“Better… of two evils,” I mumbled, and then immediately wondered why.
But so long as she’s out there, that mystery source went on, she’s in danger. And that you know to be true.
As sleep wrapped its bony arms around me and dragged me down with the rest of the eternal sleepers, it suddenly occurred to me that Logic, Defense, and Neutral had gone and fused themselves into something bigger and more mature.
I drifted off thinking of baby bones and cotton candy-flavored blood.
****
I’d been here before.
But I never thought that I’d be here again.
I’d thought—I’d hoped—that Mia’s involvement in my life was enough to…
Car horns. Roaring asphalt. Pounding heart—my heart!
I was here, and, like it or not, I had to ride.
I was here, and I had to be there; I had to get there!
Everything—my everything!—counted on it!
On my old bike, a toss-away Honda with a clanking exhaust and worthless shocks, and peaking the needle. It still wasn’t fast enough. Piece of shit was never that fast to begin with, but on the night I needed it to be even halfway decent it was a miracle I got it over fifty.
Not that it matters.
I didn’t get there in time.
And I never would.
Blacktop pavement. Blacktop sky. Even the edges of my vision were going tar-black; tears streaking the only thing that wasn’t black: the flashing blues and reds tailing me.
Cops.
Fuck them.
I might’ve been inching along at a pitiful and painful sixty-three, but they’d still never catch me. Not on that night. And not on any of the times I came back to it.
Sixty-three miles-per-hour…
I told myself I might’ve made it if I’d reached sixty-five, but really I was lying to myself. Best case scenario: I might’ve wound up watching it happen. Still, I told myself—as I’d keep telling myself—that I could’ve done something.
Sixty-three miles-per-hour…
I knew that because of the pursuing officer who’d tried to make the speeding charges stick. He’d said I was doing sixty-three in a thirty-five. He’d said I’d run stop signs, screamed through red lights, endangered other motorists, and even nearly run down a pedestrian making use of crosswalk. He’d said all this while I watched a mortician’s gurney roll on squeaky wheels from my home; a round, familiar bump swelling upward at the halfway point. I remembered thinking that she always looked better on our bed and under our sheets, but the sight was oddly serene all the same.
Then I caught sight of a few red dimples as they kissed the bleached whiteness of the sheet and began to grow, expanding across the clean cover and staining it. Then I was screaming, shrieking in blind, raw terror, and clamoring to make it to her side even as they were hoisting her into the back of the…
… the back of the…
Christ!
Somebody’d called it a “meat wagon.” They hadn’t known I’d heard, but they’d called it a “meat wagon”…
It took me a long time—too long—to realize I was being held back; held down; held away from going after her.
Then, assuring them I was fine—“I’m good. I’m cool. I’m… I’m cool.”—they let me up again, loosing me onto a world that wasn’t quite level; let me stand up on a ground that wasn’t quite flat. In my mind, I could still see the spreading stain across the plain white sheet of my life, and standing seemed downright impossible.
Then the cop said “sixty-three” again.
He said “sixty-three,” and I punched him.
I heard “sixty-three” echo in my mind, watched the words marry the vision of the spreading stain, and suddenly I knew—fucking KNEW!—that if I could turn that cop’s face into hamburger I might turn the clock back a few minutes and coax that fucking Honda to do sixty-five, maybe even seventy. If I could just beat every last “sixty-three” out of the face that had been assigned to the badge and gun I might never have to see those stains at all.
Then I was being held again. Then I was being beaten.
And—sweet Jesus!—nothing had ever felt so goddam good in all the world!
Then, too soon for anybody’s liking, some cop with an actual brain between his ears tore his buddies off of me, reading them the riot act about the scene we’d all just rolled up to—“Chris’sakes, you assholes! That’s the man’s wife! His wife! And, in case you fucking nitwits can’t see for shit, either, that wasn’t a Thanksgiving dinner she was carrying in her belly, either! Get the fuck off him before you get the whole force sued!”—and I was alone with nothing but the emptiness.
The emptiness and…
And a voice.
