EIGHT
~JACE~
My face still stung where Mia had hit me. Even after a few hours of riding around in circles, it still stung. It still stung because I’d been delivering a fresh slap, letting my own palm replay the process that Mia’s had, whenever I had the chance. I figured I deserved the reminder.
She might have been a manipulative whore, but…
I sighed, slapped myself again. This time just as much for the thought as for the reminder. Even after all that had happened—even after the painful truths that Mack had unloaded on me—I still couldn’t bring myself to think of her that way.
Not that she had any reason to know that. Not now, at least. As far as she was concerned that was exactly what I thought of her. It was practically what I’d said to her, after all. I’d been hurting—fucking festering on the inside, it felt like—and the moment I’d opened my mouth all of that pain—all of that rot—came pouring out. There’d been a toxic landfill growing in my guts since my encounter with Mack, and the moment Mia dared to ask me what was wrong I’d gone and turned myself into a cannon to fire that toxicity at a force that would’ve knocked most girls flat on their ass.
And what did Mia do under that onslaught? She nearly knocked me flat on my ass…
And then she’d left.
Like she ought to, two parts of my brain thought at once before splitting off into individual parts:
Like she ought to, thought one part, a logical, more rational part; the part that kept reminding me to slap myself—the part that kept telling me I deserved the reminder of that pain. Because if this is how we’re going to act—if THAT’S how you’re going to talk to a girl who stepped back into that shit-shack apartment when it was on FIRE to save your dumb ass—then you don’t deserve to even see that sweet ass of hers as it saunters away for good!
And, my god, how I wanted that thought to be it. Because it was bad enough to remind myself I was an asshole, bad enough to think that I’d gone and let myself think the worst of her, bad enough that I’d let it get to that point. It was bad enough that I’d let that sniveling little pissant, Mack, convince me of something so… so…
But then there was that other part of my brain:
Like she ought to, that other part said to me, its shields raised, its swords bared, and every would-be free hand clutching something—anything!—to use as a weapon against somebody—anybody!—who dared to threaten me. Because everything Mack said made perfect sense, and that little trollop realized that you’re not gonna take it; that you’re not gonna let yourself be taken advantage of like that. You’ve been hurt before! You’ve been twisted and deformed by this shitty, miserable fucking world, and if you’re an asshole then it’s because that’s what you’ve had to turn into to survive! And why not? If she’s what this world’s gonna offer up now as a replacement for what’s been taken from you then maybe it’s better that she’s gone. She is, after all, just a manipulative fucking—
I slapped myself again.
I caught the driver of the car beside me, like me waiting at the red light, staring over at me. His eyebrow was arched, his face twisted into one part worry and one part confusion. He saw before him a madman seated on a roaring, fiery steel beast, sharing the road with him. He was afraid for what might happen when that light turned green.
He should be, I thought, once again hearing both sides of my brain sync up there.
He should be, said Logic, because you are clearly not well.
He should be, said Defense, because you don’t owe the world anything anymore.
Great, another part of me, a neutral part this time, thought, I’ve got a war between Logic and Defense waging in my head.
With a brain like ours, all three of “us” thought together, who needs the Crow Gang versus the Carrion Crew.
Still staring directly at the worried and confused driver stopped beside me, I raised my hand to myself again. This time I closed my hand, made a fist, and outright punched myself square in the jaw.
Something must have been knocked loose from it, because a solidly whole part of me then thought, That one’s for you, Mia.
Then the light turned, the angry red eye clocking out so that a green one could start its seconds-long shift, and my chopper carried me away. I couldn’t say for certain where I was going. I’d traveled this particular stretch of road close to a dozen times already in the random, nonsensically serpentine circle I’d been driving in since I’d left my condo. As bewildered and devil-may-care as I’d been then, I’d gained nothing in regards to senses or a mind for direction.
It’s finally happened, Logic mused. You’ve gone and lost it. Lost all of what little mind you had left. Now the paths you ride makes as much sense as the paths you think.
