Jack’s cousin, Crime, got his name when he was twenty. He had graduated from boosting candy bars at the Table Rock Market as a lad during lunch hour in Junior High, to stealing cars and stripping the motors in an overnight chop shop as after schoolwork. He dropped out of High School his junior year, to start post non-graduate work in a counterfeit ring. He was caught passing bogus $20 bills five days after his eighteenth birthday and got five years in a Federal Pen. When he came out after two and half years of higher criminal learning he was nicknamed, “Crime,” by his mother. The name stuck. Crime accepted it.
Crime was doing his usual drinking of beer at the Satin Slipper, a country western whiskey bar with a restaurant that served steak and baked potatoes and hamburgers and ham, bacon, and egg breakfasts, and broasted deep fried chicken that had an orthopedic look to it when it came to the table with deep fried potatoes.
Many, including many faithful patrons called it the ‘Sit and Slap ‘er.’ Crime had never been faithful to anything.
The past Sunday night, Crime had a one-night stand with Christy Long, the wife of Richard Long when Christy was out on the town and got a nose full of crank. Regularly, when Christy was out on the town and got a nose full of crank, she slept with someone other than Richard. Crime fit into the scene pretty much like he always did because he had sold her the crank. After he made the sale, he and Christy made a night of it because Christy wanted some more crank for free. They foolishly let Christy’s little Datsun stay in front of the one-bedroom single wide trailer home Crime lived in with twenty cars in various states of disrepair parked all around it. Christy’s Datsun had been out front parallel with Table Rock Road and the brown Japanese car stood out with a day glow ball on the antenna.
Unfortunately, for Crime, Richard Long’s crummy-ride up to his logging job had to back track and make a quick trip into the tire store at Witham’s 24-hour truck stop, and they went right by Crimes little tuna can home at 4:30 am Monday, and Richard saw the Datsun there with its day glow ball lighting up in the headlights as the crummy drove by in the dark. And that had explained her absence from their bedroom, as the kids were at his mother’s home in Shady Cove, where she could have walked had she drank there that night as she told Richard she was going to do.
Monday evening someone had told Crime that Richard knew, and Crime didn’t really shrug it off, but he had more than one man’s wife over the years and figured it would probably pass. He didn’t hang where Richard ever did, but they’d known each other for years. Crime set chokers on a couple jobs where Richard fell timber. Crime had sold Richard a couple new chainsaws that were most likely stolen, and that had been a good deal for Richard, but they hadn’t seen each other in three or four years. He sure didn’t figure to see Richard at the Satan’s Slipper as he was fond of alliterating the watering hole’s name. Richard knew Crime was generally there and drove straight to the bar after work.
When Richard walked under the big blue and red glowing neon sign of a woman’s high heel shoe that adorned the rural whiskey bar and through the door, he saw Crime at the bar about halfway down just before the bar’s corner, where the stools and the bar made an elbow turn to the right, this side of the tables and the stage. Here every weekend a country western band played at least two Merle Haggard songs and the swing dancing swept up the floor, and cowboy hats were bobbing, and the tables were full, and the liquor poured over the ice like tiny waterfalls.
Crime didn’t see him. Richard thought of blind siding him and then it would be over, he could feel his heart pumping blood though his arms. Instead, he took out his buck knife he always carried on his belt during hunting season, took it out of the sheath and palmed the handle.
Somewhere in the Valley sermons were regularly preached about how insidious adultery was because it often included the added sins of lying, and sometimes murder in the process. Neither Crime, nor Richard Long heard these sermons, or any other sermons for that matter since they were children.
Richard sat down right beside Crime and watched him turn his head toward him and then watched his face turn white, as he momentarily closed his eyes in complete embarrassment, then blinked them open to Richard’s cold stare.
Richard then somehow remembered putting a sneak on a bull elk once that was up wind of him and Richard had run around a ridge, got in front of the large animal, and waited behind a huge Douglas fir. The bull cautiously walked up hill but rounding a corner just as he saw Richard only half concealed behind the large tree, with his .300 Winchester Magnum, the Bull had the exact expression on his long ungulate face as Crime had. It was embarrassment and his eyes had half closed and his head nodded, with an expression of, “Oh no!” but before he could turn his antlered head downhill for an escape, Richard killed him. Then Richard banged the knife down on the bar four inches from Crime’s hand and then took his own hand away.
“You’re going to need this,” Richard said. The calmness with which the big man spoke was terrifying to Crime.
“Oh Richard, let me explain,” Crime said, lowering his head again and shaking it back and forth slowly and rubbing his thinning hair.
“This had better be good,” Richard had said.
“Jack’s Cousin, Crime” was originall published in “And the Fires We Talked About” by UnCollected Press.
James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. ‘And the Fires We Talked About,” his collection of short stories was published in 2020. “Black Ice & Fire,” Mr. Kelly’s first book of poetry was published in February of 2021.