Category Archives: Adventure

Chapter 7 – Garage

Chapter 7 – Garage

Get mad, then get over it.

Colin Powell

It was a Saturday and early, earlier than he’d ever been to the garage before but he was covering for another driver and needed to start his shift at 4:45 a.m. For some reason, Walter parked his car on the street that day, rather than under the garage where the employee parking was.  It was humid, already making him sweat, but there was no rain and the forecast on his iPhone called for a clear day that day.  The birds were up; he could see a murmurtion of European Starlings strutting on a ledge that was lit up by one of the outside security lamps.  A block away, a freight train was making its slow pass through the industrial part of town, steel wheels on iron tracks, a distant flashing of the crossing lights and their warning sound.  He had walked around the block, just to loosen up his legs and back before driving, and had passed by the Tea Roses and Wavy-leaved Asters that were planted around the building, and was entering the garage through one of the bus doors that hadn’t been closed. He saw himself in the large round mirror the drivers used to make a safe entry into the garage, and noticed some people inside. When he rounded the corner, he could see four of the bigger Union Stewards milling around with Lee, the Union President, and Brady, the Operations Manager and some guy lying on the cement floor of the garage.

The cement next to the guy had a water puddle on it, “Probably from the night crew washing the elephants” thought Walter.

Brady and Lee were big guys and the guy on the ground looked to be pretty big too, but Walter could tell he’d been injured.  From what he saw, Walter knew what was going on and he knew that at least part of Union and Management were in it together, he just didn’t know why, specifically.

When they saw him, the stewards turned towards him in warning, Lee said, “What the fuck!” and hit the injured guy with a tire iron hard enough to burst his skull and, obviously, killed him.

Nobody said anything until Lee, breathing heavily and still holding the tire iron in his right hand, wiped his face and said, “Get it out of here and clean this mess up;” “It” being the dead guy.

Two of the stewards moved to pick the body up and carry it somewhere while a third went to get a bucket and mop; the fourth steward stood staring at Walter and said something to Lee.

Walter noticed that the automatic ceiling windows were open and he caught a glimpse of the sky and some birds, “Probably Tree Swallows” he figured.

Lee turned, stared at Walter, and then walked over to him.

“You’re in early, Walt” he said to Walter.

“Yep,” said Walter, and then, “It’s Walter,” he corrected.

That seemed to piss Lee off.  They stood there, silent for a few moments, and then Lee made a mistake.

He said, to Walter, “You say anything about this to anyone and you and everyone you hold dear will be dead!  You understand?”

Walter said back to Lee, “Just so we’re clear.  You’re threatening to kill me and everyone I hold dear if I ever say anything about what I just witnessed, right?”

“Right…Walter,” said Lee.

“I understand,” said Walter.

Walter didn’t know who just got killed.  He didn’t know why they killed him.  He couldn’t say if it was a just kill or unjust, who was right and who was wrong.  He did know that what had just happened was as old as mankind; that insanity ran rampant in the world.  What he also knew was that survival was the second law and that his survival had, once again, been threatened.  He walked around Lee, around Brady and the steward, over to the security door where he swiped his ID/keycard and went in to Dispatch, not upset, not panicked, just normal Walter.  He checked his wristwatch against the clock in Dispatch, adjusting his watch by half-a-minute, knowing that the Dispatch clock synchronized the universe.

He looked up his bus number; it was 256…Gypsy, filled in his timecard, and got ready to drive.

When Walter returned to the garage to Pretrip the bus, the gang was gone and there was no sign that anything untoward had happened; the wet spot where they had mopped up could have been elephant droppings.  He pulled his assigned bus out of the garage and turned left instead of right as he usually did.  The operators were trained on all of the routes and had printed schedules, called Paddles, which detailed the bus stops that had time points attached.  It was a standing joke that no driver wanted to be on The River without a Paddle.  In Dispatch, there was a bulletin board, as well as placards standing around, that reflected road construction and any detours or route changes that were in effect.   He had driven this route before and had covered for the regular driver a couple of times in the last two months.  When he turned up College Street in the dark of the predawn hours, he saw the same guy he’d seen every time, riding on a skate board, rolling along on the shoulder of the road going against traffic. He pulled up to the stop at Bricker and Western Ave., carrying six passengers; it was 5:45 a.m. and he had to wait until six to depart.  He flipped the switch for his four-way flashers, pulled on the air brake, shifted into neutral, kneeled and opened the doors.  A half-block in front of him, the usual helmeted, bearded guy on the bike, white front light on, red tail light flashing, lunch box strapped to the rack over his rear tire, wove his way towards the bus, looking forward and then back over his shoulder, half wobbling as he did so, and then crossing over to the right side of the road before passing by the bus.

“Probably on his way to work,” thought Walter.

A car pulled up and let off the cute Latino high school girl who was always there.  She got on, inserting her student 10-ride into the fare-box as she faced him.

“Good morning!”

“Good morning,” she echoed before retrieving her ticket and walking back to sit by her boyfriend in the seat just beyond the rear exit.

Another rider stepped on and said, “I lost my pass and don’t have any change.  Can I still ride?  I’m telling you the truth.”

Walter smiled slightly and said, “Sure”.  There was no point in having an empty bus.

The Avail system signaled that it was time to move on so he went through his routine, closing, lifting, shifting, checking and then moving, on towards the next stop.

He thought about the last time he drove past this spot.  A guy with a broken-down shotgun in his bag had gotten on.  The other passengers noticed that something was weird and one of them alerted Walter as she exited.  He had pressed the silent alarm and then received a call, from Dispatch, telling him to pull over and tell the passengers that there was a mechanical issue.   He did so, then stepped off of the bus, walked around to the rear and opened the engine panel.  A moment later, two city police cruisers pulled up and the officers got specifics from Walter before boarding the bus, handguns drawn, and arresting the gunman.  It turned out that he was on his way to see his ex-wife who was demanding an extra $10 per month in child support.  That demand had pushed him over the edge.  Walter had thought how some marriages are like benzene; they never degrade and when you take them on you assume responsibility for them for eternity.  With that incident, he had fallen fifteen minutes behind schedule and Dispatch wanted him to “put his foot in it” but he hadn’t; he had just driven at the speed limit trusting that he would catch up, not caring too much if he didn’t.  He was the boss of the bus.

The sun had started to make its appearance and the passengers took that as a sign to start chatting amongst themselves.  Sometimes it was good entertainment.

“I was raised Baptist but married Catholic so I was always either the world’s worst Baptist or the world’s worst Catholic.  There was a certain comfort in that,” one man had said to another.

“I’ve got money coming out of my floorboards at home,” he heard the guy, who he’d let ride for free, say.

At the next stoplight, one of the River Supervisor vehicles, a shiny new SUV, passed through, the driver nodded to Walter, Walter nodded back.  The light turned green and the bus moved on.

It was still very early but, in that town, the drinking started even earlier.  At the next stop three drunks started to get on, arguing over who would board first.

“You got room?” one of them had asked, “Can he get on first?”

“There’s no boarding order,” said Walter, “just get on.”

“People don’t seem to understand that there’s always room on my bus,” Walter had thought, laughing to himself.

He had gauged how rowdy they might be, knowing that, as a general rule, he should lock the belligerent people out of the bus, not in.  The River wanted the drunks to ride rather than having them drive their own cars and cause an accident.  Walter agreed.  If they were jerks, he knew they’d get off before he did.  Everyone was just trying to roll down the road.

At the next stop, one woman swiped her ticket and then turned sideways and stood as close to Walter as she could, separated from him only by the arm of the driver’s seat, as the other passengers paid and moved on to seats.  She was sexy with a cute face and body but she was missing some teeth and her skin was the color of death.

“Probably a heavy smoker and well on her way out,” he had thought.

He had seen her before, on some of the other routes, but that was the first time she had stood by him like that. She just talked to him for a moment, nicely, saying hello and asking how he was going, wondering if he was happy.

“You’ll have to move behind the yellow line so we can move” he had said to her.

She didn’t say anything but had moved behind the line and then leaned against the bulkhead, behind him, as he started moving again.

