It wasn’t a pissing contest, but we all saw it as one.  From our perspective, it was a contest to see who had the craziest past.  All of us were supposedly crazy—we’d each heard a background story at some point—Manuel had done something real bad, twice, Bee Bop was a coke-head turned meth-head turned ritalin-head turned adderall-head turned got-caught-offering-to-blow-a-cop-for-anything-head, with three strikes on his record, Carl with a C was a skinny, silent guy—well past his prime—and none of us had ever heard a story about him, but this lack of a story told a story, and Old D, well, Old D owned Barney’s, and it was the only place for people like us.  Guys on the lam.

This shack is called Barney’s.  There are no signs calling it that, it’s just a name that gets passed down in the system.  You first hear about it in the county cell.  Then you start to hear a lot more about it as the trial date gets closer.  And since all criminals are obviously innocent, we all learn and accept that it’s the place for anyone to seek if the law says they’re guilty of a crime, but they know that they’re not guilty of the spirit-of-the-law—and the spirit of the law is, of course, open to much interpretation.

Anyway, most guys shrug off Barney’s as a myth, or as an urban legend, but I’m writing this on paper, here, which is to say, I’m “there.”  So Barney’s, it’s real.

Old D wants to know what’s the most fucked up thing I ever did.  Well, not me, he asked all of us, except Six, of course, because Six was inside, Six is always inside.

A rolodex, literally, a rolodex of cards with memories float and rotate in my mind—stiff white cards with blue colored tabs with letters and a black crank that looks like the wheel from a toy truck—I see these cards, imprinted with violent memories; I see a card that bears the memory of my father hitting my hand and telling me not to touch “the nice things” when I am four.

But after many cards have flipped, the rolodex lands on one card that will not turn over.  This card depicts the time my father hit her the hardest.  This is the card that shows his fist hitting her jaw with all of his might.  He’s been doing the same thing all my life, and this time, it is right after my mom’s birthday—I’m there because I’m home on a visit from college—Mom’s birthday falls on Spring Break, so why not come home?

It’s just after all the guests have left, and “she’s a dumb bitch and he can’t believe she…” and I am calm, picking up my aluminum baseball bat—thirty four inches long and thirty ounces heavy—I am calm and I am swinging it, just how coach taught me in high school, so I could get the scholarship for college.  I remember how when the bat hit his stomach, the first time, the stomach gave way a lot more than I had figured it would.  The muscles in the abdomen create much more of a cushion than a ball does and the bat really swung through it, what with all the follow through I gave it.  I remember thinking: It’s just like coach always taught us: “Always use follow through, kids.”  Coach was my dad, talk about cliché, sound advice that comes back to bite you in the ass.

Standing trial when you’re a nineteen year old white kid from New England is hard.  So I learned to tell cheap jokes to feel better about things, and I found out that this attitude helps to keep a person like me from getting really hurt in prison.  It’s hard to hate the funny guy…plus, he might be crazy.  Of course, I was in a county facility until the final verdict, not a real prison.  See, until you’re guilty-guilty, they still treat you like a criminal and beat you and make your life hell, but not to the point where TV’s in the courtroom can show that abuse to America.  No, life sucks in county, but you’re not subject to corrupt guards looking the other way and to bruises that clothes cannot hide; you’re also not subject to weeks in the hole.

No one actually decides to believe in Barney’s except for a few truly desperate guys every year.  Guys who understand the difference between prison and county, or guys headed back for a second or third tour of prison.  And out of those guys who do manage to find the pick up point, which is more than one hundred and forty miles from here, what about them?  Well, Old D says that even fewer make it from there to here, what with the test and all (He told me this after I passed the test, obviously.).  But I made it.  Yup, this is “made it,” and while this sucks, it is not prison; it is not hell.

There’s six of us here: Old D, Manuel, Bee Bop, Carl with a C, Six, who never leaves “the kitchen” portion of Barney’s, which is really just a small camping stove near a flap that we use as an exhaust pipe when we cook inside what is, like I said, basically a shack.  And then there’s me: I’m by far the youngest and least likely person to be here, based on socio-economic demographics, charts of American hierarchical privilege, or pretty much any other census graph one can compose concerning which types of Americans are more and less prone to end up with a life sentence in prison.  Having no sense of remorse for a murder can do a lot to affect a judge’s sentencing, apparently.

They call me “Bam-Bam” here, and then they laugh, and I don’t get it.  Then they laugh even harder when I don’t get it.  We have no internet, obviously.  The shack is the size of a quarter of a basketball court and it smells real awful; worse than a gym but better than a barn.  All six of us sleep in there every night, basically head to toe.  Old D has a cot.  It’s still better than prison, but it is a far cry from the four year private college I was enrolled in before I hit my career-ending homerun.

I would guess that Six gets his name from the fact that he doesn’t just have a six pack, he is one.  He’s the most tightly packed ball of muscles that I’ve ever encountered.  I’m like six feet tall and on the lanky side of things, and even though Six is about four inches shorter than I am, I’m sure he could snap my neck on accident if he were to stretch wrong while yawning.

Manuel is a handsome Mexican dude who doesn’t speak much English.  I grew up near the Canadian border and I took French in high school, so I have no idea what he’s saying, ever, but I nod and I pretend that I do about half the time.  He only looks pissed about a quarter of the time, so I feel like my plan is working.  No one else here seems to understand Spanish except for Old D, but I would never ask him to tell me what Manuel is saying, as I don’t ask anyone here anything, and I feel slightly safer this way.  The only time Old D ever said anything to us about Manuel was to ensure us, upon his arrival, that he had done something “real bad, and twice,” and we took his word as gold.

Bee Bop speaks some horrible meld of nineties slang he picked up from an “infecting local Detroit underground scene that was and will always be, like, like, like the SHIT man, the only REE-E capital E, bitch, REAL shit the world needs to hear, is all I’m saying, yo, like don’t drop the fucking world, that’s D after L, it’s my Word, and MY World, you get me, Bitch?”  His frail, bony white hands shake when he talks and even though there are no drugs at Barney’s, I am positive that he is always on them as he only sleeps about four hours every night.  I wish I could stay awake as long, just so I could watch him all the time because I am very frightened that he is going to kill me/someone/all of us.

So it kind of goes without saying that no one here uses a real name.  Carl with a C, he’s Quiet with a Q, so maybe his name is real, but I wouldn’t know, hence the Q part.  Like I said, he’s an old scrawny white dude, probably in his fifties, and he wears glasses and a plain white tee and a pair of khaki pants with a brown belt.  His socks are black and he lost his shoes getting to Barney’s.  His glasses aren’t broken which means he’s not to be fucked with—something I learned in prison (I mean county.  Like I said, I never made it to the real prison.  Attica.  Shit, just the name makes me shiver.).  Carl with a C came here just after me, within weeks.

So I don’t talk to any of these guys…Everyone here except for Old D scares the living shit out of me, and Old D would scare me a lot, but he’s in charge, so I have to have faith in him and his integrity.  Plus it’s not safe to leave here—I’m barely twenty years old and if anyone were to recognize me out there, in the regular world (which would be really easy given all the press from my trial and what I imagine ensued after my escape) I’d be totally fucked—they’d add escape from prison to my already lifetime long sentence, which would fuck with my already pathetic case for an appeal, obviously.  Apparently killing your Dad for hitting your mom is not self defense, and especially if you do not feel bad about it.  True story.

Old D.  Old D is Proverbial.  He just IS the stereotype in your mind.  He’s old, but young enough to beat you into begging him for mercy.  He’s strong, but in a quiet and gentle way.  He’s “that” older, weathered, but not-past-his-prime dark-black skinned man from the Coney Island ghetto who has seen shit, done shit that other people have seen, felt bad about some of that shit, been okay with other parts of it, and now he has learned how to articulate the differences and the nuances of his perspective, which simultaneously tutors a person in the incontestable tenets of integrity.  He is fit to fairly rule any kingdom.  That’s proverbial, well, something, right?  He makes it easy to trust him, because he speaks candidly about a reality that prior to meeting him had only been proffered to me by many a Hollywood film.

This is why it was so fucking weird when Old D stepped out onto what we call the porch, but what you would call a pile of filthy rags that have been piled into the shape of a nest, which lies next to a shack that looks about as reliable as the listed campaign promises made by the current politician running for some sort of position in an election that you have recently heard about in your life.  Before I killed my Dad I was majoring in Poli-Sci and I really miss it.

Old D wears a tight fitting blue shirt with a pocket over his left breast.  He is thick, but in all the ways a body can be; he is thick with the mass that appears after years of living life to the fullest when it’s possible, but also thick from muscles grown at the expense of scraping by when it’s necessary to do so.  Unlike the rest of us, Old D has a few pairs of pants that he has collected over the years.  The day he asked us about our fucked up past, he was wearing a green pair of cargo pants that were tied snug just under his manly gut.  I can’t grow facial hair, I still look like a teenager, but I always admired his gut more than his thick wily beard and mustache—that sort of tight, powerful gut takes years to develop; it speaks volumes about experiential life.

Old D pursed his lips and scanned the four of us after no one elected to answer his question.  “What, you fuckers think I’m gonna tell someone?  Me?  Who’s got the most to lose here, huh?  I just think it’s about time we all owned up to our shit.  You know, it’s like, uh, it’s like phase two of recovery.  Right, Six?”

“Yup.”  This comes from the kitchen.  Since Six has never spoken in front of me, I have to assume it’s the sound of his voice, but I cannot see into the kitchen, so I’m really not sure it’s him.  The voice is surprisingly baritone, given Six’s stout stature, and it gives testimony to my yawn theory.

Six’s reply seemed predictable; all it needed was a post bud-in-a-can burp to properly accentuate the nature of his agreement, but Barney’s was lucky to get anything more than a half empty bottle of apple juice from a really good bag of trash.

A man Old D refers to as “Guy X” brings trash bags up here every week.  Once a fucking week.  But I’ve never seen the guy.  At ten minutes to Noon, every Sunday, Old D and Six kick the rest of us out and march us up to the river, a twenty minute walk.  Once we’re at the bank, between two old trees, they tell us to lie down and stay still.  If it gets to nightfall, and neither one returns, Old D tells us that we are to run; it’s every man for themselves (“Every man and fuckin’ Bam-Bam,” Bee Bop laughs).  But Old D always returns without Six, and we march back to Barney’s where the old trash bags have been replaced by new ones.  Six is already scrounging them for edibles, and he will place these treasures in the “pantry,” a box next to the stove; a box he guards every second of every day.  Meanwhile, the rest of us put the bags full of inedibles in the backyard to keep the smell out, which doesn’t work when it’s hotter than seventy out.  It’s been hotter than seventy since I got here.

No one is answering Old D’s second round of questions.  Bee Bop is rocking his body and hugging his knees and scaring me, so I nervously glance at Manuel who is also looking at Bee Bop with the same look I always try to give Bee Bop.  This is a look of intense fear that is being masked by a casual, nonchalant “we’re all in this together” smile that is also smug enough to imply an enthusiastic unless-you-want-to-fight-me-and-then-I-will-OWN-you stare of death.  We all learned this look in county or real prison, and we are all trying to win an Academy Award for best performance in this category.  I’d say Old D isn’t playing, Six doesn’t have to, Manuel is winning, I’m in second, and Bee Bop never learned it because no one fucks with someone who bounces all the time and rarely sleeps; they’re no fun for anyone.  And Carl with a C is Quiet with a Q.

Which reminds me of my biggest dilemma here; why on earth did Old D let Bee Bop in?  Old D gives you a test, first day, and it’s simple; pass or fail.  No one sees anyone else’s test, and when I passed mine, Old D made it clear that I should never tell anyone, ever, what my test was—and I won’t.  Not even here.

But, yeah, the test, uh, well, it “worked” for me—I’ll say that much, and so Bee Bop must be OKAY, or Old D has gone crazy.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that it wouldn’t bode well for me to consider Old D insane, since both Manuel and Bee Bop arrived here before me.  If Old D went insane before Bee Bop came, well, that’s an ugly scenario to think about.

Old D tapped his foot hard against the ground, “Go on, tell me.”

I had a stick in my right hand and I was drawing spirals in the dust that lay about the ground, as this helped me to keep my eyes from Bee Bop and the others.  Without any thought, I began to speak, keeping my eyes glued to the ground and the spirals, “My Dad wasn’t nice.  Ever.  I mean, I have no idea how the fuck he got someone as nice and smart as my mom, and I have no siblings, but man, he’s a, he was a fucking dick.  So I killed him.”

“Su fadrer?” Manuel asked.

Well guess who can speak English now. I looked Manuel in the eye, and forgetting about the Academy award, I gave him a cool lie detector exploding look of candor.  He nodded.  His face conveyed no emotion to me, but the nod improved our chances for friendship by nine thousand percent.

“That’s fucked up.  Fucked up!” Old D was not smiling, but I considered his retort as a corroboration of my main thesis, namely that what I had just revealed was indeed “the most fucked up thing that I have ever done in my lifetime.”  I felt good.  I’d never talked to a stranger, outside of the law, about any of this.

“And I fucking really killed him.  Man, I killed him,” I continued.  “And it wasn’t fun, but I wish I could go back and do it again because then I’d have fun, knowing just how fucked up he was—the shit that came out in my defense, the shit he’d done to my mom that I never even knew about—man I’d go back and I’d fucking kill him slower.”

At that point I realized that I was hysterically crying, which served to scare me out of my mind.  I became mortified, that’s the word for it, I became mortified because I was crying in front of an “essay” (that’s what they called people like Manuel in county), and a meth head, and Old D, and…could Six hear me?  And that’s when I noticed it.  Carl with a C, he’s still Quiet with a Q at this point, but he is staring at me, and it’s a look I’ve never seen before.

