“Knock knock. Anyone home. Wake up, lad! Wake up, would ya?” Billy Fryer knocked on the dirt in front of a brand new headstone. The soil still loose from the freshly dug grave. “Who do we got here? Let me see.” He read the engravings.

Patrick Mann, 1974-2023 Beloved father, husband. A proud railroad man.

“Another railroader. Christ, I’m getting outnumbered here.” Frankie Jenson laughed.

“You’ll always be outnumbered, my friend. Ain’t many drunken poets around these parts. Except old Herbert. One of the greatest poets on this side of the grave.”

He winked, waiting for the reaction he knew he’d get from his old friend.

“Why that old fool ain’t no poet. Just a drunken fool. A rambling fool. And before you say anything, lad. I’m more than just a drunken rambler. Why in 1932, during famine and war in Ireland. I wrote a collection of poetry that made its way to the land of opportunity. Poems for the broken man. That was poetry. Do you want me to recite some of it?”

“No, God. Please, no more. Or I’ll opt for the eternal sleep.”

“Oh, you’d never, you tired old fool. You like me far too much.”

“Um. Excuse me. Pardon me!” A timid voice from behind the bickering friends made

them turn around and smile.

“Bloody hell, you owe me a drink,” Billy said.

“Yes, sir. You must be Mr. Patrick Mann. Beloved father, husband, and proud old railroad man,” he said, again looking at the headstone. “Let me guess, your old man told ya it was in yer blood? The way father’s guilt their sons into becoming them, even though they hate themselves, is beyond me.” He finished with a roll of his eyes. “Anyway, we’re here to welcome ya.”

“Where am I? Where the hell am I?”

“Frankie, do ya want to explain it to him?” Frankie was a tall, dark-skinned man in an old dirty suit that looked as though once upon a time it could have been white. It was ripped and torn, parts were charred and burned. Half his face in the same condition.

“Well, uh. Patrick. It’s always hard to tell the new ones. It’s going to take you some time to grasp what I’m about to tell you.”

“What’s going on?” Patrick looked around swiftly. Eyes of panic. Eyes that Frankie and Billy had seen many times before.

“Well, boy. You’re dead. Ain’t no simpler terms a man can put it.”

“Dead? What are you talking about, dead?”

“You’re dead, son.”

Then Billy cut in. Those five seconds of silence, far too much for him to bear. “You’ve bitten the dust. But the good news is you can spend your time here with the likes of us.” Then he began to sing “Here in Drunkard’s Row, where the working men they go. The ones who lived with just enough hate to miss their chance at the Pearly Gates.”

Frank rolled his eyes. “An old poet. Don’t worry about him.”

“But. But. But. The doctor. He. He told me I was getting better.” Patrick checked his arms where the IV had been placed when he was still in the land of the living.

“They do that, lad. They do that. Now come with us, would ya? You’ll understand what I’m talking about in due time, friend.”

The trio walked through the thick smog of the graveyard. Patrick’s head still on a swivel as he scanned the darkness of St Anthony’s. “What is this? Is. Is. This heaven?”

Billy looked at Frankie and the two burst into laughter. They awaited that question every time, and every time, the same reaction flowed through them like the ghosts of their flesh and blood.

“Not quite, pal.” Frankie answered.

“Well, then. Oh God. Am I in hell?” Patrick asked as he looked at the melted skin on the left side of Frank’s face.

Again, the two laughed despite telling themselves on the way to see Patrick, that they’d be courteous and respectful this time. The green ones just asked so many questions. So many existential questions that an old poet and and door-to-door vacuum salesman had to explain.

The two self-appointed greeters.

“Not quite, my friend.”

Then Patrick stopped in front of a giant white cross. “What the fuck is going on?” The two turned around and could see the anger in his eyes. That anger that belonged to a railroader. “You better fucking tell me right now what’s going on.” His fists were raised in front of his face. A stance that told the men that in life, old Patty had been accustomed to raising them. And probably doing quite well when they started flying.

“Yep. He’s a railroader alright.” Billy said. “Look lad, put those weapons down, would ya? There’s something you need to understand about death, alright? These are secrets that the living will never know, nor ever understand. It belongs to us, friend. Only to us. I’ll explain it as clearly as I can, though I’m half in the tank.” He said, hauling a brown paper bag out of his striped wool coat.

“You’re always half in the tank.” Frankie said. Billy just shrugged and took a swig that

quickly turned into a chug.

“Neverthe-fucking-less. I’m going to explain it to you, lad. Ya see, in life, they teach you about heaven and hell, right? How if you’re good, you go to heaven and. If you’re bad, you go for an eternal swim in the lake of fire. But even in the land of the living, you must have had some questions about that? You a religious man?”

Patrick shook his head.

“Good. The zealots are harder to explain this to.”

“Watch your mouth,” Frankie said.

“Oh relax, would ya? Drunkards’ Row in yer Bible?” Frankie didn’t answer. “Anyway, Mr. Mann.”

“Patrick”

“Sorry. Patrick. You see, life is far more complicated than good and bad. Most of us tread that line our entire lives. Because, well, how can you be saintly all the time? Christ, giving yerself a tug is grounds to be bedmates with Lennon. So where do we go? The Catholic Church never told me where I’d go. Because even as a young boy, I knew I wasn’t the good books definition of Abel. I wasn’t going to be met with a choir of angels waiting for me once old Pete let me through them Pearly Gates. But I also didn’t think that I belonged with the Old Red Spire.”

“The Red Spire?” Patrick asked.

“Just a goddamn killer. Killed a dozen or so women outside of Dublin when I was just a little lad. So, as I say. Where do the rest of us go? The ones who might drink a little too much. Frequent the gambling halls more than we should. Fight. Possibly some infidelity sprinkled on top. Where do the humans go? The real humans?”

“Here?” Patrick asked. Frankie wrapped his arm around Patrick’s shoulders.

“You got that right, pal. Right here in Drunkards’ Row”

“Drunkards’ Row?”

“Well, that’s what we call it, anyway. Seems better than purgatory, or the land of the kinda good, but kinda bad. See what I mean?”

Patrick was silent for a moment. He rubbed his thick black hair, tugging at it. And again he looked around. Then finally, at Frankie. He looked the gentler of the two.

“When did you die?” Patrick asked.

“1963. Birmingham. Alabama.”

“The church bombing?”

“The man knows his history. Yes, Patrick. I died in the riots after the bombing. But you know what? Even in death, you are not martyred, son. Even in death, you’re a marked man. My past never eluded me.” He touched the burned side of his face.

“What did you do that was so wrong?”

“Well, like we said, we weren’t exactly monsters. I was only in Alabama to meet up with a pretty young thing. Not my wife. Ya know? It doesn’t take much. Oh well. It’s better here, anyway. You know every self-righteous prick you ever met? Guess where they are.” Frankie pointed up. Patrick let out a short smile.

“What about you?” he asked Billy.

“1936 in Spain. Goddamn, O’Duffy and politics. I volunteered. I was young and wanted to fight. I died in a blood soaked foreign land. Want to hear some poetry I wrote during the war?”

“Uh. Maybe later. So, why no heaven for you?”

“My past, son. I killed a man. A dirty, dirty man, plus all the men I killed in the war. That’s kind of a grey area, I think. But, nevertheless, killing don’t get you the harps, my friend. We grew up in a hard place. Chances of making it out without blood in on yer hands were slim. Slim to none. Anyway, enough about me. So what brings you to Drunkards Row? Other than the cancer, of course. Sorry about that, by the way. Terrible way to go. Took me old man. Working in a factory his whole life. Breathing in chemicals.

Patrick paused. Thinking about his life. His wife. His kids. Friends. All the living people he wasn’t going to see again.

“Christ. I wasn’t a good man. I worked hard and kept a roof over my family’s head, but that’s all I ever did. I was a tired, cranky old drunk. No time for anyone. Not even my boy. Jesus. I need to tell them. I need to tell them I’m sorry.”

“Sorry, pal,” Frankie interjected, patting him on the back. “But that’s the mystery. They can never know until they come themselves. I’m sorry, friend.”

“Jesus. Jesus. I wasn’t good.” Patrick began to cry. “I could have been better. Christ, I could have been better.”

“Regrets run rampant here, Patrick. Let us introduce you to the rest, alright?”

“The rest?”

