It was spring again and that could only mean one thing. New refugees on the farm. The farm itself was the staging area for a group called Swords Into Plough Blades, a radical organization that had evolved from The People for Ethical Treatment of Humans. That was just the way things were in that time. In my time, I was a member of nearly every splinter group the conservative media liked to paint as hostile liberals with a biased agenda. Bias is an optional word. It was a step up from previous lodgings in so far as they had an actual shower to clean yourself in. I had gotten quite used to hosing myself off in the yard, a humiliating experience.

I believed in fire and brimstone the way that only the hunted can. The sheer weight of my crimes held me firmly on the earth. I had grown over my previous friends, been betrayed by all of them at some point or another. I made new friends. I frequented new bars. I had a new name in every city and the air was crisp and clear. The ultimate rule of travel is to settle for the winter and move once the ground thaws. It was spring again and I was set to move on.

I accept a ride into town with Vanessa, the only girl at the homestead. The homestead itself is about forty miles from the nearest city and we made weekly trips there to pick up supplies. But I knew this trip was different because I was being transferred, I was being sent on my way. Vanessa was typical of the group in ideology and statistics, if not average in gender. She was a vegetarian, a vegan really. She refused to pay taxes and was just lucky she didn’t have any actual income. She was, on a deeper level, a philosopher with hurt feelings. She had become involved with a notorious speed freak that used to abuse her in several ways and she had adopted a tough veneer to protect herself, to insulate. She was roundly accepted as a tough member of the group, willing to take the cables to a prisoner as the case was. It never came to that. I often wondered if her tough as nails persona was also an attempt to gain acceptance in the man’s world at the commune. Because she had to prove herself the equal of any man in many insane ways and it bothered me. Her beauty was always a hindrance to her, something that held her back. She had to be accepted like I had to be accepted. Even more so than me. She had no past deeds to make her reputation. Walking away from her car, towards the bus station, I had the feeling of a million eyes on my back. But Vanessa’s were not among them. She had let me out on the main street with a cursory goodbye handshake, a bidding of good luck, and a promise that the homestead was there for me if I need it. There are a thousand communes in this country that have accepted me over the years. Staying one step ahead of the authorities has been my only goal in life for the last thirty years. Vanessa watched me walk away for a few seconds and then swiftly accelerated and left my life forever.

It was in a bar in Louisiana, maybe near New Orleans, that I first saw the dancer. She was maybe 17 but she looked 14 and she danced 30. She drank 40. She laughed never. She had a mole on the inside of her leg, right before the crotch. I can’t tell you how many nights the frustration of looking at that mole and knowing I could never touch it lay down upon me like a barrier between the waking world and this infected plain of sleep. I had followed a man named Baz from Tallahassee where people still had bomb shelters in the backyard from the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had built a wall around himself like some impressive sieve designed to protect him from all hassling engagements. He was one of those guys. He had a million projects going at once and a sea of faces smiling at his every word. Truthfully, I found him to be a bit full of himself but everyone else liked him so I made out like he was my best friend. He had a sister that drove me wild because I could never have her. I never found out if she had a mole on the inside of her thigh.
“Can we do this?” he asked me one day in the park.
“God bless the Indian Summer,” I said.
“It’s the logistics of the thing,” he continued. “That’s a lot of people to keep their mouths shut. It would take a miracle for us to not get caught.”
“Like a million miles away they have it any better,” I said.

I didn’t know it at the time but he wasn’t making a pass at me. I realized later that he was just deferring to me as a seasoned veteran of the war. It confused me that he would talk this way to me, ask me my opinion on things. I thought he was making a pass. I guess I just wasn’t used to being an elder statesman. Everyone kept things pretty tight in that place. It must have been about six years since I went on the run. We were in Tallahassee where people didn’t lock their doors at night. There were bugs that flew and reptiles that would crawl right into bed with you. They wanted your body warmth in the night to keep comfortable. They would crawl right up under your body and sometimes you would sit up on them in the morning and they would be crushed flat. I never heard of them biting anyone.
“Is this even possible?” Baz asked me in the park. “Can we do this?”
“They put a man on the moon,” I told him. “Anything’s possible.”
“They haven’t put a black man on the moon,” he said confidently. “Tell me how possible that is.”
“It’s better than it used to be,” I said, surprised at my own optimism.
“They send the colored overseas to die for a country that won’t even protect them here at home. Seems like a black man ’s got two choices: Go over there and die or stay here and be lynched.”

He was speaking from experience because he had gone on voter registration drives in Tallahassee when he was in high school, back in ’63 or ’64 or so. His sister was not with us in the park but she was on my mind. I wondered why it couldn’t be her that makes the pass at me instead of her no account brother, the big man around here. I mean, I was flattered. I was overjoyed actually. But it just wasn’t her. His sister was the kind of woman that would never dance in a bar in Louisiana and would never reveal a mole to anyone. She kept herself neat and proper. She wore name brand clothing with panache while her brother, Baz, just kind of slouched around in whatever he had on. He never looked like a person of import and this is what probably saved him from serious jail time. It’s harder to point the finger at a person that has no presence. His sister had presence.

