She slept in a weird position, her arm arranged by mundane forces. I complained of hair in my face and she countered with me stealing the covers. I told her that honestly she was unlike any woman I’d ever met. She nodded, suggesting understanding. But years later, after she was dead and buried, I found myself sleeping in one of her strange positions and the ache carried through my body like an empty tooth socket that throbs. Oh, to be young and in love. Not that you could call our relationship a love affair or anything. There were times when we locked ourselves in the apartment and pleaded with each other. We tried mushrooms together one night and each promised to never leave the other. She was amber in nature, the scent of burning vanilla incense. She was destined for a body bag. And I guess we all knew this. We all saw in her the possibilities of anguish. It was not that we had found each other that was amazing, it was the fact that at some time in our history, we had never known each other. She came to me in spirit after her death and produced terrifying visions of regret. Only when she offered forgiveness did I even realize that I had wronged her. I hope I die before all of my reckoning.

She awoke one night complaining of an overpowering odor of peppermint. It was the precursor to the whole ending thing. It was the tumor eating its way out from the inside. I angrily told her to go back to sleep and rolled over with all my might, willing myself to sleep. Willing her to die for interrupting slumber. What do you wish you could take back?

We were, typically, locked indoors and bargaining with each other. This happened quite often. And we were making promises and threats.I wouldn’t call it love but I wouldn’t call it hate. She had found me one day in a bar, drunk beyond belief. I considered myself a sort of hero for maintaining my balance on the stool. I knew that she trusted in me as much as it was possible for her to trust in another person. Her sister had cornered me at a party and warned me, with a knife, I think. I placated her. And I betrayed them both. She found me in that bar where I was talking to my ex wife. Our memory of this event never agreed. I contend that it was merely an alcohol fueled conversation with possible hand-holding between former lovers. She was convinced that I was re-engaging in activities with my former wife. I denied it till I was blue in the face and called her all the sluts under the sun. It was an instinctual reaction. I have done something wrong so, naturally, she has done something worse. It’s this kind of desperate relationship math that forms the basis of monogamy. I would rather kill it entirely than be wrong and it fueled a crazy hatred. She was, honestly, the most beautiful woman that had ever graced my life.

In our flowering affair I flaunted her beauty and reveled in pride. I was proud of everything about her. It never occurred to me that beauty is double-edged, as likely to injure as satisfy. Like most naive young men, I assumed that inertia was a great pilot. I knew I could never walk out the door on someone that made me feel this tall. She said we could go all the way and I believed her.

It was all there in front of me but I couldn’t reach for it. This argument lasted, as most arguments like this do, perpetually throughout the rest of our relationship. She placed me on an aggravation installment plan to have the subject brought up tirelessly and repeatedly for years to come. It was always in the bad times. When she was losing a fight she would say, “What about that time I caught you with your ex wife?” And I would have no response because, seriously, what do you say to that?

I surprised her with a rose for no particular reason and I felt good that day. Women just need to be surprised with a rose for no reason sometimes. I can’t say it was a conscious plan to impress her or reinforce her feelings for me, I just know that I happened on a flower vendor and bought her a rose. After her reaction, which was likely over the top but how can I tell, I was hoping this would be a memory that could be dragged out on the installment plan like that night in the bar. My own version of that verbal weapon. So that I could drag it out, “Remember the time I got you a rose just because I love you?” But this plan was quickly killed on the first attempt when she rejected my lovely gesture as a calculated move to manipulate arguments. Which is entirely what it was, I just happened to strike on the idea after the fact. Those are my two greatest memories of her, the night in the bar and the arguments that followed for years; and the day I bought her a rose for no reason other than I loved her. I don’t wanna call it love. In our circle, because yes we did have friends and they made the days seem timeless, love was weakness. While everyone else would swap partners until every one of our friends had slept with another, we had something special that was off limits. We never said it out loud, but we knew it and so did our friends. As far as I know, not one of them ever tried to sleep with her. And I never tried to sleep with any of them.

We never talked of marriage because that would have suggested an acceptance of our feelings for each other. It was important for us to maintain the illusion that we’d been thrown together by fate and there was no future here so we should enjoy what we have while it lasts. Everything important remained unspoken between us and arguments were preludes to making up, we knew that inherently. And if I was losing, as I often was, I would throw a table over or pound my fist into the wall. The dents that marked our home were a reminder of love. That was why I had to leave after she left. Not that I can expect anyone else to understand our relationship, which I won’t call love. I’m just trying to explain how it was that I ended up travelling the country giving away money by the handful.

She talked in her sleep, the most godawful things. I worried she was an unstable person, a fact that was made clear to me throughout the daytime hours as I found myself holding her through a panic attack. I couldn’t find a suitable spot to dump her ashes so I carried them with me across the country. She was with me in spirit, beckoning and chastising. She was a luminous beauty, an abstract painting of a realist scene. She was light in darkness or a port in a storm or a wine bottle to an alcoholic. I treaded her as water, which she surely could walk over now. I never had the chance to catch her in a compromising position with an ex as she did me because her past lovers tended to die young or disappear from the world with no warning. One night, she tearfully confided in me that she was in love with a man that had abused her, hit her with an electrical cord, held a knife up to her throat, and branded her with a coat hanger on the back of her thigh. I had seen the branding myself so I knew she was telling me the truth. She had even tried to hire a private investigator to track him down but we had no money. I was instantly scared that she would leave me, that I would be forgotten and abandoned. It occurred to me that this was the fate of Winnie the Pooh in the books. Christopher Robin simply grew up and forgot Pooh and his friends. I could not imagine a more tragic fate so I clung to her more. And by that, I mean I immediately slept with my ex wife, something that she never found out about, thankfully. The idea of being forgotten drove me straight into the arms of a woman I despised. I hated my ex wife, mostly because I had gotten her pregnant and she had a child and I am scared of it. I promised myself I would never get another woman pregnant and she understood in her own way. Not that I should have been worried. She tearfully confided in me about her botched abortion that resulted in the tearing of her uterine wall and this makes her unable to have children. She was crying and I was hugging her and promising that I could accept this defect but secretly I was overjoyed. It was the hand of fate working in my life. The one person I’ve ever felt for like that, and honestly the most beautiful woman that ever entered my life, was unable to have the children I never wanted.

