Ink pen, markers, colored pastels

I rapped on the door. It was getting late. The cold air in off the river. The sky becoming a day-old black eye. Each lot had a tree. The wind that passed over the trailers made a sound as it passed through the branches. A sound less harsh when there were leaves - when it was spring - when it didn’t suggest snow or sleet.

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Against it, my M65 field jacket, the padded liner buttoned in. Reliable in much worse weather. Reliable like good friends. But it wasn’t just the cold. It was the drive. The thoughts on the way. What brought me here.

I knocked again. It opened.

Pausing when we saw each other. Sizing each other up again and taking inventory. A ritual common to men. With a different dimension after living together in the field together. A practice of life in front lines. That men around you took better care of you then you did. An individual’s job was to be durable and alert. That was the service provided you. Ignoring needs to the point of intervention by your friends. Personal care was offloaded. The burden of your comrades - as the Dutch and Germans were fond of calling us. Always checking them up and down to see if they had all the functional parts necessary to ram home the next 155 or charge. If they came back from another detachment or battery, you made sure they were still whole. That nothing was taken by those -40-degree nights. Chatting them up to see that they were in high spirits.

Scarcely through the threshold before we hugged. Separating. I was expected. It didn’t change the fact that were excited to see each other.

He had gained a little bit more weight. Taking more of my arms to get around his already substantial upper body. Built very differently. He was a short squat with perpetually olive skin and long dark hair. I was tall, lean, long, keeping my blonde hair a bit longer than regulation.

His 9mm down the front of his pants. A reasonable precaution, even guessing it was me at the door. Having a matching one, in a matching spot. Buying them together when we got out. Besides some familiarization with hand guns, our skills had been polished since the military when ammunition was available and affordable. We put them both on the fold up dining table.

It was a space ideally fitted for a man. No more space than he needed. Enough to be warm and fed. Everything at arm’s length. I had been living with women for so long. They would never tolerate it. Eric had never had much use for women beyond the physical. I was always envious of his minimal living. When I came back here, it felt more like home than any duplex or apartment I had ever lived in. He had some memorabilia for our time in hung about the knotty pine paneling.

Out came a pack of Backwoods. I started one and handed it off. He let in the clean cold, river air when by cracking the window. He added two beers. Moving around the limited space of the trailer. Making me feel at home.

“Sit the fuck down so I can see you for a minute.”

Fetching an ash tray before he did.

There was a great deal of affection between us, though we never talked about it. Talking about seeing each other again with built-up expectation. Maybe it was a sign of maturity that I could finally express it – crude, and dressed up in profanity as it was.

I was home even looking down the lands and grooves of pistol barrel sitting on the table. It reminded me of the kaleidoscopic image of the fresh Stellite leade lining of a clean artillery barrel.

Maybe it was the state of things. Both of us were still alive when things were, every day more dangerous but especially for those of native European stock. I got the same feeling from seeing him as newly provisioned grocery shelves, a few batteries for my truck at the local auto parts store. Friends and these things are precious now. A welling up in my chest of pride, wellness, security and brotherliness. That we - everyone not in league with the communist revolutionary - kept on pushing forward, going to work, contributing and creating reasonable normalcy. When everything was falling part. What did I mean? Torn down. I hadn’t come to grips with the intention in it. That we had loved our country so much to be shipped off to one not our own. To freeze, fight, waste, to be bored to tears if not for the expectation of death, and to make a home in the slit trench that could be our grave. Juxtaposed by the so many out there that had never risked or built anything. That they were completely set against society’s every single service, function or amenity. Against its very fiber. I tried not to think of it for very long.

Sometimes I hated the North Korean, Belarussian or Russian cannoneer that knowingly sent a round out of a tube, gas washed and flame checked far beyond the point of reliable service, with gross lateral dispersion, hitting a triage, making pretty little parts out of Swedish nurses. But those were orders. They were soldiers. It was war. A fair fight. Mostly. These piece of shit Marxist revolutionaries loved their soft targets. I hated them more than any ten of those men of that Eastern coalition doing the job given.

But I wasn’t here to dine on self-pity. Here to clear my head and ask a favor.

“How you been,” I asked after he had settled into his chair.

He turned his head and looked out the window before answering, revealing his colloquially implant.

Eric had not escaped his service with his hearing. Suffering greater as an artilleryman. All sorts of studies had been done: brain scarring and consequences for the heart. More pronounced immediately after our discharge: insomnia, depression, brain fog, tinnitus. Sometime during our stint we got, first, liners. They only blunted the blast under wash. Then overpressure helmets. But as our personal protection improved, so did the platforms’ ability to launch projectiles faster and farther. With more consequences for the firer.

Towed artillery did not have the shoot and scoot capabilities of their tracked or wheeled cousins. Mobile artillery in demand on America’s three fronts. Attrition of equipment in the Pacific. The mobile type wasn’t always available. It could be dropped from the air, without its prime mover. This made it suited for the more rugged areas of Northern Finland. The old mainstay - relevant again. Enjoying its last gasps but only if it outranged its foreign counterparts. Gunnery was on the bleeding edge of technological and material stress. The failure point was becoming the gunner himself. Many 13 Bravos came back with unexplainable health conditions.

He looked very distant, though his sight was limited to a trailer over.

“I have my days when I’m pretty low man.”

Many times, the human machine broke down in combat. Drilling, inspection, personal hygiene kept you occupied. Back home. With time to think. The idle mind was the devil’s playground. There was half of him still in dutiful service. Half of me there in that night in the Arctic. Maybe, together we could be a whole person.

It was the most vulnerability he volunteered in memory but broke the confessionary air by getting beers.

When we came back, we were in different grind. Not that of the fire support. Of hefting shells. One with lower intensity but long duration. With no end in sight. The grind of family and friends not understanding. They didn’t know the church was your gun. The barrel above you like a spire. A five and half million-dollar precision instrument. Fuses set. Charges allocated. And no misses. Everyone loyal to each and the process. But at home. Malaise and mediocrity permeated everything. Everyone was out for themselves.

“Me too.”

An extended pull off my cigar.

Eric and I weren’t fags. We never showed the slightest inclination but I could understand, in times past, in pagan cultures how men - soldiers preferred the company of other soldiers. Nothing more emasculating than death at the hands of another man but it was something we’d gladly risk if it meant our battle buddy came out alive. No woman could ever offer that. That was love.

“So, you had it out with your old lady huh?”

What was happening to the country was a weight, and anything was smashed or reluctantly pushed out to two sides. For the first time. In the small warm confines of the trailer. I was willing to admit that we separated because I couldn’t stand to be in the presence of weakness. She could no longer bear up. Every time I talked to her about the news. Creating a contingency. To get out of the city. Visiting my uncle until things cooled down. She changed the subject or deferred it to another time.

“It’s a mess. She’s a mess. Over these stupid commie cunts and these fucking volunteer hours.”

It wasn’t the only reason. It was shitty and falling apart for months. After all, what did women know about men. When it was good. When it was new and novel, they got good at pretending to know. That was enough most times.

Joining a renter’s union to get the discounted rate on the lease we could barely afford. The union raised the volunteering from 10 to 15 hours a week. Handing out handbooks about the Maoist characterization of Landlord at the at the local book store.

“You know you can stay here.”