He got to his turn-around point and followed a loop of road through the parking lot of a library.  A woman came out of the building, saw the bus as it approached and ran until she got just off of the curb and into the crosswalk in front of Walter.  She made certain that she had eye contact with him and then she had slowed her pace to a deliberate walk, making him stop the bus to let her pass.

“Why do they do that?” the sexy, toothless one behind him had asked.  He’d forgotten she was there.

“I don’t know,” said Walter, “Maybe they’re just impatient and think the bus will slow them down.”

“Or maybe they know The River has deep pockets,” she had said.

He called that move the Suicide Trot.  Surely they knew what would happen between a body and a bus if the driver didn’t see them.

Walter had started back on the fast part of the route, heading back in to Central Station.  As Gypsy picked up speed, she had started making her Cicada sound.  Walter wondered if Maintenance would ever fix whatever was loose inside her frame.  When he reached the speed limit, there had been a bright flash, as if a mirror had reflected the sun light into the bus, and Walter had seen an image reflected in the windshield.  It looked like a frizzy red haired woman, wearing an eye patch and standing right where the sexy, toothless one was.  He looked up to his inside mirror and had seen neither the eye patch woman nor the toothless one.  There was nobody standing behind him where the reflection would have come from and where there had been a passenger just a moment before.

“Phew…must be losing it,” Walter had muttered to himself.

On the run in, there were mailboxes planted close to the road, often with their doors open and hanging out past the curb right where the traffic is heaviest.  The powerline poles leaned out over the road, also, and some wise person planted the road signs closer to the street than the city ordinance allowed.

“Love the left”, passed through his head, remembering what Marti always advised.

Walter followed behind a dump truck that was dropping random bits of gravel, just as he got to the mailboxes, and there was a line of cars coming up on that side.  It was a tight squeeze but he had size on his side and moved the cars over towards the center lane.  Walter had been watching all of this and then, as if in slow motion, he saw a rock slide off of the back of the truck, bounce once on the asphalt, and then hit square on the bus’s windshield directly in front of him.  It sounded like a gunshot.  The bus windshields don’t shatter but he had gotten a new knick that he had to report when he got in.  The bus kept rolling, everything was normal and under control.  He remembered the funniest time he was shot at.

Felito had come over from a Force Recon unit with the Marines and Lickass joined them from his A-team.  It was just the three of them taking an easy walk through the woods looking for somebody or something, he couldn’t remember what.  Walter was the team leader, in the lead and starting up a muddy embankment that was partially covered with leaves, Felito and Lickass were spread apart behind him, when one shot flew through the trees and sparked off of a rock by Walter’s right foot. “Sniper!”

              If it’s set up right, there’s no way to make it out of an ambush alive unless you rush the gunners and kill them before they can kill you.  With a sniper, things are a little different.  The three of them were trained to run towards gunfire but they couldn’t really see where this guy was.  At the top of the embankment was a large walnut tree and Walter charged straight up the slope and dropped to his knees behind that cover.  Felito and Lickass started to duplicate his moves but one-by-one and in turn they slipped on the leaves and mud and fell before making it up the slope.  More shots rang out.  Felito slipped again and Lickass started laughing at him until he slipped another time and, by then, they were both laughing.  Walter had just stared at them as if they were crazy which, of course, they were.  After three tries, they finally made it up and to the tree.  Felito jumped on top of Walter and then Lickass on top of Felito right as another round sunk in the dirt beside them.  Now Walter was laughing.  Stacked on top of each other and covered in mud, they huddled there for a good hour after that last shot came in. 

              He remembers what Felito used to tell him, “If you get in a fist fight with someone you don’t know, don’t screw around.  Go straight for the throat and then get the hell out of there.  You don’t know how bad the other dude might be.” Lickass used to always advise talking your way out of a fight, taking the peaceful route.

Walter had breathed deeply and thought, “Here…Now…This,” and remembered that each moment mattered as he kept driving the bus.  He felt grateful for the experience and tried to minimize his boredom and anxiety, his wish not to be driving, his thoughts that he’d learned all he could learn from this. He had mumbled his thanks to the elephant, looked in the mirror at the young adult bodies with dead children inside, riding behind him, and remembered that we all wake up when we’re ready.

The guy in the burnt orange Honda Element, that he always saw, drove by; right hand on the wheel, left hand to his chin, holding his head erect.  At the next stop, some got off and some got on.

He had come to a four-way stop and a beat-up old blue Mercedes with a double roof rack came up to the corner, perpendicular to him, and slowed but didn’t stop as it rolled through the intersection.   The guy driving the Mercedes had on an old-fashioned hat, grey hair in disarray, gray beard and eyes shining with the light of the universe and a slight grin on his face. He was the spitting image of any picture Walter had ever seen of Walt Whitman and so, to Walter, he was.

The rest of that Saturday was pretty much the same.  Walter had completed his runs, turned Gypsy over to his relief driver at Central Station, shared a shuttle van ride back to the garage, and turned in his time card and Inspection Report.  He stopped in the locker room, to drop off a few things before heading home.  Each locker had a combination lock built into it and he’d been given the code the day it was assigned to him.  He kept a few odds and ends in there, a change of shirt, deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste but that was about all.  When he opened the locker that day, there was an obvious letter sized manila envelope that he knew he hadn’t placed there.  There was no writing on the outside and it was sealed but just barely.  He slipped his fingers under the flap, opened it, and pulled out the sheet of paper that was folded inside.

“Remember what we said, or else,” was typed near the middle of the sheet.

It was a common day in an ordinary world, except for the killing…well, and maybe the reflection.

Chapter 6 – Jade

All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

                                                                               Andre Breton

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                  Of the three siblings, Sam had always been there and, it seemed, always would be.  His beliefs were founded in those things that he had heard most often and that were told with the greatest conviction.  Before his mother died, he had talked of moving south to some place warmer but, after her death, it looked like he had just been fantasizing his escape from the slavery she had trapped him in.  He was born in handcuffs and found the key to release them as he laid his mother in her grave but was hesitant to use them.

Jade, on the other hand, came late to the family and left early.

When Jade met Walter, she had a confused reaction. She was trying to be a good person but felt that she was not and was in a constant, internal struggle against the disgust that she felt for herself and longing for the love that she naturally needed.  What Jade saw, in his face, was something that she had never seen before and it made her happy until she began to fear it.

“Please find Dad and tell him I love him and miss him.  I have not fucked up anything he ever cared for me to play.  I want you to find his address and phone number.  I want to call or write him; please help me I will do anything for you.  I will pay you anything when I get a job. Please help me.  I really love Dad and God.  He makes me feel guilty. I hate mean people.  Jade is an asshole.  Jade is stupid.  Jade is ugly.  Jade has to masturbate because everyone thinks she’s too ugly and sick.  No one has touched her in a month because they might catch her ugly disease.  I’m stupid, remember?  Sorry.  He tries to fuck their brains up.”

Walter had just finished reading, for the fifth time, the words of a twenty-one year old girl.  It was one of Jade’s letters to Mara that she’d had kept from when they were much younger.  He had talked to the sisters and neither one remembered writing or reading these words; neither one remembered the pain reflected there.  If he showed them the letters, handed the pages to them, they would just glance at the paper then refold it and put it away.  The words, the envelopes, the traces are there, filed and boxed and kept available for him to read but not for the girls.

“Thanks for the memories,” Walter thought.

Jade is a couple of years older than her sister Mara, and came to be when her mother, Truc, and father, Jürgen, paired in Vietnam in the late ‘60s.  Back then, her young father was lonely, scared of being killed, and horny when he’d met Jade’s mother.  Her even younger mother was lonely, hoping to escape the war, and horny when she’d met the man who would become Jade’s biological father.  To her father, her mother had smelled like fish but was a tight little bundle of sex; his LBFM as he used to say to the other soldiers – little brown fucking machine.  To her mother, her father had smelled like a cow and, while not gentle, he was the size of most Vietnamese men and vigorous and knew of her wish for a better life than the one she had.  Mother thought of him as a water buffalo.  Somehow, for about three months, their relationship had worked.  As often happened, the unborn Jade and her mother stayed behind when her father left their country at the end of his twelve-month tour.  So, Jade was labeled Amerasian, a “half-breed dog,” and began her life shunned by most of the adults around her and most of the children, too, once their parents were done imprinting them.  Jade couldn’t know why her father had abandoned her but she often fantasized that he just didn’t know how to find her or that he’d been killed in combat.  To the contrary, he’d done everything he could to make certain her mother and, by extension, his unborn child, wouldn’t know how to find him, and he’d held a desk job in Saigon on one of the most protected bases with no exposure to combat; he’d abandoned them due to the qualities of his character in the start of a pattern he would continue throughout his life.