“Well, Jesus H. Christ, ya didn’t think it was only the two of us in this sea of lost souls?” Billy asked.

“Why am I here?” Patrick asked. “I mean, why am I not just, you know, dead? I mean, dead, dead.”

“It’s a fair question.” Billy answered. “The way it works here is strange, friend. Some folks die peacefully. They died having lived a full life and they feel no need to go on. This place here is for those who bit the dust before having their full say. You know what I mean? Died before their time, even though maybe that doesn’t make sense, because whenever you die is your time, I guess. But you know what I mean. And if you don’t want to do this anymore, you can go right back to yer resting place. But once you do that, then that’s it. Dead dead, as you put it”

“Really?” He looked back towards his grave.

“I know what yer thinking. We’ve all thought about it. But come with us before ya decide, alright?”

Patrick nodded.

Billy continued leading the way through a path between headstones on either side that looked as old as time. Full ecosystems were growing through the cracks, and the words were barely legible, if legible at all.

Eventually, they reached a tall eucalyptus tree. “Well, here we are. You ready?” Billy asked Patrick. Who stared into the darkness before answering. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“That’s my boy.”

Then the three men of different times walked by the eucalyptus to the place where time blended in sweet sacred harmony. Drunkards’ Row.

The bar looked like an old English Tavern. Somewhere you’d expect to find the Shelby brothers in an episode of Peaky Blinders. Patrick stared at it in disbelief. He looked around and there was nothing but darkness on either side of the bar.

A sign read Drunkards’ Row, and the S was hanging upside down. There were men outside, smoking, drinking, and laughing. Telling dirty jokes about a lonely housewife and a foreign pool cleaner. The men were laughing hysterically, and clinking their beer glasses together, spilling half the drought in the process.

“Well, come on, lad. Let me introduce ya to the renegades.” Billy waved him forward, and Patrick looked at Frankie, who supplied a generous nod, letting him know that it was alright. It was safe.

“Billy! Frankie!” The men in front of the bar yelled. “You got another new one?”

“Meet. Mr Patrick Mann. Devoted father. Husband. And a proud railroader.”

“You hear that, Jim?” A big burly man walked down the steps towards Patrick. He looked mean. Patrick was ready to raise his fists again, before Big Jim put his hand out.”

“My grandfather, my father, and myself were all railroaders. It’s in our blood.” Billy rolled his eyes, and the two men shook hands. “Worked in Kansas City for 35 years.

What about you?”

“Uh, Annandale. Small industrial town in the North. 23 years. Then the cancer..”

“Line drive right to the throat at a summer softball tournament between the railroaders and the men at the pulp mill. Struck down in my prime. Come on, let’s go inside.” Big Jim lead him to the old tavern doors like in the old west. He pushed them open, and the aroma of eternal life welcomed Patrick.

Inside looked like the pages of an introduction to World History textbook. Although on the outside, Drunkards’ Row looked like a small time hole in the wall pub, inside it was endless. Tables upon tables, and a bar that stretched the length of the Great Wall. It was filled with laughter, stories, and singing.

A corner table had a 15th century peasant, speaking with what looked to be a blood relative of Lucky Luciano. There were vikings, moors, some kind of royalty, and a myriad of working class labourers. One large man with a flat brim hat was yelling about unions and McCarthy. A scientist was claiming that he worked in Los Alamos as part of The Manhattan Project under Oppenheimer, while a veteran of the second world war talked about the bloody carnage during the Battle of the Bulge.

Patrick couldn’t wrap his head around what he was seeing. Billy and Frank were smiling slyly at each other, knowing full-well that everyone who rose up from the grave, to see a thick dark fog and two haggard souls, who looked nothing like angels to greet them, wanted to crawl right back in. But Drunkards’ Row was a place that most wanted to be a part of.

The door closed behind Patrick as the sounds of an English band singing their version of Dirty Old Town.

“I met my girl by the gas works wall. Dreamed a dream by the old canal”

Life is good. The air here is so fresh. I never thought the automatic rhythm of breathing would provide such euphoria. A feeling that says you’re alive. You’re here. This is now. Don’t you dare let it pass.

I don’t know where I am, or how I ended up here, but I hope to never leave. The mountains look like a painting, and the morning dew covers the tangle of weeds and grass like a sheet of ice. The moose drink slowly and peacefully from ovals of water. Chipmunks and squirrels chitter beautifully as they scale the sides of great oaks like daredevils, explorers, fearless observers of the law of nature and its speechless beauty.

The forest is endless and quiet, like the mouth of paradise has opened wide just for me to frolic. There’s no fear. No reprehension. No doubt that a meal is within hopping distance. Perhaps in the tall fields, where lilies, and sunflowers, lilacs, and lavender stand like stilted Gods of unblemished beauty. It’s perfect. Almost too perfect.

Then the sound. Followed by lightning bolts that shoot through my small frame. I scream out in pain. And all of a sudden, this dreamscape turns into a vivid nightmare. The world of colour, of peace, of love, gets sucked into a vacuum of endless black.

I look down and sharp metal teeth are wrapped around my hind legs. My blood is soaked in the steel and I hear a pair of footsteps rustling through the fallen leaves.

“We got one. We got one.” A voice calls out, and I look to it.

In his eyes is an unfathomable darkness. He will not let me go. I know this. He would watch me suffer for his own amusement. But, next to him are soft, caring eyes that are scared and filled with regret.

They’re both dressed in the colours of the forest, and wearing vests of fluorescent orange and yellow. I cry out. I cry and I cry, and I hope I can reach those soft eyes through the only common language we share.

He points a barrel right in my face, but his hands shake. And in those muscle vibrations, I hope I can convince him to release these metal teeth, and let me on my way. For what good am I to them? A rabbit without much meat on his bones. What good could I provide?

I make sure to lock eyes on this man as the other tells him to kill me. “Shoot it, James. Shoot the thing. Christ. Shoot it, or I’ll do it.”

I’m not concerned with the killer. His mind is made up. I’m concerned with the other. The hands, the eyes, the body of someone who doesn’t want to do what he’s doing. I can see that. I can feel it. But will he do it, anyway? Will he do it, because the devil is breathing down his neck?

He lowers the barrel. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

He bends down as his knees touch the forest green. With a strong grip, he pries the steel teeth off me. “Go on. Go on.” He says, as the devil laughs, and points his barrel at me, “I knew you weren’t man enough,” he says. "It's just going to die anyway. But slower and more painfully." Then he laughs.

The pain is beyond anything I’ve ever felt. But I waste no time. I hop towards the lilies like a rabbit with no blood seeping into its fur. I hop with a speed I’ve never reached before, and eventually the devil puts down the barrel.

They turn around and head back from where they came. I breathe a sigh of relief. I am hungry. I am hurt. I limp into the beauty of the tall fields.

But the eyes of the forest can smell pain, weakness, and especially blood.

I know they’re coming.

But I’m feeling confident. I’ve just made a narrow escape. Why not another? But even I laugh at this. And the soft blowing wind sounds like the sigh of Nature’s God.

The man loved Elvis Presley. I mean, he loved him so much that he had a rustic looking wooden framed picture of him from the 60s hanging from the Cypress Tree in his front yard. I mean, I know that doesn’t make him a certified killer, but I’ll tell you when I came home from the mill that morning after working the night shift. A pain in the ass shift if there ever was one.

Riot quiet, they call it. You ever heard of that? Well, it’s a term they use in like maximum security prisons. It means when things are too quiet, that the shit’s about to hit the fan. Anyway, a couple guys got into a fight. The new guy broke his ring finger edging wood. And it was just one of those nights, man. One thing after another. You’re running from Point A to Point B, and you ain’t even at Point B before you’re hanging a hard left over to Point C, ya know? The guys told me not to take the promotion. It wasn’t worth it for an extra 50 cents an hour, but it just felt right. It’s like people always complain about not being noticed. Just like Tommy Hill, great worker, good guy, but he complains all the time that no one ever pats him on the back. No one says good job. But then he gets offered a supervisor job for doing so good, and he tells em to jam it up their ass. Me, I don’t talk to people like that. I got the offer, and I said I’ll give it a try. Won’t know unless you try it, right?

