Wandering Rose

WANDERING ROSE

By James Russell

          I have a story to tell. Everybody does, I know, and I also know that most of those who ever put pen to paper and actually tell it achieve little more than wasting a perfectly good tree. I don't believe my story is any more important than the thousands upon thousands already crowding the shelves of bookstores and libraries across the world. I don't even believe that it's more interesting. The one thing I do believe, however, is that I need to tell it, and that's enough for me to feel justified in saying to hell with the trees.

        My name's Louis Brenston. People call me Sax. Don't ask why. I don't know. It's just one of those things.

        I grew up in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. I left when I was seventeen - not just Kansas, but a pregnant girlfriend and a lot of bad memories as well. I wasn't a bad kid, not really. I got into my share of trouble, but it was always nickel-and-dime stuff, skipping school, smoking a little pot. Nothing too serious.

        I was brought up in a Christian home. Church every Sunday, Bible studies every Wednesday. My mom was involved with local charities, "Feed the Kids," and the like. She'd been going down to the same little shelter every evening of every week since before I was born, serving food and talking to the residents. She had a genuine love for people.

        My dad, well he'd always been my best friend. My earliest memory though a bit faded now, is of him sitting on the couch in our family room (a hideous couch, green and red, fuzzy), puffing on his pipe as he read to me from the newspaper. He raised an eyebrow when I told him of the memory. He said he'd only done that for the first year or so of my life. Mom had made him stop, said that hearing about all the politics and wars in the world would "make Louie weird." I also remember him sitting in my room, next to my bed, on nights when I was sick. The world might have seemed cold, and feverish nightmares might have been lurking just behind my eyelids, but whenever I looked up he was there - dozing at times, but there. It never made the sickness go away, but it was enough.

        The day that I got up the courage to tell him my girlfriend was pregnant, which was back in 1985, he walked out of the room without saying a word. I sat on my bed, staring at his empty chair and feeling much like it looked - abandoned, alone. He returned several minutes later, though, carrying a small box in his hands.

        He was disappointed. He tried to hide it with a smile and a hug, but I could see it in his eyes, the way they flicked back and forth about the room instead of locking with my own as they'd always done before. But at least he was there. At least he'd come back.

        He handed me the box. It was about two inches wide, four long, its velvet skin shiny and smooth, dark blue, torn in a place or two.
"It was your grandmother's. She bought it the day she learned she was expecting. In London. She and my father were there visiting relatives. 'It caught my eye," she used to say. She gave it to me the day I told her your mother was pregnant." He glanced at the ground, wringing his hands together. "And now I'm passing it on to you." He looked back up, meeting my eyes.

        I opened the box. The hinges squeaked. Inside was a ceramic rose, its stem a pale green, its thin petals a delicate pink.
"Hand painted," he said.

        I stared at it. It was beautiful, certainly something to "catch your eye." I'd never before received such a thing, something with such real value.

        "I really am happy for you, son. Even if it's not quite the way I would have liked to see it happen." He smiled. I smiled. "Thanks, Dad."
A week later I walked in on him beating the hell out of my mom in our front room. I stood in the doorway, not ten feet from them, and did nothing. I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. All I could do was watch, watch as the hands of the only perfect man I'd ever known, hands that had held me as an infant, helped me to stand as a child, that had protected me all of my life, struck my mother full in the face time after time. Smack! Smack!

        His sleeves were rolled up, his eyes were red and alien, sweat glistened on his brow and along his forearms, stained the pits of his shirt, in large, ugly blotches that were visible each time he raised his arm to deliver another blow. The room spun around me, my world within me. My stomach turned, my legs began shaking - I couldn't control them, they kept getting weaker. I couldn't see, my vision had gone black. I tasted copper. I heard my mom whimpering. Pleading. I heard my dad breathing heavy, grunting breaths between punches. Smack! Grunt. Smack! Grunt.

        And then I was in my room, stuffing clothes into a book bag. Fifteen minutes had passed according to the clock on my wall. I couldn't remember even one of them.

        I haven't seen my parents in eighteen years, not since that night, when I crept out the kitchen window with my bag slung over my shoulder, the velvet box in my back pocket, and made my way into the Big Wide World.

        Carol. That was my girlfriend's name. She's thirty-four now, lives in Chicago with her husband and two kids. Neither of them is mine. Mine was stillborn. I didn't find out until almost five years after the fact. I was too busy gallivanting around the country. Anna Michelle was her name. A pretty name, I think. She's buried in a little cemetery in Kansas, just a few miles from my parent's house. I've never been to see her. Not yet. I plan to.