It wasn’t until six years later, when the protective man Bao, who had become her step-father, had accumulated enough money to buy the family’s way out of the country, that her mother finally felt her dreams were coming true and little Jade dared dream that she might find her real father.  Her stepfather was a fabric salesman in Saigon and found life too difficult in the harsh years after the war.  He had found, as had many, a fisherman on the coast who promised safe passage out of the country.  It took them three days to gather some meager possessions, along with all their gold, and travel to Vung Tau where they boarded the boat along with thirty others hoping for happiness. Being on the water for ten days proved to be too much for Truc, who died from the flu and dehydration and was ungracefully pushed overboard into the sea one day before the sky rained down fresh water on the survivors as they touched land in Indonesia.  For months, Jade and her stepfather struggled in the immigration camp until they were finally relocated to America.

The Universe does work in surprising ways: Bao and Jade were resettled in Michigan, in the very town where the father who had abandoned her now lived with his U.S. wife, daughter and son.  One day, a car came across the good man who’d protected Jade in her early years, and tossed him fifty feet after striking him as he crossed 28th Street in the early morning hours on his way to his shift at the factory.  At about that same time, Mara and Sam’s mother came across the letter that Jade’s father had failed to destroy, that sought the answers and made certain things clear.  Through Child Protective Services, she tracked down Jade and brought her into their home to be raised as one of her own.  It could have been what he was confronted with when looking at his oldest daughter, now living with him, that caused the last crack in his psyche or it could have been just the way he was put together but history repeated itself and within a few years after Jade’s arrival, their father walked out on the family leaving them in poverty.  With his leaving, one-half of the verbal violence also left, most of the physical threats departed, and all of the inappropriate sexual innuendo was gone.  He left their home but remained in the same town, coming back into their lives when the need was there for him.

Walter always smiled when he thought of how Jade introduced her family.  About Sam, Jade liked to say, “He’s my brother from another mother;” and when introducing Mara she’d just call her “My twin sister.”

Walter heard of Jade shortly after he started seeing Mara when Jade and her husband drove to Michigan to spend the 4th of July with the family at Sam’s cottage on Pickerel Lake.  At that time, it seemed that Mara didn’t really like her sister.  Walter didn’t spend time with them, that holiday, but he was at Mara’s the same week and heard the stories about the drama at the cottage and how Jade’s husband had been critical of Mara and how their mother had gotten into it with him and he and Jade had departed a few days ahead of schedule because of the tension. Mara continued to tell him stories about Jade, over the next year, and it made feel wary but also made him smile. The next year, after the death of their mother, in a replay that would become tradition until Jade’s marriage ended, the couple drove to the cottage for the summer holiday, bringing potato chips and Hostess Cupcakes with them.   That was the first time that Walter met Jade.

“Be sure to call about a half hour before you get here,” Mara had instructed.

“How come?” Walter had asked.  He was bringing Mara’s friend Kara, who was Jade’s age and had been her close friend in high school.

“Jade wants to make sure she has time to fix herself before you two get here.”

That made him smile.

“Whatever she thought needed fixing got fixed,” he thought when he first saw her.  She was petite with pale, flawless skin, stood straight and proud, and had a bit of a boyish figure, athletic, with broad shoulders for one so small.  He remembered thinking how she had one of the cutest butts he’d ever seen, standing there with her clothes on.  The only time he ever saw it naked was in his dreams.

That first day, when he met her, the women were gathered around the dining table and Walter was sitting there, the only male figure in the room, and Jade was telling a story, entertaining the other women.

“We all know what it’s like to be disappointed by a limp dick!” said Jade and, with a smile on her face, she looked over at Walter.

He didn’t know if she had looked at him like that because of his failure to butt fuck her sister; he knew that sisters could talk, or if she was judging whether he found her words to be inappropriate for a first meeting, but he took her words for what they were; the truth of a part of life.

That night he caught her just as she was coming up the stairs from the kitchen, heading for her bedroom.  He was on his way out, taking Kara back to River City before heading back to his home.  He stopped Jade to say goodbye.  She was standing down the steps, lower than him.  He leaned forward and gave her a kiss on her forehead.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

That should have been his first clue.

“You are great.  I’m really glad we got to meet,” was what he said.

Silence, and a face staring at him, wearing a smile.

Sam and Mara had been so excited about Jade’s visit and had anticipated it for weeks.  Walter thought that they would feel a letdown, when she left, but it was he who felt the letdown.  He thought that, for that one day, Jade had just been one of his last distractions and, in that, he might have been right.  He was deep into his relationship with Mara and knew that he loved her but what he didn’t know, at that time, was that he had fallen in love with Jade also.  And his loving one did nothing to diminish his love for the other.

“Probably just my projection,” was what he thought.

He knew that what he was seeing in Jade was the light of life, just as he’d seen it in her sister earlier, but that it seemed to have faded just before she left.  Walter was beginning to realize that it was his character, or habit, to respond to that fading light in people by trying to infuse life back into them.  He didn’t, yet, understand the lesson; it was to let that light shine brightly inside of him.

Years later, it was a Friday night and Jade’s training group would do their long run the next morning.  That Saturday would be the start of the cycle for the next marathon they were training for so she wanted to be sure and make the run.  She set her alarm for 5:30 a.m. so that she would have time to get her coffee, take the dogs for a brief walk, and then get herself together and to the meeting spot on time.  She completed her evening ritual, brushing and flossing her teeth, cleaning and moisturizing her face, and the rest, and then lay herself down for sleep at a little after 11:00 p.m.  She tried to sleep but she tossed and turned for a couple of hours, not willing to admit to herself what she was thinking of, before finally nodding off around 1:00 a.m.  Barely a few hours later, at the pre-set time, the alarm went off.

“Why am I so tired?” Jade asked over the phone, talking to Mara.

“What do you mean?” asked Mara, in return.

“I slept right through my alarm, this morning, and missed my running group.”

She had been working sixty hours a week in a high stress position managing Creatives and trying to keep the product ahead of the competition.  Her department worked seasons ahead, trying to project what the trends would be at future holidays, so that their products would sell and the company would stay on top.  She had worked her way up, over the years, happy with her accomplishments but, perhaps, unaware of the cost.

“I don’t have much of a libido anymore, either,” she said to Mara, again over the phone, when they were talking about relationships.

“I wish I did but I don’t,” Jade said, with resignation.

Mara had talked to Walter about it.  She knew that he cared for Jade and that they talked but also knew that she wouldn’t share such personal details with him.

“She’s probably just burnt out,” he said, “She should slow down or take a vacation.”

“I know, but she probably won’t,” said Mara.

“Maybe she never had much of a libido.  Maybe that’s part of the problem with her marriage,” suggested Walter.

“No,” Mara said, “I don’t know how it came up but, when they were first married, she used to fuck like a bunny.”

“Rabbit. How do you know that?” he asked.

“I don’t remember.  It was inappropriate but I think her husband told me,” she answered.

Jade had told Walter that, in the early years, her husband had a crush on Mara.

“It’s normal,” was what she said.