I sighed at that. Logic had a good point, but, then again, wasn’t that his purpose? I imagined him as a form of myself dressed in a snooty business suit with pretentiously treated and styled hair; a form of myself that I’d likely hate to love and love to hate. This, I thought, was ironic, because wasn’t that how I felt about myself already? Or maybe that was just Defense toying around in my subconscious, calling him a “nerd.” Certainly sounded like something he’d do. Defense, I figured, would thereby be the complete opposite, aesthetically speaking. He’d be dirty with grease and blood—As much your own as others’, Logic reminded me, trying to sway me from that path—and wearing more leather than any one man had any right to wear. He’d be sneering, always sneering, and his hair would be tussled from hours of masturbation, because Defense didn’t trust anyone enough to take them to bed with him. Defense would be scarred and scabbed with the wounds of loneliness, because so long as you kept to yourself you knew you could trust who you were with.
But that isn’t true now, Logic chimed, is it?
Shut up! Defense snarled.
But it had been hours since I’d last seen Mia. Hours out on my bike, heading nowhere, and all to myself. Hours with nobody but myself to talk to. With nobody else to fight, Defense had grown weak; left to bite like a feral dog at its own tail. And with the heat of battle behind me—the toxic cloud that had been churning in my guts purged—Logic was free to contemplate.
As one would expect—as I’d certainly expect—Logic was right. Defensiveness had gotten the better of me, gotten me to say some ugly things without much filter or reflection on what was said, and now that I was on my own—scarred and scabbed—it wanted to continue the fight all the same.
And, lucky for him, I seemed to be three Jaces in one: the good, the bad, and the random spectator. If it was just Defense all on his lonesome he might be stuck chasing his tail for all eternity, but with Logic and Neutral sitting across from him he could war it out all he liked; have a regular party all his own.
All on my own.
Jace, Neutral called out then, considering all this along with me, you’re fucking crazy.
My chopper sputtered a little then, and I saw that the gas meter had been on “E” for who-knew-how-long.
Riding on fumes, huh, girl? I thought, absently patting the fuel tank with my free hand while trying to ignore the painful truth in Neutral’s not-words. Then, sighing, I thought, Aren’t we all? and pulled into a gas station.
Heads turned my way as I coasted up beside a free pump, and I could almost imagine the worried and confused driver following my movements with his eyes and letting out a sigh of relief that the self-beating psycho on the fire-hog was no longer sharing his road. A deep, hot rage flashed up at my own thought of the random driver considering it “his” road, and I realized that Defense was so eager for a fight that he was willing to wage it with a fictional version of a person I’d only spotted in passing for a few seconds.
Turning off the chopper’s engine and swinging myself out of the seat, I decided that was a dangerous way to live.
Logic thought that was a good step in the right direction.
Defense wasn’t thrilled with it.
Neutral wondered if this gas station had decent beef jerky.
****
The tank was full, my bladder was empty, and the saddlebag, for better or for worse, had close to thirty-bucks’ worth of beef jerky in it. Though I had no way of knowing if the prescription would work, I’d decided to self-medicate with leathery strips of black pepper, citrus-lime, and teriyaki flavored steak-wads.
That, and the cheapest, nastiest-looking liquor on the shelves.
Because what went better with black pepper, citrus-lime, and teriyaki anything than exhaust-heated cotton candy flavored alcohol?
I wasn’t sure what these purchases amounted to in the long run. Lord knew the cashier had given me a pretty funny look as he’d rung them up. Then, adding another twenty bucks’ worth of gasoline to the tab, the pockmarked little shit eyed the tank I’d specified, spotted my bike, and his face had edged a bit closer to something resembling the driver I’d been stopped beside at the light. I’d toyed with the idea of punching myself again—I was overdue for another “reminder” according to Logic—but decided against it. Between visiting the dank, smelly restroom and loading my arms with my goodies, feeling more and more dead inside with every step I took, I’d finally come to decide on a place to go.
It was not a happy place, and so it was not a happy decision. Truth be told—and Lord knew I couldn’t lie to the three thought-processes chattering in my head—it was a very exhausting decision to make.
And so, unhappy and exhausted—feeling still more and more dead as I ran through the motions—I didn’t have it in me to beat myself in front of a gawking twerp.
No time to hate myself later. I was already fully committed to hating myself now.
Still unsure of what the purchases amounted to (other than a truly heinous form of self-punishment), I dumped the proverbial medication into the saddlebags of my chopper, fueled up, and started off, reviewing my menu while I aimed myself for my morbid picnicking spot.
You’re going to make yourself sick, Logic, Defense, and Neutral all agreed. You’re going to make yourself sick, and probably puke your insides out until you die.
Good, I thought, no longer certain which part of me I even was anymore. At least I’ll be in the right place.
