Johnson's Roost
A new story from Harry Hogg
Sonny Jones is twenty, can barely read, and has spent his whole life keeping his little sister safe from a mother who drinks away every dollar the state sends them. When Janie gets caught stealing the wrong man’s pants, the two of them do the only thing they know how to do: they run. What follows is a joyride through stolen cars, pawn shops, bad decisions, and a gang of kids just as lost as they are, while a state detective closes in behind them.
Told entirely in Sonny’s own voice. Blunt, funny, and heartbreaking by turns, Johnson’s Roost is a story about what happens when nobody ever taught you another way to live.
Excerpt:
“Sonny, get me that other bottle, honey,” Mama orders from the couch. “And a Coke. I’m about out.”
Mama’s drunk again, flat on her ass. She says, and can prove to social services, that her back is bad. Shit, her back’s bad from lying on that doc’s table while he screws her. That’s all what’s wrong with it.
Last week, Mama was out back, digging a garden to plant flowers. Her back was okay then. The doc, he don’t give a flying fuck since he gets laid for only five minutes of writing a paper. Then she shows the welfare an gets her money.
Me an my sister Janie, along with Mama, have to live off that money she gets, buying food an clothes, an school supplies. The state pays our utilities, so I got all the free water I can drink, needing it to drown the baloney an beans in my stomach.
“I found the Coke, Mama, but can’t find your vodka,” I call back to her.
We live in a small farming town in mid-Ohio, A-hi-a, as we calls it. It’s called Johnson’s Roost, named after a black family with money that moved here after the Civil War.
Course they was driven off later by white farmers, but only after they’d cleared the land an built up a farm. My ancestors quickly moved in to claim it, only to be hung for our audacity an thievery an chased off the land itself, only getting to keep the farmhouse. The house, being essentially worthless since it was half-burned down in the fighting, we still own. It’s still half-burnt, an that was a hundred and fifty years ago. Well, in our favor, it ain’t as bad inside as it looks from outside. Though the roof leaks in my bedroom, it leaks into a hole in the floor. No big thing.
“It’s there somewhere, Sonny,” she says about the vodka.
I can hear her moving around, the couch squeaking like a herd’a meeses.
“I gotta do everything myself? I work my tush off for you two and get nothing in return.”
Mama ain’t about to do no manual labor, an ain’t, same as the rest of us, got no brains for nothing else. I ain’t never had no old man, him being one of a steady stream of guys in the front door an out the back, timed so as not to be seen by the next. Each one leaves a five-dollar bill on the kitchen counter if Mama is sober enough to insist.
Me an Janie ain’t got half the clothes we need. I got me two pair of pants to her three, an we share four shirts, mix an match. Me being twenty an her nineteen, an close enough in size, they fit good enough. Our shoes ain’t two the same, not even the same color. We keep an eye on trash cans as we pass, hoping to find some what matches. Socks are saved for social functions, standing stiff in a corner of my room until needed.
***
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