When she first got married, she planned to keep her husband happy while he designed Carolina houses and earned big bucks to keep her happy.  Early on plans changed when he decided he wanted to become an actor instead, so she pledged her support and stayed behind while he moved to LA.  She was miserable and lonely but he had some limited success that kept him going.  They lasted that way for less than two years before he came back depressed, she traded her misery for happiness, and their new way of being together had begun. She kept working, getting busier and more active in perfect balance to his fall into lethargy and inactivity.  He set up “his” room with skulls and skeletons, mounted bats and rattlesnakes, and started attaching his beliefs to conspiracy theories.  He’d go three nights without sleeping, growing his beard out, and looking half-crazy but still handsome.  He became a germaphobe and it starting rubbing off on her.  They tried to have kids until he lost his erection.  They tried blue pills to get it back and they got it back enough to keep trying and failing so they tried fertility clinics and hormones and everything they could until it became obvious that they couldn’t.  She got sick.  She had a biopsy that proved positive for breast cancer and, after weighing the alternatives; she opted for a double mastectomy with immediate reconstruction.

“At least they’re bigger now,” she often thought, “and they aren’t going anywhere when I run.”

Her husband never doubted that she’d be okay.  Mara stayed with her for a bit, during that time, but it probably hurt them both more than being of any help because even then Mara recoiled from the unseen blows that life rained upon her.  A few years later, Jade and her husband decided on adoption and, through an agency, found two young sisters living in the Soviet Union who needed a home. Jade invested her heart, along with thousands of dollars, into the girls and the process only to find out that she was considered unsuitable, by the Soviet adoption agency, because of her history of cancer, even though it was more than five years behind her.  They shifted their search to the U.S. and fell in love with a two-year-old girl whose mother had given up her parental rights and began the process, all over again. They seemed to be well on their way to a successful adoption, taking the requisite parenting courses, having their home inspected, their lives looked into, only to find that they missed the deadline and another couple took the child.

Her husband continued to get parts in community theaters, impressing everyone with his talent and apparent honesty.  None of the parts paid but that was okay because she was making a good six figures now and just wanted him to become happy and to stay with her.

Jade had so much love to give and was filled with caring, so she and her husband did the best they could with each other.  She loved being seen with him and loved being on his arm.  He was tall and dark, a little heavy but not fat, kind of brooding.  They never travelled, never vacationed, other than a few days at his family home or Sam’s cottage.  His distance became greater and she needed something more so they decided on a pet, tried a guinea pig and a cat but she was allergic to both so they settled on Papillions, two of them, and the only thing her husband ever said, “No!” to her about, in twenty years, was when she tried to name one of them a name he couldn’t stand.

“It might have worked if we’d only learned to argue and fight instead of compromising on everything in an effort to get along,” Jade told Walter, later, when she and her husband were still married but living states apart.

They gave the Paps good names and called them by many.  It might have drawn another wedge between Jade and her husband, when he found traces of their feces on the carpet and called it, “Pap smears.”  When she finally drove her husband away for his sins, the two furry Monsters were all she had left.

“She used to return the rage back to our parents,” Mara said, about Jade, talking to Walter. “Once, in high school, she overdosed on aspirin and her boyfriend and I drove around trying to find her.  It took forever but we found her and took her to the hospital.  Our parents never found out.”

Jade was approaching that age when she would no longer get wet and though she didn’t fully understand what the changes would bring, some part of her mourned the loss for the things she had given to her ideals.  She thought of herself as a good person, and she was, and she would never be with another man while married and, once separated from her husband, she couldn’t think of dating.

“Do you think you guys can get back together?” asked Mara.

There was a long silence.

“No.  I don’t think so,” Jade answered and Mara could hear the sadness in her.

“You’ll find someone new,” Mara assured her.

“No one would want me,” Jade responded with complete certainty.

Chapter 5 – Sam

 

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Maya Angelou

At the point in his life when he met Mara and her siblings, Walter had yet to integrate his ways of perceiving and the result was that it gave him unusual sensitivities but also created great weakness and contributed to his suffering. When Walter first met Sam, he could see beyond the form and the behavior that life had, so far, given him and he saw Sam’s goodness. What Sam saw, in Walter, is hard to know. That first meeting, Sam was following behind his mother, pacing the floor inside the family home with the heat turned down low, the rooms gray, appearing dark and muddy from the windows being covered with plastic and the curtains drawn shut, mother and son both wearing winter coats and stalking caps pulled over their ears to preserve body heat as well as money. In the background, there was an old color television set, turned on but quiet, and the picture was faded so badly that it might as well have been a black and white contraption. Their mother was slightly bent over, suffered from poor knees and bad leg veins, as well as suffering from life. She had a habit of repeating everything she said so that she said it twice, and her son followed in suit so that the recipient got it three times.

Sam was the youngest child, and a boy, and those two things brought with them certain advantages and disadvantages. He took the brunt of the verbal abuse, perhaps because he wasn’t the sexual object of his father’s secret desires and, thus, was treated with no ambivalence, just clear-cut disdain. Even as a baby, Sam took immediately to silence and, as he grew, people outside the family viewed him as weird. People outside the family with some education and a greater vocabulary, thought that, maybe, he was afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome. He mostly suffered behind that silence and that suffering became more acute when Jade joined the family and she and Mara drew close to each other; the understandable result of sharing a bedroom, being girls and near each other in age. As the girls grew close, the distance Sam felt, from people and life, grew greater. To Sam, it might have felt as if Mara had forgotten him but she never did and would become even more of an ally, whether he knew it or not, after Jade graduated from school and left the home.

Sam became a good tennis player but had to endure the public criticism and humiliation that his father rained down upon him whenever he lost a match. He did well with his grades but never had male friends, let alone female friends. In childhood pictures, you could see Sam hanging in the background, a look of sadness mixed with anticipation on his face, his sisters with their few friends, smiling and playing in front of him. Strong as a boy, he grew to be strong as a man, though slimly built and carrying a potbelly from his robust consumption of regular Pepsi and other soda. He walked with his body in a curve, of sorts, his left shoulder held a little forward of his right, his left arm partially extended, the left hand curled, kind of like a claw, and centered in front of his belly as if defending himself from incoming blows. The hair on his head was in frequent disarray and he had a noticeable gap between his upper front teeth, not unlike Ernest Borgnine, but he came across more like the character Dexter Morgan on the Showtime series. His fashion sense seemed to trend towards browns and oranges, sometimes pinks and greens, and he was seemingly oblivious to the judgment and opinions of others.

“He’s way ahead of me,” thought Walter, after he’d known him for a spell.

When their father finally abandoned them, Sam stared in the role that would be his for the next twenty years; that of surrogate spouse to his mother. The sisters grew. Jade left home as soon as she could. Mara left, came back, then left again but Sam stayed by his mother’s side until her death. Each working day, their mother would make Sam’s breakfast and, while he ate, she’d pack his lunch. Each evening, upon his return, they’d take their supper together and discuss their days.

Sam learned how to keep his mind off of the thoughts that could cause him trouble by making lists; if something was on the list, it took a certain priority and, also, took Sam’s thoughts. Sam’s thoughts went from the list to the task and then back, again, to the list.

“How’re things going?” Walter would, sometimes, ask.

Sam would reply in his halting speech pattern, “I’m not getting my projects done,” meaning his lists.

When Walter met Sam, it wasn’t long until he learned that he had to find a spot on one of his lists if he wanted to have a conversation with him that would last more than a few minutes. Sam kept a table in the hall between the living room and the kitchen and, on that hall table, he kept up to a half-dozen lists arranged side-by-side. It wasn’t uncommon for the same task to be on more than one list at the same time but rather than serving as a duplication of the commitment, it seemed more to serve as amplification. It was unusual for Sam to smile or laugh but on one occasion when Walter asked him about his progress and he went to the table and ran down the lists and noticed, seemingly for the first time, that the same task was listed more than once, he broke into a large smile, as if he’d been caught in a private joke that even he found humorous.

Sam and his mother, and to some extent the girls, took on a kind of gypsy behavior, gaining skill at minor shoplifting, and becoming expert at negotiating down the price of home improvements and car repairs by outright wearing down the opposition.

At Sam’s, if you wanted a straw to drink from, you could choose from twenty-five or thirty with Wendy’s wrappers standing in a plastic cup on a shelf. Hot sauce, for your taco or burrito, was conveniently stored in Taco Bell packets offering three varieties of spiciness; several hundred packets kept in a Tupperware bowel in the pantry. Need a new liner for a trashcan? Pick from the several hundred plastic shopping bags that were liberated at the self-checkout line the day before.