The voice!
Over the din of everything else, I heard my name.
“Hey! HEY! Jace? Jason Presley? That you, you son-of-a-whore?”
None of the cops seemed to notice the random figure standing amidst the chaos until they all heard that last part.
I guess they figured very few people would be throwing around words like “whore” in the middle of a scene like that.
But then, just like that, they were all looking.
I was a bit late to look, and maybe that’s what saved my life.
Suddenly, Mister “Sixty-Three”—likely trying to make up for his fuckup—was coming at me like a bullet.
No…
Not like a bullet. I suppose it was the bullet that was coming at me like a bullet. The bullet was faster. Of course. Cop could’ve been an Olympic runner—could’ve been running sixty-three miles-per-hour—and he still would’ve been too damn slow. But the sight of all that uniformed authority barreling at me gave me a start; nearly knocked me right on my ass without laying a hand on me. And that was how a shot that should have built a lovely little retirement home right in my heart was, instead, forced to settle in the meat of my shoulder a few inches off.
“T-BUILT SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES, PRESLEY,” the shooter had cried out at me as he was dragged away towards a flashing Cruiser. “THE CROWS IS DEAD! LEARN IT, KNOW IT! THE CROWS IS DEAD, PRESLEY, DEAD! THE CROWS… IS… DEAD!”
Turning away from my would-be murderer, I watched the “meat wagon” holding everything I’d known as my life pull out and begin to put distance between us.
“The Crows is dead…”
“The Crows is dead…”
“The Crows is…”
The Meat Wagon’s brake lights burned, it rolled to a lazy stop at the end of the road. There, seeming to tease me, it lingered—it’s right blinker winking knowingly at me—and it finally turned and vanished into the night.
There, at the end of the road, standing where the “meat wagon” had been waiting a moment earlier to wink at me, her ghost stood.
She stared back at me.
She held her round belly in one hand, supporting its great weight and all the potential it represented.
She waved—a casual, lazy gesture aimed more towards the home we’d built and everything we could have had than at me.
She stared back at me… but she did not smile.
There’d be time enough to smile at me from the end of the road in the years to follow. But nobody smiled on the night that they died.
Nobody.
“The Crows is dead…”
“The Crows is dead…”
“The Crows is…”
That’s what I should have been hearing echo in my mind—what I always heard echoing in my mind at this point—but…
But it wasn’t.
Not this time, at least.
No, what I heard was something different; something worse:
“Mia is dead…”
“Mia is dead…”
“Mia is…”
And then the Village People began to sing in the background.
****
My back screamed at me as I shot upright. I was distantly aware of the merry tinkling of broken glass as it lost its grip on the back of my jacke
t and fell back onto discarded shards of their cousins. Pins and needles assaulted my left leg; I’d fallen asleep with it crossed under my right, and I was paying for it now. Though I had no way of knowing if I’d slept this way or if I’d done this subconsciously upon awakening, but my fists were clenched—they were ready for a fight. Every bit of me was ready for a fight.
But I woke up to a calm evening.
The sun, lazy and drooping, was in the early stages of considering sleep. There was some color to the sky, but nothing so intense as to warrant any dramatic emotional response, good or bad.
I’d come out of an old dream with a new, terrible twist that had my nerves feeling like tiny barrels of nitro ready to blow…
And the entire fucking world was staring back at me like I was a crazy person for it.
“Great…” I muttered, struggling to unclench my hand—a personal fight in-and-of itself—so that I could wipe the filth of sleep from my face. Sweat-caked brow, crusty eyes, and a crust of dried snot and settling drool around my mouth and nose. Had I been crying in my sleep? The pad of one thumb backtracked to the corner of one eye, found a few still-damp trails of salt-crystals cutting through the no-doubt grimy surface of my cheeks and sinuses. Yes, yes I had been crying.
Some deep, snickering part of me seemed to say, I told you so.
Then the Village People began to sing at me.
