An Incidental Reckoning

by Greg Walker

  The job was menial work and well below his potential, but the freedom to think and the limited contact with others compensated for it. For a while, anyway.

  When he had received notice of the money in a formal e-mail signed “Joseph Rhodes”, not “dad”, a college fund bestowed two years late with no reason, excuse or apology, his plan formed, growing from whim to preparation. Carson didn’t know if the main ingredient was courage or stupidity and supposed it didn't matter.

  His manager had always treated him decently, and he gave her two-weeks notice. He would even miss her. The salesmen, suspect and smarmy to the buying public but brazen in a pack, would snicker and wink at each other as he passed. They were easily forgotten.

  Carson arrived at the Grand Canyon as light from the east began to overtake the night, pale color contrasting against the black edge of the earth. He walked in the shadows between night and dawn to the overlook. Alone, he waited for the sun, the moment almost holy. He dared to hope that this dawn could bring something new with it.

  Shrill laughter disturbed his genuflection. He turned just enough to see a pretty young woman and her boyfriend exiting a vehicle and stumbling into each other, easy with their youth in a manner he could never be. They spoke in tones obscene to the sanctity of the morning, punctuated by profanity. He tensed at their approach and turned back before they caught his eye. The girl dropped her voice low so he couldn’t hear. Stifled laughter followed.

  Carson cursed silently, conscious of his shorts and t-shirt. He had planned to change clothes in his car afterward, had not anticipated meeting anyone this early, thought he really should have known better. Sunlight pierced the horizon and the tips of the canyon rocks glowed blood-red. His thoughts turned to escape, the natural wonder now a distraction, the light his enemy. He willed the couple to move up to the rail where he stood, but they stayed behind and to the right. He could wait until they left or retreat now, walking toward and past them in the early morning light determined to illuminate his every flaw. In waiting, more visitors would certainly arrive and compound the situation.

  He took a deep breath, mustered courage, turned, and walked towards the lot. Intending to stare straight ahead, a morbid fascination instead compelled him to study their reactions. He wasn’t disappointed. The girl, wrapped in her lover’s arms from behind, glanced at him, taking in the dark red stains covering half of his face and most of his arm and leg on that same side. A slow smile spread over her face when her eyes slid to meet his, as if she'd caught him in a shameful act. The man sensed her stare and turned, his expression twisting into disgust. He shook his head and muttered, “What the hell?” Carson burned with shame and anger and passed by in the eternity of a few seconds.

  Freak

  The word followed like a poison dart. He wondered at its infinite ability to wound, flinching as it struck.

  He slammed his car door, cutting off their laughter, could see their faces and without sound they could have been crying. He considered retaliation, ramming his old car into their convertible, marring their beauty through their possession.

  But what would be the use?

  When it was done, they would still be them and he would still be what he was, their faces only the latest to reflect his deficiencies, the features changing but the expression moving from one to the next. The anger retreated, bottled up unspent and unsatisfied. He looked back at them, at the conceded spot where they kissed passionately, ignoring the view. He had been dismissed, his life sentence good for a moment‘s amusement. Carson thought of returning in defiance, but knew the ground belonged to them now.

  He turned the key and started the engine, thinking of similar scenes that had resulted in a retreat of some kind, knowing his strategies were wanting, suddenly overwhelmed with the cumulative weight of what was and what would be until the end when his super- pigmented skin returned to the dust. He considered forgoing the stay of execution granted himself while the money lasted and getting on with it, flinging himself over the railing and into the canyon. They wouldn't forget him then. He smiled as the melodrama played out in his mind, feeling a little better, shaking off the exchange.

  “Get busy living or get busy dying,” he said to himself, quoting aloud Andy Dufresne from "The Shawshank Redemption" in a thick voice. Shamed by cowardice, angered by the callousness of people granted beauty acting as they had sculpted themselves from the clay, he drove toward the exit of the parking lot and the open road from which the heat danced already in distorted aqueous waves.

  The young, his peers, presented the strongest reactions, this current generation of immortals clothed in smooth skin, perfect teeth, and in possession of secret knowledge that their glory would never fade. The old met their mortality in pills and spectacles and gravity and pain everyday and knew the world was not theirs and in hindsight never had been. He existed somewhere in between, dealt hard lessons often and early, an old soul by default trapped in an imperfect young man‘s body.

  As he left, he glanced at the couple again. The girl stared back and gave him an exaggerated, mocking wave. Carson gave her the finger and left Arizona for good.

  Chapter 2

  Carson drove east, with the intention to turn north at some point. First he wanted distance from the life he had fled, to slough off his Phoenix skin, and any direction for a while would do. In Missouri, with night coming on, he started looking for a motel or campground.

  His full name was Carson James Rhodes. He stood nearly six feet tall, with a thin face and full lips like his mother, but with the broad shoulders of his father; his father the athlete, successful businessman, man of the world. He had the potential to be muscular, but had never bothered to develop his body, anything tending towards physical vanity mocked by his birthmarks. He had sandy brown hair that up until a week ago had been worn in a ponytail in indifference to grooming than a choice of style. He now kept it shorn in an army cut with a pair of clippers purchased to simplify life on the road. His eyes were bright blue, intelligent but guarded. He could have been handsome, if the stains the covered his body like angry red maps of fictional continents didn't exist. But they did, and that was that.

