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    Weapon In Heaven
    Weapon In Heaven
    Weapon In Heaven
    Ebook138 pages2 hours

    Weapon In Heaven

    By David Bulley

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    About this ebook

    When the Almighty takes Eddy's wife and daughter in a house fire that should have taken him as well, Eddy vows revenge. With some friends, a bluebird, and a gay Baptist minister, angry at God for his own reasons, Eddy begins an internal and external odyssey which, much like Odysseus is thwarted over and over again by divine intervention. But, eventually brings him to the gates of heaven...with a weapon...

    "Don't let the length of this book fool you, or the subject matter give you pause. What you will find between two covers is humorous, ironic, heartbreaking, and human." —Lauren Johnson of Midwest Book Review

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRebel Satori Press
    Release dateSep 3, 2012
    ISBN9781608640867
    Weapon In Heaven
    Author

    David Bulley

    David Bulley’s prize winning fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in Wilderness House Literary Review, 42 Opus, Echolocation, McSweeneys, Porcupine Magazine, Portland Monthly Magazine, Words & Images, Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine, and many others.

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      Book preview

      Weapon In Heaven - David Bulley

      Weapon In Heaven

      By David Bulley

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      978-1-60864-086-7

      * * * * *

      PUBLISHED BY:

      Rebel Satori Press on Smashwords

      Copyright © 2012 by David Bulley

      Discover other Rebel Satori Press titles at:

      https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/rebelsatori

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Most men might have gone all rigid silent or fallen belly-to-dirt wailing, pounding the earth sobbing huge tears. Not Eddy Licklighter. He just looked straight up into the sky, direct in God’s face and said, You dirty fucker. Then he stood there, and everyone around him, all the police and firefighters and onlookers and whoever else, just let him.

      That morning, Eddy stood in front of a pine, bigger than any tree in the north Maine woods had a right to be. He started up his saw and revved it a few times. You’re going down, big fella, he said to the tree.

      He walked around the whole of it twice, looking for the best place to start and how it might fall and if it needed a notch cut in it, then he sat down hard on a root and thought about it. The tree was older than the country. It shouldn’t even be in a forest which had been timbered twice, maybe three times, since white people came to Maine. And yet, there it was.

      Eddy hit the kill switch on the saw and looked up at the sky, blinking in the shock of silence.

      God, he said, you want me to cut this tree or leave it be? He laughed at his rhyme. The answer came to him clear as October sky. He heard it in the click of dead leaves stirred by air, and the creak of the pine. He heard it in the furious wing beat of a grouse some couple hundred yards in the distance. He heard it in the swaying trees, wind swirling to cause a sound like a water flowing. And, he heard it in the pine itself, creaking over him in a way that somehow felt like love. Eddy stood up and walked away.

      He drove home excited, leaning forward, rocking in the seat of his truck as if urging himself just a tiny bit faster toward home. Epiphanies were rare in the life of Eddy Licklighter and he wanted to share it with Mary. He wanted to tell her every tiny detail, stretch it out, taste his words, and savor them. If he tried true and hard enough, maybe he could tell it so she’d feel it too. God didn’t answer every day. This was special stuff and worth losing a job, which he knew without even checking. Twenty guys probably lined up to take his job as soon as he left it. Nobody was gonna pay for a man who refused to cut the best trees and just wandered on home any time he felt like it. But that was okay-fine with Eddy. He had spiritual matters to deal with now.

      Mary sat at the kitchen table, one leg crossed over the other, waving her top leg back and forth enough to stir dust on the floor—if there had been any dust to stir. She lit another cigarette from the butt of the last and jabbed the used one into the ashtray hard enough to send a tiny plume of ash up and out like a geyser.

      When Mary, at twenty-two, discovered she was pregnant with their daughter Cindy, she took the pack of Marlboro Lights from her purse and dropped them into the trashcan right there at the doctor’s office. She didn’t touch another until a month after she quit nursing Cindy. Eddy smoked all through the pregnancy, but quit the very same week Mary started again. He didn’t believe in doing things half-assed, so once he quit, he stayed quit. Mary was trying to catch up for all that time she didn’t smoke. She was up to two packs a day.

      Eddy rocked back in his chair, arms waving, smiling big. He told Mary all about how God asked him not to cut that tree and he watched her face change into a scowl. The scowl turned into a look of love and worry, and then the scowl fought back hard. Eddy clipped his jaw tight and shut up to wait.

