The Third Step

by William Lobb

  The fact that Pam fucked Billy and got high with him hurt, but shooting at Frankie made him wonder if he should have paid more attention to her. Frankie was always busy with his next plan, his next great idea, his next scam. He thought she was cool with that.

  His deep, thoughtful understanding of women and life, in general, was not profound, but to him it was quite complete. When minor life events occurred, like a bullet passing millimeters from his head, he tended to treat these things as flukes, mistakes made by the universe. Never his fault or failure.

  That was not today’s dilemma, though. They had to drop this trailer, find the hot load, and head south. There was a killing to be made in this business, and Frankie wanted in. He wondered if Billy was dead or merely beaten up. It would be really nice to know what, exactly, he was on the run from.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Pam. He couldn’t process what had happened. Eddie grumbled, “Fuck it. Let it go. There’s plenty more pussy out there,” but Frankie saw it differently.

  As Eddie continued to theorize on life and women and played his country music, his endless collection of mind-numbing songs about guns and trucks and pretty girls and beer. Frankie stared out the window, watching his breath steam up and freeze on the glass. He listened to the droning of the engine and the constant murmur of the tires on the cold pavement and he thought about Pam.

  Frankie said to Eddie, and at the same time no one in particular—maybe only to the mounting snow that now covered the road and slowed their advance into Canada—that at one time he considered the two of them to be like a field of September flowers: beautiful, alive, colorful, and thriving in the late summer sun. However, time was a cruel friend, a betrayer, a liar, and their time was winding down. The angle of their sun was getting lower in their sky, the light that emanated from within Pam that nourished and sustained them faded a little every day. Soon the enveloping and inevitable cold and darkness would cause whoever they had become together to die. They both knew it. Both saw it coming. Neither made any effort to stop it.

  They were like two dying stars, locked in some gravitational and mechanical dance: Pam, the bright and light star; Frankie, the dark and brooding star. They could never be fully free of each other. Their influence on each other shaped and helped to create who they were. Sadly, the pull, the influence was fading, as was the light. With each passing day, they drifted further and further apart, but no matter the distance, they always kept an eye on each other. They always knew the other was there, a little further away each time they looked.

  It was painful to watch from the ground, from the safety of the earth, as others looked skyward to the sad and slowing dance, just as it was painful for the two of them to endure. No matter how hard they each tried to escape the other’s influence, their pull on each other would last forever. The celestial tug- of-war would fade and they would find themselves pulled into many other stars along the way, but they would be forever entwined, influenced by each other’s force. This dance would last, in some way, forever.

  It deeply saddened him, but a paralysis engulfed every aspect of their final moments together. Frankie said this many times: their relationship had always been part of someone else’s dream. It had felt like a spell, like witchcraft, since the beginning.

  As performers in a twisted, often dangerous, play, they took liberties and made assumptions about what they could do with impunity, what they could get away with in a relationship, what kind of hell two people could put each other through with abandon, as though their love was indestructible.

  They believed none of the rules that applied to everyone else in the world would, or could, ever apply to them. She’d fuck someone. He’d fuck someone. He would go off into a bar and fight some guy, expending his love and hatred of her on some innocent drunk.

  They’d never apologize, just laugh it off and move on. Nothing was ever discussed, no “working on the relationship” ever. Things happened, then other stuff happened, and they simply kept moving on together.

  In those final days, they both looked back, not with shame, but with a sense of wonder and sadness, a profound and pervasive loneliness. Maybe if the fires had not burned so hot and fast and bright, maybe in the closing moments, there would be something, an ember, left to rebuild on, but they had now burned through each other until nothing remained but the ashes of who they once were.

  Frankie and Pam now saw each other as cardboard cutouts, sadly comical caricatures. Neither would, nor could, nor wanted to try to save this thing, this undefinable thing between them. Pam had become colder, more withdrawn. Frankie had become distant, angry, and brutally silent.

  It was like the ending of a really funny, upbeat movie that had turned inexplicably heartbreaking and twisted. Every day was a little bit sadder. The words that used to flow between them had slowed and then stopped, and the laughter had ceased months before. Frankie wanted to tell Pam that he missed her. He missed them. He missed the completeness, who and what they were. But it seemed that one day he woke up and just could not find the mechanism, the words, the desire, whatever was required, to care for anymore.

  The absurdity that had been them now became an embarrassment. They shunned it, pretended it had never existed. So now, he’d spend at least a few moments every day looking out this broken window of his imagination, watching die what had been the two of them: the us, the we.

  Frankie never purely lived in the now, or the past, or the future, but rather in kind of a mix of all three . . . and none . . . at the same time. Everything had a plan, and everything was part of his plan. Everything, including who they were, had a beginning and a middle and now an end.

  The beginning had been a shock to both, like discovering a perfect shared secret only the two of them could ever cherish.

  The middle was a joyful, learning time, a building time.

  This ending was slow and awkward, but as critical to the plan as the other two parts. Suddenly, they found themselves here at this precipice, yet neither of them could find the courage to close the door and leave.