We had run out on everyone right before things went sour and I guess we escaped although I later turned Baz in for the reward money. I left him drunk on the steps of the police station and had them send a check to my alias at my parents’ apartment in Boston. It was picked up by another member of the resistance a few weeks later and sent through the pipeline to me.

But I saw this girl in a bar in Louisiana and it was like my heart stopped. She was beautiful the way the world is beautiful to a painter. She was synonyms and metaphors. She moved as a snake but carried herself like a proud lioness. I spilled my beer in my lap and she winked at me with a giggle. That was the closest she ever came to laughing. I looked like I’d peed my pants. I crawled in lockstep with the pounding drum beat, timpani or whatever it’s called, from a Phil Spector song. I was crawling across the bar because I had been looking at a girl too long and her boyfriend hit me. Later, he bought me a beer and told me he was going to dump the girl and I was welcome to her. I wasn’t interested and had only been staring at her because she was the only smiling face in the place. Sometimes I don’t understand what drives other people and I try to hide this.

I was somewhere in Nebraska, that was the only thing I knew for sure. The man that hit me, he introduced himself as “the smarter of the Evans boys” as though this would mean something to me.
“I don’t care how smart you are,” I told him. “I’ve been to college.”
“I almost went. My brother didn’t come anywhere close. That’s why I’m smarter than him.”
“And what’s the lady’s name?” I asked, curious.
“That’s Sandra. She’s Egyptian.”
“She smiles like she’s happy.”
“Smiling all the way to the grave. I have to leave.”
“I’ve never been in this bar before.”
“Bartender won’t extend a tab. I’ve been here all my life and he won’t give me a tab.”
“Your whole life has been right here in this state?”
“Basketball team went to nationals in Oklahoma when I was 14. Got to go with my older brother.”
“He was on the team?”
“He just went there. He went everywhere.”
“He’s not around anymore?”
“He left a long time ago. But you’re avoiding the obvious questions.”

“I don’t want to start anything up.”
“I know you’re going to ask.”
“She goes home with you?”
“I don’t want her to. I want you to take her.”
“But she’s smiling.”
“Is this a problem?”
“I lost a couple dollars over the holiday,” I told him.
“Guys like you are always short on money.”
“Do guys like me come around here often?”
He just stared at me and didn’t say anything.

I had been staying with a con man, although I didn’t know what he was at the time. He was not part of any revolutionary sect I could distinguish and promised me liberation through excess. We would huddle around his old radio, scanning the dial for pirate stations, which had just started popping up with regular frequency at that time. His favorite hobby was wandering through suburban neighborhoods, opening mailboxes. He would steal social security checks and then make copies of them with different names on them. He never tried to cash one of these. He had a big book of everyone he’d ever ripped off, their addresses and such. He would send these copied Social Security checks to his former victims and let them try to cash them. He also stole unmailed letters and cut the stamp off and glued it onto his own letters. He was a con man but it seemed like revolution at the time.

He once pulled a knife on me in a drunken argument and then cut his finger horribly while trying to pull its trigger.

I was under the delusion that we were practicing revolution together. My partner, the con man, his name was something that started with a J. It amuses people that all this time later I can remember the intimate details of that night but not the name of the man that led me to this life, the one that put the wheels in motion. But I just don’t remember. The wind was painful in those times, that’s what I remember. I had been kicked out of the Student Action Coordinating Committee for radicalism and was set free in the campus life, a small fish in a big pond. Big fish eat the little fish. So the little fish has to act first. My partner, whose name started with a J, was violently against student organizations and I met him while he was peddling Mao’s little red book on campus. He had a sign pinned to his chest that said “Down with activism” or “Viva le revolucion” or something like that. He had long hair and no facial hair.

I tried to buy one of his books with a dollar wrapped around a wad of fake bills. I had been paying for my dinner this way every day. He would not sell me one but he offered to let me sell some with him if I could come up with the money to pay for my own supply of books. We bought them from an outlet for fifty cents each and sold them for three dollars on campus. After we were living together, we ended up in a farmhouse outside of town, a place that someone from his checkered past had left to him in a will, possibly a former lover. It was there that he shot a man named Jerry Hagens, or Hock. I had been at the university that day and I came home to find Hock laying in a chair with his eyes closed.
“I shot him,” my partner said. “The bullet didn’t come out.”
“Is he dead?” I asked.
“He got shot. He said stuff he shouldn’t have said.”
“Was he here to buy pot?”
“He said bad things about both of us.”
“Was it stuff about us? Or was it stuff about you?”
“I had to shoot him. I thought he had a knife.”
“That’s a comb,” I said. “He keeps it in his pocket.”
“It looked like a knife.”
“It’s a big comb.”

Hock opened his eyes and looked at us.
“Are you alive?” I asked.
“I need water,” he replied.
“Pump’s broken,” my partner said.
“Just my luck,” Hock said.

We packed up everything we owned, which was really just some clothes and a skillet and the radio, and we drove off for the university with the idea that we could stay with friends. As it turned out, our only friend on campus was Hock and he was dying back at the farmhouse.