Black pepper, citrus-lime, and teriyaki flavored beef jerky washed down with lukewarm cotton candy flavored vodka…
The groundskeeper at the cemetery was in for one hell of a mess if I didn’t survive this.
****
“Hey, Anne,” I finally said.
I’d been standing in front of her grave long enough that I’d come to lose track of how much time it had been. It felt like hours. But, even being crazy, I knew that time had a funny way of moving in places like this; had a funny way of moving in situations like this. Death had an especially strange way of warping time. Caught up in the throes of death, either in its grip or witnessing somebody you cared about wrapped up in its clutches, it could creep by so slowly you were certain you were being tortured by each second or it could be over so fast that you’d never come to fully know what happened.
In a single night—not long ago and yet somehow too long now, it seemed—I’d experienced both versions. I’d watched my entire world rolled out as though somebody had replaced my eyes with monitors playing the slow-motion footage of the scene, and I’d been certain I could leisurely walk beside the ambulance as it drove off. I’d have dragged each foot along, pacing myself against the inching tires, and run my fingertips along the cold, lifeless siding of that vehicle in a mockery of how I used to trace her form when she lay beside me. Then, only moments after that, a man had pulled a gun on me—meant to put me in an ambulance all my own—and put a scalding-hot reminder of what a dumb, worthless fuck I am right over my heart. And, looking back on that now, that part was all a blur. Everyone else had seemed to move with superhuman speed—like everyone had stepped out of a Flash comic book and wanted to act out the entire scene with their powers.
Introducing The Incredible Adventures of Mister Sixty-Three! In this issue: Mister Sixty-Three Versus the Crow Killer in… “T-BUILT SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES!”
Also featuring Jace-the-Too-Slow-Joke…
Yeah, death had a funny—fucking HILARIOUS!—way of warping time. Death, and places that remembered death, celebrated death. Places like this: a cemetery. The cemetery, as far as I was concerned. A farm where people planted corpses, watered them with tears, and slabs of concrete grew. A forest of dead names where not even the flowers left in their memories sustained their vitality for long. Worn paths from decades of dragged foot traffic scored bald spots on the surface of the ground as uncertain and random as the lives of those buried beneath it.
It was a place where the grass grew in grayer than it would in other places.
It was a place where the songs of birds sounded hollow and wrong.
And now—for this one miserable and stupid son-of-a-bitch, at least—it was a place it was a place where time didn’t want to make sense.
For who-the-fuck-knew-how-long I stood there, silent and time-warped as death itself, before a smoothed-out chunk of etched rock. Standing there and resenting it. I resented it for everything it was and everything it was supposed to represent. And, along with it, I resented myself.
And then the cycle began.
It was a cycle that I’d come to know quite well, but one that I’d thought—I’d hoped—that I’d gotten over; one that had numbed and, I’d thought, fallen away like a rotted stump from a healthy body:
Pain led to resentment. Resentment to bitterness. Bitterness to anger. And, of course, a few yaddah-yaddah-yaddahs later, and—you guessed it, class—we reach hate. Self-hatred, to be precise. It was a speech that anybody from this century might have been able to recite back, and in a certain ever backwards-talking muppet Jedi’s voice, no less, but it took a true master in the art of hatred to know it in their hearts rather than just in their brains. It was a Padawan’s hate that shot only forward and never back. Only a Jedi master of the deepest and most vile of scorn knew its true form, not of an arrow pointing at others but of a tangible ozone that all-but surrounded anything and everything. It was in all things and cycling back to its owner until they knew nothing but that hate. And then, hating everything like they did, it came back to them. Like a sort of echolocation, the process of hating—truly hating—wasn’t complete until it bounced back and came home.
It wasn’t enough to just hate the rock, the master knew, the journey wasn’t over until you hated yourself for hating the rock.
Hello, hatred, my old friend…
Thinking of that tombstone and the bones buried beneath it stirred up a fresh gumbo of hatred in my guts. Two-hundred-and-six adult bones, plus another two-hundred-and-seventy that would never fully develop. Those numbers had been a part of me for a long time. In a morbid fit of desperate curiosity, eager for some dark trivia to rub like some form of mental ash into the open wound of Anne’s recent death, I’d taken to Google to find out how many bones had been carted off in the ambulance that night. Two-hundred-and-six. The adult body contains two-hundred-and-six bones. Interesting and painful as that thought was to me at the time, Google decided to twist the knife. I type in “how many bones are in the human body” and out comes the simple answer… and then a secret prize you didn’t know you wanted.