“I got this nice wallet for free. I put it on the cash register belt at the store but the clerk forgot to ring it up,” said Sam, “I didn’t notice until I got home and looked at the receipt. I thought the bill was a little light.”

He was expert at retaining receipts and returning items just before the expiration of the store’s return policy, frequently coming out of the store with a duplicate of the returned product along with the original. It was puzzling, just how frequently large items would be left on the lowest rack of the shopping cart and failed to be rung up. Walter didn’t care enough to ask how all of the schemes worked but he did shake his head in frequent amusement.

Through high school and college, Sam never had a girlfriend. His sexuality surfaced once, when his mother busted him for looking at porn over the Internet. That time, Mara came to his defense, reinforcing to him that his urges were only natural. In his mid-twenties, he enlisted Mara’s help in setting up a Match.com account, focusing almost exclusively on blond, Barbie doll types but the first dates didn’t go too well and he never had a second.

He loved animals but, with his allergies, he never shared his home with a pet. For a while he was a frequent visitor at Mara’s house, stopping by to see the cats and asking the whereabouts of any furry critter that he couldn’t find. When Mara and Walter took their trips, Sam would offer to drop in and take care of the cats, giving them food and water, petting them and cleaning their litter pans. When a feral cat was found in his back yard one winter, he built it a shelter made from a large appliance cardboard box and filled with blankets to keep it warm and protected from the snow and ice. He’d check the box every morning, to see if the wild cat had visited.

He also shared his mother’s love of plants and birds and kept cut flowers on the dining room table and seed in the feeders.

What Sam really became good at was being frugal. He seldom ate out and, if he did, he’d only order appetizers or what he could purchase with a coupon or on special. He saved money by seldom bathing, rarely used deodorant, and wasn’t fond of visiting doctors or dentists. Those times when he visited Jade at her home, or when Jade would come to his lake cottage, there would be the usual conversations.

“Sam, you need a shower. Go do it,” she’d command.

He’d stare for a minute, and then obey.

“Sam, let’s go shopping. You need some new clothes,” she’d suggest.

He seemed pleased, by that.

By the age when most men are just getting started, having spent their money on foolish things like flashy cars, trips, parties and women, Sam had inherited the paid-off family home and had paid-off the lake cottage and both his new car and truck. In addition to his frugality, Sam became an expert at working the system, any system, and shaved every dime every time. He walked a fine line at the edge of the law, didn’t fit into society, and made his money in a way that’s common but not spoken of.

Walter, “What do you do for a living?”

Sam, “I’m kind of in the trades.”

“Carpenter?” asked Walter.

“No,” replied Sam, “I’m more like the second or third middleman.”

What he went on to explain was that he worked as a consultant, so to speak, for general contractors who would come to him to get bids on projects they were working on so that they could force the right price. For instance, a homeowner would need a new roof that, reasonably, might cost ten thousand dollars. Sam would round up three contractors and have them make preset bids, per the general contractor, which would inflate the price of the project but make things appear, to the homeowner, that an intelligent process had been followed and a fair price received. The project might end up costing twice what was reasonable and the general contractor would receive a kickback, and Sam would get his cut, and the losing subcontractors would know that they’d be brought in on future projects and make more money than they could by placing legal bids on their own.

“In a way, it’s like I’m the government,” Sam explained.

During the years that Walter and Mara were together, they usually included Sam in their plans, asking him to dinner or a garden tour, offering him the opportunity to travel to the Caribbean with them. Sam would spend days researching islands and countries, becoming expert in the details, but never seemed able to get the vacation time to go away.

Walter tried to help Sam out with projects, around his house or cottage, as often as he could but Sam often ended up deconstructing whatever Walter had constructed and then rebuilding to his own specifications once he had learned the method by watching Walter work.

There was a period of time, in the first year that Walter knew them, during which Sam looked and acted as if he was ready to explode. Uncomfortable and scared, their mother had threatened to find an apartment and move out. Mara was afraid that Sam would either kill their mother or kill himself.

“Did Sam ever own a gun,” Walter asked Mara, one day.

“Only a BB gun,” she said, and then, “Why?”

“Oh, just wondering,” he had answered. It was during the stressful time in Sam and his Mother’s arrangement.

Once, when Sam was dropping Mara and Walter off at the airport, the traffic cop pissed Sam off and he accelerated his car and almost ran the man over before Walter pulled the wheel, turning the car just in time. The cop had his back to them and never knew how close he came to being flattened. Once, late at night at the cottage, there was a knock at the door and the police were there, having received a report that someone fitting Sam’s description and driving a similar blue truck had caused some damage at a local supermarket in response to the store not having a product he wanted.

“It was all a misunderstanding, my word against hers,” he had said, smiling after the cops left.

Relief finally came, as it often does, with the death of their mother. The lid that had kept the steam from being let off was lifted and Sam began to flourish, in his way, and appeared to be a happier person. He fell in love, telling Mara and Walter where he and his love were in their relationship.

“We’re at Level 3,” he said one day.

“Have you slept with her?” Walter asked.

“That’s Level 6,” said Sam, shaking his head no.

Mara, Walter, and Sam were at the cottage one day. Sam had been down at the shoreline, working as usual, raking free reeds from the water. Mara and Walter had been on the balcony, talking as usual. When evening rolled around, the three met at the grill.

“What do you guys talk about?” Sam asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You two always seem to be able to talk. We run out of things to say and then it just gets quiet,” he said.

“Just talk naturally.”

“Give me some ideas. I’ll make a list and practice,” he had said.

As Mara and Walter prepared for their winter in Mexico, Sam had asked if Mara wouldn’t mind if his girlfriend moved into Mara’s home while she was gone.

“No way,” was his sister’s response.

That option being closed, Sam abandoned most of his old life and sunk both his time and his money into remodeling the family home, preparing it for his new life.

He told Walter, “She’s the one.”

“Must be at Level 6,” thought Walter.

And, indeed, they were and Mara was happy for him, the child whom was most abused.

Three months before his girlfriend’s lease was up, Sam constructed a budget for her, reviewed it with her, and asked her to move into his home. She declined but promised that she would when the lease was up, and she did. Once there, she never left and their family home became her home, her pride and joy. They began hosting parties, inviting her family and friends and moving on from the life, and the family, that Sam had come from.

As Sam’s and his girl’s comfort grew, they no longer searched for what to say, him teasing her about her weight and she telling him what he could do to make her happy, short of stopping the teasing. Each working day, his lover would make Sam’s breakfast and, while he ate, she’d pack his lunch. Each evening, upon his return, they’d take their supper together and discuss their days. He continued adding projects to his lists and she would change those projects, altering the makeup of the yard of her home from natural rocks, trees, perennials and annuals, to grass, cement retaining walls and poured concrete patios. Her mind saw completed projects and relaxation. Little did she know that Sam’s projects never ended, his subconscious knowing that he didn’t want to face that which Mara was facing. He needed the distractions.

Over the course of the time that Walter knew him, Sam became a drinking man, choosing pricey bottles of wine and good liquor as his favorites. Perhaps it was the influence of his lover or, perhaps, he was in transition.

One day, Sam witnessed an abnormally difficult afternoon with Mara, and he had pulled Walter aside to talk.

“I can’t be around her when she drinks,” Sam said to Walter, referring to Mara, “Besides, she only needs me when she’s in a crisis.”

Sam stopped talking to Mara. He stopped dropping by to see the cats. He never had time to talk to her on the phone.

He had his life to live, and rightly so.

The two times that Mara consented to go into rehab, both over holiday weeks, Walter had taken her, making certain that Sam had known but Sam had neither visited her nor inquired after her, perhaps afraid that in doing either, he might come one step closer to something that he didn’t want to see.

“He never talks to me anymore,” Mara said, feeling sad.

“I know,” Walter agreed.

“Is he happy?” she asked.

