Durability

I didn’t really know what a gypsy was. I’d been called one and it had been bandied about like a descriptor of something that one didn’t want to become, but damn it I had become one despite all my education.

They sprawled about on those couches that my mother wouldn’t have touched, perchance she wouldn’t have ever come into this place at all. I don’t know now much about her, there is hole in my psyche, where I had stored my time in the military and my time on the streets. All that remained now was the urgent need to never let anyone know where I was. I used a series of phones, the flip phone variety because one thing I was sure of, they were coming for me to. Who “they” were I didn’t know, I hadn’t seen a psychiatrist in 8 years and my business was thriving. Hand to mouth I was not. Out in the Rhymes cemetery I would bury my cash exchanged for gold. One thing I was sure of was that gold wasn’t going to lose favor if and when the Apocalypse came. I hunted bad men. I hunted them like I was one of them. I knew what they knew and knew how they thought, I guess I had exchanged memory for this knowledge in some sort of barter that had happened while I was asleep.

I woke up in the Pie-in-the-Sky Motel off off of A1A. I was soaked in sweat and knew that I had to get to work. I got sick of a sort when I didn’t work, like a doper off of his dope. I guessed I was a doper too, but I didn’t identify as such. Mainly I just got girls who were on dope out of the situations that they were in and it took a degree of dissociation to do the work so I had a combo of drugs that I took to keep moving.

Thump. Thump. Thump. The thump resonated into my bones and I was scared Sick. My hermit like ways were very non-threatening . My main objective in life was not to be found. I found but didn’t want to be found. Skulking around strip joints and motels like this was fine, hoodie on hat pulled down over my often-shaved visage. The door wasn’t of the stolid variety, it was more of two pieces of ply-wood or pulpwood held together by a wish. Who knew I was here. I had a gun, but it was buried down the street behind a vacant lot.

“Thomas”

My name wasn’t Thomas, I had several, but Thomas wasn’t one of them.

It was the old man in the room next to mine. He had given me a drink of rot-gut vodka the night before as I was trying to slip in out of the one eye of the one camera on the premises. Paranoia was just part of who I was now. I lived in a different motel almost every night and I had an encrypted email that I could use at any library or UPS store. Sometimes I would ask to use a person’s laptop and give them a coffee for the trade.

“Go away bro.”

I avoided mirrors because they seemed to tell me about myself. Things I was trying to escape. Parts I didn’t or couldn’t remember. All that seemed to matter now was the job, my existential essence was to make the world better. Just a little bit. I read history books mainly, I stole them from libraries in Phoenix and Rayville and Ft. Lauderdale. I doubted there was anyone out there missing me, because I thought I would remember if that was the case.

“Thomas”

Louder now and more insistent. I opened the door pulled the old man, now not looking as old as I remembered and unloaded a really overly brutal set of licks to his nose and the sweet spot where the lobe of the ear was. No doubt he would have to get his jaw wired up. He wasn’t a regular old man but until he was slumped in the corner could I see that his teeth were perfect and the dirty brown coat he was wearing was Brooks Brothers.

“Fucking fuck.” The sound of my own voice was hard to swallow, I had not heard it in days, while I was on the move. Trains, busses and sketchy cars for cash deals was how I got around and it didn’t require much in the way of speaking.

“Thomas.” He was still awake, and I shuddered profoundly, his face now in my mind’s eye and I couldn’t escape. Everyone had a story and if he got it out on the table then I would have to respond. I was linked to stories. They had some sort of power over me. If I heard it, I had to respond, and this asshole was fixing to give one to me.

Lynchburg, Tennessee

She was old enough to know better. I knew this wasn’t some 10-year-old. She was old enough to make up her own mind, but the Mexicans had her on dope and she couldn’t make up her own mind. Deep in the crevices of my psyche was another girl, married with kinds of her own now but I placed her face on the story, so I could make it real enough to move me.

My voice was telling the story, but I was miles away. I knew Lynchburg, Tenn. I’d been there. Shed blood there. Been on a ripping drunk in that Tennessee town. I had sat in the train station for hours. Waiting on waiting. On some sort of ethereal memorandum to be handed down from whoever was in charge of such things.

“Lacy, we done told you girl, that you couldn’t stay here.” She had enough Fentanyl to last for 2 days when she had her move. 15 years old and barefoot.

“They got me tied to bed, woman.

“You don’t look tied up anymore.

Regina stood 5’1 but she had two dogs and that just smelled blood. All the time. They slept in her bed, often as not lounging as only uncut dogs can. Waddle legs-on their back, with their full scrotal sack to examine. A big light bragging and little like begging at the same time. When Regina was 18 she had a littler of Thibodaux bulls that she cut them all and she would give the lot of em for just Eli. The uncut one. The other was a bitch, she got around the neighborhood pretty good and Gina, called her whore, who wasn’t of herself a saint.

”Did you do something to get tied up in a chain to a bed?”

The girl twirled on the ball of her right foot. “Did that just come out of your mouth?”

“I mean did you steal something.”

“No stupid idiot I have been abducted.”

The door was closed slowly with one of the two dogs growling a warning.

The natural red headed bombshell stood on the porch in a city she knew for 30 or 40 hours and cried and wanted a phone SO damn bad. Everything seemed mauve or light light tan. The light couldn’t really be switched on or off. It was, obviously playing up to the reality. She had been interested in philosophy and had spent the previously summer research ithe best colleges. She would go to Hollins but now, now she wondered if she had been scarred, knew to much that she could never unsee despite the best psychiatrists, the best change of sceneries. She was already a pickle, never to be a cumber again.

I didn’t feel sorry for her so much as I probably should. I felt sorry for her dad and the 20 large he paid me to go find out where she was and take pictures. Within moments of leaving he's vacation house in Hilton Head, his next read double it to bring her home, I will cover all your medical and legal bills if it comes to that, but you bring her back….so Ill Venmo you the money now. Just try to leave people alive please. Don’t kill anyone and it shouldn’t be so complicated as to have to kill anyone.

It was.

I did.

But to that later.

I came through to Lynchburg by way of an unneeded trip to see my alma mater. Sewanee was grander than I had ever been. I was a piece of shit who wanted to go to sleep forever but I like to think that deep down, far back I had been a good guy. A back-slapping sort of guy. One who got more attention from his teachers as he did the dudes and girls he saw every day at school. How does a generation just wear one down?

I knew I had been in the war and once in DC I went to a bar accidentally that was basically go VFW. I think that was as close to therapy as I ever really got. What I did now---sure there is some self-condemnation but for the whole I am just trying to help other people and it is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Most don’t want to be saved. Most just want that next fix. Ive deployed Narcan 16 times and got punched 5. Lynchburg got outta hand.

She ran till a large rock sat itself in her right foot. That point where the far of the ball meets the soft arch. She stopped hard. The call to her aunt was short. The man across from the house of her friend was a good dude and let her make a call.