Desert Son Trilogy: Desert Son, Wayward Soul, Spiritual Intervention (Books 1-3)

by Glenn Maynard

  “This is really strange,” he whispered. “He was just here when you rang the doorbell. Now he’s nowhere to be seen. He said that he wanted to meet you.”

  After checking all the rooms and even the yard, Carter felt too uncomfortable to stay, and penned Martin a note saying that he was going out for a bit and would return later.

  “Come on,” said Carter to Brenda, “let’s get outta here. I could really use a beer.”

  Brenda paused, seemingly unprepared to leave the house, which took a long time to get into. “Can’t we give him a few more minutes?” she pleaded. “Or how ‘bout I take a quick look around for him?”

  “No, really, I wouldn’t feel comfortable parading you around the house,” said Carter. “Remember what I told you about him?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Brenda told Carter that she was taking him to The James, which is a small bar on the Pearl Street mall. Of course, since neither of them had a vehicle, they were pedestrians, but it was safer that way. Besides, foot traffic was the vehicle of choice for this town full of health nuts. There was only a mile which separated Martin’s house from the Pearl Street Mall, so Carter did not mind walking. He didn’t mind walking until he found out that Brenda’s shortcut took them over railroad tracks.

  He didn’t dare reveal his phobia to Brenda. That would look pretty cowardly, he believed. He didn’t want to be a head case or she’d be running for the hills. Carter tried to hold it in, but he began to tremble. He felt the intensity of his reactions increasing. He needed to act and he needed to act without delay. This pressure hit an all-time high. He could feel his face turning red.

  On the fly, he had to calculate whether the embarrassment of Brenda seeing him like this was better or worse than bolting unannounced to avoid Brenda’s witnessing his phobic reaction. This is when it just happened for Carter. There was no time for calculations. He acted impulsively based on his physiological condition brought on by the situation before him.

  Even though no trains were running at the time, Carter still panicked and bolted across the tracks from about 50 yards before them and stopped about 50 yards after. He realized that he was running and didn’t remember much of the decision process. Before he knew it, he was on the opposite side of the tracks looking back at Brenda. With the intense phobia now out of his body, he slumped to the ground a bit, dropped down to one knee, and felt as if an exorcism had taken place. He tried fighting this withdrawal, and began to chuckle to cover up what really happened. He wanted to throw her off base even as he could hear his heart pumping in his chest.

  He slowly returned to his feet and glanced over at Brenda from a distance.

  “Come on over,” he yelled playfully. He could see there was awkwardness as if Brenda thought what he had just done was weird, so Carter stepped up his plan.

  “Brenda, run!” he yelled. “Let’s see what you’ve got!”

  There was a pause and a wrinkle in that plan, and seconds turned into minutes. Then Carter’s nerves calmed when he saw Brenda suddenly break into a sprint as she headed towards him.

  Carter locked eyes with Brenda and tried to do a little soul searching on her as she stood before him. The first thing that he noticed was that her soft blue eyes were prettier than Martin’s. He looked into her eyes deeply, but could not get as deep as he did with Martin. Carter grabbed Brenda around the waist with both hands and quickly pulled her in for a kiss.

  Brenda said nothing after the kiss, either. There was just a moment of staring into each other’s eyes. They were apparently reading as much as they could from each other and with no signs of discomfort. Carter felt her warmth, and her caring disposition. He could also extract reciprocated feelings on her end. Her eyes smiled, but they also revealed pain and suffering deep within her irises as if they’d seen far too many obstacles for her short existence. Carter amazed himself at this new ability to read people. However, he was even more amazed that he pulled off the train track fiasco.

  ***

  Carter entered The James behind Brenda, who forced her way through the crowd and to the back of the bar. There was a small room with a couple of dartboards, and this is the place Brenda wanted to be. Carter knew this because she strutted up to the dartboard, grabbed the black eraser, and cleaned the slate. From her purse she extracted a set of darts in a tan leather casing. Carter sensed that she had been here before.

  Carter never launched missiles much in Boston, but he was familiar with the basics: Cricket and Around the World. He felt like he was in a dart tournament because this small rectangular room was exclusively for darts, and there were a lot of onlookers. Carter believed they would heckle his playing because they were drunk and he sucked at darts. He wanted to give it a try, though, only because it meant being with Brenda.

  After firing a round of darts into the board, Brenda walked up and yanked them out, then handed them to Carter. This was the moment of truth. He had to show her what he had, and prove that he could fit in with any crowd. He reared back and fired his first dart over everything, sticking into the wall above even the backboard.

  Carter didn’t even look back for Brenda’s reaction. He just walked up to the board, stood on his tip-toes, and pulled his dart from the wall. When he turned around, he was relieved to see that Brenda was preoccupied with the waitress, who had just brought two ice-cold Bud Lites to their little round bar table. This enabled Carter to clean the slate himself, and he did just that, firing a nice grouping of three darts just to the right of the bull, but all inside the triple section of the fifteen.

  He returned to the table as the waitress was leaving. Brenda grabbed her beer bottle with her right hand, and half-hugged Carter with her left. He enjoyed that hug, very much, hoping for a follow up peck, which never came.

