CW: References to suicide
We mentioned it now and then, over beers at Red’s, but none of us knew where Rooster’d gone off and disappeared to. Odds were he’d gone a bender. He did that—vanished, then resurfaced with a story you could’ve just boiled down to a fuckup drank too much. He finally turned up a couple weeks later, but we were already tying one on and no one hardly turned to tell him hey.
Rooster’s neck was bruised blue, with red welts on the sides. “The rope snapped a water pipe in the garage,” was the first thing he said. “Imagine that. You think you’re going to get relief, and then you’re ass deep in a puddle.”
We were all twenty-one, twenty-two. It was 2008. The crisis hadn’t turned North Texas into a slate of crowded bread lines, but the bank had foreclosed on Rooster’s house. His father steered his F‑150 off a bridge into Lake Lewisville. For months, Rooster went on and on about offing himself too. It was just hot air, maybe a bid for attention, but you couldn’t get him to shut up. Sure, we’d all lost loved ones at some point—an uncle, a grandma, a cousin—but we didn’t know real grief. Not like his. Not yet.
“Next time jog a little before you tie the rope to a pipe,” Jerry said. He flicked his head toward the beer gut Rooster had packed on over the last year.
Benny shot his arm across the table, stole one of Rooster’s smokes. “Probably no buildings tall enough in town to throw yourself off,” he said, and flicked his lighter. “Maybe drive into a wall fast as you can.”
Rooster rubbed his neck and winced a little, but a smile cracked on his face. “Only problem is I still haven’t saved up enough for a ride,” he said. “Could be I’ll swallow all my old man’s antidepressants.”
Some college girls appeared at the bar. Red’s was a strange spot, one of the few where the students from out of town and people like us, people raised here, gathered under the same roof. Red always kept the stereo too loud—bad music, hair bands and whatnot. We stared at the girls in their frayed denim shorts as they shouted over the music. They ordered a tray of shots, took them back to their college boyfriends. Glasses were slammed on tabletops.
Other locals loitered next to the dartboards. A guy everyone called Dump Truck, because of his size, was holding court for all the low-lifes that kept his company, guarding their besieged patch of territory like it was the Battle of Gonzalez. For our part, we were neither here nor there. We were glad the college assholes shunned us but felt no kinship with Dump Truck and his band of dickheads. They had a habit of putting back too many, starting fights, and ruining what passed for a good time in this town.
“Might as well just use a gun,” I told Rooster. I still don’t know why. Maybe I was trying to join in. Maybe I’d had the thought once or twice myself. Benny shot me a look like he’d help put a bullet in my skull. Jerry shook his head and glared like a father who, for the first time, understood his kid was a fuckup. It didn’t strike me as worse than what anyone else had said, not even Rooster. But darkness clouded thick in Rooster’s eyes. He let out a breath that seemed to drain him of his soul. He fished his wallet out of his back pocket, set a five down on the table, and that was that.
~
You’d think that would’ve changed us, but after Rooster’s funeral, we kept sitting at the same table at Red’s. We kept wearing the same ragged old button-ups and jackets we bought at second-hand stores. We kept making the same jokes.
“This make me a murderer?” I asked.
“Murderer?” Jerry said. He downed his beer, then took mine and tipped it back. “Shit no. Something else.”
Benny, stubbing out a cigarette, snapped his fingers. “A suicide whisperer.”
“That’s it,” Jerry shot back. “A fuckin’ suicide whisperer.”
~
I never saw it coming with my old man. This was two years after Rooster offed himself. For days, my mom and I sat there in his hospital room. The bullet had entered beneath his chin, shattered the bone under his right eye on the way out. I lost myself staring at the hole in his face, as if it was a crater I could climb down inside and walk around in.
“What a miracle,” my mom said, sitting next to the window.
The doctor grunted. “Pretty common, actually.” He leafed through the pages on a clipboard.
“What’s common?” I asked.
He glanced up from the papers for half a second, almost annoyed, and pressed a finger under his chin. “Getting it wrong. The angle of the gun.”
That night, my mom kept watch over my dad, and I walked down to Red’s. “Welcome to the club,” Benny said. A heart attack had buried his father a few months earlier.
“He ain’t dead,” I said.
When Benny and Jerry looked at me, confused, I stumbled through the whole explanation, told them about the doctor and the angle of the gun.
My father checked out a week later. He never said whether the gun kicked or he hesitated at the last second. Little by little, he got back to whatever was normal now. Even today, I’ll walk over to their place and find him in the yard, reclining on a lawn chair with his legs crossed. Smoking. Scratching his scar. Staring up at crows on the electrical line. How anyone survives all that only to find pleasure in watching birds drop wet shit on the asphalt, I really can’t say.
~
Not long ago, Dump Truck fucked around and got himself killed. “Suicide by cop,” the papers called it, but the jury’s still out on that one. I still see Benny and Jerry now and then, though it’s tough to find the time. I work the graveyard shift at the Holiday Inn Express. I start dragging ass home around the time the sun’s just starting to splash over the silhouettes of one-story brick homes across town. In that strange morning glow, before I even notice the birds shrieking their heads off, I’ll be deep in conversation with Rooster by the time I realize I’m mumbling to myself. What does he say? Why would you even want to know, really?
A fire scorched Red’s place last year. The flames collapsed the rooftop, ate away half the façade. Rumor had it Red, behind on what he owed on the place, lit the match. No charges were ever filed. The property sat there in charred ruins for months. When it went to foreclosure, the university snatched it up at a steal. They’ll soon flatten what’s left of it, put up student housing. Big towers, eight or nine stories apiece. Taller than anything you ever saw in this town.
“No one blames you.” Rooster tells me this always when I’m crossing through the square downtown, too scared to tell him cancer chewed clean through his mom last year, and that was it for his family.
Bad luck was how my own mom described it when I came over for dinner and gave them the news, but my old man didn’t say anything. He was poking at his dinner plate with a fork, staring out the window at those crows.
College kids are stepping into the morning light, shielding their eyes. The crows are stabbing their beaks at each other, fighting over whatever scraps of food they’ve set upon. Rooster clears his throat. Truth is, I tune him out. It doesn’t matter what he thinks. Not anymore.
~
Based in Athens, Greece, Patrick Strickland is a writer and journalist from Texas. His short stories have appeared at Pithead Chapel, Epiphany, Peatsmoke Journal, The Broadkill Review, Porter House Review, and Five South, among others. He’s the author of three nonfiction books, including You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave, and the forthcoming story collection A History of Heartache (Melville House, spring 2026).