Editor’s Note: Marlow continues his exploration of an ancient place with new eyes. We have shared the view of distant shores under novel skies, and the energy and decadence of tropic isles anchored in more than one sea. Have fun with this- it is a joy to look back at it all, the laughs and the tears, the beauty and the darkness that marks our passage in time in this amazing world. In the meantime, this narrative of the overheard in a dark place may not be suitable for office use. Of course, we don’t seem to be going to the office as we once did. The Lone Wolf is a place you might find appropriate for necessary discussions.
– Vic
Author’s Note:
The description of a death is not objective, but subjective. You don’t see what actually happens, but what a person believes, that happens.
This is based in part on conversations overheard late nights at the Lone Wolf Lounge and the Black Rabbit. Yes, these are places where scamps get together for a drink. As the nights wear on, the tales they tell get worse than those heard in a sewing circle.
PS: I must admit — no matter what I’m doing, I don’t zoom right down so I can only see and hear only what’s right in front of me. My setting is always on wide angle. It makes putting things in a final form extremely hard and time consuming.
-Marlow
Old Tricks. New Place.
Over the hiss of beer can pull tabs releasing their pressure, there sat two old salts on the younger one’s newly constructed, screened-in back yard porch overlooking his new pool as the twilight flickered. The proud owner flicked his 70s vintage US Navy Zippo, and his Marlboro came to life.
“Damn, the pool’s blue lighting looks great. Z was right — worth every penny.”
Back up north in the hometown of his youth his adopted family home had had been on a postage stamp sized lot too small even to hang clothes on a line out back to dry. Down in this southern city of charm, land was plentiful, labor and materials were cheap compared to those in the union labor priced and high-taxed north, and they had started to live like royalty.
They both were used to dinged and cracked sidewalks with sixty plus years of age on them. They grew up in those kinds of places. Now they lived in fine neighborhoods either in the historic part of town or out here in McMansionville. There they carved their initials on telephone poles, so people knew who lived there long ago. No poles were required or desired here.
They were in their late decades, with no cares in their new southern world.
No more Mr. Needy with a gotta-smoke habit and no coins to pay the druggist.
Westbound lanes on the interstate towards Mr. Pool Man’s place had been swarming with state police. Radio traffic report said it was connected to a high-speed chase of some sort. Absolutely senseless and stupid loss of young lives were the rumors that floated over the dimly lit pool.
As the grilling inch thick, prime steals sizzled nearby, they both remembered the old days dropping quarters in jukebox slots on Friday nights out, swilling watered down three-two beer and singing along with the music.
Both had shared tales of setting things right back in their day. Settling scores, marking territory, sending messages — to pay this or that, not to trespass in our streets, and so one. Sometimes things got a bit nuts. Heads bashed, faces kicked, eyes poked. Faces flushed with crimson red righteousness.
It sated them then. Those who had been or were still hurting would be told by others that things had been made right, and they could return to their normal.
They never screwed up things like that in their neighborhoods where church bells rang every morning at 8 AM.
Both knew Cold War languages to speak when they didn’t want anyone to follow what they were saying, but tonight they used sign language they picked up from the old days when some of their friends’ siblings were deaf.
The words flew fast and furious as Pool Man related his stepdaughter’s sad tale of her long-term boyfriend’s bugout when their joint lease recently ended.
“Why do you hate the kid so bad?”
“It’s not so much hate, man. But, come on, don’t you find what that fucker did after appearing to be so earnest over my daughter so many times at our dining room table more than a load of crap?”
“Seemed like a nice kid. It was like your daughter had after so many schmucks finally found someone to love and love her back.”
“I feel like I’m close to cutting off one of his hands or both ears.”
“Too much risk from forensics, man.”
“Really?”
“Straight up no-shit. Let me think a bit on it.” he mumbled as his mind drifted to beat-up baseball diamonds, rusty playgrounds, littered, abandoned houses, and other depressing sites of their separate but similar childhoods.
What they now faced wasn’t nothin’ new. This world’s hard on people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it yet folks never seem to hold it to account. Most don’t and slowly become discouraged.
They couldn’t stop what came. It didn’t wait for them. Expecting otherwise was vanity.
Later that night he went through his preliminary checklist:
Couldn’t risk crime scene services
No cell phone or device use
Too many doofuses with cellphones as well as business security, street pole and doorbell cameras
Way too many unmarked vehicles
No corpus
He knew his buddy had long dreamed of walking his daughter down the aisle with his wife in the pew mouthing only to him “Do not make her laugh.” He, in just return, would wiggle his eyebrows and flare his nostrils.
