Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 1.

Boys who eat their corn.

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Part One. The world and all the ways it might end.

Chapter 1. Boys who eat their corn.

In Marshall’s army surplus backpack is a very specific array of items organized to maximum efficiency. Dusted blue on the outside and incredibly compact with twenty visible pockets, ten hidden pockets and six carabiner loops, one might not be able to predict that the backpack weighs fifty pounds and contains everything that a person might need for any possible situation that might ever arise. From top to bottom, Marshall’s backpack contains the following: one airtight thermos, three granola bars, twenty packaged MREs, one fire blanket, one normal blanket, a pair of sneakers, crampons and a harness and rope for climbing, one Life Straw, a small metal pot for cooking over a fire, a transmitter radio, two sets of walkie talkies, a notepad and pencil, a hunting knife, a paring knife, a portable battery, five bags of instant oats, two cans of black beans, one densely packed bag of almost stale coffee beans, and a flask of whisky.

Though Marshall wouldn’t appreciate being called a doomsday prepper–a weighty label too closely attached to wealthy Republicans–he would agree that he is prepared for the day of doom. The only thing Marshall does not carry that most would say is an essential survival tool is a gun. Now, he does agree that its use in the face of sudden apocalyptica is without doubt, but he’s also locked onto the news every time some white kid with unwashed hair who looks uncannily like Marshall at sixteen unleashes metal death on a school full of children. It’s the ease of the weapon’s potential. Just a single finger between him and a person’s exploding meat. He does worry sometimes that if the universe decides to go down the zombie route it will be harder to deliver a killing blow to the zombie head without a bullet but he’s willing to take his chances on that undead bridge when it comes time to cross it.

Despite his outward appearance and the backpack full of preparations that rests against the taut muscles of his back and shoulders, Marshall does not necessarily plan on surviving the end of the world when it inevitably arrives. He has the skills for it, the materials and all of the know-how for any situation that might arise from nuclear warfare to climate collapse to deadly pathogen but it does not interest him to live in a world that is void of life and rampant with violence. The one he’s in now is already straddling that line.

It’s pure indifference. Marshall simply does not care if he lives or dies but if he lives—which is likely given his intuitive know-how and the aforementioned preparation—then apparently that is just what is supposed to happen. But he does fantasize, with a certain level of grandeur and high romanticism, that he will find someone worth saving with his backpack when the time comes. Something worth living for.

Marshall is walking along the shoulder of the highway with his hands firmly gripping the straps of his backpack. Late summer in north Georgia is a behemoth and the sun is beating down on the wide-brimmed straw hat atop his head. Sweat pools around his lower back where a worn belt cinches his waist, pressing red lines into his supple skin. His underwear seems to have gone missing. He’s wearing white carpenter pants stained with years old paint splatters and a big denim button down tucked into the waistband, collar turned all the way up to hide the bruises at the base of his neck.

Last night, Marshall kissed a girl he had not wanted to kiss while the person he actually wanted to kiss watched with a look of troubled apathy. This was a situation that he had both brought upon himself and had not prepared for and so the only way he could think to get out of it was to pull the girl into a dark room and have sex with her while thinking about the person he actually wanted to be inside of. He realizes now in sober daylight that this was not the correct way to handle the situation.

The girl that he had sex with who left these bruises peppered across his neck and chest is named Lana—just Lana after shedding her surname a few years back like a beetle molting its shell. She lives by herself in her crumbling house in the woods that even her own family had been eager to leave, either physically or spiritually, where she regularly hosts the sort of party that had culminated in their dissociative sex.

Marshall had been attracted to her in high school when she still took care of herself and her hair glowed gold like sun soaked honey. After dropping out of public school at sixteen, she’d gotten hooked on a good variety of drugs that have worn her down over the course of six years into a walking specter, incredibly thin, eyes and cheeks slowly sinking back into her head like a Capri Sun pouch being drained. She throws parties out at her house in the woods about once a month hoping to score some drugs for free or have some sex for money. She hadn’t expected Marshall to pay for her though and he hadn’t had anything to leave for her anyway. He imagined they were both thinking about different people when he came on her back.

Marshall drinks but he’s always strayed from drugs on principle, leaving that particular vice to his mother. The only reason he’s still going to these hopeless parties at the age of twenty two is in hopes that he will run into the person he actually wants to kiss. Of course, he did run into that person last night but the thought of actually touching them was more terrifying than the satisfaction it would bring so he’d had sex with Just Lana instead. By the time they’d clothed themselves and slinked back out to the party, his unrequited love had already left. Did that mean something?

