Here We Rest Part 3

A Southern Crime Drama

Photo by Jenn Wood on Unsplash

The phone went dead, and the silence almost blew my eardrums out. I’m tripping. I have to be. I’ve always heard that acid flashbacks were a real thing, and if that’s true, I’m long overdue. Time has always fascinated me. I’m not an educated man, but I know everything there is to know about Einstein’s theory of relativity. Well, maybe not everything, but certainly more than most people who learned about it while geeked out, thumbing through old textbooks from the thrift store. Relative to them, I’m a genius.

When I’m low on money, I go to the thrift store or the used bookstore. It’s the only place nowadays where a man can walk in with $20 and feel like he’s the king of somewhere. Somewhere shitty, but somewhere nonetheless. You can get a copy of everything Marcus Aurelius ever said and a Harvard textbook on physics, two for a dollar. You don’t even have to like anything but a good deal to make that purchase. And considering most folks who shop at Chickaluki’s book store and their cultural appetites, I don’t live in fear of anything I like ever being sold out.

Photo by Mohammadreza Charkhgard on Unsplash

Normal human logic states that we experience time linearly. It doesn’t go backwards, and it doesn’t go side to side. As country musician Tracy Lawrence said, “Time Marches On.” I might be talking out of my ass, so don’t fact-check me, but time is relative to speed. I think that means in some galaxies, theoretically, you could spend a month on one planet and it would be like 55 years back at home. You wouldn’t have aged a day, but that puppy you bought the day before you flew out, unfortunately, will not greet you when you arrive home.

This is also how time moves when you are overcome with the sudden feeling that shape-shifting aliens live among us and one of them is your former father-in-law. Time was both standing still and rushing forwards and backwards at speeds I couldn’t comprehend. I was standing up but could not feel my legs. I was holding a phone but could not feel my arm. My mouth was open, but it had nothing to say, which really pissed my brain off because there was so much it wanted to.

Found out quick that you do not need the fear of death for your entire life to flash before your eyes. I saw it all. My first T-ball game. The Challenger exploding. My little brother hiding behind the water heater, covered in my mother’s blood from the time my dad lost a bet and split her forehead open with his class ring. I saw Sheila walking down the aisle wearing that strapless white dress and looking like she was so proud to know me, perhaps the last time she ever gave me that look. I saw her daddy’s pontoon boat on the first day he took me fishing. I tried jerking what was most likely an old, used tire that somebody had thrown in the lake so hard, reeling it in, that the lure snapped loose and slingshotted toward us like David to our Goliath. It got hooked in Sheriff Stevens’ hand. Blood was everywhere, but he just laughed because he was a tough man, and because he loved his daughter and his daughter loved me. He still has that scar, but it’s no longer something I smile about.

Photo by James Wheeler on Unsplash

I’m going crazy is what it is! Every single man in my family, even on back before the Civil War, ended up as a crazy, tin-foil-hat-wearing son of a bitch, and now my time has come. I’m not a flat-earther or anything like my Uncle Gordon, but I was hip to all that mass government surveillance way before the fuckin Patriot Act. And we’re talking way before 9/11. During this time we didn’t have internet. Well, regular folks didn’t at least. I’m sure the high rollers like Billy Ray Cyrus and Phil Donahue had them some Internet. I bet Morton Downey Jr. was one of the first people to send a racist email. The closest thing we had to anything that connected us all on the go was Randall Daughtery’s Motorola Bag Phone that I had just used to have the strangest conversation on Earth.

As far as conspiracy theories go, I certainly don’t believe in them all, hell, I’d say I don’t believe in most. But any conspiracy where you can follow the money in a straight line to a potential motive, I’ll at least entertain. Chemtrails don’t make sense to me. The flat-earth shit is so fuckin’ stupid, I’m forced to assume that the people who believe in it are all just performance artists pulling our leg. If the Earth truly were flat, why would it behoove the government to hide that fact? You have to follow the money for something to make sense, but who’s the one standing to lose money if the Earth is flat, Big Globe? I’m pretty sure people in the globe business have their portfolios quite diversified.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

Sorry if I seem like I’m sidetracking, but that’s what it’s like in my fucked-up brain. I’m shocked I’ve stayed on topic this long in the story. It’s a lot to try and make sense of, and I’ve always been someone who gets to Scotland by way of China.