She indulged in me the way a mother ignores a precocious child’s outbursts and this gave me much leeway to explore my arrested development. I was under the impression that I never had to grow up if I never did grown up things and was, consequently, often found prowling the streets at four in the morning on a Tuesday or maybe drinking at a bar right after noon or buying clothes at a Salvation Army that barely fit my frame. I had no checkbook and lived off cash. There was no way I would be caught with a credit card, not that I could have obtained one anyway. I often searched through the garbage of people to obtain bank statements for some kind of fraud that never panned out. I was mostly selling account numbers to another man, a man that I will get to later, who was involved in a massive conspiracy that became evident later in our friendship. It was in her final days that she began to stop being herself and would start shouting obscenities, it was a repeat of her sleeptalking but at amplified volume. It was after this started that I had to separate her from our friends.

Our circle was a motley group of potheads, speedfreaks, layabouts, drop outs, and malcontents. They were no strangers to profanity. But the fact that it could be coming from her, the most beautiful creature on earth and the most cultured of anyone we knew, it just couldn’t be done. I decided it would be best if no one knew of her condition so I put her car on the market and said she’d left me for another man. It was sickeningly thrilling to have everyone fawn over me for a few weeks as they tried to mend my broken heart. In her final weeks, she could no longer walk and was reduced to using a bedpan. I was stuck at home with her most of the time, the holes in the plaster reminding me of our former passion. She became a square peg in my round hole. Airplanes flew backwards and birds sang curses. Disjointed funhouse mirrors occupied my mind, reflecting obvious deficiencies in me that had been, up to this point, only apparent to others. I doubted everything I once knew to be true as I watched the love of my life, yes I’ll admit it, she was the love of my life. Yes, the love of my life. And I watched her die.

Wayne and I were smashing open parking meters at three in the morning on a carless street under a dome sky that had more stars than I’ve ever seen before. Wayne had a sledgehammer that he slammed downward into the meter and it would shatter to pieces and dump change all over the sidewalk. It was my job to scoop up the change and put it into a bag.
“Government don’t own parking spaces,” Wayne told me. “It’s an affront to the citizens.”
“So we’re Robin Hood here?” I ask.
“They don’t even turn on the street lights after midnight,” Wayne says.
“Maybe they can’t afford to.”
“Now why in the hell would the city not be able to turn on the lights?” he wants to know.
“Maybe because you keep breaking open the parking meters and stealing the money.”
Wayne just stares at me. “You think you’re so clever,” he finally says.

Wayne had been a prizefighter when he was younger and his face was misshapen, his ears flattened, his knuckles huge and knotted. He had the look of a man who’s been through the ringer. He drank like it was his last night of freedom before jail and we quietly took bets on how long it would be until he was killed in some alcohol-related mishap. I had more faith than most people, I picked a late date. People were warned to not get on Wayne’s bad side but I knew him better than most and I found that his toughness was a façade. He hid behind a mask of brutality because he was deeply frightened of being abandoned.

Wayne left town before she got sick and I missed him dearly for what our comradeship could have been, with our mutual fear of being abandoned and everything. Wayne came up on a train after he lost his final fight. He was, in his own words, struggling to find a life for himself outside of the ring. He told me all this one night when we were the last customers in the bar, everyone else was out celebrating Cinco de Mayo or Independence Day. We were the only customers and the bartender told us not to sit at the bar.
“You guys aren’t going to cause trouble are you?” he wanted to know. The bartender was the son of a mercantile owner, a cattle baron, a man that built an empire. The bartender, who’s name I never properly learned, had dissatisfied his father and was cut off. He relocated to this city to stay with an ex-girlfriend while looking for a job. He had played bartender at his father’s parties for years and snapped up the job as soon as he learned of it. He also told me all this one night soon after we met, when the bar was slow and there was the kind of dreadful silence that frightens everyone that drinks in a bar. The bartender knew the nature of this dreaded silence and engaged me in conversation to end it.
“We’re not looking for trouble,” Wayne told him.
“Trouble,” the bartender said, “seems to follow you around, Wayne.”
“I swear,” Wayne pleaded, “just a few drinks and we’re out of your way.”
“I just wanna sit in the corner and not say much,” I told the bartender.
“Yeah,” Wayne agreed, “What he said.”
The bartender served us. We picked up the pitcher and walked to a table. “No waitress tonight,” the bartender called out. This was a joke because the bar never did enough business to have waitresses. It was largely avoided by women. Wayne said this made him feel better because drinking is serious business and he needs to be able to concentrate while doing it. I’ve never seen a man drink like he did.

That was the night Wayne told me about how he came here. We mused over the seeming impermanence of the place.
“Not a man born here,” he said.
“Or women either,” I agreed.
“Everyone’s just passing through. Have you seen the graveyard?”
“I was on that side of town once but the police stopped me and ran me off.”
“There’s a special section of the graveyard for the men who died in the second war.”
“I’ll bet it’s beautiful.”
Wayne regarded me with pity. “Nothing beautiful about the final resting place of those folks. They died for you and me, you know.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I like the look of a graveyard.”
“I had a treehouse,” Wayne tells me. “Did you ever have a treehouse?”
“My dad promised he was going to build one but they split up before it happened. He always said I wasn’t old enough for it yet.”
“That was my first taste of freedom. Having a place of my own like that. I charged people to come play in it. A quarter for the girls, nickel for the boys.”

Later, Wayne pulled a knife on an old woman and made threatening remarks. He claims that the incident was taken out of context. He insisted she had expressed fear for her safety as they passed on the street and he had presented the knife to prove she was safe with him around. It turned out she was the wife of the town judge and Wayne got the book thrown at him. His lawyer argued, unsuccessfully, that this was a case of conflict of interest. The appeal went all the way to the state supreme court but was rejected. Wayne swore up and down, he shouted like a child, “The game is rigged.” So we lost Wayne for two months to the prison and during his absence old allegiances dissolved and new ones were formed. Me and her, we stayed away from everyone, too involved in our own world. It wasn’t that different for us coming back as it was for Wayne. Everything had changed somehow and we had to struggle to find the truth. It was like learning to ride a bike all over again.

Wayne was studying to be a commercial truck driver, his nose planted in textbooks at the bar, but all to no avail. He couldn’t seem to get sober long enough to actually take the driving test. Everyone could see he was going to fail at this except for Wayne. Secretly, I was glad he wasn’t successful in his attempts because I worried about what would happen if I didn’t have Wayne around to protect me. This is a cruel town and people pick on the ones they don’t understand. Wayne was known throughout the town and bad things were never said to him but often about him. I never stuck up for him in these instances, but I would protect him viciously in front of friends because I knew this might get back to him and I hoped I would be liked.