“You think Hock will die?” I asked him in the car. It was a big car and I can’t remember if it was mine or his.
“I don’t know. You think he’ll keep his mouth shut?”
“There’s no one to tell out there.”
“But the risk is there.”
“I know that,” I told him.
“We can’t take that risk.”
“I agree. I already said.”
“I’m going back there tonight.”
“Can I have the gun?”
“Gun’s gone. I wiped the prints and left it in a dumpster.”
“I didn’t even see you leave.”
“I think the firing pin was worn. The bullet didn’t even go through him.”

She held me one night like a mother to a child. It wasn’t about the best of circumstances because this was undoubtedly the worst of circumstances. It wasn’t a question of mother/daughter, it was a question of percentages. How long could I keep up this breakneck pace? How long until my energy faded? Would the momentum of the initial movement keep me going? It was just science and progress, as related through a relationship. But she held me one night.

I was stuck on overdrive and my eye twitched. I had a beard to mask my appearance. I was a preacher to the converted, and my stories were old and boring by now. My inability to recall large blocks of time turned the story sessions into a grueling exercise of grasping at straws. My only defense was, “The building was supposed to be empty.” It was my one saving grace. It was, as much as anything, the biggest cop out I could muster.

She had grown up on a farm so she took to the commune life. She also hated it bitterly for reminding her of that misspent youth. A wall of flames would have encompassed her. It would have hit the nail on the head and found the needle in the haystacks. When I heard, many years later, that she had disappeared in the aftermath of a fire that swept through the commune, it wasn’t too much of a leap to guess she had set the fire herself. There had been rumors she was with child.

“Eat something,” she told me, pushing store-bought eggplant at me.
“I wanted steak.”
“Then buy your own meal.”
“Let me borrow your car,” I said. “I’ll go to McDonalds.”
“They don’t have steak.”
“It’s all changed now.”
“Is this because of what I said?”
“I can’t explain it. It’s just how I feel. Let me borrow your car, I’ll just go to McDonalds.”

She worked in town at a daycare, tracing children’s hands and making them into turkeys. Her car was old and beat up and seemed unbecoming of a bright young star like her. She doted on the children. She was the only one at the commune that had a real job in the outside world. The rest spent their time tending to the fields, building the compost heap, sanding off the jagged corners of the wood.
“We’re going to babyproof the house,” she explained.
“What daring lives us revolutionaries lead,” I remarked.
“You wouldn’t say that if you had a child.”
“You’ve never had a child.”
“I get twenty new ones every year.”

We walked by the lake, holding hands. Her hair was in pigtails and she wore a sundress.
“I’m not a hippie,” she told me that day. “I just believe in living in tune with the earth. People make that mistake about me all the time. But it’s not true.”
“Can I?”
She nodded.
We kissed.
The world ended five days later and I was forced to leave without a goodbye. I never saw her again and, aside from the news of the blaze that killed half of the commune, she’s mainly faded from my mind. It’s not what the father and mother do. It’s what the mother does to her son. It’s what the family does to the black sheep.

My greatest fear was not of being caught or even punished for my actions, although I must admit these were frightening prospects. My greatest fear was of being found incompetent at life. I had feverish thoughts of my file appearing before the judge emblazoned with the tag “Deviant” on it. I tried in every way to escape from these thoughts but they haunted me the way an execution date will haunt a prisoner. I would face death gladly if I could just be spared the suspense.

It was in a hotel in Houston that I first attempted suicide. The girl in the room with me was too far gone on alcohol and marijuana to question my actions and, besides, I had locked myself in the bathroom with an assortment of razors. As I filled up the bathtub with hot water, I had no thoughts of death as an entity or even a barrier. It was not a point where anything stopped. Not in a religious manner do I mean these things but on a simplistic molecular level. Even in death I would remain as I am, a solid chunk of matter. The body alone is evidence that death is not the end. How could you leave a corpse if death was the end of everything? It is the end of your perception of things.

We were running one step ahead of the law in Louisiana which had placed an APB on the van we had driven in. We ditched the car and stole another one. Exchanged license plates with another car. We always managed to stay one step ahead and for this I was silently grateful. There’s no feeling in the world like knowing everyone is after you but you can not be caught. They had made roadblocks and cordoned off a city in the hopes of catching us but we had disappeared across state lines and were relatively safe. All the same, I found myself locked in the bathroom cutting my wrists with safety razors. The suicide plan went awry, obviously. I was not committed to the act and ended up making very fine cuts that drew little blood. I never told anyone about it and I was never found out. She slept through my agonizing two hour attack on myself and woke up before me the next morning and quietly drove away in the stolen car. I had suspicions that she would turn me in for the reward money and I made a hasty exit. Hitchhiking down highway whatever, I was picked up by a college student on his way north for the summer. He looked at me cautiously and said, “There are reports that there was a prison escape last night. I heard it on the radio. You’re not one of them are you?”

“I’m a vagabond,” I told him.
“You look like you could be one of them.”
“I’m the little tramp. I’m Charlie Chaplin.”
“Do you treat everyone this way?”
“Am I being rude?”
“You’re odd.”
“I can agree with you on that,” I told him. “There’s no question about my peculiarities.”
“Those cuts on your wrist,” he said, pointing, “is that from the handcuffs?”
“I’m not an escaped prisoner.”
“But if you were.”