Randall must’ve thought me crazy just standing there all slack-jawed staring into space, but processing this was like doing a goddamn decathlon in my head. I desperately wanted not to believe my first instinct. I was running through every possibility at light speed. I mean, hell, Doppelgängers are a thing. Shit, I get mistaken for people all the time. Usually someone’s dipshit cousin or their brother-in-law that ain’t worth a damn. I’ve got resting piece-of-shit-face. I reckon. I’ve always figured there are only so many shapes of heads and ears and whatnot that the good Lord made. You’ve got your A-models on down to a Z or so. Everything in neat little slide-out boxes in whatever celestial warehouse they use to manufacture us. Every now and again, two people who ain’t even related are fitted with enough similar parts from the stock and, as can be expected, they favor one another. Simple as.

All that is true, yet against all logic, I just knew that wasn’t the case here. That was Sheriff Stevens, dead and stinkin’, in that water, and I’d wager my life on it. Not that my life would be worth anything to a soul bookie, if such exists.

Randall called my name once more. I looked up at him and made eye contact to show that, however reluctant I may be, I was ready to talk. “Something on your mind, Sonny Boy?” he said. I blinked for the first time in a few minutes because my eyes were dry from staring at the sun like a 3rd grader. “Nope. Not a thing,” I replied. “I’m going to The Meat and 3, you want anything?”

Randall looked confused and he had every reason to be. Though Big Jeff’s Pork & Puddin’ (The restaurant is simply named The Pork and Puddin’ but everyone adds the ‘Big Jeff’s’ cause it’s more fun to say and because, surprisingly, Big Jeff owns it) had been my favorite restaurant for years, it was also where Sheila worked. She’d worked there since she was 16, and even now that she’s a teacher she still works a few night shifts a week and the entirety of summer break, which we were in at the time. It’s where I fell in love with her. It’s where I tried Rhubarb pie despite thinking I’d hate it. Because the way she said ‘Rhubarb’ was poetry. It’s where I’d eat every day for lunch even when I didn’t really have ‘goin out’ money. Cause even if I could only afford a grilled cheese and a sweet tea, I at least knew I could catch a glimpse of her. Much like that old lady with Christ, I could be satisfied just touching the hem of her garment. I finally knew I had a shot with her when she slipped a banana pudding in a bag to me. Free of charge. She told me to keep mum by placing her finger over lips more beautiful than anything Hollywood has ever put out. I have never loved anyone else since and I never will.

Photo by Alonso Romero on Unsplash

So yes, it would be painful to go there since the separation, but I had to see. I had to see Sheriff Stevens and if Sheila said she was with him, that meant he was at The Pork and Puddin, and when cops are at The Pork and Puddin they usually don’t pay, so they don’t leave The Pork and Puddin’ unless there is an emergency, which Chickaluki hadn’t had in earnest in quite some time.

“Sonny Boy, I don’t know what’s on your mind or what you are looking for here, but don’t go running into pain that you don’t have to. There’s plenty coming up from behind and gaining ground on you anyway.”

I did something then that I hadn’t done in a long time. I hugged Randall. I hugged him and squeezed him in a way that I hoped said everything without saying anything. I had a very odd feeling that I might not get that opportunity again. Then I headed to the PnP.

Sure enough, there sat Sheila and her dad. When he came in to eat, she went on break. She did not have to ask. It may have been Big Jeff’s Pork and Puddin’, but Sheila ran the show and everyone knew it. She could keep up with all her tables and whistle at the other girls like a field general to get them squared away without breaking concentration on her and Sheriff Steve’s conversation. She loved her daddy, and despite him being The Fuzz, so did I. In light of recent events, I’m not sure the feeling is mutual, but I also don’t think he hated me. He wasn’t really capable of such. No one in her family was. It sank in on me even further just how much I had fucked my perfect life up.

I walked up to the table and while she kept a kind face on in public, I could tell that she was annoyed to see me after that call. Now I was embarrassed. It was clearly not Sheriff Steve in that water. My mind was playing tricks on me cause I ain’t fed it nothing but booze and drugs all week. That combined with the inevitable decline of my mental faculties by birthright, I had finally snapped and would soon be confined to a padded room, let out once a day to eat tapioca and watch Matlock. “Fuck my life,” I thought. “You’ve really done it this time, Sonny Boy.”

And then Sheriff Stevens stood up to greet me. He put out his hand for me to shake, and as mine trembled on its way up to meet his, I noticed….

The fishing lure scar was gone.

To be continued

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