Flycatchers and Fireflies: A serial novel

By John Archibald

A chapter a week until it’s done. Currently on Chapter 6 and counting

Chapter 1: Mimi in a Mumu

Hubie Flynn questioned, perhaps just a little too late, how he had come to be standing on an abandoned trestle in the middle of the woods with Ulysses Sherman “Slick” Hogg, a ferret-like man who seemed more nervous than the situation demanded.

The young man was getting nervous, too. Why was he here, close to the edge, 100 feet above the forest floor, as Hogg pointed and squeaked and seemed to inch ever closer. It was like a game of red light green light. Every time he glanced back Hogg froze. Yet he still came closer. Maybe it wasn’t red light green light at all. Maybe it was king of the mountain? The young man began to sweat.

*****

It had been a strange day. Young Hubie had knocked on Hogg’s door early that morning, hoping to learn more about the electric company’s purported plan to build a dam that would turn his family’s land and half of Forrest County into a lake the size of Amarillo, Texas.

Google Maps had led him to Hogg’s isolated, modest house, and he’d been impressed by its simplicity. He’d expected gates and a long driveway, maybe a security guard with a paunch and a pistol. But it was just a ranch-style brick house that looked like it was built in the ‘50s and got its last coat of paint during the Nixon administration.

Hogg had surprisingly welcomed him inside and introduced him to his wife, Mimi, a large woman in an avocado-and–orange mumu who looked as much like a Mimi as a person can look.

“Oh, a visitor,” she said, as thrilled as one could expect from a Mimi in a mumu welcoming unexpected guests on a Sunday morning.

He declined her offer of coffee or Grapico and gaped at the sight before him. On every surface, on coffee tables and bespoke shelves, on top of a vintage oak RCA television console – everywhere he looked – were ceramic figures of pigs. Pink stoats, husky hogs, silly piglets, scary sows and a boar in clown makeup that bore a startling resemblance to Mimi herself. It was among the most disturbing things Hubie had ever seen.

“This,” snorted Mimi, “is my menagerie.”

She waved her arm, like a pillowy Vanna White revealing her vowels, and seemed to float in the mumu. Hubie could think of nothing to say.

“I have 6,321 pigs,” Mimi said. “When your name is Hogg, you better own it.”

She was a nice lady, charming in her way, the young man thought. But if he had to stay in that house much longer he knew he’d start drinking again.

The day somehow got weirder from there. Hogg listened nervously to his questions before insisting, suddenly and objectively inexplicably, that he must take the young man to show him the “real situation” the fake news would never report. He ushered Hubie into his yacht of a car – the kind of Buick that went extinct after the ‘70s oil crisis. He turned the ignition, shifted into reverse, and with eyes darting skittishly everywhere but behind him, he stepped on the gas.

And rammed into young Hubie’s car. Or his mom’s if you want to be technical about it.

“Sorry,” Hogg grunted, lurching forward again, still without looking back. “I’ll pay for it.”

Then he slammed the car into reverse again, stepped on the gas and … BAM! He hit the young man’s mom’s Honda Civic a second time.

“Dang it,” Hogg said, without getting out to look at the damage or allowing Hubie to do so. He threw the boat into gear and sped out the driveway, spewing a rooster tail of gravel behind.

“Where are we going,” the young man asked, confused and shaken by the damage to his car, wondering how he would break the news to his mother.

“You’ll see, you’ll see,” Hogg chirped.

And off they went.

*****

Ray-Ray Headley was in the shadows, relieving himself under the canopy of an ancient magnolia tree, when Hogg and that young man walked out of the house and climbed into that monstrosity of a Buick. He was just zipping up as Hogg crashed into the fellow’s little car. Ray-Ray shook his head in wonder when it happened again. He’d once worked for the DMV and he’d seen a lot of bad driving, but he’d never seen anybody have two wrecks before leaving his own driveway.

“Hide your wife and kids,” he thought. “It’s big Buick bumper cars out there.”

Ray-Ray was glad he’d had to pee, glad to be behind that tree. He could be fairly confident that he had not been seen by Hogg, whose vision was clearly not his greatest asset. Ray-Ray didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be anywhere near that guy. Slick Hogg was trouble.

Ray-Ray had worked at just about every department in city government. But now he was with the Bedford Utilities Corp., which was infested with more rats than any swamp he’d ever tromped. He had been instructed, ordered by his bosses, to come to Hogg’s home early this morning. He was told to park a quarter mile up the street, so as not to draw attention.

“If anybody sees you, you’re just marking water lines for later work,” his boss told him. “Or for mapping. You’re there for mapping.”

Ray-Ray didn’t need to ask questions and he didn’t want answers. Sometimes it’s better not to know. Even when you really know.

He’d arrived early, before the young man. He had measured and calculated and sprayed a blue X on the browning grass in the spot where another crew would dig. They would come later, also discreetly, also parking up the street, and reroute Hogg’s water line to bypass his water meter.

All so he could water his lawn as much as he wanted in the searing Southern Summer, during a drought when water was rationed and rates were higher than even the humidity.

Ray-Ray knew how things worked. Hogg was a former county commissioner, a possible candidate for the state’s public service commission. He knew all the palms to grease, all the backs to scratch, all the dirty secrets of every gas, water and power utility in the region and every bond dealer and contractor likely to kick back a little of the take.

Hogg looked like a rat, dressed like a slob, lived in a nondescript house, drove that gargantuan car and pulled strings behind his curtain that nobody saw unless he wanted them to. He’d once been indicted for orchestrating a scam that misdirected – the federal grand jury said “converted for personal use” and the newspaper said “stole” – 27 air conditioning units meant for inner city elementary schools. He sold 21 back to the supplier and donated six to churches like his own, which needed cool air as it abandoned the city and moved to the suburbs. Eighteen people were convicted in that scheme, but Hogg beat the rap after five men of the cloth and one buxom blonde woman with a cross wedged in her cleavage testified that he was a god-fearing man who supported his church. No sweltering second graders had been asked to take the stand.

