The Open Road issue is live for sale and features:
John Osier
Colter Cruthirds
Brian Tucker
Christopher McKittrick
John Aleknavage
Roy A. Rogers
Steve Stormoen
Jason McDaniel
Fred Skolnik
Amit Parmessur
Kathleen Kirk
Kyle Owens
Thomas Cochran
Peter LaBerge
Craig W. Steele
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John Osier
NOOSES
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After quitting school, I bought an old VW van for $300, took off for the mountains and got the exploding outhouse job. The fellow who interviewed me was about twenty-five, lean with drooping eyelids; he asked if I’d done any stunt work before and I told him about bull riding in junior college. Pointing his forefinger like a gun at me, he wanted to see me fall.
I put a lot on the fall. Mark, the interviewer, was also the director and lead actor in a show at Hillbilly Heaven theme park. The first day he taught me the exploding outhouse stunt and some others like falling from a barn loft and getting hanged. We did four shows a day. He was a revenuer and generally I was his assistant while a tattoo artist named Hobie Glantin played moonshiner, wearing a fake beard and clothes that looked like they’d been boiled in lard about a week. Sometimes, in between shows Hobie smoked weed, but he only had a couple of lines and the script was simple.
Continued…
Christopher McKittrick
THE CONEY ISLAND COWBOY
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Though it was a long time ago now, on most days in the early 1920s on the few bare strips of the Coney Island boardwalk between Luna Park and Steeplechase Park you’d find an old man dressed like nobody else would dress, which made him easy to spot. His long white beard usually obscured his tin sheriff star, but it wasn’t real anyway. Everything else about his clothing – from his large leather Stetson, cowhide chaps, and a pair of cowboy boots with the longest, pointiest toes and shiniest spurs you’ll ever see – were authentic. The star had been given to the old man when he first arrived to Coney Island – before I met him – but he explained to me later that the man who gave it to him had a slick smile and told him that it would help him sell more photographs.
When the old man was on his spot on the boardwalk – that is, if he got there before that bastard Italian fruit salesman, who would try to get there earlier to steal the old man’s hard-earned spot – he would stand next to a wooden sign painted with black letters in the style of a wanted poster that said:
MEET AND BUY A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE FAMOUS
SHERIFF CLETUS “TEX” JOHNSON
KILLED SEVEN MEN AND TWENTY TWO INDIANS
PRIDE OF THE PLAINS – COWBOY HERO – LEGEND OF THE DUSTY TRAIL
ONE PICTURE … TWO BITS
AUTHENTIC COWBOY STORY … 10¢
Colter Cruthirds
FOUR BOYS IN A FORD WITH FIVE ON THE FLOOR, THE FAT ONE DRIVING
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The cane pole bent taut and tipped forward in the sand over Paul’s bare foot. He tilted his cap up and pinched the pole with his toes and lay back in the sand. His dog was fifty yards upwind of him, rolling around in some buried chicken giblets she’d found. “Get,” he said. The dog looked up at him momentarily and continued rolling around in the rot. A primer gray Ford Ranger passed over the bridge and the creosote trellises clapped in syncopation and a red motorcycle and two four-wheelers followed. Paul sat up and grabbed the pole and slung a bream onto the hot sand and let it flap and then pulled the hook from its mouth. A bit of hotdog dangled from the hook. He pulled the bait loose and scooped the fish up by the underbelly and pressed the piece of hotdog into its mouth. Paul broke another piece off from a pack he’d flung in the sand beside him and pressed it into the fish’s mouth. He did this several times before putting the fish into the creek and loosening his grip. He watched the bream stir back to life and swim sluggishly from his hand before it vomited the bait and swam downstream. Paul bent the pole and attached the hook to a staple at the base and planted the pole in the sand and sat rubbing the sand from his knees. The dog, a Catahoula bitch with icy green eyes, rubbed against his back and he cussed it, flung sand at it. The dog stepped just out of reach and barked and Paul threw his cap at it. The bitch belonged to his mother’s boyfriend, who was out on the Gulf putting in his three weeks at an oil rig. Like the boyfriend, the bitch was little more to Paul than a friendly nuisance, something temporary, something that just had to be waited out.