Wayne was the one that introduced me to Terry, the man I was speaking of earlier. Terry was a meek man, what I liked to imagine a turtle without a shell would look like, trying to pull itself back into nothing. Wayne and Terry had run a dishonest underground boxing arena where Wayne threw a few fights for the gambling money. There were people that suspected this was happening but they were too fearful to say anything. It got to the point where nobody would bet on Wayne and after he lost his last match, a legitimate one, he washed up here. Ironically, Terry had bet against Wayne in this final match and this drove a wedge between the two friends. Wayne demanded half the money that Terry won and Terry left town in a hurry to avoid the fallout of this double cross. But Terry came back. Terry needed Wayne as much as I did and it wasn’t long before he’d found out where Wayne was and made an appearance. Wayne was forgiving immediately, putting Terry at ease. When the particulars of this little drama made the gossip circle, there was talk that Wayne was lolling Terry into his confidence for some kind of revenge set up. But I knew Wayne better than anyone else in town and I could tell when he was being sincere. I think, if anything, Wayne was just happy to have his old friend back. He had made his peace with the dissolution of his boxing career and was ready to forgive people that took a track against him. It was in moments like these that I thought of Wayne as a superman, a man above everyone else. There were other times, like the incident with the knife and the judge’s wife, that I felt Wayne was a beast that managed to conceal his animalism when dealing with me. I wouldn’t say that I was scared of him, but I was always wary.

Terry moved right in with our friends, propelled by Wayne’s endorsement of him, and was soon dating Trixie, a bulimic college drop out trying to be a fashion model. She went to the portrait studio on Elm Street every few weeks to have new headshots taken. She would send these to Hollywood talent agencies, to NYC modeling agencies, to all the pro football teams’ cheerleader divisions. Her teeth were rotting from constant vomiting and she lost and gained weight in the space of days. Terry, true to his nature, quickly started a numbers game in the backroom of Trixie’s inherited house. Her parents had died in a jet crash when she was 19 and she got everything. Most of the life insurance was used to pay off debts but there was enough for her to live off of for the last five years. She was worried it would run out at any minute and that was why she was always sending headshots out to different talent agencies.

Terry, hiding behind both Wayne and Trixie, set up a loan sharking network, an enterprise that Wayne jumped at because it was semi-legitimate and fairly easy and drew on his largest strength: his amazing brutality and the image of it within the town. Wayne was not above taking a tire iron to someone’s head if the situation called for it. The situation rarely called for drastic measures but Wayne was going overboard anyway. Terry, upon learning that I had account numbers of bank customers, obtained for a failed con I was planning in some obscure and cerebral way, offered me money as a collector. The end result of this was that I suddenly had some money, a fact which she never acknowledged or gave me thanks for, but she took advantage in every way. I would often find that my pockets had been emptied while I slept and I would come home to find a new television set or a sewing machine or a cordless phone.

Terry was known as a floater in the underworld, meaning he never spearheaded a project, he was more like middle management. We only learned this later, after everything turned bad for all of us. He confessed to me that he was scared to death of being caught and put in jail. But that’s just who he was. He could never find a legitimate profession. He told me all this, all his many jobs throughout the years. “I worked on an oil rig off the coast of Texas,” he told me. “That was man’s work. I realized I’m not cut out for that.” “It’s not that we can’t work,” I agreed. “It’s just finding the job that’s right for us.” People confronted us that night, threatened to fight us. But Wayne showed up and everything was put to rest. There were times that Wayne wasn’t around and Terry got beat up but Wayne always showed up later and took revenge. Before long, the word was out. No one fucked with Terry again unless they were from out of town.

But there was Lisa, a statuesque girl who was actually born here, blowing Wayne’s theory out of the water, and she had dropped out of school to be with her dirtbag boyfriend who used to drink everyone under the table. Those were the days before Wayne showed up and became the town’s greatest drunk as well as having the toughest reputation. Lisa didn’t even break up with the guy, one day he just left. He took her stereo and television with him but she never called the cops. She refused to leave town, even though everyone told her she had a future and it wasn’t going to happen here; she stayed because she didn’t want to be missing when the guy returned. It occurred to me years later that some people spend their whole life like Lisa did, just waiting for someone to show up. Even if the someone’s not so great.

Lisa eventually settled for Frank Ornick, a broken down manual laborer who did odd jobs for an apartment complex and doubled as a gravedigger for the graveyard I never went to. Wayne and him would talk about the graves of the World War 2 soldiers and they were in agreement that their internment in a sacred area was proper. Lisa never felt content with Frank and was prepared to leave him as soon as her long fabled first love returned. Everyone knew this except Frank, although it’s possible he did. Sometimes people accept the love they think they deserve. It wasn’t long before Lisa was cheating on Frank and Terry was cheating on Trixie, with each other, of course. Wayne and I and Grady and Tripp all knew about it. I think even Frank knew but he never said anything, just played dumb. Lisa was in a considerably lesser situation than Trixie, a woman who owned her own house and had ambition and a bit of money to survive on. Lisa was a waitress at the truckstop twelve miles outside of town but she had been skipping shifts to meet with Terry until they finally fired her. She refused to give back the uniform so that Frank would drive her out there every day; she would wait inside for Frank, who walked the distance. He often left at five in the morning to meet her there at eight. Lisa lived with Frank and had no income. It was the kind of dizzying and drastic affair that I had experienced with my ex wife, all those years ago before she had our child and I ran off. In his own way, Frank accommodated this affair, whether he knew about it or not. He must have suspected something for Lisa was always working and always poor. She paid no rent and bought no groceries. She never shopped. Frank surely realized something was amiss. To his credit, or possibly an indictment of his character, he allowed it to go on.

