Charlie (Bloodletting Book 1)

by Joe Humphrey

  CHARLIE

  By

  Joe Humphrey

  Book One of the Bloodletting Series

  Text Copyright © 2021 Joe Humphrey

  All Rights Reserved

  Published by Joe Humphrey

  bloodlettingbook.com

  Cover artwork reference material by by AwesomeStock and nikkidoodlesx3

  Special thanks to David Solove for his feedback and support

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  - 1 -

  Charlie leveled her thumb by the side of the road. Two days of hitchhiking and she’d already lost her resolve. She hadn’t even made it halfway to California. The four hundred or so miles she traveled had not come easy and she was already heading home, tail between her legs. It turns out she wasn't ready for the road and the bad weirdness that scuttles and hides in the desert… and there was more of that to come.

  A glint of chrome on a nice looking red Plymouth flashed in her eyes as it came roaring up the highway. Charlie waved her thumb at the driver. The big car sped past her without pause. She switched fingers and continued waving, then stomped her foot in the dust and had a mini-tantrum. It was getting dark and she was much farther from Flagstaff than she expected to be. Plus it was looking like rain. Flagstaff was where her last ride dropped her off the night before, sending her on her way with a couple of bucks and a bad taste in her mouth. The two dollars disappeared within a matter of minutes. It went toward a loaf of bread, two Dr. Peppers, a couple of candy bars, and a comic-book. The bad taste, on the other hand, was going to be there for a good piece longer, at least as long as she was on the road.

  The last two days were a crash course in life on the road for a fifteen-year-old girl. The rides were easy enough to get, but nothing was free. She considered herself lucky that what she'd done so far was the worst of what had been asked of her.

  Her primary concern, walking along the side of the highway, was the increasing distance she was putting between herself and Flagstaff. It was getting dark and she’d walked for what must have been at least two hours. Why had she walked? However many miles she'd wandered could have been covered in a matter of minutes in a car, yet she had walked anyway. Something had told her to get out of Flagstaff anyway she could. When a ride didn’t appear immediately, she started walking.

  This was one of those odd times she wished she wore a watch because at least then she could get some idea of the distance she'd covered. It hadn't occurred to her to look at the mile markers as she left town, and she'd only been doing that for the last half hour or so.

  The sky rolled from orange to pink as the sun settled behind the fiery Arizona horizon and panic chewed at her stomach. This was beginning to feel really bad. Her brain conjured up visions of every dangerous animal that could potentially poison her or rip her to pieces the moment the sun dipped behind the mountains. Everything from rattlesnakes and coyotes to roaming dope-addled hobos. To top it off, she could see storm clouds gathering on the eastern horizon. She turned and stared down the highway behind her, attempting to make a car appear by sheer force of will.

  In the distance, she saw the glowing double eyes of headlights as they puttered up the road. Excitement rose inside her as she strained her thumb upwards and out, as though that extra bit of effort would mean the difference between a ride and a painful, lonely death in the vast emptiness of the unforgiving desert. As the car approached she saw that it was a beat-up yellow VW Bug. Tears bit at her eyes and she shoved her thumb out into the road, hoping the driver would see her in the spreading darkness.

  Charlie hooted with joy as the Bug rumbled to a stop in front of her, the headlights blinding her momentarily. She ran to the passenger side door and pulled it open, blubbering “thank you,” to the shadow behind the wheel and climbed inside.

  - 2 -

  The fight was three nights before Charlie met the monster that called itself Chris Hagen. It centered on Patrick, who was a boy that was her friend but wasn't exactly her boyfriend. At least Charlie didn't consider him as much. They kissed and she let him attempt to fondle her breasts once. They were sitting on the jungle gym in the park near Charlie's house when that happened. It was after a day spent riding bikes around town and collecting bottles to return for change. With almost four dollars between them, they spent half of it on comic books, sodas, and candy.

  Sitting on the jungle gym, coming down from too much sugar and caffeine, Charlie leaned over and kissed him awkwardly on the side of the mouth. It wasn’t something she planned on doing, but it felt right at that moment. He looked at her, confused and almost shaking. For a moment she thought he was going to jump down and run away, but he leaned over and kissed her back. Almost immediately his hand found its way to the general vicinity of her left breast, but couldn't quite land it. He got more bra than boob and the silliness of it doused any sexual excitement.

  He was a skinny boy with pimples and a valiant, though futile, attempt at a mustache sitting on his upper lip. His greasy brown hair was appropriately shaggy and fell over his eyes in a curly wave that was almost cool if you squinted. Charlie was attracted to him in the way girls can be attracted to boys their own age. This is to say not at all in the same way she was attracted to Jim Morrison (about whom she daydreamed of almost constantly) but he was cute in his own, suburban sort of way. Jim certainly wouldn't have stumbled around like a dingus trying to find her boob, dainty as it was. She guessed that Jim would have known exactly what to do with her boob and the rest of her as well, but that was neither here nor there.