Continued…
John Aleknavage
FALLOW FIELDS
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“It’s my birthday tomorrow,” said the boy as he balanced across a fallen tree spanning the shallow creek like a winding bridge of mottled white and brown. He had sandy bronze hair and calm grey eyes and cheeks made flush with the chill air.
“Oh yeah?” prodded the girl, “Whatcha gonna get?” His companion was all legs and pony tails, and stood a hand taller than he, although they were nearly the same age.
“You know what I’m gettin’. I done told you a dozen times already!”
“I know. I just like to hear you tell it.”
“Well, I aint goin’ to. You know it.”
It was late January, but the children were dressed in jeans rolled up to their knees and sweatshirts. It had been an unnaturally mild winter, the creek having frozen over just twice so far, and it only snowed once the day after Christmas, but that hadn’t amounted to much and was all melted by sundown. In truth it didn’t seem winter at all, but rather the longest autumn anyone could remember in Potomahannock County. Prospects for getting a snow-day home from school were looking bleaker with each passing day. Already the hyacinths had emerged and would soon produce their tiny purple bouquets for only the attentive to admire, an undeniable harbinger of spring.
Continued…
Roy A. Rogers
TYPICAL BIKERS
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I am a retired helicopter pilot, and now I spend a lot of time riding a Harley. My wife likes to go with me on day trips or long rides. I don’t know if we are your “typical” bikers, we just love getting out on the open road to see the scenery, smell the smells, get rained on, get sunburned, meet people, and take whatever the road throws at us.
A few years ago when I was still working, I was in West Palm Beach, Florida for few days for my job. I had to fly in commercially, so I didn’t get to ride the Harley. However, like a Typical Biker would do, I visited the Harley Shop to see how much money I could leave the good people there and how little merchandise I could leave with.
After spending my time, and my money, I crawled into my rental car to leave. Before pulling out I couldn’t help but notice three bikes and their riders in front of me, also getting ready to leave.
Even though I have been riding for years, there is something built into people making us want to judge. Is it something our parents told us in our youth, ‘don’t trust anyone different’? Is it because we want to feel superior? Or, maybe having to be cooped up in a car we are just jealous of those who aren’t.
Continued…
Brian Tucker
THE COKE MAN, THE TOWN MORTICIAN & A LASSIE DOG
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Tal Gabbard, a hard-working thirty five year old Coca-Cola distributor, made his money by driving fast. He didn’t swerve or love tap people with his Peterbilt freight truck, but he made sure he was visible. Coming around curves on Highway 90, he would turn his lights on to warn others that he was not slowing down. And people moved, because an eighteen-wheeler motivated those that drove smaller vehicles. Tal took pride in his punctuality. He was dead set on getting to Monticello, and then Tennessee, by nightfall, but he had to pass through Seton, KY first.
The semi-truck and trailer rounded a twenty-five mile an hour curve, electric guitars wailing on the radio, and it coasted into a town that looked like something from Whoville. Tal noted a dingy establishment on his left with a half-lit sign reading Mercer’s Pub. Up a little further he spotted Pyles’ Consignment Shop with an obnoxious flashing neon light pointing towards the storefront. A stray half-starved cat ran into a hole provided by the store’s porch steps. Tal hit his anti-lock brakes hard, as a beige car appeared from nowhere. It was his first driving test of the day.
Continued…
Steve Stormoen
AND IF I DIE BEFORE I WAKE
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And yes, as it comes to him… as the truth comes, unwelcome, he does pray to a certain sort of technologically enabled futurism. Not necessarily that our next god-machine will solve all our problems from today, but problems we don’t even know about yet, such that the future will, haphazardly and despite itself, become a better place, and…
Mottle loses his train of thought. Seems to happen somewhat frequently lately – more due to indifference than absentmindedness, and the peculiar pace of his life: completely stationary at 65 miles an hour. Radio ads for plastic surgery and custom cell phone ringtones cut into the deepest crevices of the bus as we pass, yes, another Home Depot, another Wal-Mart, with twenty or thirty more of the usual suspects alongside – we pass these malls every fifteen miles or so. They proliferate like welts from a rash, spread by an impatient fingernail all up and down the California coast, a puddle of instantly recognizable corporate logos and typefaces, a stucco/faux-adobe halo of white, tan, beige surrounding a placid black lake of a parking lot lit with streetlight buoys, white hash marks of “park here” empowerment now at mid-afternoon full to bursting, and then the shoppers. Swarms of them – no, Mottle. Swarms of us.