All I can really remember about anything that happened after I killed my Dad and before I escaped from the prison transfer for Barney’s is telling my mom “sorry” over and over again. “I’m sorry, Mom” followed by tears and a lot of hugging.  I never said, “I did this for you,” because I did not.  I did it for me and for her and for the world, but I think she blames herself for what I did, and that’s what I was saying sorry for, all those times.  I wasn’t sorry for killing my dad, but for putting her through the sordid trial and for eliminating myself from her life, and most of all, for somehow enabling her to put all of that guilt on her own conscience…but I don’t think she thinks that the fucker deserved to die and that’s why I started crying during my story.  I started crying because I was thinking about my mom, not because I felt bad or weird about killing my dad—the fucker.

So then this happens: Carl with a C gets up and walks over to me and he sits down next to me and puts his arm around me and starts comforting me, just like a dad would, but like mine never did—not once.  At first it’s kind of helping, but then it just gets creepy.

How do I explain creepy?  Carl with a C looks nice, and when he sat down, it seemed nice, but there’s a way you do touch a stranger and a way you do not, and he slipped from the former to the latter without changing anything in a way that could be discernable to anyone else’s eyes.  But I felt it.  You just know that feeling; you just do.

I broke the stick and some dust rose and I jumped up, yelling “Faggot!”  It’s all I could think of.  A man is touching me and I am also a man and he is not touching me the right way, the way I think he should, unless we are both into each other, so I call him a faggot, and I again feel sorry for my Mom who did not raise me to be the kind of person who calls anyone a mean name.

Thinking these thoughts makes me cry some more, so I yell some more to combat the tears.  “Faggot!  Get the FUCK away from me!”  Carl with a C just sits there and his eye contact is strong—too strong.  His glasses magnify a look of sardonic, mocking, condescending, paternal “it’s going to be okay—come let me touch you some more” and this turns my mind away from my mother and towards—

—“Boy you need to shut up, now!”  Old D is now my high school principal and wrong or right it is time to shut the fuck up and so I do.  Old D’s thick hand is pressing firmly on my left shoulder in the way that a man can touch another man if that man is not his equal and must be quiet.  His hand is on my shoulder, but he is looking at Carl with a C and his eyes are squinting.

Old D’s scrutiny is interrupted by Six, who has descended the only step from the shack to the ground outside of its only means of egress.  Six is facing Old D, but he steals a glance at my face before he says, “Guy X. Gotta go now.”  These are the third through seventh words I’ve ever heard him speak.  This day is not normal.

Old D breaks his gaze with Carl with a C, who has not changed his facial expression and still looks impossibly relaxed.  He is curled against the wall, still sitting next to where I had been seated, and he looks pleased with life.  He is content and this angers me, but Old D’s hand reminds me to shut up and control my anger.  I wish I had a baseball bat.

“Alright, y’all know the drill.”  Old D releases my shoulder and heads into the shack and grabs a blue bandana.  He ties the bandana to his head as he emerges from the shack and does this with ease and in very little time.  It’s still very hot outside these days and the bandana will help to soak up some of the sweat during the walk to the river.

We march out toward the river with Six in front, carrying a machete, and Old D behind us, who we each know carries a revolver with nine bullets in it at all times.  These are the only weapons any of us know about.

Carl with a C is walking in front of Old D, Bee Bop is behind Six, and Manuel acts as a buffer between Carl with a C and myself.  I wonder if Carl with a C is watching my ass while I walk and I am not okay with some old pedophile being in our group.  This is not okay.

Time flies when there are no clocks and you do not believe in a future, so the walk to the river is a blip on a radar of time and progress that makes drying paint look like a fast-paced car chase scene from a movie.

The river is slow and appears to be nearly dead. It’s the drought season, but even so, this river looks like it is on the verge of becoming a valley.  The trickle of water is muddy and dark and moves in bursts like a partially clogged pipe.  The grass that surrounds the river has been bleached by the summer sun and the only thing that seems to be thriving here is the insect population.  There are many old trees that look like they saw death and laughed at its naivety.

“Okay, you know the drill.”  Old D speaks for the first time since we left the shack.

The drill is for each of us to lie down, face to the ground, and to lie prone until one of them returns, or nightfall (we already went over this).

Carl with a C lies down in his usual spot between two giant trees, next to the left most tree.  Manuel lies down next to him, to his right.  I lie to the right of Manuel, with Bee Bop to my right, who is under the other tree.  Things are set.  This is the drill.

We can’t tell time, but on previous trips, when we get back to the shack, Old D, who carries an old Casio digital wristwatch from the nineties in his pocket, usually informs us that the total trip took about four hours.  One time he was angry after he came back to get us, and the wait had seemed a lot longer than usual, and it was—I overheard him bitching to Six later in the evening, saying, “Seven fucking hours, man, I could fucking kill X!”

Old D, at this point, he does something real out of the ordinary.  He spits onto the ground (normal) and then adjusts the waistline of his pants (also normal).  He and Six are facing us, their backs to the river (still normal), and then he gives Six a look and then looks back at us saying, “You boys are going to be just fine.  But just to be sure, Six is gonna keep y’all company.  Cool, Six?” (Totally not fucking normal, not at all. We. Are. Fucked.).

“Yup,” Imaginary beer burp, Six agrees.

Old D then walks away, and since we aren’t supposed to move at all, we don’t see him again.  Ever.

We cannot tell time, so this is the hardest part of the story to tell.  I try to think of ways to convey the time:

After sixty-eight mosquito bites…

After four hundred and seventy-three bird chirps…

After Bee Bop’s breath slows down to a normal rate… (Okay, this never happens, I’m trying to be funny again, sorry, it’s a coping mechanism). The point is that your mind seems to find ways to pretend that you’re counting time, even when it can’t.  The point is that there’s nothing like the feeling of time passing when you cannot calculate its passage.  Nothing.

At any rate, after a truly long, excruciating period of silence in which Six never once seems to move and I am left to fester in my thoughts of Carl with a C and what this all means, something happens.

A branch falls.  I shit you not, a fucking branch from the tree to my right, the one above Bee Bop, it cracks off from it’s mother, and falls, landing on Bee Bop’s right leg.  The cracking of the branch as it broke from the tree sounded like a chorus of baseball bats crushing a ball, but it did not compare to the cracking sound that emerged from the branch striking Bee Bop’s leg. This crushing sound reminded me more of a high impact car crash—volatile, calculated, and organized; the result disturbing.

The branch was about the size and length of a traffic signal, but it seemed to weigh a lot more.  The thickest and heaviest part of the branch landed on Bee Bop’s leg and the rest of the branch missed my head by a few inches, so it was natural for me to react by leaping up from the ground.

I leapt up, but Six knocked me down to the ground before I could plant my feet, using the same forearm that held the machete.  I landed hard on Manuel who stifled a Spanish curse word and did a pushup that caused me to roll off of him and onto Carl with a C.

My leap and fall was accompanied by a soundtrack of Bee Bop hysterically screaming out in pain.

“Y’all Shut the fuck up and stay still!”  Six yelled.

“Fuck! FUCK SHIT FUCK MY LEG OH FUCK!” Bee Bop ignored him.

A third crack pierced the air and Bee Bop fell silent.  I was lying still, in the prone position, on Carl with a C’s back, but there was no way I was going to look up, let alone flinch, because the third crack had obviously come from a gun.

“Shut the fuck up.” Six repeated, waving a black pistol in front of us, allowing and taunting us to recognize its authority, his authority.

Now there’s a really “funny thing” about me, and again, I’m sorry Mom, as I’m sure this is also difficult for you to read, but you have to understand that I suffer from something, well, kind of weird.  When I’m extremely nervous, and my adrenaline is pumping…it turns me on.  Real on.  Hard on.  If I’m running the mile, I get a little stiff, but if I’m running from someone who wants to hurt me, I’m ready to impregnate a harem, and I’m entirely serious, I saw a campus doctor about this during my freshman year, and it’s a real condition.

When I landed on Carl with a C and then heard the gun shot and saw Six with the gun, my penis grew to a full erection.  There I was, with a hard on, lying on his back with my crotch in his butt.  The problem is that I obviously had to listen to Six, who had ordered me to remain still.  I felt Carl with a C get Relaxed with an R as the two of us nestled into a silence that should have been awkward, but I did not have the mental space to consider as such, what with Six and the gun.

“Faggot.”  It was a whisper.  The Q was removed from Quiet as Carl with a C expelled this simple word, directed at me, under his breath.  And it stung.

“Faggot.”  Carl with a C said this a little bit louder, just loud enough to make sure that I had heard it.

Manuel whispered something short and harsh in Spanish and since my head was buried into Carl with a C’s right shoulder, and Manuel’s head was looking to his left, we were able to make eye contact.

Just as Manuel was about to win the Academy Award for the best death stare of all time, another shot rang into the nearly silent riverbed scenery.  Birds did not scatter, as this was the fourth loud noise in less than a minute.

Manuel’s face exploded, sending small chunks into my face.  I shut my eyes as the first chunk began to navigate its way to my face, so nothing looked the way it does in the movies, for I only caught a glimpse.

“You need to be very still.  Something is wrong.  Every fucker that moves dies,” Six said.

The nervous excitement I experienced from Manuel’s death thrilled my anxiety-hard on to a degree that I did not even feel as I murdered my own father, and this excitement was too much to bear.  With no autonomy I thrust my crotch as hard as I could into Carl with a C’s rear.  His body wriggled beneath my force and he yelled out a curious cry that bordered on pain and bewilderment.  He pushed himself back into me and this caused my body to tumble over the side of him and onto Manuel’s corpse.

I squeezed my eyes shut and braced for death.  I heard the gun fire and I was amazed by how slowly the bullet traveled as it went from Six’s gun and into my head.  I watched a fantasy of what I thought Manuel’s exploding head must have looked like, using the image of his corpse to fill in the necessary details, only I used my memory of my own face and body in place of Manuel’s.

Seriously, this was taking forever.  I was still thinking and waiting for death, when I realized that I had heard a bullet fire far too long ago for it to have struck me.  Even without a way to count time, I knew it had been too long.  The problem with being alive is that it directly contradicted an obvious fate: I had been told not to move, and that if I did, I would die.  I had then been pushed off of Carl with a C and landed on Manuel.  Clearly, I had moved.  I then heard a gun shot, which is the punishment for moving in this scenario, so the only thing that made sense in my head was for me to be dead.

The next problem that arose in my mind was that I was obviously alive, and yet, if I were to open my eyes and see what was going on, I could be shot for disobeying a direct and obvious order, an order that I had already disobeyed and gotten away with once.  “Fool me once…”  So I remained still, eyes shut tight, imagining every situation I could.  I tried to listen but I heard nothing.  I heard nothing to my left or to my right.  No sounds emerged above me or in front of me.  My auditory field of perception was barren.  I heard nothing except the dull sound of dry air on a summer day; enough sound to know that I was not deaf, but that nothing, I mean no life was stirring anywhere around me.

After sixty-eight mosquito bites…

After four hundred and seventy-three bird chirps…

I waited for an eternity; there is no way to express how awful those moments were.  I waited and waited, hearing nothing and refusing to open my eyes or move.  It is amazing what the human mind and body are capable of when they are under a very apparent and direct threat of death.  I am positive that I did not flinch nor move once for however long the period was between that final gunshot and when I finally opened my eyes.

When I did, I could only tell that it was dark, obscenely dark.  We are so far away from civilization at Barney’s that it gets dark in a way that few Americans ever experience.  With what little vision I could muster, I could sense/see that to my left was a corpse; obviously Carl with a C’s.  I waited for what felt like another, half as long eternity before I finally felt secure enough to risk moving anything beyond my eyes.  This waiting period was actually harder than the first because when your eyes are open, time crawls at its slowest possible pace.

I finally turned my head to the right and could see the faint outline of Bee Bop, still lying underneath the tree branch, pinned to the ground.  I slowly arose, peeling my blood soaked shirt from Manuel’s body.  My body was slimy and covered in a combination of foreign blood and sweat.  My hair had chunks of Manuel in it, but I did not care about removing them.  My heart raced as I realized that it was too dark to see anything more than two feet away from me; there were stars out, but they only brightened the sky, all around me, thanks to the ominous trees, it was dark in a way that cinema has never once managed to properly capture.

Here’s the great thing about coming to a random spot at a river that is ‘about’ twenty minutes from a shack that is one hundred and forty miles away from a place where you are told, back in county, to wait at until “Mr. M” comes to find you and take you to said shack: The great thing about this is that it actually works.  I sat next to three corpses for a long while, fully inhaling the reality of my situation, which was that I was lost from a place that was lost from a place that is lost from most everyone in society.  I had no idea of where “I” was and where “anything else” was.  The only thing I knew was what area of the world I was in; I was one hundred forty miles away from a place that is on the way from Albany to Attica.

The reason he cried was because even though he had three cans of beer and a half pack of cigarettes, he’d forgotten to get his hands on some matches or a lighter, and it was so cold that night that no one was out, so he couldn’t find anyone to bum a light from, and the lack of nicotine sent his heart into a turmoil he never wanted to experience again.

That was Benny for you.  Complaining about a lack of nicotine, not the fact that it was freezing that night, not because he was out on the streets in only a pair of jeans and his notorious leather jacket, and certainly not because his parents had died and left him nothing, so he had nobody to turn to when his luck was down and out.

Benny was that guy.  The guy who wasn’t a kid anymore, but who stuck around in our small little town in order to teach the younger kids how to be kids.

If you were growing up in ____ and you wanted something that required ID, then Benny was your first, and only choice.  Cigarettes, booze, porno mags—you were underage, and you wanted it?  Well, then you had better be on Benny’s good side.  Fuck, rumor even had it that Benny could get you coke or smack if you wanted it—but none of us ever really found out if this was just a rumor or not.  I mean, us suburban kids, we were trying to be rebels, but that hard shit, that sort of shit actually scared us.