They prepared the space for the arrival of The Sons but were quite capable of independent activities. Advocates for Union busting, or those resisting their efforts could be beaten, shot at or killed.

By the time I came back from my truck it was almost dark.

A tradition was aimlessly walking land adjacent to the river at night talking for hours. It wasn’t the real catching up until on the river. Knowing we might be setting out soon, I raised the lid on my Grandfather’s ALICE pack.

“Can I see it,” Eric asked.

The full grain leather sheath was felted around the edges, especially where Pap had charged it with compound for stropping. Eric turned it over in the regressing winter light. Coming to me from the sheen of the new Balistol on the blade. Observing the markings. Twin Xs. Returned, I put it under my belt at the small of my back.

“You’re rolling heavy as fuck.”
“You know me.”

Our walks were supremely dangerous even in the time before the The Sons. The area around the park was mostly industrialized. The pockets of housing were low rent repositories for criminals. To say nothing about the gangs, the homeless and getting shaken down by the cops if caught in excess of curfew. Naturally, the danger was part of the attraction.

He gathered his keys, and got me another beer. He even put two more in the bottomless pass-through pocket on the front of his blanket shirt.

I returned my pistol to its proper place.

His great grandmother had grown up on a reservation in Oklahoma. He claimed she was Myaamia. Thinking the heavy wool shirt, in a French trade pattern made him look the part. Standing before me, I saw it in a way I hadn’t before. On a walk, when we discussed all things high minded, he said he was drawn to the river. Explaining the only reason he could deal with having his heart broken by being ripped from ancestral lands was that, now, finding his way back to Ohio, the Great Miami could flow through the center of that break. He told me he would live and die on it. Because it was where he was meant to be. A beautiful and tragic thought. Sticking with me. The idea of belonging. Dying on the land where you were born preferred over endless drifting or being an unwelcomed guest somewhere else. Taking on a new context with the displacement of white European American’s. As if displacement of those tribal people put a blemish on the land. It warped the record. The needle stuck in a groove it couldn’t get out of. To end the tone. And to play it again.

We bundled tightly with our various items from base PX. Cold weather flyer’s gloves from an entirely other branch of service. Not enough for the temperatures. But I knew I could get my finger into a trigger guard should I need to.

My beer came with. Public intoxication would be the least of our worries if we ran into the police. They rarely came this way. It was a surefire way to get into a gun battle. Inhabitants of the park didn’t have much to lose. A community left to its own devices. I had an overstuffed medium ALICE and a friend’s hospitality keeping me on this earth, and I wasn’t sure that was enough.

Thought it was home, the park was still dangerous. The country was a patchwork of ethnic and religious pockets, and they became outward facing during times like these. Groups were heartened by the progress and message of The Sons. When you saw them they had thousand-year-old scores to settle behind their eyes. Unfortunately for us, they often numbered more than two. Attacks over dominance, territory or, just as often common robbery. Again, if that happened, we’d be going to guns. Better to go out in a blaze than have your neck under a cheap Chinese made Saif from a paper barrel at the nearest Halal market.

Our thoughts as we checked the gap between trailers.

The office for the park was a rotunda with block wings. With glass block windows. The park was built in the late 50s. Cheap housing for American’s returning from a previous foreign war. The entirety of its charm. It was far more tired since I had been last but, other than that it was unchanged. I loved it here.

The receiving office, the landmark we associated with leaving the comparative safety of the grounds. Every pack of dogs. Had their territory. We were leaving ours. Into common circulation.

But where could you be where the night wasn’t more dangerous. We liked the night. Something the winter solstice had done to us. Months with only 4 hours of daylight. Serviced weapons and equipment, shaved, ate and shit in it. Light discipline was religious. Comfortable, better in the dark.

Not the gangs then but the flying trash. The all-in-one term used for the drones. Laminated balsa wood, foam core with a composite or birch veneer, new or recycled card board with wax or silicone impregnation. At the end of our stint, it was plastic wrappers compressed and heat formed, then wrapped in heat shrink vinyl. You could literally dissect wings and body parts and still read Cyrillic branding of common food and cosmetic products. Some drones from factories in the Russian interior. Others made in field factories very close to the front. Leaving no long logistical trains to target.

I tossed my bottle in the grass. Lit another Cigar. Offering Eric one.

They came to us like biblical locusts. The wire guided were more the worry of the border Jagers. Ours were the gliding ones. Unlike FPV drones or smarter more complex, rotor driven types it had a preregistered target, and there was no signal to jam, no operator to find or target. They could be launched like a model rocket from a field station or in man portable cassettes, numbering as many as three. Rocket motors adapted from the same cheap available types used in many Russian antiarmor weapons. Just enough to get it into the air. They were very hard to hear with no prop or rotor and after they were positioned for their near vertical strike trajectory, they came down very fast. When they weren’t emptying it out to fill in the lines, they had the prison system organized to make components. I suppose, before long they’ll have school houses turning them out. Maybe they had since our deployment.

There were long lonely roads in parallel to the power plant grounds. Some years ago, there had been a bombing. All over the news. Eric had described it as very near to Armageddon. He felt as if he had been turned over in his bed with a spatula. With his park so close to the plant, all he could see was fire. There was fire damage even to some of the trailers in his park. It was the worst infrastructure attack the country had ever seen. He was without power for months. Old fire scars all around. The plant’s outbuildings showed damage, repair or replacement. We had circumnavigated the plant many times on our walks but I had not since the truck bomb. The scale must have been tremendous.

Walking for hours. Our mouths busy with our cigars or beers. Just being satisfied with each other’s presence and the presence of the river.

Crossing over a timber rail bridge. It had the low, minimal wire cable type guard. The foot walk was perforated metal. We did it to make the walk feel even more perilous. Doing shit like that to blow our hair back. Just to feel alive for the time it took to cross. To have the shine of the river through timbers. Under our feet. That was our thinking previously. With my newfound homelessness. With the country falling apart. Dark boundless, impenetrable future in front of me. It looking none too bright. Afflicted and asking why us. We did it to have the experience of walking out on the water like Peter. But with safeguards against our sinking due to lack of faith.

Eric had never stopped on the bridge but he did now.

“I love it out here.”

“Me too.”
We enjoyed our cigars. When the beers were gone the conversation started. I wanted to bring up the big ask. But feeling it wasn’t the time.

Coming upon a paved ramp that would take us up to street level. When we crested the hill.

I popped the buttons on the storm flap of the M65, and bared the brass dogs’ teeth of the no.10 zipper. I could’ve likely accessed the Glock with it closed, the zipper only three-quarter length. But I wanted nothing in the way of my draw stroke.

We weren’t alone in the night.

These men moved heavy with impunity. Even laughing. Already knowing who they were by their dress and numbers. Their leader was out front. We met first.

“How’re you doin’?”

He became friendly when he noted our coloration. Not a big man. Not of imposing stature. But his chest and shoulders filling out his Navy Pea coat.

There was no reason to be rude. I nodded.

The one out front adjusted their pacing. Then they stopped. Beginning to cloud around us but to one side. They didn’t want us to feel too hedged in just yet.

“What’s your name brother?”

The term of endearment broke some of the tension. He was addressing Eric.

His boys backed off. Giving him space for the sell. To see our reaction.

