The Long Way Home

by Richard Chizmar

  That was the two of us in a nutshell, the Freeman boys. No one in a million years could have guessed the disparate futures Fate had in store for us just around the bend.

  When Sam graduated college at the top of his class and landed a job at a prestigious engineering firm in Washington D.C., no one was the least bit surprised. Not long after, he married his high school sweetheart, and, a year later, Jenny gave birth to their first child. A son named after our father.

  I was a different story altogether. I spent most of my freshman year at Richmond recovering from a serious knee injury I’d suffered during Fall Ball and drinking too much. Instead of returning home after the end of spring semester, I shacked up in a run-down off campus apartment with a few of my teammates and spent the summer rehabbing my knee and getting plastered on a nightly basis. By the fall of my sophomore year, I had added cocaine to my rigorous party routine and by spring break—after several warnings and a failed NCAA drug test—I’d been kicked off the baseball team. A certified letter was sent home to my parents and my scholarship was revoked.

  A couple months later, I was arrested for the first time.

  ****

  I didn’t own a car, but my downstairs neighbor—a retired concrete worker named Jeremy—had an old pick-up truck he’d been trying to sell for a couple months and for fifty bucks he agreed to let me borrow it for the week. I couldn’t afford the fifty, but I didn’t have much of a choice. The last thing I wanted to do was take a Greyhound bus home to bury my father.

  Home. It felt funny even thinking the word after all this time.

  The day after I’d been released from Hagerstown, my parole officer explained that I needed special permission if I wanted to leave the state of Maryland at any time in the next twelve months. The same rule applied to setting up residence and getting a job. I guess the State wanted to keep an eye on me, to make sure I’d been properly reformed.

  I wanted as little contact as possible with my drill sergeant of a parole officer and didn’t like the idea of asking for special permission or special anything, so I did the first thing that came to mind: I got as far away from my hometown as possible and moved to the westernmost part of the state. A little town named Burtonsville, about forty miles southwest of Cumberland. There wasn’t much there, but rent was cheap, people minded their own business, and there was a lumberyard hiring manual labor.

  Time passed slowly in Burtonsville. I worked forty to fifty hours a week hauling and cutting timber, went to AA meetings every Thursday night at a local elementary school, and spent a lot of time sitting alone in the dark eating pizza and watching bad movies. I spoke with Mom every other weekend on the telephone, but Dad and the rest of the family were still a no-show. I was mostly fine with that. I didn’t have a clue what I would say to any of them.

  Despite being there for almost nine months, I hadn’t made many new friends in town. I grabbed breakfast at Waffle House from time to time with a couple guys from the lumberyard, but none of us were big talkers. Usually the weather and the Orioles, and they liked to swap hunting and fishing stories. A pretty, blonde waitress from the pizza joint around the corner asked me to the movies about a month ago, but I politely declined. She was a good bit younger than me, and I didn’t think I was ready for that anyway.

  I wouldn’t say I was lonely, but some days were harder than others. If I found myself going stir-crazy or felt my brain starting to get away from me, I either went for a long jog around town or gave my AA sponsor a call. Virgil Marshall sold farm equipment for a living and talked good sense to me and several other recovering alcoholics in Burtonsville. He had the most god-awful handlebar mustache I’d ever seen and told horrible, rambling, filthy jokes, but otherwise he was a good man. He had fought the wars and come out on the other side.

  In fact, it was Virgil who had suggested I purchase the half-dozen tomato plants growing in plastic pots on my second-floor balcony. “A small step,” he claimed, “toward becoming a responsible caregiver.”

  I didn’t know about all that, but I was a big-time fan of BLTs and was looking forward to harvest time.

  ****

  Once I had finished listening to my mother’s message for a third time, I went into the bedroom and packed jeans, t-shirts, socks, and clean underwear into a knapsack. I didn’t own a suit or nice shoes, so I would have to pick something up down the road for the funeral. Probably get a haircut, too. I went downstairs and talked to Jeremy about his pick-up and he agreed to water my tomatoes while I was away, and then I said my goodbye and hit the road.

  I didn’t bother calling Mom before I left to ask what had happened or tell her I was coming. My father had been diagnosed with lung cancer almost a year ago. He’d been doing well enough the last time she and I had spoken, but I knew from reading the brochures that things could change in a hurry.

  Salisbury was a six-hour-plus drive, longer if any of the mountain roads were being worked on, which happened a lot this time of year according to the local news. There would be plenty of time to think. And remember.

  I had spent the past seven years of my life trying to forget, but I had a feeling that wasn’t going to work anymore.

  ****

  Hi, my name is Kyle Thomas. I’m twenty-six years old and I’m an alcoholic.

  Some days—even after everything that had happened—I still couldn’t believe it was true.

  Today wasn’t one of those days.

  As I pulled onto the interstate—after loading up with gas and an extra-large coffee from Wawa—I did what I often did on those graveyard-quiet, dead-end nights when sleep refused to come: I traveled back in time and tried to figure out what the hell had happened to my life.

