Train Ride

  Today, the mountain dissolved into the granite-colored clouds looming behind it.

  I lit a cigarette and guilt fell like a stone against my heart. I hated lying to Bonnie. But I hated even more the thought of shattering the image she constructed of me.

  My mind meandered to the beginning of our friendship. It was a few days after the little blond girl got the better of me on the playground. We were in the school lunchroom. She walked over to my table and placed a carton of chocolate milk in front of me.

  “This should help your bruised ego,” she said and proceeded to sit directly across from me. I scowled at her but she was undeterred. “My name is Bonnie. What’s yours?”

  “Trish.”

  “Short for Patricia?”

  “Nope. Just Trish.”

  Bonnie wrinkled her nose.

  “What?” I said. “You don’t like my name?”

  “It doesn’t fit you. You don’t even look like a Trish. And you don’t fight like one, either.”

  “So what do I fight like?” I was both amused and annoyed.

  Bonnie thought for a moment. “A tiger. You fight like a tiger.” I laughed. “That’s what I’ll call you.”

  “What?”

  “Tiger. Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, with a ‘y’.”

  “Why with a ‘y’?”

  Bonnie shrugged. “To be different.”

  Fast-forward to three a.m. several years later The phone call. Bonnie crying at the other end of the line. “Bonnie? Bonnie, what is it?”

  Bonnie, alternately hiccuping and crying, stuttering words. “It’s-it’s Emily.”

  “What’s wrong with Emily?”

  “Oh, Tyger. She’s dead. That bitch was coked up and had an accident with Emily in the car. Emily’s child seat wasn’t even buckled in!”

  That memory transformed the stone of guilt into a lead weight. Of course Mara was coked up when she had the accident. I sold her the cocaine.

  I turned myself in after the funeral.

  Bonnie forgave me.

  I didn’t.

  I couldn’t.

  I quit dealing cocaine altogether once I got out of jail. It was a promise I had silently made to myself and openly made to Bonnie. Now I only sold weed.

  I couldn’t stop dealing altogether. Dealing was about the only thing I was ever any good at. Truth was, it was the only thing I knew.

  I had it organized down to a science, keeping tabs on all my customers’ needs. I inherited some of the customers from my old man when he passed on. He was a tough old bastard, outlasting the doctors’ cancerous predictions by at least a couple years. But as he always told me, death levels the playing field for everybody. Once you’re dead it doesn’t matter how you lived your life because dead is dead.

  “Ya see,” the old man lisped without his fake front teeth in, “If you’re rich when you die or if you’re poor when you die makes no difference. When you’re up there, standing in front of your maker, He don’t care if you’re rich or poor.” The old man hesitated here to take a swig of his beer. “The maker is gonna judge you just how he wants to judge you. And nothing will bring you back. Not the money you’ve earned or the friends you’ve made. It just doesn’t matter. So you may as well do what you’re best at and let death take care of the rest.”

  He usually gave me a quick slap upside the head after that little gem of wisdom. Not for any reason other than he just felt like it.

  I wasn’t the town bully for nothing.

  By the time the pager in my belt loop vibrated a couple of hours had passed. The granite clouds had almost swallowed Stone Mountain whole. Or maybe it just appeared that way through my tear-clogged eyes.

  I wiped my face on the sleeve of my shirt and looked at the code flashing across my pager. Each of my customers had a code telling me who, what, how much, where and when. It was an old code flashing there. I told this person not to contact me again, they’d have to get coke somewhere else.

  I sighed and put my head against the back of the sofa. I thought about ignoring the page. Let ’em wait there in the woods behind the grocery store all night. Let ’em freeze to death for all I cared.

  I took a long drag off my cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly. The gray cigarette smoke melted into the grayness of the mountain which dissolved into the grayness of the clouds.

  In all that grayness, I began to see something. A solution to a problem. A light glimmered within the murkiness of both the weather and my thoughts. An idea, morbid and somehow intriguing, began to form in my head.