The recruitment arm hardest to resist weren’t the ones that told you the consequences the country would face if you didn’t join up. Like a preacher that threatened you with an eternal lake of fire. Not enough to change your mind. We had already been to Hell. It was Finland. And it was cold. The effective ones offered you the brotherly affection that you missed every day since your service. Many were servicemen themselves, therefore, already had currency with you. This one was smart. Persuasive. Had earned his P.

Satan always showing as an angel of light.

“Eric.”

We might’ve kept rolling. Not engaged. Hoped they didn’t take exception. If not for the beers. Not sure the conversation was much safer. If we said the wrong thing. Of course, with our guns, we wouldn’t take an ass whipping. Two magazines in my front pocket. My Grandfather’s knife down my back. It was a bad place for a gun fight, open, little cover, they knew it.

At least one knew why my jacket was open to the frigid river air. He was smiling. His smile, the model for dental hygiene. Like the new snow that fell on marshland peat coming up from a corduroy road after the passage of several Finish Moukari. A white made so by contrasting its opposite.

“What was your MOS?”

He knew even with Eric’s Navy deck cap covering his colloquial.

It wasn’t that we weren’t sympathetic. One side or the other or crushed in the middle. The fascist side appealed to us. Capitalism was officially dead. The bootstrap had been pulled on one too many times and had broken. An intelligent observation by the left and these fascist groups, that we were in a period of monopoly capital earmarking the end stage. My late Grandmother’s southern proverb came to mind. Capitalism could determine the cost of everything but the value of precisely nothing. Eric and I were no friends of the corporation.

“13 bravo.”

Eric still had a degree of pride when he said it.

The appeal of fascism was its promise to martial all resources to destroy the left. That was something laissez faire market Darwinism couldn’t offer. Private property too distracted by acquiring more to protect itself against its devourers. The fascist revealing inconvenient truths. Individual agency in these markets was an illusion. It was syndicates, cartels, mobs and gangs. With that being the case, their offer was that banded bundle of sticks. If everyone played for a team. You wanted to pick one with a reasonable expectation of winning. They filled in the postum of American upward mobility with discipline and group identity. They asked what about the blood. What about the soil? The free capitalist agent was rudderless, homeless and rootless. Exactly as I stood before them but without the money.

“The big guns. Where?”

He knew his shit too.

They captivated the minds of many disaffected young men. Men made dangerous by betrayal from the war, the economy and the political machine. They were jobless, sexless and directionless.

“Finland.”

It was one answer too many. Mentioning the theatre was a problem. Though a grievous offense in many countries to be a part of the international forces and be cliqued up with the Priests, we had had met some. Transmitted in whispers. In the darkest parts of the trench.

We had been fighting on the very same lakes and valleys where the Germans and a family of Europeans had met Bolshevism. Where they had protected fortress Europe. Only a handful of generations ago. Some of them were veterans from Ukraine, Moldova, Poland. Eastern Europe. Where Western Christianity met Islam. Now Europe was rotten through with it. The recruitment started with that mythos. It was their magic. And it was a powerful magic.

Many, many American servicemen came back affiliated or spouting the rhetoric. They would wonder why we weren’t.

“Good pure, white, Scandi stock. Perhaps you heard of us there?”
It went without saying. Now they would know we were resistant.

If it cracked off. Smiley got it first. I’d be looking for that smile in the dark.

If Eric and I agreed on an objection, it was that they were nominally Christian. Better said - they technologized Christianity for their ends. Their inborn ideological flaw was the same as the one that caused America to stray. In the American case it was: Adam Smith, Henry Ford and, lastly Jesus Christ…if time allowed. Their version: Evola, Heidegger and, finally Jesus…when he was not in the way of the advancement of the volk. Their form of Christianity was beyond these things given to us. And their Christ existed divided. Prayer had gotten us both through the long solitary nights. That left Eric and I as gang of two. And if anything went wrong in this conversation, three, if we were reunified with our loving creator.

“The Sons are here. Soon you’ll wish you had your P.”

He pulled down his black scarf and revealed a blue P next to what I knew was an old bullet wound. Where his beard didn’t grow.

As former servicemen we were already half way to one. I shuttered to think about what you would do for the other half.

When The Sons got rolling, we would be wishing for many things. The P the least of it.

“What’s wrong with your friend there? He don’t talk?”
I knew Smiley would have something to say.

I had read some about creative visualization. I was a big believer in it. Out of the night came a rehearsal of placing that glowing red dot on that smile, and keeping the circle it danced tight as I pulled the trigger. Or, if it came to it. If we went to hands first. Using the knife in the manner my grandfather described. Bringing the hammer butt down on his head, and on the upward swing, putting the blade in his precious, hard-won P.

Eric took his hat off. He put his hair behind one of the implants.

“I don’t hear real well, and he doesn’t talk real well.”

It was Eric’s way of letting them know that, between soldiers that had not come back entirely as they went off, it was inappropriate to press the issue further.

He had saved us all.

The rest of the walk went on without a further hitch.

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Tommy Lee Jones in the movie adaption of The Park Is Mine

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This is a review of The Park Is Mine by Stephen Peters. A fun book with a crazy premise. Not to be taken too seriously. It represents an entertaining book that you might want to read between more heady or intellectual literature.

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Pencil, Ink Pen

“Remember what we talked about. Everything I say.”

She shook her head cutely. She put on her bottlecap necklace. She was taught the clicks on the cap to let me know what danger she saw, in the unlikely event she saw it before me. We drilled hand signals as well, if I saw it before her. It was just like in town, and the built-up areas. The trees changed nothing. It was important that you saw it, before it saw you. It was the name of the game.

It was a vacant road ending in city planned flood plain, along with training walls and concrete spur dykes; an overarching scheme for flood control.

We were lucky in that the trail was once a gravel access road, and the gravel kept the grass down. The grass would allow someone to get very close. Already pitying those persons, having created such a hunger for the trail; a man three days fasted for a great feast, and only starting on the preliminaries of appetizers. A near ambush made me think of the MP5 nose down in a bottle pocket second but the coin shop knife fastened to my hip first. In my hunger, in the case of the ambusher, the 9mm submachine gun would be a great mercy if I got to it. In my being desirous of Maria’s young body and my hate for anyone that might be an impediment to our rescue mission, I was still very much of a simian mindset and the Word had, unfortunately not driven from me those old habits entirely.

It was more about looking for a likely geographical or natural fixture from which an ambush could be launched rather than the people with the intentions. Yes, the river corridor put us below street and housing plat but was home to many linear danger zones: bridges, places where viable trail disappeared or was hedged in, turned into funneling points by hills, saddles or flood damming. And such a danger zone came into view after only an hour on the trail.

An old rail bridge with the wood or metal, skeletal remnants from simpler, long removed signaling apparatus still clung to it.

Before arriving at it, I looked for sign, clothes, bottles, cans, anything that might indicate human activity. I saw none on the trail. In a rural section of the trail, and the homeless or displaced would be closer to town and its resources. This was good from the standpoint of running to anyone in number but bad that, if allowed it lowered alert.

