above the band. He yawns and stretches, walking into the sitting room where Mickey sleeps when he is in town. Bobby, he says, “Hey, Mickey, I gotta idea. Since we’re not working the store today, I gotta thought, I got an idea ‘bout some fun.”
Mickey , he turns from the window, wipes his elbows on the bed spread and slides out of the covers, rubbing his eyes. He walks to the hallway door, slowly shaking his head then nodding his head, his hair tossing this way and that. He opens the door and walks out into the hall and he says, looking back over his shoulder, he says, “OK, sure.”
Mickey, he knows. He doesn’t even consider. If Bobby says they go, it’s gonna be a thing, whether it’s simply eat a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, build a model car, go steal Playboys from the drug store or shoot up some empty school bus. It don’t matter what anyone else thinks, something gets stuck in Bobby’s head, it’s gonna happen.
Mickey, he walks into the bathroom, he closes the door, he lifts the lid, spits into the toilet, looks down at his 12-year old cock in its miniaturized full stiff morning glory and whispers to himself, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
He then takes a deep breath, looks up, closes his eyes and slowly, silently whispers to himself, to last night’s dream, he says, “Baseball, baseball, baseball,” breathing between each ball and base until there is a little less glory, allowing him to let loose a vigorous morning stream.
And he walks back into the bedroom and Bobby has his jeans on and is throwing shit from the closet into a couple of grocery boxes. Mickey, he watches as he sits and pulls on his cutoffs, standing up onto his tiptoes to hoist and zip.
He slides into a tee shirt after first sniffing it.
He says, looking over at Bobby while Bobby’s head is still stuck in the closet, things flying back into two boxes. Fireworks and ammo seem to be going into one box, and toy soldiers and assorted related accouterment into the other. Mickey, he says, “So, what’s up? We getting some breakfast?”
Bobby, he stands up, looks at Mickey. He says, he slides the boxes back from the closet with his foot, mission accomplished, he says, “We’ll stop by Hardee’s and get a couple of sausage biscuits and a co-cola. Better get started before it gets too hot.”
Mickey, he wanders over and peers into the toy soldier box stuffed with the lifeless bodies of hundreds of toy soldiers, their hands forever attached to whatever weapon their god, the factory in Taiwan, deemed necessary, deemed appropriate for the waging of imaginary war.
Plastic plus magic bring these men to life, squat men on their knees with a large caliber machine gun being fed with belts of munitions, men lying prone with the sharpshooter rifles, pairs of men feeding and firing mortars, one crazed Japanese soldier running full stride, his mouth wide open in some foreign-tongue scream charging ahead with bayonet raised, several soldiers walking casually with their rifles over their shoulders, German goosesteppers and German officers doing the Heil, Hitler thing.
Others existed in between, the cowboys and Indians, some on horses, some gunslinging, some simply replicas of the crazed Japanese soldier, but this time an Indian with a hatchet.
All soldiers were survivors, veterans of the wars contrived by Mickey and Bobby over the years as they created battle scenes delicately constructed then temporarily destroyed, full circle of life, by marbles or pea gravel used to kill them, to claim their pitiful lives, one at a time or as many as they could bowl down.
What the fuck, they were only plastic people. Only plastic, but familiar and had been living in Cuthbert longer than Mickey had been alive.
And, Bobby, he walks back in from his room, shoes on, pulling on his tee shirt and jangling his car keys. He slides them into his pocket and grabs one of the twenty-two rifles with a shoulder strap off the rack on the wall. He hands it to Mickey, butt first, and he says, “Hey, strap this on and grab that box,” as he nods at the soldier box.
And, Mickey, he does, and Bobby, he takes the shiny new Browning off the rack, cradles it in his arm, barrel pointing down, and picks up the box of destructive material. He nods toward the door for Mickey to open it.
And, Mickey, he does, and Bobby, he leads the way down the stairs where they find his momma, Mickey’s Aunt Louise, at the bottom. She stands there wearing her nightgown, she, Aunt Louise, she likes wearing that nightgown, that loose, silky pajama with the matching robe, all 1971 Southern suburban flowing. She wears her nightgown every day until she has to get ready to make lunch.
Until she gets ready to have Thema make lunch.