  I turned on the stereo. Maybe there was something to those weather predictions.

  ***

  In the woods behind the grocery store there was a dried-up creek bed, about four or five feet deep with banks on both sides. In the middle of this creek bed was an uprooted tree stump. It was on this tree stump where I sat and waited.

  My breath billowed in clouds from my mouth. The temperature had plummeted since Bonnie and I went to the grocery store just a few short hours before.

  I pulled my leather jacket tight around me. I had a flashlight in one pocket and a brown paper bag in the other. Both felt like leaden weights pulling at the collar of my jacket.

  Some would interpret this for guilt. But this was no more nor any less than any other transaction. I wasn’t thinking about morals or issues or guilt or blame. I thought about the long shot I was playing and my newfound faith in weathermen. I thought about Bonnie, working so hard to take care of her elderly mother and her two nephews, keeping them fed and clothed, warm and sheltered. I thought about forgiveness and marveled at people who doled it out as easily as candy.

  I thought about the night Emily was born. I was there at Bonnie’s request. She put the bundle into my arms and I held a newborn baby for the first time in my life.

  I don’t know — I guess no one does for that matter — what babies think or how they feel about people when they are held. But as I held this little baby and cooed and purred to her, she looked at me and smiled.

  I know babies can’t see things clearly. But maybe this strange new creature felt something about me that few people do. Few people tried to get past my defenses. That little baby girl did it with just a smile.

  And now she was gone.

  That stone of guilt weighed heavy on my heart again and I wondered who was the more to blame: myself or Mara?

  It didn’t really matter. Either of us accepting blame would never bring Emily back.

  I heard a rustle of leaves in the woods. I turned my flashlight on and pointed it in the direction of the approaching footsteps.

  “Hey! Dim that, will ya?”

  I aimed the light onto the ground in the creek bed. My customer walked into the circle of light until she stood in the backwash.

  She looked whacked. Dark circles beneath her eyes stood starkly against her pale skin. Dressed in tattered blue jeans and a faded pea-green Army jacket, she was drawn and thin, a hyped-up junkie too involved with her habit to eat, too busy snorting to comb her tangled mass of mouse-brown hair. Her eyes swam in her head, unable to focus, concentrating just enough to know the business at hand. Oddly enough, despite the haggard, desperate look of a wired-out junkie, she maintained her smug attitude. She held fast to her façade of defiant victim, even as she slurred her speech and swayed from side to side, incapable of standing straight at this point.

  “You got the stuff?”

  “Whaddya think, I stand in the woods for my health?” I looked her in the eye. “You got the money?”

  She hesitated. Perhaps a brief flash of cognizance penetrated the haze covering her brain. But the flash was gone and she pulled some bills from her pocket.

  I pulled the bag from my pocket and handed it to her.

  She handed me a wad of bills which I put into my pocket without counting.

  “What’s with the gloves?” she asked. Her eyes wavered in and out of focus as she eyed the black leather gloves covering both of my hands.

/>   “It’s cold. Or haven’t you heard?”

  Her attention returned to more important matters. “This is the good stuff, right? I don’t want any of that cheap crap.”

  I watched her fingers twitch as she contemplated opening the bag. “It’s the good stuff, all right. Have I ever steered you wrong?”

  “You sure?”

  I shrugged. “You’re welcome to try it. You don’t like it, I’ll take it back.”

  “Money back guarantee, huh?” She eyed me with a touch of suspicion — as well she should have — even as she opened the bag. She took one of the small plastic bags from within, removed a straw from her jacket pocket. She plunged the straw into the white powder. She inhaled deeply. She sighed. She inhaled again. Sigh. Once more.

  There was a look of ecstasy on her face. She had her fix.

  Her ecstasy was short-lived as panic crossed her face. She dropped the bag and clutched her throat. Her eyes bulged and focused sharply with the realization of what was happening to her.

