How to Find Peace at the End of the World (7 page)

For a brief moment I wish this, that Westley has been transported somewhere with his beloved guarddogs and his favorite bong and is smoking out like a villain. It gives me a little chuckle, actually.

I get to the chain link in the back and edge to the farthest spot to get a better look at the back yard. I bang on the fence a few times to see if I can draw the attention of any pits that might be in the house. I stand there for a good ten minutes banging and shaking the gate. Nothing. Then I take off my jacket and start climbing towards the top. At the top, and I don’t know where I learned this, probably from some action film, I double the jacket in a loop and throw it over the razor wire. Then I lever myself over the top of the gate.

Wow. Well, fuck. What the movies don’t tell you is that the razor wire still hurts like a bitch, even through two layers of heavy wool jacket. I pop over and release my gritted teeth after scratching the fuck out of my chest, stomach and thighs. No time to get over excited now, Dan. I cling on for dear life, or at least the preservation of my ankles. Then, when I’ve climbed down to about two feet off the ground, I drop down onto the concrete driveway below.
For some retarded reason I crouch and start running in a zigzag pattern across the back lawn as if some sniper has a bead on me. Part of me knows this is silly, but my body responds anyway, my heart pounding by the time I get to the back door.

This is where my plan comes together: dogs gone I should be able to get in through the pet doors and load up on Shaggy’s reserve. The premium shit. Doubtful the stuff I lifted from the old lady’s house is anywhere near as good. I rub my hands together and stoop down and stick my head through the doggie door. It’s darker in the house than outside and it takes a while for my vision to resolve. Despite my size I slip through the massive doggie door. The memory comes to me now that I’d seen before two of Westley’s pits going through at the same time, that’s how big the door is.

Still paranoid about something, I creep towards the stairs that lead to the second floor of the house, to Westley’s room. Once up there I look around all the small bedrooms, one for Wes and two guestrooms, one I’d once crashed in on getting smashed on Salvia for the first time. Most of this junk is useless to me: fender guitars, computers, cowboy boots (maybe not the boots, but Westley has smallish feet). I find his keys on his nightstand and take them, too. His car isn’t nearly as rugged and capacious as the Beast, but the keys may open other locked treasures further into the lair.

Actually, I don’t have to look far. Inside a powered cooler in his walk in closet I find the mother lode: several stacked plastic bins lined with paper towels. Each bin is like a layer cake of bliss.

What am I doing? I can hear Amy’s voice in my head suddenly. It resounds through my skull. I should be working my hardest to get back to her, to find help, fucking civilization, and here I am in my drug dealer’s house helping myself to premium bud. This is what I need right now. Calm the nerves, so on and so forth. I wave her away and pick up the entire stack, fresh buds, pollen, nuggets, all of it.

I make it to near the front door before they find me.

I’m standing there, almost Scott free, the bud bins in my arms when I hear this low meta-growl, like a symphony of growls. I slowly turn around and then even more slowly set the bins down at my feet. There they are, six pits standing there, teeth bared and their threatening registers mix together into some unholy note of displeasure. I slowly lift my hands up over my head and then reconsider (dogs don’t know that sign) and put my hands out instead.

That’s when the line of angry grimaces breaks. One by one they cock their heads as if my smell has finally made its way past the skunk weed and through the maze of their doggie gray matter. Almost in unison they plop on their back haunches, their red tongues popping out of their heads. I keep holding my hands out except now I reach to let them smell more of me. They are still, after all, dogs, and they know my smell. They are overjoyed to see me even. The wall breaks and I’m surrounded by short, warm fur and my fingers and then arms are covered in gloppy pit-bull kisses. I’m trespassing but they’re hungry and scared and bewildered, most likely.

It breaks my heart, really it does. Five, no six pit bulls. All of them waiting obediently in this house for Wes, thinking the next moment he’d stumble through the door in his blasted stupor.

“Good doggies,” I say as I open the front door and slide the boxes outside.

I stand there for a moment, thinking about taking them with me. Then I wait a bit more for sense to come. I’m on a quick jaunt up to Dallas. No way six dogs will do anything but slow me down. Plus, I think they might be better off simply having run of the neighborhood or beyond. Revert to their feral nature. Run and hunt in packs and all that. Or is this just the wishful thinking of an idiot?. But for now, for now, what do I do?

