By Damien Bell
Trip pulled off of Queen Street, up the thin littered road to his new home. Raymond had told him he could set up there and sort out a new way to go on. In fact Raymond had been partially to blame for this. He’d made the decision so much easier. Trip was not aware of the subtle changes that his body had noticed. The hill he drove up was the highest elevation in the valley town of Huntsville Alabama. Everything else in the small city was low, nestled safely in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. This road led up an isolated hill that rose like a sore from where someone had kicked it. He parked his white corolla by the blue building with a cardboard sign in the window that read ’check in/ Free Cable/Free AC.’
Trip tried to pry his fingers off the wheel, the knuckles of his right hand were rusted door henge’s that threatened to snap if pushed too hard. His hand had gotten worse in the last two days, not better, and he realized that free medical care was no longer an option. One more bridge burned. What if they were broken? The words of Sergeant Major Zinni replayed in his head- “If anyone had anything to help you it was a long time ago, but it’s now.”
Raymond. ‘Raymond was to blame for this‘, Trip decided as he put down his green duffel bad and opened his room with a hole punched keycard, ’and this room, it smells like shit.’
The carpet of the tiny room was a greenish-gray and looked like it had been another color in another time. One sink- stained yellow, one wooden chest of drawers with one T.V. and one microwave stacked on top. Trip dropped onto his bed.
“Hey buddy, I thought you’d puss out for sure.” Raymond stood in the door wearing golfing pants, a faded pink Izod shirt and a tan derby hat. “You shouldn’t leave your door open around here, there’s a lot’a weirdo’s.”
“This place is a shithole.” Trip responded without even lifting his head.
“No, no this place is gold, absolutely no paper whatsoever. Check it out, free cable, free AC.” Raymond tapped the sid of the television and something in it rattled and dropped.
“This place is a shithole.” Trip pushed himself up to a sitting position being careful not to use his right hand. “Who fuck’in dressed you?”
“It’s the new uniform. I’m a professional golfer. A pro-fesh-on-al ball skriker as they’d say here in the South.”
“Well that’s cute.” Trip dug into his duffel bad and pulled out a dark liquor bottle. “Almost empty, wonder when they’ll stop pay’in me.” Trip had already pulled his modest bank account at an ATM on base before he’d left. Things like ATM’s and check cards could be tracked. It’s much better to have cash.
“Really Trip, this’s the only time I’ve ever been impressed by anything you’ve ever done.”
“Well that’s sweet.” Trip tipped the last of his bottle down. “But it’s fucking stupid. I don’t have any money, I’m still in Alabama, and I think I gotta fucking boxer’s fracture or something.”
“Nothing’s fucked man, everything’s gold. No one can trace you to here, Sanji don’t care who sleeps here as long as he get’s his eighteen bucks a night. So one, you gotta place to live, and with cable and AC for God’s sake! And as far as getting outta Alabama goes- Why bother? The first place they’re gonna look for you is out of state. They’re gonna go to Idaho or whatever bumfuck state you’re from and look there. It doesn’t matter what state you’re in. You’re a federal matter now, so anywhere you go you’re…”
“Stop, stop, stop.” Trip pleaded tiredly. Raymond’s mention of Idaho made him realize that the Army was going to knock on his parents door and tell them everything. “What am I gonna do for money?”
“I told you, I’ma Pro-Fesh-on-Al Bawl Skriker now. You don’t have to worry about’a thing. An’everything with Uncle Sam, it’s all just paper. Stacks and stacks of paper. Don’t let a little bad paper work kick your ass.”
Roxanne brushed her long auburn hair in front of the she stained mirror. It was getting easier to stand in front of a mirror. It was getting easier to walk out of her room and go to a real job. Her mouth, her eyes, legs, breast, everything was becoming hers again, slowly as the past dripped away bit by bit. Roxy never expected things to be easy in her life, because her life was never easy, but she’d never imagined things getting so much worse. In an instant, her life had become a swirling vortex of compromise beyond anything she thought she’d been capable of. It had been one month on her shaky ‘real world’ legs and things were beginning to fall into a predictable pattern of normalness that she hadn’t known before. Even before her mother had died. The month following her mother’s death felt like it was all one memory. One month condensed into one loud, abrasive memory like a bad car wreck. Only a few of the really stunning details remaind trapped in the part of her mind that would replay them. The others quieted. Their fierce voices softened until she could only hear them in her sleep, or when she thought of God.