Later, I admitted a grudge against the Vietnam war and the government in general and he pulled me out of the car and beat me up, whispering “Fuck you, hippie.” But may I suggest that he was not a bad person? Can you believe me when I say he just had his values and stuck by them? I forgave him for hitting me. I forgave him for leaving me there. Who knows, maybe this was all planned by some divine hand. I walked farther than I ever thought I could. And it did not rain. It was one minute out of thousands, a long march drawing closer to Mexico. Mexico was the key. I had dreams of sipping margaritas on some anonymous beach a million miles away from any past misdeeds. It was my guiding purpose as it were, the sum total of motivation. The sky there is like the water, blue and pure. The people there are foreign but familiar. I came to know everything about Mexico from the outside.

The doctor told me solemnly that I was going to lose the leg below the knee. It had gone gangrenous, it had turned putrid and rancid. Through no fault of my own, I had injured myself badly. The nurse claimed the damp condition of the Pacific northwest was a breeding ground for bacteria. The doctor shut the door behind himself and sat down with a sigh. “You’re gonna lose the leg,” he told me.
“I knew something like this would happen,” I replied. “All my life…like water through my hands.”
“You will have no leg after this,” he said. “I want you to understand the implications of this.”
“How can I run?” I wondered. “Seriously, how can I run?”
“They make very convincing prosthetics these days. This isn’t the end of your life.”
“But you sit me down and tell me you’re gonna chop a piece off. You tell me you want me to understand the gravity of the situation.”
“This is no laughing matter,” he said when I burst into nervous giggles.
“I’m sorry, really I am. I don’t mean to be flippant or difficult.”
“Do you realize how serious this is?”
“I do, I do,” I assured him. “It’s the seriousness that makes me laugh. I’ve always known I’d never make it in one piece.”

In the end, they changed their mind and amputated three toes. I was overjoyed. I was ecstatic. And it occurs to me that this might have been a trick. They tell me I’m gonna lose the whole leg so I will readily accept the loss of a few toes. They stick the worst-case scenario in front of you so you’ll accept that dark truth and then WHAT'S THIS?! AN UNEXPECTED VICTORY! I lost those toes and I was ecstatic about it.

They come to you as friends. This is the thought in the back of my mind the entire time I’m on the run. Maybe it was in Boston when I lost my life savings in a pool game. But it could just as easily have been in Omaha, or outside of Omaha, when the man drove off with my bag containing all my personal belongings. I didn’t think twice about putting it in his trunk. He said he’d take me all the way.

I had lost my jacket in a foolish bet about the specific course of the Mississippi River. I felt I had been cheated but the man was more powerful than me and, besides, had his friends with him. I had no one. No friends anywhere. Or so it seemed. The sky crushed down the plains and there was talk that this place used to be the dust bowl. The land stretched in every direction for miles and I was under a huge dome of stars. There were no rats in that time, or, if there was, they were hidden from view. My life in the last years has become an odd hunt for rats. Parasites. A series of parasites, a never-ending list. This is parasite 457, followed by 458. You know the type.

Walked off the dirt road to a farm house but nobody answered my knock at the door. Standing in the light snowfall, just an inch or so on the ground, I must have looked crazy. I had no jacket on. There was mud all over my boots from the walk. It had been days since I shaved. Nobody answered the door and I accepted that as true and just. I could have been an axe murderer, although I had no axe. I could have been any number of things except for what I was: A man on the run from the police, without a jacket or worldly belongings, stuck in the middle of farmland he didn’t understand. A stranger in need of an indulgent smile and special care. But no one answered the door.

I resolved to wait it out, no more walking. It had taken me miles to even find this place and there was no sign of other life around it. In every direction there must be cities, but it’s not the direction, it’s the distance. I sat by an old water pump, blowing on my hands to keep them warm. I was shivering. And I saw a spider web created between the handle and the pump’s shaft. The snow had produced drops of moisture on it and these had crystallized into ice. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and I was, really, thankful that the man had driven off with my bag, stranding me here. I was grateful even for no one answering the door. Beauty fades but living in its presence for a moment reminds you how important and lovely it is. I was thankful for everything that had happened, all the bad luck that put me in this spot, to see this lovely creation.

But I never even explained how I ended up here, outside Omaha four or five years ago, with the entire US government after me, a wanted man and all that. It’s not a story I like to tell but it’s the one that everyone wants to hear so I tell it anyway. My final line is always, “The building was supposed to be empty.” What people call ‘yes men’, that’s what I was surrounded by. Actually, I was a yes man. I wasn’t even the leader, we all knew that. We were a radical splinter group. I have trouble remembering who said what, whose idea it all was. I was the one that threw the bomb, lit the fuse. The building was supposed to be empty. I crashed in a flop house. I’m not what you’d call domestic but I offered to buy everyone coffee and a muffin for breakfast. They took me up on the offer and I walked out of the house, determined to never go back. I had feverish dreams about waking to find everyone murdered, slaughtered in their sleep. Initially I was frightened that this carnage could take place around me without waking me. Then I was worried that everyone was dead and these murders would be added to the list of my crimes against humanity. It was the thought of punishment for these crimes I did not commit. I guess I could handle jail time if I had to. But not if I was innocent.