  Regardless of his inability to be the brooding, lionesque God-on-Earth that was the lead singer of The Doors, Patrick was still not too bad. She found herself, for the first time, considering the possibility of allowing Patrick to take things further. The thought never occurred to her before that night. She didn't know if it had occurred to Patrick either (it had, repeatedly, and with great enthusiasm) but she found the idea compelling in a way she never expected.

  What happened was that earlier that afternoon they were riding their bikes along next to the train tracks that ran up the west side of town. Patrick hopped up onto the ties themselves, which went against every instinct ingrained in Charlie’s psyche by her mother. She yelled for him to get off the tracks, that it was dangerous. Patrick yelled back for her to come up and ride with him, that it was fun, and for her to stop being such a fucking baby. This was new for Patrick, both the swearing and the reckless attitude. After a brief internal argument with herself, Charlie guided her bike up the mound and onto the tracks. There was, after all, not a train in sight. She rode behind Patrick, watching the wind whip through his hair and the way the ropey, taut muscles in his skinny arms flexed and relaxed as he used them to keep the bike headed in the right direction.

  The wooden ties under her tires bounced and shook her body violently. She pedaled faster, catching up to Patrick, nearly bumping his back tire with her front. The tracks vibrated faster under her wheels and up through the frame of her bike. A new but somehow familiar feeling began radiating out from the leather seat that quickened her heart and pulled her breath shallow and slow. Sweat broke out on her cheeks and brow.

  Without warning, she guided her bike off the tracks and onto Marsten Road, into town. Patrick almost didn't see her go but managed to hop off the tracks and get turned around. He caught up to her sitting under a tree in the park, her legs drawn up to her chest and her bike laying in the grass.

  "You okay?" he asked, trying not to show her that he was out o
f breath. She didn't know what was wrong, but she knew she was feeling something new and it made her nervous and uncomfortable.

  "I'm fine," she said, not entirely truthfully. He seemed content with that answer and stood up.

  "Let go spend our money."

  - 3 -

  That night she went home wondering what exactly it was that overwhelmed her. She didn't think it was love, and she didn't think it was lust, because even when he was fumbling around in her shirt, she never felt the same way she felt when she watched Jim on television, sliding up and down his microphone stand in his leather pants, or listening to him screech his way through When The Music's Over in her headphones. The truth of the matter is that before she'd seen Morrison performing with The Doors on The Smothers Brothers two years earlier, she'd never felt that way about anyone.

  There had been crushes before, sure. She nursed a fixation on Elvis through most of her preteen years, but that was puppy love. It was innocent and cute. The things Jim stirred up in her didn't feel innocent at all. They felt vulgar and forbidden and amazing. They felt adult. Elvis was Gumby compared to Jim.

  Whatever it was that she felt kissing Patrick was adjacent to what she felt for Jim, but it wasn't anything close to as powerful. She imagined Morrison taking her, guiding her, and showing her exactly what to do so she'd know for the next time, and the next time, and the next time. Patrick didn't exude that kind of confidence or sexual prowess. It was that bumbling attempt at getting ahold of her breast that killed the mood for her. Not because she didn't want him to touch her, but because it just felt... weak.

  Charlie understood that this wasn't fair, but she couldn't help but be turned off by the clumsiness of it. It wasn't fair to Patrick, because she was just as new to this as he was, but it was at that moment that she realized that she simply didn't want to be with someone her age. There was nothing about it that appealed to her. She had a fleeting moment on the train tracks where she considered taking things with Patrick into uncharted waters, but lying in bed, wrestling over the mixed feelings that were surging through her body, she was convinced that she wanted a man. Patrick wasn't a man. He was a nice boy, but he was no man.

  That’s when she decided she had to tell Patrick it wasn't going to happen, and she was going to have to do it soon. She'd seen the way he kept looking back at her as he rode off on his bike, waving too much, his expression sheepish and embarrassed but overjoyed. Thinking about those glances, Charlie felt bad for him. He was her friend and he was a good kid, someone she cared about, and she knew she was going to hurt him and probably destroy their friendship.

  Charlie decided some time ago that she was reserving her virginity for Jim. If she could get backstage, there was a chance. She was a cute girl and knew it. Perhaps a little skinny, but not unfeminine. She wore her hair long and straight, sometimes tied into pigtails with leather thongs. She'd seen a photo of Jim's girlfriend, the redhead Pamela Courson, and wanted desperately to dye her hair red, but her mother wouldn't allow it. In fact, her mother wouldn't allow much of anything Charlie wanted. It was a fight that lasted for weeks when Charlie decided she was going to start wearing blue-jeans. Until that point, she'd worn dresses. Conservative dresses her mother made from the same pattern, over and over again. Charlie won that fight, but only barely. The compromise was that any jeans Charlie wore, she would have to buy herself. She saved babysitting money for months to buy her first pair. They were tight Levi’s that made her legs look long and her butt look high and her mother cried when she saw her wearing them for the first time. She felt guilty and almost packed them away, but it wasn’t long before her guilt turned to resentment and drove her to wear them almost exclusively.

  The hair coloring was an issue Charlie only raised once. She knew immediately that there was no point in pushing it. Her mother shut down to the idea completely. That Charlie would color her long, beautiful hair was horrifying. Not only dye it but dye it red of all colors. Charlie felt stupid even asking.