Black and oxidized red iron works with timbers on top, covered in and housing little black holes from which to ejaculate assailment on trail weary passers. I focused the monocular on every one. I covered my unaided eye with the free hand so that it wouldn’t fatigue being closed for the extended time I had to glass the bridge. Another reason for glassing the trail was that, with the pistol and sub machine gun we had no answer for the far ambush. I pressed in on the levy to steady the monocular.

“Remember our spacing.”

She shook her head.

She remembered but it was a reminder that, at this critical juncture there could be no mistakes.

I wrapped the neck lanyard around the monocular and returned it to the flannel pocket.

We moved like cats, in the dark to our layup position. We would have to sit and wait in the cold until the signal maintainer showed. We were nailed down, and that was very dangerous. If someone saw us, we couldn’t move and miss our ride. There was one way into the city and one way out.

Despite being quite warm from the hike in I set my rucksack down and retrieved my coat. I would need it soon.

“Please don’t sit on the ground. The pad remember?”

She knew nothing of the danger of the trail.

I remembered a colleague from SERE school sat down on the ground in the cold during a solo exercise. He explained that he simply remembers waking up on the gurney receiving fluids.

She was going sit in the thick but frosty grass, thinking that it would be enough insulation with the poncho liner she was wrapping herself in just now. I worried often about her lack of worldliness and ability to think about these things. She put out her accordion matt to sit on.

I would be on my feet, glassing our surroundings. The monocular was not conducive to long term use or broad field of view, better to have binoculars but it was all that I could carry. Using it along with unmagnified scanning, looking for any danger.

Just half an hour in some manifested from the leafless brush. It was the brush that grew in fenced in dead spaces along highways. Two appeared, then three more. Eight in total, and moving very fast. It wasn’t the number. It was the pacing. You didn’t run unless you had something to run to. Eight mud smears, and they were heading our way. Trying to follow them with the monocular, having their number but not their armament. No long guns to speak of.

“Here we go.”

Maria, not knowing what I meant with my mouth but seeing my hands pinching the buckle and releasing the bag containing my gun.

“Pack up. Get ready to move.”

“What is it?”
It didn’t matter what it was.

“Eight men. Heading our way. They might pass us over.”

Maybe they were running away, instead of to something. Maybe we got that lucky. But then, I thought about the horses, and thought not. It wasn’t the concept of the omen. It was what the old man said. The whole world. The whole world was an enemy of what we were trying to accomplish, and these eight were no different.

I got up on the tracks. Maria joined me, on our bellies. She had to see. There was a dead animal on the track, and it smelled like the next few minutes if these men didn’t keep going.

“They’re going by.”

She whispered, though there was no chance of their hearing us.

They were on the valley floor. Feet beating the gravel. When the two on point unsheathed their machetes, the waking light hitting the shot blast metal I knew they weren’t going by.

“Nope. J hook. Coming around and approaching us from where they’ll get the closest before we see them.”

She made the sound that she always made when distressed, like a mouse in a trap. I looked over at her pretty fat face. She looked to be in the pain that she had when I groped her breast.

It was an unfortunate fixture of fighting that I often became an animal just before or at the suggestion of one. It was mostly violence that I thought of but, in Maria’s company, I thought of burning in carnal desire. I wanted her more than all eight of those men together. Eight men, starving for every one of Maslow’s needs and then some. If they caught up to us, they’d fuck her to death. But they’d have me to go through to do it.

For them to have survived this long, for them to move together, like migratory birds, they had been more smart than lucky. Until now. They would make the mistake this morning.

I crawled back down and into our grassy depression. I retracted the bolt and inserted the magazine from my pocket. I slapped the charging handle. Even in the case of eight machetes, the gun was still the best help a man could get.

I read something, some time that in soil there was every chemical constituency related to the human body. That metal was drawn from the soil by burning it. If from dust we were drawn and to dust we shall return, and if, all over Europe the Germanic fighter had been interned in this dust and this dust used to make it. If, by this process war used men twice. Then there was a Teutonic soul trapped in this firearm. It was too bad I was now made to never use it.

“Get up on the tracks, and don’t come down. Look for the maintainer. Do not fire your gun until I go down or if they come around back. Do you understand?”

The idea of my going down in her eyes and on her gorgeous face. I had made it worse with the night we spent together.

The elevated tracks would put her fine shapely, Hispanic body, evident even under top coat on an auction block, and they would see her but if they persisted, it might be the last thing they see.

Maybe the maintainer would show early.

I backed away from the crest of the hill. I put Maria and the tracks at my back.

“Put your back to mine, and watch our six o’clock. They might send some around back. Tell me if they separate.”

Probably not. They would see her posted on the track with command of the tracks, the valley floor and any avenues of approach to us.

“They stayed together but I can’t see them anymore.”

That meant they would be on top of us soon.

Dirty heads and hats appeared just above the crest of the hill. I could’ve positioned myself on the crest of the hill and fired on them. I was confident in my abilities with the Swedish made red dot sight to be rid of most of them before they made it up. That was the old me. But it was like Jude said – the hurting had to stop. To let them crest the hill was tactically dumb but spiritually sound. This was a rescue mission. Jude needed rescuing, and so did these eight. But I had no illusions about their reciprocating Christian Charity. If they came in farther than that grassy crest, then it was not without purpose that I bear the sword.

They let out a unified war cry and came over.

There was the pleasant report of the MP5 and, simultaneously the cymbals clang of the 9mm against one of their machetes. The blade went off into the grass. His hand recoiled, having either been injured by the machete being ejected or from the splash of the bullet fragments, the bullet hitting so near to the hilt. Like their bonsai cry, the sound was so pronounced on the dry winter air. It caused them to stop their advance. The man’s hand was bleeding.

Only a long arm of such engineering could’ve delivered the shot. I knew the German roller locking to shoot like a gamma knife.

The sound, the accuracy, the suddenness. They knew I, and the gun with me would center punch most of their flaking clay foreheads before one machete had meat.

They understood that I had hesitated to fill them up when they appeared. It encouraged retreat because they knew I had voluntary given ground. But they would have no more. As far as it depends upon you be peaceable with all men – and now it depended on them. The reach of their weapons. How fast they could close that fifteen yards distance. The things they would do to Maria.

I pushed the calfskin of my contact glove in on the trigger. To fire again, and still have 28 reasons why they should find two easier victims. The first one stepped back, and, like school fish or any organisms that behaved or moved as one, they all began moving back.

Some of them wore their blankets with heads through neck slits secured with a sash that was once, and would be again a scarf. The fleece of the box store blankets had their nap rendered shearling by dirt and skin oils. Or they wore their blankets secured in the manner of the American native with it over one shoulder and secured with bailing twine or shoelace at one hip. If the blanket was brightly colored it was splotchy dyed with walnut husk, so as not betray their position. Perhaps a war veteran among them, in great supply in the ranks of the homeless to teach them or learning through necessity camouflage. If not a blanket, then oversized hooded sweatshirts worn to rags, and if not a sash then a belt with box cutters in those plastic or leather sheaths grocery stockers used to wear. Maybe they had ditched their backpacks for an assault but they looked to be carrying much of what they needed to survive, momentary in the harsh weather. Some treaded lightly or snuck on sandals in varying states of deuteriation, with socks against the cold. Having their hair slicked back with gray mud or clay and faces colored with wood ash. They looked positively Aboriginal. Their smell hit us before their machetes. They

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held them one or two handed and the sheath were retained by their sashes or slung across their back with the same bootlace that fastened their blankets.

