KING MOB

by Sheldon Lee Compton

The young man walked along Highway 119 with a hooded sweatshirt wrapped as closely to his body as possible. At just after five in the evening, it would be dark soon, and it was already a fragile cold in the sun. Likely the low thirties. Vehicles shot past him heading south like meteorites. Those going north were dreams in his periphery. He wrapped his shirt more tightly around him, buried his head as far back in the hood as it would go and kept walking, because what else was there to do but walk. And think of Matewan Akers.

His mom named him Patch after a character on a soap opera and his dad wasn’t there to dispute. For all Patch knew, his dad could be named Patch, too. Might have three heads. Might be forty feet tall. Might be white. Might be black. Might be deaf. Might have been a load of sperm in a tube or whatever they kept it in before slamming it into his mom. If that’s what happened, which is unlikely. Patch knew the more likely possibility but didn’t ever want to think about his mom like that, picture her involved in the stories he’d heard about since he was in grade school.

Patch’s mom blows dogs for pills. 

Patch’s mom fucked my cousin and my uncle. Same night! Same time! 

Patch’s mom trades her pussy for drugs. Trust me I know.

Over the years he had managed to block this out. It was all still lodged somewhere in his brain but he had willed that section to go dark; it was now a purgatory of his mind, black spots and brown areas and gray streaking chips from the edges of his heart.

But blocking it out became strainful, then hard, then impossible. As this happened, tribulations mounted. Humiliation and shame he had piled into a vacuum in his mind created just for that purpose kept coming. By freshman year of high school, the same people who had jeered him in grade school began to realize they could get by with more. They switched to the physical. Classmates for no reason ever stated would corner him in the bathroom and force him to lick the bottoms of their shoes, would push him into the gym locker rooms and take turns punching him in the nose until his face from hairline to chin pulped up.

Over time Patch learned to adjust to the treatment. Bad things happened. It wasn’t a matter of accepting that bad things happened; it was a matter of accepting that bad things happened to him. He was kind, understanding, helpful, patient, plus all the rest, and none of it mattered. Bad things happened to good people. No matter what he ever did, no matter what he decided he shouldn’t do, none of it, absolutely none of it, could sensibly change anything. 

And then he met Matewan.

/

Cutting helped. Pulling scabs. Squeezing the blood so fast it puddled black before spilling across his arms, legs, parts of his face. Patch imagined peeling all his skin off in small strips at a time cuddled in perfectly clouded contentment and then heading onto that whatever next thing that had to be better than this thing. It would be spectacular.

Patch pulled the hoodie tighter around his body and then down so far over his forehead, most of his face became a cave entrance. The walk would be eight miles to the other side of Kimper where Kevin Dearborn lived. Kevin dated his mom five or six years before and sometimes helped him in tight spots. And spots were tight. Since meeting Matewan he’d become so nervous his arms were pocked with bloody gouges, deep quarter-sized craters he picked and pulled at day and night. When he got tired of those, he did what he could to cut or scrape another. He needed it now. He pulled his sleeve up and then back down when a gust of frigid wind whipped across the four-lane. Up with the sleeve and without giving himself time to think, he bit his forearm and jerked his head sideways.

/

About the time Patch managed to get Matewan out of his mind, a car pulled off and parked in his path. He moved a couple steps to the left and was about to go around when Matewan stepped from the passenger side.

“Are you alright?” she asked. Her arms were stiffly groundward, her hands balled into fists.

Patch knew what this meant. It was a lesson quickly learned with Matewan. She was pissed, but didn’t want to show it. He had always wanted to get her into a poker game, because she was also convinced it worked.

As with any time he saw Matewan, he studied her. She had shaved the sides of her head and had a short section left for a right-hand part. It was a rich, dark red and with her blue eyes she was made of leaves and the sky in fall. She was pudgy but not in a way that turned the switch off. She had no tattoos but did have three brands. Nothing special, as far as Patch could tell. One a simple X, the other two some kinds of runes it seemed. He asked her once what they meant and she said calmly and while looking away from him into some distant place in her timeline said, “It means I’m of the Mob.” 