It doesn’t matter anyway because nobody got killed and I left the next morning claiming I was buying food for everyone. It was like when your blood begins to pour out of a wound and your instinct is to drink the blood. Keep it in your body in any way possible. The sky was solemn, was beautiful, was light and autumn and machines at rest. I could stare at that sky for hours, not that it would do me any good. I was burned by hope, charred by promise. All the could have beens ran through my head at an alarming rate, never stopping. It was only when I lifted out of myself for a minute, in these infected sleep periods, that I could see my life as a point on a graph. The high points weren’t high enough and the low points were plentiful. I guess if you’ve never encountered it, you can’t imagine what that is like. This shifting consciousness, built on lies. Because I traded in cons, I was an out and out liar to people. I had to, as protection from my past misdeeds. It gave me the chance to be a different person every few months, but I never changed at all. It was just a change of name, which is just a label. I was who I was and I was stuck with me.

And there was beauty in the form of a song that took the shape of a woman. I could tell you her name, but I’d prefer to keep that for me. Because that is mine, that is something in this world I can claim as my own. And if I were to tell you, it would be less real. We slept on the floor of her apartment, she too poor to have a bed. We had noodles together by candlelight because she couldn’t afford to turn the lights on at night. Her sister didn’t trust me from the beginning, citing a long precedence of strange men that turn out to be bad news. And who was I to explain myself to her? How could I have made her understand my past? She told me to treat her sister gently. And I betrayed her. It all reminded me of another girl, a girl named Jessica that rode me like a horse into the fire. And burned by love, or maybe a lack of love that was convincing to everyone except me, I had to part ways after she robbed me of my innocence. It wasn’t an easy time for me, those pre-college days. And I say this as though it’s been an easy time after college, but it hasn’t been. Practically my whole life has been unbearable. It was the knowledge that I was finally happy in college that fueled the explosion. Every time I figure out what I want it gets away from me. And when I’m happy, I just want to ruin it.

She suckered me into the firefight. It was supposed to be a normal day, just like any other day, as normal as our life ever got. She had been ripped off in a drug deal and I tried to appear vengeful and competent to exact revenge because I believed that maybe I loved her. Love was so nebulous in those days that any feelings at all were inevitably translated as love. It wasn’t what you’d call exploitation but maybe it wasn’t love. I dreamed of catfish that walked the land. I took this as an omen. Her mother had been a conservative woman who pushed her religious beliefs on others and she dealt with this by turning violently against her mother’s agenda. She convinced herself she could avoid becoming her mother by believing in all the things her mother did not. She spoke sentences with relish, cherishing the impact of words on her listener. She came to me as a schoolgirl gone bad, corruption as a way of existence. I fell for her immediately. She often pushed her beliefs on me and I blindly agreed in advance. We lived in an apartment above a drugstore in a small town in a western state. We would fight about the men that came around. I once caught her with his hands down her pants and she denied it resolutely, called me all the liars under the sun. Her dishonesty was at odds with her political confidence, her belief that she was being lied to by the people in charge. I guess it’s easier to lie when you think everyone else is lying to you. Or it’s easier to believe everyone lies when that’s all you do.

She threw a hammer at me while I was asleep, accusing me of sleeping with her friends, a group of girls I had only met briefly and decided immediately that we were incompatible as friends or anything else. I found them to be shallow representations of her, ghostly afterimages. I woke up alone on many occasions and I did not question her absence although my mind was flooded with images of stolen kisses and illicit behavior. I accused her of trying to make an ass of me and she threw my wallet in the toilet. I felt like an ass. So she had won. I never moved on entirely, I maintained contact with her up until the firefight. We were just coins in a fountain, no threat to anyone. She had invited me back with the promise that she had changed but in reality she was more her than she’d ever been before. The drugs had gotten to her and stripped away the niceties of her personality, leaving in their place a desperate person that would yell in the face of a homeless person, that would laugh after running over a rabbit, that would enlist a male friend to intimidate me when I was already under her control. She showed me the gun before we went in, explaining, “These guys have ripped me off before. There are always guns around.”
“It’s not a question of how much I love you,” I tried to tell her. "There has been an attempt made on my life. In so many words.”

I really didn’t know what I was talking about but I had a feeling it had something to do with a slight I had experienced at a party. Three black men had come in, dressed like Black Panthers, and they dominated the party, taking the focus away from me. I poured myself into my drink, which I quickly downed and refilled until there was no thought of being left behind. These three men were so much more forceful in personality, so much more interesting than me. I considered it involuntary character assassination and I blamed them publicly, though never to their faces. People grew tired of my incessant complaining and the circle was complete. I was once again friendless in a city that I considered amenable to my predicament.