And, Aunt Louise, she’s at the foot of the stairs in her nightgown, her hair wet in curlers, her arms crossed beneath her ample bosom, she says, looking up as they come stomping down, she says, legs slightly apart, her short, stocky body blocking the stairs, she says, “Bobby Parker, where in the Sam Hill are you going with those guns this early on a Wednesday morning?”
She stands on her tippy toes, sees what Mickey has in his box, and she looks up right into Mickey’s eyes for a good three-count, until Mickey can’t stand it, trembles a little body shiver, and looks down. Then, she turns to Bobby, hand up, finger pointed heavenward, she says in that high-strung voice that makes Mickey giggle without giggling, she says, “Bobby Parker, dammit to hell, you know I was saving those toys for my grandchildren to play with! Where are you taking these things and what are you going to do with them?”
Then, back at Mickey, she says, “Hey, baby, you hungry? You want Thelma to make you some eggs and grits? There’s bacon warming on the oven, you just head on in there.”
Then, back at Bobby, she says, “You best answer me, Robert Parker.”
Bobby, he looks at Mickey. He looks at the back screen porch door over his momma’s shoulder. He looks back at Mickey. He does not look at his momma, he just pushes on by, walks to the door. Mickey, his eyes follow from floor to Bobby, he stutters, he looks at Bobby leaving, he looks at his Aunt Louise, he says, his voice trailing as he looks back at Bobby walking out the door, the screech of the spring pulling it back, he says, “Aunt Louise, I ain’t hungry right now. Thanks, though, Aunt Louise!”
And he hurries out the door after Bobby, putting the box into the trunk of the Impala, the trunk that Bobby held open impatiently, waiting for Mickey to get there, and then Mickey, he lays his twenty-two across the back seat and hops up into the front bucket, bracing himself for Bobby’s big foot stomping down quickly and hard on the gas, fishtailing out of the gravel driveway and out onto College Avenue.
They drove five houses down and pulled into a similar drive with the same spinning and crunching and spitting of gravel with an added honk of the horn, pavloving Pete out of the house and onto and across the front porch. Three strides later, he’s at Mickey’s door and looking down expectantly, but Mickey looks straight ahead, paying Pete no attention. Pete leans in and looks at Bobby who thumbjerks him into the backseat. Pete pouts, opens the door and pushes Mickey’s seat forward with a little more pressure than probably necessary.
The door closed and they do the reverse Starsky and Hutch backwards onto College, gravel tossing and all that as Pete, he says, one hand reaching up to the interior to steady himself, Pete, he says, “What’s up? Where we hea — ” as the beast jerks with a terminating screech, Bobby kicking the brake as they slide to a stop, palming, popping the ratchet shifter down to Forward. Another screech, squeal and bark, and they’re on out towards the city limits and beyond. He hops the tracks, climb the hill, pull over at the bait shop sitting at the top and leave the car running in Park, its three-quarter Crane cam rolling, rumbling over like a goddamn motorboat every two and a half seconds.
Bobby, he hops out, takes long deliberate strides, swings the door open with the jingle of a little bell atop it, and disappears inside. Pete lights a cigarette, leans back into the sweatbox that is framed by the black vinyl of the backseat, short sleeve shirt unbuttoned, his shiny white belly out all shamu, protrusive umbilical scar and all. Bobby comes out with a full paper bag and hands it through the window to Mickey. He walks back around to his side, slides into his captain’s seat, does the footwork magic along with the fancy wrist-action shifteroo, and heads back out onto the road.
They turn off heading southwest on a county-maintained tar and gravel road, turn off onto a dirt road, onto another dirt road and around a long curve running alongside a vast cornfield cut out of the middle of the woods, and then again off towards the woods, and then, here.
Bobby pulls off the road into a tiny clearing at the edge of the low dug clay pit.
They lean against the warm hood of the Impala. Mickey, still sipping his breakfast, wonders why they didn’t stop at Hardee’s, looks straight ahead, looks over and beyond Pete, his legs dangling, the BB gun laid across his lap, sitting on the edge of the low dug clay pit.
Bobby, he drops his empty beer can, stomps on it into the dirt, uses the toe of his shoe to kick it off the edge of the pit as he hops down after it. He grabs the BB gun off Pete’s lap, cocks it a couple of times to build up enough pressure, aims as he walks, and pops off a toy soldier over on the left-side cliff from about ten feet away. He cocks it, pumps it a couple times more, shorter distance and all they hear is a soft thud, no casualties.
