Tom Thompson was a squat, young man, all shoulders and neck. His family called him Tom Tom; his grandma, Geraldine, had called him that as a toddler. Tom never heard Geraldine call him Tom Tom. She died when a shard of shooting clay pierced her neck with the force of 25 grain birdshot. It was a freak accident. To save money, Everett, Geraldine’s husband, made his own clay pigeons out of a plaster cast concoction that he weighted with sand and hay. The clays flew like the real deal but didn’t always break up well, so one rather jagged shard found a home in the soft of Geraldine’s neck. She fell over and bled out in the garden.

Everett kept shooting into the early evening, rather proud of the homemade clays, never knowing what happened. When he found Geraldine ass up in the cabbage he set the gun down on the grass, noticing how cool the blades where on his knuckles, and shuffled away from it all. At 1:30am the police found him at one of the local pubs with his belt strapped around a brass pole that ran the length of the bar. The cops took Everett out in cuffs. After sleeping off the drunk, the police questioned him. After several hours the death was ruled a freak accident. Everett was released to tend to things at home.

All Tom knew was that his family called him Tom Tom. One day in seventh grade an eighth grader asked him if his shirt came in men’s, so Tom split the boys lip and dotted one of his eyes. Tom had never hit anyone and never would after that, but because he hit Tad Meizer, Tom’s peers began calling him Tommy Gun.

One time Tom asked his friend Trenton, “why do they call me Tommy Gun?”

“Because you throw punches really fast,” Trenton answered.

“Oh.”

Tom finished Junior High and completed High School like a smudge of gray, no one person caring, including himself. In later years people would say, “Tom Thompson, yeah, I remember the name. Sounds real familiar, but I can’t place the face.”

After High School, Tom got into a private liberal arts college in Colorado. The students and faculty were not happy with gray. They expected more, so Tom dropped out within his first semester. Tom got a job on an assembly line watching a hollow circle, which resembled a bottle cap without a center, put black bands around the erasers of Dixon Ticonderoga pencils. The job was drab, even for Tom, and he quit within the first week. From that point on Tom would only use Dixon Ticonderoga pencils. He loved the way they factory smelled, and the pencils smelled just like that, so he used them only.

Having been booted from the dorms at the college, and having not worked but a few days, Tom had yet to find a place to live, so he called home from a payphone. He wasn’t sure why he called. He didn’t want to go home, but he wanted something. Whatever it was, he felt he could get it with a phone call home.

“Hello.”

“Hi, mom.”

“Tom Tom?”

“Yeah. How’s everything going at home?”

“Well…I haven’t seen your brother in almost a week and he still lives here.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t get him out of his room. You’re dad’s in one of his moods. He’s done. Says he’s gone for real this time. Said he’d off himself. I told him to do it, just get life insurance first and I’ll help. Told him I’d give some meds. Make it look just like an accident.”

She chuckled.

“He said he’d burn the house down with me in it…blah, blah, blah. Same shit. How’s things in Utah?”

Tom hung the phone up and went back to his car. He laid the driver seat back and went to sleep until a cop woke him, banging a Maglight on the driver’s side window. Tom cracked the window.

“You can’t sleep here.”

“Where should I go?” asked Tom.

“Don’t know. Can’t sleep here, though. Private property.”

Tom looked around at the remnants of the old filling station, the payphone the only thing working.

“Okay,” Tom answered.

Tom made his way anywhere other than the old filling station. Having not been awake long, he fell asleep within minutes of getting on the highway, and woke to violent shaking and the sounds of things crumpling that were made not to. There was a series of flashes, and the sounds of bones adjusting in unnatural ways. By the time it was all over Tom was sitting sideways, watching dust through his window settle down against him from the black sky.

I’m still alive. This was Tom’s first thought.

Oooouch! This was his second.

While Tom looked around the battered remnants of his car, trying to figure out the best way to escape the crumpled mess, a man with a globe of thick hair and a grizzled beard appeared in the driver’s side window.

“Christ, kid. You all right?”

Tom jumped.

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Here, let’s get you out of there.”

The man reached into the window, unsnapped the seat belt, and plucked Tom from the car like a coin, bouncing his head off the frame of the door.