Ray-Ray knew Hogg had two obsessions: his ability to manipulate others, and his lawn. He was as nutty about his zoysia grass as his wife was about her pigs. Ray-Ray had been inside the house once, to replace the water heater at city expense, and he liked it just fine outside. Dead grass or not.

He watched Hogg careen away down the road, feeling sorry for that pale young man in the passenger seat. He waited to make sure they were gone before packing up his things. Ray-Ray hated people like Hogg. Best to steer clear of him.

*****

Hubie Flynn felt Hogg’s tiny wet hands touch his back, and he flinched, prompting Hogg to laugh. A kind, reassuring laugh.

“Relax, there son, I just want you to see the expanse,” he said, his hand still on the young man’s shoulders. “Just look out there and imagine it all, covered in beautiful water. Lakeside houses will start at a million bucks.”

“But I don’t have a million dollars,” Hubie said. “And my family’s house will be at the bottom of the lake.”

“Well,” Hogg said, “I wouldn’t ask you to leave it.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Of course not. It’s way too late for that anyway,” Hogg said. “But I’ll do you a special favor.”

“You will?”

“I will.”

With all the force he had in his rodentine paws, Hogg shoved Hubie in the back.

The young man hurtled off the trestle and into the abyss. Before Hubie hit the forest floor he had one final thought.

“What an asshole.”

Hogg had the exact same thought.

Chapter 2: NoW Swimming

The title on Salem Khalidi’s business card read “Deputy Director of Telecommunications Security” for KMX & Associates, which sounded great to his mom. But his one job, his one real responsibility, was a shabby rented storage unit in rural Forrest County, and more to the point its contents.

KMX & Associates was a dummy company that existed only on that business card, but in Khalidi’s mind it functioned as a subsidiary of Rapier Communications sans the proper paperwork.

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Khalidi had been hired six weeks prior, after a job interview in which he promised Lafayette Rapier he would never ask questions and never, ever reveal anything he was told to any living soul, including his mother or girlfriend, if he had one. He had signed a non-disclosure agreement, although he did not as yet know that because he had not read the fine print on his employment agreement and Rapier had not pointed it out. The financial consequences of running his mouth would ruin him, but – Rapier sensed this all along – his real concerns did not fall within the confines of the law.

“What happens at Rapier is highly classified,” the boss said. “If you speak of it, I will know. And you don’t want me to know.”

Khalidi did not want Rapier to know. He was happy with his title and his salary, which paid him more in a month than he’d made in two years as an Uber driver. He was afraid of Rapier because he was not as stupid as his father so often shouted. Hell, the governor was afraid of Rapier. Everyone was afraid of Rapier. Fear was the man’s greatest asset, and the company’s primary commodity. If he were ever to say out loud what the company actually did – which he told himself he never would – he would say it trafficked in fear.

The day he was hired, after acknowledging he understood the consequences of laziness, loose lips and disloyalty, Khalidi was given keys to a white panel van filled to the brim with brand new, in-the-box pay-as-you-go cell phones of dubious origin. He was told to find a safe, climate controlled location for the phones. A place that could never be traced back to Rapier or Rapier Communications or any of its mysterious subsidiaries, real or imaginary.

“I don’t want to know where,” Rapier told him. “I never want to know how or where you do what I tell you to do.”

He told Khalidi to store the phones safely, preferably in a remote location, to wipe down the van and dispose of it in a place it would never be found.

“Dispose of it? Like, dispose of it?” Khalidi had asked.

“Not sold, not traded, not stripped,” Rapier said. “Gone.”

Rapier then gave Khalidi a list of 12 addresses, all run-down houses in skeezy neighborhoods. The properties were numbered from one to twelve. Each week, after receiving a coded message, he was to wrap one of the phones in parcel paper and deliver it to one of those homes.

“Got it?” Rapier had asked.

“Got it,” Khalidi had it. But Rapier explained it over and over until he was convinced that Khalidi really had it.

Every eighth day at dawn, as Rapier prepared for morning Tai Chi on the pier below his surprisingly forgettable lake home, he would pull out his current phone to text Khalidi a seemingly random phone number. Then he would throw his old phone into the Chickamauga Lake, a man-made body of water said to be so deep that a diver going all the way to the bottom would have to guard against the bends on the way up.

The phone number is irrelevant, Rapier told Khalidi. Don’t call it, don’t save it to contacts, don’t ever text it. The only significant thing about the phone number would be the last two digits. Those digits would correspond to the numbers assigned to the 12 houses.

“For instance,” he told Khalidi, “if I were to text you 867-5309, which house would you go to?”

“Number 9?”

“Number 9.”

“But what if the last two digits are 16?” Khalidi asked.

“They won’t be.”

So the system was set. Each delivery day Rapier would text Khalidi a phone number, and each of those evenings Khalidi delivered a new phone to the corresponding address. It sounded complex, but it was simple. Brilliant, Rapier thought. But it took planning.

On his first day on the job Khalidi rented unit B4 at Dixie Storage outside Bedford, behind the strip mall that used to hold the tanning salon and the video store, but now held what was left of The Bedford Bee, a once-proud community newspaper that now operated out of an old Radio Shack. Khalidi rented the unit in the name of KMX & Associates, and paid six months in advance with cash Rapier had provided. It took all day to stack the burner phones inside. But when it was done Khalidi was pleased with himself, please with his own sense of order. He turned his attention to ditching the van.

He had dreaded this part. Rapier had been very clear that disappear meant disappear. No trace. No trouble. He drove to a junk yard, the kind where they crunch cars into blocks, but the lady at the gate asked for all kinds of paperwork and ID, so Khalidi backed up quickly, sputtering that he’d forgotten his wallet. He drove to an old quarry, past the “No Swimming” sign that had been altered with spraypaint to read “NoW Swimming,” but it was teeming with high schoolers with beer bongs and bathing suits. Khalidi couldn’t beat it out of there fast enough. He drove and drove until it finally dawned on him. A quarter of this county would soon be underwater.