When food systems were stretched to their limits by irrigable farmland being replaced by sprawling data centers or ill-conceived carbon offset farms, and even sitting intentionally fallow the society’s offscouring had suffered the most. Food banks, charitable organizations, churches and gleaning programs had strained to the point of failure and suspension of services. Being on the street became cannibalistic, and the word was not used euphemistically. Food scarcity, though lacking ingenuity and deniability was an effective way to totally decimate the indigent. These were the survivors. They had grouped up into crews or cells for banditry of all types. I heard about them, in extreme cases ripping off entire semi-trailers. These men before us seemed adept examples.

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Sat down last night with the man, the myth, the legend @Dave Gray (The Motor City Mangler) to talk about my debut novel Beset. Ironically enough, we talked about war on the day for it - Memorial Day. In addition to such topics as: spirituality, where’ stories come from, crafting characters, movies, history, working class woes and the Colonel Kurtz vibes.

This was a blast, and I can’t wait to do it again.

Had the interview gone on for another ten minutes, I think we would’ve solved the world’s problems but we stopped short so you guys and gals would have something for next time.

Dave Gray’s professionalism and acumen really blew me away, and I think he’s got a future in the interview game. He’ll also be breaking into the publishing game soon. Homeboy’s killin’ it.

https://substack.com/@urbangravedave?utm_source=global-search

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https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Beset?id=AQAAAEBacEIwCM&hl=en_US

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Chapter 1# Inventory

Everything to be itemized, every ounce counted. The walk so very far. Shelter, water and food, but things ancillary to traveling clandestinely. Not all miles were created equal; some miles more miles than others. A step was not the same when it came to rest upon contested ground, and there was no shortage of contest on my way.

Amid an Ohio winter, dangerous because of its fickle personality, its murderous contemporaries in the common highway robber, and forward reconnaissance elements of The Sons of Disobedience.

Limitations imposed by weight, forty-five pounds the target, with water it would prove to be well over. The more it neared sixty, I would be paying more attention to where I placed my foot than threats exterior to the contours of the trail. That could prove fatal given where I was going. The size of my rucksack, an envelope to sustain three days of operations, 2000 calories a day, far below what I would be burning under such a load and given the weather.

A day in, a day to find Jude, a day out. My ride wouldn’t wait.

Everything was spread on the twin bed. My rucksack entirely dissected, its various organelles placed separately for inspection.

The fittest I had been since before the commune, I couldn’t say I was the twenty-year-old strong back from my military days, able to carry a full complement of sustainment gear, plus arms.

Add to that the distance - that terrible distance.

The kerosene heater watched on, restraining commentary, instead protesting being replaced as my one companion upon her return.

Not just a woman but the precipitating event. The fork in the road. She came in like the sudden winter storms I remembered from Mountain Warfare School in Vermont. She came to bend your life like a welding rod, never to be returned to pristinely straight.

The comparison of her and the news she bore to the experience of Mountain Warfare School, also apt because of my embarkation on the type of unsupported, long ranging operation that typified the program, though twelve years removed. I hadn’t lived out of a rucksack for some time. The fear the skills necessary had oxidized and would have to be polished to shine on the trail.

I could hear light, womanly steps and a soft knock at the door. Three steps took me from the bed to the door, three steps getting you anywhere you wanted in the workshop loft.

Maria was standing in a three-quarter length wool top coat, her hands deep into her pockets, bundled to the chin in my borrowed scarf. I ushered her in without delay. Cold was devastating to her condition.

“Come in.”

In the midst of her depletion, she would often look, loiter and feel before speaking, trying to divine answers before expending the energy to ask. This allowed her to become quite the empath and autodidactic. She would need that for the places and the people we would have dealings with.

She turned her beautiful face, not the caramel coloration of memory on the bed. She had to know such an inventory would take place. Even noticing the 9mm submachine gun on the bed, no effort made to conceal it, part of acclimating her to the seriousness of the undertaking.

“Are you ready for today?”

Easier to shake her head than speak.

“We’re you ever taught to use one of these?”

I produced my .357 revolver from the nightstand. I turned the muzzle down and showed her the empty charge holes, closing the cylinder. Holding it as if it had the potential to burn her. She needed to be taken from handling it as a thing to handling it as possibly the one thing to carry her through this experience. Needing to carry it, move with it and aim it true, to have and to hold when I wasn’t there.

“Two hands on it.”

She did as instructed.

“Too low. Get them as high as you can. As close to the top of the grip tang. Close to the hammer. Its gonna come back but it won’t hurt you.”

I shook my head in approval as she adjusted her grip.

“Now turn your thumbs down. Like you’re making two fists.”

They needed to be away from the cylinder release latch, under recoil she could inadvertently engage it.

“Like this.”

I was standing next to her.

“Can I show you?”

She shook her head. Getting behind her, I began to mold her grip. It would’ve been easier without her wool gloves but she was still and always recovering from the cold. When I relinquished my hold on her hands the front sight dipped as if I had been the only thing holding them up. She leveled it again.

“That’s better.”

With her grip proper, it was the aiming.

“Put the front sight in that notch.”

“I know.”

She wanted me to know she was putting forth the effort. I put her in front of the window, cracked to allow air for the kerosene heater. Stretched out before us, acres of fallow farm land. She aimed it across the room, not at all different than mine at the commune as it related to dimensions or interior furnishings.

“Now put your finger on the trigger. Squeeze slowly.”

The hammer came back with much hesitation, her cold weakened finger resisting the main spring, finally slapping down like a metallic gavel. She flinched and batted her pretty eyes.

“See, nothin to it.”

“Can you show me again?”

“As many times as you need.”

She pressed her body into mine, intentionally muddling her grip so that it needed fixing.

“Remember, I said thumbs down.”

She remembered but didn’t.

“They can’t be near this cylinder latch.”

Playing along, and fixing her thumbs. By the time everything was in proper alignment, she was no longer looking at the sights. Suddenly having the strength to push into me, forcing me to adjust my footing on the roughhewn slats and push back. She lowered the gun and turned around. She made her knees weak. Upon sensing this I put my arms around her, as much to hold her up. She added her weight to my arms enough to make me feel her dependency on them. Maybe playing up her illness. She didn’t look up at me, just pressed her face into my neck. She didn’t kiss me. Her lips weren’t firm. They just rested there. Her lips were hot, her nose, ice cold, running, slick and wet from the cold. Her weight, her pressing that fat of her lips thin on my neck said take me before death does, not caring that the bed wasn’t clear for such a thing. She just let her head fall against my collar bone with her eyes closed. No longer able to tell if she was playing possum. Maybe she was leaving her neck bare to have it returned with the characteristic vigor of a person not casting their shadow across death’s threshold. Maybe she figured if she closed her eyes, I would put her to bed.

I man handled her over to the burning kerosene to see if it inculcated the heat that would bring her back to life.

I sat her in a red velveteen armchair. It was likely original to the parcel’s farmhouse, displaced by modern furnishings in the farmhouse proper. While creaky, it was still structurally sound the way things were made in that era to far outlast the maker.