  Dry heaves issued from her throat. She began foaming at the mouth as her body twitched uncontrollably. A thin strand of blood trickled from her nose. A sheen of sweat covered her forehead.

  She reached out for me but I took a step back. She fell to her hands and knees, gasping for breath on the way down.

  I searched my heart for sympathy or compassion for this person on her knees before me, looking up at me, beseeching me for help. I found none.

  “Something . . . in . . . the coke,” she gasped.

  I bent down so that I could look her in the eye. I wanted her to have a good look at my face. Her breath stank; it smelled putrid like a corpse lain too long in the sun. She dry-heaved as more spittle escaped her mouth. I didn’t back away an inch. Her eyes focused on me, imploring me to help.

  My voice was low and rasped with every ounce of rage I felt in my body. “I’d tell you to give my love to Emily,” I said, “but you’re not going where she went.”

  Her eyes widened in recognition, a full cognizance that was interrupted by her heaving blood on the ground in front of her, over her hands and Army jacket.

  I stood and took a few steps back as she tried to crawl towards me, reached for my feet, made an attempt to hang on to something, anything, to keep from dying. She lay face down upon the ground, her body spasming. After a few moments, the convulsions lessened in degree until there was one final gurgle.

  I took the wad of bills she had given me from my pocket and tossed it carelessly toward her inert body. I watched as they caught the air and swirled down around her like lazy snowflakes.

  I turned and walked away.

  I know two wrongs don’t make a right. That’s what my mother always said. I know it won’t take long for forensic specialists to figure out what chemicals were in that cocaine. I know I had no right to do what I did and I will never be able to justify my actions. I know it was murder. But I also know I’ll pay for it someday, whether in my lifetime or after death has leveled the playing field for me.

  Those little boys won’t hurt any more. No more cigarette burns. No more bruises. No matter the price, for better or worse, what’s done is done.

  I only regret not doing it before Emily died.

  As I stepped out of the woods and into the parking lot of the grocery store, snow began to fall.

  Summer Storm

  With a flourish

  he brandishes his hand across her face,

  his weapon, leaves a red handprint

  on her cheek and cuts her mouth inside

  against her teeth, a drop of blood trickles from the corner

  of her mouth, the handprint will disappear - it always does -

  never realizing it is the last mistake he will ever make

  in his life.

  She had told him

  she was not a punching bag,

  she was not here to be used or abused

  for anyone’s amusement.

  She stands beside him as

  he lies sleeping during a storm:

  a summer storm,

  so likely to strike any time, any place.

  She shoots him once through the eye

  and melts into the thunder.

  It Takes One to Know One

  “I don’t care how you do it, just get it done!” Seline’s voice sizzled and her eyes flashed fire.

  Sheila cowered beneath the vehemence of the spoken words. She quickly scuttled to her paste-up board on the other side of the room to do the job Seline wanted done.

  Maureen stuck her head around the corner of Seline’s paste-up board, her eyes wet and wide with anger. “How many times have I asked you not to yell at my people?”

  “I did not yell. I didn’t even raise my voice.” Seline didn’t look up from the story she was pasting up on the grid sheet before her, but the careful enunciation of her words carried the weight of her anger.

  “No, but the tone you used was uncalled for.”

  Seline tossed the paste-up knife she was using into the gutter of the paste-up board and placed a hand on her hip. “I’m not about to stand here and beg or sweet-talk anybody to do my paper right!”

  Now Maureen stepped around the corner of the paste-up board so that she faced Seline with her entire body and put her hands on her hips. Maureen was short, round and full of sound and struck a formidable sight when she did that. “Well, you know just as well as I do that the only reason we do your paper is because we have to!”

  Seline took a step closer to Maureen. “I am all too aware of that, Maureen, since you insist on reminding me at every opportunity. But just because you have to do my paper, doesn’t mean you can do a shoddy job on it!”

  An Xacto knife rattled as it hit the carpet and a few people jumped at the sound.