  A billion words had been said over their brief time, changing and growing darker. Now, here at the end, there were no words. Anyone watching this uncomfortable mess unfold would ask, “Why didn’t one of them simply walk away? Pride, cowardice? Why not speak your mind?” Let the relationship gasp one last breath and die, another victim of the street, another corpse on the sidewalk. Don’t mourn it. Don’t say a word. Walk on.

  But the pair had lingered an agonizingly long time, until all that was left was silence and a cold wind blowing through an empty field. Then, nothing.

  Chapter Seven:

  Reality

  A finality came crashing into him when he felt the bullet pass and he looked up to see Pam standing there holding the gun. Up until that moment he’d believed, a very small part of him had believed, that he could fix things with her. They had been through so much together. As the lead flew maybe a half-inch from his face, he swore he could see angels dancing in the weeds.

  For a moment he felt he must be dead. Reality came back swiftly: were he to die, he’d not be seeing angels anywhere, not in his world. As long as he was seeing angels and things that had no place or reason to be in his world he knew he was still alive. The finality was not about death . . . that bitch seemed to circle him like a vulture and wait for him at every corner. It was the realization that this dream of Pam, this image he had attempted to create, the imaginary life they had together, this illusion of her had now finally crashed to the ground and shattered before him in a trillion little shards of glass. A once strong and beautiful crystal fortress now lay in pieces on the ground.

  As he watched the illusion fade, he wanted to lean into the bullet as it passed. She did kill a part of Frankie that night. A very real part of him died yet continued to live on, maybe even more disconnected than he had been previously. He’d always had a fascination with ghosts. He’d always known, deep
down, but had never spoken about, never even acknowledged, never whispered to anyone that if things such as ghosts existed, he knew it was his fate to become one: A soulless, empty spirit walking the earth aimlessly, possibly until the end of time. Frankie took a strange comfort in this.

  This was his plan: to live forever, to put off the inevitable, whatever that may be, to haunt. The old woman was the only one he even mentioned this to—it was only once—and it was long ago. She wept when he said this, as if it were an affirmation of a nightmare. All of her religion and spells and songs and words, she realized, could not save her boy from a fate he’d convinced himself was his: to walk the earth aimlessly as a disconnected spirit, never thinking, never caring, never connected. It seemed somehow perfect.

  For another moment, while his hands were still covered in the mix of his own blood and Billy’s blood, before the cool night air forced it to dry on his skin, still kneeling on Billy’s seemingly lifeless chest, Frankie recalled the words of the old woman. She said when he died the devil would be there to welcome him, long before the angels were even aware he was gone. He fought constantly with the old woman and her superstitions and stories. She often told him she loved him, but there was something wrong with him. He lacked a goodness. He was broken, possibly before birth. He told her the only place he was going when he died was the cold dirt. His was no spiritual journey, no welcoming cherubs waited to escort him to some other side. This was the only side. And he was okay with that, although slightly terrified that he might be right.

  When he’d leave Cora’s house and walk down that dark road alone, he’d get lost in her words and her warnings. Sometimes he’d walk to the family cemetery, a small, well-kept, and pretty place in daylight, but a cold, dark, forbidding, terrifying place at night; especially alone, especially after one of his talks with the old woman. Frankie would sit there surrounded by the tombstones of his dead relatives. He had no inclination to pray. He’d just sit there waiting, sometimes for hours, for the spirits to come, to talk to him, to guide him.

  Nothing ever happened as he sat there. Occasionally he heard a strange noise. Sometimes he’d see Sarah, his great-grandmother fifteen generations ahead of him. He’d watch her pass in the distance, never reaching out to him, never even looking his way. Some nights he’d bring a quart of vodka and or some weed. He’d sit there working on becoming unconscious; maybe that was the pathway to talk to the ghosts. All he accomplished was passing out among the stones, only to awaken with the sunrise, or a few times in the local jail. There was a cop he’d come to know. This cop had given up arresting Frankie. He brought him in on the nights it was really cold or starting to rain. Each drunken night in the cemetery in silence, waiting, hoping for connection, just broke Frankie a little more. Each time he went there he left another piece of himself.

  These were the moments when he would wonder, silently, if he could be wrong and the rest of the world, the believers, all the saints he seemed to deal with every fucking day of his life were right. He’d still hear the old woman wailing out “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Jesus Loves Me,” and “Amazing Grace.” Songs of comfort and joy that left him sad and confused and feeling even more desolate and alone. He was like a baby that refused to nurse, like a broken, lost child.

  Her songs and her friends at the church terrified him. The confusion terrified him. He felt left out and suspicious of them and their magical faith. The more they pressed him to join into their fold, the more he resisted. He could politely resist or burst out in an angry rage. The more they talked sweetly to him of confusing promises, of believing, of faith, the more he would push back and run.

  He’d run to a bar and drink, consume, and become consumed and become perfectly drunk. Absurdly drunk. He possessed a legendary ability to consume huge quantities of booze and chemicals. He’d sit quietly, appearing completely sober and then for no reason, he’d remember a past wrong, a debt that needed to be settled, or simply an imaginary war raging in his head and he’d attack. I could never quite understand why. Was he waging war with himself, the world? He had no death wish, death seemed to him a million years away and yet somehow imminent. Frankie’s war was based on his inability to connect to this God that everyone else seemed so cozy with.