Not Benny though.  Nothing seemed to scare Benny.

***

The first time that Benny got arrested, a lot of us “tough kids” took to sewing black patches with the letter B on them onto our favorite hoodies or jackets.  Some of the less artistically motivated kids, like me, we couldn’t figure out how to make patches, so we just took a sharpie pen and inked the letter “B” onto all of our clothing.  But the motivation was the same.

We wore these B’s with pride, as a sign of protest against “the man,” ‘cause Benny’s arrest was “Total bullshit, man!  Total fucking bullshit!”  But the funny thing, looking back, is that none of us even knew why Benny had been arrested, so for all we know, it was “Totally called for, man.”  But we were just a bunch of kids, in need of a hero.

The whole patch idea seemed really cool at first, but when Benny was released from the local slammer, and he saw what we’d all done on his behalf, well, he couldn’t stop laughing.  For about two weeks after his arrest, whenever he saw a kid in town with a “B” on their clothes, he would just point at them and say “baaaah.”  He wasn’t grateful for our attention and our hero-worshipping, and by calling us out as sheep, well, shit, that just made Benny seem even cooler to all of us.

Benny wasn’t working for us, he was just living his life—reckless and careless and in your face.  Of course, this was before I got to know Benny, before I saw what he was really all about.  Hindsight ‘aint 20-20, it’s just jaded and full of remorse—at least with me it always seems to be that way.

***

I was about six years younger than Benny, but my older brother was in the grade behind him, so Benny was vaguely aware of me in a way that made a lot of the other kids in my grade feel jealous.  I liked this, as I didn’t have a lot going for me back then.  I was fifteen and full of despair.  I thought everything in the world was phony, just like Holden Caulfield thought, only unlike Holden, I didn’t have a brother or a sister to obsess over, and I didn’t want to catch any fucking bodies falling.  I just wanted to get high, so that I could stop worrying about how I was never going to get a chance to touch a girl anywhere below her shoulder.

But just ‘cause Benny would nod his head at me when I crossed his path in town didn’t mean that I was actually his friend on any level other than the imaginary.  In my head, Benny and I, we were tight.  Secret handshake tight.  Inside jokes about other kids tight.  But in reality, I was just a chump who bought ten sacks from him for the price of a twenty bag.  I always remembered to smile as I got ripped off—because Benny, well, shit.  He was cool…that‘s why.

That’s why I never understood how that whole night ever even happened.  Because unless I was actually special to Benny, in some sort of way, then why would he have trusted me, of all people?  Why would he have confided in me, and shown me the worst aspects of his life, unless we were closer than just drug dealer and drug buyer?

I’ll never know.  But I’ll always wonder.

***

I was fifteen years old, and had been so for just over a month.  I’d just taken my first job ever, at the local Burger King, and something about a real job made me feel like I was an adult, and this made me eager to experience some real adult problems and adventures.

My parents cared about me, but they didn’t care about knowing where I was at all hours, or what I was doing with my time when I wasn’t at home playing video games and trying to set personal records for most masturbations in a day.  So at the time, they were “my fucking lame-ass parents,” but in retrospect, they were pretty chill—as far as parents go.

I was at work, “late” on a Thursday night.  I was in charge of closing down the BK and my fat, disgusting boss was in her office sitting on two chairs (one for the left cheek of her ass, one for the right.)

All I had left to do before I could leave was to take out three enormous bags of trash.  I had to pass my boss’s office on my way to take out the trash.  I looked in as I passed her office and saw that she had passed out, yet again, with a half eaten burger nestled in her chest.  I shook my head as I noticed that part of the mayo and tomatoes from her burger had slid into her lap.  She was so pathetic that it actually made me feel sick in my stomach.  I vowed then and there to never again eat another burger.

I stopped staring at my boss and made my way outside to the dumpsters.  I had a fun game that I liked to play when I closed, and this was to throw the garbage bags as high into the air as I could, so that when they landed in the dumpster they would explode upon impact.  I was fifteen—this is what fifteen year olds do for fun before they discover how to drive and get drunk and high every day…

Well, I took that first bag and flung it over my shoulder, as high as I could, and I launched that fucker to a new record high in the air.  It came down with a huge thud, and some of the milk shake spray pelted me in the eye.  It was marvelous.

But then I heard someone yell, “WHAT THE FUCK?” and that’s when Benny’s milk shake covered head came out of the dumpster.  He looked like a fucking skeleton rising from a coffin and the image made me shriek like a kid on a rollercoaster.

This, in turn, made Benny laugh.  Benny, as I would later discover, liked to laugh a lot.

“Relax, little Hof, it’s just me.” he said.

Hofstrom was my family name.  My older brother had been called Hof all his life, and I was therefore given no choice by my schoolmates and the community in general.  Save for my parents and immediate relatives, no one called me anything but “Little Hof,” and it drove me nuts.  Christ, even the teachers at school sometimes slipped up and called me Little Hof, instead of my real first name.  I wasn’t little, I didn’t want to be little, and I therefore hated my nickname.

“Benny…what the fuck are you doing in there?” I stammered.

“Snoozing, before our big night.”

Our?  Had Benny really just used a word that included me with him?  What the hell was going on here?  Before I could revel any further in this matter, Benny said the only thing he had to to make that night possible.

“Wanna get laid?”

If you are reading this, and you are a guy, then I don’t really need to explain just how momentous Benny’s offer was to my fifteen year old self.  Go ask most any fifteen year old kid from the suburbs, virgin or not, if they “wanna get laid” and you’ll see in their eyes the maniacal expression of a frenzied gold miner from the 1800′s.  There is nothing on Earth that simultaneously excites and terrifies a fifteen year old kid from the suburbs like the prospect of having unfettered access to a girl’s body.

I was so busy licking my lips and picturing a girl laughing at my penis that I couldn’t even answer Benny’s question.

Benny pulled himself out of the dumpster.  “Hof, did you hear me?  Quick, go get me some fucking towels, I gotta clean myself off, you little turd.”

He had called me Hof.  My big brother’s name.  I was spellbound.

I shook myself into action, threw the remaining two bags of trash into the dumpster, and raced inside to get Benny some paper towels.  Shamu was still napping in her office, so I snuck into the storage closet and stole an entire ream of paper towels for Benny.  I then locked up the two front doors and clocked out.  I was back outside in less than ten minutes, but Benny was nowhere to be seen.

I was used to disappointment, but this was a pretty crushing moment.  I kicked a few loose rocks on the ground, and tried to figure out how I could turn this into a really cool story to impress my friends.

Before I could really begin obsessing about the inevitability of dying a lonely old virgin, a large yellow old-as-shit Buick screeched into the back alley of the BK, broiling me in its headlights.  The car stopped about five feet away from me, and Benny stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Get the fuck in, Hof, let’s go!”

I ran over to the passenger side of the car, and pulled on the door, only it wouldn’t open.  Benny let me try a few more times, laughing the whole time, and then he finally reached across the car and unlocked the door for me.  He was laughing like a maniac.  I felt like an idiot.

I slid into the comfy leather bench in the front seat and handed Benny the paper towels without a word.  In return, he handed me a splendidly rolled joint.  “Fire it up, bro.”

I fished into my pants for my favorite Zippo, probably the only thing I owned that was even remotely cool.  I lit the joint and pulled hard.  The smoke made my lungs explode into a coughing fit that convinced me I was dying of Ebola.

I tried to look cool, but Benny was laughing even harder now.  He took the joint from my skinny small hands and inhaled like a pro.  By the time he’d taken two hits, he’d already smoked more than half of the jay!

I was already so high from the first hit that I could barely think, so I faked the rest of my hits and smoked the thing Bill Clinton style.

Finally, after about twenty minutes of conversation-less driving, I realized that Benny and I were out on the highway and about three towns away from our home town, nearing the big city.

Questions I wanted to ask, but I was too afraid to:

“Where did you get this car?”

“Where are we going?”

“Why were you sleeping in a dumpster?”

“Am I really going to get laid?”

“Are we friends?”

“How does sex work?”

Questions I didn’t really care about, but I asked Benny so that he would think I was cooler than I actually was:

“So, um, our town is like, so fucked.  Don’t you think?”

“Man, did you hear about Billy Epstein? Fucking A, he got kicked out of ____ High for getting caught with a hunting knife in his locker. That’s so fucked.  Don’t you think?”

Benny varied his answers to my inane questions by either laughing hysterically or by just saying, “No shit.”  I learned, that night, that Benny is a man of few words, but many joints.

By the time we pulled off the highway and into the shittiest, least safe area of the city that I’d ever seen, Benny was sparking up a second joint.

Instead of making sure that Benny had a plan, or inquiring as to my overall safety, I instead gave in to my desperate, adolescent need to be “cool.”  I therefore continued to nonchalantly ask Benny what he thought about every tedious bit of small town gossip that I could think of.

Benny interrupted me at some point and said, “If you had a little sister, would you let me fuck her?”

I didn’t have a sister, little or big, and I didn’t think that if  I did, I’d have any say as to who she did and did not fuck, but I figured this was some sort of test, so I said, “of course, Benny.  We’re bros.”

This made Benny lose his shit.  He started laughing so loudly that spit was coming out of his mouth and a thin string of snot was flapping like bubble gum in his left nostril.  He was so dirty and punk, and that was so cool.

Benny kept laughing while I stared silently out the window, stoned out of my mind.

As we drove on, the houses got shittier and shittier and shittier and the people got Blacker and Mexicaner and Asianer.  I began to grow afraid.  I wasn’t racist, so much as realist, meaning that I was well aware of the fact that skinny little white teenagers from the suburbs were not supposed to be in this part of the city—especially at this time of night.  Even cooler than cool kids like Benny were not supposed to be there.

Suddenly Benny pulled the car up in front of a gruesomely beat up little house on a street with no lamps.  In front of the house, four black men were sitting on the stoop sharing a blunt.  Upon our arrival one of them threw an empty bottle into the street and then the group cheered as it exploded.  This frightened me.  A lot.

I looked down and realized that I was still wearing my dorky collared burger king work-shirt.  Benny noticed my apprehension, and without a word, he removed his famous leather jacket and handed it to me.

All my fears evaporated as I put on Benny’s jacket, and I felt an elated tingle course through my body as the momentousness of this occasion sunk into my mind.

Benny looked me in the eyes, and asked me if I had any money he could borrow.

“I’ll pay you right back, I promise bro.” he told me as I handed him all my money, which amounted to about thirty six dollars, a lot of money for a kid like me.

Without another word, Benny got out of the car and I followed right behind him as he made his way up to the four men on the stoop.

“Sup?”  Benny asked.

No one bothered to look at us, or to answer Benny, but one of the men moved his ass just far enough over for Benny to fit one shoe on the porch step.  Benny did just this, and then pushed his way in through the slightly ajar front door.

I stood behind him, and all four men began to laugh at me.

“Shit, Whitey, you don’t wanna stand out HERE alone.”

I caught his not-so-subtle hint, and put my foot on the empty spot on the stoop and launched myself into the house.  The men continued to laugh as I closed the front door behind me.  Just before the door clicked shut, I heard one of them say, “I’d leave that shit open…”

***

The house smelled like a symphony of pot smoke, cigarette smoke, dog shit, stale beer, and there was another smell, one that I wasn’t familiar with at the time; used latex.

Inside about ten more black guys, and two Asian dudes; most of them had neck tattoos.  They were sitting around drinking and smoking, some of them had girls in their laps, but the girls didn’t even look up at me.  I was trying not to stare and one of them interrupted my lengthy gawk by offering me a blunt.

The last thing in the world that I wanted at that moment was any more pot, especially mixed with a cigar, but I wanted to fit in, so I took a hit of the big brown blunt, and the smoke hung like a fire in my throat and lungs.  I winced, I coughed, and then I realized that everyone was staring at me, only it was hard to see them through the water in my eyes.  I felt my heart beating in my right thigh, and I remember thinking that this was very odd.

By the time I could see through my eyes again, Benny wasn’t there.  I also thought this was odd—or, to be more exact, I found it devastating.

The guys in the room stopped laughing at me, and returned to their aimless drinking and smoking.  I slid into a corner of the room and tried to act nonchalant, but it was hard, because no one was talking and there was nothing to do there.  A radio was on in some other room, emitting some rap song that I wasn’t cool enough to recognize.  I pretended like I knew the song well, and tried to bob my head along with the beat, hoping this would make me look cool.  Looking back, I don’t think a single person in that house gave one fuck as to whether or not I was “cool.”  As long as I wasn’t police, they didn’t care what I was.

I sat around, like a total tool, for about twenty minutes, which felt like four hours, and finally, Benny returned to the main room, holding a young girl’s hand.

Let me elaborate a bit.  When I say young, I mean young.  This girl was younger than me, and by a lot.  If I had to guess, which I did plenty of that night, I’d put her at twelve, tops.  She was wearing a tight mini skirt that was all of nine inches long, and a tight white top that barely covered her smooth, dark, black chest.  She had two small studs in her ears and her hair was flat ironed.  When she smiled, her mouth revealed jagged pillars of salt trapped behind braces.

“Hof, this is Kinka.  Kinka, this is Hof.”

Kinka was beautiful, in that “she’ll be hot someday” kind of way.  But the operative word here is “someday.”  At that moment, she wasn’t hot at all, she was just a kid.

Kinka feigned a smile for me, but I could tell that nothing about me interested her.  All I could think about was the fact that Kinka, at this hour, should have been asleep, or at the very least, she should have been combing a doll’s hair.  Not hanging out with a bunch of druggies and drunks, and—and Benny.

Benny thrust Kinka’s hand into mine, and nodded to the hallway.

“First door on the right.  She’s all yours.” he said.

