Grit, Black, Blood, page 1
Advanced Praise
GRIT, BLACK, BLOOD
by Ashley Erwin
“The long awaited epic southern fried fatalistic myth, Grit, Black, Blood, is a Greek tragedy soaked in moonshine and Crisco. Ashley Erwin is one of crime fiction’s most authentic voices.”
—S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of Razorblade Tears
“Grit, Black, Blood comes out of the gate hard and fast and with every intention of taking no prisoners. Told in a unique and kinetic prose, Ashley Erwin writes like how Barry Hannah said William Faulkner wrote—all horns blaring at once. Readers of death-defying sly noir written by the likes of writers like Frank Bill and Bruce Holbert will be eager to get whiskey drunk on this novel of violence and cunning.”
—Charles Dodd White, author of A Year Without Months
“Ashley Erwin is the Queen of grit lit, busting a bottle upside your head and pressing a blade to your jugular with her poetic vernacular that cuts deep into the human condition, peeling back the layers of tough-as-boot-leather-lives surviving within the chewed up rural landscape of Grit, Black, Blood, where devilish deeds are as common as the air we breathe and vengeance is another word for family, so twist off the cap of some smooth Kentucky bourbon, pour a few fingers, take a deep inhale and pony up for one helluva story.”
—Frank Bill, author of The Savage
“Ashley Erwin is doing for Kentucky what John D. MacDonald did for Florida and Flannery O’Connor did for Georgia. She speaks the vernacular of the land—of Dairy Marts, cornfields, knife fights, and coal mines. The characters in Grit, Black, Blood are as off-the-wall as th
ey come, yet as authentic and raw as any I’ve read in a novel. If you’re a fan of Southern crime fiction, you need to buy this book”
—C.W. Blackwell, author of Hard Mountain Clay
“Ashley Erwin writes with the rage and fury of a Tarantino film on the pages of a Tom Franklin novel. Grit, Black, Blood kicks you in the gut, walks a mud hole through you, and keeps you turning pages. Don’t miss out on this book!”
—Mark Westmoreland, author of A Violent Gospel
GRIT, BLACK, BLOOD
Text copyright © 2022 ASHLEY ERWIN
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Shotgun Honey Books
215 Loma Road
Charleston, WV 25314
www.ShotgunHoney.com
Cover by Bad Fido.
First Printing 2022.
ISBN-10: 1-956957-15-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-956957-15-0
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 171
For the Hitman of Hazard and all ‘em other Erwins
making up that tree in Carter County;
for Nanny, and those we’ve lost;
for Gary, the one on the other side of the page,
I hope ya hear my voice, it’s ya I’m always talking to,
and for The Man, ain’t nothing worth doing less yar by my side,
and finally for Edna, as much as there’s bits of ‘em in me,
there’s a helleva lot ya there too, all my love, firecracker
Grit
Black
Blood
1
1990
Enter
Cowboy Mick
He’d shot five people that day. The lady with the bouffant. The husband to her. Red, the man who ran Red’s. The fat man in front of him while waiting in line to kill Red. And me. Believe that were all that gun’d give him in the years he’d tote it.
.45 split through me like its cutting hair. Sent me against the busted-out cutlass next door with streams of red spurting out. Settled over me in cold spikes fitted with flesh eaters as rodeo hands, the disease making way over ever’ inch.
Mick Fairchild were his name, that rusty motherfucker. Stood with a phone in one hand and Ruger Blackhawk in the other. His feet planted on the peeling patch of throw-away roof that these shitholes always have. It’d been two years since I’d seen him last and “Morning Mick,” bubbled out a lot nicer than that fucker deserved.
“Morning,” he clipped that phone dropping from his shoulder.
OH THAT’S RIGHT, THE PHONE…. WELL, WE BETTER REWIND…
RRRRINNNNNNG. RRRRINNNNNG.