“I was over there, helping him move some furniture, and they got into a disagreement about where a piece should go,” he told her, “he wanted the chair positioned so that you could look out of the window and she didn’t. She wouldn’t change her mind and he stood right where he was but starting turning in circles, like a dog chasing it’s tail, making two or three turns, his mouth opening like he wanted to say something but no words coming out, and then we put the chair where she wanted it.”

The last time Walter and I talked, he told me that when he was leaving town, he was in a taxi on his way to the airport and they pulled up along Sam at a stoplight. Sam was trying to pull a short hair out of the backside of his earlobe, using his thumb and middle finger, and was having no success, unaware that he was being watched, as if he was invisible within the protective cover of his car.

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Chapter 3 – Walter

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night. Edgar Allan Poe

He walked quickly from his car through the garage, the breezeway, the hall, the kitchen, and with most haste, through the next hall and into his room carrying his load. As he passed through the beaded curtain hanging in the doorframe, the combination of his fear, distraction, and too many things in his arms caused him to drop his umbrella onto the hall floor just outside his door and resulted in an elevation of his anxiety up one more notch. He lowered the balance of his load onto the desk facing the window, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled to the edge of the room, just inside the door and around the wall so that he couldn’t actually see to the left down the hall, nor could he actually see the fallen umbrella that he was trying to retrieve but most importantly, he couldn’t, yet, be seen by anything or anyone whom might be coming out of one of the other rooms down the hall. A trickle of sweat, a dust of perspiration appeared across his face, neck, and forearms. Stretching, straining, he reached his hand into the hall, felt around the carpet, touched something hard yet soft, hooked it with his fingers, and pulled it, as quietly but as quickly as he could, into his room, his level of anxiety nearing the “freak out” point. With great relief, he realized that he’d retrieved the umbrella. He gave it a quick look-over, unsnapped the strap that held it wrapped shut, made certain nothing was stuck to it or had slithered into it, nothing hidden in the folds, nothing attached, then snapped it back and hung it on a hook in the closet.

“The window…is there something at the window? Is there something looking in?” He heard the hiss before It came.

“It’s the wind,” was his first thought. His second thought was, “That’s not the wind.”

By then it was too late to avoid some damage but there was still enough time to survive. That’s what he thought. He started running, out of the house and down the driveway to the street. The one he was worried about rode by on a bicycle. He reached forward, running, to grab the guy on the bike. The move required him to lean forward and stretch out in length. The guy on the bike leaned back and, with one hand, slit his throat from below his Adam’s apple up to his chin. Walter had woken up from the dream, not totally covered in sweat but close. He had felt relieved, given a bit of a laugh and had shaken his head.

“What the hell?” he thought.

He was up at 1:54 a.m. Sunday, and used the upstairs bathroom to piss, sitting that time, and had looked out the window and up at the roof of the garage. There was something on top, sitting there, bigger than a cat, bigger than a raccoon, staring down at him.

“Another dream?” asked his mind.

He had been too tired to go outside and clarify what he had seen and so he just went back to bed, sleeping and unaware of any more dreams or things watching him, until 6:30 a.m. when his alarm went off. It was a day when Walter had agreed to meet me at the East River City High School track for speed work and we were on for 7:30, which would give us enough time to get our laps in before the football players, cross country runners, or any other students needed to use the track. He ground the Midnight Sun dark roast coffee beans and started them brewing before dropping into Mara’s basement for his usual routine, rising back up fifteen minutes later to pour a mug and grab a small bowl of Stoneyfield Organic Plain Nonfat Yogurt with some blueberries and walnut pieces. We liked to do our speed work early and on nearly empty stomachs and he had found that this combination kept him comfortable. It was raining outside, as it had been for several days, but we kept to our schedule through most kinds of weather. Walter had suffered some spinal damage during the years he spent doing the things that he only barely spoke of. Some things he never spoke of, now I’m sure. Anyway, that nerve damage had caused him to lose the dorsal reflex that impacted his right foot and also paralyzed the big toe on that foot. As a consequence, he was never able to wear barefoot shoes, and when going barefoot he always risked the possibility of stubbing that toe, potentially breaking it but at minimum tearing the skin and toenail badly. What he liked to do, was wear his near-barefoot shoes when doing the fast running, so he usually came to the track wearing his Birks and then switching into his Nikes or New Balance, saving his Saucony shoes for actual racing. He was living about ten minutes from the track so he beat me there and was waiting when I arrived.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Hey,” he responded, with a little head lift.

“Let me get loosened up,” I said. “Are you already set?”

He just nodded in the affirmative. I did some active stretching, swinging on one leg and then the other, doing some standing trunk twists and arm rotations followed by twenty-five jumping jacks and a few deep knee bends.

“All set.”

We jogged together, a relaxed four-forty, splashing water as we went along, just to get our blood flowing and then started the stopwatch. From there on, we ran four cycles of a two-twenty flat out, followed by a two-twenty jog, and then switched it up to six cycles of a four-forty flat out, split with a four-forty at a jogging pace. We were soaked to the bone by then.

“You want to do a timed mile?” he asked me.

“I’m not sure that I feel up to it,” I answered.

“How about a mile at an 8 1/2 minute pace?” he wouldn’t give up.

“Someday, you’ll roll that foot over and break your ankle,” I said, giving in.

When we were done, I was exhausted; I don’t know about him. We gave each other a fist bump and he started doing some static stretching in the rain.

“Hills Monday?” he asked.

“Can’t wait,” I said, walking to my car.

That noon, Walter was sitting in Snout & Belly, the hotdog place in East Town where he’d ordered a Tofutti dog, “No Snouts, No Bellies, No Hooves”, and was just finishing his meal. He tried to not eat anything that had once had a face, especially if it was a face he might have known. He had taken his raincoat and hat off and was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and had his elbows on the table with his hands raised to his mouth, holding his food. If someone were close enough to look, they would have seen several thick, short scars across the and backs of both of his hands and one or two lining the skin near his right elbow. His forearms were turned out so that anyone, who wanted to, could see the Nietzsche tattoos that said, “What doesn’t kill you (moving to the left) makes you stronger.” It wasn’t that he wanted anyone to see what was written in his skin, he just didn’t care. To anyone who might have known of Walter’s past, it would have been apparent that the few days he had spent in Vietnam, Bosnia and the Persian Gulf hadn’t killed him yet, but they could also tell from looking at him that the strength of his youth was pretty much gone, although a hard core remained. It was anyone’s guess as to whether he’d tip to the right forearm or the left. “We will all, eventually, tip to the right,” he had told me one day.

In the diner, the television was on above the service counter, and a local news report came on, mentioning The River and catching Walter’s attention. “A week from Friday will be the inaugural ceremony of the new garage for The River. U.S. Secretary of Transportation James Hartwell will be cutting the ribbon and formally opening the structure. Local officials hope to inspire an additional $25,000,000 in federal grants following a closed-door presentation scheduled to take place after the ceremony. The public is welcome to attend the ribbon cutting and can gain access at the main entrance on Jacobs Street, in downtown River City, at 11 a.m.,” announced the reporter. Walter knew that he’d be out of the garage, driving his regular route at that time on that day.

Walter’s mobile phone vibrated in his pocket and he reached for it.

It was Mara calling. “Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m just finishing lunch. You remember, right?”

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot,” came her voice.

It seemed that she was forgetting more often. He didn’t know if it was the medication and the booze but he knew that the combination messed with the wiring in her head. It could be that she just had other things on her mind; he didn’t really know what went on in there and she didn’t shed much light on it. Sometimes she would seem to not be paying attention at all, not responding to participating in their conversation and then, weeks or months later, she’d quote something he had said or reference the conversation in some other way.

“They are all different,” he thought, thinking of the women. He had sat there, in the restaurant, surrounded by women, looking at every one of them without consciously thinking about it, filtering out the ones he could imagine himself sucking on or them sucking on him. Tummies, some just little pooches sticking out in the front, probably having their period, others wrapping around the sides and back; nice figures, nice shapes with tummies, cute little butts.

