Paul Einerhand

Buckshot Blue Jeans

Jake sat on the back porch steps wearing only his Fruit of the Loom boxers. He loaded the 12 gauge with buckshot shells. A small boombox played Love Shack by the B-52’s and a crack in the speaker distorted every bass note of the dance song. He didn’t care. It was music about having fun. Something he didn’t remember happening much growing up. It tenporarily releived the madness going on in the house. Jake shivered in the chill of the April morning air. Just back two months from a stint in the Navy, he’d been a lot colder for a lot longer. Colder, as in working on an Aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic loading missiles and other ammunition onto fighter jets. He’d also done ordnance work cleaning up after any explosions while on base.

On the clothesline some thirty feet away hung every pair of blue jeans he owned. Six pair of prewashed Levi’s size 32/32. The sun came out from behind a cloud warming his skin. It felt good to be out in the fresh Spring air. Inside, a stench like rancid cat piss drifted from downstairs. Except no cats lived in the house. The odor came from the basement where his dad Lester and older brother Angus were cooking product. Mom said they’d started a few months before he came home from the Navy.

Jake’s brother had drawn a crazy check since he was 15. Driving Angus home after football practice, Lester was drunk and ran into a tree. Angus suffered a traumatic brain injury. Saturated with guilt Lester put all his energy into tending to Angus. Twelve year-old Jake and his sister Bonnie at thirteen became people who just happened to live in the house. And mom? Well she’d always been her husband’s enabler. In Jake’s mind no sane person lived there except himself.

Bonnie, with her kid from another mister, lived a couple of miles down the road with her old man Goose. His uncle Clyde nicknamed him Goose cause he’d been an unattractive baby. Clyde’s logic made little sense but the nickname stuck. Jake had seen a picture of Goose at six months old. He looked like an old man’s wrinkled pecker. As he approached adolescence Goose had the good fortune to become fairly attractive. Not Brad Pitt handsome, but more like a 6.5 as compared to a negative 10. Goose had a job working at the only Levi Strauss mill in the USA twenty miles down the road in Greensboro. He makes $15.75 an hour to stitch rivets onto 501 jeans.

Bonnie had said “to hell with ya’ll” when her kid was only a few weeks old. The little baby cried a lot from living inside the flammable litter box of a house. His clothes smelled like Morris the cat’s pee. Bonnie told Jake she was throwing herself on the mercy of Goose who’d had a crush on her since elementary school. Jake wondered if Goose was a good fit for her. She said, “I can live with it. At our house I’m going to die.”

Goose let her and the kid move right in. Jake couldn’t blame her. Hell, he slept on the ratty couch here on the back porch most nights. She never owned up to who had fathered little ‘Tater or Tate, but everyone knew he wasn’t Goose’s kid. Jake knew he needed to get his own place, but he’d pissed away most of his money from the Navy. He had $1200 to his name.

Aiming the shotgun just below the knee line Jake shot the left leg of the first pair. The force of the pellets colliding with the jeans knocked them off the line. He shot the left leg of the remaining five pairs. Then he reloaded. Walking out to the clothesline he inspected the holes in his jeans. His mom stormed out the back door of the ramshackle house.

“What in blue blazes do you think you’re doing Jacob Lamar Davis? You’re gonna’ get the law over here shooting up the place in broad daylight. Your daddy will come out here and and wring your neck.”

Jake inspected the second pair of jeans.

“These jeans might be worth a small fortune.”

She put her hands on her hips. “What do you mean? You going to take off again. What, just leave out like your sister did? That hussy won’t ever bring my grandson down here.”

Jake frowned at her. “Are you serious. You’re not fit to be a grandparent as long you let dad and Angus stay down there cooking shitty meth. The only reason the hillbilly mafia hasn’t come over here and killed us all is cause their product sucks. If they ever figure out how to do it right they won’t last a week.”

She sighed. “What are you shooting your jeans for?”

“Well Mom,” he said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “It’s 1990 and folks don’t want just any old jeans now a days. I heard on the radio people would pay up to $150 a pair for jeans with holes in them. Especially the legs. So I’m trying an experiment. Goose said he could get me some seconds from the mill if I could sell these. Then we’d split the profit. Hell even if I sold just mine right here I’d make almost 500 bucks.”

She laughed. “Sounds pretty far-fetched to me. And what are you going to wear…if you do sell those jeans don’t let your daddy find out. He’ll want to take that money. He thinks you should be paying rent. You got money still from the Navy don’t you?”