Khalidi drove far into the hills, past reclaimed strip mines and pine forests, beneath kudzu vines that looked like Godzilla as they consumed telephone poles and power lines. He passed a shuttered old gas station, a mom & pop diner and a decrepit “gentleman’s” club called “The BooBu Patch.” He hadn’t seen a gentleman in 30 miles, and considered stopping there to see what it was all about, but he thought better of it. The van first, the Patch later, he made a note.

So he drove until he found an old, abandoned railroad trestle leading into the woods. A sign said “No Trespassing,” but it too had been edited by spraypaint to read “No TrespIssing,” which Khalidi thought was kind of funny. He did not see the “Bridge Out” sign, for it had been removed by the graffiti artists, who thought that was kind of funny.

The trestle looked safe to Khalidi. He slowly pressed the gas, and eased onto the expanse, wheels straddling rusty railroad tracks above a whole lot of nothing. It was an ancient thing, built of wood and creaking like a melting glacier. Khalidi inched along, up and down as the tires struggled with the spaces between the crossties. He believed with every downward dip the bridge would collapse, that he would fall to his death, never to be found as the valley filled with water. Or worse, that the van would be stuck on top of this trestle and he would have to call Rapier. He felt sick, overcome with terror and motion sickness and vertigo as the ground dropped away beneath him. The bridge shook. His stomach churned.

Up and down and up and down and up and down. He’d been so distracted, so busy concentrating on his fears and his feelings and the tracks before him that he did not look up to see the abrupt end to his trestle. For a flit of a second he noted the steel rails twisting toward the earth, and thought them beautiful, like sculpture. And then plunk.

The wheels of the van crossed the final tie, and Khalidi heard metal grinding metal as the front axle met the rails and began to slide. Khalidi slammed on the brakes and stared straight ahead, gripping the steering wheel like a life preserver. Before him lay the lush forest floor, and a whole lot of air between it and him.

The van lurched forward, but stopped as the back tires dropped, blessedly, into the space between two of the last slats. Khalidi shifted into Park, pulled the emergency brake, unclasped his seatbelt and opened the door to nothing but emptiness. He slammed it shut, and felt the trestle groan beneath him. He scrambled to the back of the van, tripping over empty phone crates and until he reached the double doors. He twisted the handle and pushed, but gravity had begun to work against him. The doors seemed to weigh a ton.

He focused suddenly, like he had when he took the SAT’s in high school. His score might not have gotten him into Harvard, but it was enough to make his mom think she might be wrong about him, and everyone else think he’d cheated. He grabbed a crowbar, leveraged one of the doors open, shoved his shoulder into it, pushed with all his might and fell, hard, onto the trestle.

Khalidi was face down above the deepest part of the gorge, eyes squeezed shut as pain radiated from his elbows. He did not actually see the van plummet into the abyss . But he heard the sound.

Screeeeeeeeeeee. And then the crash, the rending of branches and limbs. Then a thump, and creaking as the van settled somewhere far below.

Khalidi stood up, shaky. He was about to turn to go when he heard a sound from below.

“Hey!” someone yelled. “Little help down here?”

Khalidi felt a cold chill rise from the stomach and climb his spine. He vomited over the side.

He heard the voice again.

“What the hell?”

Chapter 3: For your own protection

Lafayette Rapier had dreamed of a future in politics when he was a student. He wanted to change the world, to give voice to the voiceless and opportunity to those who had been denied it. He wanted to right wrongs.

And then he met Joe Dale Comer.

Joe Dale approached Rapier their junior year at State College and asked him –- begged him, really –- to manage his campaign for president of the student government association. Rapier had planned to run for the office himself, but Comer would be hard to beat. He was the son of a wealthy lawyer, who was the son of a wealthy planter, who had started the secret society within the Greek system that controlled all of student life and politics. Joe Dale wasn’t just the BMOC, he was royalty. He was tall, good-looking in a ruddy, wholesome way. He was reasonably intelligent from an academic perspective, leaned unexpectedly progressive, was surprisingly kind and inexplicably, stupidly honest.

That race in college changed Rapier’s life. And Comer’s too. Rapier agreed to manage the campaign on one condition: that Comer tell him everything he had ever done that might reflect badly on him. Girlfriends, boyfriends, pornography, drugs, fights, embarrassments, crimes, kinks, secret desires and shames.

“Write down anything that might come back to haunt you,” he told Comer in their first meeting. “I need to know everything. So I can protect you.”

He never thought Comer would actually do it. But Comer nodded. Solemnly. The next day he came to Rapier’s dorm and handed him six pages of confessions hand written on a yellow legal pad, beginning with the first time he touched himself and ending with a three-way that included his sister-in-law and a tight end on the high school football team. Comer withheld no details. He described awkward sexual encounters, petty thefts and a couple of drunken fights that read to Rapier like 2nd degree assaults.

“Don’t tell anybody,” was all Comer said.

“Of course not,” a stunned Rapier replied. “This is for your own protection.”

Rapier had managed that campaign well. Comer won easily, as he likely would have done if he had simply put his name on the ballot and held a kegger. He’d gone on to win a seat on the local school board, with Rapier’s help, and then State Auditor, though he was mediocre at math and unsure what the responsibilities of that job entailed.

“What does the auditor audit,” he’d asked Rapier.

“Nothing, unless I tell you to,” Rapier said.

Rapier had known from the moment Joe Dale handed him that pile of yellow paper that he, Lafayette Rapier, would never run for office himself. He wanted real power, and he knew in that moment that he held the blueprint to it in his hands. Joe Dale might someday reach high office, with his help, but he would forever be beholden to his old friend. Lafayette abandoned political ambition, even his ideology. Politics was just a commodity like any other, subject to the whims of the fickle masses. He would rise above the throng to trade in it, manipulate it. He opened Rapier & Associates right after graduation, and began to manage small races, from constable to city council.

