Herbert and Helsinki are old. They live on an island in Appalachia. In other words, they’re my neighbors. They have a boat. It is a little boat. They grow corn, make whiskey, and ride shotgun on their dirt bike. My bike is bigger than their bike. Your bike is your cock. Straight up that canyon. Straight to coffeecancoffee by the handful. In front of a fire and then you walk in the room buck naked. Your tits were coffee cups, that thick kind you smell in morning cafes with the smell of hot cakes turning turning perfectly brown as a beaver whose new home is your waterline. This one is an adolescent, and eager to get to work. He will change the entire island because that is what beaver does. I listen means regret you ever allowed this one in your bed and your blankets where you examined him for all his secrets and injection points. I draw the line at injection points. Junkies do not want sex or friends. What they want – and they want it now – is to get high and stay there. Having sex with a junkie is like having sex with a cardboard box. The last place you have left is your urethra. Stick it in and push it through. Herbert and Helsinki are old. The island is their refrigerator. They put it on a boat and bring it in.

It is a serious business selling the stuff they sell. The whiskey is the color of gin but it is not gin and in no way tastes like anything you have ever had before. The herbs. the Fruit. The gathering. The homemade brew. The whiskey pot. The hound dogs. They are selling themselves. That is what they know how to do. Herbert and Helsinki are always fishing. They eat what they catch. Not everyone can live this way. When the water freezes over, they drink firewater and we all dance the floor off its feet in the hard core whiskeyland of pen and pain. I look forward to the publication of their book about these hills. But it has not yet happened.

They never go over to the north end of the island, it’s strictly forbidden. One old cemetery with fallen yankee soldiers whose graves have worn away we are all worn away and sometimes down to nothing but our dancing feet.

That is where the screams they hear at night sing sedition. Every night, the the agony of the scream. Herbert and Helsinki are old. They still sleep in the weeny boat. No dogs allowed. Helsinki was kind of a dog herself, that wolf-bitch could howl from the rocks.