“These guys might try something,” she told me. “I’m gonna go in first and you honk the horn after two minutes. Then you come in five minutes later.”
I agreed that this was a rational course of action but in my heart I was against getting involved at all. After honking the horn for a couple minutes, I went into the house. The house itself was a decaying ramshackle affair that stood on a fault line and had cracks in its foundations. There were no trees in the yard even though the area itself was steeped in trees. I considered this a sign of humility although looking back it was probably a self-conscious declaration of independence from nature. I could have been friends with these people. I knew that immediately. After so many years of living with people that forced me to live in tune with nature, I was prepared to have friends that sold out the hippie daydreams of a self-sufficient life. I intended to find friends that would eat fast food and throw the wrappers on the ground.

When I got inside, she already had the gun pointed at one of them. I could have been friends with these people. Shots rang out while someone walked out of the kitchen and I hit the ground and heard the bullets whizzing over my head. One of them went through my jacket as I lay on the ground, sign of a very poor aim. I was not hit but my jacket was split down the side and was useless to me. Like so many times before, I blamed myself. I was constantly losing jackets in bets, losing them in apartments, losing them to firefights.

The smoke never cleared and I crawled out of the house and ran off without looking back. That was the last I ever heard of her. There are faces I don’t like to wear but I do it. Someone once asked me how I get through life and I answered flippantly. I said, “I survive on God’s good grace.” It was a blow off answer because I found the question invasive. The actual answer to the question is, “I just do.”

It was a question of destiny on a stormy night. I had lost everything (once again) and was hitchhiking (once again). The moon was out but not seen, and the cloud cover gave the sky a rumpled blanket look. I felt like a fish on a line. I felt like glass placed in a furnace, ready for a new shape. No cars were stopping and fire raged in the distance, probably a farmer burning his crops. But I asked myself, at what point do you give up hope and burn your crops?

I had been stranded in a desert town after an off-hand remark that was taken the wrong way. I can’t remember exactly what was said now but it had something to do with politics because everything has to do with politics except for religion, which is politics to most people. I hadn’t meant to offend anyone and was, foolishly, confident that my opinion about such things mattered. So it was that I was pushed out of a car, one that had barely stopped moving, and they drove off with my backpack inside.

I entered a church, a safe haven from the wayward streets, where the wind made echoing sounds as it swooped around the steeple. I don’t know what branch of the Christian faith this church was but it had a steeple and that indicates something. I needed atonement. There was a single woman inside the altar itself, praying stoically, malevolently. Her faith was so much more powerful than anything I’ve ever had and it had to be considered a powerful weapon that could be used against me. I made my way past the altar, which was lined with candles and sported a crucified Jesus, weeping in agony. I discovered a back room where, of all things, I heard a number being called out. “7,” a voice said clearly.
“He said 7,” another voice said, louder this time.

I hesitated to move forward but there was no thought of turning back, not to face the pious woman and her quiet condemnation. She had eyes like daggers and I could feel them in my back. My face was flushed with guilt and I gently raised my hand above my head as though to be called on in class. I stretched out as far as I could but I could not touch that ceiling.
“32,” the voice said.
“That’s a 32.”
I made my decision, I stepped through the door and into the hallway.

I entered another doorway to find a roomful of seniors sitting patiently at tables. They had an intensity about them that was unsettling. Naturally, they were playing bingo. How can I describe the horror that filled me? To be locked in this struggle between good and evil, which obviously is what my life is, and to stand before the lord high executioner in such a way. I was reminded of a shipwreck survivor fearing the sight of approaching rescue boats. I tried to tell myself that I was safe here. That it’s at least a church and not a flop house under police scrutiny like I’ve stayed in before. But, honestly, how can I set foot in a place of worship when I am an unredeemable character? How have I stayed active this long, free from prison, if I have not sold out every belief these people have? And I would do it again in a second.

I imagined myself in Chicago where I can ride the elevated train and watch people as I pass by their windows. Just a blur of a man in front of a television set and then there’s a billboard there. A woman spanking her child and a split second cry from him before a long line of brick wall that refuses to end.
“Are you going to play bingo?” a woman asked me, all hair and glasses with a chain extending behind her neck. I could have died for those glasses, those eyes of pure virtue.
“She asked you a question, young man,” someone said after I didn’t reply.
I offered my hands in a supplicatory position, an I-don’t-know pose.
“You can’t come in here and sleep,” the woman with the glasses told me. “I’ve been coming here over six years and I’ve never once seen anyone allowed to sleep here.”
“It’s not a question of lodging,” I suggested. “I’ve had a run of bad luck.”
“This is my twenty-first bingo game without a win,” she told me dryly. “I don’t need to hear other people’s hard luck stories.”
“I can’t seem to find my way back to the highway,” I told her. “All the roads I went down led me back to this church.”
“You must not have looked very hard.”
“I’ve looked all my life,” I told her. “I’ve been going down the wrong roads all my life.”
“Do you have a tattoo?” she wants to know. “You can’t be buried in the cemetary if you have a tattoo.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t have a tattoo.”