He's having a hard time putting it all together with the vicious hangover beating against his forehead like a landlord on the verge of eviction, and this kid has been following him for a couple miles now which is starting to piss him off. Even with the cars roaring past on rattling frames and the cicadas screaming their discordant August tune, Marshall can hear the kid pushing through the weeds, freshly dead leaves crunching beneath his carelessly placed feet, the sound pelting his back like little bugs digging welts into his skin.

Marshall ducks suddenly off the shoulder and down what would not look like a path to anyone but him and only because it’s the same path he follows home after each rager at Lana’s. Sometimes he rides his bike to Just Lana’s place, but only if he knows he won’t be drinking–still a DUI–and anyway his bike chain broke last week and he still needs to steal the parts from the hardware store that are needed to fix it.

He hopes that by following this haphazard path through the wood and weed he’ll be able to lose his tail but the kid manages to keep up somehow. Marshall’s shoulders are relaxed with his hands buried deep in his empty pockets. He’s not walking any faster than he normally would but is confidently using the back of his wide head as a billboard announcing fuck you, and stop following me to little effect. Marshall would rather be thinking about kissing soft, healthy lips or making a very big sandwich but all he can hear is this kid’s misplaced footsteps stomping in perfect time with the throbbing in his head.

He's just at the edge of the woods where poorly kept nature turns to poorly kept trailer park when he finally gives in and turns on the heels of his boots with a hand on his hip and calls out, “Hey!”

The underbrush scurrying comes to a sudden halt but Marshall can see the glint of sun off of cold metal, clear as day. Not a weapon, but something big and blunt.

“You’re not very good at following me and I am incapable of hurting children so please come out or go away.”

The body hidden in the leaves shifts slightly and lets out a huff. “I’m not a child.”

“Prove it,” Marshall says.

A child emerges from the brush. He can’t be older than twelve.

“I’m twelve,” he says, chest puffed up like a rooster.

“Okay twelve year old adult, why are you following me?” Marshall asks. His shoulders have only further relaxed though he’s still putting on a bit of grand bravado. There’s a knife in another pocket he won’t be reaching for.

The kid mimics Marshall’s stance in an attempt to measure up but Marshall is six foot three and the kid hardly reaches his waist. Despite the mean look he’s putting on, his soft, round face betrays him. He’s wearing a tarnished metal pot on his head like one of those raccoon fur caps with the pot’s black handle in place of a tail. It’s too small for his wide noggin and the sun sears his dark skin, presses his darker eyes into a reluctant squint. He’s wearing an oversized Scooby-Doo tee and there’s a torn out hole where Velma’s face should be.

“You look like you know how to do stuff,” the kid says with all the bravado he can muster.

“Sure,” Marshall says. “I’m real good at things.”

Someone, one of Marshall’s fuckass neighbors, is playing Bruce Springsteen loud enough that his sexy voice is crawling through the gaps in the trees. If it’s anyone but his neighbor Trish–and it’s unlikely to be Trish because she’d never listen to music this loudly, polite lady that she is–then they’re probably the type to be willfully overlooking Mr. Springsteen’s intentional satire of patriotic masculinity in order to fuel their own nationalism and self-obsessed sense of manhood. Which Marshall finds disrespectful, obviously. 

The kid is staring at him through the tiny slits of his squinting, eyes like raisins. 

Marshall widens his gaze. “I said I’m real good at things. What do you need, kid?”

He spits out the corner of his mouth. “Need you to kill my pa.”

Marshall spits too. “Well, come on then. And don’t open your mouth again until we’re inside, got it?”

The kid nods and so Marshall turns and walks past the forest line and into the trailer park. He’s always wondered why they call them parks when there really ain’t nothing park-like about them. Almost every trailer sits on cinder blocks, rusted to the point of losing whatever color it might have once possessed. The dirt paths are lined with litter and beer cans, weeds running rampant in every yard and not even the pretty, useful weeds that yield fanciful wildflowers, just the kind that conceal pathogen-drunk tics and mosquitos that swarm when it rains and all the ditches and divots in the uneven road get swampy.

