Life on the Preservation, US Edition by Jack Skillingstead

brought that one home she made sure her mother didn’t see it.
    As she coasted by a row of mailboxes a rock flew by Kylie’s face. It struck one of the mailboxes and the little door dropped open. Kylie swerved, stubbed her front tire into the curb. DVDs and books bounced out of the basket.
    Ray Preston, whose major accomplishment since The Judgment was burning down what remained of the high school he had previously dropped out of, regarded her from across the street. A faded pink plastic flamingo on a spike tilted in the dead lawn behind him. Ray had another rock in his hand.
    “Why’d you do that!” Kylie shouted at him.
    “Because you ain’t right, that’s why. You’re holding us back.”
    “Back from what, you idiot?”
    Preston was so skinny he looked like a starving man. His clothes hung in rags. He never cut what was left of his hair. Scabs crusted the bald patches of his scalp. His scraggly gray and black beard grew down his neck like diseased moss. He had been the last person in town to quit drinking ‘spirits’, and Kylie doubted he had quit for real. Father Jim had worked on him a long time but people had been working on Ray Preston his entire worthless life. Kylie wasn’t afraid of him. Ray looked like one of the skin-and-bone people who occasionally lurched into town. The SABs didn’t act human, most of them. They were kind of like movie zombies, except they didn’t eat people. When skin-and-bone people appeared they were always run right back out of town. Ray Preston was terrified of the SABs, even though he looked like one himself. Father Jim said the SABs were people whose souls had been stolen by the Devil.
    “Holding us back from the Lord ,” Preston said.
    “You better not throw that rock in your hand.”
    “Why not?”
    Kylie withdrew Billy’s baby automatic from the zippered pocket of her leather jacket and pointed it at Preston. Billy had the big revolver, but he had told her to keep the small gun for protection. It had belonged to his mother. He said it was a good gun for a girl. Kylie let that pass. “That’s why not,” she said to Preston, leveling the good-for-a-girl gun.
    After a moment Ray casually tossed the rock behind him. “I wasn’t going to throw it anyway.” The rock landed next to the flamingo. Ray wiped his hands on his filthy Levi’s. He picked at a scab on his nose. “That the gun you shoot Father Jim with?”
    “I didn’t shoot him, but it’s the gun.” Kylie tucked the automatic back in her jacket. She picked up her bike and leaned it against the mailboxes. Ray watched her but stayed where he was. She gathered the spilled DVDs and books and replaced them in the basket. The dust jacket was torn on one of the poetry books, a vertical tear right through Robert Frost’s head.
    “He’s a prophet,” Ray said, referring to Father Jim. “Everybody says so. A Prophet of the fuckin’ Apocalypse.”
    “Who’s everybody, you and all the other idiots in this town?”
    “Why don’t you shut up, you little cunt.”
    “Watch your mouth,” Kylie said, “or you might get shot in the head yourself.”
    “Day’s coming when getting shot in the head won’t mean nothing,” Ray said, looking like he wanted to ask himself what that meant. He pointed at Kylie. “That’s a warning.”
    Kylie pulled out the .22 and fired into the air.
    “So’s that!” she said, but Ray Preston was already halfway down the block.
     
     
    H ER MOTHER LOOKED at her suspiciously when Kylie shouldered through the front door with her arms full of the stuff she’d retrieved from Billy’s house.
    “What’s all that?” Maggie said.
    “Some books.”
    “I mean those other things.”
    “Movies.”
    “What for? You can’t play them here.”
    “I don’t know , Mom, I just wanted them. They’re not going to hurt anything, don’t worry.”
    “Did I say I was worried?”
    “Whatever.” You don’t have to say it, Kylie thought. Her mom worried constantly and always had, even