“Ouch.”

“All right,” the man said, standing Tom on his feet and dusting glass from his hair and shoulders.

“All right, let’s get a look at you.”

The man looked Tom over, adjusted the boy’s shirt, dusted his left shoulder off a little more.

“There. How are you feeling?”

Tom turned slowly and looked at the car strewn about the field like park trash. He doubled over and puked.

“All right,” the man said, “that’s normal. It’s scary stuff. Look at it, though. I mean, really, take a good, square look at it.”

The man lifted Tom and directed his sight towards the car.

“All of that mess, and you’re just fine.” Doesn’t that make you feel good? Feel alive?”

Tom puked a little more.

“Guess not.”

The man patted the boy between his shoulders and looked around the black of the field and at the headlights running on the highway like tracers. Tom stood and faced the man.

“You’ve got a little,” the man said, pointing to his own chin.

“What?”

“Some chunk,” said the man, poking himself in the chin repeatedly.

Tom wiped the back of his hand across his mouth slowly.

“Got it.”

The man looked over the wreck again.

“Well, I suppose we’d better get going.”

“What?”

“We have to go,” the man asserted.

“My car,” Tom said, quizzically.

“What about it?”

“Um.”

“Exactly. We have to go. You’re going to own the state a shit load of cash.”

“What?”

“Oh, yeah. You tore through the guardrail and cut this field all to hell. Look, I’m leaving. Stay if you’d like, but I’m going.”

The man turned and began walking back towards his pickup.

“Uh.”

Tom looked around again. The man was getting in his truck.

“Okay!”

Tom ran, noticing a sharp pain in his hip, and climbed into the passenger side seat.

The two of them drove from the field and down the highway. A few miles later the man pulled off onto a country road, and from there he turned on to an even more country road, and from there onto smaller and more remote roads over and over again until Tom had no idea what direction he was traveling. The two didn’t speak, Tom shy and uncomfortable, the man not a huge talker unless things needed to be said. The man was amiable when he chose to talk. He valued what others had to say, but it didn’t seem Tom had a word worth a wooden nickel so the man drove on in silence.

Finally, the man pulled onto a rut filled dirt path and drove along it for several minutes, the two of them bouncing around the cab of the truck. The man rounded a corner and came upon a humble but quaint cottage.

“I’m Ted,” said the man. “This is home sweet home.”

Ted stepped from the truck and marched up to the house and entered it, leaving the door open behind him. Tom didn’t know what home was for certain. He just realized that. Home sweet home, he thought. He stepped from the truck, shut the door, and shuffled towards the light spilling onto the porch.

Ted had 2 daughters, ages 5 and 17. The daughters were all ribs and sinew, knotty muscled tom boys that shoveled shit, plowed dirt, and chorded wood. Early on, Tom asked Ted what he did for a job.

“Why, I work to live.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I’m nobodies puppet. I have all I need out here,” and Ted left Tom standing there thinking on what that meant.

Ted was often gone from sunrise to sunset. He spent most the day in the several complex gardens he had situated within the woods. When he found good soil for planting, which was rare, he would climb the trees and clear the canopy so the sun could reach the crop. When Ted wasn’t tending the fields, he was hunting. On his first morning in the cottage, Tom woke up to Sam, the 17 year old, prodding him with handle of an axe.

“Time to get up. Burnt up most the logs for breakfast. Got to cut more.”

Sam leaned the axe against the wall by the couch and left Tom lying there. They were not almost out of wood, Tom knew, but it was time he earned his keep. He was surprisingly eager.

The girls laughed at Tom when he split quality firewood to mulch chips with clumsy swings. Sam, the 17 year old, made splitting wood look easy. On sunny days the sun would light Sam’s face as she chopped, and she would occasionally lift her apron and wipe sweat from her face and say that signature line—”just let the axe do the work. Just let the axe do the work.”

Eventually, Tom got handy at helping around the house. He began working longer and longer days. Instead of leading all the time, Sam began to relax and enjoy her youth a little. Baby fat began fading from Tom’s frame, and his bulwark shoulders broadened and became less rounded; his forearms thickened and striations rippled under his skin when he swung the axe and carried the wood. His hands callused. Tom grew patchy facial hair. He began waking early with Ted and would ready the wood stove and have breakfast on plates by the time the girls woke.