I squinted, recalling the bizarre closing to my terrible, terrible dream, and suddenly wondered if I was still trapped in sleep. Awareness dawned on me like a slug crawling across my face, slow and slimy and discomforting, and I slapped a palm across my brow, embarrassed, as I reached into my jacket and retrieved my still-ringing phone.
Because of course my ringtone for Danny was the Village People.
I cut off the song just before the second half of the letter sequence in “Y-M-C-A” and grumbled something that didn’t have any meaning even to myself.
Danny said, “The fuck did ya just say?”
I didn’t have it in me to admit to him that it sounded an awful lot like “condolences” to me. I barely wanted to admit it to myself. “Nothing,” I groaned, only slightly more coherent this time, “What is it?”
“What’s it always, kid? Business,” he asked and then answered back. “S’only fuckin’ thing get my cute ass callin’ ya when I should be cruisin’ for a little twinky action.”
I decided it was better not to ask if he was referring to snack-cakes or skinny gay guys. Knowing Danny, it was a bit of both. Ignoring the subject in its entirety, I said, “Meet you at the shop in…” and trailed off, figuring it was better to let him decide how much time he needed.
Danny told me he needed no time, because he was already there.
“Fuck,” I muttered, realizing I’d zigged when I should have zagged; offered a polite gesture when I should have been a selfish prick.
Wasn’t that always the way, though?
“What’s that?” Danny asked.
“Nothing,” I lied, realizing I felt like I was going to puke again. Not knowing the nature of the beast—what sort of bulk and volume was waiting on the docket of my esophagus—I aimed to end the call as soon as possible.
“Are ya drunk or somethin’?” he asked then, and I realized how much I must have been slurring.
“Was working on it,” I confessed, and, as if demanding to prove the point, the payload was delivered then. I puked, long and hard…
And loud!
“JESUS BALL-LICKING CHRIST!” Danny swore, and I thought I heard him stifle a retch of his own through the phone line.
Nothing gets a person’s upchuck reflex working better than hearing another’s in full-swing, I mused to myself as the last of my technicolor yawn died down. The spicket of my sickness trailed off into a trickle of something more elastic than drool and less substantial than vomit that oozed from the center of my lip in a disgusting rope that hung halfway to my stomach and refused to snap free. God, I’m gross! I thought, crossing my eyes to follow the precarious string of… what? “After-puke”?
“God, I’m gross!” I repeated to myself, this time out loud.
“Fuckin’ sounded gross on my end, too,” Danny grumbled over the phone. “Do me a favor and get yerself a fuckin’ mint—a whole damn bag of ‘em, in fact—before ya get here, kay?”
“Says the guy who’s used to smelling his own cum on other guys’ breath,” I jabbed back.
But Danny had already hung up on me.
NINE
~MIA~
I woke up feeling like I was hungover. My head ached and my vision was blurry from crying all night. Candy had been there to support me during my breakdown, but I still couldn’t wrap my mind on what had changed with Jace. The night had drawn on in a haze of uncontrolled sobbing until, at some point, I must have just cried myself out. Now my body was cursing me for it.
Groaning, I clenched my eyes shut—trying to will the world away through blindness—and chanted “fuck” to myself. It was a silly, vulgar mantra, but one that seemed to work, at least. I managed to calm down a bit, to get a grip on my awakening emotions, and avoided erupting into a new round of sobs. Finally, still chanting “fuck,” I opened my eyes and sat up. I’d spent the night crying on Candy’s couch, and Candy’s couch was where I’d since remained. The rhythm of my “fuck”s slowed, but I continued the chant as I glanced down at my phone. No missed calls. No messages.
“Fuck…” I muttered, this one feeling somehow different from the others.
And, it being the last “fuck” uttered—in that instant, at least—I supposed it was a fair assumption.
I chewed my lip, asking myself if I should try to contact Jace. I wrestled with the idea of calling him, toyed with the idea of texting him, and then, finally, slipped off into a plane of thought that rested comfortably between two possibilities; both of them rock-solid in the resolve that, no, I should not try to make contact at all.
He has to be the one to engage the dialogue that fixes all of this, one part of this logic explained.