I took Kinka’s hand and let her lead me into the back bedroom.

Kinka and I had yet to speak, and we’d actually only looked each other in the eye for about twenty seconds total at this point, but as soon as she closed the door, she pressed her body against mine and began to probe my lips with her tongue.

Something else began to throb near my right thigh, and I had no idea what to do about it.

Kinka must have felt my throb, because she next began to literally feel my dick, rubbing it with her little hands over my jeans.

I grew very hard, and I knew what was coming next, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

Just as I was about to explode in my pants, Kinka, a real pro, she pulled back from me, and let out an insincere giggle.

“First time.” she said.  It was a statement, not a question.

This was more embarrassing than anything I had ever experienced.  Here was a girl, way younger than me (at fifteen anything more than two years is waaaaaaay young, I tell you) and she had more experience in the bedroom than I did, and was calling me out on it.

“No way!” I yelled.  I yelled this pretty loud, I guess, ‘cause Kinka, for a split second, seemed a little alarmed.  But then she looked me in the eyes, for the second time that evening, and she could see right through my machismo lie.

“We don haveta if you don wanna, but y’all still need to pay.”  She said this with the same tone and care that a tired supermarket clerk uses when asking you, “Paper or plastic?”

I stood there, frozen in fear.  My mind was racing.  I was basically weighing the odds of three choices: turning Kinka down, and then trying to explain it to the fourteen or fifteen other guys in the house; turning Kinka down, but getting her to pretend that we actually did it; and, lastly, but least likeable of all: the option of actually having sex with her.

Why the hell was I there?  Why the hell had Benny met me at the dumpster and asked me to accompany him?  What the hell was the point in all of this?  My desire to get laid, and my curiosity about how it all worked was strong, but some part of me, a part I never knew existed before that night, was trying to speak some sense to me, and I was surprised to find myself actually listening to this anti-virginity-losing advice.  I felt so lame, realizing that this was not how I was supposed to lose my virginity.  This was not a cool night.  There was nothing going on in this house that I wanted to be a part of.  I didn’t express any of these thoughts to Benny or anyone else because I figured that if I did, they would all laugh at me the way my classmates laughed at the kid in our school with the lisp for talking like a “fag.”  That was not going to be me.

“Kinka, look—” I began.

“—Yes or no?  I don got all sorts of time.”  Kinka was now sitting on the bed in the room and pretending to find interest in a loose stitch that had become unraveled from the cheap blanket on the bed.

Aside from the bed and the shitty blanket, there was only a small table in the other corner of the room with several empty cans of beer and an overflowing ashtray.  The combination of stale, stagnant smells was making me seriously ill, and I finally realized, for sure, that I couldn’t finish this job.

So I asked her, “How much?” and she laughed.

“You gots to ask my man that.  I don’t touch nothing except you.  Get in, o get out.” With this, she peeled off her top and exposed her barely feminine chest.  She had tits, for sure, but they were really small and undeveloped, and I felt like a total fucking pervert just seeing them there.  I smiled and tried to think of something polite to say, but nothing would come out.  Kinka continued to play with the loose thread, so I eventually turned my back on her and left the room.

My head was swimming.  I was stoned out of my mind, and all I could think about was how fucking weird it was for Benny to be fucking an extremely young prostitute in the ghetto.  There were a million girls closer to his age in our hometown that would be more than happy to fuck him.  So why in the hell were we here?  Nothing was adding up, and I felt weary from all of the confusion.

I got back into the living room, and Benny was nowhere to be seen.

I tried to play it cool, and pretend that I had just fucked Kinka—fucked her real good, like a man would, but no one in the room was paying me any sort of attention.  I sat there for another three minutes, eavesdropping as best I could, but nothing these guys were talking about made any sense to me.  I didn’t understand a word they were saying, it was as if they weren’t even speaking English.

Finally, I got the nerve to check outside for Benny.

I can’t describe the sense of paralyzing fear and panic that devoured me as I went outside to find no Benny and no car.

“What the fuck?” I thought.

One of the men on the stoop, the one who had barely moved to allow me entry to the house, he said, “Shit, boy, you look like you just seen a ghost.  You too old to be believing in ghosts!”

This got everyone else laughing, which added to my sense of panic, and also allowed me to feel deep humiliation.

I was trying my best not to show any of my fear, but this was all too much for me.  I was now alone, in the ghetto, surrounded by older men who were getting fucked up on all sorts of shit, and I had no money, no car, and no real idea of what the hell was happening.  I would use the word surreal to describe this moment in time, only surreal sounds far too friendly, and I wasn’t feeling anything friendly at that moment.  I only felt bad vibes and the sense of confusion that comes with smoking too much weed in a “foreign” environment.

Finally, their laughter died down, and I managed to eek out, “You guys seen my friend?”

No one laughed this time.  The place got real quiet all of a sudden, and then the same man who had asked me about seeing a ghost said, “You don’t got no friends here.  I think you should go.”

Things were really quiet now.  No one laughed and no one stirred.  It was just like the night before Christmas, only instead of milk and cookies and holiday cheer, this night was full of weed and beer and intimidation.

I was afraid, and feeling terribly let down.  I was now beginning to wonder if Benny wasn’t a loser, and not my hero, and I was fairly sure that Benny wasn’t really my friend.

He had smoked me out and taken me to get laid, but he had also, apparently, taken all of my money, and then left me high and dry to get my ass kicked.

I wasn‘t sure what to do, so I tried to vie for a little time.  “Hey, my ride…uh, you know when he’s supposed to come back?” I asked.

All four men stood up.  A guy in the back pulled the corner of his t-shirt up towards his belly button, revealing the black handle of a gun.  The ring leader then looked me hard in the eyes and said, “Bitch, All your business is done here.  You better start walking.”

“mmmm-hmmm.” his friends agreed.

I now had two very simple options at my disposal; I could walk left, or I could walk right.  Given my lack of local geography and experience, combined with how dark that street was, both options seemed like certain death to me.

What I wanted to do was to somehow marry an odd combination of desires to bawl my eyes out and to find Benny and fucking kill him, but I knew those were not options at my disposal.

So I pretended like everything was cool.  I pulled Benny’s leather jacket tight around my body and I zipped it up as high as it would go, and then, taking a gulp, I stepped off the porch and walked down to the curb.

When I got to the street, I took another long look to my left, and then an even longer look to my right, and despite all my desires to be cool, and to be a man, I let it all go, and I began to cry.

I didn’t want those men to hear me crying, so I turned left and started marching down the street on my very own personal Cambodian Death March.

Two things kept me going as I trudged down that scary-ass street:  One was a fantasy that Benny was going to suddenly pull up next to me in that yellow Buick, joint in hand, laughing, and then he would explain to me, in between his inhalations and maniacal laughter that “It was all a joke, Hof.  We’re bros!”

The other fantasy that I entertained was even better: I was going to find Benny the next day and then expose him to everyone in our town for what he really was: A good for nothing sexual pervert who paid to have sex with little girls.

All in all, I’m lucky as hell, because after walking for only about four blocks, I spotted a 7-11 and, as luck would have it, there was a police car in the parking lot.  I knew that my parents were going to give me hell for ending up in the ghetto after midnight on a school night, but I also knew that getting hell from my parents would be way “cooler” than getting killed in the ghetto, so I walked up to this squad car and knocked on the window.

What’s even luckier is that I didn’t have to say a word to the cops about Benny, the whorehouse, or any of the drugs, because the cops were so busy laughing at my scared little black-leather jacket wearing white-suburban-ass that they never even bothered to ask me why I was there in the first place.  Instead, as if it were a routine, the cops took it upon themselves to offer me a ride home.  They found me so comical, in fact, that they also didn’t seem notice that I was stoned out of my mind.  They just dropped me off at my home, without a threat, a taunt, a warning, or any desire to contact my parents.

***

Here’s where things get weird(er): After that night, no one in my town ever heard from Benny or saw him again.  Suddenly, Benny was a ghost, and I was the last person to have seen him, only I couldn’t tell anyone this, not even my own best friend, because I was too scared of being connected to Benny, in case it somehow got back to those scary men at the house, or to my parents, or to the police.

I was so scared, as a matter of fact, that the next day, when my parents were at work and my brother was at football practice, I took a pair of scissors and cut Benny’s leather jacket into small strips that I hid in a black garbage bag all week.  I waited to throw out this bag until the family trash can was on the curb later that week, the night before the garbage men would come.  I took all these paranoid precautions just to be sure that no evidence of my experience that night would exist.

But the talk in town was pretty impressive.  The top two rumors involving Benny’s sudden disappearance were that he had been killed in a knife fight and that he’d killed someone else in a knife flight and fled to Mexico.  Not a single rumor involved underage girls or a stolen Buick.  Your guess is as good as mine.

Years later, with the help of the internet, I tried to find out what had happened to Benny, but all my searches wound up empty.  In an odd sort of way, I almost prefer things this way.  Now that I’m “old,” and many years have passed, my entire life consists of my wife, my children, my bills, and a few different crime-mystery TV shows that all have an acronym in their title.  It’s kind of nice to be able to look back at my youth and have a few question marks and a few mysteries—to have a real ghost story of my own.

I asked my parents about Benny one year at Thanksgiving, and my mom laughed—Benny style, kind of maniacal and discomfiting, all at once.

“Honey, do you really remember your imaginary friend Benny?  That’s so funny.  Your father and I were worried sick when you still mentioned him halfway into your teens.  You always had such a vivid, incredible imagination!”

My father added, “Yeah.  How come you never did anything with that imagination?”

I had no idea what they were talking about, I didn’t remember anything about any imaginary friend, and, trust me, Benny was real.  This isn’t some stupid fucking ghost story.

So I could blame it on the traction.

The sunsets here are powerful. They’re so bright sometimes that they can blind your eyes with their brilliance – especially if you’re driving along at dusk. They say that most accidents occur at dusk.

So I could blame it on the dusk.

The hills on my road are very steep. The houses on my road are spread out, and the road is about four miles long. I live exactly half way along the road, which is about a half mile past the Johnson’s and a quarter mile before the Fletcher’s. The Johnson’s live about two miles in, and their house is at the bottom of a very steep hill. You have to slow down to nearly a crawl as you approach the bottom of their hill, because it is so steep that you can’t really see the bottom until you just about reach it.

So I could blame it on the hill.

I could blame it on a lot of things, but the bottom line is that I didn’t even see it happen, I only felt it. And as soon as I felt it, I stopped the car like any person would, and got out to see what I’d hit. I figured it was at best a rabbit, and at worst, someone’s dog. A sensation of guilt began to gnaw at me. The guilt came from my brain, but I felt it in my chest.

I’d stopped the car, but a thick cloud of dust from the gravel surrounded me as I pushed the door open to get out. The dust hit my nostrils and I coughed the way I used to cough when my father would smoke his cigarettes in the front room after dinner.

My heart constricted in my chest when I first saw the tricycle.

I stepped back. I looked behind me; I saw nothing. I looked ahead of me, and I also saw nothing. I was at the bottom of the hill, and the only way to see me would have been to come down the hill from either direction.

The tricycle had a red seat and yellow handlebars. The front wheel was black and made out of plastic and it was also bent and now facing the wrong way in front of my car. Next to the tricycle lay the boy. I recognized the boy, but I couldn’t remember his name.

I called out, “You okay?”

The boy didn’t answer. He didn’t move either. He looked real small.

I was wearing gloves. They were an old pair of gloves that I’d had for many winters, and I was wearing them because it was the end of winter.

I reached out, with my hands still in my gloves, and I touched the boy’s neck. Even with my gloves on, I could tell that his neck was still warm. The boy didn’t stir.

I repeated myself: “You okay?”

No answer.

I again looked around me, in all directions, but it was the same as before. We were alone.

I felt the boy’s neck again, this time I did it like how I see them do it on TV and in the movies, using two fingers feeling for a pulse. I felt no pulse.

This meant that the boy was not okay. The boy was dead.

I stood up. My head and shoulders were shaking and I felt tiny bubbles pushing at the skin around my eyes. I was shaking, but it was cold, so I could have been shaking from the cold.

I turned around to face the grill of my truck. There was some blood, and a thick mat of the boy’s blonde hair stuck to the bottom of the grill. I turned back around to look at the boy.

The boy was lying face down, next to his tricycle, I turned his body over, very carefully, and the only evidence was a thick wound on his scalp, on the side that had been facing the gravel. Just a nick, with some hair missing, that was all.

I stood up, and I looked around again. No one.

I’m sixty-four years old. I am retiring at the end of this year. I have no family. I eat Progresso soup for dinner most nights. I never go out; most of my nights are spent watching the television and day dreaming about a life I never lived and a future that doesn’t actually exist.

Nowhere, in any of my dreams or my nightmares, do I end up being known as and hated for being the man who killed a boy with his car. It would not be fair.

I looked down at the gravel. I could barely make out three sets of my own foot prints in the shape of my boots. I walked over to these sets of boot prints and kicked the gravel around until the prints had been smeared away.

I walked in a full circle around my truck, eyeing my surroundings closely. Since I hadn’t slammed on my brakes, there were not any irregular tire marks from my truck.

I walked back over to the body of the dead boy. I’d only touched him twice, and both times, I’d touched him with my gloves. But just to be sure, I picked up a blade of grass from the side of the road, and I used it to wipe the spot of skin on the boy’s neck where I’d felt for a pulse.

Stepping carefully, as though there were grapes underneath my feet and I didn’t want to crush them, I walked back to my truck, and I got inside the cab.

I looked in the rear view mirror, and I didn’t see anything.

The sun was setting, but I didn’t appreciate its brilliance.

It isn’t my destiny to go to prison. Not now, not ever. I eat canned soup for dinner each night and I never married. I worked hard all my life and I never hurt anyone on purpose.

