Cousin Mose

We arrive at Mose’s trailer. He’s sitting on the collapsing front steps in the mid-morning sun, smoking a cigarette. Amber says, almost mocking me, “Mose, your cousin here, or your brother, or however you two are related, wants to get you clean and take you from all this!” With that she makes a grand sweeping gesture with her left hand and spins in a half circle, like an angry ballerina.

I’m pissed off, she’s mocking me. Mose was my best friend as a boy. That whole life was blocked out to me. Maybe it was drugs, maybe it was trauma, maybe it was some complex mechanism of self-preservation. It’s all coming back to me, it is ALL coming back, in continuous terrifying flashes.

As Mose looks on, I say to Amber, “Mose and I would sit alone together, out back of the church, close enough to Margot’s cottage to throw a rock and break a window. We did break a few panes of that old witch’s glass. We’d sit on those wet steps and throw stones the hundred feet, or so, until we heard the glass shatter, then we’d run inside. Sometimes we’d cry, Amber, and sometimes we’d fight each other, bloody, to hide our shame and hurt. One time, we were ten or eleven years old, right before Jimmy went away, and I finally left this hill for good. We made a pact. We tried to kill ourselves, slitting our wrists. We failed. We were found bleeding out back of that church and taken to the basement and beaten. You remember that, Mose?”

He looks down at his dirty and worn out sneakers and answers, “Yeah, James, I remember all that and more. I remember it all. But, I ain’t got no life left in me, James. This here is all I got and all I guess I need, and all I deserve. You got out. I died here a long time ago. There ain’t no savin’ me from this, James, there ain’t no life for me other than this right here.”

He opens the trailer door, it creaks and groans and we follow him into the small, dirty kitchen and we all sit at the debris covered table.

“I tried to get clean once.” He says, looking at both Amber and I. “I even had a job.”

Amber looks at me and smirks, an ‘I told you this was coming,’ look on her face.

Mose rises to his shaky feet. “Yeah, man, it was fuckin’ hell on this earth. I did some rehab, that was back when I was on the heroin. The state jacked me up on methadone. That was nothin’ but heroin the state gave you. Better than the state police arrestin’ yer ass, and lockin’ you up to jones it out, I guess. Methadone was some ugly shit. It blocked the cravin’ fer dope but gave you a weird high. So, they sent me off to do this counselin’ crap. Bunch of horseshit was what it was.”

Mose sneers at Amber and continues.

“I went fer that shit about a month, I guess, and they’s all fuckin’ excited up and happy that I was ‘clean.’ Mind you, I wasn’t clean. That shit is worse than dope.

“They get me a job, a real job in a factory. That one down in the village that made the truck parts. That big fuckin’ huge building, down by the river, all dilapidated now. All they made was that one goddamn stupid part.

“The boss there; the only thing that son-of-a-bitch gave a shit about was the fuckin’ line. Me and about twenty-five other junkies got those shit jobs on that line. A big long rollin’ belt, looked to be half-mile long, loaded full with them fuckin’ stupid parts. I had to pick every fourth part and put it into a box. Not the third part, not the fifth. I was number four. That’s what that fucker called me, too. He never once called me ‘Mose,’ only ‘number four.’ I put the box with the one part in another bigger box. When that box was full, I put the full box on a pallet. When the pallets was stacked fifteen tiers of boxes high, I’d call for a boy in the forklift to come take it away. Then another boy would come with a new pallet. All the while I just took every fourth fuckin’ part off that belt. Not every third or fifth, every fuckin’ fourth part. And I had to do the stackin’ without missin’ my part comin’ down the belt.

“The fuckin’ boss yellin’ ‘eyes ahead’ and ‘both hands!’ And every two hours, like he was some kind of god ‘er some shit, the motherfucker would yell, ‘break, fifteen minutes.” Then I had fifteen minutes to piss and wash that grease off my hands from them fuckin’ dirty parts, drink a cup of shit coffee, light a smoke and get back to the fuckin’ line.

“It wasn’t even fit fer a human. A fuckin’ trained monkey would a quit that shit! It was hotter than fryin’ fuck in that shithole and that son-of-a-bitch tellin’ me when I could go piss and eat my sandwich. One day I went and had to piss my pants, because he wouldn’t let me off the line to go piss off the dock where the trucks was backed up, like a civilized human.

“After about five days of this, he was standin’ out on the loading dock, acting like all king-god and shit, smokin’ a smoke and talkin’ shit to the big-titted blond girl from the front office. Five days of the workin’ life and bein’ clean and I had enough. I told the boy on the line next to me I was either goin’ to kill that motherfucker or burn that whole goddam parts factory to ashes, with every poor bastard on that line with it. Dead had to be better for all us than that fuckin’ line.

“I saw a forklift sittin’ without a boy in the seat. I jumped on it and started it up. I jammed the gas pedal on the little propane truck and rammed that fork right into the foreman’s chest, while the blonde with the big tits jumped out the way. I runned that fork into him like a goddamn shush-kabob. I pushed his dead ass off the loadin’ dock, still on the fork, and the lift-truck kept going over the side. Big crash, and that asshole was good and dead. I jumped off the fork truck and started runnin’ from that goddamn place and never stopped, and that was my entire time clean, sober and workin’.

“The state police come to the trailers after a week and found me and asked a bunch of questions and I said I wanted to show the boss I could work the fork-truck and get a promotion. But it turned out bad, and I was real sorry for the horrible accident. Truth be told, James, I had a big ol’ hard dick watchin’ that bastard lay there cut damn near in two with that big yellow machine squeezin’ what’s left of his guts out.”

Mose says, “I want to get clean, James, sure as fuck I do. I ain’t never been clean, expect for that week where I killed the foreman. We was set dirty as boys and we always been dirty. The way I figured it we was made to be this way and there weren’t any reason to try to be much else.