Dimly, Through Glass

by Knight, Dirk

  Rick Sawyer needn’t know that the man he mourned today had every intention of taking his life, any more than the police needed to tell him. Hector is dead. Dragging out the man’s sins for all to see and smearing what little good was left of his reputation wouldn’t serve any purpose, so Carlos greeted the attendees quietly and thanked them for coming to pay their respects.

  Thankfully, Sawyer had agreed to hold a small reception at his home, sparing Carlos the trouble of cleaning and tending after the guests.

  He didn’t want the responsibility of keeping up appearances and pretending he still loved Hector. He was Hector’s only surviving family and he was secretly thankful that the white man had killed Hector in the fight.

  He felt sorry for the man because he would have to live with the guilt of taking a life, but he felt the man had done a favor to the world by stopping Hector before he could rampage the office he’d worked at for so long. He wanted to tell the man that he had stopped Hector from killing at least one other person, but he wouldn’t bring himself to do so.

  Carlos has grown tired of wearing the smile and feigning interest in the lives of the few friends that had remained loyal enough to Hector’s memory to come to the graveside service. He approaches Sawyer after the mourners place their flowers on the casket, and tells him that he will not be able to attend the reception, and to give everyone his regards, but not to mention it until they arrive, as he doesn’t wish to speak to anyone else today.

  Sawyer nods in understanding and places one hand on his shoulder as he walks back to the black Lincoln that the funeral home has provided for the procession. He will catch a cab home, so he can be alone with his thoughts. He is tired of mourning. His life has been upended and he doesn’t know where he will live or how he will survive, but he thinks that any life is better than the umbrella of fear he has cowered beneath recently.

  Evie

  Evalyn Chambers, a nineteen-year-old cocktail waitress, is under duress when she leaves her crummy one-bedroom apartment that morning. After bribing another girl to take her shift, so she could go stay at her hot little snowboarding instructor boyfriend’s even crummier apartment for a much-needed getaway, she had gotten into her loaded down car and it would not start.

  Her auburn ochre hair, streaked with purple down the side, and topped with a toboggan hat, falls midway down her back. She has a series of piercings in her lips and nose that glint and sparkle in the early morning light. She is already wearing her Roxy pink-camo pants with her brand new Burton boots slung over her shoulder as she stands, appearing dumbfounded, and looking under the hood of a Chevy.

  She lights a cigarette and takes a deep breath, when she notices Jarrod, her upstairs neighbor, leaving for work.

  “Hey Ev, what’s wrong with the ride?”

  “Fuck, dude, I don’t know! Why don’t you figure it out?”

  “Hey, you got another cigarette? I was gonna stop at the gas station and grab a pack, but I guess since I gotta help you get this piece of shit running I’m not gonna have time,” he says with a luminous smile. He is smitten with her, and he has been hoping to spend more than a couple minutes with her ever since she moved in three months ago, but it was always a short sweet hello, the occasional smoke-out before work, or he had bought her alcohol a few times.

  “Ha-ha, whatever dude, you keep that Hyundai together with duct tape and Popsicle sticks,” she says as she hands him her open pack of Camels.

  “Thanks,” he says as she lights the flame for him. He takes a deliberate pull before getting into the driver seat and turning the key.

  The engine turns over once, followed by a series of increasingly weaker clicks. He meets her eyes and motions with his index finger to the tiny button used to control the headlights, to the left of the wheel. When her eyes follow his lead, he presses the button to the off position with a click, and then giggles.

  “I think I found your problem,” he says.

  “Ha fucking ha, Jarrod.”

  “Don’t shoot the messenger, Heavy Evie. The good news is all you’ll need is a jump and you should be good to go.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got Cables in the trunk. . . . Sadly this happens all the time,” Evie says. Smoke is curling out of her nostrils and pooling for a second on the lip of her toboggan before dissipating into the crisp Phoenix morning. She smokes the cigarette in a purposeful manner, almost with a sense of longing, while Jarrod hooks up the cables to her battery, and then revs his engine.