It’s his neighbor Truck Willis playing Mr. Springsteen. His daddy named him Truck because he likes trucks. It’s him and his daddy and his daddy’s daddy and their confederate flag from Amazon.com hanging off their awning, the symbol of a war none of them fought in or went to school to learn about. All three generations of Willis men are seated beneath their tattered awning sipping on beers and saying nothing in particular. They don’t look at one another or speak, only scratch and sniff their balls every so often. All three of them would be dead if only someone would ask for it.

He slows as he passes so the kid can catch up and he can shield his small black boy frame with his own white bulk but he pays Truck and the decrepit chain smoking men no mind and they hold their tongues about him.

Born in the USA! Bruce belts.

And you’ll die here, too, with only the company of other men, Marshall thinks but he doesn’t say it out loud because they’re all thinking it.

Marshall’s trailer home is shittier than most but it is the place that he lives. Rusted gray on the outside, at one point Marshall’s mom had it decked out in salvaged neon signs for various beer brands and at several other points Marshall’s father broke most of those signs with a baseball bat or the occasional fist. There are still bits of that plasticky glass bedazzling the weeds like angular blooms. 

Inside is dark and small and smells like cigarettes, the nubby little butts unceremoniously scattered on the end table where his mother slumps in the evenings. Marshall only partakes in nicotine when no one wants to fuck him–the phallic metaphors and so on. There’s hardly room for more than a row of counterspace, a couch and a TV. Ma loves her TV so Marshall lets her have it even though it’s too loud for him to sleep on the nights that she actually comes home and they can’t really afford cable. 

Today the trailer is empty. There are two wrinkled dollar bills and a loaf of sad, deflated looking bread on the counter. The kid sits on the worn couch covered in scratches from whatever animal had dished enough damage to make its previous owner leave the old thing on the sidewalk down the street. Marshall had carried it home with his father a long time ago in a different summer heat.

“You want a beer?” Marshall hangs over the fridge, airing out his pits.

“I’m thirteen,” the kid replies.

Marshall raises an eyebrow like OK, and? but the kid gets weird so he cracks a single cold one for himself. There’s nothing else in the fridge. He leans against the counter, still maintaining some distance. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Beaver.”

“Who the hell calls you that?”

“Everyone.” He shrugs and pulls back his upper lip revealing two pearly white buck teeth like gleaming blank billboards dwarfing the rest of his baby teeth. 

“Jesus Christ,” Marshall mutters. “Alright, Beaver, is it okay if I call you John?” Beaver shrugs again. “Alright, John, how the hell did you hear about me?”

He adjusts the pot resting on his head though Marshall can’t puzzle out why he’s still got it on inside. “Well, my mama heard about you from one of her girlfriends at the nail salon and she told me what you do so she could explain why I’m supposed to stay away from you but I think she wanted me to come to you anyway on account of she wants my pa to be dead.”

That’s the most that little John Beaver has spoken up so far and so Marshall takes a considerable amount of time to sit with those words and sip on his beer and then he says, “Tell your ma to stop talking about my shit at the salon or I won’t be able to do my shit at all.” He pauses and strokes his chin thoughtfully. “Or, instead of doing my shit, tell her I’ll be taking a shit in prison. Yeah, that’s better. Stop talking about my shit or I’ll be taking a shit in prison. Tell your ma that.”

Beaver nods.

“Good man. Now before I do anything, I gotta know how bad is your pa, really? God honest.”

John Beaver hesitates slightly and then takes the pot off of his head. The beer in Marshall’s stomach threatens to rise back up his throat and add more filth to the unkept trailer. He nods and Beaver puts his pot back to cover his scalp.

“Alright, I’ll kill your pa,” Marshall says.

---

When Marshall asks if John Beaver feels safe going home tonight, the kid just shrugs again like his shoulders were made for the constant motion of indifference, so Marshall tells him he can stay in the trailer tonight and they can reassess tomorrow after he’s killed Beaver’s pa. It’s a quick turnaround on the murder request but Marshall prefers not to dwell on the logistics. Sitting with it for too long makes him start to feel things.

Marshall puts on the Sopranos for Beaver to watch while he runs to the corner store for some food. He tells the kid to stay put, then double and triple locks the door behind him, eyeing Truck Willis carefully as he ties up his sneakers snug and tight and jogs away, backpack bobbing rhythmically as a countdown clock against the taut muscles of his back.

The corner store is right around the corner which makes it both a corner store and a convenience store, though corner is fixed and convenience is subjective so Marshall adheres to the universality of the corner. He has the two dollars from the kitchen table and a handful of change tucked into his back pocket that he has to stretch into dinner for two. There’s also that probably stale bread back at the trailer. He’s made more from less. 