I search the house top to bottom and find a literal half ton of dry doggie chow locked away in the basement. I bring it all up, all twenty bags and set them in a bunker next to the doggie door. With my knife I cut the sides of the bags and the chow skitters across the tile floor, drifts against the bags. I take the kiddie pool that Westley was fond of soaking in when utterly blasted and I fill it with water from the still running back tap. The dogs are at my feet the whole way, greedily pulling at the kibble, greedily lapping from the pool. When they are sated they look up at me expectantly. Where to now oh great leader? They seem to wag.

This is going to be tough.

I head to the big walk in Sub-zero. Inside I find about twenty pounds of steak, both chilled and frozen. The pits go crazy even though they’re full on kibble. I take each piece and toss it overhand clear across to the other side of the yard and the puts take the bait and run after. As they fight over the meat I book it the other way, back through the rear entrance across the bottom of the house and through the front door.

I leave the front door cracked open, of course. I grab the bins at my feet and walk to the wide gate to distract the dogs.

They sit there on their haunches and do that thing, that almost too high to hear squeal. I wish it were all just a few octaves higher because then I wouldn’t be able to hear anymore that sound that fucking breaks my heart.

The paranoid thought takes up in my head for a moment: what if they aren’t smart enough to find the unlocked front door. I disabuse myself of the notion quickly. Their noses will lead them out eventually. I tell myself I can’t take them with me for the last time. Then I think they might find me too quickly, the lot of them running to the front door and peeling off after me. I take the last bit of jerky out of my pockets and leave them on the ground, right near the reach of their red tongues wriggling through the chain link. I slowly back away until I’m in the front of the house again. I throw the door open wide. Even the six pits, trusting and loyal as they are will be able to figure it out. So the wind doesn’t slam the door shut again, I prop the door open with the umbrella stand near his front door. Then I head back to the chain links where the doggies are just licking up the last bits of jerky, their tongue prints dark on the pavement. I give each dog a rub on the head and get in return a generous slathering of thick doggie drool. They’ll find their way out soon enough. That, or Westly will be back. Either way, I’m not doing anything bad here, I tell myself. I’m not sentencing them to a slow painful death. Of course not. I keep telling myself this as I climb back into the Beast and start it up and tear out of Westley’s cul-de-sac without looking back.

 
4 PM I can’t wait. I stop when I am clear of the neighborhood and with the engine idling I roll myself a blunt and light it. I lift it up to the rear view mirror. Cheers Wes.

Honestly, Westley was the closest damn thing to a friend I had in this two town.
 

I sit back into that seat of the Beast and take a deep drag. I’m really trying to get my groove on this thing, but each distant dog bark makes me sit up and check the mirrors. I’d already told myself if I see Wes’ crew tumbling down the empty street that I would just open my doors and take them all with me. I’m a sucker like that. But they don’t come and the street behind remains empty. It’s the strong bud. It’s making me paranoid. That’s what it is. Strong bud.

I start the car up again and maneuver with one hand, the other holding the blunt. I start to think about all this messed up shit. I think deeply but it’s always hard to tell with the state I’m in. Like all potheads I’d once tried writing down all these deep philosophical and pragmatic concepts that I had when high, thinking that they would change the world, but they always turned out to be something like the wonderings of a fourth grader on pain medication.

What if the whole world is like this? What if I’m the only one left? What would I do then? Would I go crazy? I’m pretty sure that I will go crazy, maybe even as early as when I get into Dallas and find the streets deserted. Or maybe sooner. When I get to Conroe? To the other side of town even? What is it? What can make everyone disappear? Should I get on the ground right now and start praying? Believe in the God I’ve never really believed in all that much?

