Marci ate 34 Twinkies in 10 minutes, hardly a world record, but plenty good enough to win the Goose Creek county fair competition and its cash purse of 175 dollars. She rolled the sweat-thin dollars into a tight tube and stashed that in the back pocket of her Wranglers. She dropped the Twinkie-shaped trophy onto a cage occupied by an orange rooster, then vomited a spray of yellow long and loud enough to startle all the caged fowl into a fury of feathers and crowing.
The money could sustain her living in the backseat of her Bronco. She was newly on her own since she’d freed herself from her ass-face boyfriend Jimmy three days ago after a ten-year sentence of suffering. He was a magician, and she’d been his assistant on stage donning a sequined leotard with too much cleavage. It had been fun in those early years, the gasps of the crowd, the flashes of fiery conjuration on stage, but she’d quickly learned why magicians never revealed the workings of their tricks. Under the cape was just another weirdo creep starved for attention. She’d escaped that finally, and now she and her goat Elwood—who was all she loved in the world—could make their own lives elsewhere. Maybe they’d start a little farm like her daddy, but they’d do better than her daddy, who’d been a mean prick and a terrible business man.
Once she quit puking, she’d return to Elwood’s stall with some fresh oats and a Milky Way bar because those were his favorites, then she’d drink herself crocked with a bit of the cash. She’d start with High Lifes and move on to gin until Jimmy blurred away into nothing. That’d be his best magic trick to date.
“You robbed me,” a voice called from behind her. She turned from her puking to face Buchanan and his horseshoe mustache.
“You eat Twinkies like a pussy,” she said.
“I woulda won.” He had come in second, at a pathetic twenty-six Twinkies. “A man’s throat just don’t open like that. It’s an unfair advantage of the sexes.”
She puked again, without turning, hoping to splash a few drops on Buchanan’s fancy red cowboy boots.
“Christ,” he said, a gag catching in his throat, “you can’t even hold ‘em. Don’t even appreciate ‘em. A goddamn waste of Twinkie on you.”
“Have at them,” she said, nodding at the yellow mash between them.
“I come bearing a message from Mr. James the Magestick,” he said.
“I don’t care a rat’s ass about what Jimmy has to say.”
“You wanna be hearing this.” He ran forked fingers over his mustache. “But I might not feel like telling you nothing, seeing how you cheated me outta what I deserved.”
“Fine. Whatever,” she said, wiping the puke from her lips. “You win, Buchanan.” She grabbed his hand and rattled it around.
He yanked his hand from her wet grip. “You better take this seriously, missy. It’s about your goat.”
She pivoted back to the proud orange cock clucking inside his cage, and she snatched up the gold-painted trophy. “Here then. Crown yourself the rightful king of Twinkies. Now say what you gotta say.”
He held the trophy in one arm like a baby, cradling the plastic trinket she would’ve left with the cocks. “He’s got it. Your goat, that is. He said he won’t be giving it back for no less than one hundred dollars of your winnings, restitution for that fine assistant uniform you vandalized upon quitting him.”
“You’re lying.” She had torn it, split the leotard right down the middle immediately after their last performance, after he’d jammed bleating Elwood into a tiny box and pretended to stab swords through him. She and Elwood had walked away in only her underwear, a pool of ragged sequins at her feet.
“I assure you I would not fabricate such a serious affair.”
“That asshead,” Marci said. She brushed past Buchanan’s shoulder, but she felt a tug on her jeans.
“Not so fast, missy.” He’d knuckle-hooked her beltloop. “This plaque here reads Marci Freehan, and that sure ain’t me, sure does not ring like Buchanan S. Wilhelm.”
“Flathead screwdriver’ll pop that sucker right off.”
“And then the winner shall be anonymous? I don’t think so. I require official record.”
“Hell, Buchanan, what do you want me to do about it? Engrave it with my big toenail?”
