guilty parting with some of their loose change. Eventually, The Duke was able to save enough to buy an old Army jacket at the thrift store; when he started wearing that his take nearly doubled. Only the prostitutes around the corner did a better business. But, the Duke wasn’t starving and he was getting by.
After a while, things became routine. The Duke would work his corner most of the day. At the night he’d hit the bars, and spend most of his money. When the bars closed, he’d try and find a warm place to sleep. The next day, bright and early, the Duke would be back at his corner again.
It was during one of Seattle’s frequent down pours that the Duke met Ruthie. The Duke was down to his last few bucks. The bar was about to close, and the Duke dreaded having to sleep outside in the rain. He saw a girl across the bar. She was quite plastered, which made her an easy mark. The Duke was still relatively fit from his military days, and the girl... well she was ugly as sin. But, what the hell, her money was as green as anybodies. So he crossed the bar and sat down next to her. She stared at him dumbly for a couple of minutes and then offered to buy him a drink. An offer the Duke readily accepted. As it turned out, Ruthie was an injun— the first that the Duke had ever seen up close. The only thing the Duke knew about injuns was what he gleamed from old John Wayne movies. Ruthie went on and on about some asshole who had abandon her in Seattle. She was also trying to earn enough money to buy a ticket back to Alaska, so she could see her kids again. But what fascinated the Duke the most was that she spoke relatively good English, albeit slurred with drink, and not the Injun talk he remembered from the movies.
At some point, Ruthie invited the Duke back to her place. The Duke, being three sheets to the wind at this point, happily obliged.
Ruthie’s place was a tiny room in a big fire trap hotel downtown. The room consisted of a bed with a rusty metal frame, a couple of broken wooden chairs held together by duct tape, a splintery table propped up by the Good Book under one of the legs, and closed heavy curtains that hung perilous close to a giant radiator.
Still, the Duke reckoned it was a warm place to sleep for the night. There was even a little bathroom off in the corner— a great luxury to someone who’d been living on the street for over a year.
Ruthie staggered over to him. She fell forward, and on instinct the Duke caught her in his arms. She turned, and planted her soft warm lips on his. The Duke couldn’t breathe, and his heart raced. But, that was just the beginning of his horror. Her tongue darted into his mouth and he nearly choked on the taste of old fish and whiskey. Mercifully, she pulled away. He was shaking. She began to unbutton her dress.
The Duke had never seen a woman naked before, and what he saw now made him sick. Where the penis should have been was a large mound of dark hair, and some sort of fluid leaked down her leg. The worst thing wasn’t her gross nudity, no it was the smell. A terrible smell that came from that dark place between her legs, a musky smell mixed with the odor of stale urine. When that smell hit his nose, he nearly threw up. The hideous smelly creature took a step forward, and the Duke took a step back. The naked thing would not be deterred, and took another step forward. The Duke took another step back, but found his path now blocked by the splintery table. It was then that Ruthie had her first “accident.”
The Duke left Ruthie sobbing on the bed. Meanwhile, he enjoyed the glorious comforts of Ruthie’s shower. The water was hot and he wished it could last forever. He drowned himself in the spray until the hot water finally ran out.
Refreshed, the Duke sat down next Ruthie on the bed. He could hear her still sobbing softly in her pillow. He was naked. She was naked. No sinful thoughts crossed his mind. The Duke had done a lot of thinking in the shower. The same thoughts he had had back in the psych ward. It was so clear what he had to do. His war was a holy one, he realized, not bound by the petty constraints of society or military life. The shower had been his baptism. It had washed away all the cluttered thoughts in his mind. The Duke was a holy warrior, but a warrior who needed to fight his war unseen.
Ruthie had been heaven sent. He would marry her. He would adopt her kids. He would hide under a mask of normalcy. And, when the world least expected it, he would send all the Commie bastards straight to hell.
“Ruthie,” he said gently. “I’ve been thinking. I’d really like to meet those kids of yours.”