        I spent the first few years after leaving home in an attempt to escape, to simply run, as fast as I was able, in whatever direction fate chose for me. I'm still not quite sure how my life became what it did, though - that of a restless wanderer fit for a movie-of-the-week. I Was a Teenage Vagabond, it would be called. Except movies need plot, and if mine has one nobody's bothered to let me in on it. Filled with random snapshots: people, places, memories like fading echoes - my life resembles a madman's attempt at collage, a schizophrenic mural of unrelated events, emotions. That's not a life.

        I live alone, unless, of course, a goldfish named Robbie and an on-again, off-again visiting stray cat I call Mange can be counted as roommates. I've been here about a year now in this little studio apartment in Oklahoma. Prior to this I rented a spare room from an old lady upstate. Mrs. Kramer. She'd been a widow for about an hundred and fifty years when I came to stay with her, and was the sweetest little woman I'd ever met, so long as I didn't cross her before her morning coffee. She could cuss like a champ if the mood struck her. I moved out when she died and the house went up for auction. She didn't have a will, I guess. Before Mrs. Kramer's I stayed at a halfway house. Before the halfway house I lived in the state pen. Jefferson City. "The Walls," they called it. I did three and a half years for beating a guy up in a Blockbuster Video parking lot. I was drunk.

        Prison did a lot to shape my way of thinking, probably more than all of my years serving as a professional vagrant crisscrossing the good ol' U.S. of A. combined - though the nearly two years I spent shacked up in Idaho with a whore named Mindy runs a close second.

        Prison gave me a glimpse of the world as it truly is, without its clothes and makeup, the raw, naked truth of humanity all the way down to its unseemly moles and venereal diseases. The world outside the penitentiary is the same as the one within, only with its best Sunday suit on and its genital cream applied -the slut who doesn't tell you she's HIV positive.

        Prison is a much more honest place.

        And Mindy, well, with two years or so of freebies, she showed me quite another version of the "naked truth," minus the above mentioned moles and diseases (though there were one or two rather uncomfortable exceptions, I'll admit).
She found me sleeping under a bridge one night, I was about twenty-one years old at the time, and all but forced me to come home with her. She wasn't beautiful. Her skin was freckled, even pockmarked in places, her eyes were much too far apart, her nose had been broken and had healed somewhat crooked. She was also "past her prime," as they say, somewhere in her mid-to-late thirties, early forties. But she cared, cared enough to bring a punk kid into her home and eventually into her bed for the simple reason that I looked cold, that I looked lonely.

        She was the only person that I ever allowed to look at the rose my father had given me. Within its tiny petals, its fragile stem, lived a man whom I could never again know, a life I could never again experience, and I didn't much like the idea of other people peering into such things. He was mine. It was mine. No one else's.
"It's pretty," Mindy said when I showed it to her.
"It was my father's. 'Fore him it was my grandma's. She bought it in London. 'Caught her eye," she said. She gave it to my dad when my mom got pregnant. Hand painted. Now it's mine."
"Take care of it, Sax," she said. She touched it, caressed a petal with her finger. I let her.
I closed the box and put it back in its place, in the darkness beneath our bed.

        As strange as it might seem, it was she who first taught me to believe in God. Saint Mindy the Idaho Whore.

        She wasn't one of those Bible-thumping, "Great Gawd a'mighty! Send me your money for a blessin'" types. Her faith - if you could call it faith, and I guess in a way you'd have to - wasn't so much in heaven as it was in hell. If you were around her long enough you'd catch on to what she believed. It would have been hard not to, considering the offhanded comments she would make throughout the course of any given day, things like, "Well, I'm damned anyways, so who cares?" and "Hell don't seem too bad a place, not once you figger out it's the only choice you got."

        I never had to rely on accumulating bits and pieces of her thoughts to understand her, though. She laid out the what and why of her beliefs for me early on as we were lying in bed. We were drunk, all but passed out, staring at the ceiling. She might have been high, but I can't say for sure. She usually was. I remember feeling the sheets move as she searched for my hand in the dark. She took it and held on like a vice.

        "I growed up in church, you know. Went every Sunday with my pa's brother, Uncle Smiley. I don't know why it was we called him that. He didn't never smile, s'far as I remember. When he couldn't take me, if he was sick or somethin', I'd walk. It was a good li'l ways, five, maybe six miles, but I was a pretty quick walker. 'Course I was still late when it happened that way, but I figgered if God was up there forgivin' people for killin' and thievin' and all, He prob'ly didn't get too upset with me showin' up a few minutes after Preacher'd started talkin'.

        "I heard a lot of stories told in that li'l church. I 'specially liked the ones about the talkin' animals, you know the ones, the snake and the ass, but I wasn't never sure they was really any more than that, stories. It coulda happened, sure, but I never seen no animals chattin= it up with no people and I'm not so dumb as to go believin= everything I hear just 'cause somebody tells me it's in the Book.