If Wranglers weren’t so well made, she would’ve busted out of his knuckle grip and bolted. He couldn’t run her down in his stupid red boots. Yet she was caught in the grip of another man’s busted-up pride. Assface Jimmy had been similarly offended when they misspelled James the Majestick in sparkle-star font on the ’78 Ford’s custom paintjob. He’d threatened to set the autobody shop on fire by sparking a tiny fireball from his palm, a chintzy trick using projectile flash paper. They refunded him, and from that day Jimmy leaned into the misspelling, claimed it added a touch of mystery to his title. The Twinkies threatened to riot up her esophagus once again, but nothing seemed left inside her. She pulled the roll of bills from her pocket and held a twenty out to Buchanan. “Go get your trophy named right,” she said.
“It’ll take ten more, I figure,” he said, still holding her.
She peeled off another bill, and he released her. At her back, she heard him yip and howl, boisterous as those caged cocks. She skittered off through the sow barn, rows of stinking shit and snout snuffling. Next came the sheep puffed to the brim for tomorrow’s shearing competition, and finally the goats. They brayed at her. They climbed their fences to ogle her with their bugged-out yellow eyes, those rectangular pupils that made them seem otherworldly. They were accusing her for Elwood’s absence.
She scoured the vacant stall for any kind of evidence, but faced only the chorus of guilting goats. Her phone buzzed and she found a picture from Jimmy, a close-up of Elwood, the snowy fur circling his yellow, pleading eyes.
She pulled the roll of Twinkie-winning bills and counted out exactly one hundred dollars, Jimmy’s ransom. She slid that into the back of her underwear, where she was plenty sweaty and the bills would emerge smelling like swamp ass. Then she reached into her grooming bucket and fished out her hoof-trimming shears. They’d do a nice job scraping up Jimmy’s truck’s fancy-ass paintjob.
On her way out, Nancy blocked her path with those giant tits of hers flopping loose in a camouflage tank top. Her meaty arms formed triangles at her sides. Hay jutted from her short curly hair, as if she’d just come from screwing in the bales, as she was well-known to do.
Nancy said, “Stall rent, kiddo. Time to pay.”
“Perfect timing. I just had some luck with Twinkies.”
“I witnessed it, baby.”
“I kept wondering, while I was eating, who’s paying for these Twinkies.”
“They’re last year’s that didn’t get deep-fried and sold.” Nancy snorted snot into the back of her throat. “Fried & Dyed donated them from their filthy-ass food truck.”
Marci flipped through the crinkled bills. “They say enough preservatives to last a century. Twinkies never die. I can already feel my body getting younger. I might live forever.” Really, she felt like she might puke again. If she did, Nancy would make her clean every stall, every manure mound from every mewling mammal. Marci pressed a fist to her lips to steady the rising bile. “How much?”
“How much you win?”
“Never enough.” She cast her eyes to her Twinkie-splattered shoes and tried to make her face look pathetic enough to inspire charity.
“Count out what you got.” Nancy stood stone like. A nearby sheep snaked its tongue against her elbow.
Marci counted aloud each bill that wasn’t hidden in her underwear, and when she reached the grand total, she proffered it with a piteous smile.
“Think I run a poorhouse, kiddo? Think just because you’re a pretty face I’ll forget what a stall is worth?”
They stared at each other then, for such long seconds it made the ransom money feel bulgingly obvious through her jeans.
Nancy shot a chin at her stall and said, “Where’s that gorgeous goat of yours?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Best not be accusing me of running loose stalls,” Nancy said. “Think I’d let someone steal your goat?”
“Who would have the balls to fuck with you?”
“Goddamn right.” Nancy clapped Marci’s cheeks, dropped her tough-bitch show now that Marci had supplicated amply. Nancy snatched the offered money and began to walk away on those thick legs atop those steel-toed shit-kickers, so strong Marci considered telling her about Jimmy’s goat-napping. Nancy would delight in beating the piss out of asshat Jimmy. But the situation required some delicacy, for Elwood was at stake. Plus, Marci’s daddy said no Freehan ever needed help from no one. Amen and forevermore. All this, and just maybe she didn’t want to see Jimmy get too banged up. Those ten years together—her his lovely assistant, her his Amazon in the sheets, her his dream goddess, as he liked to say—had given him a slice of her heart to also hold ransom. Maybe more like a crumb at this point. Soon less than that.