I hoped this would please her because at this moment I had no other intention than to answer her questions correctly.
“You’re new around here.”
“I just got dropped off by my friends.”
“Your friends live here?”
“Just passing through.”
“This is not where you wanted to get out, is it?” she asks me.
“There was an argument,” I admit.
The number 46 is called and my conversation partner looks at her card and then back at me.
“You came along just in time,” she tells me. “Bingo!”
A man comes over and checks her card and nods to the man with the microphone. There is laughter and clapping.
“You’re my good luck charm,” she tells me. “Now what did I win?”
The man that’s checked her card, he’s wearing a suede jacket with leather patches on the elbows.

“You won a ham,” he tells her.
“Is it a big ham?”
“It’s a healthy ham.”
“Is ham good for cats to eat? I ask because my neighbor has cats and they wander over to my house and I feed them. This ham is too big for me.”
I feel forgotten and I turn to leave, intent on finding a quite corner to doze in for a few hours.
“Young man,” she says behind me and I turn around. “Would you like to come home with me and share a ham?”
“That offer is just out of this world,” I tell her.
“It’s as much yours as mine. I wouldn’t have won without you here.”
She implied that this was destiny and I believed her. Her belief was so much stronger than mine that I could take it as fact. I could just attach myself to her faith and a little bit would rub off on me.

She offered me a cot in the garage and I laid on it until dinner time. That night, after the ham and after she’d gone to bed, I quietly crept around her house looking for money. I found some in an empty mustard bottle in the refrigerator. I took it all and left, looking back over my shoulder the entire way.

He had been winning at hands of poker all night and most of us were amazed, a few thought him a cheat. We were all gathered in a circle around the game, even though we’d spent the night split up, in small groups the way a bar normally works. No one was saying anything but we all knew something important was happening.
His child had been stillborn. He told me this when we first met about two weeks prior. He asked them to sever a foot and they did. He had it encased in lucite and wore it on a string around his neck. I don’t tell you this because I think you will pity him or feel disgust or feel anything really. I tell you this because that’s just who he was and it was one of the first things he introduced me to. He said he knew right from wrong and I believed him although I had my doubts. The foot didn't look human.

He carried shotgun shells in his pockets but he hated guns. He could hold a grudge. I don’t want you to get the idea that he was a bad person, because he wasn’t at all. He was, in many ways, one of the kindest people I ever met. But he had his ways and I had mine. His girlfriend had been raped while he was in the military and he returned with a bloodlust, eager to find the culprit. But when names appeared before him, he grew wary of approaching any of the likely suspects. He told me this in secret, far away from the prying ears of his girlfriend, now wife. They’d been joined in a little ceremony on the base where they shared a house.
“Everyone was surrounding me,” he explained. “They were closing in. It was a shaved head, you know the other soldiers, and then it was long hair. And I couldn’t tell the difference.”
I told him I understood but I think the vagaries of his monologue were eluding me. This may have something to do with the mushrooms I had ingested. They were ground up into a powder and packaged in a pill.

“It’s just people,” he explained to me. “People with guns are people with bigger attitudes. I don’t know if the gun gives them a new personality or if it just brings out the real person. But I can’t stand guns. I can’t stand a person with a gun.”
“I’ve made it through life without picking up a weapon,” I offered.
He threw his empty beer bottle on the ground.
“Every person has their own version of reality. And your version isn’t important until it encroaches on theirs. They want us to go die in another part of the world for some cause that they don’t even explain to us.”
“An explanation would be nice,” I told him.
“She’s a good girl,” he told me. “She doesn’t hold anything against me. She understands I had to do my time. She never said to not touch her or anything. She understands a lot.”
“If it makes you happy.”
“She makes me happy. I almost went looking for the guy. I don’t know what I would have done to him. I don’t know where the road ends, is what I’m saying.”
“What if the road goes on forever?”
“That’s why you can’t take the wrong route. I would’ve been doing more time. And what’s the one thing we don’t get more of?”
“Love?”
“Love comes and goes. I have no illusions. I understand that she may not be here for me tomorrow. I've made my peace. I’m talking about time. Time is what is always growing shorter by the second.”

He had been winning at poker all night but I could see he wasn’t smiling. After the game broke up, he was jumped in the parking lot by two of the men he had beaten in the card game. I was too scared to get involved, too worried that I would get hurt. I’ve never been a person that can jump into a fight. I’ve seen fights but I’ve never been in one. This is supposed to make me less of a man and maybe it does, but I don’t care. I’m happy staying away from fights. I haven’t gotten hurt yet. While they were beating him, one of the shotgun shells discharged and he was killed. One of the men lost a thumb. There was blood everywhere, even I was covered in it. The police came and asked everyone questions and I became more than just a spectator. As a friend, I was asked if I could accompany him to the hospital. I explained that I needed to get home or my wife would kill me.
“Your wife will understand,” the officer told me. “Does he have a wife?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “He does. She lives on the base.”
“She would understand if things were reversed.”
“We’re talking vice versa here?” I inquired.
“Would you please put out your cigarette?”