Roxy was beginning to appreciate her one room home at the Queens Street Lodge. It was her’s. She’d gotten the smell out of the carpet and had managed to bleach the filth-yellow stain in her shower and sink to a sort of off-white. She even bought some of her own covers for the bed, and the small fridge by the T.V. had milk and juice in it. Roxy had befriended the heavy set black girl across the street, so it felt sort of like she had a neighbor in a real neighborhood. Best of all was her window garden. She’d bought a half dozen plants and put them in the window to get light. It kept her sane to nurture her garden and watch it grow. One was a tomato vine. She’d taken the white wire shelf out of her fridge and stuck it in the window so that the little vines could weave themselves through it.
Roxy remembered a similar garden that her mother had. She remembered her mother’s boyfriend Clint stumbling in one night and plucking all of the marble sized tomatoes and stuffing them in his mouth all at once before spitting them out and cackling some non-sense about the food pyramid. “Don’t forgit’yer veggies.”
A hard quiver rolled up her spine and filed her lungs with frost. How could her mother have kept him in the house? Inside Roxy know that it was because her mother was just as scared of Clint as she herself was, but it was easier to feel angry. She hadn’t been the one to find her mother at the bottom of a stairwell. It had been Clint. He was so quick to take over, telling Roxanne not to worry about a place to stay, that he would keep up the rent and they wouldn’t have to move. No more than a two weeks after the funeral Clint changed his mind and made it clear that Roxy would have to earn her keep. At first she didn’t understand when Clint told her that he was going to bring someone over to meet her. He gave her a broken white pill and told her it would take the edge off. It did. It filled her with a warm feeling of love that sort of shined on to the apartment and Clint and on Clint’s friend. She slept with his friend and when she asked what had happened the next morning Clint only responded with “you earned your keep.” Her head pounded and she couldn’t think straight from the after effects of the pill. Still her rage was stronger than her physical pain. Clint didn’t move from the couch as she tore the apartment apart but when she came after him she was met by a hard blow to the face and a thick brown work boot pinned her neck to the floor.
Clint drew a long blueing revolver and pushed the barrel against her temple. He spike quietly but not gently.
“I said you are going to earn your keep.”
Roxy could see her auburn hair matted in front of her. The shag carpet aht her head was pinned to. The metallic taste of blood. Clints arm was shaking the way it did sometimes. Roxy pictured his jittering arm causing the gun to go off and scatter her skull across the apartment.
“Now take this,” Clint commanded as he bent over and pushed another white pill in her mouth. “I’ll be having guest tonight. It’ll take the edge off.”
“Two under par, not bad not bad.” Raymond Munch had come to be known as the resident loony of the ShackQ bar and grill. The rustic bar was the local watering hole for redneck poolsharks, rowdy soldier’s, old sports junkies, a cheap screw, and one loony pale, thin man of maybe twenty-two. He came every day ,from evening to close, decked out entirely in golf attire and pumped a seemingly endless supply of quarters into the the one arcade in the bar (PGA Tour2000).
The bartender kicked the little man out one day with the polite suggestion to ‘get his ass to a doctor.’ After closing the bartender cursed himself when he found he was 120 dollars richer from a game that no one else seemed to like at all. He cursed himself to sleep and all day the next day until, like clock work, the little man showed up with another pocket full of quarters and went right back to work. The bartender offered an apology but every time he spoke he only got an obscure outburst like ‘Two par! Two par!’ or a long enthusiastic ‘fouuuuuuuuur!’ After that he decided the little man was best left to his own devices, pumping rolls of quarters into the machine all night long.
“Two under par, not bad.” Raymond said to himself and dropped another fifty cents into the machine.
“Pardon me Mr. Woods” A burly man with a long white beard said as he bumped past Raymond to the ATM next to the arcade.
Raymond said nothing, but followed the man from the corners of his eyes. The bearded man slid his card through, punched some numbers, took his money and went back to the pool tables waving crisp bills in the air and yelling for a rematch. Moving like a ghost, Raymond to the same position in front of the ATM that he’d had at the arcade. The screen read- THANK YOU. HAVE A NICE DAY- in bright green letters. Raymond waited exactly thirty seconds for the screen to change to -WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE ANOTHER TRANSACTION?-
“You bet your ass I would.” Raymond said as he punched in MAKE WITHDRAWAL The withdrawal limit is $400. “No need to be greedy. I’ll just take $400.” Raymond had a sliding scale system for all withdrawals, done proportionate to size of the account and his personal judgment of the person he robbed. “First hole, pure gold.” Raymond slipped back to his arcade. He’d run out of time on the last hole and his computer opponent had taken a considerable lead. Life’s tough like that sometimes.