There’s nothing left to fix, and you’d just be wasting your time in trying to talk to him, the other said.
My lip trembled.
And then I stopped it.
“Why the fucking shit should I be sad?” I demanded aloud, asking the question of nobody—letting it resound off the empty room. Scoffing—and telling myself it was in no way forced—I added, “I don’t even know what his problem was!”
But that, I felt, wasn’t entirely true. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I felt like I knew exactly what had come over Jace.
However, as the sadness inside me began to boil into rage, logic and reason fizzled away; drops of water-like enlightenment evaporating on a hot, angry skillet and vanishing like steam on a breeze.
I hated him!
And, what’s more, I loved him too much to hate him…
Which only made me hate him more!
Growling, wanting to slap him and, at the same time, make love to him, I jumped to my feet and consulted my phone yet again. I saw that it was nearly two in the afternoon. I glanced around, wondering if Candy had left for the day. It seemed distantly obvious—but, again, logic and reasoning had gone the way of the dodo—since I’d been chanting “fuck” and making a rage-bitch ruckus practically since the moment I’d woken up. That Candy hadn’t made an appearance to, at the very least, tell me to quiet down was a good sign that she’d already gone out. Standing, I walked on sleep-drunken legs into kitchen and saw a note on the table. Recognizing Candy’s handwriting even from a distance, I shuffled to it, scooped it up, and scanned its message:
Hey slut,
Take it easy today. Do the Netflix and chill thang! Things will get better. I promise. Guys do dumb shit, but it doesn’t mean forever.
Might feel like forever to you right now, but it ain’t forever.
You two are too retarded for each other for this to be forever.
So chill!
I had to run out with Fag
gy McDick-Lover to talk some of the old crew into not being stupid. (Don’t worry, I won’t bring this up to him.)
I’ll be back later tonight! Order a pizza for us!
XOXO
Your Candy-girl :-)
PS – I like my pizza like I like my men: with extra meat.
Snoogens :-P
I sighed, looking down at the note and watched as the page began to grow blurry. It wasn’t until a few spots of moisture began dampening the paper and streaking the ink that I realized I’d begun crying again.
“‘… too retarded for each other…’” I read, then reread aloud.
And then I was hugging the letter to my chest and weeping. Minutes ticked by, the empty room content with listening and waiting while I cried it out, and then, after who-knew-how-long, I’d done just that. I’d cried it out. I took a deep breath, feeling surprisingly better.
I wanted Candy to be right, and so I believed that she was. After all, that had been the logic I’d followed regarding Danny and his predictions regarding Jace. And just look how that had turned out!
Nodding to myself, I decided that I had to hold out on faith that Jace would come back to me. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out where I would’ve gone. Sooner or later, I had to have faith that Jace would come for me.
Right?
I bit my lip, hating how conflicted I felt. Taking another deep breath, I began to get dressed, deciding that what I needed right now was some shop therapy. Even if I had no one to do it with, and even if I barely had enough money to cover the sort of pizza habits that Candy had developed since we’d escaped from the Carrion Crew. Despite all that, I needed to get out and just…
Just chill, I thought, looking back at Candy’s letter.
Smiling, I took a moment to fold the paper and slip it into my pocket. For some silly reason, I felt more comfortable having it on me. It felt like, in some way, Candy was with me.
As I set out, still trying to figure out just what I was going to do with myself, I moved to return Candy’s spare key to my purse. As I did, my hand fell on the crow keychain and I froze. I looked down at it, surprising myself with the bizarre, totem-like power it seemed to hold over me. Then, slowly—carefully—I picked it up, letting it sit in the hammock of my palm. A part of me wanted to throw it away—to hurl it as far into any distance would present itself and, in some impossible way, have that symbolic message carry over to Jace—but another part of me felt comforted with it there, in my hand. It seemed almost sacrilegious to part with it, not until it was in the hands of its rightful owner—the man I’d gotten it for in the first place. After all, I’d spent so much time just searching for it; searching for the perfect gift. All to make things right.
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