By this point, Wayne and I were covering everyone with alibis, as our friendship dictated. Terry was with me for Trixie when he was seeing Lisa, or maybe Wayne would claim that he and Terry had gone drinking in another county after a boxing match. Wayne was now coaching a youngster named “Right Hand” Randy Rhodes. Randy was a good kid but dumb as a bag of hammers. I once convinced him that I was my own twin brother when he accosted me about a debt I owed him. Under Wayne’s tutelage, Randy had developed a reputation as an up and comer in the amateur boxing world. A lot of people tried to persuade him to leave Wayne behind and find a respected trainer. Wayne was, because of his final fight and all the fights he threw, considered to be a mediocre talent that once displayed the same potential as Randy. A lot of people were convinced that Wayne would ruin Randy’s career as he ruined his own. Wayne was, idealistically, playing it straight with Randy. He had Terry whispering in his ear that Randy could throw a fight or two and get them all money for a few months. But Wayne wouldn’t do it. He never even questioned Randy’s integrity and Terry became more vocal until he crossed the line and went behind Wayne’s back to convince Randy to throw a fight. He was successful and it turned out Randy was a horrible actor. There wasn’t a spectator in the place that believed it had been a fair fight. I made my money off the fight and so did Terry and Randy. Wayne was livid. He cornered me and scared me into telling the truth. I was frightened that his rage would overcome him and I would be a target, a release for him. But he quickly pulled himself together and hunted down Terry. Once again, Terry was threatened and half of the winnings were demanded by Wayne. And once again Terry left town to escape Wayne’s wrath. Word got around on Randy and his bad performance and he was banned from boxing across the country. All the promoters know each other and often trade talent around. Randy was blacklisted for throwing a fight. He disappeared around this time and there was talk that he had gone off with Terry, but I don’t think that was true. One thing I learned about Terry in my time with him was that he’s ready to cut his friends off and disappear when he has to, with absolutely no regret. Since the match had been a county sponsored event and not a backroom boxing match, the police became involved, as did the state gaming commission. There was an investigation into Wayne and Randy’s backgrounds. The ultimate decision was that Wayne had thrown fights during his career and as coach to Randy, had convinced the young man to throw his own fight.

Wayne was picked up by the police after drinking one night and brought before the state grand jury. He was advised by his lawyer to take the fifth. There’s a law that says if you take the fifth for one question, you have to take it on all subsequent questions. Most people don’t know that and I didn’t either until I heard it from Wayne. This caused a sensation in the state media and it was even picked up on the AP wire so the story worked it’s way around the country. Wayne was shown on television taking the fifth and there was no mention of Terry at all. Wayne did the right thing, he didn’t rat on Terry, despite how mad he was at him.

After this time, Wayne went to jail for fixing a fight that he tried to keep clean. Randy was never heard from again and is probably leading a beat life somewhere that’s too hot or too cold. The old gang broke up. Trixie moved to Los Angeles after Terry left and there was talk that she knew where he was headed and was planning on meeting up with him. That was wrong. Because the one that truly knew where Terry was going was Lisa. And she refused to go with him, too scared her first love would return and not find her. Frank continued dating her. Everything was fucked up and people didn’t like each other anymore. My only friend in town was Wayne and he was in jail with a three year sentence. It was at this time that she got really sick and I withdrew from everyone. After she died, I inherited almost one hundred thousand dollars from an old life insurance policy she had picked up young. I couldn’t scatter her ashes, couldn’t even think of a place she’d approve of. I originally just left town with the intention of scattering the ashes in the Pacific Ocean. But that didn’t seem right when I got there. There were too many people on the beach and I wondered how many of them would understand what I was doing. She needed a quiet and uninhabited spot. It occurred to me later that I didn’t want the money. That was when I decided that I would continue travelling, looking for people to give the money to. I couldn’t live with myself if I profited off the death of the only person I’ve ever loved. So I was going to give the money away. Not to a church or charity, but to people that needed it. People like me, but people that hadn’t come into money the way I had. I’m sure she would have wanted it this way.

Somehow I end up in Boise where I settle down for a few months, making new friends at bars, all of them scuzzy people, the true salt of the earth. It is a nowhere town with nowhere people and I think of that John Lennon song, but I’m pretty sure that was about something else deep down. I meet Cassandra and my heart skips a beat because she’s got black hair in a Cleopatra cut with a shock of silver down the side. It’s all I can do to keep from gawking at her throughout everything. Cassandra ended up in Boise as the result of a court case. Her parents divorced at a young age, Cassandra just a baby really. Her father lost custody and went on to father three other families over the years. Cassandra cries as she explains how he traveled all over the world with different people, different kids. He never came back to see her but she got a birthday card every year throughout her childhood. Sometimes there’d be a five dollar bill in it. Her mother was a seamstress and never had any money. She would claim the five dollar bill and use it to pay for food. Cassandra hated her mother.

I saw at once that Cassandra didn’t need my money. She needed me. By travelling the country and spreading joy wherever I go, I was her father. I think that’s how it worked. Her father died years ago of a brain embolism and Cassandra didn’t find out about it until years later. She could never pinpoint where in the country he’s buried and looks for this in her off time. It was in this bleak city during winter that I filled a dead father’s shoes and thought maybe my journey was over. But Cassandra had problems. Her mother had dated the typical variety of men that you meet in a nowhere town like this, and when they lived up the road from Boise in Bakersfield. Her mother was a cocktail waitress in a strip club at that time and Cassandra’s earliest memories involve seeing her mother’s ass get pinched by drunken truckers that would offer money for sexual favors. The truckers tried to pass counterfeit money in the bar, using copies they’d Xeroxed. No one could ever tell the real from the fake because the lights in the strip club were always burning red and everything turned red as a result.

I invest in a cheap hotel in the borderlands of Boise, right on skid row, where people eat out of trashcans. I give fifty dollar bills to homeless men, a hundred to homeless women. I have a vague idea that the women can get back on track if they just clean themselves up, have a place to stay for a few days. That a man will come and save them. I’ve seen it happen. It’s happening to me with Cassandra. Cassandra managed to grow up right, despite her upbringing. She became the quintessential latchkey kid, making her own meals and putting herself to bed. When her mother wasn’t working, she was dating various men around the city. Men that hit with their knuckles, not the back of the hand. Men with tattoos that drank cheap beer and smoked the butts that people left in ashtrays. Cassandra was a hidden secret, for her own protection. As things deteriorated between Cassandra and her mother, the birthday cards stopped coming and Cassandra slowly began to let her dreams of a fraternal reunion die. It was in this moment, as she let that hope die, that Cassandra died. It was this death that left her in this town she’s grown to hate. It was the notification of her father’s death that opened the door for me to meet her. She gave up on leaving, accepted that some birds are meant to be caged. And then I appear, prowling the streets and throwing money around. I could be the ship that’s finally come in.