Every time he was approached to run a campaign he began with the same sentence he’d said to Comer.

“Write down anything that might come back to haunt you. I need to know everything. So I can protect you.”

What a bunch of saps. Politicians. They were desperate to please, even more desperate to be loved, prone to sex addiction and drug abuse, pathological in their ability to lie and dissemble. Rapier built files on each of them, at first color coding them by the psychological disorder he imagined them to have.

Narcissistic personality disorder was yellow. Antisocial personality disorder was blue, and green folders were reserved for those he diagnosed as both narcissistic and antisocial. Eventually, all of his folders were green.

Very few candidates were as forthcoming as Joe Dale, but they all wrote down something. A dalliance with a co-worker, perhaps, or a long-hidden criminal record from a misspent youth. Pictures of boys, and girls, and drugs. Lots of drugs and financial crimes.

Rapier got most of those men and women elected with anti-drug, tough-on-crime platforms approved by trailer park Jesus himself. With every campaign, win or lose, he filed those secrets away in his safe.

His business, branded with a logo of a sword, grew over the decades. Rapier was good at what he did. He hired data analysts and social media savants, old school private eyes and experts in military intelligence. He got a few good men and women elected to office, and many more bad men and women. It did not matter to him. They were but a commodity, and he would control both the supply and the demand.

Rapier protected his clients from political foes and journalists looking to drag up their embarrassing pasts, and he would use his knowledge of their misdeeds to control them, subtly or not, when necessary. He got plenty of repeat business, too, even from those he controlled. The politicians began to realize what Rapier had known since college. They had hired him, paid him good money, and handed him the very information he could use to destroy them. But he could make them kings if they kept him happy. And on retainer.

Rapier had managed Ulysses Sherman “Slick” Hogg’s run for the public service commission, which was created to regulate the state’s utilities but was ever packed with industry lackeys who stood staunchly for deregulation. He had urged Hogg to drop the Ulysses and the Sherman and run simply as Slick Hogg on the ballot, because a Slick Hogg is better to voters than a Yankee marauder any day. Hogg refused as a matter of principle, not his only principal but one of only several, and lost. But he came to understand what Rapier did, and how he did it. He decided that he, too, could play the game. He began to do favors for Rapier, who in turn used his influence to place Hogg in strategic but invisible positions of power.

Rapier was a kingmaker and a puppet master and in some cases an executioner. He enjoyed the mystique. He reveled in it, and treated it as an art. He turned half of the office into a dojo. He taught new employees Tai Chi and proven veterans Shaolin Kung Fu. They in turn called him Sensei and bowed when he entered the room. He made all his operatives, including Hogg, read Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” The sign above his door, carved in Asian dragon wood, read “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

Rapier kept his own secrets close, and prized the fact that nobody knew them, or him. He was happy not to be a household name. He could shop at the grocery store without being noticed, dine unmolested in the finest restaurants. His homes were plain, his cars boring. He thought himself a simple man, though he had become the most feared operative in three states.

He smiled about that as he drove to pick up his new burner phone, if Salem Khalidi had managed to find the right address. Rapier wondered out loud if it was time again to move to a bigger office.

“I need a bigger safe,” he thought.

Chapter 4: The puking stranger

Khalidi lay in bed for hours but did not sleep. He stared at the ceiling, wondering if the crack above his bed had widened since he last noticed it. He was surprised when his smart watch began to beep. Surely it was too early for his regular 6 a.m. alarm. It was still dark outside.

But the watch was not telling him to wake up. It was telling him that something was wrong.

“Your heart rate rose above 120 while you appeared to be at rest,” it said, suggesting breathing exercises and meditations that would never ease his mind.

He looked at the clock beside the bed. It was 2 a.m., and his heart still pounded. The warning from his watch did not help his state of mind. Khalidi was not an unhealthy man. He ate too much fried food and drank too much when carousing with his degenerate friends, but that was not often. He followed the demands of the fitness app on his watch, and made sure to get his steps in, to spend an hour a day in some form of exercise, to stand up when his watch told him he’d been on his ass too long.

Khalidi would normally be concerned about the high heart rate, but he knew the cause. It was the same reason he had lain in bed all those hours staring at the crack. He couldn’t get that voice out of his head, the one from the ravine that cried “a little help down here” when he’d tipped the van over the edge of the trestle to crash noisily into the ravine.

Khalidi had puked at the sound of that voice, perhaps even on it. Then he had run – he was ashamed of his actions now – until he could not breathe. He’d stopped running when he reached the BooBu Patch. He considered going inside, but decided against. There would be too many questions, and he was not eager to be seen. He summoned an Uber from the parking lot, and waited for 35 minutes until a pasty driver named Bubba rolled up in a Prius outside the Booby Hatch, friendly and talkative and curious what a man like Salem Khalidi was doing in this desolate part of the county. Khalidi was probably too short with him, making him memorable and suspicious. His fears were well-founded. He noticed as he went to bed, glancing at his Uber app, that his star rating had dropped below 4.9 for the first time ever. It was 4.87, and it pained him.

He heard Rapier’s voice in his head, too, telling him to get rid of that van in a place where no one would ever find it, to wipe it down and make it vanish.

Rapier told Khalidi to store the phones safely, preferably in a remote location, to wipe down the van and dispose of it in a place it would never be found.

“Gone,” Rapier had said. But now it was at the bottom of a ravine with some other human who may or may not be covered in his vomit, his DNA. A human who knew not only that the van existed, but that it came to rest on the forest floor in the most suspicious of circumstances. This human might have seen him.

Khalidi wondered if he had wiped the car properly, if he had worn his gloves when he pushed the car over the side. He simply could not remember. He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed and began to put on his shoes. He had to go back to the trestle.