Two-hundred-and-seventy bones at birth. Google told me, its bold, all-knowing script still somehow clear despite how blurred with tears and drunkenness I’d been at the time, that the total number of bones decreased to that aforementioned two-oh-six by adulthood.
Thanks, Google; so my dead pregnant wife represented—what?—four-hundred-and-seventy-six bones? As though the pain of losing a mother and unborn child wasn’t bad enough, the number of bones they represented had to serve like some sort of cosmic taxation for just how terrible the whole fucking mess was.
Fuck you, God, I remembered thinking after consulting my cell phone’s calculator, what gives you the right to take an extra sixty-four bones from my life?
There was a lot of hate in those times. I hated my family and my gang for getting us roped into that shit, of course. I hated T-Built and the rest of the Carrion Crew for taking it to that point. I hated the cops, the medics, the mortician—Who gave him the power to declare that a dead person was dead? I’d thought, followed sickeningly with, just because they’re no longer alive. And, of course, I hated myself for not being able to stop it; for not being able to just die alongside them. I blamed God—any one of them, who was I to theologically judge at that point—for any of the other points of hatred I’d already made, and I also blamed him-her-them-it for not just taking the extra sixty-four bones from me.
If a tax was so desperately wanted; so absolutely needed, I’d thought, why not just take it from me and leave me crippled physically for it? What good does it do to break my mind and leave the rest of me in tip-top order?
Fuck…
I really thought that I’d left all that behind when I started feeling for Mia.
But now…
So it was that I finally—finally!—after staring at her tombstone and reminding myself how to truly hate all over again said, “Hey, Anne…”
And, go fucking figure, Anne’s tombstone said nothing.
Or maybe she’s just taking her own sweet time, a thought chimed, though I couldn’t bring myself to decide if it was Logic or Defense. Eerily enough, it seemed like something either would say.
I muttered “fuck” and then smashed the top off the vodka bottle over the top of a neighboring headstone. It was sloppy and loud and probably a good way to wind up with a throatful of glass, I knew, but there was a million-and-a-half miles between knowing and caring. Jason Presley had covered enough miles that day, I decided as I started to chug from the broken, jagged mouth of the bottle; no way I was gonna try to cover one more, let alone a million-and-a-half. Besides, my throat already felt like I’d been gargling with razorblades—I’d caught myself in the middle of a few screaming fits on the road, and who knew how many I hadn’t caught myself in between there and here—so what was a bit of broken glass?
Realizing I truly must have been cursed, I swallowed a full gulp of room-temp, sugary-sweet liquor with no shards of ouch to distract from the taste.
“O-oh sweet merciful god of fuck!” I coughed around a disgusted retch that decided halfway through to turn itself into a dry heave—my guts refused to give up the payload, though; so I simply lurched over my dead wife’s grave—until I finally managed to stave off the fit. Then, wiping off my trembling lips with the back of my chapped hand, I took another pull, shuddered, and whispered, “Never will I ever wonder what a clown’s cunt tastes like…”
Anne’s tombstone still said nothing, so I said “fuck” again. This time, when I moved to drink from the busted bottle, the motion of tipping my head back sent me into a half-spin. Worrying that I’d either cut my face or fall (and then probably cut my face), I opted to sit down and did so promptly against the marker that was supposed to represent Anne and our baby. Then, wrestling blindly in the other saddlebag—because it was just classy to park one’s motorcycle across a row of graves, wasn’t it?—I yanked one of the bags of beef jerky and tore the top away with my teeth. I braved another pull of vodka, imagined an orgy of drunk pixies dragging their assholes across my tongue, and then pulled a strip of dried steak free of the mystery bag with my teeth.
Teriyaki.
I puked on myself before I’d even gotten a chance to try chewing.
Then, washing down the remnants of sick with a splash of the vulgar vodka, I said, “How’d it ever get this far?”
I’d been meaning to ask Anne’s grave, talkative as it had been so far, but realized I was extending it to whatever might listen. Three non-existent hands raised from three non-existent bodies in the non-existent classroom of my painfully existent mind. Rolling my eyes, I stayed any possible out-loud responses my subconscious personae might care to offer with a mouthful of dreadfully salty meat.