“Life’s tough sometimes.” Patricia voiced slowly. It was hard for her to say anything at all to the story Roxy had told her about her month with Clint.
Of course Roxy couldn’t tell all of it. She’d hardly spoken more than a few words of it and she already felt like she’d said too much.
Patricia wished she could say something to comfort Roxanne. Sympathy was a foreign and strange emotion to her.
“Anyways” Roxy said as she wiped the hair out of her face and tried to smile. “I love you hat.”
Patricia smiled and bright teeth contrasted sharply again her black skin. She wore an oversized truckers hat that said ‘WHITE TRASH’ across the head. “Thought you might.” Patricia split open a cigar, dumped the tobacco in the trash and began to pack the brown leaf wrapping with dark green marijuana buds.
“I saw him again.” Roxy said distantly. “I saw him at the bar down the hill. What is it? The Shack? I saw his truck outside of it.”
“He didn’t see you though, what’re you worried about?” Trish pumped the thick wet blunt. The smoke got caught in the light that pushed it’s way through the drawn curtains.
“He’s still here, I thought he’d left for good but he’s still here. I hoped he died.” Quick sobs shot from Roxy as she tried to remain composed. Patricia handed the blunt to Roxy. “No Trish.”
Patricia felt helpless to console her friend. It was the best she knew to do. “Come’on then Rox. It’ll take the edge off and..”
“Don’t say that!” Roxy jumped up and her chair went back into the wall. “Please don’t say that!” Roxy paced the dark smoke filled room. The voices that had quieted rose again. They scattered around like shotgun pellets ricocheting in a trash can. Cacophonous, loud. Sharp. Roxy dropped on the bed, pulled a pillow between her face and knees and sobbed into it.
Patricia reluctantly put an arm on her, and then held her. “Ah’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Patricia was not much for consoling words, though she wished she was. She rubbed Roxy’s back and Roxy seemed to calm. Patricia felt more comfortable touching her. She’d never really held anyone in her life. She seldom even left her room. The men who came to her to buy were never interested in anything beyond a bag. Patricia’s statue was that of a football players. She was larger than most me and her bulldog face with it’s sagged cheeks and deep set eyes didn’t make up for the matter. Whether they’d admit it or not, many were genuinely afraid of Trish. No one had ever tried to steal from her or abuse her in her adult life, and no one had gotten close enough to be her friend, except Roxy. Patricia looked closely at the beautiful girl in her bed. Long auburn hair with light brown eyes, fair skin and a slender build. She smelled nice. She was beautiful. Trish moved the hair from Roxy’s neck and kissed it. It was hard at first but got easier. Patricia’s heart filled with warm energy and an overwhelming feeling of release and connection flowered in her for the first time in her life.
Once Roxy realized what Trish was really doing her body went rigid. She became aware of Trish’s stale smell and smallness of the room.
“No, no.” Roxy almost kicked Trish as she scrambled off the bed to her feet. “Trish I don’t..” Roxy had never been with a woman and she certainly wasn’t going to start with Trish. “I don’t. I just don’t. I’m sorry.” Roxy was unnerved but she felt bad for Trish at the same time.
Patricia got up and walked back to the table to relight her blunt. On a normal day she wouldn’t start drinking until around eight in the evening, but she’d start a little earlier that day. Patricia would not argue or cry. She settled back into the smog that she filled her room with. The stolid bulldog once again.
“It’s okay Trish, I’aint mad. Ah just don’t ya’know.” Roxy pulled her strewn chair off it’s back and sat back down. Several silent minutes went by before Roxy said, “I was sleep’in better at night hop’in he was dead. A car wreck, a robbery, anything. Just telling myself he aint here no more. He’s all gone. Gone in hell.”
Trish rolled her blunt around her fingers for a minute and then got up. She opened the top drawer pulled out a black semi-automatic pistol and laid it down on the table. The high gloss finish on the pistol was so bright Roxy could see her eyes reflected in slide as she stared over it.
“Professional fucking golfer. The least Raymond could have done was at least try to fool me into thinking he was sane for a little while..” Trip opened a plastic bottle of scotch and sat on the bed watching T.V. The television had a twist dial to change the channel and no remote which made Trip more passive about what he would tolerate watching. Everything came in as yellow and black with trails of phosphorescent red riding down the screen from time to time. The sound; however, came in just fine and Trip listened intently for news or a flash warning about a soldier gone AWOL. Triop could see it so clear in his mind.