Jake shrugged and pointed the shotgun at the house. “If he does it will be over my dead body. And it ain’t no more far-fetched as you say then people paying $50 a gram to snort shit that burns a hole into their brain.“

She started back to the house but I’ve slipped. “I know I should’ve put my foot down more often, especially when you and Bonnie were younger. But I did take up for you and got the bruises to prove it. As ya’ll got older I just learned to shut up and prayed you’d get out of here.”

She kicked at a weed in the grass. “If you remember, I’m the one who got the recruiter to move up your enlistment date. And of all the places you could go after the Navy you came back here.” She headed to the house. Jake snorted. “Yeah that’s true, but big shit. Way too little too late.”

Mom shook her head and went inside. Jake re-hung each pair of jeans on the clothesline and wrapped up the leg he’d already shot. Then he attached the pants leg with a clothespin to the line. “Why the hell did I come back here? That’s a mystery I guess… maybe there’s no place like home no matter how fucked up it is.”

Monday he walked onto the construction site of a planned community near Greensboro. A buddy from high school he’d run into told him his uncle was a foreman on that site. Said they’d been looking for a backhoe operator. They hired Jake on the spot for $12.50 an hour.

Within a couple of weeks he’d received orders for twenty-one pairs of his buckshot blue jeans. Most came from executives who saw the two pair the foreman bought. He took a $25 deposit for each pair and bought the jean sizes from Goose for $10 a pair. Goose got ten bucks each for his trouble. Jake used the rest to buy buckshot shells. Setting up an assembly line at Goose’s trailer made sense. He didn’t want mom or the idiots in the basement to know how well his little business was going.

He went back to blowing holes in the jeans at Goose’s. He’d gotten a solid routine going for making and getting to the buyer with 4–5 days. In the distance towards the house he saw black smoke. A few moments later his mom walked around the corner of the trailer sobbing.

“What is it mom?”

She sat in a flimsy lawn chair. “They…they blew up the house. They’re both dead.”

“Who blew up the house mom…dad and Angus?”

She shook her head. “No these three men in a big truck busted in and locked them in the basement. They threw me out and told me to walk or they’d slit my throat. I saw some sticks of dynamite in their back pockets. I’d walked for couple of minutes and then heard this huge boom. I could see flames. Then they drove past me out of sight.”

Jake put his arm on her shoulder. Did you see any of them… what they looked like?” She shook her head then dropped it into her hands.

“No they had masks up to their eyes and ball caps on their heads. It all happened so fast.” She looked at the jeans hanging on the makeshift clothesline. “One of them had on a pair of jeans with holes in them.”

He stood up. “Shit! I knew if dad and Angus kept cooking they’d blow themselves up. That’s what happened mom. When you get asked by Johnny Law what happened…they blew themselves up. That’s got to be the story. Do you understand? You were getting the mail out of the mail box.”

She nodded once as she got last in the grass sprouting on the ground beneath her feet. Jake walked her to the back door of the trailer. Bonnie frowned when she opened the door. “Look when Goose gets home tell him to stay here with ya’ll till I get back.”

He jumped in his truck and hauled ass down the road towards the house. Yep. Pretty much burnt to the ground. He walked around looking at the smoldering mess. No debris blown out in the yard. He’d seen enough of the aftermath from explosives to know there hadn’t been any dynamite explosion here. An empty gas container set partially melted near what remained of the steps to the basement. He checked the shed where the lawnmower was stored. No sign of the gas container.

Jake grabbed a pair of his jeans from the truck. He tiptoed to the melting gas canister. Wrapping the blue jeans around it he hurried to the bed of his truck and set the jeans and container down. Looking out at the road he wondered if the Volunteer Fire Department would even show up. And insurance? He doubted the place was covered any more.

He drove towards town. As he approached Goose’s trailer he saw mom sitting on the tiny front porch. Pulling his truck up in the yard as she smoked a cigarette.

“I thought you gave those up years ago.”

She stared a hole through him back down the road. “Well, son, I decided today’s the day I start back. Start living rather than dying.”

He got out of the truck and sat next to her. “I put that gas container in my truck bed. I’m going to take it into town and bury it in a dumpster.”

She took his hand. “I guess in all the turmoil, I imagined I saw those men. Your dad and Angus blew themselves up. All that flammable stuff they had down there.”

Jake squeezed her hand. “Yeah Mom… they made their choice…and you finally made yours.”

© 2021 Paul S. Markle All Rights Reserved