The Marauder

The Mercury Marauder was reduced to merely a shape in the moon lit garage. It's maroon color now a non-descript black. Black would have been more appropriate for this dark hearted vehicle, Jared was sure of that.

He stood in the garage doorway in just his boxer briefs, his sleep being disturbed by an unsettling dream, although he couldn't quite remember what about. All the same, he seemed to be drawn into the garage after walking around his house aimlessly, taking a swig of orange juice strait from the carton(which his mother hated, but what mama don't know...), scanning through late night infomercials, taking a swig of Burnett's shoddy but always reliable vodka, and eventually a glassful of both in the form of a slightly sweet, but mostly burning screwdriver.

Now, Jared could see the shape of his mother behind the wheel, just as he had on that stormy Sunday night two weeks prior. But that was impossible. His mother was six feet in the ground under a comfy head stone, right next to good old Pops. She had always wanted it that way.

Jared knew your eyes created phantoms in the darkness when there were none, but he was positive it was there. He took a shaky step toward the car, then stopped.

The car was eerily silent, although he knew any other car would be no different. It was a unique silence, Jared was sure of it. This was a silence created from the mere presence and morbidity of the vehicle. It was a dead silence, he thought with a humorless chuckle. Surely that was the alcohol thinking.

He started again toward the car, the passenger side by instinct. Mama never let me drive, even at thirty, he thought. He shook his head at his foolishness and walked around to the drivers side. The shape behind the wheel was gone of course, only a vacant, leathered drivers seat.

Contemplating a moment, he finally decided to get in.

That was what you came in here for right? To get in.

Jared jumped back as if the drivers seat were filled with poisonous snakes. The words hadn't been heard. They were in his head. And they all came at once. It wasn't like listening or reading, where one had to interpret words one after the other. It was like the words were inserted into his conscious. There was no voice, no tone, just words.

He opened the door without thinking, placing himself snugly in the driver's seat.

Ah, much better, now close the door.

There it was again, this time Jared only flinched. The words could well have been his own. Mustered up in the far reaches of his alcohol sodden conscious, unexplored until now.

"What are you, a schizophrenic now?"

He turned the rear view mirror as he said this aloud, so he was staring into his own eyes. He pulled at his own hair, stuck his tongue out at a wild angle, and opened his eyes wide in a mock crazy man grin.

Your Mama always said the crazy folk hardly ever looked crazy at all.

Jared shut the door.

He giggled the giggle of a true inebriate. The thoughts were welcome now, a source of entertainment.

The leather seat cooled his bare skin with a slight shudder.

"We've got a great show for you tonight, the malevolent car is our guest tonight folks."

Another inebriate giggle.

Only if Mama could see him now. Behind the wheel of her beloved car. She feigned only contempt for the thing, but she relished it from within it's leather and glass innards, it's power window and seats. It's power steering. Helluva veh--

Great to be on the show tonight, Jared.

He wet his numbed lips.

What was he doing? Sitting in a car convincing himself his mother loved a car she surely hated? Giggling to himself? Having a conversation with a morbid car that was purely phantasm? Was he really going crazy?

Maybe if he turned the radio on. He wouldn't seem so crazy. Sitting in the car listening to the radio would be perfectly normal.

Sane.

Radio? No worries Jared. I've got that covered.

Jared reached for the radio and pressed the volume dial inward. The car remained silent. He pushed the dial once, twice more, and spun the dial to make sure it wasn't a case of the volume being too low. Still silence.

He cursed angrily aloud, offering the opinions the car was a portion of fecal matter, it's preference to perform fellatio, and that the car's mother, was in fact, a female dog.

He continued with the vulgar verbal attack, when he realized why the radio remained off.

"Fucking keys," he said.

He began cursing again, but this time at himself. After he ran out of things to describe his diminished mental capacity, he added an emphatic: "Fuck!"

They keys were on his nightstand. He knew if he went to get them, the pull of his California King would be too great, not dissimilar with the car's.

