Mickey Squire’s Last Fuckup (an excerpt)
Mickey Squire is a nineteen-year-old high school senior. A lifelong fuckup in a small Tennessee town, he’s on track to finally graduate…until he accidentally kills the school cop.
Here he just used his grandmother’s debit card to withdraw cash, to buy booze. Now he heads home…
Mickey popped open his glovebox and lit a Marlboro and drove home. Turning eighteen meant different things. It meant he could be charged as an adult. It meant he couldn’t get into fights at school and it meant no more going down to Tom’s Bait Shop when Old Barry was working.
Mickey smoked, a trail of smoke fleeing out the window as he pushed his car to sixty, sixty-five. Only state troopers bothered you at ten over and they never ventured out here. There were more lucrative speed traps near Fort Campbell and Mickey turned off the highway and onto a lineless country road, barely wide enough for two cars.
Barbwire fences lined steep ditches. The road dipped for hills, he crossed a bridge, creekwater lazy in the late afternoon lull. Kudzu vines strangled a roadside smokebarn. A yellow sign warned of a blind driveway, the mailbox camouflaged in a batch of weeds and warped from repeated bashings. Mickey was taking the long way home, the nicotine hitting him in waves each more pleasing than the last. First time Granny suspected him of smoking she made him hold out his hands and she sniffed his fingers, and told him to get the big cooking spoon out of the second drawer.
The cigarette neared its end and Mickey stopped at a railroad crossing, sucking on his cigarette to the bitter end. He burnt his fingers and flicked the butt out the window and idled at the crossing, the last nicotine wave washing over him and sweeping him close to a pleasure alluring enough to dive in, deep enough to drown in and he closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he rolled up the window, the pleasure fading and calling to him. There was plenty left in the pack, but he didn’t have time to smoke a full cigarette between here and the house and the last thing he wanted to do was waste any. Smoking was expensive and he bumped over the tracks, the steering wheel rattling.
Granny didn’t have a neighbor for miles and Mickey pulled in the driveway, backing up to the shed behind the house. Granny’s property covered several acres. Mickey mowed it in the summer and he opened his glovebox.
Granny might smell it, she might not, but Mickey wasn’t about to take any chances. He retrieved a cologne bottle from the glovebox, Brut.
I’m sorry Granny. Whack. I’m sorry. Whack, and each time he apologized, she struck his hands harder, breaking the skin on his knuckles and dousing them with iodine afterwards. It had been a long time since Granny used the spoon and Mickey wondered if the old woman still had the strength.
What would you do, if she smelled it and told you to get a spoon? His first instinct, to shuffle over to the second drawer from the fridge and grab the big wooden cooking spoon, shamed him. A boy had done that, a boy who tried to grow up too quick and nothing Mickey said would stay Granny’s hand, no I’m sorry or It’s all Sam’s fault Mickey reaped what he sewed. But you’re not a boy anymore. You’re old enough to smoke now. Almost old enough to buy beer. Mickey liked these thoughts and kept them coming old enough to die for your country old enough to drive all night old enough to graduate old enough to get a good job, old enough to do what the fuck you want.
What the fuck he wanted, but his bravado faltered when he thought about Granny. Mickey sprayed the Brut on his hands and arms, splashing some on his neck. He capped the bottle and shoved it back in his glovebox with a sigh.
Mickey opened the front door and stepped inside and there was Granny, upright in her rocking chair like she was sewn into it. Eyes glazed, pictures moving on her box-shaped TV. Mickey watched her for a moment, unsure if she was alive, and when she spoke it startled him.
“Someone sure smells good.”
“It’s cologne.” Mickey went to the kitchen. In recent years dinner had become his responsibility. He set up the TV trays in the living room and microwaved two Hungry Man dinners. Granny used to cook up feasts — for Thanksgiving it was just her and Mickey, Mickey playing outside and strolling into the kitchen every five minutes to ask if the food was done yet, and Granny’s answer.
She snored in her rocking chair.
Just a minute.
Mickey ate alone and on the way to his room turned the TV off.