  Carson pulled into the Happy Camper Campground somewhere in western Missouri. He dropped a cigarette to the ground as he peeled his sweat-soaked shirt from the seat and got out. He coughed and crushed the butt. Happy wasn’t the first term that came to mind.

  The main building, warped and weathered, sagged alarmingly. An elderly man squinted and scowled through a dirty window as if the structure’s heart and soul, it still standing only from his infused spirit, doomed to fall when he expired.

  The shell of a swimming pool beyond the building held not water, but a mixture of dirt, flaked paint chips, dead leaves and plastic grocery bags co-mingling in the deep end. A playground no sane parent would allow their child to use languished half-buried in weeds. The campsites, at least, were mostly packed dirt and red clay free of weeds and populated by a smattering of tents and one towed camper infected with a leprosy of rust. Carson, now wearing jeans and a button down shirt despite the heat, his usual attire to hide what could be hidden, walked on stiff legs towards the building.

  The old man withdrew from the window. As Carson entered the sweltering shack he discovered the proprietor behind a counter, scouring it with a rag and holding an unmarked bottle of cleaner emitting fumes that made Carson sneeze.

  Shelving units on the wall, as bowed as the rest of the building, offered Frisbees and t-shirts for sale and camping items inflated in price far beyond reason. Soda bottles lined up in a neat row populated a cooler decorated with a long retired logo Carson hadn’t ever seen, though familiar with the brand. He picked up a brochure for the campground with a photograph on the front of a young girl swinging on a swing in the very same playground that decayed outside. That girl had to be pushing forty by now, he thought.

  The man thumped the bottle down and his eyes roamed over the birthmark on his face. “What do you want?”

  Flus
tered, Carson stammered, “I….I need a campsite. You are open, right?” He hastily folded the brochure and stuffed it into his pocket.

  The man stared, the scowl returning in force, most impressive without the window grime to dilute it. Carson took an involuntary step backward, feeling like a trespasser.

  “You bring drugs or alcohol with you, boy?” On the word “boy” he rose on the balls of his feet and tipped forward, his face turning red with the strain. He had thick, unkempt white hair that waved every time an ineffectual fan made its pass, a thin, bony frame, and appeared to shave every third day or so. Bright eyes burned from nests of wrinkles and creases.

  Before Carson could answer, the man continued, raising an accusing finger along with his raspy high-pitched voice “Because if you brought any of them things, thinking this is just a place to get liquored up with dirty little girls, you need to turn around and get the hell out of my campground!" His nostrils flared and the finger trembled.

  “Look," Carson managed, meeting the man's stare, “I just need a campsite for one night. It’s only me. If you can't do that I’ll look for something else. Sorry to bother you.” He backed towards the door, afraid to take his eyes off of the man, the thought of more driving disheartening.

  “Now wait just a minute. I didn’t say you couldn’t have a campsite,” the old man barked but less belligerently, lowering the finger slowly like a pistol not quite ready to be holstered. “As long you ain’t one of them, you’re welcome to stay. That’ll be forty bucks for the site.” “Forty dollars? For one night?”

  The man scowled harder, introducing new wrinkles Carson hadn’t seen, but then yielded instantly as though protesting only to have something new to gripe about. “All right, twenty-five dollars then. And quiet time is 9:00 pm. I’ll call the police, you have any of that loud music blaring.” The new threat brought the finger only half up; drugs, liquor and dirty little girls apparently the greater campground evils.

  Carson handed over the twenty-five, careful not to reveal the healthy stack of bills he drew it from. He would have paid forty, and now briefly thought about haggling for fifteen. Ultimately he felt sorry for the eccentric proprietor of this place already gone but somehow still holding out.

  “Do you have a site that’s sort of private? Without any other campsites right next to it, I mean?” Carson dared to ask, knowing he’d arouse the man’s suspicions again. The scowl, which never seemed to leave the man’s face but only vary in intensity and mix with other emotions and expressions, ratcheted up.

  “What for?” he growled.

  “I just like my privacy, sir.”

  The man's eyes roamed over Carson's face, this time not as if examining his birthmarks but rather in an attempt to flay off the skin and examine his character. The scowl intensified then relented, and the man grunted in a conclusion that must have been favorable.

  "You can have site forty-two, on the cul-de-sac. There's no one right around there right now, but I can't promise the place won't fill up."

  Carson waited for a smile to go with the joke.

  "Well?"

  "Uh, yes. That would be fine. Thank you."

  Carson left the building, glad to escape the high-strung little man, and walked to his car to drive up to the campsite. From inside, he heard him shout.

  "If you see any of those dirty little girls, you come get me, son."