When Robert Plant's vocals came thumping out of the speakers, Jared nearly hit his head on the ceiling of the car, he was so startled.

The digital readout displayed 97.9 as the station.

"And she's buying a stairway to heaveeen," Plant swooned.

After swallowing his heart back down to it's normal compartment, Jared began slowly nodding to the chords of "Stairway to heaven."

Thought you'd be in the mood for a little Zeppelin, I sure am.

In the isolated proportion of the mind that remained sober, no matter what drugs, alcohol, or emotional event(these variables simply decrease the proportion) held the majority of the office that was your brain, Jared realized the key was still on his nightstand. There was no logical reason the radio could be on, but he still rocked with the music.

Eventually, Zeppelin surrendered to Skynard, then to Grateful Dead. Jared closed his eyes, humming in stride with Jerry Garcia's subtly rich tone.

Soon, he was losing stride with the music, and his conscious state began to slip away. Slowly at first, then seemingly all at once, a slap of fatigue. Then another, of even deeper fatigue. He nodded off near the end of "Goodnight Irene".

"Got my mojo working, just don't work on you..."

He was dead asleep by the concluding chords of the song, with short piggish snores serving as markers in the night for his journey to meet the sandman.

***

Jared squeezed the bridge of his nose before he actually awoke from his recreational solvent induced sleep.

Reality slipped covertly into his dream.

One moment, he was being mugged, was shot in the forehead by his assailant, an intense pain, and the next he was sitting, blinking into the murky darkness the garage took on in the early morning.

He groaned, trying to squeeze the intense thumping behind his forehead out through his eyelids. Right now, Jared did wish he was being mugged and shot, he wouldn't have to deal with the furious thump from within his forehead.

His dream had been disturbing, but he didn't care to trouble his brain with too much thinking, that had a tendency to make pounders like this even worse. The number one priorities right now were quenching his intense thirst, and to make his way to his bedroom.

He tried to wet his lips, but nothing. Only the bitter dryness of souring alcohol, a taste that resonated even up to his nasal passages, into an alcoholic scent.

Jared thought about his father, and how he used to say alcohol was like a woman. "Knows how to make you feel, but still there in the morning, causing you all sorts of trouble."

His father was rumpled and battling a pounder(one of many) of his own as he drove his son to school that day. He was notorious for his hungover-drive-to-school-in-the-morning advice. "Thos'r words to live by, boy," he'd add.

Jared sighed, the thought of his father bringing warm memories to light. Sure he was an alcoholic. Sure, he was a bad enough alcoholic to eventually succumb to cirrhosis of the liver, but he was a good man. All too often, the alcoholic label overshadows a man's better tendencies.

Besides that, Jared Kent Sr. wasn't a stereotypical lush. When someone was stamped an alcoholic, images of barroom brawls, miserably failed sobriety tests, a black and blued wife, skirmishes with teenage offspring, among others, came to mind. None of these ever came into play with the elder Jared Kent.

He was a subtle drinker. A glass of scotch after a hard day's work(which was every day at the dye factory), a beer or two for dinner, another four to five as he watched the evening news before he hit the sack.

He loved to fire up the grill on the weekends, and on these occasions, he fit in eight to twelve cold brews. The icing on the cake, however, was when pals from work paid a visit. When the grilling was over, and the Earth well tucked into it's blanket of darkness, thunderous laughter wafted around the warm night behind the Kent household. This meant they were chipping at a bottle of Bacardi. The laughter continued long after the bottle was empty, and was a common enough ritual for Jared Jr. to be accustomed to Jared Sr's "grownup talk" as his mother put it.

Still, Mr. Kent never laid a finger on his wife or three children, never a harsh word provoked by alcohol, never raised his voice inappropriately. In fact, the Kent family hadn't realized his alcoholism until it was too late, he had never allowed more than a stutter step when he consumed even mass amounts of alcohol.

Jared rubbed at his eyes until they hurt, wishing for both several Excedrin, and a glass of water.