The claustrophobic room, when not in use by locals was rented to those passing through for harvest season work details. On the rare occasion I was furnished it, and with no TV to speak of, I sat in that, my single piece of furniture staring through the reclaimed wood casement out at that harvested horizon. My arms sitting flaccidly on the bald arm rests. The chair the mechanism, along with hours by which my thoughts were interrogated, the device especially useful since her visit to the farm. The chair might provide her the same service.

She had bouts of extreme weakness, and maybe this was one of them or a clever tactic. After clearing the bed, I transferred her. She just looked up at me with a neutral stare, no more energy for her to demand company.

“We’ll do this after you get some rest.”

I hope she knew I meant bringing her up to speed on the revolver. After all, it was her room, and I had to head into town for supplies.

I loaded each charge hole of the cylinder, and pocketed the speed loader. Seating the gun firmly into the nubuck interior of the holster. Insane to think of going into town without it. It never left my side even on the farm.

The farm situated in an area with sympathetic and aware neighbors, and even being traversed by employees, occasionally its sanctity was breached. Days ago, a few highwaymen breached the farm’s fence, and one was worked over with a post hole digger in the hands of the owner’s son. Thankfully, they made their escape instead of pressing the issue. The men got off light considering he was always within reach of the 30/30 lever action in a leather scabbard on his horse or behind a tractor seat. During especially tense times, it might be complemented by .45 Colt revolver, a securely fastened thumb break away from being at hand. I saw the Colt often during my first few months, the trust of the family not easily won, even by those seeking spoil through honest labor.

I came down the steps leading up to the apartment. Before I could leave, I fed the woodstove, part of my various duties. All trips into town had to be okayed by the old man. It was precarious, with very few on the farm trusted to do it not enforce. I would be borrowing from the fleet of well used trucks, and sent with money for supplies beyond those related to my own needs. Representing a significant investment, my retrieval in the event of delayed return.

While adding the last log, the patriarch himself entered. He was holding the double bit axe head I had seen him toying with yesterday.

“Soaking in linseed oil didn’t work?”

“No sir.”

He went over the bench vise where the new handle awaited the eye of the head. Removing his gloves for fine work, and going about putting the head on. He inserted the wedge in the portion of the handle slotted.

“I need to go into town.”

He handed over a paper from the pocket on his wool stormer. It was yellowed around the edges, being old stock, atop the farm’s letterhead. I wondered how many transactions had been conducted on the pad from which it was drawn.

“Your lady friend resting?”

“Yea, try not to make too much of a racket.”

We talked as he drove the wedge in. The brief period we were in her room together, too short a time to engage in any turpitude but long enough to be aware. Even at his advanced age, few goings on around the farm ran fugitive from his notice. It didn’t help that she was walking about in articles of my clothing. There would be no shacking up on the premises beyond the boundaries of marriage. He gave me more leeway given the fidelity I had shown the farm, because of Maria’s infirmed state and my being her one care giver.

This tension created by Maira’s unexpected visit advantaged me concealment for the real conundrum, having to tell Bill that I would be leaving very soon, and may not be returning. The worst part is that I couldn’t tell him why or where.

“Does she have everything she needs?”

Bill could be a real son of a bitch, not unlike the bread allowance we got from the farmhouse kitchen, a thick interminable crust with a warm soft interior. He was capable of compassion but the table was so very low and the bucket had to be drawn up. His face was traversed by every line on every conceivable point of articulation, with a fading scar on his cheek from the surgical excision of a carcinoma contracted from a lifetime in the sun. He had wild gray hair, only cut when it interfered with wearing his wool stormy kromer, its shearling lining yellowed by sebum and cigar smoke. The errant gray hair had seeded itself in his ears and his nose, his eyebrows looking like some of the more senior brushes he used on the coat of the bowed back American Quarter Horse that had adopted Bill’s temperament. He ate richly, and lived richly but lean times had come to the farm, and he had lost weight since my commissioning. The beginnings of his deuteriation coincided with the land he so faithfully stewarded. We took palliative measures but, ultimately the farm would go to some lumbering conglomerate – on the horse manured air of the farm was the blood of an Englishman.

“We need more kerosene, and some other items.”

He handed the keys over. A big deal was never made about my trips into town. Much about farm life made the serious mundane, continually entrusted with tasks risky to life and limb but it was every day.

“She’s sick?”
He knew she was.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”
“Kopis Sarcoma, cancer of the epithelial lining of the blood vessels.”

Jargon to him.

“Will she get better?”
“No.”

The uninsulated sheet metal interior was all the louder for having spoke back the finality of Maria’s condition.

He went about using a fine-tooth Japanese saw to remove much of the material standing above the axe eye. He returned to his work, as men often did when exposed to emotions they weren’t equipped to winnow into seed and chaff.

“We’re getting a load of wood.”
It mean that I would have some stacking when I got back but he was gracious enough to

give me the weekend off to spend with my female caller.

With that I brought more wood into the shop before setting off.

…

Town was comprised of a farm and fleet, where I obtained my kerosene and a three-store strip. The lack of any kind of real commercial center greatly reduced the criminal element but, unfortunately made it more desperate when it could be found. My neck, its innate interest in self-preservation, swiveled my head. All the time scanning. The key to whole thing was to see the threat before it saw you, and for it to see that you saw it. Every stop sign or light. The cold furnished the excuse for the pedestrian traffic to have their hands deeply pocketed. Out of any could come a weapon. Watching eyes. I sideways glance. Gate and pacing, too slow or too fast. Watching how they watched.

I was not above suspicion. The town was so small that you had to watch what you wore, how you talked and what about. Your face, your vehicle had to be known. It was give and take, and townsfolk willing to conduct business did so with a circumspect eye. They had upper limits on risk exposure.

One of the stores was a coin shop that also carried second hand and surplus wares. They knew me here but still no allowance for a misstep. I also tried to keep my time therein brief. Riffraff could come off the street, making a visit especially tense.

It had two large windows out front but stoutly barred like the front door. The entrance a solid looking aluminum thing. At the end of every business day, the entire inventory, along with the till went into the centerpiece of the room, a black iron monolith. Dissuading break in attempts since the 1880’s. So large, and so secure to the deck that even if tethered by logging chain it might reduce my F350 into a smoking, steaming ruin before budging. The safe was the reason they kept the windows. Anyone peering in would instantly know any attempt to get at the valuables therein was ludicrous. That didn’t keep desperation and stupidity from prying hammering and testing the door with every tool imaginable.

I was watched the minute I came through, the squeaking of the out of square door and bell ringing above it.

As dangerous as it was to go into town, the coin shop the rare treat that almost made it worth it. It was packed to capacity with goods but also curated to display a nonlinear motif.

Some of it Western, a tall imposing Indian, once an adult ceder tree. The image of stoicism, he even had eyes that asked my business there. His paint was still vibrant and intact on all areas above the curious hands of children marveling and probing the statuesque and stately indeginate. Like the town’s inhabitants, staring at him risked offense.

I perused for anything needed before our setting off. I rifled through a rack, stopping on a pea green double breasted Navy coat. I removed my shirt jacket. Fitting as if tailored, I removed it, looking for moth damage or any markings. In purple ink on the inside of the arm: United States Marine Corps 1942-1943. The spirit of an age could be captive in things. Its smell. The creamy brown of its buttons. Its story, it’s traveling to get here stamped on my heart like the quartermaster marks against its sateen liner. The color was ideally suited for the back drop, and I need something warm and durable for when I got into town to start my search for Jude. I needed to blend in. There was a price tag safety pinned to the inside of the tail.