The mob? He hadn’t expected her to say such a strange thing. When he didn’t answer, she moved until she was eye to eye with him. “I said are you straight, you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just sick today. A cold or something.” 

Of course a stone-cold lie. The brands looked painful, and were fresh. At least the last one. Like yesterday fresh.

Matewan looked him up and down, inspected everything and he felt the waves of detection everywhere like nerves tingling awake in a numb limb. When she finished, he badly wanted to pry under the sleeve of his hoody and put his fingertip in and out of the sticky wound on his forearm, but he knew better. Still, she picked up on something.

“You’re having one of those days,” she said, finally. “I know it. One of those days you won’t talk about. One of those Patch-is-fucking-nuts-days-and-can’t-seem-to-hide-it-too-good today-days.”

She bent and nodded to whoever the driver was and then took Patch by the shoulders. She went on and on for a while, a long while it seemed. Instead of listening, he studied her features. The lips full and bright red, that wild hair like a radio signal to the world that she was something special you better believe it. Patch could have listened to her all day. The way her words just kept coming without a pause or a moment’s thought.

And then he was walking 119 again as if nothing had happened. Even the break lights of Matewan’s or whoever’s car popping out of existence like a firefly’s last call were lost on him.

/

By Kimper, his hands and feet were so cold he wouldn’t notice spraining his ankle until finally setting up under the Lee Avenue bridge later in the night. Kevin Dearborn did business in a space above his two-door garage. Two connected flights of steps that Patch banged his way up so loudly by the time he was at the door, Kevin was waiting, giving him a hate-you face.

“Got a card game going in here, Patch. What’s up?”

First thing Patch noticed was that Kevin was high; second thing was he had no plans of moving out of the doorway, inviting him in. Would have been nice to get warm before he started right back the way he came another ten miles colder by ten degrees now than it was when he started here.

“Got anything? Any goodies?”

“Hell man. Goodies? Who am I, your uncle?”

Patch couldn’t think of anything else to say so he stood straighter, tried to look like a normal human being for at least ten seconds.

It worked. Kevin snorted and went back inside. He made sure to close the door, but was back in less than a minute. He nodded and Patch put out his hand. Kevin dropped five pills into the palm of Patch’s hand, started to go back in and turned instead. He stepped out and closed the door behind him. Patch could see men around a table playing cards or maybe a board game. Maybe just drinking. Their beer in long brown bottles looked good.

“What are you still doing with the pills, Patch? They’re hella hard to get now and meth is easy as buying a Pepsi at Double Kwik. Don’t understand you, buddy. Meth’s speed, I know, and you’re into calming down. You was like that growing up, But trust me, as long as you’re out of my mind, it don’t matter if it’s pills, meth, or paint thinner. It’s the being out of your  mind that’s the thing, right. But I don’t get you. Never did, though. See, that’s the last of what I got. I get one script a month and don’t need them. So I sell them, but I ain’t a drug dealer, see? I know you think different.”

Kevin went on and on while Patch tried to space out, but it never worked. He couldn’t do what other people said they did all the time. Oh, what was that? I didn’t catch that. Patch always heard. He couldn’t turn off his attention. So for another three minutes at least he listened to Kevin talk like a shitty father until the door was shut.

The entire time Patch had been pushing his fingertip into the tear on his forearm - sticky then wet, sticky then wet. He would have loved if it would heal right away within seconds so he could start picking and watching the way everything paused as if he had no more blood in his body at all and then started welling up, a black shiny ball that quivered against gravity for as long as possible.

Patch quivered against gravity himself, back down the stairs and to 119. He’d snort the five when he was back to Lee Avenue. Sleep until he couldn’t possibly sleep any longer. His break from his life, the thing opiates did that meth didn’t. Kevin couldn’t understand that. He’d love to meet someone who did.