Once Nancy strutted into the darkening night outside the barn-light glow, Marci examined the hoof-trimming shears. The blades crunched together, rusty from the South Carolina air’s hot breath. She knew Phyllis over at the horse barn kept a bench grinder. She could sharpen her blade and maybe also shave off the last crumble of affection she held for Jimmy.
Marci passed through the barn housing the prize-winning farmers’ largest anomalies: behemoth, warty pumpkins and watermelon’s plump as a tire and strawberries ripe and red as angry fists. She paused to puke once more against the green 4-H barn full of sagging kid pottery and always enough paintings of cats to wallpaper a trailer.
Her gut was settling by the time she stumbled upon Phyllis’s stall. Marci never liked horses. Their haunches and ropey muscles seemed poised for maiming, all just waiting for you to creep behind them so they could kick a hoof through your skull. Marci slid past their swishing tails and twitchy ears and wet-marble eyes big as avocado pits.
Marci whispered a “fuck you” to the farting, chuffing horses, and then flipped on the grinder switch. It whirred a deafening buzz. She touched the hoof-trimmer blades to the grinder gingerly, like a teenager’s first kiss. And just like the awkward teenager she’d been—when at fourteen and wearing a mouth full of barbed-wire braces she’d clunked against Sparky Greenberg’s mouth and made his gums weep blood and his little boner against her hip shrunk away and he cried like a baby, tattling blood into his open palm—the shears whined too loud, and her grip loosened. The grind wheel flung the shears past her right ear.
She snapped off the grinder. Blathering, flapping, whinnying lips replaced the mechanical clamor. She followed the equine complaints in the dark. She peered into loudest beast’s stall and spotted a glinting that shouldn’t have been. She couldn’t help thinking of Jimmy’s gruesome trick of shoving swords through Elwood’s boxed body. The shears had lodged into a horse’s ass.
“Mother fuck,” Marci hissed at the barn door, and then she jumped back when a hoof thunder-cracked against it. This horse seemed especially feral. His shock of gray tail flagellated the darkness. She tried to reach over the gate to retrieve her shears, but the beast was too tall.
She hated to confront that horse, but had no choice. She hopped the gate and squeezed in next to the muscled monster. She bit her cheek not to scream as the horse viced her between stall walls and its demonic lungs, big as blimps, seething, painfully sucking all the fairground air into those blackhole nostrils. She was almost sure the shears couldn’t possibly hurt a horse this massive. But from those great lungs spilled a whine that reminded her of Elwood as a kid when he got skunked and how he’d whimpered, and she and Jimmy had scrubbed for hours with dish soap until his coat was soft as silk.
She gentled her hand up the horse’s haunches, and her fingertips found blade, still just a tad too far for her to pluck. She knew how to mount a horse, of course. She’d grown up on her daddy’s farm, and even if he couldn’t afford horses, the neighbors let her ride their shithead draft horse Glider, who’d bucked her off seven times to the great amusement of every spectating adult. This horse would be her first in nearly twenty years. She boosted herself atop the giant, mounting him backward. She gripped the shears embedded deeply. She tore off that band-aid. The beast’s hindquarters reared, hoofing the walls like rifle shots. She managed to rodeo-ride until it calmed enough for her to tumble into the hay bed. A hoof stomped inches from her nose. The ground pulsed like a thunderous heart. She scrambled through a clomping gauntlet and up over the gate.
The horse was still bucking and bitching, and she caught herself pitying this demonic creature. He was a living thing, after all, certainly worth more mercy than her daddy or Jimmy or really any man she’d ever known. She reached into her underwear. Jimmy didn’t deserve her money or even her ass sweat. All he needed were these sharpened shears. She slipped the ransom money under the bench grinder, along with a note: Some cash to patch up your horse. Sorry.
James the Majestick’s ’78 Ford pickup with its sparkle-font paint and gold rims should’ve been easy to spot amongst the animal trailers and pop-ups and rusty vans. She made three laps through the lanes, got sick of the catcalling from the group of men drinking Tecates and listening to polka. The women wearing cowboy hats over their ponytails and tipping shots were even worse. They all recognized her as James the Majestick’s assistant, and they begged her to flash her fantastic cleavage like she did on stage.