When Walter met Mara, his third wife had just left him. They had been married for about nine years. Her previous husband, and the father of her children, was a good looking private detective who both packed a gun and was still in love with her but he was also a man who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and she’d grown tired of his indiscretions and had left him after the kids graduated from high school. They’d lived about a mile apart and remained occasional lovers until she met Walter. When she and Walter married, her ex called their home crying, professing his love and threatening to kill Walter. Of course he didn’t truly understand who Walter was. When Walter heard the threat, he just smiled.

Sometimes Walter felt that he was a little slow and it was years into it that he realized that she wasn’t happy the day he tried to make love to her and she hopped out of bed and said, “Why would I ever want to make love with someone like you?”

They tried marriage counseling.

Walter said, to the therapist, “I know she loves me.”

The therapist said, “Let’s find out” and, turning to his wife, asked, “Do you love Walter?”

“He’s a good man,” was her response.

“But do you love him?”

“A lot of things would have to change for me to say that.”

“So, you don’t love him?”

“I wouldn’t marry him again.”

She came home one day and gave notice that she had to leave the state, go south, to take care of her parents for a couple of months and suggested that Walter come down for Christmas.

For Christmas, she spent the days with her ex-husband and their kids and said, over the phone, to Walter, “Why don’t you come down for New Years?”

Walter’s response was, “Why don’t we get a divorce?”

To which she replied, “I never thought of that.”

With KK in the passenger seat, he drove the Tahoe into the parking lot, looking for the best place to park to give her a good field of vision, knowing that after he parked and went inside, he’d come out and she’d be gone forever.

They were divorced ten months later, with everything being done over the Internet and through the mail. She came home while Walter was out of town, and took all of the things she wanted from their house. The financial settlement and Walter’s fucked up value system pushed him into bankruptcy but, and I’m just guessing here, it also created the crack in his time based Dreamstate that allowed him to hear the Call.

The more we talked, the more it became clear that Walter knew that he saw everything through smoky glasses, that his whole world, or his perception of the world, was shaded by the pain in his experience and, even with all the things he’d seen and done, his greatest pain seemed to be connected to the women in his life.

His awareness came back to the diner and the television. The reporter was saying, “Record breaking rains with flooding continued across Michigan on Sunday, forcing evacuations and claiming the lives of ten people who drove off washed out roads and were swept away by swollen rivers. In western Michigan, residents around the Lazy River were being warned of possible evacuation. The flooding impacted at least one-third of the community around the Valley. Damage estimates were still being calculated. The cost of repairing public roads and facilities alone is reaching $100 million.”

He gathered up the plastic utensils, paper plate, napkin and foam cup he’d used and carried them over to the trashcan and dropped them in. He was feeling his belly as he went back for his coat and hat, and was aware of his body, his arms and legs beneath his clothes.

“I’m getting hard yet fat at the same time. It must be from running, doing pushups, and practicing yoga, all while eating donuts,” he thought, resolving to cut back on the pastries.

He left the diner, walked steadily through the rain to his car, got in and drove home to Mara’s.

When he got inside, he hit the head and looked in the mirror as he washed his hands, unspoken words floating up from the bed of his mind, “I look better than I am, and I’m not looking too good,” it was becoming his mantra, and then, as if he had no control over his thoughts, “A form, a wrapper, a machine, a tool, a shell, a carrier, a vessel, a cover, a mask, a transporter, a distraction, a deception, a feint, a glove, a decoy, a body, not an illusion because it’s real but misperceived or misunderstood. This is me, breathing. What is this Me? What am I?”

Later that day, Walter had driven Mara to the mall where she wanted to buy some fabric to make a throw for Jade. She had gone into Joann Fabrics and he had decided to sit on a bench inside the mall but not within the store and wait for her to finish her shopping. Walter wanted to tell me what had happened to him that day but he wanted to preface his story with another, so that I might better understand. I think what he really needed was a framework to put things into context so that he could better understand what he had experienced. I imagine it was even more difficult, for him, to try to explain it. I also think that he was beginning to suspect that I thought he was going crazy.

“I knew this guy,” he said, “who was an all-state athlete in high school before he went into the military. In the service, he excelled at everything he did; he took all of the schools that were offered, just to become a better soldier. In addition to the physical training they gave him, he took martial arts lessons off base, studied combat theory, and talked to every combat veteran he could. You could have asked anyone who knew him and they would have told you that he was a world-class soldier, clearly better than the rest.”

He paused for a moment.

We were running on the Kent Trails and a faster group was passing us by.

“He was with a group that took the airfield in Panama City when we went in for Noriega. He was with his squad, so there were eleven other guys with him. They had just taken a position behind a metal airplane hangar, when someone opened up on them with automatic fire. One bullet, just one, ricocheted off of the hangar and killed him. The shooter wasn’t even aiming at him; he was just spraying bullets in his direction. He never even had the chance to fire his own weapon in combat. Out of the 150 or so guys in his company, he was clearly the best and, yet, he was the only one killed that day,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“There’s a lot of randomness in life,” he said, making his point.

“I hear you,” I said.

“So, I was sitting in the mall, waiting for Mara,” he continued, “and I saw something.”

I just waited.

“You’ll probably laugh, or you won’t understand,” he talked on, “but I saw the Void and it scared the shit out of me.”

I just listened, not really knowing what the fuck he was talking about. “I can’t explain it but it was the Infinite Nothing, a depth that was frightening. It only lasted for a few seconds. It was like looking at a gathering of sand covering a piece of glass or a mirror, and then the sand pulled back and I saw what was hidden; there was nothing looking back at me.”

“So what’s that got to do with the guy who got killed in Panama?” I asked.

“This stuff just happens. We don’t know when it’s coming or who’s going to receive it,” he said, “no matter how much we prepare or anticipate.”

“I get that,” I agreed, “but I’ll have to think about what you saw.”

We kept running, staying pretty quiet for the next hour.

In time I finally came to understand what Walter was doing, without him having to tell me. In the words of Joseph Campbell, he was trying to disentangle himself as kindly and carefully as possible from the commitments he’d made while asleep; there were others depending upon his role in their dream, maybe I was one of them, and his intention was not to cause chaos or shake the boat but rather to get out as quietly as possible even if it took him a little longer than he’d like

The Homeward Migration of Souls…on Pickeral Lake

Preview

My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.

Clarence B. Kelland

Without moving his head he could see, an arm’s length or so out in the water, a lavender blouse, a bra pulled back, and a young woman’s wet breast revealed.

The nipple looked healthy and erect and the skin was pale but firm and under it he could see her thin, blue veins and he thought, “How perfect”.

The sun had not yet set. The sky was still light but a dirty brown color, not yet blackened by night, and the lightning that had flashed so vividly just before the bridge and the brakes had given out was no longer present. The rain was just starting to get heavy again, coming down with such force that it seemed each drop was a liquid rock and he could hear the next stoning as it advanced towards him, coming in across the river.

“Rain…pain,” thought Walter.

The pain came in waves each time the wind made a pass, bringing with it leaves and small branches out of the Peachleaf Willow trees and moisture off of the river, making visibility that much more difficult.  He could hear the Gods still bowling in the heavens but their rumble was low.   In the moment it took for him to realize that he was both alive and not dreaming, he knew two things:  The way the neck above the breast was twisted and bent was not so perfect, and he could make the choice to not come back from whatever just had happened.

There was a dull ache in his head but it was as if he was detached from the pain somehow, watching. He was lying in the cold, muddy water of the river but enough of his left arm, shoulder, and head were up the bank so that he could breathe mostly air.  The peculiar thing about his arm and shoulder, though, was that while he knew they were there and could kind of see their outline, there wasn’t a clear separation between them and the earth, as if they were all just one piece of something with slightly different variations in color and texture. Rising out of the watery mud, at about the spot where he knew his wrist must be, he could see about half of the black skulls and precious stones of the bracelet Mara had given him to remind him of his death and its place in his life.

Behind him, now and then through the wind and rain, he could hear screams and shouts and the sounds of more pain mixed with fear.  He was about to shout for help himself, just as a reflex, but then part of him knew he probably wouldn’t be heard and he wasn’t even sure he could shout so he kept quiet.  What he didn’t know was that the last thing he needed, at that moment, was to be heard.  His head was turned with the wind, away from the sounds and whatever was flashing. Strangely, in the rain and dampness he could feel heat.