  Her car starts on the first turn of the key and he rolls up the cables and carries them to her trunk.

  Perplexed, Jarrod walks to her window and asks, “If this happens all the time, why the hell were you sitting here staring at your engine like a helpless prom queen?”

  “Well, Mr. fabulous . . . I didn’t quite know who would be coming to my rescue this fine morning, and I couldn’t risk the whole city knowing my secret, now could I? Besides, I wanted to see if you really know as much about cars as you claim. You passed your first test.”

  “Well, alright then. What did I win? Ooh, I know, how about you finally go out with me for dinner?”

  Blushing a little, which is more than normal for her, she says, “Maybe,” and puts the car in reverse. Jarrod takes a half step back, never taking his eyes off of her gratifying profile. She stops the window halfway up and says “I’m going to Flag for the weekend; when I get back, sure.”

  “Sure what?” he says. “Dinner?”

  Laughing at how truly amazed and obviously giddy his response is she says, “Yes, but you better save a bowl of that stuff from last night for our pre-dinner blaze,” she says and grabs one more smoke from the opened box.

  “Here, and thanks again for the jump,” she says, and tosses the rest of her pack of smokes out the window to him, then rolls the window the rest of the way up.

  He is still standing there next to his car, exhaling smoke into the chilly air and putting the hard pack she gave him into his jacket pocket, when she looks back. His interest in her is so genuine. She wonders what Monday night will be like, and if he will try to make a move, finally. She pulls onto the street and guns it to make speed with the other cars.

  The new snow-boots in her passenger seat catch her eyes when she looks to clear traffic, before making the left. The boots are stunning. She had wanted them and pointed them out last time she and her mother were out together, before she was ostracized from her parents’ house. Her mother gave the boots to her last week, supposedly a belated birthday gift, but she knew it was an attempt to buy back her affections. Evie is at odds with her mother, by default of her marital status. Her Father was the sonofabitch that had made her leave, but her mother is weak; never would stand up to the old man, and for that, Evie has grown to feel disdain and contempt for the woman who birthed her. She thinks that her mother should be stronger. If she had been able to stand up to Leonard, her tyrant of a father, and she was only nineteen, why couldn’t her mother do the same?

  Evalyn, or Evie—pronounced like heavy—which she preferred, had dropped out of classes at ASU, just to prove a point to her father after he refused to let her attend school at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The point that she was hoping to make was that she was independent and made her own decisions, unlike her enfeebled mother.

  “I’m not paying for you to go to that liberal hippie school. You want to learn how to grow pot organically or make soap out of food from those lesbian, vegetarian punks, you’re going to have to pay for it yourself!” he had said when she brought home the application after a ski trip her senior year. That was the same trip where she had met Freddie.

  “You will have fun at ASU, Tater Tot, just stick to the game plan and go to Arizona State like your father and I did. It’s a great school,” her mother, Connie, had chimed in, ever trying to buffer Leonard’s impetuous temperament.

  Evie remembers that conversation well. She remembers because the entire time her fat-faced father had been talking, she had been smiling and nodding and coming up
with a plan. The plan was that after her dropout and her father’s wasted tuition money, he would see that she wouldn’t bow to his dogmatic demands, and then she would be able to attend the school of her choosing.

  Her plan hadn’t worked. Instead of caving in to her impulses and strong will, he erupted. She was supposedly home for Thanksgiving, but in reality had dropped out of school and hadn’t considered lodging. She didn’t want to spend the holidays in the dorms, alone, she had said, and she missed her family, even Felix, her teenage brother, and so on.

  Then came her father’s awkward look and silence, when she had dropped the bombshell of her recent departure from school, and told him that her Camry was loaded up and she would be staying here with the family until she started at NAU in the spring. His silence and impenetrable stare had lasted less than twenty seconds before he stood and threw his plate into hers.