Anyway, sorry. I get sidetracked something awful sometimes. Too many things spinning around in this nogging. You wouldn’t wanna take a vacation in there I tell ya. Sorry. Sorry. Where was I? Oh yeah. Oh right. When I came home that morning after the riot shift, and I saw old Bernie Adams coming out of that creep factory, he called a house. I wasn’t surprised. No. No. Not one bit. The people on Hillside, I mean, they all gathered round, saying oh “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe he’d do something like that.” And I told em straight up. I can be a real straight shooter. Some folks don’t like that, but I mean, that’s just my daddy right inside me. Sometimes I feel like it’s his soul or something come out of the grave to give me a hand navigating this world. Cause sometimes I ain’t too good at doing it for myself.

So I told them, I said “You can believe it just fine. You don’t want to believe it because no one likes to know that there’s someone that sick living on their street. Living close to their kids and whatnot. But you all avoided this man like the goddamn plague. No one went near him. Never. Y’all told your kids to stay away from that house on Halloween.

Christ, Bertha brought that yellow police tape, ya know, the stuff they use on crime scenes. She walked up Bernie’s step on Halloween, I don’t know, two, maybe three years back, and she tapes the front door, and railings on the stairs, and she hollers, no one goes to this man’s house. So, again, I repeat, people might not have thought he did what he did, but don’t try to turn this man into no saint, either.

But yeah, I mean, I had my suspicions to a point. And now that I see that they were right, I feel like maybe I could have called the cops or something earlier, but I mean, you never do. Hillside is the first step above living on the street. We take in the strange, the deranged, the unwanted. Christ, the halfway house down by the highway. Those folks come here when the doctor tells em that they can live in society again. And the doctors only tell them that when they have too many folks and not enough padded rooms.

So, to say I was suspicious, or I saw some weird stuff, well it would be true, but it would also be true, to say I see weird stuff almost every day. I mean just last week. Jacob Hansen, 20 something years old, was walking down the street bare ass naked. Nothing but his iPod and his earphones. He’s singing some kid of shit, and no one bats an eye. I mean, Paula, just waves to him. She’s out knitting or crocheting or whatever, making mittens for some reason in the middle of July. She looks and sees this naked man singing and dancing, and she just waves, “Hey, Jake. How’s it going hun?” And goes back to her Iced-T. Probably a Long Island one, if you know what I mean.

So, this place is filled with strangeness. But yes, Mr. Delong, to answer your question, I think I became suspicious when I’d go for my evening walks along the railroad tracks with Pepper here. I’d take the dog down the street, and she’d eventually drag me down a little dirt path between Old Abe’s house, and Jimmy Johnson’s, and then we’d be on the tracks. But it ain’t bad to walk on that track anymore. There used to be twelve tracks, plus the mainline down there. Now there’s six, and the mainline only has one passenger train every three days, and it only arrives at 9:10 pm. Long after I’m gone to work.

The tracks go right behind Bernie’s house. I mean, they’re crazy close. Homes that close to the tracks go for dirt cheap. Or At least they did. Back in the 70s and 80s, I remember old Herbert Walker yelling at the midnight shunters to keep it the fuck down because he was trying to get some shuteye. Sorry, pardon my French, but boy was it ever funny.

But I don’t make it a mission of mine to go snooping, ya know? There're folks round here, they ain’t got no shame and looking into a window, boy, you could see some stuff. But Bernie would always be playing Elvis. Just a hunka-hunka Burning Love, and you know, uh, that one. Shit. Oh yeah. Well, that’s all right now, mama. You know? You’re young, but everyone knows the king. They’re great tunes, and naturally my ears would hear the sounds and I’d look over. And right in his living room, Bernie would be dancing. The whole thing, the swooning, the spinning, the stepping, all of it. He was dancing with some black-haired lady, but it looked weird, man. It looked wrong. She was so stiff. Like she was sleeping, or knocked out on drugs or something. It was like she was boneless or something. Cripes. Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

Bernie was quiet. You never saw much of him. He worked as a janitor down at the hospital, and he’d leave in the morning and come back at night. But I never saw anyone in there with him. I never saw him as a man with a woman or kids or anything. Just a man who, uh, worked his job, came back home, and I guess listened to Elvis.

But again, I mean. I tried not to think nothing of it. Like I told you, we don’t live in high society down here on Hillside. Strange happenings, well, are normal. You know? Like, if strange things weren’t happening, then that would be strange. I know I sound crazy, but I just want to let you know why I didn’t say anything sooner.

So, a few nights later, me and old Pepper are doing our walk again. Same route. Same everything. And I goddamn hear Elvis again. This time it’s Suspicious Minds. Loved that song, and now, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to it again. I tell myself, I say, “Hey Reggie, just keep walking partner. Keep walking. Whatever is going on in that house, it ain’t none of your business. So, just keep on walking. You ain’t made it this far in life by sticking your nose where it don’t belong.”

But I can’t. I look in again, and there he is, dancing with the boneless lady. And this time, I go in for a closer look. I keep telling myself that now it’s getting too weird. I can’t walk by every night and just pretend that my eyes are playing tricks on me. My doctor always tells me I got 20/20.

And Pepper, she’s a good dog. I know she won’t make any noise. I just tell her to be quiet little girl. Daddy needs to check on something. I walk closer through his tiny little backyard that had blades of grass nearly up to my head. I make it to the window, and to my left, I see the back of the heads of what looks to be a couple of kids sitting at the couch.

Now I lived on Hillside my whole life. There’s no way this man has a wife and two kids. There’s just no way. But still, I don’t say anything. Once I get back home, I grab a bite to eat and get ready for my shift.

And it was on that shift that I asked Billy Boyd. Billy’s a strange kid. About 30 years old. Just walks around, sits at coffee shops, shoots pool with Cueball and the gang down at Dooly's. He just gets stories out of everyone. He knows things about people you wouldn’t believe. Anyway, he’s sitting in the lunchroom eating a cheese sandwich. Just two pieces of white bread with a square of processed cheese, nothing else. I says to him, I say, “hey, Billy.” Of course, his first reaction is to roll his eyes and answer, “What did I do wrong, mister boss man?” And I say, “no,no. It’s nothing like that.”

I ask him about Bernie. Like, what did he do before Hillside? The man is in his 50s, maybe early 60s and he’s been around for fifteen, twenty years, but he ain’t been around long enough. This man had another life before here. So, I ask, what the hell did he do?

Billy says he heard he worked in a funeral parlour or something. He can’t remember where, but he did the embalming or whatever it’s called. Like where they put the chemicals and all that in the body, so they don’t decompose right away or whatever. Hell, I don’t know anything about that. But when he said that, it was like these sirens went off in my head. I pondered it for a bit, but I ended up calling the cops.

The next morning when my shift is finished. I drive down Hillside and I see the striped boys taking old Bernie down his steps. The look on his face is cold. Like he doesn’t care one bit. Almost as if he wanted to get caught, eventually. I wouldn’t have believed that myself until he looked over at me before being put in the back of the cruiser, and he smiled. The grin sends chills down my spine, and I’m sure it’s telling me that he planned those nights of dancing. Planned them for when I’d be taking my walks. He was just playing me. Waiting to see how long it would take for someone to see enough to do something about it.

So, the story is that Bernie took three bodies from the morgue he worked at. Along with oodles of chemicals and makeup and everything else, and created a family. He had them in that house for almost 20 years. Dancing with them. Playing Elvis Presley.

Across the street from me. In the house where the king hangs from a tree.

One moment my thoughts and my body are as heavy as a stone pillar, and the next, weightlessness. I’m a cloud, a smoking barrel. I’m a prism of light, a thought, a whisper, a cold breeze, the goosebumps on your arms, an atom, a cell, rebirth, and death. I’m everything and nothing. I’m the mystery revealed.

And though I know I’m not seeing with my eyes, because there are no sockets, no flesh, or a head to hold them. There are visions. At first, it’s my body lying in a pool of blood. Flesh, bone, blood, and little pieces of what I suspect are my brain tissue scattered like a madman’s painting on a dirty linoleum floor. The man with the suit and the gun, and the latex gloves, is wiping the barrel and the grip of the .35. Cleaning it for fingerprints. He’s walking over to my body, and kneeling down next to my outstretched right arm, being careful not to place his knee, which is covered with a $3000 dollar suit, in the bodily fluids that moments ago were inside my head. He’s gently lifting my hand and placing the gun inside of it. I see this, or I feel it. I’m witness to it.