  “Does anybody know another way outta here?” I asked from the paste-up board in the corner next to Seline’s paste-up board.

  Bobbie laughed. “Kinda trapped back there in the corner, ain’t ya, Jodie?”

  Nervous laughter filled the empty void.

  “I like working back here in the corner,” I said. “I like it when the setting sun shines in the window.” I looked from Maureen to Seline and back to Maureen again. “But if you guys are gonna start hurling Xacto knives, at least let everyone else get out of the line of fire.”

  “Fine,” Seline said curtly to Maureen. “It won’t happen again.”

  Without another word, but with a dirty look my way, Maureen huffed back to the paste-up board on the backside of mine where she was working on the daily paper.

  I didn’t appreciate the dirty look, but it told me Maureen had gotten the underlying message. We each had been given the “give Seline the proper respect and professionalism” speech.

  Every Tuesday night, the battle of wills provided a good show. Being the pre-press supervisor, Maureen was responsible for completing the daily metro paper as well as Seline’s small local paper by the same deadline. Regardless of how they got done.

  Seline was the editor of the small local paper and she enjoyed pushing Maureen, and the other paste-up artists, to the very edges of their limitations of patience and stamina. Which made it difficult for anyone to show her any respect.

  When Seline finished with the page she was working on, she brought it over to me. “Tell me something, Jodie.” She held up the grid sheet, a thin piece of cardboard roughly the size of a newspaper page, for me to view. “Do you think the photo looks better where it is or would it look better in the upper right hand corner?”

  Bobbie joined us as Seline finished her question. “I think it’s fine just where it is,” she commented. She placed the grid sheet she had just completed on top of a stack of other completed grids.

  “No one was asking you,” Seline said tartly. “Jodie?”

  “Actually, I agree with Bobbie. It does look fine where it is.”

  Seline looked at the page for a moment. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Is that one ready, Bobbie?”

&
nbsp; “Uh-huh,” was all Bobbie could say. Bobbie watched as Seline signed several pages out on the roster and walked them to the adjoining camera department. Bobbie shook her head and looked at me. “What kind of hold do you have over her, girl?”

  “Look,” I said as I trimmed a galley of copy. “I’ve been proofreading and editing Seline’s pages while I paste them up. I’ve got quite a few errors that way. I guess she appreciates it.”

  “I guess,” Bobbie said.

  “Ya know, if Maureen would let me do all of Seline’s pages on Tuesday nights, it would take the heat off everybody else.”

  “It sure would. Have you asked Maureen about that?”

  “I did. But she wants all the pages evenly distributed to get it done quicker.”

  “I’ll talk to her about that,” Bobbie said. “I’ll get her to do it.”

  I chuckled. “If anyone can, you can, Bobbie.” Bobbie and Maureen had worked together at this paper about eight years. Bobbie was one of the few people to have any influence on Maureen.

  I was still chuckling when Maureen shot around the corner of my board.

  “Okay, look, Jodie.” Maureen spoke fast and out of breath as though she were afraid that time would run out before she finished what she had to say. “Since you work so well with Seline, we’re gonna go to lunch and leave you here with her. I think you can finish up what’s left and then you can go to lunch.”

  “Sure. I’d be glad to,” I said. I could feel a sly grin cross my face as though I knew something they didn’t. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a look pass between Bobbie and Maureen and Bobbie just shook her head. Maureen disappeared to the other side of the board. “Lunch!” she boomed out. No one in the room needed a second announcement.

  “I feel better now,” Seline commented when she returned after everyone had left.

  “You should,” I grinned. “You got your weekly dose of flirting with the camera guys.

  Seline grinned back as she picked up a page that I had just completed. “Brash.”

  “That’s what you like about me,” I retorted.

  “One thing I can say for you, Jodie,” Seline said as she bent over the paste-up board to edit stories, “is that you don’t get bent out of shape over things like Maureen does.”