“You were the master scammer,” I told him. “You would steal entire histories without leaving a single trace.”
He still didn’t get it.
He looked up at me through eyes the color of whiskeyed-out piss, the cobwebs of senility clouding his once-sharp vision.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Who am I?
We’d fought so often, he and I.
“Who are you?” he repeated.
I looked in the mirror of his greasy bedroom window, staring at the reflection of a man in a mask.
“Who are you?” he asked for third time.
Good question.
We never see the tracks we leave behind.
Just the woods, and the darkness and then nothing at all.
I stood there in the quiet and lonely dusk of the room, holding the pillow out before me in both of my hands, as if I could somehow muffle the approach of what came next.
Afterword
Whenever you put a collection together like this it feels a little like you are holding some sort of weird high school reunion. You wonder who you ought to invite. You wonder whose invitation ought to be lost in the mail.
And you hope that you don’t forget anyone.
My grandmother, Judy Vernon, died in the gray foggy grasp of full scale Alzheimer’s.
I’ve always felt that it was the death of my father that trigger the onset of this disease. I can still remember how she looked at the funeral.
“A mother ought not to out-live her sons,” she kept saying.
This was after the death of my Grandfather as well.
She had received two sharp and unexpected blows to her sense of what was supposed to happen in life.
And in the years following she just sort of retreated.
By this time I had moved to Nova Scotia so I was spared a lot of the ongoing tragedy of watching someone you dearly love slip away into the recesses of their mind. My brother Dan was not nearly as fortunate. He stayed and took care of her as best as he could. He visited her regularly at the nursing home that she eventually lived in.
I am both thankful and somewhat guilty-feeling for being spared that long slow siege.
Still, it haunts me.
Every time I find myself grasping for a detail that has eluded my recollection I wonder to myself if this is just the beginning of a long slow fade.
That’s the problem with being a writer.
We think way too damn much.
I am recessive by nature. I am quite comfortable with my own company. I don’t visit my family or even phone nearly as often as I ought to. I am always somewhere else – either at work or in the heat-haze of creation.
That haunts me too.
So I am not surprised to see how much this second collection of Captain Nothing tales seems to centre around the fogbank of memory and regret.
The first story, “The Indelible Skivvy Stains of Unbleached Regret” was written especially for this collection. It is a soft wistful sort of story that deals primarily with identity and recollection. Who we appear to be and the many wonderful facets of who we might actually have once been. I had a lot of fun writing the sections that deal with shopping at Target.
The second story, “Some of Us Make It”, is also an original tale that has been sitting in scrap form in a computer file since Superman wore short pants. It is a sort of vignette/anecdote – almost too short to call a real story. I like writing those sorts of pieces. You have to pare down to the bone and make every word count.
The third story, “Don’t Bet on a Wet Horse,” originally appeared in the Skullvines Press’s gross-out anthology Tabloid Terrors #2 Nessie Tried To Pimp My Wife. I should mention that Skullvines will be bringing out a brand new novel of mine in e-book format later this summer under their newly-founded Blasphemous Books imprint – and is to be entitled TATTERDEMON.
The fourth story, “Saint Valentine’s Massacre”, originally appeared as a short poem, without Captain Nothing, but the story idea was too good to squander on a simple poem so I reworked it into prose format and decided that the good Captain Nothing would be the perfect voice to use to tell this little tale.
Writers have been recycling LONG before Greenpeace ever came along.
The last story, “The Tracks We Leave Behind” has appeared precisely thirteen times – in the Dark Thirteen Ultra-collectible edition of my Dark Regions Press collection DO-OVERS AND DETOURS. The collection itself is now available from Dark Regions in trade paperback. The collection has some of my wildest and most sought after tales and it has so far kept quite beneath the radar – so I recommend you run out and buy thirty-two copies each. Give one to each of your friends. Give two to those you don’t care for.
Yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
If you loved Nothing To Lose…
If you couldn’t wait to get your hands on Nothing Down
Be sure to catch
Apocalypse Nothing
Volume 3
Of
The Adventures Of Captain Nothing
Here’s a short excerpt…
Apocalypse Nothing
It rained cats and dogs all day.
I nearly was taken out by a random bouncing Staffordshire bull terrier.
Not that the whole concept of being taken out by a precipitating mutant puppy worried me all that much. I’d made friends with the idea of death a long time ago. Death was a buddy of mine. Death was a lucky rabbit’s foot that I kept in my vest pocket. I’d take him out every now and then and rub him for luck – little ju-ju totem netsuke of certitude.
Would it be my day today?
Who knows?
Who cares?
My name is Captain Nothing – and the way I looked at it Death was nothing more than a warm comforting bed waiting for me at the end of seventy three year long walk in a hard pouring rain.
And as for the Apocalypse, it really was nothing to write home about.
One morning we all woke up and the sky had changed. Colors swam like hungry goldfish, hair stood on end, teeth chattered and God let off a good ripe beer fart on our entire existence.
Maybe it was the end of days.
Maybe it was global warming.
Maybe it was the over-zealous meddling of a pack of slightly maddening scientists, coupled with an imploding marigold gamma generator, a dose or two of 2-4-5 Trioxin Bialgamate and a poorly thought out government funding grant.
One morning we woke up and so did the dead. Graveyards started self-evicting. Granddad and Great Granddad clawed their way out of the muck and moss of interment, defying finality and descending upon the towers of civilization like a horde of random drive-by locusts. They showed up on the doorsteps of mankind – so many unwanted dinner guests – and we were the blue plate special.
It turns out that George Romero had it right all along.
Coming in 2012
APOCALYPSE NOTHING
From Crossroad Press
Look for all of Steve Vernon’s Crossroad Press books
Devil Tree
Gypsy Blood
Long Horn, Big Shaggy
Nothing to Lose
Nothing Down
Noir Dark (coming soon)
Roadside Ghosts (coming soon)
Rueful Regret (coming soon)
The Weird Ones (coming soon)
Apocalypse Nothing (coming soon)
Nothing Down Page 4