        "The one thing I learned, though, the thing that I believed more than anything else, I learned the first time I set foot in that place, and that's that faith, real faith, from the heart kinda faith, is a gift from the Big Guy Hisself. I even remember a scripture on it, somethin' like, 'By grace you was saved through faith, but the faith ain't really yours, it's a gift from God.' Lots of people believe in God and Jesus and all, but it always seemed to me that it was only head faith, 'cause if it was heart faith how come I always seen ol' Bob Wiseman from the next pew at the tavern soon as he left church? or why'd my friend Lindsey, whose folks sat right up front every Sunday, keep comin= to school with black eyes and busted lips? She might not ever of said what happened, but it wasn't no secret. I'd seen her pa lose his temper before." She fell silent. A minute passed. Two. I waited. She took a long breath and continued. "See, I knew real young that head faith don't mean a thing, 'cept that you're a liar, the worst kind, too, 'cause you ain't just lyin to other people. You're lyin' to yourself, and I didn't wanna be that kinda person, the kinda person that really ain't a person at all, you know? I wanted that heart faith is what I wanted, and I prayed for it. Hell, for years that's just about all I did was pray for it, from the time I wasn't nothin' but nipples up to my seventeenth birthday. But He never did see fit to give it to me. I don't hold it against Him, though. I might not know much, but I damn sure know enough to realize He's free to do as He pleases. Who am I to say what God A'mighty can and can't do?

        "I know I'm goin' to hell, ain't a doubt in my mind s'far as that goes, but I guess you could say I've made my peace with it. God and me, we just went our separate ways and I decided to enjoy life while I got it. And I am, you can believe that. You think I do what I do 'cause of the money?" She laughed. It was a sad laugh. "You can see for yourself the money ain't too great. I do it 'cause I like sex and it's a way to keep food on the table while I do what I like. Everybody paves their own road to hell with somethin'. I just figgered a long time ago that I was gonna pave mine with somethin' that'd make me happy." She grew quiet once again. A few minutes later her hand loosened its hold and her breathing mellowed. I drifted off not long after.

        But she hadn't made her peace with it, not really. I can remember waking up time after time to the sound of her crying beside me. She never knew that I'd seen her huddled up in the corner of our bed, naked, sobbing into the sheets. "Please, God, oh please, please," she'd whisper as she rocked back and forth. I can still hear her when I close my eyes.

        It was years later before I realized that Saint Mindy the Idaho Whore had shared with me more insight into God and religion and faith than I could have learned from a thousand "Great Gawd a'mighty!" preachers combined. It was also many years before I came to understand that, in a way, she had become what she most despised - "the kinda person that really ain't a person at all." Not concerning her faith but her acceptance of it, because she did have faith, I think. Just not in the right thing.

        I was about twenty-three when I moved on. I never told her that I was going, just packed up and left one afternoon while she was sleeping. I left a note. I don't remember what it said.
I went back to my aimless roaming after that, walking, hitching, living from day to day for the next two years. I was camped out in the woods a few hundred yards from the interstate the night I was picked up by the police - not city but the real deal, bonafide Highway Patrol, complete with sunglasses, buzz-cut, and two dollar sneer. It was in Arizona, not far from a little nothing town called Lyston. Someone driving by must have seen the small fire I had going, thought it smelled good enough to bury their nose in, and phoned it in as suspicious.

        A cop pulled up around one in the morning, asked me my name and then told me I'd better be gone by sunrise. Pretty standard warning. He went back to his car, turned on the engine, started to back up and then stopped. One minute, two, five, he sat there. I had a few drinks in me at the time, I was tired, and in drunken logic I figured he must have felt the same way. I'm tired, you're tired, hey, everybody's tired. He's taking a nap, I recall thinking just before I dozed off.

        But he wasn't. It turned out that I fit the description of a guy they were looking for, guy named Longfellow I learned later, who had killed three women in the past year. So while I thought officer Howdy-Doody was catching a few quick z's in his cruiser he was actually reading something off of his computer which he thought referred to me, something to the effect of "Armed and Dangerous, Approach With Extreme Caution," which really isn't the best first impression to make with a cop, believe it or not.

        What followed was alot of screaming and gunpointing on his part, alot of laying face-down and keeping quiet on mine. Within the hour I found myself shackled to a filthy wooden bench in Arizona's Braxton County Jail, a place that reeked of spinach. It might have been what they were serving for dinner. Whatever it was, it stunk - a green, vinegary smell that hung heavy in the air.

        The detective that questioned me refused to call me by my name. He referred to me as "Franklin Longfellow" instead, doing it so often and with such anger that I began to respond to it.