I started the truck’s engine, and I put it in reverse, and I very slowly moved the vehicle backwards. I then put the truck into drive, and drove around the spot where the boy and the tricycle were lying in the road, and being sure to move at a speed that wouldn’t create any tire tracks; I crawled on up the hill towards my home.

My heart was now pounding and I kept looking in the rearview mirror, but no one was there. I passed the Johnson’s house at the top of the hill, and no one was outside. Just in case somebody was watching, I tried to pretend that I was happy. I pretended that I was whistling along to a song on the radio, even though I never listen to the radio and I don’t even know how to whistle.

I got home about two minutes later, and I went directly into the bathroom. I ran some water in the sink, and I took a giant wad of toilet paper and put it under the water. I walked back out of the house and over to the grill of my truck.

I took the wet toilet paper, and I applied it to the spot on the grill that had the blood and the hair. I cleaned the grill real good. I frowned; the grill was now a little too shiny. So I picked up some gravel, and I threw the gravel at the grill. The dust settled on the wet parts of the grill, and then it looked normal again. Normal for this part of the country.

The sun had now set, it was no longer dusk. I went inside to fix a can of soup, I watched some television, and then I tried to fall asleep.

***

I didn’t sleep so well that night. I kept thinking about the state prison and the various men I’d known who had ended up there. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve a lot of the bullshit I’d already dealt with for most of my life, and so I decided, that night, that for once in my life, I was going to stand up for myself.

It was on the front page of the local newspaper the next morning. I first saw it at work because someone had left the newspaper in the break room. By lunchtime, nearly everyone at work was talking about it.

Margie, the one with the fat thighs and the stupid pictures of her nieces and nephews, she just wouldn’t shut up about it.

It was so sad and so tragic and she just couldn’t believe that someone would leave a child to die.

Fuck her. Fuck her and her fat thighs. I watched her crying about the whole thing and eating a large slice of cake with a spoon. Every time that she would sob, her fat body would ripple and ooze about, and then she would cut into the white cream at the top of the cake, with more attention than she gave to her job, and she’d spoon a hefty chunk of the cake into her mouth. I found myself wishing that she would choke on the cake.

By quitting time I’d had enough. Everyone at work, even the customers, everyone was talking about the Johnson boy. At one point, Ed walked over to me and asked. “don’t you live on the same road as the Johnson’s?” I nodded and did my best to look morose.

There was only one way to drive home, and there was no avoiding it—in order to get home each day, I had to pass right by the spot, and then I had to drive on up the hill, past the Johnson’s house.

But I got used to it. Besides, I don’t really have any friends, and I never go out, so I only had to pass their house twice a day, five days a week, and then maybe two or four more times, on the weekend, if I had to get out to run an errand or two.

***

Four days had passed the first time I nearly lost my nerve. It was just a little after work, and I’d already passed the damn house, which by now was barely visible beyond the yard full of wreathes and flowers and candles and the such. The whole town was making such a big deal out of the thing.

I was settling into my routine when I heard a knock on the door.

No one ever visits me. The last time I had a visitor it was some electric guy checking on the utilities. That was about two years ago. Only relative I got that is still alive is a brother who is ten years my junior, and he moved out west with some gal nearly twenty years ago, and I haven’t seen him since.

I heard a second knock, but I just stood there, right in my own kitchen. I could feel my heart going all crazy again. It wasn’t “pounding” so much as it was threatening to stop beating. It was going about all weird in my chest, and I wasn’t sure if this was it, if they were here to take me in, but I decided then and there that if this was it, I wasn’t going to do much about it, I was just going to stay quiet and see how things turned out.

I waited there in my kitchen, like a prisoner in my own home, and I listened to the world. It was so quiet that I could hear birds chirping outside and I could hear some feet scuffling in the gravel pathway that leads right up to my front door.

My heart was really moving about now, and I don’t know if I was more nervous about the trouble I was in, or my heart exploding. But then I heard the sound of a child’s voice.

“I know he’s there, Ma. His car is parked right here in the yard, and he never goes out but once a day to get to work and back.”

Whoever it was, it wasn’t the police, and I was suddenly able to relax.

My heart settled back into rhythm and I used the back of my hand to wipe away the small beads of sweat that had percolated on my forehead.

After hearing a third knock I walked to the door and opened it.

Standing outside my front door was Evelyn Woodbury and her son—I forget his name. I nodded. Evelyn nodded back and smiled a polite smile. I’d known Evelyn since she was a little girl and I was a young man. She’d married some man from out of town and I remember that she had been showing a bit before the wedding.

“How do you do, Roger?” Evelyn seemed a bit frightened, and I didn’t mind.

I nodded again, and then I looked down at her boy, and back up at her. She was wearing a sundress, and it was a little too tight on her. It also looked worn, and I thought she looked a little worn down herself.

“…Well, Roger, we’re sorry to bother you at the dinner hour, but—” Evelyn stopped talking but she forgot to close her mouth.

The boy cut in, saying, “—Sir, we’re holding a fundraiser for little Willie Johnson. I’m sure you heard by now about the tragedy that occurred last Thursday evening, around five thirty. Sir, it was real sad. We’re all real sad. Willie was hit and killed by a car, sir, and we’re collecting money, through the school, for the Johnson family, so that they can do up a real nice funeral for the boy, is all.”

So they wanted my money. Everyone in this god damn world seems to want your hard earned money. First the government asks for it from your pay check. Then they ask again every April, and then you have to pay them even more of it with the sales tax every time you want to buy something in a store. It goes on and on and on, so I stay at home, and I do what I can to keep to myself.

I reached into my back pocket and felt for my wallet. Inside of my wallet were some bills, and I knew exactly how many there were, and of which denomination as well. I reached for the third one over and I took it out. It was a five dollar bill. I handed it to the boy and I forced a smile.

Evelyn relaxed a bit, and she tugged at the sides of her dress, as if that could make the thing fit, or make her look better; maybe both. I don’t know; I don’t understand women very well, I never have.

They thanked me for my generous donation, and I nodded once more. I stood there, with my left hand holding the door open, and watched them as they walked back down the gravel path, and then turned left onto the main road. There were another two miles of houses going on in that direction, and I wondered if they were really going to walk to each and every home along the way, doing the same thing they had just done to me. I watched them walk on until they were just out of sight, and then I closed my door.

***

The more the papers wrote about it, and the more the townsfolk talked about it, the more I got angry about it, and what little guilt and worry I may have felt, well, it just slowly went away, like how the snow melts in the early part of spring.

They even talked about it on the local news, which I don’t regularly watch, but now I had started watching nearly every night. There was something weird about watching a mystery unfold, and being the only one who knew the answers to the questions that everyone else wanted to know.

Plus, I wanted to be sure that they weren’t going to catch me. So far, they didn’t have any suspects, but the police were making an investigation, and the case was still open. For the most part, I wasn’t afraid anymore; I was just tired of it all, and I wanted it to end.

***

The most scared I ever got was the one day that Officer Thompson came by. It was the same time of night that Evelyn and her boy had come by; at dusk. Only this time I wasn’t making soup from a can, I was cooking a microwave dinner. I know this because it was a Wednesday, and Wednesday is the day I always cook my microwave dinner.

Officer Thompson knocked real hard, harder than Evelyn and the boy did. It was a tough knock. Not an unfriendly knock, but just the right kind of knock to let you know that it deserves an answer.

I walked over to the door and opened it. Officer Thompson nodded his head, and removed his hat. I nodded in return, and stepped to the side, so he could enter if he wanted to.

He did not enter.

“Afternoon, Roger.”

“Fred.” I said.

“We’re…” Fred sighed, and then took a long while to resume speaking.

While I waited for Fred to continue, I could hear the microwave doing its thing, but now that I was worried and now that my stomach was all tight, I realized that I had lost my appetite.

Fred finally continued. “Well, we’re just combing the whole road is what we’re doing. The Johnson boy, as you know, well, we don’t have much on who hit him, but we figure that whoever killed the boy, well, he probably lives on this road, since it’s a dead end.”

He just stopped, right there. No question, just a statement. What this did was to put me on guard, it did. I wasn’t sure if it was a tactic of his, or if I was just being paranoid, but I felt sort of stuck, the way you do when your boss asks you if you’d mind staying a bit late that night, to help out. I didn’t know what to say.

Fred was my own age, and we’d gone to school together. He’d married Anne Walsh and they’d had themselves several kids. One even went on to the big state school with a scholarship in football.

I don’t watch football, but I was born and raised in this town, so I know most everything you can know about football.

Fred was looking right at me, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I don’t much read my own mind, let alone the minds of other folks. Forty-six years of checking insurance policy figures has taught me very little about people and what they are thinking.

“Well, it’s sad.” I finally said.

Fred broke eye contact, and sighed again.

“Sure is.” He agreed.

He seemed relieved, but I wanted to be sure.

“I think an awful lot about it.” I said. “Some nights.” I added.

“We all do.” Fred agreed. He wrung his hat in his hands, making out like it were a bandana, rather than a state issued trooper hat. I thought he was going to permanently crease it, but he didn’t.

The next thing I did is what saved me, I’m sure of this, and I’m very glad I did it.

“The Fletcher boy. He speeds.”

Five words. That’s all I had to say. It was just like when my father had taught me how to make plants grow.

My father had been a farmer, and he had wanted me to take over the farm. But I was good at math, and my brains didn’t want me to farm, so I had taken a job with the firm instead of the farm.

But here I was, more than fifty years later, taking my dad’s profession to heart; planting a seed and then watching it grow.

***

Soon thereafter, I began to notice all sorts of things I never noticed before. Driving on the main highway, for example, I one day noticed how well aligned all the telephone poles were. They had built them all perfect and neat, spaced out just right, so that the lines didn’t sag, but also so that the lines were not too taut. And the center lines on the highway, they had been spaced evenly as well.

In town I started to notice other people existing in their own lives. One person in particular that I happened to notice was a new girl that had been hired at Betty’s Coffee Shop. I noticed that this new girl was pretty.

People at work still talked about the Johnson boy nearly every day, but now I could tune it out. The subject of the Johnson boy became about as interesting to me as the football scores and the new county highway they were building that could get you to the Wal-Mart quicker.

Only thing I really cared about was my workday ending so I could get back home where I could be alone.

***

It was about three Thursdays after the accident that I heard the big news at work.

It was Margie who I heard it from. She was in the break room, per usual, eating a doughnut and sitting on her fat ass. I wondered if she ever stopped eating and actually worked.

She was in the break room when I walked in to get a little coffee. Ever since the accident, I hadn’t been sleeping as well as I’d like, so I’d taken to drinking a cup of coffee here and there to keep me on my toes at work. The coffee at work was thin, and I didn’t mind the taste of it, but it did make me have to pee a lot.

“Oh Roger, did you hear?” Margie’s cheeks were flushed, and I couldn’t tell if it was from wearing too much makeup, or if it was from sitting and eating so damn much.

She took her thumb and her index finger and pinched a chunk of doughnut away from her partially eaten doughnut. She was careless, and some of the chocolate from the doughnut smeared itself on one of her long, pink painted nails.

She shoved her fingers right into her mouth, and I could hear her sucking the chunk of doughnut into her mouth. It made me feel sort of sick. I turned my back to her and poured myself a cup of coffee.

Margie continued, “They think it was the Fletcher boy. They think the Fletcher boy was the one that done did it. That he was the one who…who struck and killed the Johnson boy. Someone says they saw him driving home right about the time that poor Willie was killed!”

What really got me was the way she said struck. I’m not real particular about many things, but I didn’t like the way she said struck. For some reason, when she said struck, it made me very angry, so I didn’t answer her and I left the room.

It wasn’t until later, when I was getting ready to leave work that I was finally able to figure it out. I didn’t like it when Margie said “struck” the way she did because it was an accusation. It implied that the Johnson boy had been hurt on purpose, and that was unfair.

I’m not going to jail. I am too old, and I’ve worked all my life to avoid trouble. And it’s not like I tried to do what I did. It just sort of happened, the way that a storm wind can turn over your shed, or a valve in your car can suddenly break, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it from happening.

The way I see things, things work until they sometimes break. And when they do break, you can try to fix them, but sometimes, no matter how much the thing needs fixing, and you want to fix it, you just can’t, and then, well, there’s nothing you can do.

The Johnson boy was broken, and there wasn’t anything I could do to fix him up, so I carried on. But I didn’t like that Margie said he was struck. I didn’t like Margie.

***

I was fixing to get in my car after work that afternoon, when I noticed the new girl at Betty’s again. She was leaning over a table in the window at the front of the coffee shop, and she was wiping down the red and white checkered tablecloth with a grey rag.

It has been years since I went to Betty’s. In high school, it was where most of the fellows and gals would go to socialize after school, so I didn’t go there much. Years later, I would take my brother there before he could drive, because he could talk to people which meant that he could talk to girls and such, but me, I never much went there, except when my family would go for a breakfast before a big trip to visit Grandma up in the big city.

This was all a long time ago, before Grandma died, and before my folks passed on as well. I watched the new girl scoop the rag and its contents into her other hand, and turn around to find a waste basket. Her apron was tied in a neat bow behind her back, and she was wearing a pretty colored dress that hung just right. Her hair was tied up in the back, with a white ribbon, and she was wearing some sort of silver necklace that hung around her soft, white neck.

I thought about going into Betty’s. I figured I could sit myself down and order a cup of coffee. After all, now that I was drinking coffee, I could try theirs, to see if it was any good. But what would I do with myself once I had the coffee? Would I sit there, and stare out the window? I supposed I could buy myself a newspaper, but I didn’t much like to read the newspaper.

No, it was a stupid idea. I needed to be practical at all times, and going into Betty’s was impractical, that’s what it was.

I walked to my truck, placed my key into the lock on the door, twisted the lock all the way to the left, and pressed the silver button that was set into the handle, and opened the door. I sat on the leather cushion, and looked into my rear view mirror.