Zero in on a phone. A rotary phone. A shitty phone with a long cord that belongs in a place where gravel makes up the majority of the parking lot, where beat down doors and bugs constantly crawl outta cracks and there’s always one lady round somewheres with her hair teased to Gawd in a blue buffant and there ain’t shit ya can go to saying to her that’s gonna convince her ya ain’t what she’s thinking ya are and the Franklin ya slam down for propiety sake with the hint at…if there’s a joiner, I’d garner a listen and by the grace of Gawd there hadn’t been one so’s ‘fore ya know what’s what yar popping frosties and swapping yarns with a man packing heat and ya done found out ‘bout his children’s children he don’t see no more ‘cause he ain’t worth the company and it’s shitty, the place ya’r at, not him, he’s a pretty solid guy for a feller named T’Bone who train hopped off the tracks just yonder over and ya go to thinking he probably don’t deserve all that shit his kids said to him ‘cause he seems like a nice enough guy ‘cause ya’r cracking cold ones outta cooler listening to a train whiz by every hour on the hour where breezes don’t exist….’cept for once a year when ya finally decide to tear yourself from the shitty green door encasing the room where this phone exists and get some air on yar skin ’cause a damn week’d passed since ya were somewheres halfway of Waco and Dallas with that deed of paper bare knuckled ‘tween yar fingers and that steering wheel with ‘em words sawing nail beds into yar damned meat paw skin with a back order of cast iron sear blackening where Connie’d wrote his name; Yer daddy. Find him.
RRRRINNNNNNG. RRRRINNNNNG. Then there goes that damn phone again biting clumps of yar gut and spitting ‘em back at ya, horning out like some goddamn bugle of deserve as in, Buddy, ya best believe what’s coming’s got a pre-requisite. But all ya can think ‘bout is that fluff of corn exploding on yar windshield and ‘em spirals of tinctured yeller spinning arcs and sparks like whittled gold which’d Rama-Jammed yar foot down metal-to-the-peddle jarring up ‘em wheels of that rumbled muscle car dead-in-yar-tracks on a two lane highway in the middle of fucking nowhere and ya never really did like the middle of fucking nowhere ‘cause it’s where ya’s from and there were always that stink tagging along like a damned blanket suffocating tight and it weren’t the type nurses taught in hospitals and all of it due, this episode, this random splitting of a cornfield by a punching fat middle aged clown with paint leftover from a kid’s birthday plastered on his face were ‘cause ya’s hunting yar dad and there were an all over notion of not right tied up on both those ends, like, weren’t nothing warranting a clown getup this far out in the boonies that weren’t dipped and dripped in seedy and wrong, which were of right accord like the card carrying sentimentality ya had towards that particular family member in search of and the sure fired sealed and dealed agreement of both ‘em quandaries were flapping jacks in the form of that big fat ZERO that clown mouth were making and suppose it were sorta natural causations to why yar foot would go to knee jerk reaction of BURN BABY BURN and stomp that gas peddle full metal jacket down plowdriving Ronald McDonald there to clip-dent-to-shit on yar bumper and ya double-Dutch-shoving a body in your trunk and all this sermoned to the mount ‘cause in the foreground of NOW where that same monster’s parked, there’s a faded yeller paper flapping under yar windshield in the motherfucking breeze.
THAT oughta bring us ‘bout fair and square…Let’s get to that convo carrying out… Shall we…
In true slip-n-slide fashion and form, a wide variance the preferred measure of attack regarding these sorts of thangs however Mick standing with his feet spread further than his shoulders atop that motel roof weren’t rooted so much in tactical attunement and finesse as much as it were the desired absconsion of that bean pole visage that carried a 150-pound frame on a taller than should even when sopping wet. But ya had to give props for the try.
“Thought I’s gonna have to wait all morning up here sweating like a pig ‘fore ya grabbed that note.”
“Hate I struck ya as slow, Mick.” A slight slurrying of slush detectible in the lower right side and a grateful sigh that the Wessen Gawd Almighty clutched in the left were beginning to assuage the worry of the bullet’s initial cumbersome placement
Turned up to him, marking a spot with a squint. “How long’s it been?”