Whatever. I’m still too damn hopeful. This is a localized phenomenon. Like the alien dome lowered over the city. Or what if great alien chompers came down one day and clamped down on the city and lifted it up and now I’m really travelling through deep space to some alien world? Like in that movie I saw once and I can’t name right now. There are no other people because they’ve all been beamed onto the alien ship for testing and the only reason I wasn’t was that my brain lacks a certain special brain wave that makes me susceptible to the alien’s beaming ray. I elaborate on this fiction, piling on different caveats and even backgrounds for the aliens (they are from a planet orbiting the far star of the trio of Centauris and the reason for their apparent transgression is that they are basically huge nerd xenobiologists who want to study their quarry in very precise conditions, but only after properly tagging all of them with anal probes). And then, when everybody is finally returned to the little dome city cage thing, I will be the only one among them that is any the wiser and I will lead a test subject uprising, breaking through the shell of the dome and travelling through the various tunnels of the arm holding my fair city into the massive alien space ship and within the space ship I will conquer the waves of aliens, turning their technology, all their vaporizing ray guns and giant mechanical suits against them and take over the ship by forcing the few alien scum xeno-biologists I leave alive to turn the ship around for Earth, and to my Amy, and while they do that, they also sabotage the faster than light drives and we are stuck travelling at an unbearably slow speed back towards earth until the drives are fixed, which will take a long time, and because I don’t believe I will be able to even make it back in time to my Amy before she dies I am inconsolable except that I realize, quite sensibly, that there are people here with me, my fellow Houstonians, millions strong, and I try to forge a life among these people that hail me as a hero, and try to rule justly for the centuries that the Alien technology, infused in my blood, keep me alive, while taking many wives, actually, many harems, loving them even until they are quite old ladies, for they have not tragically or non-tragically been similarly enhanced until the very end when I die and my soul is consigned to that rare place that souls dwell, encased in their little bubbles and surrounded by the floating ethers of those they have loved and have similarly loved them.
Shit. This is strong stuff.

