I, Racki (Part I)

I haven't finished the current short story I'm working on, so I decided to post an older one. It's called I, Racki (the phonetics are a coincidence)and it was a chapter from one of my aborted novel attempts. It's set in the fictitious town of Stone Creek, in which my novel Maniac Tuba takes place, but I think it can be read independently. It's written in the style of Mickey Spillaine, so apologies in advance for the violence and sexual themes.

Enjoy!


I, Racki

Go-karts flip.

This thing happens every year, like Christmas or deflowerings after the Prom, cataclysmic, a thing of beauty forever, something you’d always remember, and when the doughy thirty-and-above crowd went home tonight, they’d boast about it to their fat relatives. The height of the go-kart in the air. The crack of Moseph Mosley’s skull on the asphalt of Main Street.

I got to the Annual Stone Creek Go-Kart Grand Prix and Fish Fry around noon. The crowds I waded through busied themselves with the circuit between the track downtown, the fryers on the softball fields near the elementary school, the beer tent at Harrison Park, and the porta-potties everywhere else, leaving their children, like a pack of feral dogs, alone to roam the streets and sidewalks of the town mouthing off, scratching cars with rocks, and just begging to get slapped down by one of their betters. I say fried fish tastes a lot better after you make a junior bully squirt some tears.

The clouds that had covered most of the sky all morning had moved off and it was getting warm, so I went to put my letter jacket in my Monte Carlo and there a half-dozen kids were loitering, the oldest one of them a twelve year-old whose eyes got all buggy when he saw me rolling up my sleeves and grinning about how I was going to use him as a punching bag. He and his boyfriends didn’t know whose car it was. They were going to find out. I was going to find out if my golf clubs worked on pre-teens.

I get in these situations and I tend to black out. I grabbed the biggest one by the arm. He started pleading, screeching. I got my pitching wedge out of the trunk. His little friends were long-gone. That’s all I remember. My arms had gotten tired and I had bent the shaft. And no, I didn’t replace my divots. That Callaway set me back seventy dollars, and at the rate I was going, my bag would be empty before our match on Thursday. As I was thinking this, the mumbling, bleeding lump of kid I just beat down spit a tooth on my hi-tops and two things hit me, like twin lightning bolts: one, that I smelled pork fritters, and two, I needed to go tell Jailey Hrcz I wouldn’t be taking her to the Prom tonight after all.

Petra Plascak finally said yes, so obviously I didn’t need Jailey anymore.

And those pork fritters smelled delicious.

For the next installment, click here.