  “Glad you could join me,” she said. “I lucked out with the dart board. That’s your beer.”

  “Thank you,” said Carter. “Here’s to us as…friends.”

  Carter raised his bottle up high, thinking he should just shut up. Maybe he was just trying too hard to act casual, he thought, hoping that her mind moved along too quickly to pick up on the pettiness in which his own mind dwelled.

  “Have you ever played Cricket?” she asked.

  “Of course I know how to play Cricket,” said Carter, relieved that she had picked one of the two games he knew.

  “Good,” said Brenda with a smile. “I really am glad we found each other again, because I really owed you a night on the town for saving me from Nebraska. God, you don’t know how much that meant to me.”

  Carter smiled at her and said, “I enjoyed the company as much as you enjoyed not having to walk.”

  He stared into soft, blue eyes as he finished what he had to say. He withheld pertinent information, though, about how much he adored her after such a short amount of time. He withheld how connected he had become and how he had never felt this way about a woman, especially having only seen her a few times. He felt as if she was the one, and he knew it sounded ridiculous, but could not explain it away other than love at first sight. Carter never even knew he could feel this way about a woman. He felt her presence inside of him as if she were his soul mate.

  After Brenda knocked Carter for a loop three consecutive times, he threw in the towel, claiming that he let her win. Pulling bar stools up to the table, Brenda ordered a fourth round of beers, saddling up for an interrogation.

  “Carter, what brought you out west from Boston?”

  “I just needed a change,” he replied.

  “I know you weren’t exactly intending to come here to Boulder, so where exactly were you intending to go?”

  “Hmm.” He paused for several seconds. “Brenda…uh…I was really just shooting for the west, because I’d never bee
n.”

  She looked into his eyes, and he knew that she knew he was hiding something from her. He tried pulling his eyes from her, but this only added to her curiosity about the truth.

  “Carter,” she said, drilling him with her stare, “tell me what’s going on with you.”

  Carter had been sitting on a barstool with his elbows holding him up on the small round table. His head and shoulders slumped down, and he nearly put his forehead onto the table. He felt that he had to open up to Brenda, and even though he believed that she would understand his plight, he still hardly knew her. However, he knew that he had to unleash his dark side to her now. If she was going to run, then this would be the time to do so. She seemed to understand him, and unless he told her the truth, Carter believed that she would know whether the truth was being told by merely looking into Carter through his eyes. Besides, he was one to get drunk easily and talk, so it would come out eventually.

  “Why Boulder, Colorado?” she pressed.

  Carter prepared to reveal himself to Brenda. Back up onto his elbows he went, making direct eye contact with her.

  “Brenda,” he said, “I know that this is going to sound crazy to you, but I’m kind of looking for…signs…I guess you could call it that. I’m searching for…oh God, listen to me…my identity.”

  “Oh, great,” she began, and then completed her sentence with a zinger. “You sound like my boyfriend.”

  Carter slowly eased his beer onto the table. It was three-quarters full as he watched Brenda do a ‘bottoms up’ with her bottle, plunking the empty one on the table and whipping her head around at the same speed as the passing cocktail waitress. “Two more Bud Lites, please,” she said with her hand raised above her head, pointing her two fingers back and forth at the Bud Lite beneficiaries.

  Carter’s mouth must have been agape because Brenda noticed surprise in his face. It had been the combination of her last sequence of events that froze him in his stupor. Very deep down he had been hoping that this constituted a date, and in one fell swoop he learned that he was merely out on the town with someone who was taken, will only be a friend to him, and who had no problem drinking him under the table. Then he remembered that Brenda had said she wanted to repay him for giving her that ride. That’s all there was to it. He felt like a fool.

  “Actually,” Brenda said as an afterthought, “I should say ex-boyfriend.”

  Carter could breathe again. “I’m sorry,” he said, but without feeling, nor meaning. His insides were experiencing a grand finale, exploding in ecstasy from the very thought. He worked at keeping his outward appearance at bay. He was pretty good at hiding his feelings, so this part wasn’t much of a challenge. Maybe he would never be more than Brenda’s little actor-friend, he thought, but only thought. He began to feel very woozy, and he knew that the more he drank, the more he spoke.

  “Reggie is starting to become another person,” she began, and Carter acknowledged her with a nod, but boy did he ever know the feeling. “He used to be such a great guy, but he changed almost overnight. He’s really getting weird with his latest religious kick. Usually he goes through fazes, but this is never ending and deepening. He’s…so…eerily intense. It’s like he’s living in a fantasy world.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Carter mumbled, louder than he had wanted.

  “What?” Brenda yelled over the jukebox that mixed with dozens of conversations.

  Carter hesitated. “I said aren’t you appalled?” He had leaned in to yell this to her.

  The music became wilder and the crowd larger. The conversations all around needed increased volume to accommodate the competition. Another couple converged on the dartboard.

  “Reggie is big into the eastern religion now. Buddhism is his latest fad, but I think it’s more than just a fad now. He’s living it. He keeps telling me that he’s going to return to this earth as a bird after he’s dead and gone, so he can shit on all the people who shit on him in his lifetime.”