Then time begins to roll backwards with rapidly intensifying speed, all the way to the beginning. Then it stops, and goes forward. The world, like it’s spinning off its axis, begins playing my whole life. My whole existence. I’m inside of these moments, and outside.

I feel my birth. A brilliant white light followed by the sounds of a doctor announcing my arrival, and the tears of happiness, exhaustion, and relief pouring through my mother. I’m three years old, falling down the steps of our condo, splitting my head open. I’m six. My first day of school, taking the bus home and missing my exit. Trees are whizzing by as we hit the off ramp, and I’m crying. I’m ten, my father is at work. It’s my birthday, and the kitchen table is filled from end to end with my favourite comic books. A big red bow in the middle. I’m 17, kissing Jenny Fitzgerald, and eventually bringing her up to my room, where I’m awkwardly fumbling with a condom. Shaking hands, and a face as hot as the center core of the planet, while Jenny sits naked, as comfortable as a broken-in leather ball glove, softly giggling. Not making fun of me. Not a giggle that says she’s going to tell all her friends what an absolute nunce I am in the sack. Just a soft giggle, reminding me that it’s just sex. It’s just fun with someone I love. It doesn’t need to be made into something bigger than it is. It doesn’t have to be monumental, monolithic; it doesn’t need to scrape the sky with its grandiose. It can just be a secret. A small secret communion between two bodies. A ritual of flesh. A coming together. A magnetism. An act. And eventually I can see myself calming down. My heart returning to its regular BPMs. I can feel the heat fading, going into hibernation, and resting up for the next time that I feel myself ruining a good thing.

Jenny’s kissing my neck softly while rubbing my forearm. “Just relax. It’s okay. It’s just me. Relax, baby. Relax.” I’m closing my eyes. Breathing in and out. Concentrating on my breath. Clearing my head of the thousand unwarranted, and uninvited thoughts that always spread like fucking bacteria during those moments where you just want to be present. Where you need to be present. The moments where you’d give away every material possession that you own, just for a switch to appear on the side of your head, that could turn your brain off. Just shut it off, and let you live in the moment, and stop self-sabotaging every good thing that comes along. Because God knows in my life, those moments were few and far between.

I finally get the condom on, and without hesitation, Jenny climbs on top of me. It’s a revelation. I’ve entered into a world. A world that was as fantastical as the dreams of CS Lewis, or Roald Dahl, for the entirety of my life, until that moment. Jenny leans down and kisses me the whole time as my hands stay glued to the small of her back.

It wasn’t perfect. Hell, anyone who says the first time is perfect is a liar. But it was damn good. And we sure had a lot of time to perfect our art. Our Sistine Chapel would be created throughout the next two years. Both of us not being scared to ask about what the other wanted, or what the other needed to be engaged, to be fulfilled, to be celebratory in the act.

Jenny and I used to talk a lot about that. About the people that condemned their partners as selfish and shallow lovers. They begrudged them and ripped apart the flesh from their bones as their backs were turned. We’d say that these people weren’t communicating. These people weren’t caring. They weren’t letting themselves be known. Sex to these people was no more than masturbation with another body.

Now, Jenny and I were laying in my bed. Her head tucked tightly under my left arm, as my right was folded behind my head. The aftermath much more calming than the precursor. That switch not quite on my head, but about as close as it ever could be.

For Jenny, it must have been the same. Because the calm allowed her to reveal to me the deepest and darkest depth of her self. The person within the person. The imprisoned soul, who was only allowed out for moments like these. Or a moment like that. Maybe. Probably it was the only time. The words flowed out of her mouth smooth and relaxed, like there wasn’t a single doubt in her mind that now was the time, and I was the person to hear the stories about who she was. What she was, and then let me, let us, decide whether or not our love could withstand it.

Jenny is delivering her heart to me on a silver platter. She’s speaking about her father’s death. The unimaginable weight of it. The nights alone at a small gravestone, holding palaver with the dead. Writing down everything that she needed to say to him when he was alive, but that she never did. For whatever reason. Life is enough of a reason, I’m thinking.

She’s telling me how empty you feel. And how long it takes to cry. To truly wash yourself of the sinking feeling. The quicksand feeling that you’re going underground with them. For a while, you suffocate in silence. The numbness, initially, is the strongest feeling you own. It wrestles with sadness, anger, and even small traces of empathy, jealousy, and happiness. .

But then one day, your defence system is broken. Your Berlin wall, your great wall, your Edinburgh Castle, your impenetrable fortress is broken, and the floodgates fall. Then you’re a whimpering, anxiety ridden, grown child whose emotions are just as sporadic and unreachable.

She’s telling me all this as I continue to rub her between her shoulder blades, where she has a small Japanese tattoo that translates to strength in love. I don’t talk. I let her get it out. I don’t attempt to say I understand, or provide pseudo-solutions. This is her time. I let her have it. As much of it as she needs.

Then Jenny stops for a minute. Up to that point, she hasn’t cried or choked up. But now I can tell. I can feel it in her muscles as she tenses up. But she carries through. She tells me about her mother. Her mother, who handled the tragedy of her father’s premature death by nearly drinking herself into one. She completely loses touch with reality. The idea of reality is something that becomes so fractured that in order to draw another breath, the smell of vodka needs to be on it.

At that bar, drunk off her ass, she meets a soul more corroded than hers. This man tells little white lies until her cheekbones hurt from smiling and laughing. He’s charming, he’s handsome, but he’s the devil. Milton’s devil. The wordsmith, the charmer, the one who is so articulate, and confident that you fall in love with his words, though you have no idea what they mean. But you don’t care. You just want to see his lips move. His eyes look at you the way that no eyes have since you the days of high-hair, and Purple Rain. That’s enough to feel empowered. To feel special. To feel ready to give this world another try. No, not your young daughter at home, dealing with a grief as deep as yours, but from a stranger with kind words, and hard-strewn eyes.

Like a vampire, the man is invited into Jenny’s old Victorian home on Waterloo Road. He stakes the place out and instantly Jenny feels something off about him. Something wrong. She can’t tell if it’s the way he walks, or talks, the way he laughs, or the way he touches her mother, and the way he looks at her. But she thinks it closer to all the above, then it is to one specific trait.

And it isn’t long before he’s sitting next to her on the couch, while her mother is working. Wrapping his arm around her, smelling her hair, telling her how much of a grownup she is. She isn’t a little girl anymore. She’s a woman. That it’s time to start acting like one.

The gradual torment leads to the bedroom, like it so often does. Midnight visits from the monster in the suave skin mask. He holds his large right hand over her mouth, as his left arm goes prospecting underneath her covers. That same smile. That same laugh. The one that fills her mother with second-chance euphoria.

By this point, Jenny is crying. Not loud. Softly. As for me, my heart is beating like a jackhammer. At that moment. The moment that I’m being brought to. Is the moment that I decided to kill the king of Annandale. The moment I decided to kill myself.

After Jenny finishes her story. I simply tell her I love her. “I love you, Jenny. I love you so goddamn much. It hurts.”

She’s drifting off to sleep, still nuzzled on my chest. But that night I don’t sleep. Not a fucking wink. I stare at my ceiling. A young man who always lacked a certain passion. A young man good at a few things, but great at none. Great at none because I never took that next step. That steep inclined step that takes you from the land of the average, to the world of the greats. But in my head on that night, I’ve never felt a passion so deep. One that didn’t stem from vainglory, but from burning hatred.

Now, as I float in the ether between life and death, all I see is Jenny. Jenny lying on my chest. Breathing softly. And I look at the young man draped with anger and fear. And I want to yell at him. I want to tell him to just hold her. To just stay with her and take off somewhere. try to get the fucker arrested. Anything but what he did. What I did. The vigilante shit. The Hollywood movie shit. The stuff that doesn’t work in the real world. The world where the bad guys don’t always get what’s coming to them, but the stupid ones do. You can count on the stupid pricks, to always get what’s coming to em.

As I reach out to touch Jenny’s soft face, the world, again, begins to spin. This time forward. It takes me through the drunk meetings with my regicidal friends. How to kill the king. The king. The king. Death to the fucking king. It’s all we talk about for months. It’s spinning past every word. Every stakeout. Every fight with Jenny as she tells me to just let it go. To just leave it the hell alone, because I’ll only make things worse for her. And worse for me.

I’m screaming, I’m pointing in her face. I’m telling her how it has to be. Then it stops. And the king is leaning over my body. His face merely inches from mine. He’s smiling. Then he’s laughing.