The visitor parking lot was twice as big, thinning out a bit now that the Gravitron and Scrambler and Roll-O-Plane had stilled and their purple-orange-green lights had winked to sleep. She couldn’t find Jimmy’s truck there either. She texted him, Where the fuck you at?
He took too long responding, and she kicked gravel into a Mustang’s passenger door. Walking out on Jimmy’s act had exhilarated her, warmed her whole body with delicious revenge. He’d been claiming for years that he could sense them on the verge of a big break. He was destined to honor the world with his dark arts. Meanwhile, she’d suffered the waiting. No one deserved ten years watching rough drafts of magic tricks, picking up scattered card decks and bleaching swallowed swords and chucking dead bunnies into fast-food dumpsters. When she quit, it slipped out like an ancient, cramping belch held back far too long: I’m leaving you, she’d muttered on stage. As soon as she said it, bricks slipped off her shoulders. She didn’t need to know where she’d live—in the back of her Bronco—or how she’d eat—leftover corndogs and funnel cakes—or that she was unemployed since she couldn’t exactly quit him and keep her shift at James the Majestick’s Magic Supply Emporium. She had loaded Elwood into her Bronco and rolled down all the windows and hauled ass down country roads, shouting her freedom.
She reached into her pocket to find a text from Jimmy: At our spot. Come and find me.
For a moment, she thought he meant their rental house, the slumping queen mattress that smelled like vanilla because Jimmy sprinkled it once a week like the fucking pope blessing a bakery. But their house would be too obvious. Jimmy was in performance mode. He was surely hiding somewhere on the fairgrounds. He’d been doing magic shows here since he’d found her as a high-schooler milling around the animal barns. His glitter and glitz against her chicken shit and grit. She was his greatest transformation, he’d told her while he was cutting a deeper cleavage line into her leotard and bedazzling tiny stars on her fringe.
She trudged back toward the blinking-out fairgrounds. She was losing patience in tandem with each light flicking off. She crossed through the gates and into the shutdown fairgrounds now lit like a graveyard, save for one circle of spotlights. It had to be the tractor display, the shined and waxed new John Deere models. It had been their spot, she supposed, the place where they’d first groped each other, crammed inside the cab of a big red combine ten years ago.
She shouted Elwood’s name at big knobby wheels and thresher teeth. Like an incantation, Jimmy emerged. He was wearing his magician’s silk top hat and the sparkly midnight-blue smoking jacket that matched his truck. His white-gloved hand held a rope.
“It would be in your best interest to halt, dearest, an interest that’s always been an interest of mine.” His hands were lifting the rope, white fist, tight grip. “I’m holding all the cards and pulling all strings.”
She was near enough to see the triangle he meticulously sculpted under his lower lip. She had the urge to shave his lip clean with the rusty hoof-trimming shears.
“Now, now, dearest, or you’ll force my magic,” he cautioned, both hands drawn, rope tugging through the crook of his thumb.
She tapped the shears against her forehead, and his eyebrows rose into the brim of that ridiculous top hat. Jimmy panicked, hopped back. He wriggled the sleeves of his blue smoking jacket and threw something. A puff plumed and quickly blew thin in the breeze. He shouted, “Sha-zooka!” his signature phrase, and even though she’d heard it ten thousand times, him practicing in the bathroom mirror, suited up and sparkling next to the toilet paper and tampons, this time it slipped a sliver of shock up her spine. The rope went limp. He whipped a lasso-like circle in the air. Elwood was gone. He’d disappeared her goat. She tackled him to the ground, pressing the rusty blades against his neck.
“Now now now, dearest. Calm down, dearest,” he said through a pinched throat. “Only I can reverse a magic this strong.”
“You don’t have a dick tip’s worth of magic.” She tightened her thighs, pinching his ribs. “Give me Elwood.”
“He’s a goat, Marci. Just a goat,” he said. “And I am a person. Your fate. Our forever.”
With each claim the blood inside her bubbled. She dimpled the blade deeper into this throat. “Ten fucking years. What was I thinking?”