From my mirror I could still see the new girl leaning over on the counter, talking to the cook through the service window. I moved my head a little, to the right, to see the rest of the restaurant, and I noticed that there was only one customer, an old man, who was sitting alone in the booth at the back of the restaurant. He was staring straight ahead of himself, no paper, nothing; just staring.

I started the car, and pulled out onto the main street that gets me to the main highway that takes me to my road, the road where I struck the Johnson boy.

I thought about Margie and I got real angry again, but then I remembered what she had mentioned about the Fletcher boy. I turned right onto the highway and I thought about how I was going to watch the news that evening.

***

In regards to the Johnson boy, the Fletcher boy was innocent. I knew that much, but no one else did. But was he really innocent?

The town sure didn’t think so. After all, the Fletcher boy had run over the Bonderman’s dog the first year that he’d gotten himself a license to drive.

And this fact was the particular item that led the town into an uproar.

Surely it was the Fletcher boy.

That boy’s always had an odd sort of way about him.

He never really fit in, even when he was young.

Why myself, I’d caught the Fletcher boy killing his neighbor’s rabbits with his own bare hands about four summers ago. His parents had asked me to look over him for a few hours on a few different weekends that summer, so they could get away, and I had agreed.

Well, when I’d caught him killing the rabbits that one day, he’d given me the kind of look that would scare nearly any woman to her death. I just shook my head and told him it was wrong, and that he couldn’t do it, ever again. But I’ll never forget the look he gave me. He was sort of odd.

The Fletcher family was poor, and they couldn’t afford a lawyer. The boy had just turned eighteen, so he was going to face the charges as an adult; as a man.

He said he was innocent, which, like I said, I knew to be the truth. But the way I saw things; better him than me. He was young; he could be taught things and he could be rehabilitated and he would get out and then he would still have a life.

What the hell did the state want with me? I was nearly sixty five years old and about to retire. I was a man who’d kept to his own all his life. I had walked the straight line, I had worked hard at calculating insurance claims nearly every single day of my adult life, so what good would it do anyone for me to go to jail and then die there?

Hell, I’d only missed six and a half days of work in the past fifty years, and four of them had been because I had to attend to a dying relative. Only two and a half had been for me; and they were for the time that I got real sick from eating some pears that I suppose I should not have eaten.

The Fletcher boy was going to be tried for manslaughter and for hit and run. All in all, the state was going to try and recommend that he be put away in a real prison, and for as long as possible.

Margie seemed satisfied with the news, and slowly but surely, she and everyone else at work began to talk about other things. It was now nearing the end of summer, and this meant that the annual town beauty pageant was coming up that Saturday. Margie thought that this year’s crop of young women was just about the most beautiful girls she’d ever seen.

I was thinking about why someone as fat and ugly as Margie would enjoy a beauty pageant, when I noticed a strange man conversing with Margie at her desk. Her demeanor had suddenly become quite professional, and after a brief exchange, she pointed directly at me, and the strange man proceeded to walk towards me.

I suddenly began to panic, real bad. This is it. I thought to myself. I could feel my heart beating in many odd spots of my body, even in my thighs. A hot, uncomfortable sticky sweat formed in my loins and my breathing became distorted and everything looked like I was looking through a screen door. Even sounds seemed distorted. They had somehow caught me. I was done for.

The man was wearing a dark suit, either navy blue or black; I wasn’t able to pay very good attention. His shirt was very white. I remember thinking that his shirt was very clean and white. Starched. Bleached. White.

“Roger McDermitt?” The man asked.

I tried to speak, but it was difficult. Everyone in the office was watching me. Most of them had stopped working, and some of them had even stood up from their desks to take in the scene. Even Flo, the boss’s pretty young secretary, who had never so much as even acknowledged my presence in the three years she’d worked there, even Flo had stopped filing her sharp red nails, and was looking right at me.

“Yes. Sir. I. Am.” The words came out the same way that the last drops of catsup come out of the bottle if you shake it hard enough; slow and messy, but they came out nonetheless.

“Mr. Roger McDermitt, Do you in fact live at the address of 2023 Dovetail Lane, in Millard County?”

It took me an eternity to get the word out, but I nodded and said “Yes.” In all my life, I’d never felt so dizzy and sick to my stomach. It felt even worse than the time I’d eaten those bad pears.

The strange man then smiled, and my panic attack began to recede. I realized that if I were going to be under arrest, they would have sent an officer to arrest me. I felt my bowels move, and I wished for a quick escape to the bathroom.

“Mr. McDermitt, I represent one Timothy Fletcher in the hit and run manslaughter trial of one William Johnson. I’m here to ask you, on behalf of the boy’s parents, if you would appear in court as what we call a “character witness?”

I was completely blown away. They wanted me to testify on behalf of the boy?

“Me?” I asked.

“Well, Mr. McDermitt, you see, the defendant is being tried by the state justice department for some pretty serious crimes, and his parents seem to think that you, well, since you once looked after the boy a few summers ago, well, perhaps you could explain to a jury of his peers that he’s, um, misunderstood.”

I smiled, and I accepted a piece of paper that he had brought for me to fill out and then sign. I was to show up to the county courthouse in three weeks time. I took my copy of the paper, it was yellow, and I folded it into a quarter of its original size, and then placed it in my pocket.

I looked at the office calendar that they kept up on the wall, the one where you’re supposed to write your name when you need to request a day off. It is the same cheap calendar that the agency gives out to all of its new customers. I walked right over to the calendar and for the seventh time in my life, I asked for a day off from my job.

I felt my heart race a little; not in the way it had when there had been a knock on my door, but in a different way, like the way it did when I saw the pretty girl at Betty’s wiping down a table or smoothing her hair when she thought that nobody was looking.

***

I only had one suit, it was the suit that my parents had bought for me when I’d graduated from high school, and I had decided to apply for a job at the insurance firm.

I had worn the suit for that interview, and then at the various funerals I had to attend in the forty some years since. Despite its age, it was still in a nice condition, and as I walked up to the stand, in order to take my oath, I felt well respected by my peers.

All in all, I was only up there for about ten minutes. First the defense asked me my relationship to the boy, and then they asked me if I thought that he was mentally troubled. I had thought a lot about what I was going to say, ahead of time. I had even practiced it in front of the only mirror I own at home. I have to say, my delivery that day in court was impeccable. I even, at one point, made one of the jurors gasp in shock.

“It is my opinion that the Fletcher boy has always been troubled. I thought a lot about what I was going to say today, since I was asked here to speak on the boy’s behalf. But the more I thought about it, the more I could not forget about an incident that occurred nearly four years ago, when the boy was about fourteen years old. It was at this time that I had been asked to watch the boy on a Sunday, while his parents were out. I was in the front yard of his house, when I heard footsteps and the sounds of branches breaking all coming from across the creek that divides the Fletcher home from their neighbors’ house. I got up from my seat on the porch and went to investigate. What I saw next, well, it still gives me chills.”

At this point, I paused, not because I actually had to think, but because I wanted to give the next part of my speech some more weight.

As I paused, I couldn’t help it, I had to look at the Fletcher boy. We locked eyes. What I saw in his eyes was not so much hatred, as it was a cold acceptance of reality. I began to think about what it would feel like to be this boy; and I realized that I knew exactly what it felt like to be this boy, for I too had lived in this town, a town that assumed everything about who I was. And I too had never been able to escape from the reputation the town had branded on me. Suddenly, I didn’t feel sorry for the boy at all.

I went on to describe the way the Fletcher boy had killed those rabbits with his bare hands, and I told them about the look he gave me when I caught him. As I said this last part, everyone in the court strained their heads to get a good look at the boy.

After I had finished, the Fletcher boy’s lawyer said he had no more questions, and the attorney for the prosecution said he didn’t need anything from me, and I was excused.

***

The trial lasted for nearly two weeks, and my testimony had been given right in the middle. It was two days after the boy was convicted, the day after his sentencing, it was on this day that I finally decided to go into Betty’s and try some of her coffee.

I left the firm right at five and walked across the street. In my pockets were two quarters, and I slipped them into a newspaper box in front of the coffee shop. I took a newspaper out of the box, and wrapped it under my left arm.

I hesitated for a minute before opening the door, wondering if I should have combed my hair or anything like that, but it was too late, I’d already walked up to the door, and now I had to go on with it.

I walked inside, wearing a carefully practiced smile. Betty herself was standing behind the café counter holding a pot of coffee. She smiled at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, but wasn’t sure exactly who I was. I looked all around the shop and for the pretty young girl, but she wasn’t there. The place was deserted, except for Betty, the Cook, and now me.

I felt like closing my eyes, and dropping to the floor I was so disappointed. The pretty girl wasn’t there, and just like every other disappointment in my life, there wasn’t anything I was going to be able to do to make things better.

I felt like an idiot, and I didn’t know what to do. Betty smiled again and instructed me to sit anywhere I liked.

I walked to the far corner of the coffee shop to the same booth that I had seen the old man sit in the day I had watched the pretty girl clean the table after work.

I sat down and Betty brought me a mug and a menu. I told her I wasn’t hungry, but I accepted the coffee.

I really wanted to leave, but I sat there anyway, hoping that maybe the pretty girl was just on break. Finally, after about ten minutes of staring at the opposing wall, I looked down at the table and I saw the newspaper lying there.

I took a sip of black coffee from the time worn mug. The mug felt sort of soft in my hands, and I noticed that it was chipped in so many places that the chips almost seemed like they had been placed there on purpose, by the potter himself.

I had left the newspaper folded in half and face up on the table. It was the most important headline that day, so at any moment that I wanted to, I could look down, and read the headline.

It was written in a pretty large sized type, and the letters were bolder than many of the headlines I am used to seeing.

It was a simple headline; unremarkable in many ways, but not so if you were me. It read: “Young man gets twenty years for hit and run manslaughter.” I read it again, one more time, as though it were like the weather, and capable of abrupt change.

But regardless of how many times I read the headline, it did not change. And every time that I read the headline, I felt a powerful sort of rush. The rush was addictive, and very pleasant. It was the same kind of rush you sometimes get in my part of the country when you watch a brilliant sunset, at dusk.

Sheila felt like crying, but she resisted and put up a fight; she was not going to show him what he could perceive as weakness.  She felt dizzy and realized that the motion of the car was making her sick.

“Pull the car over.  Now!” she said.

“What? Are you crazy?”  Jeff removed his foot from the gas pedal, but the car was descending down a rather steep hill, so the car’s slight deceleration was not noticeable to Sheila, who was now making an effort to focus on her inhalations in order to prevent herself from vomiting in the car.

Jeff maintained eye contact with the road and ran his right hand over the soft leather of his brand new BMW’s steering wheel, the same soft, expensive leather that covered most of the interior of his new car.

Sheila broke the silence.  “How on earth could you say that?”

Jeff looked at his wife and felt a wave of anger.  He was angry with the gods that governed his fate.  He’d made it through adolescence; he’d graduated from high school with the nearly perfect grades required by his nearly perfect workaholic father.  He’d attended the nearly perfect second tier Ivy League alma mater of his father.  He’d met “the right kind of girl,” and he had waited until after graduating from law school and passing the Bar to propose to her and to marry her.  And then, after his first major promotion at the firm his father approved of, he had suddenly been punished for all of his hard work and follow through with a retarded daughter.

That’s right, he thought.  He had said it aloud and now he could say it to himself: His daughter was a fucking retard.  His daughter would look funny, speak funny, and everyone who ever meet her would notice within moments her clear cut mental deficiencies.

Jeff slammed his fist into the wheel and the car’s horn burped.  “All I’m saying is the truth, Sheila; I’m just calling out the three hundred pound gorilla that you and I have been spending months ignoring: our baby, she’s retarded.”  Jeff squinted and pretended to be seriously involved with the process of piloting the BMW.

Sheila turned her body around in her seat in order to directly face her husband.  His body language infuriated her—this was the man she had fallen for nearly seven years ago, and for him to think that after all these years she would mistake his squint for anything less than an attempt to avoid eye contact was insulting.

“You are the one who is acting like a…” She couldn’t say it.  She couldn’t use the word; the word had been removed from her vocabulary within weeks of the original earth-shattering ultra sound.

She had felt a crushing blow the second the doctor had stopped rubbing the humming little plastic piece over the smelly jelly on her belly.  The doctor had sighed before looking up from his clip board, and in that single moment, Sheila’s motherly intuition had informed her that something was wrong with her baby, and it was not something small.

Jeff had been out of the room, on an important work related call, and the doctor had had the audacity to step outside and tell him first, so that he could “let his wife know.”  The doctor was a coward and a sexist.  That evening, she discovered that while not a sexist, her husband was a coward.  From the moment that Jeff had found out that his baby was not going to be extending his Ivy League legacy, Jeff had become a part-time husband, throwing himself into golf and work.

Sheila swiveled back around in the seat and turned her face towards the passenger window to prevent Jeff from seeing her tears.

Jeff maneuvered his head in such a way so as to use the passenger side mirror to see Sheila’s face, and the sight of her tears dispelled his machismo and made him feel like shit.

“Sheila—I…I’m sorry,” he offered.

A strong, powerful silence took control of the car.  This was one of those arguments wherein the less that was said, the more powerfully one stated their position.

The silence was finally broken with a loud, ear piercing “WAAAAAAAH,” that came from the backseat.

“Wah” can be a surprisingly harsh word, given the fact that its last letter is a soft “H.”  It’s not a word that is listed in an English dictionary, yet almost every human being, regardless of the language they speak, can tell by the inflection and intonation of a human’s “Wah” that something is wrong, and that this wrong-thing must be resolved before anyone within earshot of the “Wah” will be able to think clearly.