        "You killed 'em, didn't you, Franklin? Strangled 'em? Eh, Frankie?"

        "I... No, I didn't kill nobody, I..."

        "What? You what? Didn't mean to? That's a crock and you know it. A jury might buy it, though. Who knows? And maybe it was a accident in a way. Lost your temper. Went a little too far. Hell, buddy, that happens to the best of us. But you gotta admit to it. Fessin' up now's about all the chance you got. Juries don't like findin' out the guy who's tellin' 'em, 'I didn=t mean to,' lied to the cops. Doesn't give much credibility to anything else he says, you know what I mean? Like maybe he's just sayin' what his lawyer fed him."

        "But I didn't, I mean, I don't know..."

        "Can't you see I'm tryin' to help you, Longfellow? You're gonna tell the truth one way or the other. You can tell me or you go in the back with a few of my buddies and tell them."
I almost admitted to it. I really did. Just to get out of that room and away from that cop, away from the threats and anger, the way he spoke to me from only inches away with breath that made me sick. It smelled like rancid milk gone bad. But I didn't, and as promised I was questioned by his friends, who posed most of their questions in the form of backhanded slaps and closefisted punches. They tired of me after only a few short hours, though, and I was thrown into the Tank. Because of the crimes I was accused of I was placed with the maximum security inmates, the worst that the state of Arizona had to offer: murderers, rapists, telemarketers.

        That was my first true exposure to jail. I'd been to Juvenile Hall a time or two when I was younger, but it was nothing at all like Braxton County Jail. The penitentiary was nothing like that jail. I saw a man raped within the first two hours I was there.

        I was twenty-five years old, barely old enough to buy liquor. I should have been off convincing some young lady to marry me, to start a family. Instead I was sitting in the corner of a large, barred cell trying my damndest to melt into the shadows, trying to convince myself to look away from what was taking place only yards away.

        They had him pushed up against the bottom section of the steel bunk bed across from me, six or seven of them crowded around him like a pack of jackals. I remember one man above all the others, his thin face and long red nose with a stitch across the bridge; his dirty green stocking cap, rolled up so it rested on the crown of his head; his curly hair,shiny black, greasy, that fell to the collar of a ratty fatigue jacket. Most of all, though, I remember his eyes, his smile. Gleeful. He stood next to the man that had his back to me, a man whose face I don't remember, a man who stood hunched over, pumping his hips in rhythm with the grating sound of steel bed legs against concrete and the screams of his victim.

        Grunting. Skin slapping against skin. The sound of tearing flesh. Screaming. Grunting.

        Crying.

        Silence.

        And all the while the man in the green stocking cap grinning, gums receding from his rotted teeth, his eyes bright, but dead. Cold.

        And spinach. That smell is linked so closely with the memory that I have to resist the urge to describe the event as stinking of it, because for me that sums up every horrible little detail, every sound, that I remember about the experience. But no one else would understand.

        Thank God.

        They dispersed when the man with his back to me finished, returned to their cards and dominoes and television, left the man who had suffered at their hands draped across the bunk, his legs spread-eagled, his right arm hanging onto the floor. He lay there bleeding, choking on his own stifled sobs.

        I wanted to help him, I did, to at least cover him up, to restore to him some amount of dignity. But I also felt like screaming at him, like putting a pillow over his face until he shut up, until I could _no. ^longer hear his cries or his pleas for help. I wanted to leave.

        In the end I did nothing except pull my knees closer to my chest, farther into the shadows. It was none of my business.

        "Oh, God, oh, God." I listened to the man moan those words for the rest of the night, words so similar to those of Saint Mindy, and yet so different.

        God. Was this His creation - these evil hands that committed such atrocity? His doing? Was He present as it happened, crowded around with the rest of the animals, maybe? Smiling that same gleeful smile with those same dead eyes?
There was no God. No good. Only the semblance of it in an evil, rotting world; the placebo of a cancerous species.

        God.

        I fell asleep cackling to myself, my head resting against the bars and my arms wrapped around my legs.

        I was there for three more days - not just in the jail but in that same corner. In the darkness. I watched the savages tear into that same guy five or six more times before I left. They took turns doing the deed, each one forcing him to perform more perversely than the last. "Share and share alike," right?

        His screams and protests diminished with each new attack. He began to take it, to "grin and bear it," accepting of the inevitable, I guess, which was really the most horrifying part of all, that a man could be broken with such ease, made to accept such a fate within a matter of days - of hours, really.

        I was released, without apology, after the real Longfellow was captured. I saw him on the news. The man looked nothing like me. They found him asleep in a dumpster behind an all-you-can-eat joint called "Riley's" with his arm wrapped around the corpse of a cocker spaniel like it was his favorite teddy bear. He was eventually convicted of nine murders - the three he was initially charged with and six others which he admitted to of his own accord. Four of them were girls between the ages of fifteen and sixteen. One was seven. I hope that man's spent the last ten years bent over his own bunk somewhere.