As the tail end of summer moved into fall, and fall waned into winter, Ted bought new flannels and gave Tom his old ones, impressed at how just four months of a rougher life helped Tom fill the shirts that would have hung on him before. With Tom carrying more of the workload, the girls could be found playing together in the yard in between meals. They even fattened up a bit.

Tom knew what home was now. When Tom thought of the word home and what it meant he thought of the cottage in cold mornings before he had stoked the dead embers in the furnace; when he thought of home he heard the bird’s call that snuck in the quite after the splitting of a log; when he thought of home he smelled hot cast iron skillets on the woodstove; it was all smells and sounds—home was like that.

Winter sprang heavy on the family. They spent more time together, and occasionally the girls would snap at each other and nag one another until Tom wanted to slap them both. Instead of resorting to violence, which he was never good at in the first place, Tom took up reading anything he found. Ted was around more often as winter hit its peak. Some days were just too cold to spend hunting. The family lived mostly on vegetables and meats they canned in the fall.

“Wish we could grow steak,” Tom said one evening, staring with distaste at a Mason jar of string beans and potatoes. Laura, the nine year old, laughed so hard she shot corn across the table and onto Sam’s neck. She had pictured big steaks growing from green stalks.

In fair weather Ted would usually come home late into the night, after Tom and the girls had already gone to bed. Tom was often awake when Ted got home, and he wondered why Ted chose to come home to an empty house rather than one filled with his family. Some nights Tom would lay in bed and listen to Ted move around the place with clumsy strides that landed heavily. On some mornings Tom would wake to find Ted asleep in his chair with one boot on and one off. He would wake Ted. Ted would thank him, put his boot on, and spend the whole day working in the clothes from the day before, not wasting a sliver of daylight to change or shower. On one night too cold for Ted to be out late, Tom came into the living room and found the man sitting in his chair holding a bottle of tequila. Tom threw fresh wood on the fire, and among an orange flame that seemed to writhe with anger, Ted handed the bottle of tequila to Tom, who took his first drink that night. That night Tom learned of Pauline, the mother of the two girls. She had died in an auto accident some years before.

“I lost my wife that day,” Ted told Tom.

He took a swig from the bottle.

“My girls lost their mother.”

Ted’s voice broke a little.

“We lost a lot of things,” he said, taking another drink.

With that, Ted sat the bottle down on the floor and walked to a closet. He dug around the inside and found a box. He retrieved a harmonica and handed it to Tom.

“It was Pauline’s,” he said. “She made beautiful music with it. I want you to have it. Let it always tell your tale.”

Tom took it.

“Thanks,” he said, “but I don’t know how to play it.”

“Neither did she. She just played it when she felt she needed to. It did all the talking for her.”

“Oh.”

“You’ll understand,” Ted assured. “Use that and not the bottle.”

Ted went down the hall and went to sleep. The next morning Tom woke to breakfast, coffee, and his stuff in a duffle bag.

“It’s time you go,” Ted told him.

After breakfast Ted ushered Tom to his truck and drove him to a bus station and dropped him off with two twenties and a ten.

“Remember what I said,” Ted yelled from the truck as he pulled away. When Tom watched the truck roll away it way it hurt him like nothing else in life had. He shuffled to a near by park bench, and people stared at him as he sobbed into his hands in the middle of the afternoon. Tom sat on the bench until the evening, where he finally sprawled out and held himself against the cold.

Tom awoke to a nightstick poking him in the stomach.

“Wake up,” said the officer. “You can’t sleep here.”

Tom shot up and stood face to face with the officer.

“I can’t! Well where can I sleep?”

Tom’s action alarmed the cop, so he put his hand on his firearm.

“I don’t know,” said the officer.

“I don’t know either,” Tom yelled. “I’ve never known! Nobody fucking knows!”

Tom kicked the bench and stormed off mumbling to himself. The officer exhaled and released the grip on his gun.