My stomach toiled, tightened, and gurgled something that I was certain translated to “FUCK YOU!”
I clenched my teeth against the threat and told my belly that it’d take the abuse or I’d let the whole machine drown in puke right then and there.
Realizing that—HOLY SHIT!—I meant it, my stomach settled and took what was coming, no doubt crossing itself and reciting some gastrointestinal rendition of the Lord’s Prayer.
There’s no stomach-god up here, I taunted, dumping another cluster of jerky into my open maw. Just diarrhea-inducing devils!
I started laughing at my own thoughts, but I lost track of the mess halfway through and realized too late that I was crying. My hand tipped and sloshed cotton candy vodka on the grass. It occurred to me that the jagged corner of torn plastic from the jerky bag was digging into the exposed skin at the base of my throat, where the bag had come to rest after I’d let my hand fall across my chest. I did nothing to save the alcohol or relieve myself the discomfort.
“How’d it get this far?” I asked again, sobbing around the words. “God-fucking-damn, Anne, what… what am I even doing?”
I let my head fall back, slam painfully into my dead wife’s tombstone, and then just forced myself to stare up at the sky. It was clear and peaceful up there, and a part of me felt like if this were a book or a movie there’d at least be clouds. The weather always reflected the hero’s mood, didn’t it? Wasn’t how this was supposed to work?
You’re no fucking hero.
Stories don’t follow the lone soldier, cowboy; there’s no chemistry there, no motivation. Even Tom Hanks got a volleyball.
“Least I had you, baby…” I said, surprised at how my tongue seemed to drag on the words, slurring them already.
Fuck me… how could I already be so—
I eyed the bottle and, despite the decent splash I’d lost in the grass, realized I’d drank more than half the contents already.
Well, I mused, momentarily self-aware to a debilitating degree, that certainly explains this!
The thought was punctuated with another wave of vomit, tasting every bit as toxic as my words to Mia had been earlier.
I deserve this, I thought, letting the seemingly unending projectile stream of throat-destroying bile tear past my lips. And THIS!
I finally slapped myself again. I was overdue.
My hand came back sticky and wet, and I saw blood on my fingertips. Captivated by the sight, I studied it. I realized after a long, confusing moment of gray that I was falling in love with my blood, and I pressed my thumb into it, relishing in the tacky way it seemed to cling to me. It made me feel alive and wanted.
I puked again, shorter this time. Finished, I wiped with the back of my hand.
That, too, came back sticky with blood.
Blinking, confused, I wondered where the red was coming from. After a long moment of inner debate, I tested my lip and discovered a decent gash along the bottom corner.
“Well,” I said, letting my chin sink into my chest and whispering at my sternum, “the broken bottle giveth and the broken bottle taketh away.”
Then, collecting a fresh smear of blood on my thumb, I rolled it across the sweating, liquor-streaked outer surface of the glass bottle. A morbid mockery of a thumb print stared back at me, deformed and already streaking.
“Littering is a crime,” I muttered, then threw the bottle into the distance. I flinched a little as I heard it smash in a chorus of enraged tinkles against some distant slab of resented concrete. “Public drunkenness is a crime,” I went on, feeling a fresh wave of sick coming and feeling it would be an ironic statement to precede the puke. No puke came. “Figures,” I whimpered, kicking out at my motorcycle, feeling that some act of violence might ease the pain in my heart, and having my boots flail harmlessly short of the chrome. “M-mur-der is… a crime,” I drawled on, beginning to thud my head rhythmically against Anne’s stone and appreciating the pain and growing headache for what they were. “And… and…” I began to giggle to myself, “and prostitution is a cri—”
The vomit finally came.
The force was enough to have me scrambling onto the my hands and knees. Pain and suffocating nausea had me certain that the only way to not choke to death on sickness was to practically slam my face to the very ground my wife was buried under while frantically waving my ass up at the sky.
Here I am, God, I thought, still sobbing and puking all over myself. If ever you truly wanted to stick it to me then there’s no better time than now.
But the hand of God—or the dick of God; whichever—did not come down upon me. Instead, the puke-stream ran dry and I hurled the unfinished bag of jerky into the distance to be mulled over by cemetery critters at a later time.
“Anne!” I sobbed, finally turning back towards the stone and throwing my arms around it. Never had I been made more aware of what a piss-poor representation it was to its source. Hard, jagged, and unfeeling; I craved a warm, understanding body and this was what I got.