Mick swatted out, “Two but that little affair didn’t really give us adequate time, so’s twelve for good measure,” as if it were a fact he’d chewed on ever’day since the last sighting. “That a clown I saw in yar trunk?”
“Sure enough is.”
“He tie the balloon wrong?”
Mick always were a man to draw things out. Fashioned hisself after a real life gun slinger. A version of one of ‘em tough guys born and bred on John Wayne and Clint. Caught hisself up in it. Living out this fantasy of somebody reared in the wrong time, in the wrong place. Wanted n
“Just sent a reminder down my spine’s all.”
Mick went for a scratch on his nose, the Ruger following suit, pinning that grain against the rugged glare of his sun tarnished skin. “Might like a story.”
He weren’t asking after the one ‘bout Ronald. He’s asking after that blood that’d sat and boiled and festered on him. “Come on me in a cornfield. Just popped out.”
“Ya don’t say.” The gun still arched by his brow, “just popped out on ya?”
“That’d be.”
My guess, he’d been sent down on a promise of a couple stacks of ten. Been told and fed and clothed in things that ain’t part, that ain’t real, and he done shot me. This cowboy, Mick Fairchild, ‘cause somebody’d told him to and ‘cause he never could get past my knowing what he really were.
“I’d say it now if ya’s primed on a thing,” he clomped with heavy breath.
Fighting words, finally. Traveled all the way up to the line and now the tiptoe across to see who’s made of what. That pain of knowing whittling over the dawn’s speckling. That scar he’d earnt at six all grease and shine from where Granny’d done a bad stitch after he’d been pushed down and beat over by a Meek boy, so he said.
From mine to his but more to me, “Ya ain’t ever wanted to hear nothing I’d done tried to give. Starting up now just cause ya’s standing there and I’s sitting here don’t seem to fit all that well with sense. It’s a problem, Mick. It truly is.”
That glint forced mean; a stare I’d seen practiced since rumbles staged in the back yard. But there’s clouds buried in him. Barrels of haze covering up his eyes, fogging over that sight he’s never granted.
It were dynamite and the match were already fucking burning. GO. TIME. “Ya’s a sickly boy. Fragile little thing. Cough ‘bout ya. Always that cough. That cawing. That rattling. Like ya’s begging for it, begging for the gawddamn world to stop. Like ya’d something worth contributing. And I used to hope maybe ya did. Used to think—GAWDdamn, it might just be.”
Sun tipped round, edging Mick’s tilt over and out. Folds of black, tacky on still cold gravel. That frail boy playing in the dirt of his mind. His life ahead of him. That thing that’d make him whole hidden in a suit somewheres he’s yet to step in.
“Never quite found the fit, did ya.”
I’d made my peace on it long ago.
Charted my mark.
Slug kicked out.
Fire burned through.
Bang clanged overhead.
Mick Fairchild were my brother and I’d done killed him dead.
BUT the kicker, the one to boot, the thing that’d make ya madder than hell were that not even an hour ago in between ‘em reruns of (Nanny’s Family) on that two station T.V., though ya’d a mind on ya to go and have a talking with that lady in the front ‘bout that spell of false advertising as there were distinct and as ya recall solitary reason for why ya’d pulled into this here Oasis and that were the golden promise of HBO for free and yet when that clicker there to a 1986 box with two bunny ear antennas sticking out were hell or highwater intent on fucking mockery sending illuminating shards onto the wide sprawl of every sort of potato chip that shitty vending machine held ‘cause that’s more like than not to be the case, ain’t it, like what else ya supposed to do at 3 in the morning when ya’ve put a fair hurting on a bottle of whiskey and yar stomach starts asshole catcalling ya from the deep ‘bout how if ya’s a good and true Christian ya woulda had the decency to at least sop down some Bologna on white bread to ya innards and go to work on the bottle but seeing as how we’re clearly in the stage of life were we can’t have nice things and ya hear T-Bone there through the wall lend a holler to that same office airing a grievance ‘bout noise incompliance and how if somebody don’t shoot ‘em there racoons off the roof while he’s in the middle of an afternoon siesta which is exactly what a cooler full of frosties’ll do to a feller though I believe he were in the business of that grand tradition of whiskey sipping ‘till it came proper drinking time hence the predicament of the aforementioned chips meaning Mick there’d set up camp for quite some time and of course the real tears for fears here were that shot he’d done give were 9 to 1 odds of land from the particular velocity of wind and altogether shit shot he’d always been but he’d got me good.