The night was cold and the wind whipped a dead leaf across the sidewalk with a rattle and a scratch. Out in a dark field Tom heard the rings of a soccer goal slapping against it’s metal frame. Tom left the park and nestled underneath a bridge. As he squeezed himself in the gap where the bridge and wall met, Tom noticed a soiled Hardee’s cup held against the wall with a circle of small stones. Tom looked at the cup, the capital H looking more like a 4, the left side of the H having worn away. The cup was filthy.

“Don’t look at my cup, bitch!” stressed a voice from the dark.

“What?” asked Tom.

“What? What ya mean what?”

“Uh.”

“Uh what? Git the shit out yer mouth.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Oh, boy, don’t you lie. I’ll knock yer dick right in the dirt. Shiiiiit.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry? Watcha sorry fer?”

“Um. I…I don’t know.”

“Fer lookin’ at my cup, ya dumb son of uh bitch!”

“All right. Quit calling me names. I won’t look at your cup.”

“Damn straight.”

An old, black man crawled out from the shadows. His body was pointed at sharp angles with starvation.

“Watcha lookin’ at, boy? You stare too much. Rip them fuckin’ eyes out.”

The whites of the man’s eyes had gone yellow, his face a cactus of gray hairs.

“I asked you a question.”

“What?” Tom asked.

“Whatcha lookin’ at, I said?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s God damned right. I’m nuttin’. Yer nuttin’.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

The man didn’t respond, so the two of them sat some time listening to the wind.

“So,” Tom started, finally breaking the silence, “what’s with the cup?”

“Keep yer God damned hands off, you fuckin’ cracker.”

The man reached over and pulled the cup from inside the circle.

“I’ll split yer wig. You don’t know shit about all this!” The man was shaking with rage as he swiped a hand over the expanse of everything in sight. “Not a God damned thing. Not a damn thing!” he kept saying, swatting the circle of stones about and then grabbing one and launching it into the dark. “Nothin’,” he mumbled, cradling his cup and staring at Tom.

He rolled away from Tom and curled against himself from the cold.

“I was staying at this cottage in the woods,” Tom began. “But,” he paused. “It didn’t work out, I guess.”

“Shut up, boy, for I kick your God damned teeth out.”

Tom cradled himself in silence and listened to the wind whip and the occasional vehicle driver overhead.

Tom didn’t think he had slept at all until he woke to one explosive word.

“Bologna!”

Tom heard the man’s feet on the pavement in a combination of crippled thuds and heavy shuffles. Tom opened his eyes. The man lumbered in Quasi-Motto fashion towards a rusted truck with mismatched rims some thirty yards away. Tom rubbed his eyes as he watched the ditches and bushes spew scantily clad derelicts. The people crawled and stood in crooked shapes, more triangles and squares than the fluid shapes of the human frame.

In the back of the truck a red haired girl in a flannel shirt sat below a piece of plywood that stretched the width of the truck bed. Atop the plywood she manned a sandwich assembly line. With adroit hands she slapped bologna on one slice of white bread and spread mayonnaise over another with the rounded back of a spoon.

“Yes! Yes!” she ejaculated, handing sandwiches to reaching hands and rifling others over cowering heads.

Tom shuffled slowly towards the truck as he watched the starving people clasp at the air and mount one another towards bologna sandwiches mashed in the girl’s freckled fists.

“Yes! Yes!” she screamed.

The people stuffed their faces. Others absconded back into the bushes and ditches with their food. Tom approached the truck and lifted an opened palm slowly. The girl, with sandwich in fist, stopped yelling and looked Tom in the face.

“You don’t need a sandwich,” she said, throwing one at Tom anyway.

The sandwich bounced off his face and into the dirt, leaving a smatter of mayonnaise in his right eye. Tom blinked rapidly, lowered his head, and walked back towards the bridge. A swarm of pointy woman nearly plowed him over fighting for the sandwich that lay in the dirt. Tom sat back down in his crevice, pulled the harmonica from his bag, and began to play. Tom pushed the air out through his mouth and slid the instrument along his lips and cupped his hands in ways that just felt right. All the air within earshot got very heavy, and it made it hard for people to move because their hearts hurt. Many of the homeless stopped eating and just stared at Tom; a few heads emerged from bushes and floated above the crests of ditches. The girl in the truck stopped and watched Tom, who, it seemed, wept into the harmonica more than anything else. The girl uncapped the jar of mayonnaise and with a slow guilt began to make two sandwiches. After the sandwiches were made, she stepped down from the truck and made her way to where Tom played.