I laid the coat on the glass case and looked in through the top, past its various scratches.

“Can I see that knife please.”

The owner’s wife elected to position herself where the hip nearest me wasn’t saddled with her black polymer 9mm pistol, where I couldn’t reach across and grab it. She was less familiar with me than the owner. She let her hand search around the case, not willing to take her eyes off me. She placed it on the coat.

It was foliage colored injection molded sheath with a nylon backer. Full tang, with two slabs of plastic, held by oversized hex head fasteners. I unseated it from its sheath. A 4” drop point blade with pronounced belly in a tan powder coat. Straightforward and unremarkable in design other than a sleek slender subtlety. If firearms were imparted the masculine essence, then knives the feminine one. What was it about the slow blade? The knife was never in a hurry.

“I’ll take both.”

…

Back without incident, the load of wood had showed, the stacking already commenced. I borrowing work gloves from the truck and staring out at the immensity of the field of loosely ordered word. Our job to gather it, reorder it into something useful. Man’s commission and God’s purpose to bring order to chaos, and bring light to darkness, and we went about it, into the night.

Though I could feel in my hands that the temperatures were all the time dropping, a sweat came on, the kind with a fever dream. Hours passed, and we droned with the thoughtlessness and automaticity of honey bees. No one said anything to each other. The sweat was cold on my stomach and chest but hot on my back. We worked so long I thought I would sweat blood like Jesus about praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Occasionally, I would look up at her room, and she moved across the window, passing like clouds over the sun. When I didn’t return, she appeared in the doorway of the barn. It was past late and was now early. The cold was at its most extreme and she was in the frigid hell of it to be with me. There was never a time where I felt more attracted to woman. It was impossible not to be attracted to her. Sweet was sweeter when contrasted with the bitter, and her thighs smoother when in contrast with the roughness of the split logs. Her love and her bed warmer for having been witness to the masochism of the work.

“Please, you can’t stay out here.”

Her pretty face was buried to her reddening nose in her scarf but she lowered her shoulders and looked out from under her hat with wanting eyes.

“You need to go back up to your room Maria.”

The others worked on, not even involving a look in our personal affairs.

“Come on.”

I opened the door to the barn. She sat a lumber bench nearest the stove while I added the new wood.

“If you’re going to ask me to do this thing for you. If this is the last time we’re going to see each other. You’re going to do this thing for me. Do you understand? You’re going to make me feel beautiful and wanted one last time, instead of the diseased thing that I am now. And if you’re too stupid to do it for me. And if you’re too stupid to do it for yourself, because you want it and because you love me. Too stupid to feel a woman who loves you that’s here and not dead. Then you can do it as an obligation.”

The words severe even in her slight but melodic Spanish accent.

She laid hold to my coat hem.

“Do you understand me?”

She ripped down savagely on my coat. But her gaze didn’t have the strength in her arm, just a red eyed longing. But her mouth. She was like a dog. It distorted with that ecstatic pain of the height of orgasm. She wouldn’t go on another minute resisted.

She had traveled all this way, and death behind her, but only just, like the standoff established by an animal whose diet consisted of carrion and whose tailing was waiting as much as investigative.

“Please . Go back up to your room.”

When she wouldn’t, I took her from her seat. She hugged onto my neck as I took her up the steps. She had lost weight since her disease. She might’ve been skeletal if not for fat distribution inherent to her heritage.

Putting her down, and spreading the extra wool blanket, as the heater had run out of fuel. When I was done, she had removed her jacket. She threw off her sweater, and began to unbutton her shirt. She hastened to remove her bra before I could tell her to stop.

Before I could get to her light fell upon her bare breasts. I hugged her breasts against my chest and bent us over to retrieve the braw but she resisted. She had to be fast about love – her time here was limited. She pushed me away so that I could I see her in all her womanly glory. On her full and shapely breast was the condensate from the breaths of the five beautiful baby boys should would never feed. I removed my work gloves, and carried her to the bed.

I laid behind her, sweet soap fragranced her neck contravening the farm’s wet hay air. She grabbed my frigid dirty hand and put it to her breast, and she squeezed my hand. I grasped her tender breast. She made me squeeze it tight until she moaned in pain but her nipple was erect. I had to have in possession the fullness of her womanhood. Somone had to possess it before no one could, only of use to someone else and no good to her where she was going. I had to have her and want her the way I would want her over a lifetime but we only had one night. So, I squeezed her breast until she suddenly stiffened against my body and she reflexively drove her hips into my groin. She drew breath in sharply with the pain. She had known pain since her disease but this was the pain someone gave to her so it was good. If I squeezed her breasts then she was real, and if she was real, she was alive, and if I squeezed until it hurt, if I hurt her even though I didn’t want to hurt her, if I hurt her anyway, if I hurt her against my better judgement, if what she wanted was more important than my better judgement then she knew I really wanted her. I pulled the blanket over and we fell asleep with my covering her breasts with my embracing arms.

…

The following day there were no questions about the night I had spent with Maria. Her being in higher spirits, even her face with some renewed color in the morning.

We were up early and she was steadying the sights. The pistol bucked wildly against her weak arms, even using the much-reduced power .38 special loads I brought from in town. After a few cylinders, she could keep the shots within a roughly 20” X 20” piece of seasoned oak at 5 yards, slightly better when thumb cocking the hammer. It would have to do. She would be in the back of the signal maintainer vehicle, and if there was a problem she would likely only be firing the span of a truck cab or through a car door. It was for defense, and for repelling what happened to pretty shapely, Hispanic girls at close interval – even sick ones.

Her top coat had pockets big enough to accommodate the gun, and it was explained to her that she could fire from the pocket if needed, though with the poor quality of her sighted fire I wouldn’t trust such unsighted firing beyond a few feet. She could also press the muzzle against her attacker and fire without fear of the action hanging up. I even taught her to use the speed trip to load but with her reduced sensitivity from the cold, her gloves and general weakness it was a fumbling slow affair. If she couldn’t get it done with the initial six, the speed strip would be of little comfort.

It was enough for today. She couldn’t be overtaxed. We had a big day tomorrow. At the end of the session, she loaded in bullets singly, closed the cylinder, put it in her pocket and looked at me with a chin elevated by dignity and that she had executed the manual of arms properly. It was hers now.

I took her back up to her room. It was time for my run. If I had followed the scriptural admonition to read in an undertone day and night, then my feet had read the land, left to right, up then down on the same schedule. As if I knew something was coming. As if Maria’s news about Jude had been behind this whole time. I had prisoned myself within the confines of spiritual and physical fitness with the persistence and regimentation of a monk.

The run was through a lane created by blackberry bushes. An old coach trail. It was later in the morning and warmer. The morning was too cold to run, as it might have some effect on my lungs and they would be top working order.

I rested on another of the lumber benches, retrieving a pack of brand new Bicycle cards from the breast pocket of my shirt. They were made not far from my hometown, and well behind the line of advance of The Son’s. I shuffled through them, unconsciously stopping on the queen of spades. The spade a war implement, but unequally when compared to others, being it in two ways, for fighting but for preparing the ground for fighting. I realigned them, placing my powerful palms down on them and rending them in half in an instant. I placed the two halves, shorn on the bench neatly next to each other.