I was sure it was over. That they were going to handcuff me right there and take me to jail to await trial. Something about my desperate face, my long hair, my unkempt appearance, had tipped them off to the fact that I was a wanted man. But they didn’t. He died right there outside the bar and they said they didn’t need me to ride to the hospital with him. They also wouldn’t let me take the money he won, even though I had given him half of it because he didn’t have enough money to enter the game.
“You can take it up with the widow,” they explained to me.

I had spent my day in all the wrong places, the Firewater Inn and so forth. I had been to a bar named exactly that not three years before and I hadn’t found anything I liked in there either. I was looking for a man named Clive, but that wasn’t his real name. His real name was something so shady that nobody believed him when he would tell them. So he went by Clive. I liked this moral pre-emptive name exchange and was looking for him because his sister said he could help me. I had misunderstood every instance of the exchange and she patiently explained to me that this is not the first or the last and it will certainly not be anything special. She had a way of talking that made you feel like a dumb kid.

Clive was rumored to have killed a black man named Ronnie K over a drug deal that went bad, or, as other accounts had it, he bought a broken stereo off of Ronnie K and beat him to death with a pistol. That was the part that frightened me. Not that he would have a gun, or that he would use it as a battering tool, but that he had the passion to do it until the person was dead. And, also, that he might have done it by accident. There are strange days when every accident has a meaning. I wondered if Clive, which was not his real name, had one of these days with Ronnie K being an unlucky participant. His sister was top heavy but with thin legs. She spoke around the stub of a cigarette butt, squinting against the smoke. She asked me to make love to her the first night we met and I shied away because she really wasn’t attractive. The next night I insisted that I wanted to make love to her, creeping with envy for her perfect little world, and she denied me. It was only much later that I realized every stop has a reason and maybe a rejection one time will inform the senses on future possibilities. Was I sad she wouldn’t sleep with me? No. I was just upset because I thought it was my choice to take or leave.

What a time to be alive. Each day was filled with promise and I saw myself cresting a ridge in some ways, turning a corner for the better. In my classic style, I was overcompensating for past misdeeds by wearing a business suit and shaving daily. It took me two weeks of shaving before my hands stopped shaking so much that I cut myself. I ate five meals a day and lived in a cabin on a campground that only cost me $6 a night on account of it being off-season. I had to walk three miles to get to town but even this was a fair ordeal, giving me time to bond with nature. It reminded me of the easy alliances of childhood. Clive’s sister suggested that she might be pregnant but it was none of my concern.
“You’re not responsible or anything,” she told me.
“I know that.”
“It can’t be yours since we’ve never slept together.”
“I know. I already said.”
“I tell you this,” she said around her cigarette, “because I think maybe you have run your course.”
“What am I,” I wanted to know, “a river? You want me to, like, get on my knees and flow before you?”
“You’re such a child,” she told me.
“Aren’t I older than you?”
She gave me a withering stare and said softly, “It’s not the years. It’s the mileage.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but later I realized this was perhaps the most important conversation I ever had. She was trying to tell me something about myself. I had been locked outside of myself looking in for some time and it was only later that I realized she was telling me something I needed to know.
Clive dismissed everything I said with a wave of his hand. “People shouldn’t be saying things about me like they’ve done,” he explained.
“It’s only on account of the fact it’s your sister.”
“I don’t have a sister.”
“You do,” I told him. “I’ve met her myself.”
“She says she’s my sister but she’s not. That’s just something she says.”
I couldn’t believe it. I was not expecting it at all and it seemed to change everything.
“How do you feel about that?” I finally asked.
“A weaker person can latch onto a stronger person,” he told me before taking a drink. “I guess that’s what all this amounts to.”
“Are you talking about me and you or you and her?”
“All of you. None of you has any guts.”
“But there are things you don’t know,” I told him. “I’m a wanted man.”
“I’ll be careful with you then.”
“I don’t say this to gain your respect. I just think you oughta know.”
“Getting everything out in the open is the proper way to do things.”
“That’s it exactly. All the cards on the table.”

“Did she say I could help you?” he wants to know.
“Yes she did. She said you might be able to help me.”
“Did she say I could or I might be able to?”
“That you might be able to.”
He took another drink and said, “I see. Sam!”
The bartender walked over, and he was the type that should have been spitting in the glass and then wiping it with a dishrag, you know the type.
“This,” Clive told him, “is a wanted man. I want you to call the police right now.”

I’ve never been sure how I ended up there with this man, this man that had killed another man over a drug deal or a stereo ripoff. And people always ask me if he was drunk at the time and the answer is yes, he was drunk. But I think I had it all wrong. I think Clive had never killed anybody over any drug deals or anything really. I think maybe Ronnie K just left town and it was all just a rumor sparked by his disappearance. The girl that was not his sister had possibly tipped him off about me, I can’t be sure. I had to leave town immediately and I lost everything that was at the campsite. It seems I’m always losing something here or there. It’s like that old saying. Wherever you go, there you are. Which couldn’t be more true. Wherever I went, I found myself. And of all the people I had been, it was this recurring character that stares back at me from across the mirror. I had never found a way to unlock what was inside but that seemed irrelevant. I was, in more ways than one, everyone I had ever met. I became determined to drown all the people I had been. To start fresh and if I didn't find something honest...I would conjure it.