She approached him.

“The name’s Pearl,” she said. “You can call me Ann.”

“Tom looked up and stopped playing.

“Ann?” he asked.

“Yes. Ann.”

“Why Ann?”

“Or you can call me Pearl.”

“Um, okay,” said Tom, biting into the sandwich Pearl handed him.

“Well?” she asked.

“Wha−” Tom said with his mouth full.

“Nothing,” she said, sitting down next to him.

Tom and pearl talked all morning and well into the afternoon. Tom discovered, through dialoging with Pearl, that the man with the Hardee’s cup was named T.B.T.B. had come and gone three times for coffee already that afternoon, staring Tom down every chance he got.

“What’s his problem?” Tom asked Pearl.

“People like you,” she said.

“Like me?” Tom asked. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s people like you and me, that’s the problem. I don’t understand it, people like us don’t, but he does.”

Tom stared at the man.

“I’ll pluck out them sonsabitches!” T.B. called, casting a stone at Tom, which he easily ducked.

Tom and Pearl talked until the sky paled and the sun was gone from sight, talked until the clouds were thin, pink strings above them. Then, Tom and Pearl went for a ride out in the country side, almost as remote as where the cottage was located, and made love in the back of Pearl’s pickup. A few crickets whirred, and the two kids shook with the cold long before either one shook with orgasms. After they were done, Pearl and Tom held each other inside the truck, locked together under a military issue sleeping bag given to Pearl by her father. The two of them slept through the night, and Tom awoke to the windshield thinly frosted and glowing orange with a crawling sunrise.

Pearl and Tom talked through the morning. Pearl talked about her father, who she lived with, alone, her mother having died during childbirth. Tom talked of his almost Bunyonesque anabasis towards a meaning in his life, though he called it no such thing, having never read Pilgrim’s Progress. Pearl and Tom found out much about one another. They found out neither of them had anything at all, really, so out of a not so random blue Pearl ordered, “Marry me.”

“Um,” is all Tom could say.

“What else will either of us do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Tom answered.

“Well, neither do I, so let’s do it together.”

Tom looked out the front windshield, over a field, some grasses green still while others were brown and dying. The sun was high now, and the frost had melted and dried on the window in mottled browns in the shapes of continents.

“Okay,” Tom said with a smile.

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Yeah, whatever we’re going to do let’s do it together.”

Pearl kissed Tom and they made love again.

Pearl took Tom to her father’s house. John Blake, Pearl’s father, had a rough-hewn jaw hard as kiln brick. His eyes were rounded and smooth as water-worn stone and his body was a thin frame of muscles pulled tight. John’s skin was tan and his hair short. His hands were ribbed with thick knuckles and calluses course enough to grate cheese. Sometimes Pearl caught John staring too long out of the kitchen window while food burned on the stove or soapy water breeched the top of the sink. John had been to war and was a state cop. He loved Pearl in the awkward ways fathers love their children, especially their daughters.

Pearl walked in with Tom and took him to the kitchen. John sat at the table sipping coffee and listening to NPR.

“Morning, John,” Pearl said.

“Pearl.”

“This is Tom,” she said.

John looked at Tom.

“Morning,” he said to the boy.

“Good morning.”

“What is he,” John began, “like the third one this month?”

Tom looked at John and cocked his head. John’s eyebrows rose questioningly. Tom looked at Pearl.

“Yeah,” she said, “three or four. We’re getting married.”

“Ha!” John exploded. “Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Pearl affirmed.

John looked at Tom.

“Is that right?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess it is.”

“I can’t hear you!”

Tom jumped and felt the sting of piss nearly spring from his prick. John and Pearl laughed. Pearl punched Tom playfully just below his left nipple.

“Ouch,” Tom whispered, rubbing below his nipple. He looked at the floor.

“Well,” John declared, “it’ll work or it won’t.”