After a while Linda begins to seem freaky to me. She can turn her head. Look at me with plastic eyes. I don’t like it. I feel like throwing her out of the car but I can’t bring myself to do it. I put her in the back seat instead. She still stares at me accusingly. I cover her with a canvas tarp.
In downtown I go down the streets I sort of remember from a summer internship down here ages ago. I worked on the top floor of the library for a nice lady, filed for her and arranged and catalogued the contents of her storage closets. I find, surprisingly, that the way coming back to me quite easily.
I pass by the downtown Fuel N Go and look at my gas gauge. I’ve been driving all day just about and the tank is already ⅓ of the way down. I decide to stop at the station and fill up and see if I can find some more gas cans while the power is still on.
I find that the pump still asks for my credit card. Good. I put my Visa in and take it out quickly and select premium. Let them bill me. I put the nozzle in and press the trigger. Click. Nothing. Shit. I remember something about having to flip a switch to turn the pump on, or at least to a mode that actually, you know, pumps gas. I grab a large 4-D cell maglight from where it’s strapped in the truck’s cab. I realize how paranoid this is, especially considering what other dangerous creatures I’ve encountered on my journey so far: basically nada. I don’t know if I might actually be comforted should I come upon a bear or something in the middle of downtown Houston, running the gas pumps at the Fuel N Go. But it’s almost ingrained in my mind: I’ve seen so many zombie films and post-apocalyptic vampire films that I know not to go anywhere without a 4-D cell Maglight because it can be used as both a a source of illumination and a weapon. Not that the Fuel N Go is scary or anything: it’s not very deep and one wall is all windows and the lights are still on, it’s just the desolation of the surroundings resonates so strongly in my brain pan with all those disaster movies that I used to enjoy and probably now don’t enjoy because, Hell, I’m in one.
I slink towards the glass doors and peer inside. There’s one of those glass barriers around the counter, but currently the slot is open. I go inside and take a better measure of the opening. I’m all of 5’10, 150 lbs. I think I can get through. I pull myself on to the counter by the grill above the opening and then I lower my legs through and slowly sit my butt on the counter, legs where the attendant would be. I drop the rest of the way in.
It’s much tighter in this hole than on first blush. There’s a lot less light, too: metal grates cover the windows and block even more of the light already made meager by the window paint and stickers outside advertising specials. Under the console I find the switch for pump seven where the Beast is parked. I also find a really nasty girly mag. I slip it into the waistband of my pants along with a few packs of cigarettes: I have never before smoked cigs in my life, but Hell, good as time as any to start, right? There’s also what looks like a sawed off twelve gauge, but I leave it in its cradle because it’d be redundant: I’ve already got one. I also take a box of lighters. I’ve used my own up until now but I expect it’ll run out of fuel sooner rather than later and it’s something I’ve had for every camping trip since I was eleven, though I don’t expect to be spending any extended time in the wilderness. Pump on, I unlatch the cage and make my way back out to my car and start it filling up. While the Beast drinks, I go back inside of the store to see if there’s anything else I can use. I find a stack of gas cans, five gallons and self-venting. There are ten of them and I gauge for a second whether they will all fit into the back of the truck bed. I grab some zip ties and string them all together through their handles and carry them out to the pump. Crap, might be faster if I had the use of more pumps. I go back inside, into the cage through the now open door and flip the rest of the pump switches on. Outside, I open the lock on the truck bed and peer inside at the damage: a tool box had become un-moored from its bungee ties and gone careening into the quilt wrapped jars of preserves. I slowly peel open the blanket to find the jar of asparagus had shattered. Good. At least it wasn’t the eggs. I take a few clean spears of asparagus and munch them down as I take the larger shards of glass and throw them away. The pickling vinegar had already mostly evaporated. I pile the loose blanket back on the rest of the jars.
I begin my parallel filling operation on the gas cans, one five gallon can at each pump, even though I probably won’t be able to take them all. When I finish with one, I load it into the back of the truck and am gratified to find that it takes up much less room in the massive truck bed than previously thought. I load up each canister as they finish, one after the other. Ten cans, five gallons per. That will only keep me from having to stop for gas twice. I suspect that pretty soon the power will finally cut off, and I won’t have the luxury of pumping my gas like I was on my way home from work. I wish I had bothered to find out the procedure for manual pumping of gasoline, then I remember something from my childhood camping trips. I head back into the gas station and look through the shelves, trying to pin down the specific piece of milky and red plastic I remember from so many years ago. I finally find it in the back section of the store next some other hardware. A fuel siphon. It hasn’t changed much since one fateful camping trip when my father, losing track of the gas gauge, drove us into Yellowstone on a quarter tank. It wasn’t too traumatic, just memorable, especially when you are seven years old. A friendly stranger in a minivan stopped and produced from all the errata tied to the top of his car one of these babies. Just like this one, it had a plastic accordion pump attached to a valve and two pieces to tubing thin enough to fit down the nozzle guard in a fuel tank. After asking if we had any grade restrictions (we didn’t of course) the stranger siphoned a good half of his own tank into ours and then waved it away when my father tried to pay. We went on to West Yellowstone and had a good time.
Remembering these things is starting to get to me, put a crimp on my new found solitary mode of existence. I should remember, instead, all the shitty things people ever did to me. It might make me glad of my particular predicament. But then, doing that seems somehow to be consigning myself to a certain fate. I’m not quite ready to do that. Maybe when I lived alone among all those people I resented, never being able to tell anybody how I felt (especially after my parents, having had me so late, passed away) I was ready to do that. But Amy really turned all that around. Still, I wonder if living the way I did back then somehow prepared me somewhat for this situation. That and I think back and wonder: didn’t I once in high school have fantasies very similar to this? There’s an eerie quality of deja vu pervading everything I find myself doing now.
I go back into the store and grab a few cold drinks and some snacks. I do a walk around of the beast, check the bed cover and hoist myself back into the seriously high seat. Geronimo, I say, as I plunge into the empty downtown of Houston.
7 PM. I regard the hole in Heritage plaza with a morbid curiosity. Well, maybe not morbid, because it is unlikely anybody died in this crash. It is both eerily reminiscent of what happened on 9-11 and also not. There’s no fire, or the marginal fire sparked by whatever fuel was still left in the plane has been put out by the fire control systems in the building, most likely. At least I think this is the case for I still see a sort of mist descending from the ragged hole in the side of the building. I guess that’s the part that really reminds me of 9-11: there’s a ragged hole in the side of a large building about two thirds of the way up. What doesn’t hark back to the day: there are still some very recognizable parts of the plane intact. Part of a tail section or something. In fact, it looks almost as if the front of plane and the building have merged in a big, blurry mesh of twisted metal. The angle of impact indicated by the fuselage also seems rather steep: like the plane that almost took me out near Hobby airport it must have run out of fuel. It’s quite a dramatic sight. It almost looks a little surreal, like, instead of being reality, some giant promotional campaign for a new movie or something. The movie will premier and the promo will be taken down and packed up and sent to the junkyard or something. If only this entire ordeal were like that.
I sit there a few more moments as the sun gets lower in the sky. I should really go in to the large building right in front of me. I should really begin looking for what I came here to find.