The White Road-CP-4 Read Free

leather enema to his burdens. He could take a leak by the side of the road farther on down the way; but the more he thought about it the more he wanted to go now. He could feel it burning inside of him: if he waited any longer…
    Well, hell, he wasn’t going to wait. He pulled down his zipper, reached inside his pants, and waddled over to the side wall of Little Tom’s Tavern just in time to sign his name, which was about as far as Virgil’s education extended. He breathed out deeply as the pressure eased and his eyes fluttered closed in a brief ecstasy.
    Something cold touched him behind his left ear and his eyes quickly opened wide again. He didn’t move. His attention was focused on the feel of the metal on his skin, the sound of liquid on wood and stone, and the presence of a large figure behind his back. Then the voice spoke:
    “I’m warnin’ you, cracker: you get one drop of your sorry-ass piss on my shoes and they gonna be fittin’ you up for a new skull before they put you in that box.”
    Virgil gulped.
    “I can’t stop it.”
    “I ain’t askin’ you to stop. I’m ain’t askin’ you nothin’. I am tellin’ you: do not get one drop of your rotgut urine on my shoes.”
    Virgil let out a little sob and tried to move the flow to the right. He’d only had three beers but it seemed like he was peeing out the Mississippi. Please stop, he thought. He glanced a little to his left and saw a black gun held in a black hand. The hand emerged from a black coat sleeve. At the end of the black coat sleeve was a black shoulder, a black lapel, a black shirt, and the edge of a black face.
    The gun nudged his skull hard, warning him to keep his eyes straight ahead, but Virgil still felt a sudden rush of indignation. It was a nigger with a gun, in the parking lot of Little Tom’s Tavern. There weren’t too many subjects upon which Virgil Gossard had strong, fully formed opinions, but one of them was niggers with guns. The whole trouble with this country wasn’t that there were too many guns, it was that too many of those guns were in the hands of the wrong people, and absolutely and positively the wrong people to be carrying guns were niggers. The way Virgil figured it, white people needed guns to protect themselves from all the niggers with guns while all the niggers had guns to shoot other niggers with and, when the mood took them, white folks too. So the solution was to take away the guns from the niggers and then you’d have fewer white folks with guns because they wouldn’t have so much to be scared about, plus there’d be fewer niggers shooting other niggers so there’d be less crime too. It was that simple: niggers were the wrong people to be handing out guns to. Now, near as Virgil could figure it, one of those selfsame wrong people was currently pressing one of those misplaced guns into Virgil’s skull, and Virgil didn’t like it one little bit. It just proved his point. Niggers shouldn’t have guns and—
    The gun in question tapped Virgil hard behind the ear and the voice said:
    “Hey, you know you talkin’ out loud, right?”
    “Shit,” said Virgil, and this time he heard himself.

    The first of the cars turns into the field and pulls up, its headlights shining on the old oak so that its shadow grows and creeps up the slope behind it like dark blood spilling and spreading itself across the land. A man climbs out on the driver’s side then walks around the front of the car and opens the door for the woman. They are both in their forties, hard-faced people wearing cheap clothes and shoes that have been mended so often that the original leather is little more than a faded memory glimpsed through patches and stitching. The man takes a straw basket from the trunk, a faded red check napkin carefully tucked in to cover its contents. He hands the basket to the woman, then retrieves a tattered bedsheet from behind the spare tire and spreads it on the ground. The woman sits, tucking her legs in beneath