"Can't be good for you," he groaned.

In fact, he thought, anything that makes you feel ill the next morning is probably bad for you.

He could feel his pulse at his temples, and felt as though he had a slight fever. He would get up, make his way to the kitchen--no, that was too much, he could get a drink from the bathroom faucet, lead laden or not. Now he would only have to make one stop before he could go back to bed, the Excedrin would be in the bathroom as well.

Outside the garage, Jared could hear the chirp of three to four insistent birds.

He tugged at his crotch, as every time he awoke in the morning, he sported almost a full erection. His tight fitting briefs weren't helping.

A sigh escaped from his lips.

He didn't really want to go to bed. Well, he did, but he didn't. Maybe he could drive around a little. The car wasn't talking to him like the previous night, that was probably his own commentary, but it certainly had an influence in his current desires. He couldn't fight off the urge to go for a crisp morning drive. He wanted Excedrin, he wanted sleep, but he wanted to drive more. The need for clothing hadn't occurred to him, he was so determined.

The car was silent, except for the sound of agitated leather when he occasionally shifted his weight. The radio's phantom power source was still a mystery, but not one he wished to solve. Too much pavement to burn.

There was no more wasting time. Before he knew it, machinery groaned and grinded to life, lifting the garage door. He didn't recall pressing the programmed garage opener on his dashboard, but it was an action that didn't require much thought.

He began to back out before the garage door fully opened, again not able to recall the moment he started the ignition. Although he questioned the process of opening the garage door and starting the ignition, he didn't question the fact that the car keys remained on his dresser.

As he exited the garage, he completed an exemplary three point turn, and sped down Ceder Drive, engine bellowing.

***

"A-B-C liquors," he said aloud. "Is this what you want?"

Jared sat in the Marauder with the engine running, grumbling to itself like a disgruntled old man.

It would, he thought, ease the beast raging in his skull.

He had seemingly come to the town square of Buckney, North Carolina, by instinct. It was a small town, one in which Jared spent the majority of his life. Everyone knew each other, and each other's intimate business. It had always bothered his mother how everyone in town seemingly knew things about her person before she her self did.

Pulling into the Kroger parking lot for no apparent reason, he parked in front of the neighboring ABC Liquor store his father had visited probably more than the grocer.

When Jared Jr. was old enough, in his early twenties, his father explained to him his worship(for lack of a better word) of alcohol. It served as his messiah. Jared Sr. went on, expressing that God's assumed existence was rubbish, God was no more credible than the Boogeyman in his eyes. The only evidence of a God was a book written by a man. Man, he digressed, had one instinct that lived through the centuries, no matter what advancements and liberations he masked it with.
Deceit. Since the beginning of time man was not only prone to, but likely to deceive one another. With that said, how, Jared Sr. asked, was the idea of God any different from the Boogeyman? You were supposed to believe in Him, no questions asked, just like children are supposed to believe in Santa Clause. God seemed to knock on Abraham's door every other day in the Bible, a comment that spurred a guilty grin from Jared Jr. But where was He nowadays, when the world really needed direction.
The question had stumped Jared Jr., who had, unlike his father, gone to church with his mother every Sunday for as long as he could remember. How was a guy spending a week in a whale's digestive tract any different from the Greek myths we often looked upon with scornful smirks, daring to assume ancient peoples were naive. Is the thought of a God who struck the Earth with lightning in anger, any less believable than a God who flooded the planet and had a single man collect a male and female specimen of every animal species known?
Now, Jared Sr. was beginning a digression within a digression, but retreated to his purpose. His God was the bottle. You don't have to fear the bottle. You don't have to impress the bottle. "In fact", he said, "alcohol is a deity that seems more omnipresent the less impressive you are."
Sometimes, Jared Sr. would go to the ABC store without purchasing anything.
Only to admire.
Admire the liquors and champagne that would never touch his lips.

Courvoisier, Krug, Dom Perignon, Cristal, Johnny Walker, Dewar's, Justerini & Brooks, Pimms No.1, Dalwhinnie, Lagavulin.

