“Semicircles” (fiction)

I was reading back through some old stuff and came across this fragment. It’s a section from a longer piece. The longer story didn’t really come together, but I kind of liked this section. Maybe I’ll build something around it.

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“The fields are dangerous” is what Jimbo thinks he hears his father say. It is one of the times he is left guessing whether the old man is trying to clue him in on the fact that he knows more about his son’s lifestyle than he lets on. Now and then an unexpected clarity surfaces from behind the old man’s ostensible incoherence and flashes of belligerence.

 “Sure,” Jimbo says. He puts the bag of nuts down between the legs of his yellowed lawn chair. He’s seen strays drink from the furrows dug by the chair’s slatted legs, but only a few flies are at the bottom of the dried-out troughs now.

“Not in the dirt.”

Jimbo raises the bag to his lap. He shoots forth a dribble of chalky, dense spit. It joins the similar mounds that make a wide half-moon around the front of the two chairs.

“Hey--” the old man starts before going silent as he takes a massive sip from his beer. It is unclear if he had interrupted himself with the sip or if the sip itself had been the point. He lets out a loud burp.

“Putting ‘em back, huh?”

“Look, Son, I’m not drunk. If I was drunk I’d be going like this.”  He holds up his hand to demonstrate severe tremors.

“Yeah, and if you was really drunk, you’d be going like this,” Jimbo says before shaking his whole body.   

“You’re looking like you’re trying to kill me,” the old man crows. He retrieves the coin and sends it back through the Coke machine. Another cold one comes out as the quarter reappears where it had been. His dad’s rigged Coke machine is a great conversation piece with his friends, though none had seen it.

“Phone! Phone!…Jimbo: phone!”

“I said I’m coming,” he shouts even though he hadn’t said anything. He jogs across the backyard and bounds up the cracked cement steps before throwing the screen door open hard enough to contribute to the dents that mark the house’s faded olive green facade.

“I told you watch it with that,” his mother says in a harsh whisper, taking him by the shoulder with a finger in his face.

Jimbo grunts and takes the phone from where she had left it on the counter. The kitchen smells like sweat and stale smoke.

“Hello,” he says in a now deeper voice.

“Yo, I’m coming around,” the voice on the other end of the receiver says.

“…don’t think anything of shitting it up,” in his auditory periphery Jimbo catches the last snatch of what his mother is saying. She sags as she walks toward the sink.

“Now?” Jimbo says.

“Yeah. Coming around.” 

Jimbo hangs up the phone.

She is saying something about his father to herself. He slows upon hearing this. Most times the old man was agreeable enough if you didn’t get in his way or stop him from drinking.

“Tommy’s coming to get me. We’re going out.”

“Out?” she turns from the small, curtained window above the sink to face him.

“Yeah. Out. With Tommy.”  He brushes past her as he heads for the front door.

She puts her hands to the same thin blond hair she shares with her son and sighs. As he grabs the door handle, he sighs as well, making them seem contagious like yawns.

He adds another dent to the house on his way out, and then pauses to look toward the Coke machine in its cul-de-sac at the end of the driveway. Sometimes his father will take unexpected offense to things like that. Sensing no movement from the Coke machine, he sprints up the dirt driveway, rushing to the ragged edge of its opening.