        They gave me a small paper sack marked "PROPERTY" when I left. Inside was my comb, a handful of change, an a half-finished roll of Certs.

        "Where's my box?" I asked the property clerk.

        He looked up from his lunch. "What?" His eyes pinched together.

        "My box, my velvet box. It's not here." I shook the bag at him.

        He reached across the counter, stuck the tip of his finger into the bag, and peered inside. He took a bite of the banana he was holding in his hand. "I ain't seen it." He flipped over a page of the newspaper in front of him. "Look's like Hussein's at it again, damn A-rabs."

        "I need my box."

        He glanced up at me. Annoyance (not to mention country stupidity) was painted across his face. He finished chewing then licked the inside of his mouth, creating a wet smacking sound. "Look here, I done told you I ain't seen it. Now if you don't stop your yappin= about the dang thing I'll put you right back in that cage and make sure you stay this time. You won't be able to hide from them boys forever, ya know." He nodded over my shoulder. "Now get."

        So I got. An hour later I was on a bus and crossing over the Arizona state line. The box, the rose, they were gone. Which was probably for the best, I figured. I'd carried that rose with me for eight years, using it to hold onto something, to someone, that was as good as dead. With it I could never truly move forward. Without it, well, perhaps I could.

        My dreams plagued me after that - nightmarish, foggy visions of jail cells, of grinning beasts, of echoing cries and screams. "We're coming for you next," the man in the green stocking cap would say to me. He had no eyes, only gaping holes filled with rotting flesh. And the man bent over the bed. "Oh, God, oh God, oh please, God," he cried. Blood trickled then flowed down his legs. "Sax," he would whisper as he began to turn his head toward me. "Please..."

        I always woke up before I saw his face. I hadn't seen it in Braxton and, thankfully, I never saw it in those dreams either.
For the next year I roamed from town to town, state to state, boredom to depression and back again, working odd jobs here and there, sometimes for cash, sometimes for food, sometimes just to wile away the hours.

        I was in a diner toward the end of 1994, just before I came to Kansas City, Missouri. It was in St. Louis, place called Cream of the Crop. Bad neighborhood. Good food.

        I was sitting at a booth, eating a slice of apple pie and working on my fourth cup of coffee. Free refills on coffee, "The Bottomless Pot Special," I think they called it. I didn't really even much care for coffee, but I felt compelled to get my money's worth on anything labeled "free."

        I always sit at a booth. They're more comfortable and are usually next to a window. I enjoy having something to look at while I eat - something other than obese waitresses in stained uniforms and the games on kiddie menus, that is.


        The windows in Cream of the Crop didn't look out on much - a dark street blanketed in filthy snow, a flickering street lamp across the way, an old warehouse covered in local gang lingo and crude artwork - but I watched it nevertheless, eating my pie and sipping my coffee. A dog limped out of the alleyway beside the warehouse, a Retriever, his skin tight against his ribs, his fur matted and missing in places, revealing red, boiled flesh.

        He looked at me. From across the street he stared straight at me, through me it seemed, with filmy eyes of anguish and hopelessness, long eyes that begged yet not sure just what it was they begged for. Mercy, I suppose. I set my cup down, my hand shaking. It rattled against the saucer. They were his eyes, the eyes of the man left bleeding upon his bed in Braxton, eyes that, on the man, I'd never seen, but looking at the pathetic beast before me I knew for certain that they were his.

        Three boys emerged from the same alleyway. They were young, nine, maybe ten years old, each of them with long, unkempt hair, each with a familiar grin on his lips, a cold, gleeful gleam in his eyes. They crept toward the dog.

          I could see blood seeping from the animal's head. His ear appeared to have been ripped in half. He sat there staring at me as the boys neared. I knew then what was going on, that they'd done this to him. The children. The monsters.

        I stood and ran toward the exit.

        Yelp!

        I rushed through the door and across the street. The bells attached to the door jingled their tin-like song behind me. "Get the hell away from that dog!" One of the kids turned and looked at me- He clutched a large rock in his small hand.
His friends ran back into the alley.

        He watched me for a moment, bouncing the rock in his hand. I was still several yards away. He looked from me to the dog that lay sprawled at his feet, spun around, raised his arm high above his head and hurled the rock at its head.

        Its skull gave way with a muffled cracking sound. The kid took off after his buddies as the dog began convulsing about on the ground. The boy's laughter followed him down the narrow passageway, lingering in the cold air.

