Grave Desserts
PT. 3
‘Another Stone in the Lake’
(Edit #4)
Streets shimmered from the rain, and the tiny, quivering ponds on the roads and sidewalk cracks cast back teeming clouds that hung like bulging pregnant bellies overhead. Ceaser wanted desperately to play outside with his hyperly friendly dog Pepe. He had been waiting all day to leave the house. His parents had been shouting and screaming every night for the past few weeks, and Ceaser didn’t think there was anything he could do, but leave them to their insanity. Normally Ceaser’s parents wouldn’t have allowed him to slip out at midnight, but the fighting was so furiously concentrated, like a stand-off in those Westerns with Clint Eastwood, that nobody noticed as he escaped into the night with Pepe in tow.
Scatters of lightening in the sky gave a slight thrill, but Ceaser was mostly eyeing the rail thin black kid across the street from his house. This lonely looking adolescent neighbor was interesting to Ceaser because he was always hanging, as if stranded, on the porch of his house whenever Ceaser went to play outside with his dog. Ceaser didn’t know him at all, but he wondered if he was hiding from his parents bull-crap too. The black kid looked cold, and bored, so Ceaser decided it was a good time to introduce himself. He carried Pepe across the street, because he was very protective of him, and then placed the pudgy white chihauhua on the stoop of the first step that was leading up to the skinny kids porch. Pepe sniffed the air, and wiggled his ridiculous looking butt around, hoping that someone would think he was deserving of a few pets. The thin boy dropped down a few steps and gave Pepe a pat or two on the head, looking up at Ceaser, between admiring the dog. The kid had long curly eyelashes that reminded Ceaser of a girl.
“Hey, I’m Ceaser, and this is Pepe. What’s your name?”
“I’m Gabe. Your dog’s real cool.”
“Hey, you wanna go down to the lake with me, and throw stones in?”
“Sure!”
*
Jes heard drums in his ears whenever he walked by the overpass on Mckinley Street and Patterson. He use to walk around these same scarce and desolate parts of town in later hours of the night in hopes of running into some old friendly alley-cat drifter or a dude from his younger days with a joint, and a few memories to mull over. He’d like to peep in the dumpsters, and see what freaky shit the impatient neighbors were throwing away. Sometimes he’d find an almost full cigarette in the gutters, or on a porch step, and with any luck that sucker would still light. If Trish could see him lighting this old fuck stick that had been laying out on some porch, she would kill him, because he was supposed to have quit.
Lately Jes had become more cocky since he’d been healing up pretty fast from last years motorcycle crash. He was taking too many risks for a sixty year old, and Trish was reluctant to let him out of her sight for too long, but Jes just wouldn’t stay down for long without getting squirelly. His old bones would ache with boredom, and couldn't stand the dust that was falling all over them. Trish would pull out all her tricks, when she got a whiff of Jes getting antsy. She would throw down promises of her famous Meat Loaf, or the delicious Lasagna with extra cheese that was his favorite, or she’d cut his hotdogs into little slices, anything to keep him still. Nothing pinned him down to the trailer long though, and before she could stop him, Jes would be out the door and round the corner. It would always make Trish so mad, but Jes couldn't contain himself!
On this particular night his shoes were dragging him like magnets towards Canyon Park with all it’s promises of thoughtful retrospection by the river, and it’s multitude of spots to hide out from the world. Before he reached the nature trail, he decided to linger at the train tracks for a bit, before taking the walk further into the entrance of the park. Jes withdrew his little one hitter from his pocket, and packed it generously with some grass from a unrolled baggie, gazing as he did into the river at a faraway spot where the rapids were the most fluctuating. He wasn’t really looking at the water as much as gazing into the back of his own head. Trish was really starting to bother him lately. She was treating him more like a pet then a mate, and Jes was beginning to wonder if she rather enjoyed her role as his nagging jailer. He wasn’t sure of what to think of their relationship right now, so he changed his line of thought to the homeless camps that he could see down at the riverbank below his little dugout of dirt on the edge of the tracks. There were a few tents that remained after the flood, that Jes could see through the naked trees. The one nearest to the river’s lip looked real heavy duty. It was green, and looked like the kind of tent he had seen in an Army Surplus store the last time Jes went to buy a backpack for his camping trip with Trish from Menards. The Fall had come early this year, and that was a good thing because the leaves were rain soaked to the point that it allowed Jes to see a lovely girl emerging from the green tent. She had shoulder length red hair and a delicious body. The black sweater and tight black pants were uncharacteristic of a homeless runaway, which was all the more troubling, however. It seemed to Jes that she was gazing off at the water, or at something in the distance. That butt on her though! Jeez, it made him hard as a rock. Behind him, to the right, Jes could hear two young boys passing him as they bravely, but slowly plodded further up the train tracks. He took a meandering glance their way, but he could barely see their upper bodies, as a thick mist had started to settle on everything in sight on the bridge. The moon, that had once been so full and vibrant was now veiled and hidden from view. Jes took another gander at the redhead, and a chill passed through him like a knife. She was staring back at him maliciously, like a cat eyeing a mouse. Her eyes were black, and beastly. It seemed like he face had become only a pair of eyes and nothing more. In the next instant, she was flashing her pale breasts at him. She had lifted her black sweater, and heaved her chest in his direction. Her chest was so chalky white that the nipples were barely visible. It should have aroused him, but for some reason it felt wrong, and devoid of pleasure.