Pete, he walks over, tiptoes through Bobby’s army advancing across the vast red plain, he leans over with his lit cigarette and lights a twisted paper fuse emanating from the earth beneath some of Bobby’s men, right next to the small home of a remote band of fire ants.
A pop pop and a puff, and several of Bobby’s army fall. Two more topple as a horde of angry fire ants pour out of their half-collapsed and smoking mound. Pete, he looks back, he says, his cigarette all Andy Capp dangling, his eye cocked from the smoke and the sun poking above the pines, he says, taking the cigarette from his lips with thumb and forefinger, he says, “Land mine,” and walks by with smoke trailing.
Mickey, he takes the BB gun from Bobby, pumps it twice, takes aim, gets a bead on the left-side cliff and takes out a cannon by accidentally hitting the rock it was propped upon.
Mickey, he hands the rifle back to Bobby, he’ll take what he can get.
And, so on and so on for six or seven rounds, until Bobby, he stops, he says, he points over to the right-side cliffs, all pretty much untouched and pristine, he says, Bobby says, “Hey, we’re really only fighting ourselves, at my army and your army. I mean, what the fuck?”
And, Pete, he looks over, he shrugs. Bobby, he hops back up, car-side, grabs the twenty-two, lies prone at the edge of the pit, pulls back the bolt action, cocks, aims, fires. Several of Mickey’s brave boys go down, the bolt comes back again, reloads, cocks, fires another round, another platoon down.
He gets up, red dust all over the thighs of his jeans and the chest of his black tee shirt. He brushes himself off with the back of his hand as if he were own valet with a whisk broom, shrugs, shakes like a dog with the .22 held out with extended arm. Stops, sniffs, sneezes and hops down into the low dug clay pit.
Pete drags the box of fireworks down into the pit behind him, reaches in, grabs a small string of firecrackers, lights it with his cig, tosses it into the middle of Bobby’s army and releases havoc. Mickey grabs an M80, holds it out for Pete to light and he quickly tosses it at Pete’s cliff. It bounces over to his own side, explodes, takes out two tanks and about six pounds of earth that blast up and rain down on all the armies and rednecks alike.
And so on and so on, each round escalating until Bobby grabs the clothes hanger wrapped with the garbage back, walks to Mickey’s cliff, lights the end of the knotted bag with his lighter by holding the flame beneath the plastic until it begins to drip. And then it glops.
Small balls of fire that make horrific hissing, whistling sounds as they fall to earth, splattering out with even smaller balls of flame that instantly cool into bits of hard plastic. The fire also falls onto the plastic soldiers and horses and dinosaurs that, in turn, also burst into flames, hissing Wicked Witch of the West whispered screams.
And, Bobby, he holds this contraption over what is left of Mickey’s army, firebombing, napalming the entire cliffside until there is nothing left but some eco-wrecked dystopian apocalypse. Spots of small flames and smoldering flames and smoke and darkness take the fortress all Dresden.
And, Mickey and Bobby stand staring at the carnage, Bobby holding the smoldering, no long blazing hanger, Mickey holding an unlit Silver Salute in one hand, a lighter in the other, both with jaws slightly open, staring. Then, instinctively they jump, springing forward up onto the far cliffside as behind them they hear the ch-chung of the Browning pump slide, shell engaged. They turn to see Pete pointing the 12-gauge at the remaining attacking plains army, from a distance, allowing the shot to spread.
An enormous cacophony erupts, exploding plastic bits and rocks and bird shot and fire ant corpses and clay spray up and out and away, underneath which a second ch-chung cranks, explodes, shatter, lifts, separates whatever had been spared from the first blast. A third ch-chung follows the succeeding explosion, but its own is interrupted by Bobby’s screaming, “Goddamn it, Pete, for fucking out loud…!!”
And, Pete, he points the shotgun down, the adrenalin seeping from his body, down and out of his toes. A red dusty face looks up, broken by a toothy grin and the whites of his eyes, and he says, pointing at the devastation before them with the Browning, he says, he shrugs, he smiles, he says,
“A-bomb.”