‘This just in. A Violent soldier has escaped custody today, six days before his scheduled court martial. Trip Strauss, Caucasian, six foot -five, and about 220 pounds. Authorities presume drunk. If you see this individual lure him somewhere safe with cigarettes and beer and hit him in the head with a shovel so we can throw him in the brig were he belongs.’
Trip used to believe that homeless men were lazy, the poor just weren’t trying and criminals got what they had coming because they’d always just been a bunch of rotten bastards. For the first time in his life Trip felt he’d experienced an epiphany. Now he believed it possible for good people to have bad things over take them and get sucked into a rotten world that they never could have seen coming in a million year. Maybe that’s what makes a bad guy, the villain. Trip wondered if there were any inherently bad people out there, or were they all just a victim of circumstance.
Only two years before he’d been on a farm in Idaho. His father had built every sports field, court, or arena imaginable. Trip’s father was an engineer who inherited his father’s farm. Trip’s father, having no need or will to run a farm decided he would use the place for his own baseball field. This contented him for a little while, but soon he needed a football field as well. With his expertise in engineering it was easy for him to design and construct them. He began building a massive sports arena the way that some people might build a collection of model airplanes.
Naturally, Trip and his tow brothers were engulfed in sports from day one. Trip’s Dad was not the kind who wouldn’t play catch with his son, he was the type who wouldn’t stop. Because of his size, Trip naturally excelled at football and spent most of his time training and practicing for it. Once in high school he found his true passion in wrestling. His Dad didn’t have a wrestling ring, but within three months of Trip joining the wrestling team his Dad had built a wrestling ring, boxing ring and a Dojo for martial arts. Trip excelled at them all. He love the solidarity of it all and the focus it took for take on an opponent with no teammates. He enjoyed the solitude so much that he avoided the wrestling parties, and most parties in general. He never drank and spent his time training and helping his father with whatever project was currently in creation. Trip had no interest in college. He wasn’t good at math, so he figured it wasn’t worth it if he couldn’t be an engineer like his father. He worked on the farm for two years after high school and simply through up a mental block every time his mind would wonder to what his future may hold. He did have a good excuse for when someone would ask what he planned on doing with his future, “I’m gonna get used to the working life before I go out and spoil myself with college.” This seemed to satisfy most people, leaving them with the impression that he valued discipline and hard work. Then while out in town at the mall one day Trip ran into a uniformed Army recruiter. The sergeant looked at the towering farm boy and said “Good God son, We’d sure like to have you on our side.” Trip asked if there was a wrestling team for the Army and the Sergeant said yes. That was that, Trip joined the Army.
The wrestling, like many of the promises his recruiter had made, never happened. His command would not release him from his duties to wrestle. On top of his disappointment at not getting another chance to wrestle was the fact that he was never alone. He could never escape the thousands of green uniformed soldiers everywhere he went. He lived with them, ate with them, worked with them. Everywhere was ‘them’. Trip tried to be a little more social than he had been in high school so one night he partied with them. Trip found that alcohol made it easier t obe surrounded by people. He actually liked them when he was drunk, and he began to drink a lot to make it all bearable.
‘It had worked’ Trip thought as he took another swig, and got up to change the channel. Who would have known that he was a genetic alcoholic. Who could have told him that alcohol would ravage his mind and career. Two years before her could not have seen himself taking offense and leveling his commanding officer when he was confronted in the typical abrasive military manner. It was like his fist had a mind of it’s own. They’d had minds of their own several times before while drunk or in a particularly vicious hangover. But knocking his commanding officer out was not something that could be cleaned up and made to disappear.
“These assholes are gonna throw you in the brig.” Raymond told him. When Trip called him in the frantic moments after he fled from the Company Office. It made sense. Of course he was going to the brig. Assault on an Officer, punishable under the UCMJ. Raymond promised to take care of him but he had to get off base quick.
It had made sense at the time, and if Raymond hadn’t proved himself to be a complete loony it may have still made sense. Alone in his raunchy room that was all Trip really wanted. To feel like it was a good idea. The least Raymond could have done was pretend.
A hard spasm started in Clinton Webber’s shoulder and made it’s way down to his hand like the shock wave from an earth quake. He managed to put his beer down before he spilt it, and braced himself for the sensation that always followed a bad shake. Inside his neck and should a thousand spiraling silkworms scattered at once making him nauseous and afraid.