/

“The Mob, yes.”

Tony Sanford was a good guy but daft. If Patch had anybody else the next morning he could have asked about the Mob he would have, but Tony was it. Tony scratched his chin and put his nose in the air, closed his eyes. He seemed to be thinking about thinking instead of actually doing it. Patch grew impatient.

“You don’t have an idea one about what I’m talking about,” he said.

Tony stopped scratching his chin but kept his eyes squinted shut and said, “The Mob. See there, dude, I do know what the hell the Mob is. What about that! Whooo!”

His voice echoed off the bottom of the bridge and now it was Patch’s turn to squint.

“Hell, man, try to be human for a second, would you. So tell me.”

“It’s this fucked up crazy bunch that stays up Clinton Creek, back behind the cliffs up there. Just a bunch of loons. Bunch of junkies and dopeheads acting like their high’s something special instead of a kick in the ass like everybody else’s.”

Patch had been to the Clinton Cliffs, two big dick-shaped sections of earth and shale stacked hundreds of feet above a train tunnel just before you got into Tomtiffany. It was generally considered a backbone busted through the vegetation, a gross cross-section of nature and the revelation of the mountain’s ageless anatomy. The Cliffs were old and held pockets along it’s front wall you could climb down into from the safe side through tiny entryways. Four of them, to be exact. One was big enough for two people to sit in, a cave hundreds of feet in the air but only a four or five feet deep.

When Patch and Tony got to the cliffs both were tired and hungry and beginning to feel their enthusiasm wearing thin. They dropped down a natural sandstone chute and into the largest of the cliff caves. Soon as they got to their safe spots, Patch pulled up the sleeve of his hoody and gingerly slid his fingernail under a scab the size of a silver dollar on his forearm. He played the pain, felt the edge lifting, lifting, and lifting in a steady, slow tear. When he had his fingernail nearly all the way under, he dug in and pulled hard and fast. It was the best second of his day so far. He pushed his sleeve farther up his arm and squeezed, pinched, pushed. Tony watched without saying a word. Patch then wiped his arms on the bottom of his pant leg and let his it hang as if broken. Tony couldn’t help but watch the dark blood well up again from the circular indention and then blinkdrip clear to Patch’s wrist. 

“Man oh man, that’s one nasty habit you got there,” Tony said.

“Ain’t it though?” Patch said.

“Why do that shit?”

“No good answer for that. Focuses me some, I can say that. But it probably has something to do with a trauma I’m not confronting.”

The way Patch stressed that last phrase sounded like he was saying what somebody else had said to him plenty.

“Quack?” Tony asked.

“You bet. And more than one.” Patch paused but clearly had more to say. “And I don’t just pick scabs like I’m twelve. I cut and tear, too. Fact of the matter is, sometimes I just flat out pull my skin off.”

Tony leaned back and away from Patch. “Damn, damn, damn!”

Across the railroad tracks below was the Liberty Freewill Baptist church. Tony saw Patch fixated on it and thought the peeling talk was over, but Patch started talking about tearing and bleeding again.

“I make a nick, like this.” Patch suddenly had a tiny pen knife gripped in his right hand. He pulled his sleeve way past his elbow and sliced about an inch long cut across his bicep.

“Fuuuuuuck, dude. Stop that,” Tony pleaded. His voice went high-pitched like a little boy’s.

He let Tony have a good look and then pushed his fingernail under the skin, lifted the same as he had with the scab, and started slowly peeling a few layers of epidermis down down down, skinning himself like the Apache used to do white men for torture. Blood gushed now, enough that an actual rope of blood had started to drizzle from his elbow. Tony turned and got sick inside the cliff cave.

Patch didn’t laugh, didn’t apologize, didn’t try to say anything at all. He pushed his sleeve down and then turned his head sideways, peered up through the sandstone slot. 