Derek was alone in the bar, I had stumbled in merely to get out of the cold. He sized me up as I walked in, unbeknownst to me as I was still trying to adjust to the lack of light. It was one of those gray days where it’s so bright you squint but it seems like the sun will never reappear. Derek was known as Pistol Pete but nobody could explain why. I learned most of his story at his funeral, one that I paid for. Derek was abandoned in a church parking lot when he was six and raised by a family that frequented the church. He grew up being force-fed church and dogma, told his masturbation was a mortal sin. He rejected it all when he realized he was hurting no one by disregarding it. He was the kind of guy that wouldn’t even pay it lip service for his parents. For the second time, his family abandoned him. He was in search of his real parents in some kind of perverted revenge fantasy. He never found them. I should have known right away that he and Cassandra were friends.

Derek worked a small con where he would steal electronic equipment from a store and then return it with a found receipt. He got paid in cash and worked a different store every day. He had a gambling problem, he would bet on anything. And he never won. He was making hundreds of dollars a day and couldn’t even afford food. He drank on credit. He refused the money I tried to force on him, explaining that he makes “an honest living”. Honesty is relative outside the confines of organized religion. It was in one of our heroic nights at the bar, a rundown place called the Oblong, appropriately enough because it was like a shoebox. Not in size, it was rather large. I just mean the shape. We had many great times in there, and some of the worst nights I can remember, but we always came back.

On that night, Derek suggested to me that I was more than a traveling philanthropist and leveled at me a charge that I was quite possibly a pied piper in disguise. He support this belief with references to an unhealthy relationship to Cassandra, a girl he referred to as “exceedingly in need of a person like you”. He regarded me as a threat because I could steal his friend from him. I considered him my friend and he considered me an interloper, a usurper. The bar itself was populated with bums that had escaped from varying levels of the prison system and it’s possible I was the only customer not on probation or escaped from a work detail. There were raging alcoholics that would offer to buy everyone a drink and then suggest that someone else do it first. Then, if you were fool enough to do it, they would refuse to buy another round. They’d even refuse to buy you a drink. The bartender was heavyset and not attractive. There are some people that you look at and just shudder because they’re so hideous they shouldn’t be allowed to contaminate the gene pool. The bartender was just such a man. But he filled shot glasses to the top and charged you for a single. We, of course, loved him for this. He wasn’t making the owner any money operating in such a fashion but it kept the bar packed and the owner believed this was vital. It was in this bar that Derek told me I will destroy everything I come in contact with. I wish I could have told him he was wrong, but Derek had a long history of foreseeing trouble before it happened. I trusted in him to be right on such instances. And I felt enormous guilt about being the future danger he warned me about.

Cassandra bullied me into attending a play that her class was putting on. She was a schoolteacher and this was her class. I felt uncomfortable in the company of children since I was always saying or thinking things that are not meant for children. It was my introduction to her split personality. I don’t say that in a way like she’s schizophrenic and is two people sharing the same body, although that is what I mean. She simply has a different personality when dealing with her work. Derek usually accompanied her on these activities and it was a special thing that I was allowed to accompany her. Even if it was over my protests. We had been sharing a bed for about two weeks and her request for me to accompany her was laced with a veiled threat. I accepted it as all men accept such a thing. I did not hide my discontentment but acquiesced. I told myself that it would make her happy and I owe her that because she’s made me very happy.

The play itself was themed around American history in celebration of President’s day and there was a focus on Abraham Lincoln. The kids spouted such horrible lines as, “Boy, that Civil War was tiring. Now I can relax and watch this play.” The assassination was not shown, there was merely a gunshot from behind the curtain. It sounded like a cap gun. Cassandra was radiant, was amazing, was a joy to behold. What beauty she mustered, what a change it was to see her smile from deep inside. I had trouble with this at first, finding this personality to be more exciting than her other. I felt cheated, like I got the lesser of her self. I wanted to explain this to her, to convince her to act with me as she acted with the children. But I found no words to express this desire without offending her. A person unwinds in their own way. Even I know that.

As the wind set in, sealing the springtime with a chill, and cows wandered away from the herd to die, I began to take stock of my life and prepare to move onward. The Oblong had closed because of the bartender giving away so much alcohol on credit and people wouldn’t pay up, they often just left town. Derek had become involved with an exotic dancer named Cherry Forever and disappeared from our company. It was just me and Cassandra now and I was aching for her other personality. I often stopped in at the end of the school day to catch her on the tail end of her transformation.

It wasn’t long before Derek was hooked on the same drugs that Cherry Forever was so deeply indebted to. I think it was called Oxycontin or something like that. Derek died peacefully in his sleep, his heart just gave out. Cherry left his body in her apartment and moved away. We didn’t discover his death until weeks later. He had decayed so bad by then that an open casket was out of the question. I paid for his funeral.

I met a man in Tucson who slept on a moldy mattress in a room that was always flooded with water. He would walk around in it, ankle deep. He put me up for the night because there was an insurance investigators’ convention in town and all the rooms were booked. “Can’t find a room in this town,” he told me with humor. “Not when they got them conventions.”
“I don’t wanna be any trouble.”
“Listen here, boy,” he told me. “The only trouble there’s gonna be is if you kick in your sleep.”
It was in this way that I knew we were meant to share the bed. Not in a homosexual manner, and when I tell people this story that’s always what they think, but they just didn’t know this man. I spoke with him all night and learned all about him.
“My name is Robert,” he started, “but you can just call me Rico.”
“How do you get a name like Rico from Robert?” I asked him.
He shook his head sadly and I realized this was a dumb question. I asked him what he did for a living and he said, “I retired with the TB. Wasn’t a doctor alive to treat me for the TB back then. But before that, I worked in the movie business.”

Rico told me about his time working on sets, how he was an executive producer and the studio liason. He had worked on pictures I’d heard of but never seen, movies that showed late at night on television because they were in the public domain and free to show. There was, of course, a girl that ruined everything. Her name was Mattie Hedron and she was what they called an ingenue at the time. A promising actress. She was known for her beauty, for her ability to cock one eyebrow up on her head. She couldn’t remember lines and had them read to her from off-screen by production assistants.
“She was the color and the light of this world,” Rico told me.
“She was special,” I agreed.
“She was the movement. But she couldn’t lose. And fame is about losing in increments. Losing your privacy, your time, your love life, your passion, your everything. It’s all just losing it bit by bit. You need to be able to lose with elegance. That’s how a star survives.”

She was engaged to another actor, a man named Robinson Blakely, a British stage actor that took the part of villains in mystery movies. He was also secretly gay and their relationship was a front. She gained the power that his position in the Hollywood world brought with it, he got the security of a heterosexual relationship for the gossip columns.
“I lost my mind in love,” Rico tells me. “I gave my heart just to watch her walk away on another man’s arm every night. You can’t imagine what that was like.”