The old man came out of the barn setting down his now rehung axe next to the bench to light his cigar. He looked down at the cards unimpressed, knowing they could not have been put into two halves by any other means.

“That was a few games of old maid.”

He drew the flame into the tight packed tobacco.

“I have to leave.”

There was no reason to languish in avoidance.

“Figured that.”

“My friends need my help.”

The overwhelming sensation that he deserved some kind of explanation.

“Tough guy. Gonna take on the world by yourself.”

His voice was raspy and in low tones but not from the cigar. His condescendence was amplified by his having to look down to observe me on my bench.

He knew I had not accumulated much wealth in my short time on the farm and few resources for striking out on my own or getting established. The farm supplied steady employment, it was community, trustworthiness, protection and that was vastly more than you could say for swaths of the country, especially the locale where I would be delivered tonight. Combine these things with Maria’s firearms training and he knew something was not right, knew it was dangerous, never understanding how right he was.

“Sometimes you just want to throw your lot in with your friends no matter what their fate. Better to stick together than hang separately.”

He required no further explanation, only long draws of his cigar. Both men of few words, knowing as Jesus did, when brought before Pilate and the Sanhedrin that a defense was only as good as your accuser’s ability to receive it. Knowing that we were in a world of obstinate ears and hardened hearts. It wasn’t that I didn’t listen to him. I was taking on the world, and anything less than contemplating certain death wouldn’t do.

Maybe I always had an attraction to the light off the gleaming blood of Christian martyrdom, even before having come into association with Christ because he had come into association with me, the biblical assertion that God having known me in the womb. To blame this enterprise on Maria, something that had been forty-five years and nine months in the making was nonsense. My raven haired, beautiful Queen of Spades was not to blame. This had always been my decision, as the spirit had always known it but it had only now occurred to the flesh. And if the flesh had to be risked on behalf of the spirit.

Neither one of us had great zeal to turn my leaving into a large production.

I left for Maria’s room.

I used the morning to police the contents of my ruck sack. It was as orderly as the piles of firewood my hands ached from stacking. It was trim and the submachine gun was in a plastic trash bag spray painted to match the bag under the side compression straps. If I needed it in a hurry, it could be used through the bag or torn away to access the trigger, fired, for a time, though it ran the risk of spent casings, trapped in the bag going retrograde into the action causing a malfunction. The bag was a necessary precaution. I couldn’t be seen penetrating the military cordon period, let alone armed. Ideally it would never be used at all. My trigger finger was no longer for martial purposes but for searching, line by line the word of God. Knowing, on some level, it was for psychological comfort. I would feel naked on an extended tab, on dangerous ground unarmed, a pacifier from my days of spiritual infantilism as a soldier. The smallest part of the reason to bring it was that there had to be some allowance for the evil that men do, no matter the lengths gone to avoid them.

“Are you ready?”

Her chance to express any final concerns. We would leave that night. She shook her head, too weak to speak.

“I want you to get as much rest as you can before we leave. It’s going to be a long couple of days.”

I rested on another of the lumber benches, retrieving a pack of Bicycle cards from the breast pocket of my shirt. They were made not far from my hometown, and well behind the line of advance of The Son’s. I shuffled through them, unconsciously stopping on the queen of spades.

The spade a war implement, but unequally when compared to others, being it in two ways, for fighting but for preparing the ground for fighting. I realigned them, placing my powerful palms down on them and rending them in half in an instant. I placed the two halves, shorn on the bench neatly next to each other.

The old man came out of the barn setting down his now rehung axe next to the bench to light his cigar. He looked down at the cards unimpressed, knowing they could not have been put into two halves by any other means.

“That was a few games of old maid.”

He drew the flame into the tight packed tobacco.

“I have to leave.”

There was no reason to languish in avoidance.

“Figured that.”

“My friends need my help.”

The overwhelming sensation that he deserved some kind of explanation.

“Tough guy. Gonna take on the world by yourself.”

His voice was raspy and in low tones but not from the cigar. His condescendence was amplified by his having to look down to observe me on my bench.

He knew I had not accumulated much wealth in my short time on the farm and few resources for striking out on my own or getting established. The farm supplied steady employment, it was community, trustworthiness, protection and that was vastly more than you could say for swaths of the country, especially the locale where I would be delivered tonight. Combine this with Maria’s firearms training and he knew something was not right, knew it was dangerous, never understanding how right he was.

“Sometimes you just want to throw your lot in with your friends no matter what their fate. Better to stick together than hang separately.”

He required no further explanation, only long draws of his cigar. Both men of few words, knowing as Jesus did, when brought before Pilate and the Sanhedrin that a defense was only as good as your accuser’s ability to receive it. Knowing that we were in a world of obstinate ears and hardened hearts. It wasn’t that I didn’t listen to him. I was taking on the world, and anything less than contemplating certain death wouldn’t do.

Maybe I always had an attraction to the light off the gleaming blood of Christian martyrdom, even before having come into association with Christ because he had come into association with me, the biblical assertion that God having known me in the womb. To blame this enterprise on Maria, something that had been forty-five years and nine months in the making was nonsense. My raven-haired beautiful Queen of Spades was not to blame.

“Can you hold onto me?”

She shook her head, her eyes beaming at the chance.

An hour was more than I needed to gas the bike.

She only ever worked, giving herself to others. She was half the kitchen staff, with Patricia in her chair, the better half. No one ever took her out. No one ever let her have fun. A man’s brain diseased with rationalizations.

Due to the bike’s wheel clearance and diminutive frame, it took some doing to get us on.

“You ready?”

She put her arms around me, one hand over the opposing wrists.

“Hold on.”

The bike was up righted and started. I started slow, only to where the alley terminated into a vacant lot, turning around at the end.

“Go fast,” she said over the idle.

I goosed the accelerator. We shot down the alley. Her arms so tight I could barely breath. Out on the open road, she rested her head on my back. I thought I could hear her laughing. I didn’t want it to stop.

Some ways down the road, there was a stretch running along the river where we could go fast, unimpeded by traffic.

Now that she trusted me, her hold somewhat relinquished. Looking around my back, she put the wind in her face. She enjoyed herself so much I thought about running the tank dry, knowing I had to fill up anyway. She rested her chin on my shoulder, contented in the cool fast-moving air and no longer needing the speed. Her supple breasts pressed into my back.

I would bug Sarah to lay on me, the heaviness of her bare breasts and the rhythm of her breathing on my naked back. A ritual after making love. We both gave each other something during the ride.

I took the slop out of the brakes. I stood the bike, with her as extra weight on one leg.

“What do you think?”

“I love it.”

She laughed.

“You’re nuts.”

She laughed, taking it as a compliment. It was good to be a little nuts sometimes.

“You wanna keep going?”

“Yes.”

On her cue, an SUV of the make and model preferred by Androgyne barreling down, almost close enough to hear the engine noisily digesting fuel.

Of all the times.

Even Maria forgot the rest of the ride when she noticed.

“I want you to hold on very tight. Do you understand? We’re going to go very fast.”