*****

Hubie Flynn still couldn’t believe he was alive. From the moment Slick Hogg had touched his back on that trestle he had counted himself a dead man. The whole ordeal was frozen in his mind. The smell of Hogg’s breath and the oily pomade in his hair, the gentle touch, the shove, the feeling not so much of flying, but being suspended in air, of having the thought he believed to be his last – “what an asshole” – before plummeting to his certain death.

But Flynn did not die. Obviously. He had landed on a bough covered in vines. Honeysuckle and kudzu and English ivy so intertwined it was almost like a trapeze artist’s safety net, only full of sharp sticks. A branch from a pine tree stuck him through like a spear just above his right knee, another beneath his left knee. He was in tremendous pain, and had no hope of climbing out of the ravine, but he was alive.

Hubie was lying on his back atop that bough when the van tumbled over the side, crashing to the ground mere feet away from his head. But he had seen a face peer over the side after it fell. He did not know that face, but would never forget it. He knew it was not Hogg.

He had yelled something, he could not remember what, before the man lost his lunch. He wondered if it had been a fatal mistake. But then, he was literally stuck in the bough of a tree in a ravine that would soon be filled with water, if he even lived that long. He didn’t have much choice.

His only hope, he thought, was the puking stranger.

Chapter 5: Improper use of a Nakiri

Salem Khalidi learned as a child that he would never be a woodsman. He had joined the Boy Scouts at his father’s command when he was 11, and had enjoyed the group well enough until the troop leaders insisted they take the meetings outside. Overnight. For several days. And nights. Days and nights on end.

They had called this outing a “Jamboree,” a word that sounded joyful, carefree. Khalidi had conjured up images of minstrels and circuses with dancing bears and cotton candy. But this Jamboree was not at all merry. It was just a bunch of Scouts, most of them older and stupider and meaner than he, seemingly competing to merit a badge proclaiming themselves stupidest and meanest of all. It had rained relentlessly all week, and the drab canvas tents dripped like the insides of a limestone cave. The stupid, mean boys tried to make campfires by holding the flame of a Bic lighter to the aerosol spray of a Lysol disinfectant can, creating do-it-yourself flamethrowers that seemed to young Salem like bombs waiting to explode in their hands. It was like Lord of the Flies. With pyrotechnics.

Khalidi secretly prayed that one of the cans would explode, that the sausage fingers a particularly stupid and mean boy named Stonewall Jackman had used to thump him on the back of the head would be charred in a fiery aerosol blast. Khalidi instantly regretted it, fearing the mere existence of his misguided prayer might inject evil into the universe. He closed his eyes to amend his previous divine wish, suggesting instead that any wounds Stonewall received would be instantly disinfected with Lysol backwash.

Regrettably, neither prayer was granted.

He had huddled shivering in his leaky tent for days. He vowed, on the third day of eating canned tuna and soggy crackers, that he would devote the rest of his life to scouting the great indoors. Yet here he was, heading into the woods, alone, but for the blinking fireflies, in the middle of the night.

Khalidi drove past the BooBu Patch, wishing again that he had the nerve to simply go inside, although he imagined the patrons as grown up versions of those pyroscouts, laughing and jeering and more than willing to burn it all down. He drove past the old strip mall, wondering briefly why the lights were still on at the Bedford Bee. He found the unmarked road – it was more like an overgrown path in the darkness – and eased as far as he dared. This time he did see, if not heed, the “No TrespIssing sign. It was something a kid like Stonewall Jackman would do, he thought, and rolled his eyes.

He stepped out of the car and was 11 years old again, immediately overtaken by sounds he did not understand and could not identify. He longed for the great indoors. Or his apartment, the mediocre indoors.

Photo by Jan Segatto on Unsplash

The woods, even in the dead of night, seemed to speak to him, at him. They chirped and cheeped and trilled and croaked and creaked. Khalidi realized he did not know the difference between a chirp and a cheep or a croak and a creak. He took a good long look at himself. Figuratively, anyway, because he could not even see his bare knees quaking in the darkness.

Perhaps he should have prepared a little better for this, he thought. He was in short pants, with expensive Italian loafers and a cashmere sweater his mother had sent him last winter. He was holding one of Rapier’s burner phones in his right hand, and in the left a $300 Shun Nakiri knife, his prized blade of choice for slicing and dicing vegetables, that he had grabbed in the kitchen on the way out. What he planned to do with that he did not know. But Shun had never let him down. At least not before his mother washed his Santuko in the dishwasher.

He clicked the flashlight app on and held the burner phone in front of him. Better than the darkness but no less scary now that he could see it.

“Quiet,” he told himself. “Quiet,” but every step sounded like an earthquake, or a bear call. He wished, for just a moment, that he had a Bic lighter and a Lysol can.

*****

Hubie Flynn had tied broken branches to both legs with honeysuckle vines, like splints. He had become quite adept with vines since he had landed on them. He could not walk, exactly, but he could shuffle for brief periods, like Frankenstein, if Frankenstein had branches tied to his legs. He heard the crunching before he saw the light.

“Stop! Who goes there?” he said, realizing too late how stupid that sounds in real life. “I mean, who’s out there?”

Khalidi did not know how to respond. He did not know who this man was, or why he was at the bottom of a ravine, or whether he had been struck by the falling cargo van that had plummeted from above.

He was in some ways surprised – both relieved and frightened – that the man was still there at all. But he did not know if it was truly a good thing or not. The cheeping and chirping had stopped. It was dead quiet. He had heard the man talk, but could not tell where he was in the dark and the brambles. Khalidi called out tentatively.

“Hallo? Is somebody down here? Hallo?”

He clutched his Shun, which was ideal for dicing onions but untested on human flesh. He wondered what he had been thinking. What he was doing, and it dawned on him that the stranger might actually be gladhe was here, might see him as a savior, as long as he didn’t realize that he was the one who dropped a vehicle on him, vomited and ran away like a coward.

