We flew to Chicago, took the train to Champaign and celebrated a very Midwest Christmas with Maddasyn's flatland speedway cornfield clan.
The word 'family' fails to summate the troubled bloodlines binding my Oxford chum to the community she claimed as kin. For nearly one year I lived among them and I can tell you those people were altogether another breed, tribal and guarded, yet magnificently hospitable.
Under and above it all they were outlaws. And I was a fool to ever let myself forget that.
Fuck it. I'm already telling stories on top of bloody stories here so let's have another shall we?
*
It snowed worse than any fatal winter in a Russian novel the night we stepped off the train in Maddasyn's hometown.
A towering cousin called Camille made a proper scene at the station. She roped us both in one circus-bear hug, pressing wet kisses against Maddasyn's temple and hauling the top of my head into her creamy cheek again and again.
Pilloried under the rough sleeve of Camille's Carhartt coat I could only grip my rollerbag and scramble to match her surefooted strides over the snowy car park toward a four-door Blitzkrieg Edition Ford pickup truck.
Mounting the back seat of that urban assault vehicle was like scaling a Mad Max climbing frame to find a pine-scented VIP booth at the top. I dragged my arse over the washboard ribs of a black leather bench scalloped in red flames, floating on a cool cloud of LED accent lighting.
Cousin Camille started the engine. Maddasyn turned up some White Zombie and put a lighted joint into rotation. Blasts of burning diesel drowned the music and the chassis shuddered, rocking and righting beneath me.
I puffed and passed and sank into the custom-stitched seams of the heated seat. The furrowed upholstery delivered blunt first-date vibrations, unleashing pleasant chemical aftershocks that squashed my exhaustion. I was sparkling, on full alert. Primed to participate in whatever might come next.
Peering between assault rifles racked in the rear window I saw Champaign's neat streets and festive lights shrink to a gumball bunch and vanish behind flaky drapes of snow. Then the farmland opened around us and we were riding in the belly of a crew-cab killer whale, chasing a school of blue light across the icy ocean floor.
Camille lowered the volume and turned down a rutted road flocked in fresh snow. Frozen hedges rose in crystal coils choking naked ranks of ash and oak, reaching higher than the top of the Ford.
The surrounding wood thinned. Derelict vehicles crowded the lane, snowed-over humps abandoned in rows like proofing loaves. We passed a wooden farmhouse, a couple of aluminium Jet Age caravans and an actual fucking log cabin. Each miserable domicile was guarded by chained dogs baying among ramparts of impossible clutter.
"Poor things," I said. "Are they your neighbours' dogs?"
"Everyone on this road is family," Camille said. "And those babies are spoilt rotten, don't worry 'bout them. They juss hate bein' put on watch when we congregate uppit the Big House."
A crop of strange shapes leaned left and right in the Ford's headlamps, casting a broken comb of shadows over the snow and into the wood.
"Is that a cemetery?" I asked.
Pride inclined Camille's jawline. Her smile filled the rearview mirror.
"We go back six generations," she said. "You're about to siddown with the latest three. Annif my youngest goes into premature labour wither first gremlin you're gonna meet the beginnin' of a whole new batch."
YOU ARE READING
HUMILIATION of a SAMURAI
General Fictioncover: @JELyrica / One week after Margaret pulls the plug on her relationship with Vincent, a decade-old video of their performance as a musical duo called Citizen Samurai goes viral, and they're hired as an opening act for an aging British boy ban...