He says, “You stupid, stupid, fucker. You got balls, kid. But come on, what chance did you have? A stupid ending for a stupid kid.”

Then he gets back up. Looks at the large man who cleaned the prints. Taps him on the shoulder, and tells him. “Jenny is going to be a mess. I’ll have to go and console her the best that I can.” Then he winks at him, and he lets out a deep, hearty laugh.

The king leaves the room.

Then nothingness.

Sam’s relationship with her father was complicated. There was an intensity so deep and corroded that each small moment became monumental. Some times that was good, and others it was hell.

On any given day, the stories told about Sam’s relationship with Gerry could be different. Their love was apathetic, instrumental, menial, delusional, rotten, fluorescent, angelic, demonic. It was whatever it was. It just was.

By the time Gerry passed, he was a lonely soul. Him and Sam’s mother, Tricia, had parted ways years before, and ties were cut with Sam. He died alone in a small home along a river listening to Springsteen’s serenades for the disenfranchised.

When Sam received the call about funeral arrangements, she hadn’t the slightest clue what to say. Her answers were unintelligible, and she was shaking and nodding her head to a cell phone, as though movements as a form of language could be understood through sound waves. Shock, happiness, disaster were all formulating in her head like a twister. She hung up and cried deeper than she had since she was a child.

The next time the funeral home called, Sam said to cremate him. Why she said that, she didn’t know, but it seemed right. In her mind, they were walking up Sugarloaf Mountain on those quiet Sundays when the world seemed molded for them. Two people who always envisioned an idealized world that never materialised. A dream told through a bedtime whisper. But on those mornings when the world slept off a nasty Saturday hangover, they took to the mountain. They smiled at each other. Talked about things that never in a million years would be uttered to anyone else on God’s green earth. Because on those days there were no secrets. Just two half-souls becoming whole.

It took them close to an hour to reach the summit, and there they would overlook their town. A town that told their story like a Greek Pathos. What they saw filled them both with regret, and the possibility of restitching all the torn seams that seemed so viable a few hundred feet above the ground. Then Monday would arrive. And with it, the true realities of life would rear its ugly face, and the resentment of what life could have been if not for the other, would again erase the peaceful Sunday’s magic spell.

But when he died, Sam just thought about the Sundays. The past had a way of enlarging the good and deflating the bad. Sam supposed that’s what nostalgia was. A past-fantasy that never really existed, but maybe, in some ways, it did.

Her father was sitting on the tallest rock with a spray painted heart and the initials of two young lovers. Sam was standing in front of him. Those moments where he wore a face of deep thought. Deep intellect. A side of himself that he never revealed in front of his family, or his coworkers, in fear of ridicule. Ridicule that he was trying to be someone he was not. He was a labourer in an industrial town. That was all. That was it. But in front of Sam, on those trips, he was whoever he wanted to be. And on the mountain he was a Sunday philosopher.

“You know, Sam. The mountains, the wilderness, the breeze coming off the river. That’s how people are supposed to live. The freedom to be amongst nature. You’re not a slave to anyone except the elements. And even those you can overcome. The world wasn’t supposed to be smokestacks, polluting towns. Chemicals giving people cancer. People telling people who they are without a clue. Ya know? It was supposed to be freedom. The freedom of the wind in the air. The path paved just for you. Not for everyone else”

Sam would nod and agree. Agree with the idea of a world without borders. A world without judgment and suppression. A world where people were allowed to be free. A world on top of a mountain on Sunday. It was perfect. But perfection was such a small flame that in Sam’s experience, always burned out before it could grow large enough to light the sky.

She would sit on that mountaintop, praying to a God she never believed in, to please freeze time. “Please, God, just let me savour this moment. Let me live inside of it. Let me die here, in the company of the only one who ever truly understood me.”

“Sam, can I ask you a favour?” The voice of her father echoed inside her head. “When I die. I want to be free. Free amongst nature. Not in a coffin. Please. Never a coffin. Can you do that for your imperfect old man?”

Then, she realized why she had said to cremate her father. There was no way to tell if that memory was real, or just her imagination creating answers to questions that she could never answer otherwise. But she knew she had to go back home. She had to go back to the top of the mountain.

And that’s what Sam did. On a hot mid-July Sunday, a bottle of water, a backpack with the ashes of her father in a spiraling flower urn, and heavy thoughts of days gone by, she climbed the mountain for the first time in fifteen years.

The maple trees rising above her head like old friends. The snakes slithering through the fallen leaves, and the skittering squirrels and chipmunks, provided a comfort she had forgotten about. A comfort that the city, an office, a cubicle never provided. A life she had run away from out of fear. Fear of something she didn’t understand. Fear out of becoming her father, when she already knew that location wouldn’t change that fate.

As she reached the summit, the familiarity of it all nearly brought on a fit of panic. Sam looked around and saw nothing had changed. Nothing, except for her father being in her backpack instead of on that rock. That rock with the initials still carved into it. LJ loves PT. Sam wondered if they were still together now. Still in love. She actually felt like she would die if they weren’t. She needed them to be, so she told herself they were.

Sam placed the backpack on the steel grate on the edge of the mountain, looking over a town that hadn’t changed much except for the diminishing clouds from the smokestacks. “I’m sorry, dad,” she said to the urn, feeling silly, and saddened by the fact that she was speaking to a clay pot. Feeling saddened that inside of it was filled with sand. Sand like the beach of New Haven, except it was her father. A man who was larger than life. The biggest man she’d ever known, in stature and presence. Now he was grains of sand. “I’m sorry, dad.”

Then Sam raised the urn up above her shoulders and looked down at the town. The town filled with ghosts and demons of the past. But the same town filled with the biggest love she’d ever known. A feeling of wanting to stay and never see this place again played an evenly matched game of chess inside her heart.

“Dad. I know now. That I was you. And you were me. And that was a problem. We hated so deeply, but loved so deeply. The problem was that we could never find that middle ground. That place where most people live,” Sam said. “Our gift, our curse, was that we loved too much. We hated too much. We needed life to provide what we knew it never would. At least not in the long term. In short, sporadic spurts, it would. And in those, I’ll live, dad. In those, you will too. I love you. I hate you. I am you. I hope that you find peace amongst the trees. Amongst the sky. Amongst the freedom that nature brings. I love you.”

After the ashes fell over Sugarloaf like the sands of time, she slung her bag over her shoulder and took off down the mountainside.

Scattered images in the purgatory between dream and consciousness pierced my aching head as I awoke, sore and disoriented. Cow shit like smelling salts bringing me back to the land of the living.

I looked around at the wide open enclosure of what looked to be a barn. Hay piled to the rusted steel roof on all four sides. Old John Deere tractors that looked as though they hadn’t been touched in decades sitting between two old dirty work stations with saws, screwdrivers, and nails sprawled like the after-effect of a mid-west tornado.

“Where the fuck am I?” I thought. “Jesus, what happened?”

The images were still like white noise coming from a TV with barely any reception. The figures were there. So were movements. But the details weren’t clear. Christ, my head was splitting. I got up and walked like a 3 a.m drunk after being thrown out of a bar, all the way to the two large barn doors. I pushed on them. Nothing. There was a small split where sunlight creeped in. I could see what looked to be a chain on the outside. That would explain it.

Panic was sitting in my chest. I slid down the barn door and sat on the ground, trying to slow my racing heart. Trying to remember. Trying to solve the mental puzzle. With my hands in front of my eyes. My eyes closed tight, concentrating deep on my thoughts. The images began to clear like the calming of rippling water.

Me and Jack Langley sitting in his Buick, parked in the tall grass in front of the Geary’s mansion on Roseberry Hill. Both of us with ski masks on. Both of us laughing, smoking cigarettes, thinking that it was too easy. Too goddamn simple to break into this house, steal whatever valuables they had and skip town. Too good to be true. Then I remembered what my father said before the cancer took him. That when things seemed too good to be true, it’s probably because they were.

We walked out into the cool evening air, with a brilliant orange flame setting over the western hilltops of Annandale. With a rag wrapped tightly around my wrist, I broke the glass above the doorknob, reached in and unlocked it from the other side.

Inside, the house was quiet. Dark and still. Then I remembered a gunshot ringing through the graveyard silence, sounding as loud as artillery rounds deep in the jungles of Quang Tri. I turned around and saw blood trickle down Jack’s head like a scarlet constrictor before he fell back down the stairs.

