Dastardly

Funny that little funny thing ran out of the bark of the walking stick.

  Run around, run.

  Oh God! A scorpion, a bark scorpion. How could I have been so careless? The wounds had affected my ability to think. And I held my hand too long in one place. The sting hurt like hell.

  Never put your hands anywhere your eyes cannot see. One of the cardinal dos and don’ts of the desert.

  And the scorpion quickly struck me. Arched over tail of thick segments, but a tiny thing. A bark scorpion. Smallest are the worst, of course. The ugliest big greenish-yellow ones are harmless. Pinchers in the front for feeling prey.

  Squished, it looked like pus. Got you, buddy.

  But you got me first. Damn you.

  First I’m talking to dead old coots with poopy pants and now I’m talking to little dead scorpions which I left behind me hours ago.

  If I ever get back I vow I will do a couple of things. One is work hard to get Marsha back her money and apologize for taking it. I will tell her the truth about what I think. Tell her that maybe I have a weird kinda thing for her. Sure, that’s the real truth that’s dawning on me. I have a thing for her and I want to let her know. If she doesn’t want me, so be it, but there it is in black and white. I would like to spend the rest of my life with Marsha and Bailey. If I get a chance I will want to tell her. If I get a chance.

  A lot of untapped writing material here. Oliver. Old Poopy pants himself. He was a fucking classic. One of a kind. Never meet a better character. Never meet anybody else, maybe. Never meet another soul.

  Marsha, Marsha isn’t half bad-looking, for an over-weight woman who writes sappy love stories. She has a couple good ideas, too. Marsha is the only person who cares enough for me, secretly, oh so secretly, loving me, sure, with all my horrible flaws, my rude remarks and my theories about writing which make me laugh and aggravated her, knowing full well but never saying to herself that I had taken rent money from her and I looked at her as someone to take money from, someone to use. Finally the idea she’s loved me has permeated my thick skull and I respect her for loving me. Even if she doesn’t love me she has liked me enough to do a lot of good things for me, but how have I repaid her? With the worst behavior possible, stealing from her and her kid. Wow, and she still had it in her to speak kindly and not be angry at me for taking her dough. And I have no respect for her writing romances; I made endless fun of her. She didn’t want to know if I thought she loved me; she didn’t want to face what I thought she thought of me. That was a lot of people thinking about other people. It’s too painful to imagine it. It makes my head hurt. Maybe that’s the scorpion poison getting to me. To delve into that would break her heart. She probably never wanted to know. That had to be the reason she had never expressed her love for me, or else she didn’t love me at all and I had only been imagining the whole fucking thing all this time.

  How did this thing for me grow on her? What had caused it to gradually develop? Perhaps it was nothing more than years of abject loneliness, but she faced the same now, only with the memory of loving me. That might make things a little better. The thought was too painful. But didn’t love mean caring enough for someone to let them use you? To put up with their abuse? And yet I know that doesn’t seem right.

  And she did care for me, but now I was gone. But when she thought I might have gone to Mexico for a few days, two weeks, but this time? It might not make sense. She might know I wouldn’t disappear for a long time when Bailey had that big tooth problem.

  She will begin to look into the matter of my disappearance. Relatively swiftly, I hope. The fact that my wallet and the Subaru are gone would make it seem I’d truly left, at least at first of my own accord. She would contact all my friends after three weeks. But I’ll never make it out here in a week at the pace I am going. I won’t get to the car for days, if ever. There’s no sign of the road and I can’t remember how we had left it—what the trail looked like.

  No one will know anything about me leaving town. Nobody will remember me saying I am going anywhere. I didn’t trust anybody enough to let them know what I was doing.

  Would my parents come out to my apartment and help in the search for me, if they’ve forgiven me, looking for me in hospitals, in Mexico, in morgues? They’ll file a missing person report and about that time my Subaru will be found where this goddamn canyon begins, but a thorough search might never turn up my corpse.

  My fucking parents and maybe my brother will empty my apartment, because the landlord will insist on evicting me, and my landlord’s ex-wife will finally be getting what she has wanted for months, and his family will prepare to take my fucking shit back to Wisconsin. Eventually, someone will stumble upon my crappy car in the hills. I don’t know why I pulled it under those trees and bushes. Stupid crappy idiot. I should have left it in plain view of the rangers. I doubt they’ll ever find my body though. The coyotes and mountain lions will get me first. They won’t know to look for someone else, so the old man’s body will be left there, too. Poor Oliver, his fate is worse than mine. Or maybe better. He died fast.

  At least I won’t be palming money off Marsha anymore, when she can’t afford her own rent and she’s supposed to be saving money to attend a writer’s retreat in Idaho. Marsha will mourn me, wondering if I had ever considered her more than someone to use, but always doubting it. She won’t be going to the writer’s retreat because she’ll need every damn dime for Bailey’s teeth now and she can’t throw money away. With me out of the picture, who will take care of Bailey if she does go to the retreat? The plan had always been that Bailey would stay with me during that time.

  Mark Viglietti, she’ll think, surely he is out there somewhere looking out for number one. And wherever he was, Marsha would be sure he would continue to look out for himself.