Haftmann's Rules

by Robert White

  I left town that day. Found a ride with a logger driving back to Upper Michigan. When we crossed the Five Mile Bridge, I felt better about my decision.

  I live in a little town, more a village, near the lakeshore. I don’t feel right unless I’m near the water. I go down to the lakeshore to sit and watch the water. Sometimes I think about buying some fishing gear and going after the steelhead and pike. The yellow perch isn’t as good as Lake Erie’s. At dusk the bats come out for the flies and midges and the sun sets. It’s very peaceful.

  I found a little work to do as a caretaker. Mostly I’m left alone in my cabin and that’s how I want it. I send a postcard to Tico every three months. Nothing comes back because I haven’t put a return address on any of the cards. It’s better this way.

  But something strange happened to me yesterday when I was down by the breakwall. I saw something spray-painted on the rocks that I had not noticed before; at least, I’m sure it wasn’t there the last time I came down to review my existentialist rulebook. I couldn’t see it very well, my vision being what it is, so I moved closer.

  WE DON’T DIE WE MULTIPLY.

  I thought of my conversation with Agent Booth back in Tico’s Place when he was first introducing me to this mad conspiracy of haters and killers. Bureaucrats, gangbangers—these will be the final inheritors of post-apocalyptic America.

  Something vaguely familiar about the writing bothered me. The block letters reminded me of something I’d seen before; all the letters were in capitals except the e’s. They were lower cases but shaped like the schwa, a broken arrow tipped upward.

  Just my imagination, I suppose, but I felt like a rabbit imprisoned in its hop.

  Maybe it’s time I got another gun.

  AUTHOR BIO

  Robert White grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio. He has published several Thomas Haftmann tales in various print magazines and webzines. Like his private eye, he is a full-time lapsed Catholic and part-time existentialist. He has worked in grocery and department stores, sailed as a deckhand on ore boats around the Great Lakes, worked as a mold puller in a plastics factory, and on the clean-up crew at Mexican Original, a taco factory in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He writes book reviews and does interviews for Boxing World. Although he once spent two extraordinary weeks in China about ten years ago, it’s now clear that Ashtabula is the hill he’s chosen to die on and that’s fine by him.

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