Clinton reflected back to when he’d graduated high school. The Department of the Army thought it would boost the local economy and improve civilian relations if they hired civilians from the local area for their waste site clean up. Clint was hired and proud to have a real job so much sooner than his peers. He spent his first two years as a fork lift operator. In the early seventies there were few environmental regulations and none of them applied to the Army so their cleanup operation was nothing more that a mass burial. Their job was to did huge holes, several hundred meters long and fifteen meters deep, fill them with barrel of waste and then cover it all back up. The base was used mainly as a missile and rocket testing ground. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic byproduct from manufacturing rocket propellent were filled into fifty-five gallon drums, sealed and buried. This seemed a safer alternative to the Army’s original method which was to drain it all into still water ponds where it would later saturate the water supply. (High levels of toxic percolate are still found in Northern Alabama’s water supply and it’s made it’s way to the Mississippi, spreading the contamination all over the SouthEastern United States.)
Clint never paid much attention to the fifty-five gallon drums. In his eye’s they were the safe ones. The real hazard, whose rumors had become something of legend among the workforce, were the wooden pallets of gray artillery rounds from the once active U.S. Chemical Warfare Division. Since the Geneva Convention had banned their use they had to be disposed of. The long chemical names on these munitions were virtually unpronounceable. Everyone called the tri-banded gray shells Triple-Methyl-Ethyl-Death. Clint thought it had a nice ring to it.
Clint liked his job. He felt like he was doing a good thing and he got a raise every two years. It took fifteen years to bury the entire stockpile and Clint was afraid he’d be out of a job once it was done. He would have been out of a job if it hadn’t been for new environmental craze of the early ninety’s. OSHA, The Clean Air and Water Act, and similar bills were passed that kept Clint in a job. These were a Godsend to Clint because his job was now to dig up all the waste and chemically decontaminate it, a task would take another fifteen years at least.
By then Clinton was the senior man in the Army’s Civil Cleanup Division. He was appointed site safety manager and tasked to run the whole show. Clint was proud and satisfied for a time. He was proud until he came to personally oversee one the site operations. They had been carefully excavating wooden pallet of the Triple-Methyl-Ethyl-Death and he remembered burying this very site five years before. He pictured his life as a wheel going around once or twice and then he’d die. What if they just wanted to bury the shit again? What would he have really accomplished? The novelty of a good deed with a purposeful job slipped away.
Clinton Webber scanned the indigo Alabama sky with the pitch black mountains surrounding him on all sides. Square construction lamps illuminated the crater in the ground. The big orange CAT machines were lifeless, parked in front of the earth mound like a cicada shell abandoned on a tree. Clint lowered himself into the pit. He tapped on an exposed crate. Triple-Methyl-Ethyl-Death. The young guys didn’t call it that anymore. With their short attention spans ‘Death’ worked just fine. He ran his hand over the crate slowly with respect but no fear, like a man who learned to hold his hand in a fire without getting burned.
Clint thought it was the Death trying to teach him a lesson that a single artillery shell exploded only eighty yards from were he so fearlessly stroked Death. He thought it was his imagination at first. It more of a loud pop than an explosion. Grey and red clay flew into the air and the construction lamps showed a cloud of dust rising from the hole.
The Army denied the accident, claiming it was a normal explosive that self detonated. All knowledge of buried Nerve Agent was denied and the hole that Clinton’s men had unearthed was buried again before the sun rose that morning. Because no Nerve Agent chemical munitions were officially stored at Redstone Arsenal, Clinton’s symptoms of convulsions, insomnia, episodes or dementia and depression, and impotence could not have been the result of a chemical exposure. They relieved him of his position at the Civil Service and sent him back into the world alone. That was five years ago.
Clinton picked his beer up again. The shakes would not come again for at least an hour. However; he couldn’t deny that they were getting worse, not better. Time was no friend to his condition. His skin always felt like it was wreathing with maggots and his mind would aimlessly swing from one thought to the next, taking reality farther and farther away. He could barley remember what he was doing ten minutes befor at any given time. His purpose had become a blur and the future could not be comprehended. He only knew now that if he drank enough, he would sleep.