She was all over him them, past insults forgotten. He tempered his disgust with more pleasant thoughts.
And, when the Duke thought about bashing Ruthie’s skull in, he was finally able to get it up.
Article VII: “Now she's starting to rise..."
Marion had been down all day, and now her head was splitting...
She wondered if this torment would ever end. She did not fit, and there was no place for her in this world. She didn’t belong here, and people seemed bound and determined to never let her forget it. She had been shouting for the last ten minutes, only stopping when her voice cracked and her throat went raw. There was so much rage inside of her. She could feel it stabbing her from the inside out like sharp little pains that made her fingers ache.
She knew a fit was coming on. She tried to fight it, but once it started it wouldn’t stop. All the stuff she had bottled up would tip, then the mad vomit would come out.
She would scream at God in blasphemous prayers. Asking why He would be so cruel to create such a hideous creature that was so friendless and alone. She would scream at herself for being so fucking stupid, then damn herself by listing all the stupid things she had done in her life. Mostly, though, she would get mad at all the people who had made her life a living hell.
For this was the real Marion Morrison: naked and stripped bare from the politeness of society, standing revealed as the gross disgusting creature she was. She was an inhuman thing made up of only two emotions: rage and despair.
She was able to suppress it when other people were around, shame and embarrassment made her appear normal.
But lately she would sometimes catch herself muttering and swearing under her breath. If she were at work when this happened she would run to the bathroom and wait for this mild storm to pass, praying the entire time that no one had heard her.
She used to walk to the store. Hell, she used to walk everywhere. But one day she had a fit so bad on the sidewalk she worried that the police would come and put her in the insane asylum. She could still remember people staring at her as she screamed herself crazy. She had run home in tears. Marion always drove everywhere after that.
She wished she still had her Walkman, but that had been lost in the move to the big city. Music was her salvation. One of few times she had known any sort of peace was walking the old logging trails back in the village while the Talking Heads blasted out her headphones. People in the village respected her privacy, especially after her mom died. Her brother had bought her the Walkman and the tapes to go with it. James had quit school his junior year and started commercial fishing with their uncle. It was an unexpected gift, as James was notoriously stingy with his money. She loved him for it, although his taste in music was questionable to say the least. The Billy Joel tape was a nice gesture, but the Talking Heads were the real find. Something about David Bryne speaking French while singing about a Psycho Killer was oddly soothing to her.
But those days were a fading memory. The big city offered no peace, and her precious Walkman was lost forever. Marion had scoured the thrift stores hoping to find a secondhand replacement, only to find nothing but old vinyl records gathering dust. Like all adults she was trapped in a gilded cage, plagued by all those responsibilities that adults must suffer through: you worked to pay for your own survival, and that was that. Perhaps if she skipped a few meals and counted her pennies she might eventually save just enough to get her sanity back although she would probably be long in the tooth by then.
It’s funny how so much of our piece of mind depends on other things. Now she had broken the car radio during one of her fits and sanity would be that much harder to maintain.
Shame was the one thing that kept her alive. Marion was usually at her lowest following one of her fits; it was during these times that she would begin to wonder if the world would be better off without her. Would God forgive her for what she was planning to do? Would He understand that life is not a gift if it is something to be endured or a burden that one has to suffer through? Could God be that cruel? Well look at your life, Marion though, He could.
But all the people who gave her shit would be thrilled about that wouldn’t they? They’d shake their heads and say things like “We all knew she was going to do. It was really just a matter of time.” And why should she give those assholes what they want! It was also because of them that she refused to drink or go to the bars, which made her even weirder to her fellow Alaskans. For the bars were holy places to the good people of Alaska. She knew everybody was just waiting with drool stained lips for her to get drunk. Then all those same assholes could nod their head and say “See we were right about Marion Morrison all along. She’s just like her mom.”
Once, her mom (in one of her more sober moments) actually dragged her to a psychiatrist. She was about 16 at the time, and her teachers had noticed she was having
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