“Somebody’s up there,” he said.

Tony didn’t offer to move. He didn’t speak. All he could do was wipe at his mouth and spit little bits of sick off the end of his tongue. 

“Yeah, well,” he said. “I think I’ll go see who it is. Leave you to go on and fuck yourself up while I ain’t around. Don’t do that around me again, dude. I’m serious. That’s some extraordinary fucked up right there. It’s what Daddy would call painfully worrisome. Get what I’m saying?”

Patch all at once felt bad about exposing Tony to his problem. And couldn’t figure why he would have done it at all. But then he didn’t always choose when he would or wouldn’t hurt himself, when he would need that second or two seconds of intensity. 

Tony scrambled up through the slot and Patch followed him out. When they were back on the mountainside, Matewan laughed and then turned to a man standing with her about ten feet away, leaning against a tree.

“Told you,” she said to the man. “Probably down there jacking each other off.”

Everything about Matewan was different. Patch stood looking at a stranger, and a mean one at that.

“Take a look at the shirt sleeve,” the man said.

Matewan bent over and leaned closer to Patch. “Yep, hell yes. Holy hell yes. I told you, motherfucker! I fucking told you!”

This made the man laugh and he clapped his hands together and said, “I believe we’re all going to come out to the good today. I will soon, so very soon, be most pleased.”

/

“You’re going to do this because you want to,” Matewan was saying. “And because I want you to. But you’ll see that it’s really for the Mob.” She turned and pointed to the man, finally acknowledging him. “For King Mob. And that’ll make you want to even more, for more than just that little bit of bright pain.”

Patch realized he was on the ground. Had he passed out? Did somebody knock him out? If so, he didn’t remember any of it. Just one minute he was standing and dying on the inside listening to someone he knew once named Matewan saying things that Matewan would have never said and then the next minute he was here, prone, the stick and thorn floor of the mountainside clipping into the flesh across his back, and his calves, his neck, shoulders.

He was mostly naked, save for his underwear and socks, and was pinned to the slanted mountainside, tied like a man about to be quartered to four tiny trees that bent and swayed each time he struggled against the bindings.

The man pushed away from the tree and came to squat beside Patch. When he did, Patch noticed there were several people there, all leaning in pairs of twos against trees all down the side of the mountain. When the man crouched low to him, Patch could see he was much older than he or Matewan. Older than any of the others gathered around - there must have been twenty of them. They were all much younger than this man with his hair silvered along the sides, his eyes and forehead a crunch of wrinkles. He was young in his eyes, though. Brown so light they were almost gold or pale orange. His mouth was huge, larger than any Patch had ever seen. For a spirited second he thought of Mick Jagger’s wide, puckered lips, and imagined the man jog-dancing around in the trees, nearly floating, jumping from one tree to another, light as a dandelion seed.

Then the man was beside him, crouched low, then on his knees, and then the wide, wide mouth close enough to his ear he could feel his warm, steady breath. And when he spoke now, his voice, the words, the phrases, came out strange, like a foreign language Patch had just now suddenly learned.

Patch’s mom blows dogs for pills. 

He said.

Patch’s mom fucked my cousin and my uncle. Same night! Same time! 

He said.

Patch’s mom trades her pussy for drugs. Trust me I know.

He said.

And he laughed loudly, a long drawn out laugh that went so long and was so strained it became a feral tongue, one long, final lungful of high whining that didn’t stop but instead ran empty of air and resonance. Matewan appeared at his side. She might have been more beautiful at that moment than Patch had ever seen her.

“This is King Mob,” she said, and she said the name so solemnly and with so much reverence, it frightened Patch more than anything to that point.

As soon as she said this, Patch turned again to the man, to King Mob, and his mouth was wider now wider than was possible and there were teeth, large yellow blocks like quarter sticks of butter, the squared jaw teeth of pigs poking through the swelled lips. His shirt was off and his skin was one continuous thick scar similar to the brand he’d seen on Matewan four-hundred billion years ago on 119.