He’s both hopeful and hopeless that he will/won’t see the person he doesn’t want to not see. But of course he’s there. He always is.

Jamie’s family who owns the Quik-Mart will often (and loudly) tell others that they only had children to breed employees into existence that they would not have to pay and they usually pose this as a funny and practical notion. Any array of Jamie and his five siblings might be running the store on any given day but today it’s just Jamie at the register and Isadora stocking the fridges with chunky headphones clasped over her ears.

Marshall nods at Jamie when he walks in and the boy’s eyes go wide with a primal sort of fear. Marshall shifts the collar of his shirt again and feels the pinch of the bruises beneath. 

Dora is three minutes younger than Jamie, quiet and stoic like her brother but in a cool, indifferent way, whereas Jamie is selectively mute and prone to standing in corners looking like a wilting wallflower resigned to its neglect. Dora returns Marshall’s nod with a casual ease, or she’s just bouncing her head to music only she can hear. It’s cool either way.

Marshall walks the aisles with intent. Ham, cheese, mustard gathered in the crook of his arm. Bottled water because the trailer’s tap can’t be trusted. Eggs for the morning.

“Hey,” Marshall says, placing his items on the scratched up counter. Two televisions hover over Jamie’s head, one showing four different live CCTV angles of the store, the other playing the news without sound. Marshall peers up at the news, unable to meet Jamie’s eyes and see the confusion in them that he’d also avoided the night before. Today, an oil pipeline has burst and is leaking thousands of gallons of oil into a river on federally protected lands. The tiny strip at the bottom of the screen lists stock prices that have gone up and down next to a barely legible title card announcing a mass shooting at an abortion clinic.

In the CCTV footage, Marshall sees his own face seeing his own face. His hair so brown it could be black, long enough that it is beginning to curl around his ears. The grainy height of his forehead. His wide mouth and broad nose. And of course, the sheer size of him. Tall and wide and imposing even in his chosen meekness. He tries his best to keep his shoulders slumped, pulls his limbs close to his body in order to appear smaller and still he towers over the transaction, taking up much of the screen.

Given a few moments to gather himself, Jamie is finally capable of nodding, though it is a troubled nod. For most of his life, Jamie had sported an untamed bush of dark wiry hair but had recently taken to buzzing it to the scalp and Marshall is still getting used to the sheer amount of skin, nakedness that he can now observe on a boy who’s nakedness is otherwise left to the imagination. Where he used to hide behind falling curls like a shroud of smoke, Jamie now relies on thick brows and dark lashes to mask the well of inaccessible emotions that is constantly bubbling up in his leather brown eyes. He looks down to scan the items and all Marshall can see is his big, wide nose, dark scalp stubble and lips parting and closing in an attempt to form words or maybe just for the stimulation of lips pressing together and pulling apart. Even in utter distress, Marshall still finds Jamie desperately handsome.

When he looks back up, Marshall can practically see in his sharp black pools the image of the night before when he looked over Lana’s bony shoulder and locked eyes with Jamie while the drug-addled girl sucked on his tongue like a hard candy. They can both see it now and it’s awkward like it’s still happening though Marshall’s tongue is desperately dry and unsucked currently. And so, like emotionally immature men do, they become bottles for themselves for a few moments. Look away.

The total comes to $14.63. Marshall begins counting out his change on the counter but Jamie just takes the two weathered bills and pushes everything else back toward Marshall. This isn’t nearly the first time they’ve danced this financial kindness rodeo and so Marshall is only a little embarrassed. 

“Thanks,” he says to the worn countertop, spooning the items into the shallow space at the top of his backpack..

He’s pushing through the door with a hard shoulder when Jamie mumbles a discreet, “Later.”

Marshall doesn’t turn around because it’s enough to turn his cheeks red with desire.

Out the corner store, he pushes through to the adjacent hardware store, walks up and down each aisle and though his pace never slows and his hands never leave his pockets he somehow walks out with the exact part that he needs to fix his bicycle tucked away inconspicuously in a pocket inside another pocket in his backpack. Waves a sweet hello-goodbye to Bette at the registers but she’s busy on her phone.

---

The cat is scratching at the door when he returns and the Willis men haven’t moved. He opens the door and Lump enters slowly, cautiously, as though she actually had no idea where she was begging for entry to.