“You don’t mean that. You’re not thinking straight.” He was getting hard underneath her, and that pissed her off worse than any of this. So she lifted the shears from his neck, raised them high, and drove them at his crotch.
Jimmy jerk-rolled at the last second, and the shears sunk into dirt. And thank God, because who had time to deal with police and hospitals and broken dicks?
“You’re insane, dearest. Completely and utterly immigrated to the lunatic abyss,” he said, scrambling to stand. “You’ll never find Elwood without me. Only I know the realm of his exile.”
“Yeah, well, I suppose you don’t need balls to show me.” She snipped at the night.
“I offered a reasonable ransom, did I not?”
“We’re miles past me owing you anything.”
He dipped down to retrieve his stupid top hat, flicked it atop his balding scalp. “You don’t have it?”
“You don’t deserve it.”
He picked up the rope and spun it to form spirals in the air. His lasso geometry was a bit beautiful. She hated Jimmy even though she acknowledged that his hands were wonders, able to invent a trick out of just about anything, a broomstick, book of matches, stack of dirty dishes.
“Dearest,” he said, “you’ve always been so terrible with finances.”
“Not near as bad as you.”
“Remember the knockoff Avon box you were going to resell? The off-brand Tupperware? Or, consider your darling Elwood who might as well devour dollar bills for lunch.” He spun and spun that rope.
“I never said shit about all the props you burned through, all those poor bunnies. I didn’t blink when you bought the entire volume of Magic for Dummies and then Expert Magician and then Magician Monthly, or when you quit your good fucking programming job to buy the store.”
“The difference, dearest, is commitment and focus. I was always following my true path. Whereas you are lost, but, fear not, my path is bright enough for you to join.”
“The only way I’ll follow you is if we’re going to Elwood.”
“Then let us go, you and I, to the realm of the banished,” he said and flung his cape and spun on his heel.
They wove through the placid fairground tents, barns like crypts and tombs. His cape shimmered now and then. Behind the hoedown tent that would bustle with Stetson hats and gingham dresses tomorrow, past the trailers stowing the precious kegs of piss-thin domestic beer, and farther still through a wooded area where brambles tugged her ankles, Jimmy’s cape glimmered on, a juvenile cry for attention. But Elwood was worth it. Elwood was everything she had left. Jimmy finally stopped in a clearing where the moon illuminated every blade of grass save for a rectangle of black that Jimmy stood over.
“What is a grave but an act of earth transference?” Jimmy said, doing his magician voice she so despised. “What is a hole in the earth but an opportunity for transcendence?”
“If he’s in there…” Her grip on the shears tightened against the sickening plummet in her gut that made her want to fall on her knees.
“Each body, man and animal, merely a corpse awaiting its mortal transmutation.”
She couldn’t decide whether to succumb to another bout of Twinkie purging or to play a game of pin-the-shears-on-the-shimmery-cape. She imagined Jimmy slitting Elwood’s throat as he bleated to the stars, Jimmy offering his sacrifice to the muses of magicianhood, so that he might earn his big break and escape this podunk fair circuit.
“If you killed my goat, Jimmy, I’ll never forgive you.”
He swung to face her, and he wore moon-sparkling tears that jeweled his cheekbones. “Kill Elwood? My God, dearest, you think me possible of such violence? He’s over by the tree.” He pointed, and sure enough, there was Elwood munching the bark off a birch.
She rushed to her goat, ran her fingers down his ribcage and up his neck checking for injury, until her fingers reached the silky wattles and no sign of hurt. She hugged his boxy skull to her face, kissed his ears. Elwood bored of the inspection and resumed teething bark. She turned to thank Jimmy or stab him or she didn’t exactly know what, but he was nowhere. The trees whistled. Her feet crunched leaves. Elwood munched on.
“Jimmy?” she tried against the lonely moonlight. No answer. And maybe Jimmy had finally pulled off real magic and eviscerated himself. It would be the kindest death she could imagine for him. Success in his craft finally and totally.
“So long, Jimmy,” she said and tugged at Elwood’s rope, but a gnarled knot bound him. She picked at the knot’s knuckles.
“Why persist?” Jimmy’s invisible spirit suddenly said. “How could I possibly go on?”
