The Lankville Daily News

By Chris Vitiello

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An employee with the unfortunate name of Pitts placed a folder before me.  I scanned it quickly.

“Now, look here, Pitts.  This information is incorrect.”

He raised his shoulders slightly and shot me a look of idiotic bafflement.

“That’s all I know.  That’s all I know is what is in that folder.”

I desired to whip him right then but I kept calm.

“As I noted earlier in the day, I am in need of the carbon service forms.  There are men going into the field today.”

He shrugged his shoulders again and said nothing.

I waited for this Pitts in the lunchroom.  He secured a plastic tray (still moist from the washers) and began moving slowly down the line.  He picked out a gelatin dish (small nuts floated at its quaking surface) and a softball-sized fish ball.  He slid over to the register.

“No, no, Pitts.  Allow me.”  Much to his surprise, I paid for the meal.

He wandered over to a table filled with other pasty dullards.  I sat beside him.  It was worrying him, I could tell.

“Tell me Pitts,” I said.  “What do you do for recreation?”

His nerves were beginning to take over.  The fork which he had used to skillfully pierce the fish ball was now shaking slightly in his hand.

“I…I have a little bench in the basement…”

“Ah, a bench,” I noted loudly, imparting as much ersatz good will into my voice as possible.  “A bench.  And what sort of hobby do you engage in on this bench of yours, Pitts?”

“Well…nothing…lately.”

“No, no, Pitts.  Surely, you must have a number of grand activities in progress or planned or perhaps even completed.  Are there shelving units full of your work, Pitts?”

He was shaking full on now.

“Come now Pitts.  I am a mere philistine when it comes to such matters.  Inform me.”

“I…understand…what will happen,” he said.

I stood up.

“Very good, Pitts.  Leave your tray there.”

He followed me outside to a weedy yard where he was whipped mercilessly.

By Chris Vitiello

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I have no memory of any mother figure.

It is said though that my mother is still alive.  She lives alone in the distant provincial town of Heaves, far north beyond the Dietz Mountains.  A man (we will call him Klobedanz) recently was interviewed for the position of semi-post-production foreman at the factory and while viewing his two personal statements, I happened to notice the name.

“You are from Heaves?” I demanded.  He shifted uneasily in his seat.

“Yes, I went to school there and graduated…”

“No,” I stopped him.  “There is no need whatsoever for me to understand your sordid personal history, Mr. Klobedanz.”

Later, however, I returned to the statement.  You should consider hiring me because I have Lankville small-town values.  I come from Heaves, where people help each other do things like fix tires.  They will gather around in large groups of ten, twenty and horn in on your tire to the point that you get pushed back into the dirt and can no longer feel the wrench.  You can no longer see your car or understand anything.  And, later, they will throw a picnic and there might be cold pies, a ham and often some dough pockets.

I tossed it away (indeed, Klobedanz was not hired) and consulted a booklet brought to me earlier by a research assistant.  ABOUT HEAVES it was called, an ancient side-stapled pamphlet in simple block lettering.  There was an advertisement for a feed store on the back cover and a small map inside showing the main street and the few ancillary roads that ended abruptly at what appeared to be wheat or perhaps alfalfa fields (the legend was unclear).  A cemetery and Fluid Fellows Hall were crudely noted by a vastly untalented artist.  Though that artist was likely deceased, I had a fervent desire to whip him.

I grew determined.  It was late, approaching midnight, but I selected an appropriate vehicle from the garage and made the seven-hour drive without stopping.  I reached Heaves at dawn.

It was grim and utterly silent.  There was not a single operable storefront– it was as though the town had been crassly and suddenly abandoned.  Nothing was boarded; it was indeed possible to view dark interiors with little more than a forgotten broom, the remnants of a chair or an enormous but renounced stuffed panda inside.  Standing on the sodden wood porch of a former general store, I looked out on the hamlet and its odious hill houses with nothing but rancorous outrage.

I chose a street– white, cracked cement forming a byway to nowhere.  The occasional wood frame house– ramshackle centenarians– stared back at me.  Soon, I found my first inhabitant of Heaves, a tiny, barrel-chested old man in a blue bathrobe, attempting to feebly bend over to pick up a paper.  I swiftly grabbed it out of his reach and held it to my chest.

“Look at me, old man,” I said.  “Look closely at my face.”

“What?”  He blinked in the sunlight.  He was entering an area vastly beyond his understanding.

“I asked you to look closely at my face.  Study it.  Do it now.”

He issued a few more senseless utterances.

“You will not achieve the satisfaction of this newspaper if you do not do as I say.”

He tried.  Minutes passed.

“Now.  There must be a woman here.  An older woman.  There must be a resemblance, you understand?  Tell me.”

I waited.  There was an endless period of deep confusion.

“Do not just tell me something I want to hear old man,” I warned.  I showed him the whip then.  He seemed to focus.

He described a nearby address.  I looked down at the paper.  Heaves Regional Gazette.  

“I will give this to you now, old man.  Atrocious prose awaits you.”

It required a simple right turn on the main street and then onto an overgrown dead end side street.  The house was the last on the north side– it was a crumbling bungalow with missing cedar shingles.  Dead plants lined the rails of the front porch.  An overturned bird bath covered with a deflated Easter decoration filled the cramped front yard.

I stared up at the lace-curtained bedroom window.  “You are there.  That is enough.  It will soon become clear.”

I deposited myself in a filthy wicker chair that creaked monstrously with even the slightest movement.

I would wait.

By Chris Vitiello

File photo

My first automobile was a 1978 Neptune Conquest which I purchased myself from funds accrued working summer night shifts at a rural lumber yard.  It was orange with an exceedingly flat hatchback, bronze colored rims and a deep chasm in the dash where a glove box had once been.  “We took the glovebox out years ago,” said the yokel, who had left the vehicle exposed to the elements in a field of alfalfa.  “My wife, who is dead, would not stand for it.  She was not one for hidden compartments.”  He spit and then ate a pickle which he produced from his pocket.  “But she is dead now and we forded a river to take her home.”

I could no longer tolerate him.  “Take the money,” I said, as the fury mounted.  “Help me get this to the road.”

A few hours later, I pulled into a popular area taco stand.  Though I later taught myself impenetrable methods of self-control, at that time I was young and concupiscent.  I leaned against the car and some girls came up in short dungarees, rolled up in-line with the panties.

“Got a new car, Chris?” said one, a brunette named Shelley with large aviator glasses that I knew instantly to be fake.  “It’s got a flat back.  Flattest I’ve ever seen.”  She was aroused.

“It’s a 1978 Neptune Conquest,” I said, hating myself for it.  But it immediately impressed them all as I knew it would.

“Let’s take a ride,” said Shelley.  “Do you know Twin Carnal Trees Drive-In?  They’re showing Thergos 2015 tonight.  It’s erotic.”

And so it was.  A pornographic drive-in theatre nestled in a shallow grove and Shelley’s hand down my fashionable gym shorts.  I leaned back and looked up at the dome light.  It was cracked.  I silently cursed the yokel.  I reached down and attempted to move the seat back.  It wouldn’t budge.  Nor would it incline.  I would get even.

I focused on the film.  There was a man dressed like a clown in a dirt clearing and some shabby wooden structures that looked like deer blinds.  Suddenly, there would be an unannounced oral scene.  It was very confusing.  But I moved like the actor and before long there was climax.  Shelley asked for a napkin.

“There are only thin ones,” I noted.  “Even when stacked together, they provide little in the way of absorbency,” I added.

We watched the rest of the film in silence.