        I stood there, my heavy breaths creating a dense fog around my head, and looked at the poor creature. Spasms racked its body, its tongue lolled from its mouth. Its eyes, cloudy and unfocused, remained upon me. Its head was split open. Blood mixed with the snow and spread, reaching like a crimson hand for the darkness. T

        he street lamp above me buzzed and flickered. The dog's legs, beyond its control, kicked madly at the air. He blinked.

        "Sax," the voice from my dreams called. "Please..."

        I stooped to the ground and picked up the rock. Avoiding the animal's gaze I proceeded to smash it into his head several times. Bone crunched. His legs stopped moving. The pulse of the flowing blood diminished.

        I stood and placed the rock in the pocket of my coat.

        Dead eyes bore into my back as I walked away.

        I stumbled away from the diner in a daze. I didn't pay for my meal.

        I hitched a ride with a carload of neo-hippies on their way to Kansas City, Missouri, but it didn't really matter to me where they were going. There was no escaping what I was running from, regardless of where I fled.

        Children.

        The men in jail, in the end they'd only done what was expected of them. Apple seeds don't make pear trees, cats don't bark, and, well, fags with felony records don't say please. It's a law of nature.

        But the kids, the kids should have been different. How could such evil proceed from ones so young? from those that we expect to exemplify all that is good?

        Smack! Smack!

        I saw my father's face, the madness in his eyes, as he rained blow after blow down upon my defenseless mother. I heard her cries; I smelled her fear, like sour sweat.

        My right hand began to shake. I grasped it with my left and held it in my lap.

        "You okay, man?" the girl next to me asked. She wore a bright yellow shirt with "THIS BLOWS!" emblazoned across the chest.

        I nodded.

        She shrugged.

        I don't remember much else about the trip, except for a billboard we passed somewhere along the way. There was a brunette on it, a showgirl for some new riverboat casino wearing a glittering black dress and holding a spread of hundred dollar bills in each hand.

        She looked sad, despite her outrageously white smile, like maybe she knew what I_ knew, that money and glitter and fake smiles are all we really have to look forward to, that life is a one way trip that leads to a dead end. "Everybody paves their own road to hell with somethin'. I just figgered a long time ago that I was gonna pave mine with somethin= that'd make me happy," Saint Mindy had told me, and on the road to Kansas City I realized that I envied her. She might have believed she was damned for all eternity, but at least she believed, at least she had a purpose in life, unorthodox as it might have been. She'd said to God, "You don't want me? Fine," then dug down real deep in her chest and hawked a massive wad of phlegm right in His eye. Perhaps she'd never have agreed to such an illustration, but that's just what she was doing, like it or not. And I envied her for it. I had no God to spit at, no hell to deserve. My life was meaningless, fodder for the flames of centuries past and centuries to come. I was nothing.

          It was pre-dawn when I arrived in the city. I found a nearby apartment complex and set up camp for the night in one of the basement storage areas. Before falling asleep I wrote something, a poem of sorts, though it doesn't really rhyme. Someone once told me that they don't have to:

"Rocks and fists, us and them
Beasts are they and beasts are we
Innocence a lie, lone wanderers, predator or prey
Evil in an evil world, living to die."

        Years later I had it engraved on a bronze plate and bolted to the rock that I took with me from St. Louis. I'm not quite sure why.

        I turned that little storage area into my home. A mobile home, actually. I packed up my belongings every morning and unpacked them every evening so as to avoid being caught. I was there for close to a year before the Blockbuster Video incident.

        I drank a lot during that time. I had to. Trying to drown out the certainty that your life amounts to a big whopping Zero is a difficult job, but I applied myself to it like nobody's business. I'd managed to be officially promoted from Boozer to Uncontrollable Alcoholic in record time and figured I might even make Dead Man by the end of the year if I kept it up.

        I knew how bad I was, which is just about the only positive thing about coming to the realization that the worth of your existence ranks right up there with plague-ridden feces - the whole denial thing goes right out the window. Unfortunately, denial's not always a bad thing. You have to at least care about something in order to deny it.

        I'm still not sure what I was doing at Blockbuster Video in the first place. I didn't have a VCR. Or money, for that matter. Just taking a stroll, maybe.

        I was in the parking lot, lighting a cigarette, when a car roared past me. Heavy bass blared from the cab, rattling the trunk. Punk kids. I flipped him off.

        It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

        The car stopped a few yards ahead of me and a kid jumped out of the driver's side door. He couldn't have been older than seventeen. He had on baggy blue jeans which he wore down around his butt and a thick green coat. His hair was short, clean-cut.

        He sauntered toward me, holding his arms out to his sides in what seemed to -me a comical imitation of the crucified Christ. "Wassup punk? You gotta problem? C'mon, then! C'mon!" He slapped his chest with his hands, two quick pats, and then returned them to their former positions.