  First, there was the alcohol. I never drank much in high school. Mom and Dad kept a tight lid on that sort of activity, and I was stone-cold obsessed about training for baseball. My body is a temple and I must treat it as such, and all that happy crappy business.

  That all changed when I got to Richmond. Most college students drank to be cool and fit in, or to get laid. A game of beer pong here, a game of flip cup there, maybe the occasional slammer of a night where they go overboard and end up puking in a trashcan. I wasn’t one of those people. From the very beginning, I drank to get hammered. Drinking socially just didn’t make sense to me. If I wanted to stand around talking and sipping from a frosty mug, I would have sipped lemonade or sweet tea like my mother used to make. But if I was drinking beer, hell, I wanted to drink all the beer.

  Virgil said some people are just wired that way. The disease is often hereditary, passing down from one generation to the next. Other times it comes clean out of the blue like a Texas tornado and destroys everything in its path. Whatever the reason—and this wasn’t an excuse, merely an acceptance—I was one of those people.

  Then, there was the cocaine. Despite seeing it around at a few parties during my freshman year, I never touched the stuff. It felt big city and dangerous to me. But then I’d started dating Lexie Sharretts at the start of sophomore year and she turned me on to it. Lexie came from a different world, and I found everything about that world exotic and exciting. Money, fast cars, yacht clubs, I was like a kid in a candy store. I liked cocaine the first time I tried it (Lexie and me in bed in her apartment), loved it the second time, and craved it like oxygen after the third. The drug not only made me feel happy and confident, it made me feel invincible. I wasn’t just going to come back stronger and faster than ever before from my knee injury, I was going to have such a blockbuster season that scouts were going to come out of the woodwork and offer me a seven-figure signing bonus to leave college early. Thanks to the cocaine, I was absolutely sure of it.

  Finally, there were my grades, or lack thereof. This part wasn’t very complicated. I’d simply stopped going to classes. Between training and physical therapy, spending time with Lexie, partying, and waking up hung over every morning, there simply wasn’t enough time fo
r studying and homework. After all, I was headed to the big leagues, right? What did I need a degree for?

  ****

  I relaxed my grip on the steering wheel and resisted the urge to slam my fist on the dashboard. I knew violence wasn’t the answer—unfortunately, only after a lot of first-hand experience—but when I thought about how I had thrown my life away, it wasn’t easy. I wanted to break things. I wanted to break myself.

  But I had already done that.

  Instead, I counted to ten inside my head, rolled down the window, and cranked up the radio. Mick Jagger preached to me about JFK and the devil, and I sang along.

  The evening was warm but there was little humidity, rare for August in Maryland, and the air felt good on my face and arms. It was just past six on a Friday but traffic was sparse. Not many people commuted long distance to work out here in the mountains.

  For a moment, I tried to picture Lexie Sharretts’s face and couldn’t. Christ, I couldn’t even remember what the girl looked like anymore.

  I glanced at the speedometer and eased up on the gas pedal. I wasn’t in that much of a hurry and a ticket was the last thing I needed. The idea of walking into another courtroom and facing another judge made me want to puke. I settled in at sixty-five and checked the time again. If all went according to plan, I would roll into Salisbury right around midnight. That seemed fitting somehow.

  ****

  After I’d been kicked off the baseball team and thrown out of school, I refused to return home to Salisbury. My father called the morning they received the certified letter, and every day after for two weeks. My mother and Sam tried almost as many times. They all threatened to come down and get me and take me home. After awhile, I just stopped answering the phone. None of them had any idea how bad it was. They were patient and kind despite their obvious disappointment and confusion, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t face them and the rest of the town. I was too embarrassed.

  I slept on a ratty sofa at one of my shadier friends’ studio apartment and got a job cleaning dishes and clearing tables at a busy restaurant off campus. I still drank every night, sometimes sneaking leftover pitchers from the tables I was supposed to be cleaning, and still did coke when I could afford it, which wasn’t very often now that Lexie had dumped me.

  A couple months passed and with it the sense of shame lessened enough for me to promise my mother I would come home for an upcoming weekend to help celebrate her birthday. I missed my family and finally felt decent enough to show my face.

  But the day before I was scheduled to get on a bus and head to Salisbury, I got into a fight at a downtown bar that resulted in six stitches in my forehead and a broken plate-glass window. I (along with the jackass I’d been fighting) was arrested for disturbing the peace and destruction of property.

  Instead of celebrating Mom’s birthday that weekend, Sam and my father drove south and bailed me out of jail. I was grateful, but once again, I refused to go home with them. At first, they were livid, all indignant sputtering and shaking heads, but when that didn’t work, they begged me. But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going. Maybe ever. I was nineteen years old. They couldn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I promised my father I wouldn’t drink anymore and sent them on their way. It was the best I could manage.

  ****

  There was a fire burning somewhere near the highway, and the smoke was stinging my eyes, so I rolled up the truck window and closed the vents. It took about thirty seconds for the interior of the pick-up to feel like a sauna, but I figured I’d outdrive it in another five minutes or so.