Shut up, John,” Pearl said, playfully. “It’ll work. It’ll be wonderful.”

“I’ll smoke to that, I guess,” John said, pulling a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt. He put one to his lips and handed a second to Pearl. John offered one to Tom.

“No thanks.”

“Sit down…son.”

Tom sat.

“So, what’s your story?”

“My story?”

“Yeah. Don’t you know something about yourself?”

John took a drag off his cigarette, exhaled, and took a sip of his coffee.

“You in school?” John continued.

“No. I was. I’m not now.”

“Why?”

John took another drag.

“C’mon, John,” Pearl pleaded.

John turned his attention to Pearl.

“Why don’t you tell me a little about Tom?”

“I can tell you a lot,” she declared defensively. “All kinds of things.”

“Well?”

“He came here to go to school, but it didn’t work out.”

Pearl looked at Tom for a little recognition, but he just stared at the table.

“And you should hear him play the harmonica,” Pearl kept on.

“You play the harmonica?” John asked.

“No.”

“You don’t?”

“Yes you do,” Pearl pressured. “I heard you play. You can play!”

“C’mon, kid, let’s hear you play.”

“I can’t—”

“Can,” Pearl blurted. “You can play!”

“Play, play,” they both chanted.

“Play,” John belted, slamming his fist on the table.

“All right,” Tom nearly screamed.

Pearl and John grew quite as Tom pulled the harmonica from his pocket. Tom looked at it a moment and then pulled it to his mouth. A lawn mower hummed outside somewhere. Tom put the instrument between his lips, looking at Pearl and John through climbing tendrils of smoke.

Tom inhaled and exhaled. The sound was obstreperous. It was like an old man wheezing through emphezemic lungs. Tom tried to do things with his hands to alter the horrid sounds. He dropped the harmonica. It bounced on the table and to the floor. Tom picked up the instrument and looked away, ashamed.

“That was horrible,” John said, tapping the ash from his cigarette and taking another drag.

“He can play better! Tom, why don’t you play better?”

“I can’t right now. Sorry. I can’t right now.”

Pearl shook her head and laughed.

“That was horrible.”

Tom laughed, loosing up a little.

“Yeah, it was” he said. “It was really bad.”

The three sat around the table and talked, more comfortable now that they had laughed together. John and Tom mostly talked while Pearl listened. Tom told stories that Pearl hadn’t heard but was glad to. Pearl heard John tell stories she had heard him tell drunk more times than sober. He was a better storyteller when sober, she thought. The conversation had outlasted coffee and moved to tequila; the sun moved from an angry orange, pushing through the horizon, to a molten hole in the center of the blue sky. Finally, the conversation began to slow. There were those awkward pauses where people stare at knickknacks like they’ve never seen them before, or they stare out of a window like there is something quite profound outside. The three of them were struggling to keep the conversation going until Pearl piped up and said:

“Tell him about the house with the little girls.”

John looked at Tom, intrigued by a new avenue of discussion.

“That’s all right,” Tom said.

“C’mon,” Pearl pleaded.

They sat quite a moment.

“This guy with two daughters took Tom in for the past few months,” Pearl started. “He lives alone in the woods with his two daughters. Their mother died, and now they just live out there by themselves and live off the land. They don’t need society or none of that shit. They just need each other.”

John looked at Tom, quite intrigued.

“I’m making Tom take me out there. He don’t know it, well now he does. Tom, you are taking me out there.” She chuckled.

Tom didn’t say anything.

“That’s how people are supposed to live,” Pearl kept going, “work for what you need, not for what somebody else needs, you know?”

“Is that right?” John asked Tom.

“Yeah.”

“Where was this?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Out between Claxton and Red Run it sounds like,” Pearl said, “right?”

“I’m really not sure.”

John stood and left the kitchen for a few moments. Pearl sat next to Tom and held his hand. John returned after a moment.

“Hell,” John yelled, “I say we go check this place out, as a family.”

Pearl squeezed Tom’s hand.

“I don’t know. They kicked me out just yesterday.”

“What’d you do?” John asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s go. Let’s go find out what’s going on. I want to meet these folks. They sound like real nice people. If you’re really going to marry my daughter I want to go meet them.”