Then there was the fat man. 300 pounds if he was a pound, putting my head in the crook of his arm. A head that he could have popped like a cork had he wanted to, but instead, he put a needle in my arm and dragged me off to a shiny black corvette, where he threw me in the back like a rag doll.

There was another image, like a word on the tip of a tongue. It was there, but not there. Close, yet a thousand miles away. A face. A face at the window of the car, as my consciousness slipped into the ether. My head leaned against the window, and I saw a face. His face. Yes. His face.

It was my mother’s shit head husband. Frankie Laroque. He was screaming something. His hands behind his back, before he was thrown into another car. Christ, I thought. Where was Frankie? What happened to him?

Frankie, the greasy fucking bartender at The Dollar who got my mother to elope and marry him in Vegas while high as a kite on methamphetamines. Good choice, mah. You got yourself a real stand-up guy. A real father figure.

He was screaming, “Hurt him! Hurt him! Or was it, don’t hurt him?” I don’t know.

Then I heard a rattle behind me. Someone was unlocking the chain. The door opened and Frankie was thrown to the ground. Soft ridiculing laughter could be heard before the door closed, and the chain, again, locked. The sun too bright to see any faces. Just sharp dressed shadows.

Frankie’s hands were tied behind his back, and his face was worse for wear. Like a fucking steamroller had run over it. His left eye was swollen shut, a plethora of purples and greens, and blacks swirling like a vortex. Dried blood stained his ears, nose, and lips. He was crying. “I’m sorry, Jamie. I’m so sorry. Jesus, I’m stupid. I’m so goddamned stupid.”

“What, Frank? What the hell is going on here?”

“I-I-I,” He stuttered. “I-I sold you out. Okay? I sold you out, and now we’re fucked!”

“What are you talking about, Frank? What the hell did you do?”

He was crying like a baby. This big grown man. 6 foot 3, 220 lbs, weeping like a teething newborn.

“What did you do, Frank? Tell me what you did?” I grabbed him by the scruff of his wife beater and picked him up to his feet. He wouldn’t look at me. He stared at the straw and the shit on the ground. “Look at me, Frank. LOOK AT ME!”

Finally, he listened. But his eyes took the anger right out of me. Like a punch to the gut, I knew he was telling the truth. I didn’t know what he did, but we weren’t getting out of this barn. I let him go. “I-I-I’m sorry, Jamie. They swore they wouldn’t hurt you. They swore they wouldn’t hurt me if I told em who’d been, ya know, ripping them off.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Kid. Your head’s so far up your ass, you can’t see that you ain’t as smart as you think. Young punks and their God complex”

“What? What are you talking about, Frank? Speak English.”

“You were stealing from the wrong people, son. And having your drug riddled fucking mom as your confidante wasn’t exactly an Einstein move, was it?”

He stopped for a second, then continued.

“Look kid. I was in trouble. Big trouble. Debt that I couldn’t repay in ten lifetimes that was gathering interest by the day. Your mom told me one night that you were stealing money from the same guys, and I saw an opportunity man. I saw an opportunity to give them information. To provide them with something.”

“Oh. Jesus. Oh Christ. We’re dead.”

“They swore they wouldn’t hurt you, Jamie. They’d just ask for the money back, that’s all. They might rough you up a little, but not this. And they told me my slate would be wiped clean. I’d be free. I’d be good.”

I looked at Frankie, and then the chain rattled again. The door swung open. I didn’t even look up. I just stared at the shit and dirt on the ground, knowing full-well that I’d be sleeping underneath it soon.

“Way to go, mah. You picked a real stand-up guy”

I’m stunned, standing in silence. My usefulness a non-entity in this room of pain, blood, birth, and beginnings. It’s beautiful, but terrifying. I hold her hand, tell her it’s alright, tell her that I love her, and that it’ll be over soon. Empty promises escaping my mouth like cold-calculating prisoners. I don’t know what’s happening. There are doctors whispering amongst each other, their faces unreadable. But although she’s sweating, swearing, and writhe with pain, she’s beautiful. Her body a cathedral and from it a blessing. I hold my girl and hear Paul Simon singing he sees angels in the architecture.

“Who’s the loudmouth over there?” The short stocky man asked the bartender as he lit a cigarette.

“Oh, him. That’s just Union Jack going on like a fool trying to get a union started at the mines. Comes here all the time. Gets the guys all riled up. McCarthy this, McCarthy that. The red scare, the Korean war, Christ, he even defends Negro rights in here.”

“Why don’t you kick him out? Sounds like a communist to me.”

“Well, sir, I’ll tell ya exactly why I don’t kick him out. I sure as shit ain’t no red, but it ain’t my place to tell paying customers what they can and can’t talk about in here. Each one of those men over there pays for each drink. Never argue the price, never try to get a deal. Nothing. They come in and pay their way. For me, that’s where it ends. Believing in capitalism means believing in the almighty dollar. That’s what keeps me afloat. I didn’t get into this business after the war because I believed each man in here would be talking sense. No, sir.”

He nodded, smiled a dishevelled grin, and turned around to look at the crowd. Union Jack was standing up, speaking in a tone of aggressiveness and passion so fierce, so telling, so manipulating, that the men were like children staring up at their hero. Believing every word he had to say like it was scripture.

The strange stocky figure at the bar figured that if Jack told his soot-covered disciples to go out and start killing for the good of the people. For the rights of the working class, to take down the ruling class, that they wouldn’t hesitate. He held a power that he admired, no doubt. Union Jack was a monster. A tall, fascinating brute who believed every word he said, so how could that passion and energy not transfer to those who listened?

“Do you think they’d mind if I went over?”

The bartender shrugged his shoulders while cleaning a mug with a dirty rag.

“I can’t imagine. Jack likes to talk. Loves to persuade and loves to debate. So no matter which side of the fence you stand on, he’ll have words to say, no doubt about it.” Then he paused before adding, “Go over at your own risk.”

The stocky man put out his cigarette in an overfilled ashtray next to a bowl of peanuts, grabbed his drink and headed over to the angry working class round table, where the miners sat in fearful admiration, and obedient anger. Dirt still lathered on their work clothes. No doubt in his mind that they had come straight from work.

“You see what they do, don’t you? They start a war 6000 fucking miles away. Mr. Truman. The strongest man in the west will jump at every opportunity to flex his muscle. To show that the Americans are strong, and that they can’t be pushed around. But the Koreans, the communists, aren’t travelling 6000 miles to take us over. Not a chance. They’re doing this to avoid all the problems that are going on in their own goddamn backyard.”

Union Jack was pounding the table with his fist. Spilled beer was flowing like a calm river across the old splintered wood, but no one seemed to notice. Or if they did, they didn’t give a shit.

The miners in unison were shouting, “Yeah! Yeah! You’re right!” Just like the stocky man in the expensive suit had thought. These dirty workers would chant and yell no matter what Union Jack screamed and pounded his fist about. They were hypnotized.

“Tell them Tim,” Jack said, pointing to a dull looking young man on the right side of the table. “What happened after your accident?”

“I was”

“Hurt!” Jack cut him off. “Then what happened?”

“I-I had to”

“Go to the hospital. Right. And during all that missed time that was only missed because of a company error, did you make a cent?”

“No, sir. Not a penny.” He said, and looked down at the suds floating to the top of his mug with a look of disgrace and shame.

“Not a penny. And you know what? Mr. Freeman has ten million dollars. But no, please, God, no, don’t bat an eye at that. Please put all your money and your military into a non-exist threat half-away across the world. But if we say anything about this, God forbid we say anything about wanting a better wage and working conditions, or Mr. McCarthy and HUAC will come down here, blacklist us, and send us to court. Does that seem right to you? Does that seem just? Does that seem fair?”

The table roared so loud that the other patrons of the bar were startled, and muttered obscenities before going back to their drinks.

“Hello, uh, sir?” The stocky man asked, raising his right hand like he was in grade school. Jack looked at him quizzically.

“I haven’t seen you around. What’s your name, sir?”

“Benny, uh, Benny Harlow. I’m a reporter with the The Worker. I’d, uh, love to interview you quickly, if you had a minute?”

Jack laughed and looked at the table.

“Well, I’m a little shy, ya know?”

The table burst into laughter.

“Maybe we could go outside for a few minutes?”