John Beaver has his legs pulled all the way up to his chest and seems to have shrunk beneath his hat. He realizes the clawing at the door had just been a fat cat and relaxes. “Thought it was a raccoon,” he says. “Or a gator.”

Marshall eyes him. “A gator? Boy, do you even know where we live?”

“Ma says gators get bored and like to go places and that they eat twelve year old boys who don’t eat their corn.”

Marshall cracks open another beer and begins assembling crude sandwiches with what he’s got. “I think we both know you’re too smart for that, John.”

“I am. About the corn stuff at least. I really thought maybe they get bored and go walking.”

“Not up here they don’t.” He wonders if he’ll have to kill the mom too. He doesn’t like killing women but sometimes they suck too and maybe that’s what feminism is all about. Killing women for the right reasons.

They eat while watching Jeopardy! If Beaver notices the stiffness of the bread, he doesn’t complain. They don’t talk, just watch and learn while Lump finds things to knock over.

When Marshall’s mom stumbles through the door at 9:36pm with a beer in her hand, she doesn’t say anything either, just watches them through a hazy film draped over her eyes. Her lips are cracked and unmoving but he knows what she’s saying anyway. Silence is its own kind of language.

“Come on.” Marshall stands and takes Beaver’s hand. “You can sleep in the bed with me.”

Elaine does not question her son or the little black boy with the pot on his head, but falls to the couch the moment they’ve moved and begins giggling at Alex Trebek for some reason. Nothing funny to Marshall about that man’s legacy.

Beaver is tired but Marshall makes him brush his teeth anyway. One falls out in the sink, small and white, glistening like a pearl in the dirty basin. Beaver’s never heard of the tooth fairy and Marshall doesn’t have enough money to put under his pillow so he tosses it into the trash can with the naked toilet paper tubes and hair clippings.

Marshall changes into his sleep clothes and the kid stares. He pays John Beaver little mind. Kids are just like that. And Marshall knows he’s a big guy which often attracts a gawking sort of attention. People don’t know what to make of his hulking figure and quiet, to the point demeanor.

The bedroom is more bed than room. Just a big mattress that lives above the back wheels with a plastic door that crinkles and screams when you slide it closed. Even with the door locked into place, the TV still roars in the living room. Marshall offers Beaver a beanie so that he doesn’t have to sleep with a pot on his head and the kid accepts. The hat drowns his small skull but he doesn’t seem to mind.

In the dark, in the relative quiet, laid out in the place that will lull them to sleep, Beaver finally gathers the courage to ask the question that often falls from the lips of people in need of Marshall’s services. “You really kill people?”

“Yup,” Marshall says.

“Why?”

“Because they hurt their kids and someone asks me to do it.”

“Only if they ask?”

“Mhm.” He fiddles with the hem of his shirt under the covers. “They gotta be a bad parent and someone’s gotta want them dead. Only way that it works.”

Beaver is stoic. “So my mama wasn’t lying? You really killed your own daddy?”

“Because my mama asked me to,” he says in a rehearsed manner, the same way he’s answered the question a dozen times before.

Beaver shifts in the dark. Elaine giggles again and can’t seem to stop. Marshall can tell that Beaver isn’t scared. Just curious. He answers honestly because he thinks it’s good for kids to be curious about stuff.

“Would you kill your mama, too?” Beaver asks.

Elaine’s giggles morph into a cackle, then cut off as suddenly as they started and he knows she’s finally fallen asleep.

“Nah,” he says. “She never hurts nobody. She’s crazy but nobody wants her dead.”

Beaver’s thinking is loud, the little gears in his prepubescent head not yet knowing that it's best to keep your stuff quiet. And then he says, “My ma is like her. I don’t want her dead neither but sometimes I think she wants it. Like she might be better off.”

The flashing lights of the television creep under the sliding door. Marshall watches the ceiling and wonders when the day will come that asteroids rain down and punch holes into the roof so he can finally see the stars splayed out above like a living tapestry.

“I don’t do it like that, Little John. Just not how it works.”

“I know,” Beaver says. “I just think about it sometimes.”

“You’ve got a big mind, my friend. I hope someday you can use it to think about easier stuff.”

He yawns and turns over. “Me too.” And just like that, he falls asleep, so instantly with the weight of death on his mind, gone in a moment the way only a kid or an addict can manage.

Marshall barely sleeps at all waiting for the end to come.

end up like a dog that’s been beat too much / ‘til you spend half your life just covering up

Next chapter.

Table of Contents.

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