But there was no way he could know that.

“Hallo?” Khalidi said again. “Are you hurt?”

The man in the brambles spoke. Khalidi almost jumped out of his skin.

“You’re the guy that puked on me,” the voice said.

“Damn,” Khalidi said under his breath.

“What? What do you mean? Puked on you? That… what … I don’t … that’s crazy talk,” he stumbled. “I, ah, I heard you calling for help.”

“You dropped a van on me, and then you puked on me. Like the van wasn’t enough,” Hubie Flynn said.

“No. What?” Khalidi. “You’ve got the wrong guy. I was just happening by and … and heard you.”

“I wasn’t making any noise,” Hubie said. “You’re the guy that barfed on me. I know it’s you.”

“What? No. You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m just trying to help.”

“You’re Barf Man,” I saw you,” Hubie said. “I was looking right up at you when you pushed that van over the edge. I called for help and you yacked all over me and then you ran away.

“I’ve been down here ever since, legs broken, covered in puke, fighting off barf-eating bugs, and now you come back. Why?”

“Me?” Khalidi said. “No, you must be …”

“Why are you holding that knife?” Hubie said. “You’re working for Hogg, aren’t you.”

It was a statement, not a question.

“Hog?” Khalidi said. “What hog?”

Khalidi was confused, but he could see Hubie now, stretched beside the crumpled van, legs held stiff by tree limbs wrapped with coils of honeysuckle vines. His pale face shone in the moonlight, almost peaceful. Or was it almost dead.

“Are you … are you OK?” he said.

“Are you going to kill me?” Hubie asked. “Or are you going to help me?”

Khalidi thought for a moment. It was not in him to harm this or any other human, with the possible exception of Stonewall Jackman. He certainly would not harm anyone with his precious kitchen knife. Khalidi got queasy slicing chicken breast with that knife, and not just because it was an improper use for a Nakiri. He’d never be able to raise it against this beleaguered young man.

“Or are you going to puke on me again?”

Maybe he could kill this guy, Khalidi considered. But no. He could not. He dropped the knife on the forest floor and ran to the young man.

“I didn’t know you were down here,” he said. “At least not until I, you know, vomited on you.”

What came next rolled out breathlessly, in no particular order.

“Who is Hogg? I didn’t know. I couldn’t sleep I was so worried. Did I break your legs? Sorry about the vomit. I really don’t know Hogg. How did you get here? Did this Hogg do it? Is it a real hog or person Hogg? What am I going to do?

“I think…” Hubie began. “You’re gonna help me.”

Khalidi took a breath. He looked at Hubie and nodded.

“Let’s get you out of here,” he said.