Mattie developed a taste for cocaine and spent time slumming with black jazz musicians.
“You didn’t do that then,” he tells me, as though the cocaine use is acceptable now. “Whole damn world went and changed on us. That is how we are different than any other group of humans that ever existed on this earth. We see great change within our lifetime, many changes. I remember the first black man that did not respond when someone called him ‘boy’. That kind of thing don’t leave your head. It was a fuck up. Pardon me if my language is coarse. I coast on good grace.”
I assured him it was fine.
“I know a man like you expects me to offer a drink as I pour out my tale of woe. It comes from all that time spent in bars. Don’t deny you’re a bar man.”
I admitted that I have spent more than my fair share of time in bars and was ashamed of it. It made me feel like I had a taint, a noticeable trait that everyone could see. I tried convincing myself that this was a special person that can see into your soul. It didn’t work too well.

“She was fucking me,” he went on, “she was fucking another actor, maybe two or three other actors, definitely the lead in that movie she was doing. She was fucking black guys, guys that robbed houses to support drug habits. It’s what people nowadays call slumming. I don’t say this to put her down, you understand. I’m just trying to explain the situation.”
Mattie began participating in burglary and drug use, anonymous sex with strangers. There were rumors around town just waiting to make it to the gossip column.
“Back then,” Rico tells me, “it might have been even worse than it is today. Because people today take over a star’s life. The star has no more life. But that’s understood, it’s accepted. Back then, people believed they had a private life until it hit the gossip column.”
I imagine somewhere in this story of heartbreak there is a message intended for me. So I break my silence and explain what it is I’m doing, giving away my inheritance and everything. Rico just looks at me.
“I knew you were desperate but I didn’t realize how much help you needed.”
“I can’t keep it,” I tell him. “That money doesn’t belong to me. I’d give it all back for one more hour with her.”
“Let me tell you what I learned from Mattie,” he tells me. “Let me get this right out in the open so there’s no confusion and no inner struggle.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t pick and choose which relationships last. That’s a misconception. Nobody chooses. Because eventually one person does make a choice and the other person never wants that. And if no choice is made, it’s making a different choice. And watching the person you love leave you eventually.”
“So you’re saying marriage is outdated?” I ponder.
“You kids today don’t know. You just don’t know. You think history began with the Beat Generation. You think Shakespeare is for fussy grown-ups when you are yourself grown up. There was a whole world before you came along. And even before she came along.”
“It’s not that I’m surprised we met and got together,” I tell him. “It’s that I can’t believe there was a time when we weren’t together.”

“Was she the color and the light?”
“She was the movement.”
“Then you make your peace. It’s gonna take you the rest of your life. The money is a pressure release valve. It’s your way of not confronting her death. You run all over the country giving it away, you don’t have to think about her being gone.”
“Can I give you some of it?”
“I want no part in any of that,” he replies. “And I’m serious, because I could use the money. But I want no part in that.”
I silently slipped out after he’d fallen asleep and walked the streets, my feet stinging from the dampness they’d incurred inside his flooded apartment. I left him two hundred dollars with a note saying I’m not giving it to him, I owe him a hotel fee. But I know he’ll just throw the money out. But I have hopes. I believe he may just keep that note, save it. And bring it out on dark days to remind himself that at one point in his life, he did a nice thing.

Outside of Houston, I realize I’ve blown through about half of the money already. With the end in sight, I decide to settle down with a woman name Charlotte who works as a stripper or a dancer at a club. Her hands are small and her waist is thin. I want to shed a tear for her, express my fear that she has no childbearing hips. A woman like this just screams to have a child. She is estranged from her husband, a nebulous man that would never hit her but ran her down emotionally like a raging river. She became that thing you seek, the woman so worn down that she can no longer say no to anything. It was in just such a way that she ended up taking her clothes off for money. It reminds me of those flowers that open only once a year.

But she’s too good for me, despite her profession. I can see that immediately and so can the others at the club. Barney and Hal and Irving and Danny, they all know the truth. They all see past the mask I’ve presented, that of man about town, daring adventurer. They size me up correctly on the initial meeting. They know I’m a small time hustler that somehow got a big score. They don’t say anything, but the knowledge is there. My only hope is to keep that information from Charlotte.

She orders Chinese food in the native language and I’m aghast, seriously not prepared to accept her as a cultured person. My goal is to reduce her to the level of a whore. This will give me the much-needed superiority that our relationship calls for. She laughs and the world can stop. They can bulldoze the area but her house will remain standing. Despite her profession, she is the most virtuous of women. In drunken empathy, I relate the death of my love, of the death of my pride, of my many adventures with various people that are best known in the world as con men and used up old men. I don’t tell her about new girls I’ve met, had affairs with. There is something sacred here and I need her to believe she’s the first woman I’ve had since she died.
Marigold.
Moribund.
Exoskeleton.
Glass crunches under foot.
Insects sting when provoked.
We hide things away, live behind bulletproof glass.

It occurs to me that my greatest test yet is to just break down Charlotte’s walls. She confides in me her childhood. The broken jaw her first boyfriend gave to her, hiding the truth from her parents. She settled on a story about drunk college men that attacked her as she walked home from the date and promptly disappeared back to the anonymity of the ivy-covered institution. I picture her with a broken jaw, wired shut. Forcing a smile at the kindness of her family. And secretly yearning for the opportunity to forgive her lover. It is in just these circumstances that we all find love for the first time. The only hope is that you can crawl out from under the wreck with all your limbs intact. Love that overpowering, enough to make you hide your broken jaw from the harsh light of truth, doesn’t come along once in a lifetime. It is a pattern that starts in the teenage years and builds. From the broken jaw of the first love to the beatings with an electric cord by your second husband. I saw a long line of threats that aren’t empty, of violence that springs up in seconds. I envision Charlotte’s eventual murder or be murdered situation and silently hold my breath. It’s not what I want for her.