“Yeah, sure, friend. No problem. Hey, Walt. Get these lowlifes another round, would ya? And put it on my good friend Senator McCarthy’s tab, eh?” Jack winked at Walt, who just rolled his eyes and nodded.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said to himself with the face of an old man who had seen every act of this play, played out far too many times. The same rhetoric. The same arguments. The same speeches, night in and night out. The workers might not tire of it, but old Walt sure as hell looked like he’d heard enough to last a couple of lifetimes.

Jack brought his half-empty mug of beer and wrapped his arm around Benny like this was a long-lost reunion between two war time brothers, who hadn’t seen each other since the days of blood and fury.

Jack pushed through the swinging doors, and the quiet of the late evening mining town hit them with the absolution of a C.S Lewis fantasy world. Stars invaded the cloudless sky, and smokestacks rose like the barrel of an industrious howitzer in the distance behind a mass of equally sized oak trees.

“Have you read any Karl Marx, Benny?” Union Jack asked while grabbing a pack of Lucky Strike from the breast pocket of his work shirt.

“Can’t say that I have, no.”

“Well, you know what he says about capitalism? He says that capital is money, and capital is commodities. Do you know what that means?”

Benny shook his head slowly, lighting a cigarette of his own.

“It means that it’s inherent in the term capitalism. It’s simply about money. That us, the working class. All the men inside that bar, all the men along this road, and roads like this all over the world, are just commodities. We’re not people. We’re not human. We don’t have souls or hearts. We are judged by the ruling class on our usefulness. And our usefulness depends entirely on labour. And if we can’t perform these duties. Then we have no use. Now, do you know what Marx says about communism?”

Again, Benny shook his head, blowing smoke rings into the cool night air.

“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions. Only in the community, therefore, is freedom possible.”

“I like that” Benny said, and again Union Jack let out a hearty laugh that echoed through miners’ row.

“I’m not saying I’m a communist. You can’t say that here. All I’m saying, sir, is that people are losing their livelihoods. People are losing their lives based on what HUAC is saying, what The VFW is saying, what all of these red channels are saying, and it’s sickening. It’s sickening the amount of power that Mr. President and Mr McCarthy have over us. It’s absolutely sickening. It’s terrifying!”

“You have a big heart, Jack, uh?”

“Jack Brockman, and I don’t know about that. My father died during the depression, and my mother not long after. I fought to stay alive and bounced around all over the country looking for fair wages.”

Benny was starting to feel the magician’s spell of this man. But he had to remember the danger of men like this, and why he was here.

“Mr. Brockman. You have a big heart, though it might be misplaced.”

“What are you saying, mister?” Jack asked, his quick temper from the bar appearing on the lines of his forehead.

“I’m sorry, Jack. But this has gone on far enough. We can’t have this anymore. It’s dangerous. It’s too dangerous.”

Benny hauled out the 45.

“There’s no such thing as fair in this world, Union Jack.”

I drove to the Moonlight Motel and knocked on the door of room 106. The Moonlight was a sleaze joint on the outskirts of town with the cheapest rates around. It was the kind of place where you looked around like your head was on a swivel. Scanning the cars, looking at the windows of the conjoining rooms to see if eyes peeked through the venetian blinds. But then you had to laugh at yourself because even if there were someone up here to spot you, their sins would be the same as yours. This was the lowest point for lonely travelers who were all looking for the same thing.

Mona didn’t answer. I knocked rhythmically for a couple of minutes before losing my patience to the harsh western winds. My right hand turned the knob slowly. The door stopped about three or four inches in. A rusted gold chain at eye level answered why.

“It’s just me, Mona. It’s just me, Johnny.” I said.

My face was pressed against the splintered wood, and with my right eye I could see her sitting at the edge of the bed. “Mona, can you open up? I’m cold.” She got up slowly and emotionlessly, dragging her bare blistered feet across the shag carpet before flicking the chain off its hinge and dragging her body back to the bed.

“Sorry, John. I’m just tired, ya know?” she said.

“Yeah. Boy, do I ever.” I took my jacket off and threw it over a chair in the corner of the room. We sat silently for a couple minutes. Then she sighed, got on her knees and began bouncing slowly on the bed while waving me over with her index finger. “Come here, big boy. Come see, mama. Lay your head between mama’s breasts,” she said, switching gears to work Mona. Playing out the scenario I most often requested from her.

“We don’t have to rush into this, Mona. Could we take our time?” I sat down on the bed, and she came over to massage my neck before kissing it, and rubbing down my bare chest to the buttons of my work pants. “Mona, Christ. Could we take a second, please? My back is sore as hell from shoveling shit all day. Could we just talk for a minute? Please?”

She didn’t answer. I turned around to see her wearing a face of unbridled anger and annoyance. She was pissed. She hated when I did this. It wasn’t what the hour was for. We both knew it, but I still did the same thing every week, anyway.

“Can we just fuck? So you can give me my money and hit the road.”

“I thought you liked my company,” I answered.

“Why do you always do this, John? Why do you always come here like we’re a fucking couple or something? I. Get. Paid. To. Fuck.” She said, clapping her hands together after each word.

I looked her in the eyes and held my stare. It made her uncomfortable because no one ever looked in her eyes to see what was in them and what was behind them. Looking in those sky blue irises would mean acknowledging that she was a human being. And that wasn’t good for rooms at the Moonlight Motel. Wasn’t good for business.

“Why do you do that?” She asked.

“Do what?”

“Look at me.”

“Because I like you.”

“Why?”

“Because I see you.”

“What in the hell does that mean, Johnny? Stop trying to make me feel stupid.”

“I’m not, Mona. That’s the last thing I want. I just meant I look at you. I look in your eyes and I can see someone worth seeing, that’s all.”

“You know you only have an hour, right?”

“Yes, I do. And didn’t you tell me you’d do anything? Anything at all.”

“Yeah.”

“Then talk to me. Sit and spend the hour talking to me.”

“What?”

“You heard me, Mona. Sit next to me. Talk to me.”

I patted the edge of the bed to my right. Signalling her over with a quick brush of my head. She just looked at me for a minute like a scared old battered dog experiencing love for the first time in its life. Wanting to believe it. Wanting to run towards it, but being fooled too many times to ever trust it.

“It’s alright, Mona. It’s alright.”

She extended her legs and timidly slid her body next to mine, Mona’s eyes scanning for a devil’s trick, but soon realizing there was nothing there but me.

I wrapped my arm around her like it was our first date at a drive-in. All of a sudden, it was just the two of us. Two people. Not a customer and worker, but two people alone in a motel room, with nothing but the sound of the baseboard heater humming like a swarm of angry flies, and the sound of Mona’s heart beating with nervous excitement.

“What did you dream of as a kid?” I asked.

“What?”

“As a kid. I mean, no offense. But this couldn’t have been your dream. When you were a girl looking at a clear sky filled with stars, you weren’t dreaming of the Moonlight Motel”

“No, of course not,” she said. “No. It was never this.” and then she looked like a

traveller heading back in time, to places, and thoughts that hadn’t been allowed at the forefront of her mind for a long time.

I put my hand on her knee and rubbed softly with my thumb in a counterclockwise motion.

“It’s alright. It’s just me. I just want to talk.”

Tears were filling her eyes, and I took my hand from her knee and raised it slowly to the dark circles underneath. I wiped them and smiled at her. She took my hand in hers and kissed my palm. “I’m sorry, Johnny. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. It’s just been so long.”

“It’s okay. I know this is strange for you, hell it’s strange for me. I just realized I don’t talk anymore. I don’t know any folks anymore. And I wanted to know you. You’re the closest thing to a friend I have, Mona. And I ain’t just saying that.”

Mona was silent for a while. But I didn’t press the issue any further. I let her sit with it. Let her come to me on her own terms.

“An actress.” She eventually said in a decibel above a whisper. “Hollywood. A million miles from here.”

“Not quite that far,” I joked. “But yeah, it ain’t close. What brought you here? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I don’t know. Money, I guess. It’s always fucking money. But I’ll admit when I was younger I actually enjoyed it, believe it or not. I liked sex. I liked it a lot, and I was young. When you’re young and beautiful, you get nice looking men. And if they’re not, they’re rich.” She laughed at this, but her eyes looked sad. Sad and ashamed. “But I guess like a lot of jobs. You get comfortable. People tell you you’re great at this and you’d be crazy to go off on your own. It’s a scary world out there. You’re safe here, and all the rest of the horseshit they peddle. Then you wake up one day, and you’re on the wrong end of 30, with a lifetime of sin and regret.”