Chapter 6: The waddle gives him away

Ray-Ray Headley looked at his watch and rolled his eyes. His boss, Mr. Parker, called him an hour ago, urgent.
“Get here now,” Mr. Parker had said. “I have an important job for you.”
Ray-Ray dropped what he was doing – building a wheelchair ramp on a sidewalk in front of an able-bodied city councilman’s house – and hurried over. Mr. Parker’s receptionist Honey, part basset hound and part pit pull, barely looked up when he arrived. She peered over the bags beneath her eyes, which was an impressive feat, he thought, growled and pointed for him to take the chair in the hall outside his boss’s office. He’d been there 20 minutes now, staring at the brass nameplate on the door in front of him.
Ray-Ray rolled his eyes again, at least in his head. He was always careful not to show what he was thinking, especially in a place like this. The nameplate read “Mr. Parker, Director.” Not Theo Parker, which Ray Ray thought sounded OK. Ray-Ray was one of the few people anywhere that knew Parker’s full name was Theodopholus J. Parker, only because he had seen his birth certificate while building a secret compartment in the floor under the desk in Parker’s home office.
Ray-Ray grinned. Again only in his head. He knew things other people didn’t know, whether he wanted to or not. Nobody, for instance, knew Parker’s first name. He called himself Mr. Parker. His wife called him Mr. Parker. A lot of people wondered if his given name was Mister Parker. But Ray-Ray never corrected them.
“Might be,” he’d say, and shrug.
Ray-Ray was what more contemplative people might call discrete. He didn’t think of it that way. He just knew deep down that the squeaky wheel gets sent to the junkyard. Better to mind your own beeswax. Besides, his basic philosophy of life, if he’d bothered to have one, was “I don’t want to know.” And he didn’t.
So when he heard loud voices coming from inside Mr. Parker’s office – one voice, really, and it wasn’t Mr. Parker’s – he wanted to shut it out. He picked up a copy of the Bedford Bee sitting on the table beside him, and opened it wide so it covered his face. He didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want anybody to see that he had been here.
Ray-Ray did not often read the Bedford Bee. The truth is nobody often read the Bedford Bee, although there had been some buzz about it since the new lady took over. But Ray-Ray wasn’t much of a reader at all, much less of local news. It would make him know more things, and think of the things he knew that the Bee didn’t. Face it. It would require him to care.
But since the Bee was open in front of his face he couldn’t help but see the small story on the top of page A4, with the headline:
Environmentalist gone missing; or maybe camping.
The headline pretty much summed it up. A young environmental activist had failed to come home a few nights ago, and his mother was worried sick about him. But since she admitted he didn’t always tell her his schedule and had been known to spend weeks at a time in the woods alone, police shrugged it off. A photo accompanied the story. It showed the young man, Hubie Flynn, on a hiking trip two years before.
Ray-Ray thought the kid looked familiar, but wasn’t sure. Maybe he’d seen him at the Tasty Shaq, where he sometimes stopped to soothe his soul with a tall vanilla malt. But the more he thought about it the more he figured the missing tree hugger just had one of those faces you see everywhere in Forrest County. But, he thought, maybe that was just the common face of futility.
Ray-Ray turned the page as the argument inside got louder. He thought of it as an argument, though he never actually heard Parker say a word. Ray-Ray tried to read to the newspaper in front of him to block out what was said. He read a story about the county road striping crew that had “striped right over” Mrs. Pickerel’s ancient terrier, Ratfink, who had fallen asleep on the side of the road. Ratfink was shaken but not seriously harmed, though Mrs. Pickerel feared he might be mistaken for a skunk. Ray-Ray thought that should have been on the front page.
He heard more yelling, and the screech of chair on floor, and held the paper even closer to his face. He was thinking, as the door burst open, that Ratfink really did look a bit like a skunk, with or without the new stripe. Then again, so did Mrs. Pickerel.
“Get it done!” the man in the doorway growled at Mr. Parker.
Ray-Ray knew that man. And as Ulysses “Slick” Hogg stormed down the guacamole-tiled hall in the county maintenance wing, Ray-Ray had a thought: It’s hard to storm off and waddle at the same time. He smiled, for the first time all day.
Then a second thought struck him. He turned back to the story of the missing kid, Hubie whatever. He looked at the picture again. It was him. He was certain!
When did they say he went missing?
He rapidly scanned the story, his eyes flitting back and forth. There it was. Hubie disappeared the same day Ray-Ray had been outside Hogg’s house installing a completely illegal bypass to the water meter. Hubie was definitely the young man who stepped into Hogg’s car, and he had not been seen since.
“Dang,” Ray-Ray said to himself. He did not want to know this stuff, he told himself. He lowered the newspaper to see Mr. Parker standing in the doorway, red faced and shaken.
“Come in here, Headley. I’ve got a job for you.”
Chapter 7: Find Stuff Out and Put it in the Paper
Ty Burnwood loved and hated and loved and HATED her job. She loved the sign that hung over her desk at The Bedford Bee. “Find stuff out and put it in the paper,” it commanded.
Ty didn’t just love the sign. She loved the feeling of finding stuff out, of poring over documents until that thing she didn’t quite know she was looking for became clear. The hair on the back of her neck stood up to tell her: “You’ve got those bastards.”
She had always loved the buzz of a newsroom and the smell and sound of a printing press turning her words into a community conversation, the anxiety of fretting over every phrase until this magic thing called a newspaper landed on people’s lawns and the calls began to flood in. She loved those responses from readers more than anything. The praise, sure. But the yelling and cursing too. It meant people read. It meant people thought what they read was important. It meant, therefore, that her work was important.
She hated what the business had become in a world where news was politicized, where social media had eaten journalism and vomited up a rancid alternative, where facts didn’t seem to matter, Artificial Intelligence served as a poor swap for the real thing and newsrooms were quaint reminders of a world that no longer existed. But she didn’t hate it enough to go find work shilling for Rebel Energy – the Death Star, she called it – or some politician. She loved it too much for that. Or she hated the thought of selling her soul more than she hated her circumstances.
She still could not believe that she was now the editor and publisher of the Bee, the little newspaper in the same suburb where she’d grown up. She vowed to herself to lead just like she did in sixth grade when she’d served as editor of the school paper, the Bedford Bugle. She’d been called into the principal’s office after her first edition, after she’d published school cafeteria health inspection reports that docked Bedford for rat feces, roaches, and an inspector’s rebuke that “If this were a commercial restaurant we would shut it down.”
Sure, Ty’s dad had been a county health inspector at the time, and knew where those files were buried, but she went and found them on her own. She wrote a front page story under the headline “Rats! Bedford lunch ladies serve up vermin-celli.” In the same issue she’d written an opinion column under the pigtailed class picture from her fifth grade year, her face mostly freckles and buck teeth. She had also written the unsigned editorial on the commentary page – in a stodgy institutional voice she thought befitting of the Bugle – in which she quoted herself.
Lunch ladies had argued that it wasn’t their job to control the pests, and besides, they always used spaghetti noodles, never vermicelli. They demanded a correction, a retraction, an expulsion. Principal Jubal Dubose wanted two out of the three, but settled for a suspension when Ty refused to correct a story that was correct already. The response to her punishment set her on a course for life. Students actually marched to support her, with placards reading “Order Pizza,” and “Eyes on the Flies,” and “We shall overcome some rats.”
Still, the school board suspended classes for two whole days to fumigate and remove the roach and rat corpses. Ty had used her dad’s old Nikon to take pictures of bodies piled in the dumpster behind the cafeteria. The pictures ran on the front page of the next edition, with a headline so big it could only contain the words “Mess Grave!”
Ty had lost her editorship over that, and was banned from entering the Bugle offices. But she never forgot the feeling. She was just a sixth grader who hadn’t gotten braces yet, but she had forced the bureaucracy to act. She had beaten city hall so hard that city hall beat her back.
She never got tired of it. She’d worked on school newspapers in college, got a job right after graduation at the state’s largest paper, and made a name for herself with a story that unveiled a web of deceit at a local school board. Five people had gone to jail on that one. It would have been six, but Elijah Nixon, the 89-year-old owner of a one-man grass cutting company who had billed the school $11 million for mowing grass, died of natural causes before trial.
His last comment to Ty was “haven’t you ever heard of pickup labor.”
That story had propelled her to a regional paper, and she was sure she was bound for New York or Washington when the bottom fell out of the news business. She lost her job in a round of cutbacks and was considering getting out altogether when she learned the Bedford Bee was up for sale. For practically nothing.
She was under no delusion that she could replicate those caffeinated glory days at the Bedford Bee. Those days were gone, taken by the internet and changing habits and greedy tech punks. But she was going to try. She was publisher, and editor, and one of only two full time reporters. It was like she was in sixth grade all over again, and she loved it more than ever. She loved writing it all out, debating every word in her head, double and triple checking every fact and implication. She loved not having to fight it out with editors, and the corporate lawyers who charged more for an hour of knee-jerk cowardice than she made in two days of actual work. Fucking fuckfaces. This paper was hers. And she was going to expose the rats.
So Ty had been working late, as always, fact checking the community calendar – the most important feature of the paper, she knew – and re-re-writing a story no one in their right mind would read, when she heard a car rumble past the parking lot, heading toward those storage units behind her office. She thought that was strange, as it was approaching 1 a.m. But hell, she was working, too.
But it reminded her that it was time to go. That she should pretend she had a real life outside this empty newsroom, that she should go home and turn on some kind of noise and do her best to drift off to sleep. So she closed her laptop, turned off the lights and stepped into night air so muggy it made her cough.
It was dead silent out here, but for the occasional toad or cricket. She loved and hated that, too. She loved the idea of nature, but she longed for the bustle of the city, with real corruption and real stories.
Ty opened the door of her 1975 MGB convertible – the only car she had ever loved, even if it was in the shop more than it was on the road. She was just about to step inside when she heard a noise.
Was it a scream? A coyote maybe? She heard it again, from back by the storage units. It was a cry of agony, like a person in serious pain. She jumped into the car, started her up and, without bothering to worry about her own safety, sped behind the shopping center. She turned the corner and there, spotlighted by the beams of her little English car, was the strangest sight she had seen since a truck carrying sex toys jackknifed on the interstate, scattering dildoes and cock rings across the median. Crashes ensued in both directions, traffic ground to a halt and rubberneckers leapt from their cars to grab their prizes like candy from a pinata. Ty had snapped a photo of a grandmother limping back to her car with foot-long penises, one black and one white, in each hand. She had elected, for multiple reasons, not to run that picture.
Tonight’s scene might have surpassed even that. A man in shorts and a sweater stood in front of an open storage unit struggling to lift another man out of the car. The man was halfway in and halfway out, bloody and dirty and shrieking like a barn owl. His legs were wrapped in vines.
Ty picked up her camera.