What a fucking mess. His friend was just about coming out of his skin.
He started in serious the next morning making a mental list:
Bolt cutters, saws, old portable B&W TV. . .
No man-missing stories, no news choppers
No accidental drone footage
No blood
No K-9 dogs barking
Love and rage in any quantities cannot mix here
No shredding the birds from the tree scenes
No morgue
Need to work a timeline. It’s the details, the little things that will make it clean
and leave no trail. Things you forget or miss will be like breadcrumbs.
No mental or emotional state other than in-charge
With the initial list completed, he straightened himself out as other items flooded in as days passed:
Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary
No confrontation
Mostly in the background, always in the shadows
Littlest things are somethings in these matters
No never-gonna-see-your-ass-again looks, words or deeds – a total blank
Leave not a single piece to the puzzle
No convict-in-the-yard stares — just nothing but normal
Even verbs — no past/present tense confusion
No watchfulness, no hyperness, no tension, no body stiffness, no stomach gurgling or churnings, no grimacing
OLD TRICKS. NEW PLACE. he thought.
They were unchanged men in a changing land. Out of step, out of place and running out of time. Suddenly a new deep darkness had emerged. Suddenly it was sundown for old men. Suddenly their time was over. Sometimes in the past skies had been bathed in blood. These men who came too early had stayed too long. Born too early for their new times. Uncommonly significant for others. They were about to become savage brothers.
A long-ago movie creed went – When you side with a man, you stay with him. And if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal. You’re finished. They weren’t. Neither of them.
Along the river late one night, the list-maker walked, hands thrust in his jeans pockets, finding nothing out of place in the plan. Ugly was the moonlight and the river’s ebbtide sluggish current lapping towards the abandoned down river harbor’s rotted pilings . . .
Accounts closed, necessaries purchased, absence arranged . . . as he passed storefronts shut down along the street. A rumbling stillness was omnipresent.
He knew how this would go, but his buddy did not — his head full of people, things, faces, fears all day, every day for a long time.
Still, his list went on:
No paper notes, yellow stickies
Look out for old ladies, the busybody ones
When you feel your aloneness, smile back
Gotta carry on
Be real old school here
Put a gun to the head and then disappear
No good-bye dinners
No wanting to be out of the dumps
No cigarette butts
All clothing dumped/burned
Same for vehicle(s) and other objects
Sit there in silence — it’s nice
Do not let the things that happen next fuck you up
Must act like the last surviving people on Earth who are being hunted
He will be forgotten and unwanted
Don’t let this piss you off
No streams of smoke, corkscrewing up
All teeth ground into powder and spread to the winds and waters
Be one with Silent Bob
No pain in eyes
Leave the shoes boxes and computer folders of old photos untouched
No wishing things made sense
This boy won’t escape from the wolves
Be an animal of the dusk — invisible, silent, like a lightless firefly.
He will go back to his forest, back to the fireflies.
No crazy, no psycho, just business
No bargaining
No deadlines
No drinking
No running loose like wooden gunship cannon
A clean no-history gun
No ratty old cellar to come out from
Make sure he has never been more unafraid in his whole life
Sitting out there waiting awhile always seems to bring them home
It’s always the gun — can’t let it bust us on this– sawsall’d, pieces dropped in river
No — time for a 3D printed plastic one with hacked software code — melt it into nothingness right afterwards
The law will descend but will ascend once they find nothing.
No known associations.
“Do I think he can kill this slug . . . he’s unable to verbally form a response”
He looks confused, tired and . . . scared?
Carries a lot of change in his pockets. Jingles when he walks. Can hear it before
he shows up on the front porch.
He remains somewhere else somewhere grim and hard.
Why’s he so straight — one word pure and simple . . . wife
No stumbling through the weeds or into dirty river water.
He robbed her of being with someone.
(We all die alone, but he should have helped her with the loneliness. Not her suicide death, but the depression.)
No frenzied immediacy, no jaws of hell stuff . . . kneeling down — one in the chest, one in the throat.
Sank his parts up and down the river, not even God saw or watched.
We bury our sins in the waters and wash them clean.
“It’s what happens when casual odiousness triggers full-Russian.” It’s a disappearing old frontier that he shouldn’t have crossed. A last stroll down apocalypse road for us. Everyone is weak. Everyone but the few of us. We will never be weak.
In the distance, the Savannah River flowed. And over it, the list maker heard the girl’s father thoughts “I know in my soul I contributed to his disappearance . . . I can feel it. But I don’t know how.”
Yes we shall gather at the river
The beautiful the beautiful river…
Shall we gather at the river
where bright angel feet have trod
River that flows by the throne of God
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