Dead Men (and Women) Walking (17 page)

"You insult my bride," the
man's face twisted angrily, spit flying from his mouth. "Does your
cat look eaten? I still see it. If she ate your damn cat, would it
be lying there?"

Jim turned defiantly. "You
need help! You both need a doctor! Get out of my
apartment!"

The man seemed about to
charge him, took a deep breath, apparently reconsidering that
course of action. "Very well," he said in a calm voice, despite the
rage in his eyes, "We shall go." He motioned for the woman to
follow, and she dutifully fell in behind him.

As the two approached the
door, the man paused, looking Jim in the eyes. "You are lucky to
live in such civilized times. Once, this would have been settled
differently. As it stands, there is little harm done,
yes?"

Jim nodded, willing them to
leave faster.

"Come along dear," as he
walked out the door. However, she too paused. She wrung her hands,
looking at Jim and her husband. He turned, raising a single
eyebrow. "What is it? Haven't you troubled this gentleman
enough?"

She reached past Jim and
grabbed the body of Rasputin. "He said I could have the cat," she
said hurriedly. The door swung shut behind them.

By Dave Bartlett

“
Of all the God damn
nights, why now!”

“
How should I know? And
watch your language, He seems to be mad enough as it is!” shouted
Walt Miller over the wind that whipped the snow in entwining
“S”-shaped cyclones around his head.

“
Well Walt,” hollered Ned
back at his equally intoxicated companion, “He should’ve known
better than to call up the biggest storm North-fucking-Carolina has
ever seen on New Years Eve!”

“
Maybe if you hadn’t drank
so much we would’ve stayed on the road,” said Walt, traces of
vitriol in his voice.

“
Walt, do you see the
conditions? This road is windy anyway! Yeah I drank, but come on,
sober I would’ve done it too!”

“
Ned, you told me, ‘I’m not
going to drink too much, I’m going to be careful.’ Well here we
are,” said Walt, his voice a low, seething baritone as he tried to
hold back his anger, “in Podunk, North Carolina, stuck on some
backwoods side road, and we ain’t near nothin’.”

“
Didn’t even know it snowed
like this in North Carolina. God damn not supposed to be like
this.”

“
Ned, would you watch your
mouth? Seriously.”

“
You tell me you have
family down here,” yelled Ned, ignoring Walt’s comments as he
stumbled around from the back of the 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee they
had driven all the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma, “I didn’t expect your
inbred, retard auntie and her dogs!”

“
Leave her out of this,”
said Walt angrily as he came around from the front of the car, his
nice, suede shoes absorbing the moisture from heavy, wet snow that
had piled on the roadside at a good eight inches in
depth.

“
I’m angry is all,”
retorted Ned, his foppish mat of dirty blonde hair whipping into
his face.

“
I thought there were going
to be more. I know my Aunt Doreen ain’t the sharpest tool in the
shed, but when I got her invitation, I thought more people would
go. I didn’t think we were going to be the only ones.”

“
Well you should’ve done
checked with your relatives and seen who RSVP-ed!”

The party had not been
particularly exciting, thought Walt, using the word “party”
extremely liberally. Knowing that there was not much going on back
in Oklahoma, he figured why not go and drive out and check on his
old aunt. He hadn’t seen the elderly woman since he graduated high
school, about 10 years ago.

The only reason he invited
Ned Jenkins was because the poor guy had lost his girlfriend, and
his entire social circle was based around her. Walt was the only
one in the office who really even got along with him. Ned was. .
.crass would be the best word to use. In his college days, Ned had
been a bit of a liberal, attending rallies and growing his hair out
down his back. He was a real tree-hugging, anti-establishment
hippie in those years.

As far as Walt knew, it had
been the Army that straightened him out. Now Ned was the office
Tech Guy, and he was a Sales Representative for Texas Instruments
branch in Oklahoma. Texas Instruments basically had a stranglehold
on calculator sales to the country’s high schools, both public and
private.

Despite being in the armed
forces, Ned had remained fairly liberal in his politics, and often
talked a lot of garbage about the mostly Republican-run state and
national government. He also didn’t care much for religion, which
Walt could understand, even if he didn’t care for his occasionally
vocal disdain of Walt’s devotion to Baptism. Ned also was in
support of the homos. That made him uncomfortable, but Walt had
never met one with Ned when they went for drinks after work or
anything, so he just tried not to bring it up if Ned went off on a
rant when they were knocking a few back.

Now here was this man Ned,
leaning against Walt’s car, piss drunk, his Khakis & light
jacket getting soaked in the wet weather.

“
I’m telling you man, your
aunt is nuts!”

“
Leave her out of this
man,” said Walt again. “It ain’t her fault you got drunk and drove
us off the road in the middle of the woods, in a snowstorm!”
shouted Walt, raising his voice as the biting wind howled through
the trees.

“
Sure it is,” retorted Ned
as he trudged through the snow, warmed by whiskey, toward the shade
of a looming willow tree. “She thought your whole family was
coming, so she had too much to drink. And she just was offering and
offering, the fuck am I going to say, ‘no?” blurted Ned,
incredulously.

“
All I know is you
promised. You promised you’d stay sober enough to drive us back to
Charlotte and the hotel.”

“
It’s not even that much of
a drive!”

“
It’s an hour.”

“
Yeah, well, your aunt
lives down all these windy-ass roads off the interstate, in some
hick town in nowhere! No wonder your family didn’t show. Though I
mean, Scrabble and Dick Clark,” slurred Ned, “That was a fuckin’
party man. And she kept talking about that reporter guy on the Good
Morning Show, Abner Hollis, all fuckin’ night!”

“
So, she liked him. He was
a North Carolina man doing stories on a little North Carolina
towns.”