And maybe it would have been so much easier to accept if it hadn’t been for the hope. As I said, her husband never hurt her with his hands, only with his words. But there are levels of violence and she had just discovered new levels to facilitate her damaged psyche. There was such hope there, that she could break this orbit of violence. I was just the shooting star of the moment. I could never tell her any of this, just as I could never raise a fist against her. So we spoke in half sentences, in mumbled apologies. I found, much to my disappointment, that it was my apologies that she really lusted for. She wanted me asking for her forgiveness at every crossroads. I turned hostile and refused to apologize, even when I was clearly in the wrong. I tried to assuage her with fistfuls of cash but she couldn’t be bothered. She saw in me everything that had escaped her in her past. She knew me as a calming influence, preset to apologize. And when my apologies dried up, out of anger and resentment, she began casting a new net. It was in just this way that I realized for the first time that all the money in the world won't buy you what you really seek. That was a tough lesson for me as the money was all I had to offer anymore.

We returned to a field that she had visited as a child. She threw rocks at a row of ripe tomatoes. She cursed the sun for shining so dumbly on us. The day was meant to be overcast. This was important to her. She wanted to make love right there in the tomato patch. I understood her desire implicitly. It was quite obvious to me that she had been to this field before, as a child. And there was a secret buried here. Who had molested her at that young age, in the crop of tomatoes, that was irrelevant. It could have been her father or her uncle or a neighbor or even her own brother. I knew everything inherently. Nothing else mattered except to make her happy. If this made her happy, then I must do it. I knew she was a woman of secrets but I did not know they extended this far.

It wasn’t long before I had worn out my welcome and felt it time to move on. Nothing was said in words but I found myself dying of thirst, surrounded by water. The gang at the strip club had discovered the details of my quest, my free-spending ways. They all wanted money. They all were whispering in Charlotte’s ear whenever I wasn’t around. I felt like Caeser. It was amazing.

My clearest memory of Charlotte was an off moment, a little bit of nothing that happened for no good reason. We were driving past a Chinese restaurant, one I had never seen before but it looked like it had been there for years. I inquired, “Have you been to that Chinese restaurant?” She replied, “No. I don’t like to eat places alone.” It wasn’t the answer I wanted. It answered my question in the worst way. The point wasn’t that she had not eaten there, it was an indictment of the fact that I hadn’t taken her there to eat. I ask a question out of curiosity and get attacked for my troubles. It was an unspoken condemnation. This is my most lasting memory of Charlotte. Although I explored her body fully, first at her work and then later in private, I have no sense that she existed as a person, a physical being. She might as well have been pounds of meat stuffed in a burlap sack. I wanted to wander flower-soaked hills with her. I wanted the wind to blow through her hair. I wanted to touch her and feel her as true. Girls like Charlotte are most beautiful when they’re walking out the door.

I make it to Richmond, coasting on my own good grace. I can’t remember the city now, whether or not it’s on the ocean. I don’t think it is. I stayed for days in a dive hotel. There was a storm and power was lost. I was down to one duffel bag of cash, I knew I’d run out soon. I had no idea how I’d get home or even if there was a home to go to. I spent days inside, the power and phone lines dead. I dialed numbers that I knew as a child. And, in my own way, I was pretty sure I got through. I breathe, like a sketch from an earlier century. Rosy glows and children’s laughter. Everything like that. It seems right for the first time, it seems true. I stand a bit taller, laugh a little longer.

It was in the hospital, where I ended up after a drinking binge that resulted in alcohol poisoning, that I first met the only person I ever met in Richmond. He was a tireless moralizer and he would look down on me for my drinking. As though you really ever learn a lesson in this life.

The phone would ring for days, it was December. I talked to Rick, his name was Rick, about the past year and where I’d been and maybe there was hope that the next year could be better. It was in these night-long talks that I learned his story. He was an altar boy, his parents enforced his attendance at mass all the way through college. He was spurned by the church, ravaged in virginity. He never lived a minute of his life until he found he was dying. He told me this. He said, “I’m dying. Slowly, but it’s happening.” He had a rare disease that caused his liver to stop producing enzymes. He had to take medication and get shots and all manner of things that scared me. It brought me back to the time when my ex wife gave birth and I had to stay in the hospital for four hours, not even getting to go outside to have a cigarette. I hated her for that, just as I hate myself for hating her. I came so close to capturing us in a song, so close to being myself for once. But I lost us both.

She sat above me as though in judgement. I could feel her measuring me in the way a cabdriver knows when there’s a gun at his back. I didn’t speak to her aloud but in my head it was, “Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. There was an accident. They say I was involved.” What can you say to the dead? I knew she was waiting for me on the other side. It was aching in places. I slept with bedsores from lack of movement. Rick came and went at his own pleasure. I knew life was hopeless then. Torn between the disapproving dead and the content soon to be dead. What hope is there when the person that’s about to die enjoys life more than you do? I guess in some way, we’re all aware of our own death. It comes in patches, it is part of a larger fabric. Oh the tangles we weave along the way. All just to escape that death. And you may say to yourself, “What point is there? Why bother?” It’s a defeatist attitude that we all take at some point. Your girl’s fucked off with another guy or you lose the only job you’ve ever loved and there’s just no cohesion anymore. Life becomes the reason to go on. Life gives you new opportunities and it’s important to look in the long term. She had to die for me to realize why I exist. I’d cut the heart out of my chest to let her light in through my arm. And then she starts having seizures and smells things and hears things that aren’t there and the doctors say it’s incurable. Oh, the structure we built together. I built this life and then she died, and now it's truly mine. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it was unfair for her to leave so soon before me. And that I carry on because I know that life changes a lot. And maybe I just can’t wait to see what the next change will be. I saw in Rick all the things I feared and was in awe of. He had that same look in his eye that she did in her final days, the look that says, “I’m dying. Slowly, but it’s happening.” I wanted to run for cover, to smash a hole in the wall for me to crawl out of. I didn’t want to look at him anymore, I didn’t want to be seen in that way. With those eyes that carry that look. It makes my skin crawl. They kept me in the hospital for weeks. And I think to myself, does Superman ever die? He can take a bullet in the chest, but how will he deal with it when Lois Lane dies? Will he go on fighting crime? Will his enemies be more powerful than his broken heart allows him to be? And if he does wither and crumble, what hope is there for me? I’m not Superman, I’m not any action hero. Can I have a bigger power inside me than these indestructible comic book heroes? But none of it matters. Lois Lane doesn’t die. Nobody dies. They save the day. I just travel the country giving money away.