  The worst fight happened the night after Charlie broke it off with Patrick. She'd avoided him the day after the kiss because she still wasn't convinced it was the right decision. On the second day, he cornered her in the hallway at school and asked if she wanted to go steady. She said she didn't. Patrick crumbled. It was far worse than Charlie had feared. He seemed to both age and regress at the same time, his eyes growing red with tears and his posture drawing inward as though he’d been punched in the gut. At the same time, his mouth was quivering, and a frothy line of spit was building up on his bottom lip as he begged, making him look like a wounded child.

  When she pictured how the conversation might go, she imagined him looking stoically into the distance and nodding softly, understanding where she was coming from. This was, naturally, completely unrealistic, but she was a teenager and she wanted things to go a certain way.

  What ended up happening was Patrick cried. He told her that he was in love with her through stuttering, slobbery tears. Part of her wanted him to yell and scream and punch the locker they were standing next to, but he just cried and begged and sniffled and snotted while other students watched, stunned and amused. She felt awful for putting him through that, but she couldn't have been less attracted to him at that moment or surer of her decision.

  That night she came home to find her mother in her room, sitting on her bed.

  - 4 -

  Rosalie Lukin was a single mother and a widow. She told people she was a war widow, and that her husband Arthur was killed in Korea in 1955. Charlie still believes this, even now, decades later. The truth of the matter is that Art never went to Korea. What Art did do was accumulate fifteen grand in gambling debt at the racetrack. He bet big and bet often and had absolutely no talent for it. A fact he came to realize one drunken night when he cut the cord off Rose's waffle iron with his pocket knife and hung himself from a light fixture in the living room. Rose found him the next morning, stinking and purple-faced and quite dead.

  She was twenty-three years old and four months pregnant at the time. Rose sold the house she’d shared with Arthur in Tennessee and moved to Nephi, Utah, where she was offered a job working in her sister's dry cleaner.

  Nephi was a strange, close-knit community directly in the middle of Utah, and subsequently in the middle of Mormon country, which made life interesting for the Southern Baptist Rose. She found that she was mostly accepted, if not embraced, by the community, but at arm’s length. They tried to talk her into attending some services and accepting literature, but when she politely declined, they stopped asking.

  After giving birth to Charlotte (Charlie's given name, and the only name Rose would ever call her), she briefly considered adoption, but couldn't stand the idea of being alone. With Arthur gone, she didn't know if she could afford to take care of Charlie, but the idea of handing away the last person on earth who was required to love her was too much to bear. Not to mention that Charlie was all she had left of Arthur. Even though he was a terrible husband all the way to the end, she loved him with everything she was.

  As the years went by, Rose withdrew further. She attended church, of course, with the sparse group of fellow Baptists that were scattered around town. Nephi's population was less than three thousand, and only around fifteen of those three thousand were Baptists. Their church was more of a glorified living room, but it served its purpose. Rose found solace and strength in the church. However, over the years, loneliness and resentment hardened Rose against the world. That strength that once kept the darkness at bay, solidified into its own kind of darkness.

  Unfortunately for young Charlie, that darkness was in full effect by the time she was old enough to start worrying about what her mother thought of her. Rose's opinion of her daughter became increasingly unfavorable as they both aged. When she was a baby, Rose felt comforted by the glimpses of Arthur she saw in Charlie's smile, and in the fussy way she furrowed her little brow when she was angry or thinking particularly hard. As the years went by, it was these glimpses of Arthur that h
aunted her. There were times she cursed and hated him for leaving her alone and poor and stuck in this awful, dusty town with a child she couldn't afford to raise properly, with virtually no support system and no light at the end of the tunnel. So, when she looked at Charlie and saw Arthur’s crooked smile creep across her daughter's face, it burned her inside. There were times she wanted to slap that rotten smile off the girl’s face.

  She didn't though. Through all her anger and frustration and resentment, she never raised a hand to Charlie. That was something she promised long ago she'd never do. Her own mother was a cold, sadistic woman. Her father was a sad, useless drunk who never cared enough to stop his wife from doing the terrible things she did to her children. Rose decided never to go down that path with her own children. Her own child. She'd wanted more children, but Arthur had taken that from her, along with so many other things. That bastard.

  As Charlie developed into her teens, Rose felt her pull away. Her obsession with these rock stars was the first serious problem they had. Elvis had been obnoxious, but ultimately harmless. That awful Morrison character was a presence she refused to tolerate in her house. Morrison was deliberately filthy and antagonistic. Evil even. Screaming about sex and drugs and death and the devil. She'd heard one of the songs was about incest for God's sake. Rose couldn’t understand how such a thing could be legal to publish.

  Charlie found out exactly how her mother felt about her obsession with The Lizard King the summer before the big fight. She came home from school to find the house stinking of melted plastic. In the fireplace were the remains of her three Doors records and ashes she knew was once the modest stack of rock and roll magazines she kept stashed under her bed. That fight was bad, but it was nothing compared to the fight they had the night she ran away.

  - 5 -