Clean slug. Type that goes in swift and sharp and finds itself feeling real nice and snug right up next yar guts, right at that spot that’ll ensure that slow steady bleed, where no amount of tinkering or pulling or rooting gonna find that tip or that end. That’s what he done give me. A sure fire shot of dying in a parking lot with no gawddamn dignity to be found and a helluva short distance ‘tween the length of time we’d spent being mad and confused ‘bout each other.
That rusty motherfucker.
Always imagined it’d find me in some fashion like this, in some sorry for nothing shit stain of a town but if I’d my choosing, I’d surely want it occurring some place other than anywhere in fucking Texas. Just thinking ‘bout it, it’s enough to make me give a lean out to defying that inevitable and hightailing my ass the five or six more hours it’d take to cross a line just so’s I didn’t have to die in this Gawd forsaken place.
Can’t trust a man to come from something so flat. Can’t trust his intentions, his yearnings, none of it. Ain’t a gawddamn thing ever come from a drive through Texas that were worth a damn and this being the culmination only lands that hammer harder.
And by Gawd if any of that doing involved anything less than hauling the dead body of my brother that’d of course fell off that roof and pinned my foot leaving us both stagnant and still and driving his ass all the way back to where it were that’d bred and sealed two boys fate in a situation like we’d got ourselves here, than I would’ve.
Just ain’t gonna happen.
So’s it’d appear, unfortunate for me, that the crawling sprawl of a train rolling in on the eastside of this spit of a town, consisting all of one hotel and a gas station, and my brother’s dead stare stamping my face in a burn mark on ‘em green peepers, my last cradling. I’s to die out here with the sound of grind charging filters through breeze. That carrying of buzz playing by that blue bouffant woman my brother’s Ruger took pity on with a clear mark. That channeling dumping over the left drip of exhaust and silver streak of dirty granite come out mufflers of hard traveled miles. ‘Til finally, the chug of wheels burning over track finds its resting in the perk of my ears and settles with the dust of that train’s first roll through Hazard.
2
1930
The
Whittle
Boys
“Well, I don’t mind telling ye, me broder’s passion weren’t somet’ing he’d learnt entirely on his own, now. Bit of a mark of trade, rather. Picked it up over a spell of ripping and running we’d found erselves in. Fuck, we’s bathing in it ferr we even stepped foot into double digits. Ain’t it right, Riley? Riley? Riley…”
Quick to it, Cian burst up. That line of rope tethering all decisions want for a whiplash twirl as Riley went after the big scruff, who’d made it his sole and only job to drive him crazy with cutback eyes and grunts of reprisals ever since they stepped off Irish soil and onto Atlantic steel. Well it just wouldn’t do now would it. That’s exactly how Riley saw it and once he’d made it his intent to go after the big brawling mustached tard, come to be known as The Russian ever after, it were settled and stamped in stone.
Tuggled down and fastened at the hips, these two. And for right measure. Both of ‘em loaded up as they were. History proved there’s better odds in the pairing of ‘em than they’s like to find by ‘emselves. And as their lives tended toward the hankering for a little rough house it didn’t take long for ‘em to find that trouble their eyes’d always tended to. And given that minor detail that neither one of ‘em stood very much taller than a woman, being all ‘bout five foot six, there were a spot of crafty that came along with.