Continued…
Kyle Owens
THE RED BARN
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Danny sat staring at the sight through his car windshield, with his heater on high, of this semi-stable, two story house that had plastic sealed over the windows and curtains drawn. Chickens paraded the yard at the front of the house, an old 1951 Chevy with no wheels or windows sat on the ground to his right with a doorless refrigerator setting on top of it.
Doubt began to creep into his mind as he shook his head.
“This can’t be right. I’m going to have to call her,” he said as he got out his cell phone and dialed up his wife.
“Hello?”
“You gave me the wrong address.”
“What do you mean?”
“You gave me the wrong address. I don’t think I can be any more clear.”
“Where are you?”
“3738 Stone Mountain Road.”
“That’s the right place.”
“But I’m at somebody’s house.”
“What did you expect?”
“A store.”
“She said it was a red barn? Do you see a red barn anywhere?”
Danny stared out into the January cold and spotted an old barn across the way.
“Yeah. In the back.”
“That’s it.”
“You’re kidding?”
“That’s what she told me.”
Continued…
Jason McDaniel
VAGABONDS
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Their father handed them envelopes with “$” written on the front in blue ink. The oldest brother, Doug, stuffed the envelope in his front pocket. The desert sun glared, penetrating into the shadows and warming the exhaust filled air.
Their father put a hand on each of their shoulders. He said, “Don’t spend all of it at the first stop. There’s no way to get money to you. Don’t lose it.”
The Apache Junction bus terminal was modern with mirrored glass windows. Concrete walls trapped the desert wind, creating small dust devils that danced around the edges of fresh black asphalt.
Tommy, the younger brother, opened his envelope. He made a disgusted sound. “Only ten dollars?”
Doug said, “Twenty between us. The trips only three days. That’s enough.”
Their father gave Doug a slip of paper. He said, “Say that back to me.”
Doug unfolded the paper; it read “#480-205-1020”. He said the numbers.
“That’s for an emergency. Someone will always answer that phone,” he said. He lifted Tommy’s chin and stared in his eyes. “Don’t ask anyone for help until you call this number first. Do you understand?”
The brothers nodded their heads. Their father hugged them and whispered, “I love you.” He squeezed them close, but the boys were eager to get on the bus and begin their journey. They patted his back and withdrew.
Continued…
Fred Skolnik
DEFEAT
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Neither first in nor last out, neither out far nor in deep, he held the middle ground in the games boys played. When they chose up sides, Eddie picked Chris and Tommy picked Jay, then Billy, then Jimmy, then Paul, then Ray. When he heard his name it was with a feeling of relief. Relegated to some inconspicuous spot, shunted aside while the true stars took things in hand and shone with their special light, he was nonetheless glad to have played at all and went home dreaming of better days. This consoled him, but it wasn’t easy to be himself. Sometimes, when he thought he had something interesting or important to say he’d raise his voice to get people’s attention, but no one really listened, and sometimes, sulking and wishing to make his presence felt, at least by his absence, he’d fall behind his friends and linger in the street, but no one really noticed. The only time he really felt a part of things was when they were teasing the wino who sometimes showed up on the block. He knew it was wrong but went along.
John lived in a narrow house with rooms like railroad cars and a little yard in the back blocked off by a slatted wooden fence where his father barbecued steaks from time to time. His father was a factory hand but somehow managed to meet the mortgage payments and the installment payments and the doctor bills and the grocery bills, while his mother kept house in a lackadaisical sort of way, seeming to daydream as she drifted through the rooms, though John could not imagine what she dreamed about. His father, on the other hand, had both feet on the ground and did things with gusto. He ate his meat and potatoes with gusto and drank his beer with gusto and once in a while swatted John with gusto when the boy was out of line. John looked up to his father, thinking he was a real man, and dreamed of being just like him one day.
Continued…