  A preacher told him one day that he had to have a personal relationship with Jesus. This made Frankie’s blood run cold. He totally lost his mind. Too bad for the pudgy, white, balding preacher, a nice enough guy who believed in his heart what he spoke of, but to Frankie it was the last straw, the last nail in the coffin.

  Frankie screamed, “I can’t even maintain a fucking personal relationship with people I can see and you want me to be buddies with your imaginary friend? Fuck you, get the fuck away from me. They say I’m fucking crazy, I’ve had it with all you delusional assholes trying to get me to drink your poisoned wine.” That was usually the way it went. Something like that.

  If Frankie was ever going to come to terms with this God, it was going to be a journey and it was going to take a long, long time and it would sometimes be on his own terms.

  When he was deeply drunk, when the hallucinations came, he’d sit down with the Devil and drink even more. The Devil was someone he could relate to. Another liar, another cheat, another rambler, another smooth-talking ladies’ man, another stud with no game, just a line and a story to tell, just a guy trying to get what was best for him. Frankie had no fear of this Satan. If he was out looking for souls, Frankie knew he was going to fuck him over.

  Sometimes, when he slept—a rare event—he would dream of a field, a twisted place where no laws of man or physics applied; a barren, grassless plain, with one dead tree standing off to the left side; a barren plain under a deep blue sky. Sometimes there were lions. They were the only companionship there. Everything else was a fading illusion. It was a place of terror and a perilous peace.

  He would sit on the dry, barren plain and be totally alone. Frankie could empty himself of his rage here. He could feel his perfect and complete loneliness here. It was not a place of solitude. Solitude was a positive, refreshing thing, a meditative thing. This place was anything but that. This place was a place of perfect desolation, of complete separation. Sometimes he would sit in the middle of the dry, dusty field and wonder if this time he’d gone too far, if this time he’d never come back.

  The scene never changed. There was no morning or evening. No sound. Time, the passage of time, the markers along the journey didn’t exist here. He had no reference point. No yesterday, no tomorrow, no now, no then. This world was as dry and barren and completely empty as Frankie’s imagination would allow. He could be here. He could sit and try to fathom the world before time, before this God, before the Big Bang. There could be no beginning of time. Time always existed, but he tried. He needed to get back to that moment before time . . . to that completely empty, completely perfect place of absolute nothingness. Not even blackness, not even gray, but absolute nothing.

  That is why he found this place. That’s why he came here. He could sit here for a second or a year or 10,000 years and he’d never know the difference. Sometimes he would sit there trying to remember the words, Cora, the old woman, said to him, but they were just noises rattling inside his head. They made no sense here, no sense at all.

  At times, he’d see images of all the people he had wronged, treated badly, lied to, cheated, robbed, or beaten, or only simply sinned against by talking to them. There was a deception, a larceny even in simply speaking to him, for which atonement was required. They would stand before him in silence. He would see them standing there, but he didn’t feel any need to speak. Frankie did not need to apologize. He simply looked at them and they looked back. Times would pass where he would feel the pain he had caused them. He would sit next to the lions, without fear, but as one of them. He would feel the pain he had caused these people and let it pass away into oblivion. He could consider and ponder the old woman’s words for hours. However, this was not the plac
e where he would take a knee before someone’s God.

  Chapter Eight:

  Diners And Demons

  And Alexandrine

  Eddie slid the truck into the drop yard, about fifteen minutes outside of Montreal. They were both hungry. Frankie was now a little wasted on beers and exhaustion. They dropped the trailer in the drop yard just off the Trans-Canada Highway. Frankie jumped out of the tractor and lowered the landing gear, unhooked the glad-hands and pulled the fifth-wheel pin. His bare hands were frozen cold. Quietly he swore under his breath. He could not wait to get to a warm place. Eddie pulled the tractor away. They rode around the yard looking for the trailer with the hot load of electronics. It wasn’t there yet, so they headed for a diner and a pay phone.

  The diner was warm and metal and glass. It smelled like coffee and grease. Frankie’s first encounter with anyone north of the border was a girl who he offended without even trying. He asked her for a hard roll—that’s what they were called at home, a Kaiser roll . . . a frickin’ roll with butter. The waitress was highly offended and went to tell her boss, a slightly older, very pretty woman. Frankie stammered as Eddie laughed his ass off. “A hard roll, for God’s sake. Jesus, just bring me some toast.”

  Eddie said, “Fuck it” and laughed. They ordered eggs. Frankie finally got his Kaiser roll when the waitress came back. Frankie said she did have a nice ass and the manager was called again. Eddie suggested maybe Frankie should try his luck in Mexico.

  Eddie went to a pay phone and called about the load. Then he called his wife. He came back to the table. The trailer was in another yard about twenty miles up the road and no one had heard any news from home about a murder. No news probably meant Billy was alive.

  Eddie asked if Frankie still wanted to do this. Frankie smiled. “I got to get warm, and I got to get the fuck away from Pam. Let’s go to Florida.”