They let me out after a week to walk around the grounds. I’m forced to attend group therapy sessions and have one on one counseling about alcoholism. I want to tell them all that they’ve made a mistake. I have reason to drink this much. It was a miscalculation on my part. It’s a one-time event. No sir, no problem drinker here. Look elsewhere, dear friend. Walking the grounds, I can almost taste her like the air in my lungs. My lungs of course being among the happiest part of my body after days of recycled air full of antibiotics. I rise to my full height as though to shrug off the shape of the past. It’s all shapes, it’s science and progress. I can count on my fingers the number of times. I miss her like a limb lost in war. My money has no relevance here and it would be wasted on anyone that I could give it to. It’s appalling, the type of crowd I’ve fallen in with. This hospital will be the death of me. And who’s to fear death when the other side is calling out to you?

It seems we always just missed each other. Two strange ghost ships passing in the night. The words would bubble up and I’d be halfway through a sentence before I realized I was alone. And in her own way, she would respond. We would grow together, separated by such a simple and petty little thing. What is death but a transformation? Life energy moving from one phase to the next. We can build computers that think like men, beat them at chess. We are all lost here. I had to find my way home.

Months after my exit from the hospital, I was aboard a cruise ship working it’s way down the eastern seaboard towards Jamaica. It was all middle class people, the rich, the people that had money they never had to fight for. They dressed the same and conversation concentrated on children teething, 401k dividends, sports utility vehicles and gas mileage. It was my last great opus in an obscure way. To deny myself the acceptance of my fellow man as we made our way to paradise. There are three pools located on the cruise ship, one outside and two inside. I find myself alone in one of them after 3 AM and I quietly disrobe and enter the water. But a woman came along and ruined everything. She was a drinker and I wondered how she, an obvious problem drinker, could be judged sane and normal and American while I, who only drank for recreation, was deemed unfit for society and must be locked away for my own protection. I want to tell her all this but she looks deep within my soul and explains about her husband. “He was a surgeon,” she tells me. “He used to do surgery.”
“The snip and tuck,” I suggest, winking confidentially. “A boob job here and a boob job there. Dress to impress. That whole scene.”
“You’re not accustomed to such wealth, are you?” she wants to know.
“No,” I admit. “Tell me about your husband.”
“What is there to say?” she demands. “Gravity always wins. Like water through your fingers when you’re dying of thirst.”
“But you seem to have turned out okay.”
“I have a new husband. He married me for my money.”
“And now you’re going to Jamaica.”
“It’s not what you would call anyone’s fault. We all do what we have to do to survive.”

“Surely he’s not.”
“I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. I’ve followed him to motels after work. I’ve seen him with these girls. He doesn’t think I know, but I’ve seen it all.”
“I’m not suggesting a romance here,” I said. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
“Just what I need,” she muses. “Another man after my money.”
“I was just trying to allay fears.”
She looks at me for a long time and then simply says, “Your bathing suit is too small. You’re exposing yourself in front of God and everyone.”

Wandering the country with no money and no mission anymore, it occurs to me that I’ve fulfilled whatever wish it is that she would have had for me. I’ve experienced life and grown less insular. I’m not petty and I don’t hold a grudge. It was a growth experience wrapped in an agenda. Falling by the wayside along the way was all part of some bigger plan. If you take a big enough overview, every mistake in your life seems like a growth experience. But her grave is not like I remembered it when I began the trip. Yes, she has a grave even though she was cremated. I had to have a place I could visit. It was in this way that I returned to town and found myself once again struggling for some kind of reasoning to the madness. Her grave is different, it’s been vandalized. I sit and cry over this sacrilege. One of those kids that did it, that could have been me ten or fifteen years ago. This is the part that hurts the worst.

But she is inside me and beside me in all the glory of God’s great mystery. She is pulsing through my veins as I silently get to the job of scrubbing her gravestone, trying to wipe off the painted words. She was not a bitch, she was not a cunt. These kids had no right to make such a claim. I don’t want to say things to anyone. I want to be a boat sitting on a hill, no intention of ever going to sea. The bars have all changed names, changed addresses, gotten new customers. I don’t recognize anyone although I’ve only been gone a year. I know that I’ve come home but it’s not my home anymore. It’s just some place I used to stay when I was happy and in love. I think back to days inside apartments, of buying drugs from shady characters that we could share together, and I miss her. I miss having her as a friend. I hope that my death is soon and tragic. I hope I leave mourners in my wake. But I know that it’s not possible right now. I haven’t just left town to escape her. I’ve left town to escape myself. To escape my own place in the world. And now that I’ve completed that task, all I want to do is return home. And I get here to find there is no home. Maybe this could be a new starting point. Start the whole crazy thing over again. I don’t know where I end and she begins.

I made movies of our daily lives with an old 8 MM camera. Her laying in bed, wiping the hair out of her eyes. And maybe a couple minutes at the breakfast table. It was an afterthought, something that just happened. I acquired the camera in a trade for drugs and I thought I should put it to use. I buy a projector from the pawn shop and set it up in a bar, my bar, where I am the only customer. The film plays against the wall, over framed paintings of dog’s playing poker and a boxer knocking out another boxer. I see in her a beauty that has been robbed from the world. The bartender doesn’t say a word to me, makes no move to stop me. After I’ve watched the film five times, he taps me on the shoulder and says, “Closing up, pal.”
“One more,” I plead.
“Was she the one?” he wants to know.
“She was everything.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Over a year,” I tell him.
“One more,” he concedes. “And then I’m locking up.”

And so one final time I watch her brush the hair out of her eyes, eat a few spoonfuls of cereal, laugh and push the camera away from herself. One more time I watch it and I don’t cry because I know she’s somewhere out there, waiting for me. One more time around and I finish my drink.
“You’re not thinking of doing anything crazy?” the bartender asks me.
“I’ve done all the crazy things I’m gonna do in this life,” I tell him.
“Won’t be able to watch home movies tomorrow,” he lets me know. “League night at the bowling alley. Most of them come here after their game.”
“I’m not coming back,” I reply. “I’ve gone as far as I need to go. I made the journey and that was what mattered.”

I walk down empty streets, no cars passing by. I walk past new parking meters and the echo of Wayne’s sledgehammer plays out in my head. And I realize that home is not a place but a feeling. It is the place where there’s a memory around every corner. I will not go back to her grave. I will stay away from the west side of town, the apartment she died in. I will not go near Wayne’s neighborhood. What I decide to do, what seems right, is I’m just gonna stick my thumb out on the highway and see if I can find any place that doesn’t have a memory behind it. It’s a big country. There must be someplace. And I whisper to her, I say goodbye. The wind blows and trash floats on the breeze. I know, in more words than I can say, that she’s the litter on the breeze. Reminding me that there are places in this universe that don’t have cages or memories. And that I will find my place someday.