  The Rolling Stones had given way to David Bowie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Johnny Cash. Sam had always loved Johnny Cash, had a big poster of him in his bedroom growing up. He’d even tried to style his hair like Johnny’s his senior year in high school. I used to make fun of him, Steady Sam jamming to the Man in Black, the ultimate rebel. My big brother usually just smiled and turned up the volume until he couldn’t hear me anymore.

  ****

  About a month after I’d been arrested, Sam showed up at the restaurant one evening, sat at a table by the bathroom, ordered himself a steak and baked potato for dinner, and waited there until I finished work.

  We took a walk along the river and talked. Well, Sam did most of the talking. I just listened and nodded my head every once in a while.

  Sam had done some long-distance detective work and talked to my old roommate and a couple of my former teammates. They’d told him all about Lexie and the partying. I told him that my behavior was my own responsibility and no one else’s. Lexie wasn’t some kind of blonde she-devil who had corrupted a good old, innocent country boy; I had done that all by myself. As for the partying, I admitted I had let it get out of control, but claimed I had a better handle on it now. All of which was a big fat lie. Hell, I was buzzed that very night from stealing shots from behind the bar, Sam just didn’t know it.

  After more than an hour of listening to him lecture, I told my big brother I loved him and appreciated the advice, but my feet hurt from working a double-shift and I needed to get some rest.

  He asked one last time if I would come home with him, and when I shook my head, he pulled out an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. I opened it and found seven hundred dollars in cash. “Dad asked me to give it to you. He said to tell you it’s not much, but he hopes it helps a little,” Sam said, hugging me goodbye. “Maybe you can get your own place. Start taking better care of yourself.”

  Two hours later, I had spent the entire envelope on cocaine. The coke barely lasted three days, and when it was gone, I was burning so intensely for another hit that I broke into my manager’s office at the restaurant and stole the petty cash. The whole thing had been captured by a security camera, and I was arrested later that night.

  ****

  The truck window was rolled down again, the temperature dropping into the high seventies as dusk drew near, and I still felt the red-hot rush of shame spread across my face. I’d been a junkie, plain and simple. There was no other word to describe it.

  For the past six months I’d been sending money home to my mother every other week to try to make some sort of amends. Each time a payment showed up in the mailbox, she’d call and try to talk me into taking it back (“Buy yourself a cellphone, honey, or some new clothes…”) but I refused. It wasn’t much, a hundred and fifty here, a buck and a quarter there, but it was the right thing to do. Mom and Dad had wasted so much money on me—fines, court costs, attorney fees—it made my stomach ache just thinking about it.

  I spotted a rest stop up ahead and pulled off and parked. I was thirsty and needed to pee something fierce. On the way to the restroom, as I was crossing the parking lot, I watched a father lift his young son into a car seat, buckle him in, and kiss him on the tip of his nose before closing the door.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and kept on walking.

  ****

  After my second arrest, I had no choice but to move back home. The restaurant fired me, of course, and my friend had finally had enough and kicked me out of his apartment. Then, there was my father. For the second time in as many months, he made the drive south and bailed me out. But this time his help came with one condition: that I move back to Salisbury, get a job, and keep myself out of trouble.

  I had no money, a police record, a forthcoming court date, and no place to live.

  So, I went home.

  At first, it wasn’t so bad. I moved back into my old bedroom and being there seemed to help settle me. My father called in a favor and got me a job laying asphalt with a road crew working the next county over, so I didn’t have to worry much about running into any old friends. The closest I came was one afternoon when I spotted my ex-high school History teacher while I was working the flag and directing traffic. I turned my back on her before she could get a good look and she went on her way witho
ut recognizing me.

  I stayed home at night. No bars, no parties, nothing. I spent most evenings watching the Orioles on television and reading my old comic books.

  It wasn’t easy, but some nights I forced myself to go downstairs and watch the game with my dad or sit on the screened-in back porch and keep my mom company while she played solitaire. Despite everything I’d done, talking to my mother was still laid-back and comforting. Without putting any pressure on me, she spoke about my future like I still had a chance. “You just have to get your feet back under you,” she would always say, with a hopeful smile. “It’ll happen, just give it time.”

  My father wasn’t quite so uplifting. He was friendly and supportive enough, but there was a coolness to his words and body language, and he was all about today, never once talking about the future with me. Plans, hopes, dreams—not a word. It was like he believed I had already ruined any chance I had of making something of myself, and now the best I could do was remain invisible and not bring any more disgrace to our family.

  When I was growing up, my father would often mow the lawn or tinker around out in the garage until dusk, and then he’d come barreling inside, give my mom a big sweaty kiss, fix a plate of cheese and crackers and pepperoni at the kitchen counter, grab a couple cold beers from the fridge, and he and mom would camp out in front of the television for an hour or two watching their “shows.” That all stopped when I came home. I never heard a peep of disagreement from either of them, but they definitely started spending more time apart than together. I still saw Dad snacking on the occasional platter of cheese and crackers, but the absence of those cold beers spoke volumes. Dad had made damn sure not a drop of liquor remained in the house. Not even my mother’s favorite wine.