The “Wah” coincided with Jeff and Sheila reaching their destination, where Shelia was able to remove Penny from the child safety seat in the back of the BMW in order to restore peace.  After a few moments of motherly attention, Penny was smiling and drooling per usual.

Penny was four months old now, and she still looked like a normal baby.  She was cuter than most children her age, and this was proven by the many compliments she would receive from strangers whenever Sheila took her to the park or to a grocery store.

But within years she was going to start looking different from other human babies because she had an extra twenty-first chromosome.  Unlike most things in life, you don’t want to have extra chromosomes, for in that case, more is less.

Jeff had parked his BMW in the Laudrey’s front driveway right next to the Laudrey’s own BMW.  The two cars looked like a matching set; both sleek and black and well maintained.  Only a discerning eye would be able to tell that Jeff’s model was less expensive, and therefore just a little bit less impressive.

***

Jeff, Sheila and Penny looked like the perfect new family as they stood in front of the Laudrey’s front door, waiting for someone to answer the doorbell.  But Jeff knew that the Laudrey’s knew that because of Penny, nothing was perfect, only imperfect and retarded.

Peter Laudrey opened the front door with more effort than necessary, and the result was that his already overly-animated personality hit a new level of cartoon-like proportions.  Peter was a massive animal of a man; he was six feet four inches tall, and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds.  You could tell that he had been very athletic and handsome about twenty years ago, but he had not treated his body very well, and now he looked bloated and puffy.

Peter feigned a hint of surprise as he surveyed the guests at his door, even though he and his wife, Julia, had been preparing for this late evening bar-b-que all day.  After a moment he gave Sheila a long, tight hug, and Jeff watched him closely to make sure that he didn’t do anything inappropriate with his hands.

Peter finally ended his bear hug and then, without asking, grabbed Penny from her stroller and spun her up and into the air by her shoulders.  He made noises like “Wheeee” and “Woooh” and didn’t stop until Penny turned red in the face and trumped his antics with a triumphant “Waaaaah.”  Peter did what many men do with crying children that don’t belong to them—he handed Penny back to her mother in one swift and urgent motion.

“Wow, it’s been years since my children were at the age where crying out loud was acceptable,” Peter said.  “How fun!  Please, Come in, come in!”

Sheila gave Jeff an “I told you so” look, and Jeff caught the meaning of the look, but couldn’t tell which subject she was referring to.

As the couple entered the Laudrey’s three-story suburban castle of perfection, Jeff realized that he still had many years of hard work ahead of him at the firm before he would be able to afford a similar status symbol.

Julia called out “Hello” from the kitchen, and Peter apologized on her behalf for not coming out to say hello in person.  She was still preparing dinner, and this was good news for Jeff who cared a lot more about eating than he did about entering into an inane series of courtesies with Julia.

“Can I fix you a drink?”  Peter placed a father-like hand on Jeff’s shoulder.

Jeff wanted to go home.  He didn’t like Peter.  Peter drank to excess.  Peter womanized.  Peter was not a very honest person, or a lawyer for that matter.  But Peter was Jeff’s boss, and without Peter, Jeff would still be in debt and working for city hall.

“Sure.” Jeff said.

Peter instructed Sheila to take Penny into the kitchen so that Julia could ogle her.  Jeff didn’t like the way that Peter gave orders to his wife, but he kept his cool and smiled at Sheila as she turned around to head into the kitchen.

***

The two men entered Peter’s office where Jeff became annoyed by the ostentatious display of awards and expensive memorabilia that permeated the interior of the room.

Peter turned his back to Jeff in order to procure their drinks.  “You see, Jeffery, you can’t just go out to a supermarket and buy this sort of liquor.  It has to be shipped here, directly from Scotland, and there is an actual limit to the number of liters you are allowed to import each year.  It’s not just expensive, and of the highest quality, but it’s also very hard to procure.”  Peter turned around and offered Jeff a full glass of the light gold liquid.

Jeff wanted to have some ice with his scotch, but he knew better than to ask Peter for any.  The last time he had requested ice in his scotch, Peter had given him a fifteen minute lecture on how to properly enjoy scotch—apparently there were rules to this sort of thing.

Get the right G.P.A. to get into the right college.  Get a high enough score on your LSAT’s to get into the right law school.  Network with the right legal exec’s to land the post law-school job of your dream.  Don’t drink expensive scotch with ice.  Follow these rules and you’ll wind up happy and without retarded children.

Peter slid into his plush office chair and stared at the vacant seat that faced him from across his immaculately well-kept mahogany desk.  Jeff was still standing, staring at his tumbler of scotch and stuck in a mental reverie, so Peter cleared his throat and then motioned with his hand for Jeff to take a seat.  Jeff complied without a word.

“Jeffery, I know we’re here as friends, and it’s the weekend, but I feel the need to let you know that…well, it’s just that your work, your work at the office, as of late, well, it’s been, lacking, and as a friend—not as a boss, mind you—but as a friend, I wanted to let you know that if you need any time off, to, well, you know, to adjust to, to things, well, that would be fine with all of us.”

“Things…?”  Jeff allowed his repetition of this word to spread itself along the interior of the office and enjoyed the way it floated out of his mouth and then drifted across Peter’s expensive desk.

Peter waited for Jeff to finish his sentence, but Jeff did not comply.  Instead, he took another sip of his scotch.

Peter couldn’t stand the silence.  “I mean, Jeffery, you know, it’s not…well, I don’t really know how to say this, I mean our darling Lisa, she’s off at the University, and Bobby is just about to finish his doctorate, so, clearly, I haven’t had to deal with what you’re going through, I mean, what you’re going to go through…”

Peter was an excellent lawyer.  This meant that he could wield the English language with the same deft as a well trained chef wields his cutlery, but this last sentence of his had been poorly worded, and this greatly upset Jeff.

“Going to go through?”  Jeff was surprised with himself, for he was cognizant of the fact that he was now employing the same technique that Sheila used with him when she wanted to draw him into a fight: he was repeating the other person’s statements in the form of a question, without offering anything new to the debate.

Peter bought in.  “Well, I mean, Penny…who is just downright lovely, I mean, a truly beautiful young daughter you have there, but, well, you know that it’s going to be tough to raise her, I mean, tougher than it is for most parents.”

Jeff had worked hard on “keeping his cool” his entire life.  He had spent countless hours of his life training himself in the finely cultivated art of deferring your own sense of justice to a “respect for elders” in order to stay in said elders’ good graces, and this skill had procured for Jeff many of the finer things in life.

Jeff squinted and pretended to study his scotch glass.  He took an outrageously large gulp of the liquid and felt the thin hot fluid coat the inside of his mouth.  He swirled the gulp around in his mouth and then swallowed it like a pill.  He tried to monitor the burning sensation as the scotch traveled down his throat and into his stomach.  When the burning sensation had reached its peak, he took the glass and threw it as hard as he could about four feet to the right of Peter’s head.

The glass connected with Peter’s expensively framed Bar certificate and sent the frame crashing to the floor.  Jeff made sure to wait for the sounds of glass shards to fully quell and then looked Peter in his eyes and said, “You go to hell.  You don’t understand anything.  Fuck you.”

Peter’s eyes were wide, but he wasn’t looking at Jeff, he was looking behind Jeff, at the doorway.

Jeff turned around in his chair to look at the doorway.  Julia and Sheila were standing there, holding their hands over their mouths and staring at Jeff with disbelief.

“I’ll get Penny.”  Sheila turned around and quickly maneuvered her way back to the kitchen.

Julia strode past Jeff to the corner of the office where she and Peter began to fuss over the broken shards.  The back of Peter’s neck was bright red, and Jeff knew that his red skin was a sign of anger, not shame.

Jeff arose and left the office and met Sheila in the hallway.  Sheila’s eyes were a portrait of anger and resentment.

Jeff ignored Sheila and headed out the front door of the house.  Sheila, clutching Penny’s stroller, followed him and quietly closed the front door behind her.  When she reached the car, Jeff had already strapped himself into his seat and started the engine.

Sheila strapped Penny into her child safety seat, and then got into the front passenger seat.  Before she could buckle up, Jeff peeled the car out of the driveway, gunning the engine as loudly as he could.

The car ride home lasted nearly twenty-five minutes and was devoid of any conversation.  The radio was never turned on; Sheila breathed as quietly as she could, Penny never so much as stirred in her seat, and Jeff studied the road.

***

Upon parking the car in the garage, Jeff ejected himself from the car and left Sheila to tend to Penny.  A few minutes later, Sheila entered the kitchen that was annexed to the garage, holding Penny close to her chest.  Jeff had left an open bottle of scotch on the counter, and a few errant cubes of ice were lying next to it, slowly melting and creating a puddle on the counter’s tiles that threatened to colonize the floor.

Sheila shook her head and went upstairs to prepare Penny for bed.  After she had successfully put Penny to bed, she went into the master bedroom where she found Jeff reading a book in bed, as though it were just another normal evening in their normal lives.

Jeff didn’t lift his eyes from the book, so Sheila walked to the armoire where she began to undress.  After changing into some loose jogging shorts and an oversized t-shirt, she spun around and pointed her finger at Jeff, who she knew was watching her out of the corner of his eyes; she had been in the room for more than five minutes, and she had not heard him turn a single page in the book.

“What on EARTH were you thinking?”  Sheila asked.

“What was I THINKING?  I was thinking that no one on Earth gets to talk to me about my personal, my family business. THAT is what I was THINKING!”

“So what?  He asked you about family business and you decided to throw a fucking glass at his head?” Sheila screamed.

“No.  He asked about Penny!”

“So let me get this straight.  He asked you about our daughter, and you decided to quit your job, on the spot, just like that?” Sheila spoke deliberately in order to circumvent Jeff from accusing her of “being emotional.”

“Yes.”  Every iota of Jeff’s affect produced the human expression known as smug.

“You are a total, selfish asshole.  Your daughter has Down’s Syndrome and it hurts your pathetic ego.  Only an arrogant and conceited asshole would be humiliated by the fact that his child has Down’s Syndrome.  Only a pathetic, ego-maniacal asshole would attach such great importance to the mental health of his child.”  Sheila climbed onto the opposite side of their King sized bed and continued, “You disgust me, Jeff.  Peter is a total asshole, we both know this, but, and I mean BUT—he is still the man who literally pays you so you can take care of your family, and tonight—tonight, Jeff, tonight you sacrificed your family for your ego.  I’m ashamed to be a part of your family.”  She turned off her bedside lamp and pulled the sheets around her, creating a wall of silk and linen between herself and her husband.

Jeff closed his book, got out of the bed, and turned off his own bedside lamp before exiting the room.  He was out of the room and heading downstairs, where he intended to pour himself some more scotch, when he heard a faint noise coming from Penny’s room.

He peered into the partially open doorway of her room.  Penny was lying in her crib, and she was illuminated by a soft, pale light from her nightlight.  She looked kind, loving, and full of life.

He pushed her door open and walked over to the crib.  He looked into the crib and his beautiful daughter made eye contact with him.  Her expression was one of love and satisfaction.  She was quietly cooing and her breathing was heart wrenchingly soft, precious, and fragile.  He felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to protect her from every harm of the world—which now included himself.

He began to weep.  He replayed that day’s events in his mind, beginning with the fight with Sheila in the car on the way to the Laudrey’s and ending with the image of Peter and Julia huddled over a pile of broken glass.  Jeff blushed; he was no longer just a man, trying to claim a stake in this world.  He was now a father, and certain priorities had to be readjusted accordingly.

He picked Penny up and kissed each of her soft, fragile cheeks.  His tears made her skin wet, so he dried them off with his thumb.  “I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry, Penny.”

Penny closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep in his arms. Peter gently placed her back into her crib, tucking her under a soft fleece blanket that featured the logo of his alma mater.

“I declare here and now, from this moment on, to change things.  I am proud of you, Penny.  And I love you, Penny!”

At the sound of her name, Penny reopened her eyes and smiled at her father.  She then opened her mouth with a yawn and soothed his mind with the only word she knew: “Wah.”

The first thing I noticed upon my entry into the preacher’s apartment was the single most wretchedly suffocating stench of cat urine that I have ever encountered.

The second thing I noticed was the preacher himself, sitting in a wheelchair and smiling.  I didn’t know a whole lot about the preacher.  Actually, I knew four things about the preacher.  I knew that he was an ordained Methodist preacher; I knew that he had lost the ability to walk (but I did not know how); I knew that his wife had a malignant brain tumor; and I knew that my friend was screwing his wife behind his back.

The preacher seemed like a really nice guy, which made me feel extra bad about the fact that for months on end now, my friend had been taking his wife to cheap motel rooms in the seediest sections of town in order to screw her cancer-ridden brains out.

The preacher’s wife had recently flown to Philadelphia to seek medical attention in a last chance effort to rid her of the malignant tumor.  The preacher had finally grown tired of the separation, and booked a flight to Philadelphia to comfort his wife.

My role in the operation was simple.  My friend was dirt broke, and loved the preacher’s wife, so he had agreed to help her paraplegic husband move out of their decrepit apartment, and to give him a ride to the airport.  My friend had no car, so he had enlisted me to drive the preacher to the airport.

Prior to my arrival at the preacher’s apartment, my understanding was that the preacher had already packed up as many of his belongings as he could manage to do from his wheelchair, and all that was supposedly left for me to do was to put his bags, his wheelchair, and his two sedated cats into my trunk, and then to drive him to the airport.

The preacher’s apartment was intolerably dirty.  Flakes of dried paint seemed to float about in the air like snowflakes, and the carpet was stained with cat piss, dried catsup, and soy sauce and they combined to create a disorienting pattern that resembled art from the abstract expressionism movement.  But the aesthetic dilapidation of the apartment was not nearly as unnerving as my visceral reaction to the stench of cat urine.