  Chapter 3

  Karen Hunter trudged along the highway, her small duffel bag gaining a pound with each mile. If true, she thought, it should weigh about fifty pounds by now. She hadn’t walked fifty miles, but it felt like it. Her arms legs and hair were caked with a fine dust. She could taste and smell it, feel the grit beneath her clothes. And it would be dark soon enough.

  Her last ride from a middle-aged man - ring on his finger, a father from the toys and French fries on the floor and Elmo book on the backseat - had ended abruptly. In a nervous and round-about way he had propositioned her. Disgusted, she had demanded to be let out, on the assumption of picking up another ride. But with few cars on the road and fewer acceptable prospects among them, she wished she had humored him a bit and let him take her to Jefferson City. She didn’t really feel threatened by him, just uncomfortable. He had seemed relieved to drop her off, saved from himself and able to face his wife on returning home. Karen knew she could never have led him on, anyway.

  A sedan flew past. Its brake lights popped and the car pulled to the shoulder fifty yards in front of her. She wished for an old man and his wife, even looked forward to the inevitable lecture on the dangers of hitch-hiking and the detailed recounting of how it wasn‘t always so. She doubted she would be so lucky.

  Approaching the passenger side, never the driver’s side to keep some distance between her and Charles Manson if need be, her heart sank on finding a young man, not ugly but not good looking, smiling at her and slouching down to look across the car in his best offering of a cool pose. One glance at the boy’s eyes, he only eighteen at the most, told her all she needed to know. The eyes told everything. No matter what polite or gentlemanly words came from their mouths, she always looked at the eyes. It didn’t take any special skill to decipher what his said.

  His mouth said, “Hello. Did you need a ride somewhere? I’d be happy to take you wherever you need to go.” His eyes, however, wouldn’t stay fixed on hers, but flicked to her breasts and the details of her face and even at the door as though x-ray vision would let him see the parts hidden behind it. With it emerged a sense of being compared to chicks splayed in the pages of mens' magazines then cross-referenced with bouncing girls in porno flicks, then inserted into the fantasies they had spawned. He didn’t seem embarrassed at all by his bold visual assessment, and that unsettled her even more, as though fully expecting her to understand what getting in his car meant and that she’d get in anyway. Karen had discovered that the open road, strips of anonymity between civilized posts, peeled the wrapper off of carefully constructed personas for friends and family and the good and normal world to reveal what lay beneath. Usually.

  “Hi. Thanks for the offer, but I broke down and my boyfriend will be along to pick me up anytime now.”

  “I didn’t see any cars broken down back there.” His smile slipped and his face grew hard.

  “It was on a side road. He’ll be coming this way on his Harley, so I thought I’d walk up to meet him.”

  He seemed ready to say something else, something introduced by an ugly sneer that smelled the lie. Instead his face went flat, the lust driven fantasies folded and tucked back into his brain.

  “Okay,” he said, his voice taking on the wounded tone of a boy scout denied his chance to earn a badge for helping a stranded girl to safety, “I just wanted to help. Be careful. You never know who you might run into out here.”

  With one more sweeping glance over her person and a look of loss, he put the window up with a button on the driver’s door and pulled back onto the road.

  Off to buy a Penthouse at a convenience store to try and salvage the evening, she thought.

  Karen blew out a breath and relaxed only when his vehicle disappeared from sight.

  Of course the story of the boyfriend was a lie. She had found that the ambiguous figure of a leather-clad, no-holds-barred biker grinding the pavement to rescue his lady created uncertainty in any highway suitors' mind. She hoped that even the most hardcore highwayman wouldn't risk the hero appearing in the flesh to exact revenge for dark deeds rendered. So far so good.

  She usually didn’t actually hitchhike, walking backwards with her with her thumb out. She didn’t need to. Men and boys pulled over with regularity, and it was easier to reject the bulk of them and their expectations if she had not solicited the ride in the first place. She only thumbed for station wagons, mini-vans and the occasional Winnebago if she could make out retirees through the big glass in time; cars that screamed family well before they’d reached her. Her last ride proved that it wasn’t a foolproof system.

  Karen knew she was be
autiful. She once at the age of fifteen overheard a colleague of her father comment that she was the sort of girl that made prison an acceptable risk. Lucky for him her father hadn’t heard. She had since been hit on by millionaires and truck drivers, once had a cocky quarterback almost vomit on her shoes while asking her out, and could write an encyclopedia of pick up lines if she ever cared to copy them down. She saw her five foot eleven frame, a large portion of it devoted to legs, exalted in the eager eyes of these men. She saw the long blonde hair that framed a face chiseled by a sculptor enamored with aesthetic perfection in the jealousy of girls and women.

  Yet to her it was simply a fact of her existence, a condition that proved useful in some situations and bothersome in others, and sometimes both such as now, trying to get a safe ride into the city. She knew its power, and at one time had wielded it with effect, learning early how she could manipulate her classmates and teachers of both genders. High school marked the height of her reign, and she had voluntarily stepped down after a realization that in those halls and beyond things would never change; a never-ending search for power, sex and status - the boxed set of holy grails - with rules for the quest hammered into stone long ago. And it bored her.