      How are we going to pay the mortgage, Eddy?

      Don’t worry, sweetheart. If I got to, I’ll flip burgers up to the McDonalds.

      Mary rolled her eyes and laughed a tiny sound in spite of the scowl. You always say that, Eddy, but you never do it.

      Eddy hadn’t realized Mary might be angry until then. When the talk turned down the familiar trail signaling the end of a fight, Eddy, for the first time, realized they’d been fighting. Always when they fought, it came to a close with Mary forgiving Eddy for being who he was, as if that was why he couldn’t help but screw up, but also why she loved him anyway.

      Fighting between them was difficult to start with because Eddy, after Mary talked for awhile, just got all adoring and she’d be yelling and threatening and he’d be studying how her jaw muscle contracted and how that somehow seemed to make her eyes brighter. She would catch him at it, and then feel loved and then love back.

      He slurped his coffee for time to think. What he thought was, Too late now. Then he thought, My God, how I love that woman. Then Eddy thought how he’d like to kiss her. Cindy was still napping and now was a perfect time for such a thing. He lifted his feet from the floor and let the front legs of the chair fall.

      Sometimes love feels like a luxury, like richness. When that happens the best you can do is just stretch out in it, the same way you might stretch out in silk underwear, or smack your lips together under the taste of just-right lobster. After loving, Eddy and Mary stretched out inside that richness and reveled in it, and drifted off into napping until Cindy woke them up with kisses and giggles.

      Mary slipped on sweats and a tee-shirt, then she herded Cindy downstairs so Eddy could get dressed. He stood to pull his pants on, but stopped. He felt the wetness of a tear on his cheek. He thought hard on it. He dropped to his knees.

      God, he said, even if you hadn’t talked me out of cutting that tree, I just wanted to make a few seconds for being grateful. I am, you know. He waited just for a second in case God thought to answer, but no answer came. Eddy didn’t really expect it anyway. What would God have said? You’re welcome? It didn’t seem dignified enough for omnipotence.

      Eddy Licklighter was, just then, the happiest man on the face of this earth. He loved Mary with a fierce softness. Thinking of her made his insides ache the same way they had when he was a teen, but without all the worry about if he was good enough, and stuff like that. And he’d been right there watching Cindy come out of her mother. Other men he knew said how watching childbirth was disgusting and made them not interested in sex. Eddy was just the opposite. Watching Cindy be born added significance to sex; made it better by ten times ten.

      Eddy looked into the mirror over the bureau and smiled at himself the way people smile at children they love. Then he laughed at his own foolishness and skipped downstairs to help with supper.

      Eddy lay on Cindy’s undersized bed, flat on his back, stretched out in that love luxury. For a story, he told all about the tree and how he knew God wanted him not to cut it. Cindy rested her head on his chest curled up under his arm. Warmth pulsed out of her, the way it does a bird or a mouse whose heart beats about a thousand times a minute.

      I’d like to see that tree, Cindy said.

      I’ll show it to you, Eddy said. He was sure by now that other people wouldn’t even notice the tree, or if they did, they wouldn’t cut it. God had a plan for it, and Eddy had a plan for it too, which was to show it to Cindy first thing in the morning. Until he found another job they probably couldn’t afford the daycare anyway. He’d just keep her with him until then. That thought pleased Eddy a great deal.

      He kissed her a hundred goodnights, tucked the covers around her and tiptoed out in an exaggerated, silly way, like cartoon character sneaking around. She was wide-awake and the tiptoeing made her laugh. That was why he did it.

      * * *

      Months later, when Eddy pieced it all together and tried to figure out what happened and when, this is how he figured it must have gone:

      Mary fell asleep reading like she always did, but this time she forgot she had a lit cigarette in her fingers. The cigarette rolled out and fell through the grate over the heating duct. It smoldered for awhile in the lint and dust, then when the heat came on, blowing air through the system, it caught fire. Fire zipped through the lint faster than dry grass on a windy day. The ducts superheated between the hundred year old plaster and lathe walls. Lathes that old and dry only need an excuse to catch fire.

      An hour later the upstairs floor could have sizzled meat. Mary and Cindy were already dead from asphyxiation. Eddy was asleep on the downstairs couch, some fat psychic on the TV.

      The cast iron clawfoot tub was

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