Even in some parallel universe wherein the free market had dictated a profit to be made from producing and bottling cat urine, I somehow doubt that any sort of cat urine factory could have manufactured a smell as powerful as the scent of the preacher’s apartment.

My best theory in regards to how the preacher’s apartment could smell so awful was that it was due to a perfect combination of the preacher’s inability to raise himself out of a wheelchair to do any rudimentary housekeeping, the fact that the apartment was air tight with nary a window opened, and the fact that the apartment was barely large enough to fit one human being, let alone two adults and two cats.

As my nostrils flared from the assault of the ammonia odor, I looked around the apartment and was surprised to see two cats darting around the apartment, un-sedated and unpacked.  These two animals seemed to be playing a game that involved a dried-out cat turd and a long string of used dental floss.

I realized then and there that I had been deceived by my friend; I had not just been summoned to drive the preacher and his two drugged cats to the airport, I had unwillingly been enlisted to help prepare the two cats for airline travel.

Another thing that I do not like about most pet cats is the fact that they are fiercely independent, and I therefore see no point in attempting to domesticate them.  It has always seemed quite apt to me that cats are relatives of the mighty lion, and they therefore have no interest in being ruled by any other animal in our kingdom, and this includes us human folk.

The preacher’s two cats were no exception to this feline stereotype of mine.  The preacher pointed at one of the cats—the black one—and he called it some name that I do not remember.  The preacher grinned and said, “He’s going to be the more difficult one to drug.”  I decided then and there to drug that cat first, because I’ve always been a big fan of frontloading hard work.

I could tell by the preacher’s instruction that he assumed that my friend had told me that I was going to be helping the preacher to drug his two cats.  Like I said, the preacher seemed like a really nice guy, so I didn’t have it in me to tell him what I thought about cats, or the idea of having to do anything interactive with either of his cats.

Breathing heavily through my mouth, I approached the task of holding the cat down with the same will power that I use to convince myself to wake up on time for work each morning.

Despite my dislike for cats, I appreciate all living things, and I don’t have a cruel bone in my body.  This trait of mine made it quite hard for me to get into the idea of attempting to pin a cat in place in order for someone else to inject it in the neck with a man-made sedative.

Glancing at my wrist watch, I realized that the three of us had less than half an hour to put down the two cats, pack them in their bags, and get the preacher to the airport in order for him to make his flight.

The black cat squirmed and wriggled with great force as I attempted to hold it in place.  It hissed and moaned and threw its claws at me, and even though I think it’s unnatural and somewhat cruel to ‘de-claw’ a cat, I was okay with the idea of ‘de-clawing’ after the damn thing drew blood from my left wrist as my friend successfully squeezed the syringe into the cat’s neck.

The preacher took his thick glasses from his face and wiped them in his shirt, but the effort did very little to remove the thick crusty film that seemed to cover the lenses.  I noticed that without his glasses on, he looked a lot younger.  The preacher caught me staring at him, and he made a face that conveyed to me that he had felt some sort of intense, empathetic moment of despair with his cat.

I wanted to explain to the preacher that this was no fun for me either, so I held up my bleeding wrist and asked the preacher if he had any paper towels.

“Oh, man, that’s a zinger!” he exclaimed.  “There might be some towels in the kitchen.”

I walked into the kitchen and was assaulted by a new odor; the mixture of cat urine, cat feces from an over-filled litter box, and the not-so-faint odor of six trash bags full of rotting food.  I doubled over from the sickening, gaseous stench, and I forgot all about my quest for paper towels as I quickly rushed out of the kitchen to return to the living room.

The second cat, the so-called “friendlier one,” was smaller than the black cat.  It was mostly white, but it also had some odd splotches of orange hair mixed in.  This cat was thinner than the other one, with well defined ribs.  It made me wonder if the other cat was eating its portion of their shared meals.  The “friendly cat” was now hiding underneath a plush armchair in the far corner of the living room, hissing at my friend, who was bent over on the floor, making odd noises and calling for the “kitty” to come out and play.

Another reason I think that cats make for lousy pets is that they are far from stupid, which means that they cannot be trained very well.  I don’t think that cats cannot learn their own name, nor do I think that they are incapable of following directions and taking orders.  I think that they actually understand all of these things, and that they are smart enough to realize that if they don’t let on to us humans of their cognizance, then they won’t lose any of their autonomy, and they won’t end up doing stupid tricks for our amusement, like most dogs do.

My friend remained in the prone position, calling out to the second kitty.  I turned my attention to the black cat, which had obviously been overpowered by the sedatives, for he had curled himself up on a spot not too far from the preacher’s wheelchair to take a nap.  The preacher noticed my appreciation for the sleeping cat, and smiled at me.

“So, uh, you’re a preacher?”  I figured that this was a good time for small talk, for small talk could perhaps enable me to build up enough rapport with the preacher to ask him a few of the burning questions in my mind; namely: if you are moving out of the apartment, for good, then why is the place a total mess, why do you not have any boxes packed, and why is the room still full of furniture?

“Oh yes I am, indeed!” He replied.  “I graduated from seminary school nearly five years ago.”  His smile was authentic, but it also seemed dull and unintelligent.  He seemed like the kind of guy that a woman could easily cuckold.  This made me feel even worse for him.

“Well, that’s cool.  Where do you, um, like, preach?”  I had never in my life been to a church, and I had absolutely no clue what a preacher really did.  I figured that they probably preached, which is a verb that means to deliver, advocate, or conduct a sermon.  I wasn’t even sure what the difference was between a priest and a preacher.  I only knew that my friend had referred to him as a preacher, and not a priest.

“Oh, I don’t actually work as a preacher.  I just got the degree.  When Eleanor and I were married, I was working as a video store manager.  But then when God took away the use of my legs, I figured that I would devote my life to God.  So we moved to Houston, where I got the seminary degree.  But then we moved up here to Portland because Eleanor was offered a job that could support the two of us.  After we moved here, I applied to a few church placement programs, but they didn’t hire me.”  He told stories like Forrest Gump; straightforward, without a sense of irony, and they always ended with a smile and a nod of the head.

While the preacher had turned to face me and answer my question, my friend had managed to grab the second cat by its paws and forcibly drag it along the rug and out from underneath the armchair.  The cat had scowled and shrieked during this last move, but the preacher had failed to notice, and now my friend was pressing the cat’s left ear into the ground, quite hard, and forcing the syringe into its neck.  I felt pretty bad at the blatant animal abuse, but I was also happy to see that the task had been successfully completed without my help.

Now that the two cats had been successfully sedated, my friend and I had to pick them up and put them in their “traveler’s bag” for the trip on the airplane.  I felt pretty bad about tossing two sleeping mammals into a black duffel bag with a few air holes.

I began to hum out loud—which is what I do whenever I’m nervous—and I think my nervousness was arising from the fact that I was privy to the knowledge that my own friend had been screwing this kind preacher’s wife behind his back.  I mean, the poor guy was a paraplegic who had devoted his life to God, and so my sense of guilt began to fester.

I noticed that my forehead was beginning to ache, and I was starting to feel dizzy, and whether or not these were symptoms of my guilt, or symptoms of the choking aroma of cat urine, I couldn’t be sure.  All I knew was that I needed to get the hell out of that house.

I stopped humming and said, “Okay, well, the cats are packed, and your plane leaves really soon…so…everyone ready to go?”  I was trying to sound casual, but I think the tone of my voice was clear: I was ready to leave, and I wanted to leave now.

“Oh, gosh,” the preacher said, “I guess we just need to grab my two bags from the back room, and then get everything into your car!”

Without a word my friend jogged into the back room and returned with two gigantic duffel bags that were long enough to carry a set of skis.  They looked extremely heavy, and they seemed to be larger than my trunk.

My sense of dizziness returned.  There was simply no way that the three of us, those two bags, the wheelchair, and the two cats were going to fit in my two-door Hyundai.  I shot my friend a look that tried to communicate, “Hate is a strong word, and I think that I may hate you after this.”

My friend pretended not to notice my look, and instead he asked me for the keys to my car.  Feeling utterly defeated at this point, I tossed him my keys, and I watched him lumber towards the front door with the two gigantic duffel bags.

I looked back at the preacher, in order to suggest that he grab “the cat bag” and we follow my friend.

But before I could speak, the preacher looked me in my eyes, and with a sense of candid kindness said, “Hey, I really want to thank you for all of your help.  I’ve never met you before and you took the time out of your life to help a total stranger during a time of crisis.  You are obviously a good person, and you have made my life easier through the kindness of your actions.  I have no money to offer you for your time and trouble, but I’d like to offer you anything from my home that I am not taking with me to Philadelphia.”

“Oh, no, really, I am fine, I am just…” I was trying to politely refuse his offer, but just as I had begun to stammer a denial, I noticed a beautiful painting hanging in the corner of the apartment.  The painting was a barren tree, set against a pale yellow sunset.  The painting was simple and unremarkable, and those very traits made the painting remarkable to me.

The preacher smiled, and turned his chair around to face the painting.  “Do you like that painting?” he asked.  “I got it at a garage sale, the same day I found out that Eleanor was screwing some asshole behind my crippled back.”  The painting suddenly became even more remarkable to me.

The preacher did not turn back around to face me, and continued to stare at the painting.  “I never did find out who the asshole is, but I know for a fact that Eleanor was screwing him up until her very last day here in Portland, and I know for a fact that he is someone I’ve met, because when I confronted her about it, and asked her who it was, she refused to tell me, which she would only do if I knew the asshole.”

I felt like the preacher wanted me to respond to his sermon, so I asked him, “So do you want to know who is screwing your wife, or do you simply wish to leave town, and leave it all behind you?”

The preacher wheeled himself over to the painting, and removed it from the wall.  He then spun around and wheeled his way over to me, and handed me the painting.  Our eyes locked for the third time that evening, only now, his expression was not one of candor, or kindness, nor one of dull, unintelligence.  Forrest Gump had turned into Dirty Harry.

“You know him?” he asked.

Before I could answer, the front door flew open, and my friend came back into the house.  The preacher’s face reverted back to a portrait of innocence, and he smiled at my friend.  “Did you get the bags in the car?”

My friend returned the smile, “Yep! And we still got plenty of room for you, the wheelchair, and the cats!”  He then grabbed the bag full of cats, and once again left out through the front door.

The preacher made no delay in returning to our conversation.  “It matters not if I know who the man is.  It only matters to me that if Eleanor survives this bout with cancer, that she either asks me for a divorce, or that she promises never to commit adultery again.  I am not a fool.  I understand that when the two of us agreed to stay together in sickness and in health, that the thought of lower paralysis never really entered her mind.  While I am still a man, genetically, physically, I can no longer perform one of my manly roles in the context of a marriage, and this is probably very difficult for Eleanor to bear.  But I expect someone who loves me to be honest, and I therefore remain angered by the fact that she waited until I confronted her to admit her infidelity.”

I nodded in agreement, and in an attempt to change the subject, I thanked the preacher for the “interesting” painting.

A smile returned to his face.  “Don’t mention it,” he said. “Like I said, you are a good person, and you deserve something in return for your help.  It was especially kind of you to help out with the cats, given your obvious distaste for them.”

Before I had time to open my mouth and compose a lie about how I really liked cats, and about how his impression could not have been further from the truth, the door reopened, and my friend motioned for the two of us to follow him back to the car.

***

It took about five minutes for us to lift the preacher’s limp body out of the chair and to fix him into place in the front seat of my car, and then it took another ten minutes to figure out how to successfully fold up his chair and maneuver it like a Tetris block into the back of the car.  Somehow, though, we did manage to fit everything in my car, and as I turned on the car, I noticed that we were leaving the house with just barely enough time to get the preacher and his bags to the airport curb, where I was informed that some airline professional would meet him in order to assist him to his flight.

I drove us as quickly as I could to the airport, making sure to take the turns slowly, just to be sure that the cats weren’t moving around and hitting each other in their duffel bag.  Unfortunately for me, my friend is a total idiot, and he had mistakenly only given half the recommended dose to each of the cats, and so while they were groggy, they were not fully unconscious, and both of them managed to piss all over the bag, which in turn soaked into the left rear car seat.

After we dumped the preacher and his bags at the curb, my friend moved back into the front seat and lit a cigarette.  I was surprised to discover that I did, indeed, prefer the stench of his second hand tobacco smoke to the poignant odor of cat urine.

As we drove, my friend thanked me several times for all of my help.  I told him about the gift of the painting, but I left out the conversation about infidelity.  My friend had no morals and could not have cared any less about the preacher or the preacher’s feelings.  All he cared about was his love for Eleanor, smoking cigarettes, and having a good time in life.

I dropped my friend off at his apartment, and I could barely make eye contact with him as he thanked me one more time, and said goodnight.  As I drove home, alone for the first time that evening, I noticed that my hands were trembling.

I was upset by the fact that I was friends with the kind of person who could screw the cancer-ridden wife of a paraplegic preacher.  I was further pissed off that this same friend could then quite duplicitously help said preacher move across the country to be with his sick wife.  But most of all, I was irate at the seemingly unfair fact that it was I, and not my friend, who had been punished during this operation with the powerful, lingering stench of cat urine in my car.

Years later, I can now find some humorous elements in this story when I tell it, and this is mostly due to the facts that Eleanor survived her bout with cancer, the Preacher eventually filed for a divorce, and my friend ended up renewing his love affair with the Eleanor, therein proving some sort of genuine affection for the woman, which somehow helps me to validate his end of the adultery.

But the one thing that amazes me the most about this ordeal is that while those three people have moved on completely, and have no scars to bear, I, the innocent bystander who was simply asked to drive some preacher to an airport, I still own that same, shitty Hyundai, and no matter how many times I have tried, I cannot rid the car of the pungent, sickening scent of cat urine.  But I still can’t say that I hate cats.