It wasn’t what you had.
“I know…” I stammered, “I know. I fucked up! I… I always fuck up, but—”
Do you believe?
“Do I…?”
Mack’s words, dipshit? Do you believe there’s truth in them? Do you believe Mia was using you? Manipulating you? Do you think that’s who she is?
“I…” I stumbled, feeling my drunkenness target my equilibrium, and I toppled back, away from Anne’s grave. I more heard than felt the remnants of broken glass crackle against the back of my leather jacket. Stupidly, I let my head fall back with it, later realizing how thankful I should be that I didn’t bury a shard of cotton candy-laced liquor bottle into my scalp. “I don’t…”
You don’t know. You never know. Never bother to know. This isn’t another stereo, Jason; this is Mia! Now stop asking yourself what she thinks of you and start asking yourself what you think of her.
“I… I love her,” I admitted, suddenly wondering who I was admitting this to. “I fucking love her so goddam much.”
Then why should the rest matter?
Why?
I blinked at the question.
Why should it matter if Mia loved me? What sort of stupid nonsense was that? What good was loving somebody if—
“—if they don’t love you back?” I finished aloud.
You were happier loving her; happier with her beside you; happier with her.
“But if it’s not real then—”
What’s real to you, Jason? You’re crazy, remember? You still make yourself happy with digitally remastered shitty sci-fi flicks and anything to do with vampires despite thinking sci-fi’s for geeks and being scared shitless of vampires. All because your dad loved those shitty flicks and because your mom loved anything to do with vampires. Does that mean those things aren’t real to you either?
“That’s different,” I grumbled.
Why?
I said, “Because I want her to love me.”
And you’re so certain that she doesn’t? Just because some douche-nozzle claiming to be her brother says so? And so what if he is her brother? Why were you so quick to believe what he said?
“Because it makes sense,” I said matter-of-factly, certain I’d just won this bizarre debate with…
Makes just as much sense that he’s wrong if you don’t look at facts like a whiny little bitch. And, again, who cares? If you feel happy having her around and she’s willing to stick around because you’re rich and safe then aren’t you both winning?
“Not… what I want…” I drawled, suddenly feeling very, very tired. Even with sleep dragging me out of the moment, I found myself struggling to identify the other end of this strange conversation.
You’d think you’d be used to not getting what you want by now, dipshit. Would it be so wrong to take what you can get? Assuming, of course, that this all isn’t complete nonsense? Assuming, of course, that Mia doesn’t actually love you back?
“Better… of two evils,” I mumbled, and then immediately wondered why.
But so long as she’s out there, that mystery source went on, she’s in danger. And that you know to be true.
As sleep wrapped its bony arms around me and dragged me down with the rest of the eternal sleepers, it suddenly occurred to me that Logic, Defense, and Neutral had gone and fused themselves into something bigger and more mature.
I drifted off thinking of baby bones and cotton candy-flavored blood.
****
I’d been here before.
But I never thought that I’d be here again.
I’d thought—I’d hoped—that Mia’s involvement in my life was enough to…
Car horns. Roaring asphalt. Pounding heart—my heart!
I was here, and, like it or not, I had to ride.
I was here, and I had to be there; I had to get there!
Everything—my everything!—counted on it!
On my old bike, a toss-away Honda with a clanking exhaust and worthless shocks, and peaking the needle. It still wasn’t fast enough. Piece of shit was never that fast to begin with, but on the night I needed it to be even halfway decent it was a miracle I got it over fifty.
Not that it matters.
I didn’t get there in time.
And I never would.
Blacktop pavement. Blacktop sky. Even the edges of my vision were going tar-black; tears streaking the only thing that wasn’t black: the flashing blues and reds tailing me.
Cops.
Fuck them.
I might’ve been inching along at a pitiful and painful sixty-three, but they’d still never catch me. Not on that night. And not on any of the times I came back to it.
Sixty-three miles-per-hour…
I told myself I might’ve made it if I’d reached sixty-five, but really I was lying to myself. Best case scenario: I might’ve wound up watching it happen. Still, I told myself—as I’d keep telling myself—that I could’ve done something.
Sixty-three miles-per-hour…
I knew that because of the pursuing officer who’d tried to make the speeding charges stick. He’d said I was doing sixty-three in a thirty-five. He’d said I’d run stop signs, screamed through red lights, endangered other motorists, and even nearly run down a pedestrian making use of crosswalk. He’d said all this while I watched a mortician’s gurney roll on squeaky wheels from my home; a round, familiar bump swelling upward at the halfway point. I remembered thinking that she always looked better on our bed and under our sheets, but the sight was oddly serene all the same.
