Jonah stood on the stoop out in front of the Grain & Feed, his shoulder pressed to the post, worn boots crossed at the ankles as he scraped a wooden match along the rail and touched its flame to his fresh-twisted smoke, inhaling deep and deeper still, eyes closing as though he were dreaming of better times past, though there were no better times past of which to dream and none to come that he knew.
No credit, Lucinda had said when Jonah had asked to put supplies on his tab. Supplies he needed. He only risked venturing off the mountain and into town when it was a matter of need. He had not been to town in nearly a year, only to hear from Lucinda: No, Jonah, sorry.
Sorry. And she’d looked away as if she had not known him. Her dismissive tone stung him deep. Lucinda, of all people. Today, of all days, to reject him, as if he were a stranger, and they did not share a past; as if she’d forgotten what day today was.
The ancient anger rampaged in him now, a hot magma wanting to rupture from within him, consume and destroy him. It made him feel mean toward the very last person who deserved his rancor. Until she’d sent him out. No credit.
He shook the match and flicked it to the dirt where it trailed a dismal tendril and died. He drew another long pull of smoke, his diaphragm going taut to stoke that delirious lust, the delirium ignited in the brain and piqued in the blood bettered only by the sweet godless filling of lungs gone as black and as foul as sun-rotted meat.
He spat. Picked at a bit of tobacco stuck to his tongue tip. Couldn’t get it. Spat. Clawed at it. His anger besting him. His hands shook from Lucinda’s betrayal. That’s what it was, a betrayal. Never mind the humiliation of being denied credit in front of onlookers who eyed him sideways.
Squatter. Lunatic. Murderer. He heard their thoughts, saw it in their eyes every time he was forced to come into town. He wasn’t deaf. Wasn’t dead. Not yet. After all this time, those who remembered the Disappearance still looked askance, whispered to one another from behind cupped hands. Afraid. That’s what they were, he’d decided. Afraid of his life lived apart from them, and afraid of their own viciousness and suspicion, judgment and self-made calamities. We know what you did. We know.
He heard their thoughts, registered the suspicion in their eyes.
They knew nothing, these people who’d shaped him into a monster stitched together from rumor and breathed to life with fear when he was only an old man now, worn down as river stone, as alone now as he’d been entering this world. He’ll do it again, one day. That’s what Jonah saw in their eyes and heard in their thoughts: He’ll do it again, one day.
What fear could do. He knew better than any of them. How many of them knew a pain that altered the color of your blood from the red of life to the black of death.
A woman in a red wool coat skirted around him now on the stoop and eyed him with the look of one gauging the length of a rabid mongrel’s chain.
“What?” Jonah snarled. “What?”
The woman scurried away like a frightened squirrel.
Jonah flicked his smoke to the dirt where it lay burning.
Let it burn, he thought, his anger, his pain, welling in him.
Let the whole town burn to the ground.