Trip felt as if hours had passed since he’d plopped in front of his tri-color television. His bottle was empty and he couldn’t decide if the T.V. had gotten worse or his vision. He walked outside to his white corolla and fumbled for his keys. The sun was perhaps an hour from showing it’s first light on the horizon. Until then it would be pitch black. Trip looked around the lodging. The black silhouettes of the lodges around him barely stood out from the night sky. A few lights were on, but none were bright. Only a low glimmer of orange or yellow in a few windows. Trip gave up on finding his keys and began to stumble down the hill that he had driven up in the afternoon. The check in building was still open. Between it and the gate leading to the dumpster were a group of unrecognizable bodies, given away only by their slurred conversations and glowing cigarettes.
Trip made his way down the hill to Queen street. There were no moving cars and he walked straight across to the fluorescent letters that told him a bar was still open. As Trip got close he saw a small person in a derby hat bent over a very large man who appeared to have stumbled out of the bar and passed out.
“Raymond? Ray’s that you?” Trip’s words stood out so starkly against the night.
“Trip? What the hell are you ding here? You wanna get busted?”
“I want a drink.”
“Go back to the room, I’ll bring you something when I get back.”
Trip could barley see Raymond and his vision was beginning to double. “I thought you were golfing.”
“I was. I’m done now, I gotta new game.”
“What’s that?”
“Rolling drunks. Hey actually.. Gimme a hand with this fat fuck.”
Trip pushed the unconscious man onto his side with ease.
Raymond snatched the wallet and counted out loud. “Twenty, Forty, forty-one, forty-two, three. No need to get greedy. I’ll just take forty-three. Kay’ buddy let’s get you back before you get busted.”
“I want a drink.”
“Well you can’t have one. There’s still a couple Army fucks in there. Someone could recognize you.”
Trip stepped in front of Raymond as if he would step right through him and stomp Ray’s head into the pavement on the way in.
“Stop, hey, hey, hey big guy. Hold on. I’ll get you a drink okay. I’ll get it for you. Be right back.”
Trip didn’t respond but appeared to accept the compromise. He sat down on the curb, and Raymond scurried inside hoping Trip didn’t pass out before he returned.
A ragged man came out of the bar just as Raymond entered. He stumbled out a few steps and plopped on the curb next to Trip. Trip gave him a quick glance and noticed the man’s shoulder was shaking on it’s own. The man held his other hand up to the his shoulder as if trying to hold it still.
“You okay?” Trip asked with a long slurred tongue.
The man only looked at him. Trip saw that the man’s stark green eyes were bouncing around like his shoulder and his right cheek fluttered unnaturally.
A gun cocked.
Trip had heard that slide and pop sound a thousand times at the pistol range. It was a familiar and sobering sound. A woman of maybe eighteen stood, legs angled apart with her arms straight out with both of her hands over the grip of a jet black pistol. Trip thought he was caught. He considered running but he wouldn’t even be able to stand without considerable effort. He didn’t budge. Adrenaline began pumping reality into his head, but still all he could do was sit frozen by the vagrant man next to him.
The woman approached to arms distance without ever moving the sight alignment of her pistol. Trip was only partially relieved to see that she wasn’t aiming at him but at the man next to him. She pushed the barrel into the mans brow right above his eye forcing his head back.
The man’s head jittered a little. When he tried to look up his eyes only bounced wildly. Nothing about him showed any fear of this girl, or the gun, or his death.
“Don’t.. don’t do it.” Trip voiced squeamishly.
“Why the fuck not.” The girl replied as if she were asking her target. “Do you know this guy. He’s a bad man.”
“I don’t know him. But I know something. I know no one was always bad. Sometimes things happen. Maybe real quick. Faster than you can handle and before you know it you’re a bad guy and you weren’t never a bad guy before. They spin around you, like you never saw them com’in at all… I’m a bad man too.”
“Well then, Bad man,” Roxy said still looking at the vagrant and not Trip. “Do you think you could just up an’be good again. You think everything’id be just fine like you weren’t never bad at all.” Roxy screamed he next sentence. “Do you think you can just go back!”
“I don’t know.” Trip admitted, looking at the pavement and not at Roxy. The pavement reminded him of his Dad’s basket ball court. They’d play night games on Tuesdays. He couldn’t picture the look on his fathers face when the Fed’s showed up at his door and told him what his son had become.
“I don’t know either.” Roxy said. She tried to picture Clint going back, stepping back to whoever he was before he met her mother, but she didn’t want to. She wanted him to stay bad. Be a bad guy Clint. Stay bad so that her next step might be a step back.
© Damien Bell