28

We passed the time in silence, my mind growing sharper as we neared Red Creek. Eventually we entered the little town and drove straight through—through to the restaurant/bar that served as a bus stop. I had them let me out in the parking lot and they drove off without so much as a good-bye.

I turned slowly to look at the building. Three cars and a pickup truck sat in the bar side of the parking lot; the brick walls gave no indication of what was inside, only the neon signs advertising it for what it was.

I had been here two years before. I had been a child then; I had just left Lewis, I was afraid, uncertain, and I went about attacking life, wearing my naivete like armor. I remembered the bus ride from Westwater to here; I remembered getting off the bus and telling the driver that I wouldn’t be continuing with him; I remembered walking down the road that cold night, hearing my boot heels tap a particular rhythm that spelled freedom.

And freedom was what I found. Freedom from all ties, all possessions, everything personal. Personalities, I had come to believe, function only with respect to each other, never in a vacuum. And so here I was again, free, vacuous, seeking, miserable.

I had not grown.

I turned away from the building. The end of my journey lay only a few miles up the road. With my pack slung over my left shoulder and my cane supporting my weaker right side, I began to walk the final leg.

I heard my boot heels on the pavement, and they tapped out a different tune this time, one hesitant—syncopated almost—in its unevenness, in its pain and misery. I listened carefully though, and heard hope, and heard more hope with each footfall, with each tap of the cane. I was close to Sarah’s. I was so close I could smell her.

But the dawn was closer yet.

I don’t know how far I walked; only three cars had passed me when my feet first began to drag pebbles beneath them. I knew the sign, I felt the dawn, but I resisted it, tried to pick up my feet, but my body was just too heavy. I began to stumble. I knew, then, that I dare not act the fool; I had to prepare for the coming day and find a place to sleep. Someplace quiet, private, away from the sunlight.

On my right I noticed machinery, piles of sand and scrap lumber. A construction site. Farther on, a single light bulb burned in the eave of a new metal building, recently erected, with no sign of tenants. I left the main road and very carefully picked my way amid the carelessly strewn rubbish, looking for a way into the building. The steel doors were locked. I kept looking, my steps weaker, my cane indispensable, yet awkward as it slipped off unsteady pieces of debris and sank deeply into sand.

At the rear of the building sat a large square trash dumpster, dark blue, with a sheet-metal lid. I looked both right and left, could see no reasonable alternative—could see no alternative at all—so as the actual rose color appeared at the horizon, I quickly found a bit of broken ladder, set it sturdily next to the dumpster, climbed it and propped open the lid. The interior was dark and smelled of paint. There were pieces of wood, chunks of concrete, old rags and papers, dozens of squashed soda cans, an emptied ashtray. A drop cloth was bundled in the corner.

I threw in my cane, my pack, then gingerly, one leg over at a time, lowered myself inside, being careful of where I stepped. The drop cloth was stiff with dried paint, but pliable to a degree, and I maneuvered it into an appropriate position, then reached up and brought down the heavy lid.

Quiet. Peace. Darkness.

I was on my own, making my own way again. I was away from Her, on my way to see Sarah, to get healed, to become whole—normal again.

I set my jaw against any invasion of my mind, and consciousness was sucked away.

Low moaning sounds awakened me. Sounds close, reverberating metallically from the thin steel walls around me, muffled by the stiff cloth that was my bed. The moans were all about me, emanating from every corner of the bin, bouncing off the weird conglomeration of sharp angles and soft corners, back again to my ears with their subtle tonal differences. Moans of distress, of discomfort, of the tortures of Hades. Moans from the soul, from the source of pain too deep to define.

The sounds were mine.

The air was close, and thick with hot fumes of paint. My head reeled and I grappled for my cane, but it had fallen away from me somehow and I couldn’t seem to grasp it. The fumes rose about me in great jagged technicolor waves, poisoning my brain cells as I lurched, reeling like a praying mantis, trying to escape from my toxic prison. I seemed to move in slow motion, one movement forward and then a long rest while a million bees encircled my head. I scrambled up a mountain of concrete shards on my hands and knees until I could stand and push up the lid. It was hot to the touch; the sun had just settled below the horizon, and it had left its impression, left me to bake in a tin oven filled with poisons.

Fresh air flooded in, and I gasped at it, growing weaker and sicker instead of stronger and more alert. I sank back to my knees under the weight of the lid, but the stench below, the smell of the drop cloth on which I had slept all day, was overpowering, sickening, and I scrambled frantically for my cane, found it, and worked slowly but desperately to get out of the bin. I pushed on the lid and it rose, higher and higher until it fell over backward and clanged against the back of the dumpster with a sound that sent great purple jags through my vision. They repercussed for a long while as I grasped the edge of the bin, breathing deeply. When they faded, I dropped my cane over the edge, then hitched one deadening leg over, rolled my shoulders, and fell to the ground with an “oof!” as my lungs took the shock. I lay there for a long time, trying to clear my head of the bizarre visions, trying to clear my ears of their audio hallucinations.

A new pattern of red blips crossed my vision; I thought I heard something, something outside of the ravages of hallucination, but I willed it away; I wanted to be left alone, to be ill, violently ill, anything, anything to end this terrible sickness, when suddenly my skin seized up all over.

Someone had just touched my arm.

I saw him through peaks and swirls of color; his sounds echoed in my head for days. I struggled to sit, to stand, but flopped on the ground instead, my muscles no longer connected to my nerves or my brain. There was one thing, I remembered, that would calm the raging storm inside my head.

I moaned, long and loud; it smoothed the waves of color into sedate pools of light. It evened out the rampaging echoes and calmed my fibers. I took a deep breath and calmly unleashed a mantra that relaxed me and brought a sense of my being back into focus.

The boy lifted me and carried me to the back of his pickup truck. There were two boys, as I now recognized; one was unrolling a sleeping bag while the other held me. I mustered all my strength and will and concentrated on forming my words carefully. “My cane,” I said. My symbol.

The boy who held me smiled down at me. “We got your cane, don’t worry. We’re going to take you to the doctor, so just don’t worry.”

I concentrated again. “Sarah,” I said. “Sarah’s house.”

The boy lay me on top of the sleeping bag, the other put my cane by my side. I listened to them talk between themselves. “Do you suppose she means Sarah Monroe?”

“Sarah’ll probably be able to help her.”

“They must know each other.”

“Sarah’ll at least know whether we should take her to the hospital, you know?”

“Won’t hurt. She’s at least making sense. Jesus, what do you think she was doing in that dumpster?”

“Sniffing paint.”

“Jesus.”

“C’mon, let’s go.”

The doors slammed red slashes across my vision and the truck pulled out, each movement dragging some nauseating color across my eyes. Again, I was at the mercy of strangers. Again. But they were taking me to Sarah’s, I would be there in a matter of minutes. This would be the last time I would be at someone’s mercy.

The last time.

“I know that the police have a lot of things going on at the same time, and even though they were doing their best, their best wasn’t very good. The police in different counties don’t even communicate with each other, much less the police in different states. The Federal system finally pulled it all together, but holy smokes, it took a long time.

“I might have been a little more patient, too, if I either had something else to do but sit around and think about Angelina, or if I could have served in some official capacity with a little authority. As it was, I was just a hanger-on, and I’m not used to that.

“But a murder is a priority for only so long, and then the police get bogged down with other matters, and it gets put on the back burner. If I hadn’t been on their backs all the time, Angelina might have . . . might still . . . well, it’s hard to say.”