        I pulled a small bottle of gin from my back pocket and shattered it against the side of his head. Broken glass ripped into the tender meat between my thumb and forefinger. The kid's hands went to his face. I went to his body - drilling him in the ribs and kidneys, couple well-delivered blows to the balls, and he was down for the count. I might have kicked him a time or two after he hit the ground, but I don't remember. The police report said that I did.

        I hopped into his car, a late '80's 5.0, and peeled out of the parking lot. I turned off the mind-numbing drivel that was pumping out of the speakers ("Broke down ho betta have my money, betta give up that thang, I'm the masta in this game") and flipped the radio dial. Tom Petty came out. Better. Much better.

        It was about this time that I noticed the telephone pole. What's that doing in the road? I remember thinking.

        I woke up handcuffed to a bed at St. Luke's hospital. Several hours had passed. I was a little banged up - a few bruises, a fractured arm, the cut on my hand - but they had me all fixed up and relaxing in county jail two days later.

        I was charged with Aggravated Battery and Auto Theft, but they dropped the Theft in exchange for a guilty plea to the Battery. I got three-and-a-half years, state time.

        Prison. It was '96 when I landed behind The Walls in Jeff City, Missouri. A dark and filthy place populated by dark and filthy men. There's a sign you pass under when they first bring you through the gate, a sign that's been there on that huge stone wall since the joint first opened. "LEAVE ALL YOUR HOPES AND DREAMS BEHIND," it says. It's not a request.

        I came close to killing myself while I was there, came this close to slicing open my wrists with a flimsy state-issue razor. Not because of where I was, but because of where I was going.

        It was April of 1999. I was due to be released the next day, to be set free, cast into that wide expanse of earth beyond The Walls which harbored the rest of my kind, that twisted, corrupt species known as humanity.

        But for what purpose? Set free! There was no such thing as freedom. It was a mirage, an illusionary promise dangled in front of us to no end, that we might take one more step, and then just one more, and, come on now, you can do it, - one more - until one by one we died and faded into the nothingness. Life was an exercise in futility; "Everybody paves their own road" a farce, a delusion - a contagious delusion, though, an appealing exercise, especially in a society so corrupted that even the purest men and most innocent children were no more than a clever disguise for unadulterated evil. Why enter such a world? Why expose myself to its lies, run the risk of believing them all over again?

        So I sat there, my back pressed up against the stone wall surrounding the bathroom on the yard and tore apart a blue Bic razor in order to get to the only thing that could ever truly set me free, that would allow me to escape, to rest, to cease.

        And then I saw him. Ten feet or so away from me, kneeling down in the grass, was McGuire. The yard was vacant, save for the two of us, and he was too busy staring at the ground to notice me.

        McGuire was a Lifer. Meanest bastard I've met in my life. He was tall and skinny, wore a pair of glasses with quarter inch lenses which doubled the size of his eyes, made them seem as though they were swimming around in a fish tank - the type who looked like he probably took a lot of crap as a kid. I once saw a guy mistake him for someone who still did. McGuire stuck a five inch blade into his chest six times, did it without so much as changing the disinterested look on his face, then walked away. The guards found the guy about an hour later, dead.

        McGuire was down for killing two cops in the late 70's, shot one and slit the other's throat with a steak knife. When their buddies arrived they found him straddling the first one's chest, trying to dig the bullet out of his skull.

        I tried to avoid him as much as was possible. He exuded an eerie sense of wrongness that was tangible, like icy fingers massaging your guts. The man was evil. Period.

        That day in April of 1999 I sat there, detached at first from what I saw, just watching.
"It's all right," he said, still on his knees. The cool, spring breeze carried me his words.

        Who the hell was he talking to?

        "C'mere." He reached into the grass and picked something up. He cupped it in his hands. "If you little sonsabitches wasn't so quick to go running off 'fore your time, this crap wouldn't happen." He stood and walked a few steps to his right, to a small tree that stood alone in the middle of the empty yard. A nest sat wedged between the trunk and a low branch about seven feet from the ground.

        McGuire extended his arms above his head, toward the nest, and I watched as the hands of the most evil man I'd ever known, hands with barbed wire tattooed around each wrist, that had once sliced a man's throat and dug around in another's skull, returned what would otherwise have been a doomed baby robin to its home.

        I could see the top of the bird's bald little head wobbling around inside the nest. It was only a moment or two before it started in with a series of loud, hungry chirps. I smiled.

        McGuire stood next to the tree for several more minutes, his arms still extended, and stared up at the nest. His eyes were wide, utterly alien to both himself and that place for a moment in time. The world, well, the only way I can explain it is to say that it expanded in that moment, that I felt it - saw it -grow larger, more real.