John Archibald 6/22/26 John Archibald 6/22/26

Chapter 5: The Jamboree

He clutched his Shun, which was ideal for dicing onions but untested on human flesh. He wondered what he had been thinking. What he was doing, and it dawned on him that the stranger might actually be glad he was here, might see him as a savior, as long as he didn’t realize that he was the one who dropped a vehicle on him, vomited and ran away like a coward.

Regrettably, neither prayer was granted.

He clicked the flashlight app on and held the burner phone in front of him. Better than the darkness but no less scary now that he could see it.

“Quiet,” he told himself. “Quiet,” but every step sounded like an earthquake, or a bear call. He wished, for just a moment, that he had a Bic lighter and a Lysol can.

*****

“Stop! Who goes there?” he said, realizing too late how stupid that sounds in real life. “I mean, who’s out there?”

Khalidi did not know how to respond. He did not know who this man was, or why he was at the bottom of a ravine, or whether he had been struck by the falling cargo van that had plummeted from above.

“Hallo? Is somebody down here? Hallo?”

He clutched his Shun, which was ideal for dicing onions but untested on human flesh. He wondered what he had been thinking. What he was doing, and it dawned on him that the stranger might actually be glad he was here, might see him as a savior, as long as he didn’t realize that he was the one who dropped a vehicle on him, vomited and ran away like a coward.

But there was no way he could know that.

“Hallo?” Khalidi said again. “Are you hurt?”

The man in the brambles spoke. Khalidi almost jumped out of his skin.

“You’re the guy that puked on me,” the voice said.

“Damn,” Khalidi said under his breath.

“What? What do you mean? Puked on you? That… what … I don’t … that’s crazy talk,” he stumbled. “I, ah, I heard you calling for help.”

“You dropped a van on me, and then you puked on me. Like the van wasn’t enough,” Hubie Flynn said.

“No. What?” Khalidi. “You’ve got the wrong guy. I was just happening by and … and heard you.”

“I wasn’t making any noise," Hubie said. “You’re the guy that barfed on me. I know it’s you.”

“What? No. You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m just trying to help.”

“You’re Barf Man,” I saw you,” Hubie said. “I was looking right up at you when you pushed that van over the edge. I called for help and you yacked all over me and then you ran away.

“I’ve been down here ever since, legs broken, covered in puke, fighting off barf-eating bugs, and now you come back. Why?”

“Me?” Khalidi said. “No, you must be …”

“Why are you holding that knife?” Hubie said. “You’re working for Hogg, aren’t you.”

It was a statement, not a question.

“Hog?” Khalidi said. “What hog?”

“Are you … are you OK?” he said.

“Are you going to kill me?” Hubie asked. “Or are you going to help me?”

“Or are you going to puke on me again?”

Maybe he could kill this guy, Khalidi considered. But no. He could not. He dropped the knife on the forest floor and ran to the young man.

“I didn’t know you were down here,” he said. “At least not until I, you know, vomited on you.”

What came next rolled out breathlessly, in no particular order.

“I think…” Hubie began. “You’re gonna help me.”

Khalidi took a breath. He looked at Hubie and nodded.

“Let’s get you out of here,” he said.

John Archibald 5/28/19 John Archibald 5/28/19

Flycatchers & Fireflies: Chapter 1

The young man was getting nervous, too. Why was he here, close to the edge, 100 feet above the forest floor, as Hogg pointed and squeaked and seemed to inch ever closer. It was like a game of Red Light Green Light. Every time he glanced back Hogg froze. Yet he still came closer. Maybe it wasn’t Red Light Green Light at all. Maybe it was King of the Hill? The young man began to sweat.

****

It had been a strange day. Young Hubie had knocked on Hogg’s door early that morning, hoping to learn more about the power company’s purported plan to build a dam that would turn his family’s land and half of Forrest County into a lake the size of Amarillo, Texas.

Google Maps had led him to Hogg’s isolated, modest house, and he’d been impressed. He’d expected gates and a long driveway, maybe a security guard with a paunch and a pistol. But it was just a ranch-style brick house that looked like it was built in the ‘50s and got its last coat of paint during the Nixon administration.