Nothing Can Stop Me
Robert T. Belie
Nothing Can Stop Me
Robert T. Belie
Copyright 2014 Robert T. Belie
Nothing Can Stop Me
Table of Contents
Title
Beginning
End
About the Author
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Most people have a polished and rehearsed answer to the typical interview question about where they see themselves at in five-year’s time. Timothy Steven’s answer was no different, no less naïve, no less wrong. Somewhere along the lines of finishing up college and immediately starting work at a six-figure job with a corner office, driving a bright red sports car, and having a loving wife at home and a girlfriend or two on the side. The American Dream. But that was, well, that was five years ago.
If he could go back now and cut in on that imaginary interview he’d probably change his answer…“Hey young Timmy, mind if I take this one? Thanks. Well if I play my cards right, I expect to walk out of the Winslow Correctional Facility as a convicted felon and hopefully land some shit job washing dishes and cleaning toilets at a low-end diner.”
As it so happens, washing dishes and pushing a mop around doesn’t actually require a great deal of mental concentration, almost none in fact, and such contrived scenarios replay in Tim’s mind pretty much on a nightly basis.
They also used to occupy his thoughts on the mile-and-a-half walk to work from his one bedroom apartment, but that was before he had scraped up enough from three months of living-the-dream at the diner to afford the finest 15-year old used car that $800 in cash could buy.
Now he could drown out those thoughts reminding him of what a failure he was with the car’s radio. Mostly. That is the thoughts were still there, and driving a shit car to a shit job didn’t exactly exude a sense of success and accomplishment, but he could at least weave between the truck traffic along Route 40 and get to work in less time than walking had taken. Less time to think about things, until of course he clocked in and started his next shift and began anew regretting how royally he had fucked up his life.
Pleading guilty to criminally negligent manslaughter at 18 had earned him a ten-and-a-half year sentence. And with prison overcrowding, as well as factoring in the stupid, but by no means callous nature of his crime, and along with it being his first offense, with his young age, and time off for good behavior, Tim ended up serving less than half the time prescribed during sentencing.
Even with the reduced sentence he still had lost five years of his life. For five years Winslow had been a second home to Tim and 1,927 others. Not by choice, but as a result of choices they had each made in their respective lives.
ASPC-Winslow is one of ten facilities belonging to the Arizona State Prison Complex system, and as far as prison life was concerned it wasn’t all that bad. Not preferred of course, even late nights scrubbing piss driblets off the restroom floor of Antonio’s Fine Italian Restaurant and Pizzeria beat confinement, not by much, but enough.
All told a five year stay in the level two Coronado unit as a ward of the Arizona Department of Corrections went by as close to uneventful as possible for Tim. Boredom was the most trying aspect of prison life. Boring and tasteless meals of bland indistinguishability, boring routines of waking up, searches, recreation time in the same bleak yard, and boring clocks that couldn’t adjust time either forward or back. More than anything else the boredom meant being stuck in a forward state of decay without any power to alter his course.
He was not free to live his life for five years, but books, family visits, even movies and TV, as well as some work on a correspondence degree from a sponsored junior college all helped to some extent. Prison sucked to be sure, but the time was manageable. And at least he didn’t get caught in any rival gang power struggles and the only thing that touched his ass in the showers was water.
Eight to 12 hours a day at Antonio’s provided a lot of time for Tim to think about a lot of things. His mind went on autopilot and the images came whether he wanted them to or not.
They came to his door on a Sunday afternoon. The picture was down from his profile’s timeline, but it was too late. Too many people had already seen it and put two and two together. Silver Springs only had a population of 13,000 and a police force consisting of five officers, and two of them were now at his front door.
It was stupid but cool as pranks go. At least that’s what he thought after stealing the stop sign from the eastbound direction at the intersection of Route 40 and Ambers Road. It was cemented into the ground, but fastened to a wooden pole that only took a few minutes of Tim’s time to saw through.
With the red and white octagon prize and the stub of its attached pole loaded in his back seat he was quickly on his way back home, the whole deed having taken less than 30 minutes to accomplish.
And the pièce de résistance was the cell phone photo from his room posted online to his profile. With the blue and white triangle-shaped pennant of his high school pinned to the wall in the background was a selfie of Tim in the foreground holding his newly acquired trophy. In the caption below the photo he had typed the text, “Nothing can stop me.”
He only had 26 “friends” on his social media account. More than some, less than others. A social world large enough to fully encompass the lives of most small town high school students. A social world large enough for several people to take notice of the photo.
By 11:30pm that Saturday evening the photo had six “likes” and his friend James had left the comment, “Nice man. You should bring it to graduation.”
By 2:30pm Sunday the two officers were at his door. Through that morning before they arrived he had started having second thoughts. Doubts enough about the wisdom of what he had done to first hide and then fully delete the post with his newfound trophy.
Then came the messages about an accident in town late the previous night. Rumors. Some jokes. Some insults. Some details. Then news that made Tim sick to his stomach. Moira Anderson, also a senior at Tim’s high school, had been in an accident while driving home from the closing shift at the coffee shop she had worked at for the past three years. She had been side-swiped by another vehicle as she pulled across the intersection of Ambers Road and Route 40.
Although his head was spinning, he managed to toss the saw into the garbage bin along the side of his house, but when the sign itself proved to be too large to fit, Tim resorted to hiding it under some sheets of plywood beneath the workbench in his garage.
By the time he showered and checked his online account again, the police had wrung the doorbell.
When he made his way downstairs and saw his parents standing at the door along with the officers, and one of the officers holding a printout screen capture of Tim’s online profile, and the photo, he knew it was over.
He was arrested on the spot that Sunday afternoon. Moira died from her injuries the following Tuesday. The car that hit her wasn’t speeding, but the driver was unfamiliar with the area and with the sign relocated to Tim’s room and social profile, he just kept driving through the intersection at 55mph, right into Moira. She had no chance.
Now she was dead and Tim’s life was over as well.
He avoided a lengthy and drawn out trial by pleading guilty. His court appointed attorney strongly suggested taking a not-guilty plea… to work a jury. He had made a mistake to be sure, but it was just that, a tragic mistake. He wasn’t even present when the accident took place after all.
But in the end Tim just wanted to avoid further pain and further humiliation. He was sentenced and taken to his new home in Winslow, knowing full well that he could never return to his old one in Silve
r Springs.
When Tim left Winslow, with aid from his family, he was able to setup with a fresh start, or as fresh of a start as a convicted felon turned pizzeria busboy could muster just over the New Mexico state line. Not a glamorous situation, not where he thought he’d ever be, but a chance at a new life all the same. The only thing in common with Silver Springs was the east-west passage of Route 40 through town. And that was about all the reminder Tim needed of his past.
It wasn’t the only reminder he would get however.
Three days after he had paid for his car she appeared. Tim had finished his shift at Antonio’s and was dropping the last heavy-duty bag of trash into the industrial bin that was a fixture of the rear parking lot. As he turned toward his car he jumped back, completely startled on seeing her sitting in his passenger side seat. It was Moira. Or a vision of Moira. Just sitting there. Not moving. Staring directly ahead out his windshield.
Maybe five years at Winslow had been more damaging on him than he had thought.
He quickly headed back into the pizzeria and then back out toward his car, hoping the hallucination had gone away.
It did not. She did not. Moira was still sitting in his car. He hadn’t known her all that well in school, but became intimately familiar with her