  She was able to smirk at this part of it, but Carter knew that this was really bothering her, so he just let her continue venting uninterrupted. He saw that her smirk was short-lived, and she continued the story.

  “Now he’s joining groups and stuff. Did you know that Boulder is one of the few American cities into Buddhism?”

  Carter recognized his cue to jump into the conversation, even though he was very deep in thought. He was still listening to Brenda and understanding her, but he felt like he was doing so on another level. This seemed to be happening more frequently to Carter, as if he was slowly becoming detached from his body. He’d been there before, and although he knew it wasn’t really the case, he recognized the sensation.

  “Boulder’s big into Buddhism, huh?” he answered. “No, I guess I didn’t know that, but then again, I’m not exactly well-versed in Buddhism.”

  Brenda blushed a bit, feeling silly for thinking that just because she was a secondhand expert on Buddhism, everyone should know its principles.

  “Buddhists believe in the concept of reincarnation,” she began. “Reincarnation is when a person’s soul returns after the physical death of the body. The soul moves into a new body, so our bodies are actually capsules for these souls.”

  This topic sparked Carter’s interest, and he leaned in so he wouldn’t miss a word. He found himself fascinated by this discussion. Again, he wasn’t sure if it was the topic or the presenter, but he knew that his undivided attention had been gained.

  “So if I return to earth, will it be me?” Carter asked. “My personality?”

  “Precisely,” said Brenda. “Soul, personality, mind, whatever you want to call it; consciousness.”

  “So a person’s consciousness separates from the actual body?”

  “That’s what they believe, yes,” Brenda confirmed.

  “Wow,” said Carter, snapping out of deep thought after about 30 seconds. “Brenda, do you believe that someone’s consciousness can leave a body, and then return to the same body?”

  Brenda smiled, and then replied, “Hey Carter, I’m by no means telling you that this is my personal belief. But yeah, many people have actually claimed that their consciousness had left them, two separate entities resulting until the two reunite, but not before a lap around space, heaven, or wherever they end up going.”

  The waitress plopped two more bottles onto the table, and removed the two empties with a single pluck.

  “Thanks,” said Brenda to the waitress with the phony tight-lipped smile. Then she continued on her roll. “I find it bizarre that a person’s self, the total make-up of their identity, could somehow separate from their physical body. I mean, how is it held together? What is it exactly? What does it look like, if anything? Now if that’s not a case for all people being of the same race.”

  “It happened to me,” Carter confessed, but purposely too low for Brenda to hear over the volume of the room. He wasn’t sure if he wanted her to hear.

  “What?” she asked loudly, leaning in.

  Carter considered repeating, and decided that since she was opening up to him, he should reciprocate. The beers helped his decision to open up. “It happened to me,” he repeated. “That thing…that out-of-body deal.” He knew that he had a way with words, but did not care at this moment, so long as his point was conveyed. He also felt like he was venting in a healthy way.

  “What do you mean it happened to you?” Brenda asked in a voice tossed between sorrow and embarrassment.

  “It…it happened to me…I…I…how do I say this…I was out of my mind?”

  “No, you were out of your body,” Brenda said with a sympathetic half-chuckle, and then her forehead wrinkled lines of curiosity again, wanting this story like an eager reporter, leaning fur
ther in to Carter.

  “The real reason I left Boston was because I could not get myself to live in my parent’s house anymore.” Carter swallowed what seemed to be bales of cotton before he could resume. “My parents died in a car accident just last week…as did I.”

  Brenda’s rosy color paled in a heartbeat. Carter could see the color drain from her face. She inched her chair close enough so that she could comfort Carter with her right arm around his neck. Carter did not want to make Brenda upset over this, and then he watched as a tear ran down her drained cheek. Then another tear dropped, and another.

  “I’m so sorry about your parents, Carter,” she said. “God how terrible. How…how are you holding up? Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

  Carter remained strong, having shed his few tears over the last couple of days, but still never really having a good cry.

  “As for my parents,” he continued, “this is another shaded area in my life, and I just found this out by chance.”

  Brenda let him speak uninterrupted now. It was Carter’s turn to vent.

  “Now I’m warning you Brenda, this story is as bizarre as what you’ve been talking about. I hate to say it after what you said about Reggie, but I’ll take my chances, I guess. Just please don’t think that I’m a whacko too.”

  “Promise,” said Brenda, wiping her eye with the back of her hand.

  Carter paused as he immersed himself into deep thought, revisiting the scene of the accident with his mind. Whenever he did this, it was as if he was reliving this horrendous accident.

  “I floated…above the scene…of our accident,” he said, speaking methodically and enunciating each word. He stared past Brenda as he spoke, not wanting to make eye contact, but also not really aware of it since his concentration on the subject at hand was so intense. “I could see everything from this bird’s eye view. As wild as this sounds, I didn’t think it was out of the ordinary at the time. I knew my parents wouldn’t survive the accident by the looks of the car. Next thing I knew, my awareness was looking down on my body. It took me a while before realizing that the lifeless body on the ground was mine.”