His disembodied voice seemed to halo around her. She tugged harder, likely worsening the knot. In her struggling, the shears thudded next to her feet. She cursed herself for forgetting, and then she snipped the rope in two.
“Come back to me, Marci,” his sick soul whined from the moonlight. “Just come back.”
“Eat shit, Jimmy.”
“If you won’t, then bid me farewell.”
“Where the hell are you?” she said, bolstered now by Elwood’s freed rope wrapped around her wrist.
“In the depths of my despair. I am halved. My lovely assistant is leaving.”
She fumbled toward the voice, and it led her to that black rectangle in the ground. A dark void. A white-gloved hand popped from the shadows.
“What the hell are you doing down there?”
“Waiting for passion to pull me out. Take me back, Marci. Revive me.”
It would take only a word, a tug of his wrist, a peck on the lips, and she could be sleeping on their sunken mattress that reeked of vanilla rather than cramped in the Bronco’s back seat. No magic was needed to resume that ten-year sentence of cohabitation and annoyance in trade for mild comfort and convenience.
“Fuck off, Jimmy.”
The white glove retracted into shadow. Jimmy said nothing, and the trees whistled once again. Elwood bleated.
“Then how about a final trick?” he finally said.
“I’m sick of tricks.”
“You’ll like this one. It encompasses the purity of disappearance.”
“That’s what I’m working on here,” she said, leaning over the hole, yet even hovering over, she saw only blackness. “I’m leaving you and taking Elwood and we won’t see you again.”
“Please, dearest. Just this one last time. Just once more and I’ll release you.”
She began walking, but stopped when his voice boomed, bad as years ago, the time he snapped the rabbit’s neck right in front of her when she said she had to go to her dad’s funeral instead of help him with his act.
“I’ll haunt you. Stalk you. Leave without helping me disappear, and I’ll appear everywhere.”
She trudged back to the hole’s border, leaned her face over so that Jimmy could see her expression by moonlight. Elwood gobbled some weeds at the hole’s edge and sent earth crumbling through the dark. “Fine then, James the Majestick, how might I assist?”
“Bury me,” he said.
“You don’t want that.”
“But I do, dearest. It’s the greatest trick there is.”
“You want to practice an escape?”
“I want to disappear at the hands of my dearest.”
Jimmy always had a plan, and surely this was another. But she liked that she’d get to dirty his costume, and maybe he’d choke on some dirt. She found the shovel near the hole and a mound. She dipped the spade and cascaded dirt in a shushing sound. She’d loved him once. She had to have. As she shoveled, she tried to conjure instances. There was the time Jimmy had hand-picked her a bouquet of wildflowers, a burst of yellow goldenrod and purple lilac and snowy Queen Anne’s lace. But even then, Jimmy had put the bouquet into his practice the next morning, popping them from his cuffs and then setting them ablaze. Other times, he’d rubbed her feet, her shoulders, kneaded her palms, but that always served as the precursor to fucking. Jimmy acted with condition, as gaudily obvious as his stupid cape. She heaped more dirt.
She kept up this game of chicken and shoveled on, flinging earth in a flurry that elicited a huff from Elwood. If the dirt pile was any indication, there was still plenty of hole left. She dipped the shovel spade into the hole, fishing for his silken top hat. The shovel dangled undisturbed. Even though she couldn’t find him with certainty, she raised the shovel, tensed her biceps, her whole body a drawn bow, a spring, the hinge on a trap door. But perhaps this was exactly what he wanted—his blood on her hands. Put spade through top hat and skull or bury him alive, both put her in prison, locked in by Jimmy forever. This was the illusion’s true endgame, a cage shaped like retribution.
Marci chucked the shovel into the dirt pile. She reached into her underwear, and she materialized a single dollar bill, sweat dampened and soft. Here was the price of her freedom. She flicked it into the black square at her feet where the inconsequential fluttering disappeared and, ta-da, she’d performed her first and final solo trick.
Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collections One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, No Good for Digging, and the forthcoming Such a Good Man. He painted houses for ten years in Michigan and now teaches creative writing at Winthrop University. His stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, and One Story.