        I sat there with my back against that bathroom wall for an hour or more after McGuire left, staring up into the sky, watching the tree, looking at my hands and the thin, brittle razors that they held, thinking.

        Not today, I decided and tossed the razors into the grass. Not today.

        I saw McGuire later that night. He passed by my cell as he mopped the floor. It was late, about midnight. No one else was around. I pressed my face against the bars and rested my arms on the small platform that was used for passing meal trays into the cell - the beanhole, they called it. "Hey, Mac," I called, keeping my voice low.

        He grunted a reply without looking up.

        "I seen what you did for that bird today."

        He glanced at me, his eyes locking with mine for a brief moment - so brief that I wasn't quite sure he'd actually done it. The man didn't look people in the eye. Ever. He continued to work, his eyes following each stroke of the mop. "What the hell are you talking about?"

        I watched him as he made his way down the run. "Nevermind." He knew. I knew.It was enough.
I left the next day, eventually making it to the halfway house where I spent six months of my life, then moved on to Oklahoma and stayed with Mrs. Kramer for a couple of years before wandering down to the southern part of the state where I rented the small studio apartment that I've been living in for the past eleven months now. But I've already said all of that.

        They put a bus ticket in my hand and one hundred dollars in my pocket the day I was released from the penitentiary. The ticket was for Kansas City, Missouri, to the halfway house. The cash was for something quite different, though I couldn't yet say what it was.

        The bus station was small and crowded with people. People leaving.People arriving. People still in the middle of their journey, waiting. They stood, sat, paced, read, slept all around me. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think.

        I pushed my way through the sea of human flesh, not really seeing them. I heard a baby crying, a cough, felt the itchy caress of wool as I brushed against a stranger's coat, and yet I didn't. They were all peripheral. I reached the desk, out of breath, my chest tight, the people, the walls, the world seeming to close in on me. I slammed my hundred dollars onto the counter. "California," I told the clerk. What am I doing? I thought. California!? She handed me the ticket and my change.

        I stared out the window of the bus as the vehicle bounced and swayed along endless stretches of highway. I watched barren fields and rolling hills, forests, rivers and streams that wound this way and that, in and out of view, at times disappearing for only a few seconds, at others for an hour or more, sometimes for good.
I didn't know what I was doing, didn't understand the compulsion that had led me onto the road that I found myself traveling. Familiar feelings haunted me , like those that had kept me on the move, the run, since I was seventeen years old - the perpetual racing of my heart, the flighty tick in the pit of my stomach, the anxious fear that flitted about just beyond my reach; but there was something new as well, an inexplicable sense of anticipation that surrounded them. Oh, I was on the run all right, there was no doubt about that. But was I running from something? or toward it?

        There was a layover in Arizona. I stepped off of the bus into the hot, dry air. It was late morning. I never stepped back on.

        I began walking. Along the highway, onto side roads, along creek beds and across them, I walked, sweating, my skin turning pink then red as the minutes I spent beneath the blazing sun became hours.

        It was dusk when I wandered into the woods, the horizon a dusty red in the distance.
The whushing of tires on hot asphalt, the occasional blare of a big-rig's horn drifted through the air. The ground was covered in pine needles, vines crawled up the trees, the rocks were veiled in damp moss.

        I knew the small clearing the moment I entered, remembered with perfect clarity the log there in its middle where I had slept nearly seven years before. A shattered liquor bottle was imbedded there next to it. Its label was gone, the glass caked with dirt, but I knew that it had once been a shiny new fifth of Jack Daniels. I'd carried it to that very spot just before Highway Patrol had picked me up. Beside it, wedged beneath the log and covered with dead leaves and moss, was a small box.

        I knelt down and pulled it out of the shadows, cleared the grime from it. Only a few shreds of the velvet remained, clinging to the rotted wood beneath it in tattered, mildewed strips. I opened it. The hinges screamed, grating against years of accumulated rust.

        Inside lay my rose. The delicate pastel coloring had faded, leaving behind phantom shades of pink and green. The stem had been broken in half, a few of the petals chipped or cracked.

        I felt a drop of rain splash against my arm, another upon the back of my neck. Distant thunder growled from the south.

        So fragile, that little ceramic rose, and yet so strong. It had been broken, yes, but not beyond repair. If I was unable to fix it myself, then I would find someone who could.

        Thunder again. It was growing closer.

        I closed the box, easing shut the lid.

        I'd come a long way searching for that rose, not realizing just what it was I was searching for - or even that I was searching, for that matter. But I had found it. A bit faded, perhaps, even broken in a place or two, but I'd found it.

        I stood up, placed the box in my back pocket, and started back the way I'd come.

THE END