“
He vanished man! Three
years ago! Move on! He was goin’ to do some story on a town that
ain’t even on the map. Feature their people. Probably a bunch of
inbreeds!”

“
I know Ned, I heard her
story too. It was called Samson, the town.”

“
Never found him huh. Maybe
he liked Samson too much. Or they liked him. Fresh meat,
yum-yum.”

Walt, getting progressively
more infuriated with his smarmy, so-called friend who was spitting
his hospitality back into his face, removed his baseball cap,
scratched his brown crew-cut, and looked diagonally to the right in
order to avoid the baby-face soldier-turned-computer nerd’s
self-satisfied, intoxicated glare.

“
I for one know I enjoyed
seeing my aunt. Even if the rest of my family, who live closer than
me, decided that they did not.”

“
Man that’s why none of
them went! Because they see her too much! Your aunt’s a kook man.
She has all them clown dolls, and you saw her talking to them like
they were people.”

“
Let’s go into the car,
huh. I’m freezing.”

“
Yeah you know, you are
pretty calm for someone who is more shit-faced than me.”

“
I hold it
well.”

Walt climbed into the
driver’s side seat, and Ned decided to go into the back seat and
stretch himself out. Neither man could see far through the windows
due to the ferocity of the storm, but Walt looked anyway, his dark
brown eyes staring into the blinding white. In the rustling wind
that crackled the branches, he could hear a thousand tiny
explosions. Explosion. Fuck not now. The therapy he went to when he
was younger helped him cope. He didn’t need to do this now. Not
while drunk. Not ever.

“
Hey Ned?”

“
Yeah, what is it
man?”

“
I’m going to go the
bathroom outside, I’ll be back.”

“
Hope your piss don’t
freeze.”

Tempted to say the same
about his companion’s brain, he instead bit his tongue and stumbled
out into the snow.

He had to fight the wind
just to make it to the fringe of the forest where he would relieve
himself. He had never been a man to piss on hospitality, but he
didn’t want to intrude on his aunt when she asked if the two boys
wanted to stay the night in her small, rickety home. So instead
here he stood, frigid, pissing in the snow.

The road had been plowed
when the two men drove to his aunts, but a good 3 or 4 inches had
piled up on the small street in the time between when they went to
his aunt’s and when they left. It was serpentine and unlit, winding
and curving like a drunken snake leaving a trail in the
desert.

Ned honestly had been
driving decently, and may not even have been that drunk. But when
they hit this particular turn, he had been going much too fast, and
now they were stuck in an embankment. This much snow down here in
North Carolina. It seemed unnatural. He had seen it when he went to
Boston College, but never in Oklahoma or here in the
south.

His time in Boston had been
interesting. While BC had been a politically moderate school in
comparison to other institutions in the city, his fairly
conservative upbringing made him feel awkward, even at a Jesuit
establishment. Everyone there wanted Clinton in office in ’96, he
had been a Dole guy. But he voted Clinton.

His political convictions
weren’t strong to begin with, and anyway, after the events of the
two years prior, he just wanted companionship. So he voted, like
his frat brothers, for The Other Guy. And those guys had made him
feel comfortable. They knew about his loss, but they didn’t
patronize him ever. He was one of the guys. And you don’t piss on
hospitality. When you do, you piss in the snow.

Walt unzipped his fly, and
released the various drinks he had consumed that evening. After he
was done, he turned to walk back to the Jeep to stay some facsimile
of warm. That said, the car was not starting and consequentially,
the heat wouldn’t work.

He tugged at the zipper on
his pants, but it wouldn’t give. It was caught in the fabric. He
pulled harder and harder, exerting too much effort for somebody as
uncoordinated as he.

“
Damn it,” muttered Walt,
as he tugged. Finally, the zipper gave way, and popped clear off
his pants, landing in the snow.

“
Oh now of all the things,”
he grumbled, and reached down to pick it up, hoping in vain he
could reattach it. He had planned on wearing these pants again
tomorrow.

As Walt bent over, his foot
caught the edge of something buried beneath, and he stumbled
forward, his face and body awash in snow. In the process, he kicked
up a flurry and covered the zipper in a maelstrom of
white.

He didn’t even scream or
curse. Instead, he knelt in the snow, and turned his head to the
sky, his ballcap helping to partially obscure the falling moisture.
He looked to the heavens, and asked Him one question:
“Why?”

He started laughing at the
ridiculousness of the situation. The laughter gradually gave way to
tears. At first it was a sniffle, then it became the drunken sobs
of a desperate, empty man. Walt heard the car door open, and
footsteps approach him.

“
You okay, you’ve been out
here forev–“ Ned caught himself mid-sentence at the sight of his
friend on his knees in the middle of a snowstorm, sobbing, his head
in his hands.

“
What’s the matter man,”
asked Ned, going over to his companion, and standing over him on
the edge of the woods, looking down.

“
Leave me alone Ned,”
choked Walt quietly.

“
Look, Walt, I’ve never
really seen you show emotion to begin with. Laugh, cry, nothing.
This is weird for me.”

“
It’s weird for me too
Ned,” said Walt, looking up, his eyes glistening, his square,
stubbled jaw streaked with tears.

“
Let me be, I need time to
think.”

“
It might help if you talk
about it.”

“
No!” said Walt, raising
his voice in a rare moment of passion. “No it won’t. I talked about
everything for years, and look at me now.”

“
You’re a successful guy, a
nice guy. And you ain’t stupid,” said Ned, thinking of anything
positive to say.

“
You know how I got into
college, Ned?”

“
How?”

“
Because of my
father.”

“
What, does he have
money?”

“
No.”

“
You know how I got my
job?”

“
Your dad.”

“
You’re a smart guy too
Ned.”

“
Does your dad have
connections in high places?”