Jes had a bad feeling all over like someone was hovering just above his shoulder. As he made a move to turn, a hand sprung at his shoulder as if to steady him, while a cream colored synthetic string dropped down around his throat. As it quickly tightened, Jes felt beads of sweat rise up on his forehead, and he couldn’t breathe. He tried to reach with his right hand to his throat to stop the string pressing down, but someone swiped at his fingers with a pocket blade and sliced them open, causing them to spurt streams of blood like little baby garden hoses that had become possessed. Jes pitched backwards and fell sprawled out and gasping as the string did the last of it’s work. As he died, his purplish face fell over to the left side into the dirt. A gob of spit ran down his lower lip, and turned the brown earth black. Jes stared fish-eyed at the shoes of his killer. Those shoes were brown shoes were penny loafers, and they belonged to Mr. Miller who ran the Good Bodies Mortuary. Stepping backwards, out onto the tracks, Owen looked down at the piece of fishing line that was hanging from his hand. He was not entirely sure what he had done. Out of the edge of his right coat pocket, he noticed the blue cell was lighting up, and he had a feeling it was Chelsea making sure the body had been wrapped up and ready to transport back to her house.
The mist was clearing finally, and Owen Miller could see over the edge of the tracks, and into the winding river below. He glanced casually over at the tracks, and saw the two boys looking back at him. He didn’t even associate the act with himself yet, so he couldn’t yet read the boys, and their fearful reactions they gave him, until his eyes fell down to Jes’s body crumpled lifeless at his feet. He looked back at the string in his hand that was bloodstained from biting so tightly into Jes’s neck. Both boys were scared stiff. The brown-skinned one had pissed himself, and the urine was dribbling down his leg. The other one was shorter, and more husky. Owen guessed that he was near to thirteen, and possibly Hispanic. He had one of those weird Chihuahua jobs in his arms, and he was holding him so tight that the poor thing was barking it’s head off. Owen was afraid for them. He didn’t want them to fall off the bridge. He took a few steps forward to try to explain to the boys that it wasn’t him who had killed the dead man.
*
The man who had killed the other was starting to take steps towards Ceaser and his new friend Gabe who were frozen solid on the tracks. Ceaser flinched with fear, and tried to back up, and pull himself out of this nightmare as the man slowly took a few more steps their way. Ceaser didn’t know where to go, or what to do! He knew he had seen something that he shouldn’t have, and this man was going to try and silence both of them. As Ceaser backed away from the sick man with the string, his foot hit a steel rail, and the pain was unimaginable. He was wearing flip flops, and didn’t expect anything in the world to hurt so bad. The man said something but he couldn’t hear it. Pepe slipped from his shocked grip, and plunged over the bridge. Ceaser screamed in horror, forgetting the situation he was in. Gabe tried in vail to grab it, and yelled after the dog as it fell. The dog dropped two hundred feet into the black river that swallowed him up like he had never existed or been born into this world. In total shock, the boys both looked back at where the crazy man had been standing. There was no one but themselves in the cold dark of the evening. The killer had vanished.
(To be continued...)
P.S.
In case you need a refresher of the other ‘Grave Desserts’ installations, please follow this link for ‘Grave Desserts Pt. 2’, and that will hold the link to ‘Grave Desserts Pt. 1’.