six

THE MEN WHO HAD DONE THIS to Michael had taken extra precautions and had planned out a method of execution with the utmost attention.

Michael stopped into Gilly’s Pub twice a week. The pub was as old as the town and had taken up roots on the corner that housed the stoplight. The entrance to Gilly’s was through a glass door, down a long dark hallway adorned with cheap beer mirrors. In the back, the hallway exited to a large room with a wooden bar on one side. Several tables and booths filled the space. There was a small doorway that led to a semi-private room where the more uppity townsfolk held court.

The night before, Michael had walked down the dark hallway and stood at the end of the bar. He would order the same thing each time—a whiskey sour, just one—and drink it quickly before heading back down the hallway and out into the street. This he did in an effort to establish a sense of normalcy, a way to connect, to be part of the American fabric, to do what all men do. The drink took a long time to discover. He had not acquired the taste for alcohol when all men do, when they sneak it out of their dad’s cabinet before heading off to the high school football game. He had missed that part of life.

The bartender would see Michael and nod, prep the drink, and carry it over. Never a word spoken between them once the formula was right.

This night, however, the drink was ready for him. Rather than being suspicious, Michael had taken it as a gesture of intimacy. He leaned against the bar and drank the mixture in a long, smooth motion. The warmth coated his throat and instantly filtered into his head. The taste was mildly off, but all too often that could be attributed to the pub’s ancient soda guns and the fact that they mostly spit out flat streams. He finished the drink and pushed away from the bar.

The wall in front of him went in and out of focus before settling back to normal. His legs felt heavy and his arms loose, as if all the blood was pooling in his feet, leaving his upper half hollowed out and empty. Michael swooned and looked at the bartender, whose back was to him. He was playing at cleaning some glassware, but Michael knew that he was deliberately being shunned. His eyes went to the back of the pub, to the doorway of the private room, and he saw Haywood standing with several men behind him.

“What did you do?” Michael asked, his words slurring together, his mouth and tongue no longer working together but each trying to manipulate sound in its own unique fashion. An energy inside him began to course with rage, and then, just as quickly, evaporated, the drug he had ingested putting the inner demon to sleep.

Haywood just stood there, coming in and out of focus, his arms crossed.

Michael turned toward the front door. The darkness was creeping in and the long hallway to the outside world was twisting and turning before him like an expanding kaleidoscope of demented shapes. He tried to move his foot. It felt like a brick as it slid across the floor. The tunnel before him extended to black singularity and the world vanished.

Michael didn’t feel the floor come up to meet his face when he fell.

He didn’t feel the blows of Haywood and his men as they pounced on his body.

He didn’t feel a thing.

Until he had awoken in the ground.

Stories, the good ones that people remember, are a string of coincidences tied together until the improbable becomes true. How else could Achilles die from getting shot in the heel, or Chaucer happen to fall in with a crowd of interesting people? It is the unusual, not the ordinary, that gets retold. Ordinary is forgotten, dismissed, unnoticed. Ordinary is out of sight, out of mind. Michael was not ordinary.

His childhood, his move back to Coldwater, all of it was illuminated like a marquee for all to see. The tale was so horrifyingly different from what the people of the town experienced in their own humdrum lives. It’s why he caught people’s gazes when he walked into town, his face hidden under the hood of his ratty coat, hands tucked into the pockets.

They noticed.

They always noticed. If Coldwater had been a large city, wives would have clung tighter to their husband’s arms and mothers would have scooped up their children when he passed. But Coldwater was small, and its townspeople drove past him on the road, their windows rolled up, their scowls showing behind glass.

He was a leper in their minds, devoid of the disease.

It was no surprise really that they had come for him. It was no surprise that the town wanted him dead, gone, erased from sight. What surprised him was that it had taken them so long. The fear-riddled population had actually summoned up the courage to act rather than continue to hide behind whispers and stares.

When he had moved back to the property that he grew up on after being away for so many years, he knew he was not welcome. Haywood, the town’s sole backbone, had point-blank told him so. But there was no place left for Michael to go. He had cast his future aside so callously that when the state’s prison system had released him, there was nothing to do but go back to Coldwater, to the house that he left when he was just a kid, abandoned and forgotten.

Though he had given the state his youth as they had demanded, the town would not be content that justice had been served. His younger years now gone, the town, and especially Haywood, made it known that his older years should have been forfeit too.

And so they scowled at him, insulted at his audacity to populate the same patch of earth they called home.

The outcast.

The scourge of Coldwater.

To the residents of the town, Michael was a constant reminder that evil was real and lurking in the dark.

It made no difference that he was now an adult, a man whose childhood self was such a distant shadow as to be but a wisp of breath on the river behind him. He would be forever damned. Damned by his past actions and damned by the unforgiving memory of the town that sang hymns on Sunday and sharpened their knives on Monday.

It was justice for him to be here at this time. Justice without mercy, for he knew better than anyone that mercy was earned, never given, and no act of contrition would ever pay the fee required.

Michael continued trudging upstream, the current of the world pushing him down and away like the water that flowed against him.