  “Get the fuck out of my house,” he had shouted. And, “It’s about time you see how liberal crybabies fare in the real world.” That was his favorite term to describe him and his cronies: people who lived in the “real world.” Anyone who didn’t live in this world was, to her father, one of three things: a hippie, a communist, or a Pinko-Commie Fag. The latter was usually reserved for Progressive Liberal Politicians, any man with long hair, and a few clients with whom he had encountered difficulties brokering sales over the years.

  She had left a few hours later. Her mother had convinced him not to leave her penniless. He gave her $700 cash and the keys to her old ’97 Chevy Lumina, the shit-box that she passed down to Felix just a summer ago. The new Camry, her graduation present, stayed. Leonard had even gone through the trouble of swapping the registration and tags so that Felix wouldn’t have to drive the Camry with her personalized plates. That one gesture seemed to make it more permanent. More real.

  What a fucking asshole, she thinks, pulling into the filling station to gas up and get another pack of smokes.

  After topping off the tank, and making sure that she has a few snacks for the road—she rarely had food in her apartment—Evalyn is back on track and headed to see her supposed man. The supposed man had yet to text her back this morning, probably hung over.

  Fumbling with her phone a few miles later, Evie sees a car dart into the road ahead of her, then onto the shoulder. She is not cautious as she approaches the driver. She shouts, “fucking learn how to drive, asshole,” towards his vehicle. Just this moment her phone vibrates between her legs and she pulls it out to read her response. It isn’t Freddie.

  She looks up the instant before the driver darts recklessly back into her lane. The tires squeal in protest and the back half of the car shudders as the Lumina starts to skid sideways, stopping less than a foot before creaming the jackass driver. What’s worse, the man doesn’t seem to notice that he’s almost crashed them both; instead, he is shouting into his empty passenger seat.

  Boiling, Evie gives the little Chevy all it’s worth and passes the Acura in the center lane. The engine whining as she redlines, she cuts back into the northbound lane with inches to spare and locks the brakes up for the second time in as many minutes. The other driver is paying committed attention now, as he skids within inches. Before she pulls away, and before he has a chance to roll down his window to shout insults or any words of protest, she flicks her half-smoked cigarette back. It explodes in a shower of brilliant cinders and rains down the windshield and the hood of the shiny black car. She extends her equally shiny black-tipped finger as high as her arm will take it.

  “Fucking lunatic!” she screams out the window and guns the accelerator. Her scream is so forceful it vibrates her throat and burns with the final escaping smoke from the cigarette projectile. I really can’t wait to get out of this fucking city, she thinks, and then reads the message from Jarrod.

  Part II:

  “But if this person of maladaptive behavior—this part of him that is compulsive and uncontrollable—had the ability to truly look into himself, he’d recognize what it was that was causing him to think and act the way he was…”

  - Ted Bundy

  “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.”

  - James 1:23-24

  The Boy in the

  Camouflage Jacket

  Dennis swerves out of fear, his Acura skidding onto the gravel shoulder as he cries out. Afraid to look into the rearview again, but forcing himself to, he is disappointed and relieved by the reflection. The glass is specked with a fine spray of brown, which can only be his blood from the gunshot, but the mirror is now empty, the reflection is just his own.

  Not trusting his eyes, he turns hard against his safety belt and cranes into the back seat, looking in the floorboards and finding, again, nothing. Though he feels confident that he is alone in the car, he doesn’t question what he saw. It was Jiménez, again.

  “You’re fucking dead!” he yells, and points a finger into the rear seat. He can still feel the look in the dead man’s eyes. It was the same haunting look of laughter that he witnessed as the Mexican gurgled out his last breath.

  This is ridiculous; he’s dead, just stop freaking out, he thinks, trying to convince himself that there is no such thing as haunting. That he’s just experiencing some kind of post-traumatic stress and that his psyche may be a little fractured, but that he is definitely not seeing a ghost.