Then I caught sight of a few red dimples as they kissed the bleached whiteness of the sheet and began to grow, expanding across the clean cover and staining it. Then I was screaming, shrieking in blind, raw terror, and clamoring to make it to her side even as they were hoisting her into the back of the…
… the back of the…
Christ!
Somebody’d called it a “meat wagon.” They hadn’t known I’d heard, but they’d called it a “meat wagon”…
It took me a long time—too long—to realize I was being held back; held down; held away from going after her.
Then, assuring them I was fine—“I’m good. I’m cool. I’m… I’m cool.”—they let me up again, loosing me onto a world that wasn’t quite level; let me stand up on a ground that wasn’t quite flat. In my mind, I could still see the spreading stain across the plain white sheet of my life, and standing seemed downright impossible.
Then the cop said “sixty-three” again.
He said “sixty-three,” and I punched him.
I heard “sixty-three” echo in my mind, watched the words marry the vision of the spreading stain, and suddenly I knew—fucking KNEW!—that if I could turn that cop’s face into hamburger I might turn the clock back a few minutes and coax that fucking Honda to do sixty-five, maybe even seventy. If I could just beat every last “sixty-three” out of the face that had been assigned to the badge and gun I might never have to see those stains at all.
Then I was being held again. Then I was being beaten.
And—sweet Jesus!—nothing had ever felt so goddam good in all the world!
Then, too soon for anybody’s liking, some cop with an actual brain between his ears tore his buddies off of me, reading them the riot act about the scene we’d all just rolled up to—“Chris’sakes, you assholes! That’s the man’s wife! His wife! And, in case you fucking nitwits can’t see for shit, either, that wasn’t a Thanksgiving dinner she was carrying in her belly, either! Get the fuck off him before you get the whole force sued!”—and I was alone with nothing but the emptiness.
The emptiness and…
And a voice.
The voice!
Over the din of everything else, I heard my name.
“Hey! HEY! Jace? Jason Presley? That you, you son-of-a-whore?”
None of the cops seemed to notice the random figure standing amidst the chaos until they all heard that last part.
I guess they figured very few people would be throwing around words like “whore” in the middle of a scene like that.
But then, just like that, they were all looking.
I was a bit late to look, and maybe that’s what saved my life.
Suddenly, Mister “Sixty-Three”—likely trying to make up for his fuckup—was coming at me like a bullet.
No…
Not like a bullet. I suppose it was the bullet that was coming at me like a bullet. The bullet was faster. Of course. Cop could’ve been an Olympic runner—could’ve been running sixty-three miles-per-hour—and he still would’ve been too damn slow. But the sight of all that uniformed authority barreling at me gave me a start; nearly knocked me right on my ass without laying a hand on me. And that was how a shot that should have built a lovely little retirement home right in my heart was, instead, forced to settle in the meat of my shoulder a few inches off.
“T-BUILT SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES, PRESLEY,” the shooter had cried out at me as he was dragged away towards a flashing Cruiser. “THE CROWS IS DEAD! LEARN IT, KNOW IT! THE CROWS IS DEAD, PRESLEY, DEAD! THE CROWS… IS… DEAD!”
Turning away from my would-be murderer, I watched the “meat wagon” holding everything I’d known as my life pull out and begin to put distance between us.
“The Crows is dead…”
“The Crows is dead…”
“The Crows is…”
The Meat Wagon’s brake lights burned, it rolled to a lazy stop at the end of the road. There, seeming to tease me, it lingered—it’s right blinker winking knowingly at me—and it finally turned and vanished into the night.
There, at the end of the road, standing where the “meat wagon” had been waiting a moment earlier to wink at me, her ghost stood.
She stared back at me.
She held her round belly in one hand, supporting its great weight and all the potential it represented.
She waved—a casual, lazy gesture aimed more towards the home we’d built and everything we could have had than at me.
She stared back at me… but she did not smile.
There’d be time enough to smile at me from the end of the road in the years to follow. But nobody smiled on the night that they died.
Nobody.
“The Crows is dead…”
“The Crows is dead…”
“The Crows is…”
That’s what I should have been hearing echo in my mind—what I always heard echoing in my mind at this point—but…
But it wasn’t.