“Move,” he thought.

He had to see if he could move.  He brought his elbows in tight to his body and forced his heart center up and, with a sucking sound coming from the muck, pulled his body out of the water and moved a few feet up the river bank and rested, mostly out of the river’s current now.  Another serving of gravel from the sky hit him.

“Give me a break,” he thought, and took a breath, then struggled and pushed himself higher up the edge of the river.

When he was fully out of the river, he rolled over on his back and looked towards the place where the bridge had been.  With this movement, he became much more aware of the separation of his body parts from the surrounding earth. Through the increasing darkness, the wind and the rain, he could see the emergency vehicles, with their lights flashing, and rescuers, now with flashlights, walking around the wreck and along the river, looking for survivors or bodies.

There were others, amid the emergency responders, searching but with a different purpose.  What was left of Gypsy looked like she was smashed against the wrecked structure of the bridge, and a fire in and around her was just dying out.

Walter’s head was aching and his vision was coming and going and he had the sense that he was in that Modey Lemon song Ants In My Hands – “Well I feel a little tingle in the top of my finger on my right hand and I see a little something crawling up the length of my wrist.  I feel a little out of focus on the side of the road and I think I might crash…”

Looking once more at Gypsy, with a mixture of sadness and gratitude he thought, “Whatever killed her almost killed me.”

Nothing seemed to be improving, as far as the weather and his progress, and most of the flashlights started moving away.  He couldn’t tell if he was bleeding or not, what with being soaked from the rain and the river but he didn’t sense that any of his limbs were broken and they all seemed to work.

The color of the sky seemed to transition from the dirty brown color it was to a golden color and that flash of light he’d been seeing passed by again.

He wiped the mud out of his left eye and started to lift himself up with the thought of walking towards the road and the people when the wind noticeably changed both in feel and direction.   He could tell that it was still blowing, but around him now rather than into him, as if he was in a shelter, and while the rain continued, it stopped dropping where he stood and, behind him, he heard a sound like a million voices saying, “Here,” and when he looked back into the shadow above and beyond, he saw, half crouched behind a sumac, the one-eyed red-haired crazy looking woman who’s image he had seen reflected in the windshield of the bus.  She had a wise and knowing smile on her face and a scary look in her eye.  That eye appeared to be looking directly at him, ignoring the chaos in the space beyond him, and seemed to be totally indifferent to the tragedy.  She gave a little laugh, more like a snort or whinny, tilted her head and raised her arm in an invitation to follow, showing a full patch of hair from under it, turned on her heel, her gauze dress spinning out around her, and off she went at a remarkable pace up the muddy slope in her sweet grass sandals.

There was a flash of lightning and, in that instant of light, all in one glance he saw a woodchuck sitting on its haunches in the mud looking at him, several Chipping Sparrows perched in the branches above facing down and staring in his direction, and a Painted Turtle as it moved its mouth, nodded its head up and down, then turned and disappeared into the river, moving strongly with the current.

There was another flash and then it was as if all of the creatures he thought he’d just seen were gone and in their place he saw someone’s brown book-bag wedged into the mud, a shoe and scraps of clothing hanging in the branches, and his green and orange-striped timbuc2 driver’s bag, its shoulder strap hooked to something under the water, bobbing up and down as if it were swimming along with the current.

“What the hell!” he thought as he laid there, just thinking, trying to clear his head and make sense of it all, when he saw something punch a hole in the earth just a few inches from his head.

He didn’t, actually, see the something, just the hole. A second later there was another and then, closer, another.  At first he thought, “Hail” but then his gut, not his mind, realized he’d seen this before.  It was coming from behind him, back towards the road and the bridge, and with the storm, its wind and thunder, and the rushing of the river and his general disorientation, he hadn’t heard the sound, but his body knew that someone, for some reason, was shooting at him.

That’s when he decided that the one-eyed woman was looking pretty good.

– And On –


Commercial Break

I think I should continue the story as it does turn out to be quite interesting, but…

the challenge for me is that all of this is just a story and, in a sense, none of it matters.  True, it can be entertaining, and also true, I do now and have for a long period of time felt drawn to the telling of this story, but…

I’ve heard it said, at least a hundred times, possibly a thousand times, possibly more, that to awaken to one’s true self it’s beneficial, possibly necessary, to die before you die. Adya, I think, also says that we all awaken, that none of us make it out of here without confronting our true self.  I think what he means by that is that when the Body dies, the Mind dies, thus the Ego dies, and we’re back to where we started just as we turn to dust.  But (again) that event can be predicted to be so short and, to me, it even suggests that one might not be aware or conscious enough to understand what is happening.  As T.S. Elliot said, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”  I guess I don’t want to miss the meaning.

I’m slow.  It took me up until this week to really understand this die before you die stuff.  I was visualizing this occurrence with a strong sense of the Body, and I suppose the Self, dying, and maybe it’s the same thing as the Ego dying but what I really believe, now, is that it is the Ego.  Again, I’m slow.  The Ego is a creation made up of : Bias’s; preferences, opinions, experiences, beliefs, desires, etc., for the purpose of distraction and experience.  It’s layered upon the Essence. It’s the Costume.  It’s the conditioning.  And, like Jed says, none of it’s true in an absolute sense, only in a relative sense.  It’s all false.  So, you scrape it away and get back to the preconditioned state.  I was thinking aloud that then I could rebuild according to my own desires instead of those of my parents and society but, is that possible?  And Judith said, “Don’t rebuild.”

Onward

The man we were, more or less, loosely traveling with told us about the purple and gold temple hidden in the sycamore forest where we came to find the benevolent Reverend 2-2 who gave us advice on staying hidden and safe as well as shelter for a few nights.  Access to the narrow space he tucked us in was through what could only be explained as an unintended gap in the structure, this gap evidently having been created by termites so that it was uniquely shaped, like the opening to a womb, and delicate or soft at the edges from the unfinished work of their mouths.  There were five of us remaining, at this point, and the first one through the passage, either coming or going, had to clear the spider webs that grew as thick as cotton candy in the hours or moments between our movements.  The tricky part of this not small task, as we had no tools or gloves, was to move the proteinaceous coppe matter without agitating its creators, since the ones we could see were not only large and fast, but appeared to be deadly as evidenced by the remaining wasting husks of things caught and gone before us. As far as we could tell, no one came by to look for us during our brief stay but, if they did and we didn’t see them, it was the awful and inhospitable condition of our dwelling that kept them from finding us; no human in their right mind would have bedded down in there.   For the darkness, the webs, and the smell we were thankful.

The Reverend appeared to live alone for if he had a staff or community in support of his efforts we never noticed their presence.  In addition to shelter and advice, he gave food and beverage and allowed us the time to rest and heal before moving on.  He never asked where we came from or where we were headed or what our purpose was but he knew that we lived in danger and it was understood that he knew the man who sent us to him.  It was in the very early hours of the third morning that we parted from the temple and now, much later, his kindness remains as a faint memory of what might have only been imagined were it not for the threads of silver silk impossibly clinging to our hair and clothing.

As I said, there were only five of us left, at this point.  We’d lost The Q to her own, separate path.  In the course of the journey, she’d pealed off her human attachments and was now left to herself to bear the full weight of her ordeal.  This pealing wasn’t something that she was conscious of intending; it was her innate wisdom that caused the severing.  She had things to attend to that couldn’t be helped by staying with us.

Within a few days, the route we were on brought us to a steep road traveling up through some houses on the outskirts of a town.  I was in the lead and the terrain was so steep that I found it easiest to lean forward and use my hands, in addition to my feet, to move me up the hill.   This angle brought my head and face to within a couple of feet of the earth and, as I rounded a turn where my vision had been obstructed by some plants and stones, I came face to face with two snarling canines who shared more in common with snakes than dogs; they were racing downhill straight for me, scattering stones and dirt before them with their claws, black and red forked tongues pulsing in and out, splattering spit from those tongues and snot from their nostrils, fur stiff and hard like scales but, at the same time, oily and heated like a rack where meat had been cooked and the juices had dripped and remained too long.