  “You’ll see! We’ll go see his funeral and you’ll see that he’s just a corpse in a casket,” he says into the empty car, as if he is trying to convince himself of something he already knows, but doesn’t believe. He wonders why he said “we,” and steels himself again against the evidence of his faltering sanity.

  “Just a body in a bag,” he says a little more convincingly.

  Dennis slams his foot onto the accelerator before looking towards the road and darts out into traffic, nearly slamming into a car. He doesn’t express sympathy when the driver lays on the horn, and instead lets his foot off the accelerator to further aggravate the driver.

  He sees her in the rear view. She is gorgeous, to Dennis. He hates her immediately. While he is captivated by her youthful and edgy appearance, she makes a move and whizzes past. Dennis lets her race past, hoping to get a better look at her face.

  She doesn’t play nice, hasn’t learned her station in life just yet, he supposes. Dennis is enraged when the embers rain down on his filthy windshield.

  She is exactly the kind of girl Dennis has always wanted to dominate. A little bratty bitch who thinks her perky tits will get her out of any jam. The kind of girl in high school who made fun of him, or embarrassed him in class when they noticed his erection pressing hard against the underside of the desk.

  Those girls.

  The ones who would wear slutty clothes, and show half their ass, but then act like a guy was in the wrong for staring. Uppity bitches with too much self-respect. The kind of girls that would get drunk and screw you at a party and the next day call it rape.

  No one had put them in their place. Not yet.

  “High school will be over soon, and then you’ll learn, you stupid cunt!” he says.

  Flooring the pedal to ride her bumper again, he begins to shout more obscenities out the window to her outstretched finger.

  You will pay for this, you little bitch, he thinks and he remembers the biker.

  The biker had taken his dignity, had treated him like a bitch and Dennis hadn’t done a thing to stand up for himself. Now this crimson-haired twat is trying to do it to him, too. Am I wearing a fucking sign? he wonders.

  The sun had barely pierced the sky that overcast September morning, when Dennis had headed into the office uncharacteristically early. His music was turned low, his attention elsewhere. Exiting the off-ramp at maximum highway speeds, he had cut across four lanes and prepared to make a right hand turn. Before he could make the negotiation into the farthest right lane, a grizzly looking
man atop a Harley Davidson road-bike popped out behind him, shadowing his rear passenger bumper. Dennis had waited for the biker to make the move he had seemed so eager to make, and to pass Dennis.

  For reasons unknown the leather-clad Harley rider maintained speed and did not advance, nor would he fall back. He was shadowing Dennis. The biker seemed content to lie in Dennis’s blind spot, pacing faster and slower, faster and slower, to prevent Dennis from entering the turn lane, mocking his flashing indicator.

  Dennis had no idea why this man wanted to keep him from work, and didn’t care.

  In one final fury of fuel, Dennis gunned the gas, didn’t quite have clearance enough, but decided that the motorcycle driver had it coming to him, and merged in anyway, forcing the bike to brake to avoid being crushed.

  He waved one hand furiously, calling Dennis a punk and a faggot as he did.

  Stupidly, Dennis lowered the window and shouted back to the man.

  “You really didn’t leave me a choice, asshole. Next time shit or get off the pot!”

  It would have been perfectly fine if it had ended there, if the car ahead of him had yielded softly instead of rubbernecking, and Dennis could have gotten to his office.

  But things rarely worked out the way they should in a rational world, and the car ahead stopped unnecessarily at a yield sign, more interested in the ensuing argument behind him than in the day’s work ahead, which gave Dennis no choice but to stop as well, leaving Mr. Motorcycle an unobstructed path to Dennis.

  The grungy rebel spat a hot and sour ball of spit and tobacco juice into his face. It splattered into Dennis’s mouth and misted into his eyes. A glob landed on the door of the car and the window.