He gave me a woeful look. He didn’t. He wouldn’t, ever.
What surprised me was the rage. That it kept coming, in waves. Why? Out on my ass was the normal for me. I’d never yet met the people that could keep me. June was not my mother, regardless the ten or so minutes I almost laid claim to her. She just wanted the better version, not the broken boy I was. Nothing new here under my sun, and yet here was this car and me at the wheel, taking all the curves too fast, hating everything I saw. The kudzu hanging off the trees, the ignorant caboose car in front of Pennington Middle, the bric-a-brac mammaw houses with flamingo birds in their yards. I’d have rammed my car into any one of them, but that would have stopped me, and I needed to keep moving. For the whole afternoon I leaned on my pissed-off heavy foot, because going nowhere fast is a kind of juice.
Then the energy started going out of me and I felt new kind of bad coming on. I stopped on a godforsaken road around Fleenortown to run inventory on Mr. Peg’s leather bag and the emergency supplies I kept in the glove box, and took what I needed to stave off the pressure in my chest. That ache was an old, old story and it wasn’t ending. In Jonesville I stopped to fill up the tank. If I kept driving I might stay ahead of the monsters. Back in the car, pointed west, I tried to think of one place on the planet of earth where I would feel happy to be. Came up bust. Then tried to settle on someplace I could stand to be. Nothing again. No house or vehicle or yard or pasture came to mind. No place. A guy could take this to mean he ought to be dead.
I was in and out, as far as paying any attention to the road. Which can run you into trouble as far as stop signs or speed traps, but we’re not big on those here. I ended up way the hell out past Ewing, with no idea I’d gone that far till I noticed the white cliffs on my right side, lining the ridgetop, catching light. I kept on going and there they still were, laughing. Up here asshole, we’re up, you’re down. Those cliffs run on for a hundred miles. My car found the park where Miss Barks brought me, on that fateful day where my brain ran away with itself, thinking of being up there and jumping off to see if I’d fall or fly. And I mean really seeing it in my mind, because that’s the troublesome brain I have, it’s got excellent eyes. Look at him up there. The boy on the edge of the cliff, the widespread arms and piked legs, the crash-dive or the sail. Even before I watched the end of Fast Forward, I don’t know how many times my brain had put me up there on those white cliffs, easily a thousand. To ask that question. Which, let’s face it, is not a real-world question.
There was nobody around in the gravel lot where the trail started up. The sign said Sand Cave, White Rocks, so many miles. I didn’t register details. I’d heard of people hiking up there to that cave, those white rocks. It was doable. I had nothing in mind that would pass for a plan, only the need to move. I left my keys in the car.
Not sure why I thought walking would be any better than driving. It comes down to velocity. This was a business of outrunning ghosts, and there was no end to my dead. Not even counting parents or Mr. Peg. Death of your olders is natural. I was losing people right out from under my living days. My doll baby, that I couldn’t love well enough to make her stay. My childhood hero that was a dangerous animal. Hammer that finished last. Maggot that would surely die if they put him in prison, and Mariah on the outside, of heartbreak. I connected my worn-out rubber soles to the dirt of the trail, again, again, again. Knee bones grinding, heart pumping, unthinkable matters battering the skull door. My dad. For him I’d gone to that waterhole of hell, maybe finally to tell the man to go fuck himself, thanks for abandoning me and Mom. Or to prove something. Fast Forward dared me and I went, took the devil’s bath and came out with blood on my hands. Where do you go after that? All I knew to do was keep putting my feet to the rocky ground, waiting to register something in the body instead of the brain.
Because I wasn’t. Fifteen or so football fields up the trail I understood I wasn’t feeling. Not just drug-numb to moods or heartaches, I mean heat, cold. Tasting. That deadness of tongue and skin and eyes that doesn’t technically blind you, but you’re not seeing. Like the man said, the day I ran out of the pharmacy with my first ticket to oxy-nowhere: Blind blind blind. It grows on you till you’re darked out and don’t care. Something in me was wanting to grind my bones against this mountain till the body picked a side. Give up the ghost, or get back in here.
Eyes on the trail, deer tracks, moss, nothing. I chewed on my age-old grudges. The body is the original asshole, it can put you on detention away from all pleasures, but still makes you write out the list of its needs, one hundred times. I will piss and shit. I will go hungry. Thirsty was the one killing me at the moment. That parch like a bandanna pulled tight around your throat. It got so bad that the sight of water, a little creek, made me get down on my belly and drink like a dog. The water had taste, sweet. A little piney. People say you’ll get a dread disease from doing that, due to all the animals that have pissed in it. I wondered: Do I give a fuck here about dread diseases? I polled the mostly dead players—skin, tongue, eyes—on the subject of checking out on all future days: What if anything would you miss? Came to no real conclusion.