“Why?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know, just feel like I should, you know? Let’s go. I’ll drive.”

The three of them loaded up in John’s truck. Tom gave John directions guided by landmarks. Tom made John drive back to the train station. It was the only way he could remember for certain how to get back to the cottage.

“I don’t think I’ll remember,” Tom kept saying, even though he was recognizing landmarks and moving them along.

Tom was impressed with his ability to remember the way back. In fact, he was relishing in his success, especially when Pearl squeezed his hand proudly as they got deeper into the country.

John followed Tom’s directions and followed the winding country roads back and back.

“There!” Tom called. “Right there, that’s the lane.”

John began to slow as he noticed the small, dirt trail alongside the road. A state trooper was passing by in the other lane. John waived.

“Ronnie,” he said to nobody in particular.

John turned left onto the dirt path.

“This baby is back there,” John said.

“Yeah, just how it should be.”

Pearl squeezed Tom’s hand as she said this.

After a jarring, mile-long ride along the path they rounded a corner and came upon the house. The girls were out chopping wood and stopped when they saw the truck pull up. Pearl, Tom, and John stepped from the truck.

“Tom!” the girls yelled, stopping their work and running over to him. They wrapped him up. He was taken back. Not even Pearl had hugged him, not like the girls had. He didn’t remember being hugged like that before.

Ted came out onto the porch.

“Tom? What are you doing here? Who are these people? Girls, get in the house.”

“But, Tom−”

“Get in the house!”

The girls ran up the porch steps and into the house. Ted came down to the three of them.

“Who are these people, Tom?”

Tom didn’t respond. He could feel he had done something terribly wrong.

“We’re his new in-laws. I’m John. Pleasure to meet you.”

Ted took John’s hand reluctantly and looked at Tom.

“Married already?”

“Not yet,” John answered for Tom. “Excuse me a moment,” he said, stepping away from Ted. He pulled his phone out. After a moment, he put it back into his pocket and returned to the group.

“This is quite a setup you have here,” John said.

“Who are you?” Ted asked.

“My name’s John.”

I know that. What do you do?”

“I work construction.”

Tom and Pearl looked at each other. Ted noticed their reactions. He looked at John and then at the truck. Ted noticed the small insignia of a police shield on the license plate.

“You’re not taking my daughters.”

John stood with his arms crossed, looking over his left shoulder. Then he exploded with violent force towards Ted, but Ted was faster, and before John could hardly spring from the truck’s front bumper, where he leaned, Ted put a boot into John’s chest and pulled a revolver from behind him and sent John’s brains all over the windshield of the truck. John crumpled down the front of the truck and fell with his face in his lap. Pearl screamed and collapsed down beside her father.

“You shouldn’t have brought them here!” John yelled, pointing the gun between Tom’s eyes. “You shouldn’t have done that! There are things you don’t know about all this!”

Tom stood wide-eyed, his mind a loud crashing of thoughts: screaming, the gunshot, John crumpled in an inhuman posture.

“God damn it!” Ted yelled, shaking the barrel of his gun in Tom’s face.

Ted turned and ran towards the house.

“God damn it!”

He disappeared into the house and returned a moment later with the revolver tucked in his belt and a shotgun in his hand. The girls trailed behind him. Ted opened the door of the truck.

“Get in,” he ordered the girls.

Ted took one last look at Tom and got into the truck. Pearl sobbed and rubbed John’s head, mostly missing in the back. Ted drove past, the truck’s engine screaming. Tom listened to the sounds of the truck shrink smaller and smaller as it drove away. Tom shuffled towards the porch, unaware that he was walking. He sat down on the porch stairs. The sound of the truck’s engine ceased completely some distance down the road. There was only the sound of Pearl crying, and then a shotgun blast and a series of small arms fire, more screaming−the girls.

Tom looked at Pearl and John but didn’t see them. He listened to the girls screaming but didn’t hear them. He pulled the harmonica from his pocket, and his brain and heart and stomach and lungs just ran and ran into it.

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About mrjames: Mitch was born and raised in Illinois. He now writes from his home in Pennsylvania.