King Mob spoke again; he said, “It’s such a worn out way of saying this, but join us, Patch. We have many ways you can help us. Help we need but are too weak ourselves to provide one another.” He stopped and pointed to Patch’s bloody sleeve again. “But you do this with no reason at all. And what you’re doing, surely without realizing it, is shedding the old you and raising up something new. Only I have come close to what you could accomplish with no more fear than one of us might have scratching his head.” He slid his arms around Matewan’s tiny waist and pulled her to him. “Or her head.”

The instinct came instantly to Patch. He didn’t dwell on the man’s words, he didn’t take a minute to allow himself to feel the betrayal from Matewan. He only started that second to zip possibilities through his mind. It seemed certain that the man, Matewan, and the others were going to continue the little strange speech, the exact type of weirdness always shown in movies with nutjobs, talking to hear their own voice, their own superior mind at work out loud. Prideful and vain. While they did that, he planned to get lose. It would be too time consuming and disastrous to get himself in the mindset that an hour ago he was just a guy walking around in the ordinary world and that now he was tied up and about to be, what, skinned? No, he had to concentrate on getting one hand loose or a foot. One, and then go from there.

But he soon saw that the slightest twitch from his hand or foot caused the tiny but sturdy trees to wobble like car antennas at a stop sign. And there was no other way to get out. He knew then he could only try to talk his way out of it. 

But just as he was about to speak, a young boy no more than thirteen or fourteen came from behind King Mob and got on his knees in front of Patch. He pulled a Case knife from his pocket and without an ounce of ceremony thrust it into Patch’s thigh muscle.

“Too deep, Charlie,” King Mob said calmly.

Charlie pulled the knife out and then inserted it slowly until less than half an inch in.

“Perfect,” said King Mob. “Now take it.”

At this, little Charlie flicked the blade up and pinched the skin that rose there between his fingers. Before his leg began bleeding, he pulled the small strip of skin downward. 

It was done slowly and Patch couldn’t look away. He watched the strip of skin pull wider as the boy Charlie continued to tug downward. It eventually spread wider and Charlie curled two fingers then three fingers and so on until he had the skin of Patch’s leg gripped into his fist. Patch’s eye fluttered and he stopped holding his breath when he saw such a huge portion of his leg muscle exposed. At this he felt a thrust of orgasmic pain and passed out.

/

All agreed the ritual had gone poorly. There were improvements from before, but it still was far from correct. That was easy enough to understand when nothing at all happened, even when they were entirely finished with Patch. King Mob sat on top of a huge boulder with Matewan in his lap near the top of the hill about thirty feet from where Patch now lay. Even from that distance both could still hear his raspy breathing, an occasional hoarse, pseudo-scream.

“I sincerely do not understand,” King Mob said.

Matewan leaned into him, put her arm across his chest and squeezed his slender bicep. She noticed it was late enough into the evening that bats had circled up from the train tunnel below. They fluttered just above the canopy, darting charcoal sketches against the darkest blue winter sky she’d ever seen.

“Our carriers are here,” she said, pointing to one of the more lively cauldron of bats. “Lets give him to them. That’s never been done before, but it feels like the right thing to do.”

King Mob was quiet for a while, and he didn’t say anything when he stood, but Matewan was sure he liked the idea. And then he called them all to action.

/

A fat bloody form the shape of a peach pit and the size of a whiskey barrel swayed along the face of the cliffs. It dangled from a rope tied to an old tree above and when a strong enough wind came through, the bulk of bone and muscle knocked soundlessly against the cliff face, a broken church bell pealing nothing in the range’s largest belfry.

------

SHELDON LEE COMPTON is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His novel, Alice, was named a Best Book of 2023 by the Independent Fiction Alliance, and his work has been nominated for the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, as well as included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022. He lives in Pike County, Kentucky.