The gaudy bottling. The fancy label, sometimes the fancy box. It was beauty.

Now, this was Jared's attempt at understanding the wise man that was his father. He had already learned he didn't understand his mother as he thought he did.

A police cruiser eased in the parking space parallel to Jared.
Behind the wheel was Deputy James Connolly.
Jared still called him "Ace", as he had since they were peers at Buckney Elementary.

The Deputy gestured toward him with both a salute and wave in one quick motion. Jared responded with a similar two fingered wave.
That was how it was around Buckney, wave to your neighbor, but half heartedly.

The Deputy cut his engine, then left his cruiser for Kroger's

Jared did the same, but heading into the ABC store and never having to cut his engine.

***

No one seemed to mind that he donned nothing but his boxer briefs. Curly, ABC's clerk since Jared was a teenager, even gave him a warm greeting as he entered.

Now, Jared stood toward the back, admiring.

Courvoisier, Krug, Dom Perignon, Cristal, Johnny Walker, Dewar's, Justerini & Brooks, Pimms No.1, Dalwhinnie, Lagavulin.

Beauty.

Jared stood in a euphoric state, a constant climax, nirvana.
He knew now as the elder Jared Kent had.

Bee-yoo-tee.

"Well'd ya wanna taste?"

Curly placed a friendly grip on Jared's bare shoulder as he leaned into his ear with the offer.

Jared didn't respond, only stared.

"Your daddy used to come in here and do the same as you doin', he said. "I wish I'da done the old man a favor and let him snatch'a bottle, he deserved it, your old man did."

Jared wet his lips, his headache gone at the mere thought of a drink.

"Tell you what, boy," Curly conspired.

"What?"
"I'll have a little taste withya m'self, gets awful boresom round' here."

Curly ambled back toward the sales counter, fumbled below the register a moment, and returned with two foggy whiskey glasses.

"Should be drinkin' outta somethin' more proper," he said, pronouncing it propuh. "But this's all I got in the store."

Jared nodded, satisfied, fine by me, ol' Curly.

"What shall it be, noone buys this expensive stuff around here anyway."

Curly articulated expensive without the "ex", and here came out he-uh

"What would my father have chosen?"

Curly's face twisted into a mixture of grief and helplessness at the question.

Jared's eyes ran over the expensive inventory several times. One caught his eye, more often than not.

Dewar's.

The finest scotch whiskey.

Jared took the hint that Curly had no way of knowing his father's preference, having never actually sold him one of these playboy caliber drinks, and dragged his finger tips lightly over the label of the bottle.

Without a word, Curly nodded, giving Jared permission to unshelve the bottle and do the honors.
Jared did so, pouring both Curly and himself a hefty glass.

They toasted with a clack that made them both chuckle at their calamity, then drank.
Jared didn't stop until saw the ceiling through the bottom of the glass, then slammed it on a vacant shelf nearby.

Curly was still wincing at most of what Jared poured him.

"Tell you what," Curly rasped, still trying to scare away the bitterness with a grimace. "Go 'head an' take the rest, one bottle ain't gun' make no difference."

Face warm with pre-inebriation, Jared thanked him and walked back out to the car.

***

Better?

"Yes, better," Jared admitted.

The malevolent car was back.
It had been since the Whiskey had touched his lips, he knew.

He noticed the Deputy exiting the Kroger with nothing in hand, and walking straight next door to the liquor store. After spending less than a minute inside, Deputy Connolly took swift, but calm steps out the front door and headed straight for Jared's car, a look of determination upon his face.

He only wants some of that fine beverage you have just acquired my friend, shall we depart before he can ask, we both know how you can't say No.

Yes, just avoid the situation altogether, Jared thought.

He quickly shifted to reverse, even as the Deputy was already coming along side the Marauder, and pulled out with a jerky screech, almost partially running over the officer.
The officer only narrowed his eyes, resting his hand at his holster.

See, that's all he wanted.