Not this time, at least.
No, what I heard was something different; something worse:
“Mia is dead…”
“Mia is dead…”
“Mia is…”
And then the Village People began to sing in the background.
****
My back screamed at me as I shot upright. I was distantly aware of the merry tinkling of broken glass as it lost its grip on the back of my jacket and fell back onto discarded shards of their cousins. Pins and needles assaulted my left leg; I’d fallen asleep with it crossed under my right, and I was paying for it now. Though I had no way of knowing if I’d slept this way or if I’d done this subconsciously upon awakening, but my fists were clenched—they were ready for a fight. Every bit of me was ready for a fight.
But I woke up to a calm evening.
The sun, lazy and drooping, was in the early stages of considering sleep. There was some color to the sky, but nothing so intense as to warrant any dramatic emotional response, good or bad.
I’d come out of an old dream with a new, terrible twist that had my nerves feeling like tiny barrels of nitro ready to blow…
And the entire fucking world was staring back at me like I was a crazy person for it.
“Great…” I muttered, struggling to unclench my hand—a personal fight in-and-of itself—so that I could wipe the filth of sleep from my face. Sweat-caked brow, crusty eyes, and a crust of dried snot and settling drool around my mouth and nose. Had I been crying in my sleep? The pad of one thumb backtracked to the corner of one eye, found a few still-damp trails of salt-crystals cutting through the no-doubt grimy surface of my cheeks and sinuses. Yes, yes I had been crying.
Some deep, snickering part of me seemed to say, I told you so.
Then the Village People began to sing at me.
I squinted, recalling the bizarre closing to my terrible, terrible dream, and suddenly wondered if I was still trapped in sleep. Awareness dawned on me like a slug crawling across my face, slow and slimy and discomforting, and I slapped a palm across my brow, embarrassed, as I reached into my jacket and retrieved my still-ringing phone.
Because of course my ringtone for Danny was the Village People.
I cut off the song just before the second half of the letter sequence in “Y-M-C-A” and grumbled something that didn’t have any meaning even to myself.
Danny said, “The fuck did ya just say?”
I didn’t have it in me to admit to him that it sounded an awful lot like “condolences” to me. I barely wanted to admit it to myself. “Nothing,” I groaned, only slightly more coherent this time, “What is it?”
“What’s it always, kid? Business,” he asked and then answered back. “S’only fuckin’ thing get my cute ass callin’ ya when I should be cruisin’ for a little twinky action.”
I decided it was better not to ask if he was referring to snack-cakes or skinny gay guys. Knowing Danny, it was a bit of both. Ignoring the subject in its entirety, I said, “Meet you at the shop in…” and trailed off, figuring it was better to let him decide how much time he needed.
Danny told me he needed no time, because he was already there.
“Fuck,” I muttered, realizing I’d zigged when I should have zagged; offered a polite gesture when I should have been a selfish prick.
Wasn’t that always the way, though?
“What’s that?” Danny asked.
“Nothing,” I lied, realizing I felt like I was going to puke again. Not knowing the nature of the beast—what sort of bulk and volume was waiting on the docket of my esophagus—I aimed to end the call as soon as possible.
“Are ya drunk or somethin’?” he asked then, and I realized how much I must have been slurring.
“Was working on it,” I confessed, and, as if demanding to prove the point, the payload was delivered then. I puked, long and hard…
And loud!
“JESUS BALL-LICKING CHRIST!” Danny swore, and I thought I heard him stifle a retch of his own through the phone line.
Nothing gets a person’s upchuck reflex working better than hearing another’s in full-swing, I mused to myself as the last of my technicolor yawn died down. The spicket of my sickness trailed off into a trickle of something more elastic than drool and less substantial than vomit that oozed from the center of my lip in a disgusting rope that hung halfway to my stomach and refused to snap free. God, I’m gross! I thought, crossing my eyes to follow the precarious string of… what? “After-puke”?
“God, I’m gross!” I repeated to myself, this time out loud.
“Fuckin’ sounded gross on my end, too,” Danny grumbled over the phone. “Do me a favor and get yerself a fuckin’ mint—a whole damn bag of ‘em, in fact—before ya get here, kay?”
“Says the guy who’s used to smelling his own cum on other guys’ breath,” I jabbed back.
But Danny had already hung up on me.