Dead Handsome
Fifty-seven years ago I killed a boy. Tonight, Euart Monroe walked into my room with a Mossberg 510 and a stained hobo mattress and fired a shot into my belly. It should have killed me right off, but he didn’t want that. He wanted me to know who pulled the trigger.
I could taste the backsplash in my mouth, dripping bile and bowel, and it tasted like bits of wet cabbage.
Calm yourself, Jimmy, she oftentimes said.
Arlene. I can still smell your hair, and it smells like black tea.
Calm yourself….
The clock says 2:45. One more morning added to the four dozen years since she passed.
Look here, I see the crepe myrtle in the backyard, tinted like cherry Popsicles, and the first blush on the garden tomatoes. I can smell the late-spring mint that grows wild beside the porch. I can hear Arlene humming something sweet in the kitchen, a lullaby for no one. I hold on to these things – smells, colors, sounds — for as long as I can, because none of it is real. Reality is the reek of greasy undershirts, the whorl of colored lights on a police car, the damp black gases seeping from my bowels.
The box fan in the window filters the slushy noises from the street, curling the sounds into voices, rhythms, cockeyed conversation. But there’s no one outside, not now, not in Handsome. It’s only white noise sluicing through the blades. There’s no one out there to hear the echoing rip shot from the 510.
Breathe, Jimmy, breathe, think about breathing, think about who you were two minutes ago.
Ordinary Handsome Description:
Fifty-seven years ago, a young man named Euart Monroe came back home. Only two people knew what happened to him.
Years later, the man most responsible for Euart’s fate is paid a visit. But is it a ghost? His own tormented guilt? Or has the boy grown up seeking revenge?
Welcome to Handsome, Oklahoma, population 883 and falling, a place where some men bury their mistakes. It’s a town on the fringe of becoming a ghost.
Jimmy Wheat, small-time thief, has visions of grandeur. With a dying wife and desperate for cash, he pulls one final job that has devastating consequences.
Henry Wasson, third-generation owner of The Handsome Hotel, helps conceal a murder by partnering with the only man who can help him hold onto his business.
Edwin Kowalski, gas station owner, whose paranoia and jealousy takes him to a secret place where he speaks with the dead. And the dead speak back.
And Euart Monroe Wasson, at the center of a tragedy. A young man seeking peace for the deeds of his father only to discover there’s no peace in Handsome… and no escape.