“It’s never too late, Mona.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You’re still beautiful. You must have money stashed away somewhere,” I winked.

Mona shrugged her shoulders.

“A little, I guess.”

“Well, why don’t we take off? Let’s take off and go to Hollywood. I could be your agent. Set you up with the best gigs in town and make sure you’re compensated.” I flexed my biceps and added. “You don’t get what you’re worth. They’re going to have to go through me.”

This made her smile. For the first time since I began paying for Mona’s time, it looked real. It looked genuine.

It gave me a small insight into who she was before this life. The young girl who looked in the mirror and acted out the lines of her school plays. The one who screamed and jumped for joy when she received the lead in Romeo and Juliet. Mona Hatlee, the young girl from the broken home, would get to kiss Robby Reiger. And from there, the sky was the limit.

But inside those eyes was also the girl who went to Robby’s on the east side to go over their lines. Holding that smile until her face hurt. Laughing at everything he said, whether it was funny or not, because that’s just what you did. There was the kiss. The kiss that froze her in time. Then there was the walk home afterwards, along the railroad tracks, papers held tightly to her chest, dreaming of the wedding reception. That was all before Robby and his football buddies put her in the back of his Camry, raped her, and threw her back out onto the tracks, with her dreams scattered like the pages of the play.

“That would be nice.” Mona said.

“Yeah, but I’m pretty broke. Working as a farmhand in Lone Pine for twelve hours a day, and I’m still only getting pennies. We wouldn’t make it far on my salary.”

“Oh, we would do fine.” She added. “I have money.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Her eyes finally meeting mine. “I’ve been skimming some for years now. Still those little girl dreams of taking off. It’s all in a little black bag in my closet, piled under a whole stack of shit. It isn’t easy to get at. Money for a rainy day, I guess. If that day ever comes.”

I looked outside as soft rain splashed the motel window. “Well, maybe we should really do it then.”

“Maybe we should, Johnny. That would be something, wouldn’t it?”

I rubbed her right cheek with my callused hand and kissed her softly. She kissed me back, slowly sliding her tongue into my mouth. Something we rarely did in this room. Something she hated. But on that night, we made love. Slow, and without rush like we were the last two survivors of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

When we finished, I lit a cigarette, and we shared it. Mona was sprawled across my chest, looping her fingers around my curly chest hair, laughing as she straightened the hairs and watched them return to their natural position like a pig’s tail.

The clock said ten to 11. My time was nearly up. “Well, I should get going, girl.” I said, as I got up and walked over to my work jacket, hauling out the bills for the evening.

“No. No, Johnny. Please. It was wonderful. It really was.”

I insisted as she declined. We played a little back-and-forth game for a minute before I stuffed the bills back in the breast pocket of my work shirt and kissed her again. “I’ll pay ya double next time.” She laughed, then blushed.

“Well, I should get going, Mona.”

“Please don’t”

“We’ll get out of here soon, I promise, baby. Me and you, we won’t ever see this motel or this room again. I promise you.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Don’t hold your breath, but don’t lose faith soon.”

“I could love you, Johnny. I really could.”

“Way ahead of you, baby.” I put my jacket on, opened the door, and walked across the parking lot to my car.

Inside, I pounded on the steering wheel. “FUCK! FUCK! FUUUCK!” I cried, and then my phone buzzed. “No, please no! Please, God, no!”

I almost didn’t answer it, and ran back to room 108 to grab Mona and fly down Highway 29. But then headlights from the far end of the Moonlight Motel began to flicker. They were here. They were telling me to pick up the goddamn phone, or I was next.

I took a deep breath and answered it.

“Yeah.” I said. “ Yeah. Yeah, she has the money. It’s at her place. Yeah. Yeah. Under a bunch of shit she said. In a black bag. In her closet”

I hung up.

Then the red Toyota pulled up in front of Mona’s room. Two men got out and knocked on the door. This time, Mona opened it without the chain. And the men had the bag over her head before she had time to change the expression on her face.

They dragged her out to the car. Threw her in the backseat and drove towards me. I rolled down the window as the driver threw a thick brown envelope into the passenger side. It landed on the seat.

“I’m sorry, Mona. Christ. I’m sorry.”

Twelve years ago, on a Sunday in mid-August was when I felt the deepest fear I’ve ever known.

My father, my brother, and I were moving my grandmother from her little apartment in Riverview back home to Campbellton. A drive that I was familiar with, and on a good day, nice weather, no traffic, you were looking at four hours to make it from point A to point B.

The day’s plan was for my father to drive the U-Haul with all my grandmother’s belongings, my brother to take my father’s work truck, and for me to ride with my grandmother in her little red civic. Easy peasy.

We spent the morning loading all her stuff in the U-Haul and then we drove out of the small apartment complex parking lot like a three-vehicle convoy. We were highway bound.

The drive wasn’t an easy one from the get-go. My grandmother was visibly anxious, but I couldn’t blame her. Who could? That apartment had only been her temporary home at the insistence of my grandfather, whose intensive cancer treatment regimen demanded him to be closer to his doctor, who was a stone’s throw away across the chocolate river.

He battled as valiantly as a man could. For nearly a decade he underwent treatment. But eventually, there was nothing left for him to give, and he passed away.

My grandmother married him at 16. She had never been without him. Never even learned how to pay a bill. Needless to say, she felt lost and old, like a relic from a bygone era. And going back home to be close to her sisters was the only logical option.

But to deal with her anxiety, she chain-smoked with the windows up to keep out the cold. One after another with production line accuracy.

I kept my lips sealed as my head pulsated from second-hand smoke. Her brittle fingers shook like the onset of Parkinson’s as each cigarette reached her mouth. It was heartbreaking to watch her in that state. A wonderful woman who had treated me with nothing but warmth and love since as far back as my memories could travel.

I just wanted to make her laugh. Calm her down. And let her know that things were going to be okay. We’d all be okay.

But as Murphy’s Law dictates, things can always, and I mean always, get shittier.

This came in the form of my brother, who was driving the black Ford directly in front of us. He began to swerve back and forth over the solid yellow line in strange rattlesnake movements like he was stone-cold drunk, even though all we had that day up until that point was a couple cups of coffee.

This was the absolute last thing her anxious mind needed to be witnessing and processing.

I laughed, and acted like he was pulling a practical joke, because everyone in the family knew that the man joked to no end. A hill he would gladly die on. Some were outrageously funny, others were just outrageous. And this one, to me, seemed to be the latter. But I showed no sign of distress, because I could feel her watching for my reaction. And I felt if I began to slip, then she would slide right past me off the edge of the world.

But in my bones, I was worried. It was strange behaviour, even for him.

Then, the horror that I had been fearing since the swerving began a half-hour earlier presented itself in shattering fashion.

On route 126, still about two hours from our destination, my brother swerved into the left lane, but this time he stayed. And an SUV travelling at 100 km/h met my brother, with what I suspected was the kiss of death.

I screamed his name and my grandmother followed suit as I pulled over to the shoulder of the highway. “Wait here.” I told her, then I took off running towards the truck. A parade of onlookers already gathering. Death and destruction peaking interest like nothing else on God’s green earth.

Smoke was rising from the hood of the truck, and inside where it engulfed my brother. I was standing at the door, pulling on it with all the strength I had, and ever would have. Even in that close proximity, I could barely see him behind the thick, cloudy veil.

The door didn’t budge for a while. It seemed like a lifetime in my panicked state, but it was likely only thirty seconds or so. Eventually, it flung open, nearly throwing me to the asphalt as I staggered backwards, trying to regain my balance.

I called his name several times before he came to. He was floating in that purgatory state between consciousness and unconsciousness. Eyes open, but not looking anywhere. Or at anything.

That empty face broke me, but there was no time to stand on ceremony. So I unbuckled the seatbelt, helped him out of the truck, and it wasn’t long before the EMTs arrived to put him on the stretcher and take him to the nearest hospital.

After a series of tests were conducted, he only suffered a concussion and was discharged from the hospital the following morning. The passengers of the SUV were also fine, shaken up with a few cuts and bruises, but nothing life-threatening.

A terrifying experience, but one that ended much better than it could have.