Thunder roared, shaking the windows of the trailer. The storm was hungry, pelting the roof with talons and fangs. I felt along the ruffled blankets beside me, searching, until a great flash of lightning lit up the bedroom for a cold, fleeting moment...just long enough to tell me I was alone.
I wasn't really alone, though. I could hear it, out there in the rain...shuffling through the mud like a wounded bear, staggered and heavy...dragging its claws across the cheap siding of the trailer as it sniffed the drowning air, searching. The blue-red flicker of its eyes appeared in the window above my head, flooding the room with their pulse, now dancing across the fetal mound of my body under the blankets, hidden and trembling...
I knew it saw me anyway, of course. I knew it hated me for what I'd done to it, and it was going to punish me now. Even as the glass shattered, and the storm rushed in, I found I could not move...
A muffled crunch of plastic and metal yanked me back up into consciousness.
I was still in Russell's bed, still alone, but sunlight and chirping birds and a looming, poisonous hangover told me it was morning.
I was too exhausted and crusty to open my eyes all the way. I was hollow and aching down to the lining of my guts, the marrow of my bones, like I hadn't even slept at all. The blankets were everything I wasn't, soft and warm and perfect around my curled body, and they smelled like him. It was a good smell, different yet familiar...safe. I didn't want to leave their musty womb just yet, no...I only wanted to sink back down into the abyss behind my eyelids, where I hoped the dream was gone for now...
A second crunch pierced the walls of the trailer, followed closely by third, fourth, more - louder and meaner and louder again, over and over and over...
I pried my eyes open, blinking until they were wet enough to use. Russell Barrett's bedroom was a different world in the light of day, messy and lived-in with stains on the walls, swirls of dust drifting in golden sunlight above my head...
I sat up with a jolt, searching myself, still foggy and irrational from the dream I was pretending to forget, expecting to find myself naked underneath the blankets, blindly sure that my boxers and shirt had been stripped off while I slept...why else would he have drugged me with that Xanex...but the shirt and boxers he'd given me the night before where still on me, wrinkled and damp with drying sweat, and I wasn't naked at all...
This was worse, though, because I was wearing his clothes. Not mine. My memory of the night before hadn't fully congealed; I remembered taking his clothes from his hands, but I couldn't remember if he'd ever actually said I could wear them, which opened up a deep black pit of dread in my stomach, because I didn't want him to punish me...
But of course Russell hadn't stripped my clothes off while I slept. Of course I wasn't going to be punished for wearing them. This was a trailer somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina...not the cold, shadowy house down in the dilapidated bowels of Georgia...and Russell was not the Chief.
I buried my face in the pillow. The bed smelled like Russell, different and the same, safe...but I was too awake to let that put me to sleep again. Russell had told me something...heavy. Something bad. I wanted to ignore it, run away from it...but instead I was drowning in it, anxiety creeping in like quicksand, sinking into the mattress as my thoughts spiraled into -
Another smashing blow erupted from somewhere outside.
I pushed the blankets off and dragged my body out of bed, chasing the distraction while the spiral was broken. I found my boots and jeans in a tidy pile at the foot of the bed, wallet and phone still safe in their pockets. I pulled them on as I wobbled down the narrow hall into the empty living room. I parted the blinds at the picture window, squinting painfully through the heady, glaring migraine and the raw daylight.
My old sedan was still parked on the packed-dirt driveway out front, right next to Russell's shiny black truck, and his figure stood tall in the grassy field beyond. His back was to me, hunched low over the ground. He raised a wicked-looking blunt instrument above his head, and smashed it down - destroying something. I knew what it was, too.
Another crunch - the biggest one yet - and the Chief's laptop finally shattered against the ground between his feet, now scattered across the grass like a wave of glittering shrapnel.
I almost didn't leave the trailer. I was finally remembering just how badly I'd fucked up with him, this older, angrier man who regularly mingled with hardened killers. I didn't actually know him at all, and I definitely didn't know what he was truly capable of...how stupid was it to come here alone, and give myself over to this stranger? How stupid was it to all but...rape him, last night? He could clearly kick my ass two or three times over, and I definitely deserved it. I wouldn't even try to stop him, should he decide he needed to do that...but what if he didn't stop there? What if he decided to really get even...or worse, that nobody could ever know? Now that the laptop was gone, I was the only loose end left, besides himself...
I shivered. There was something even worse than any of that, and it was also the most likely thing to happen by far; if I went out there to greet him, he would tell me to leave. No more, no less. I understood, of course, even if the thought ripped me up inside for some stupid, useless reason...
Man up, goddamn it.
He didn't flinch when the screen door swung shut behind me with a bang, nor did he acknowledge my footsteps as I approached. He was a barefoot statue under the towering branches of the oak tree, but I kept my eye on him anyway. He wore a tight gray t-shirt and loose, clingy pajama bottoms that hung low on his hips...low enough to tell me he hadn't bothered putting on boxers underneath. Fresh, spreading sweat stains darkened the fabric under each bulging arm, the patch between his shoulder blades...the small of his back...
I bit my cheek, hard enough to taste copper.
Focus.
A heavy steel wrench hung low in his right hand. It was dangerous, real, and I didn't know what else he planned on doing with it. I just knew it was massive, a tool for taming fiery steel engines...and he knew how to swing it hard enough to crush a human skull...same as he'd just done to the Chief's laptop. It wasn't recognizable of course, reduced to a useless pile of ruined circuitry and black plastic shards all over the ground, but I knew what it was. The disfigured yellow smiley-face sticker gazed up at me with its one remaining eye, half-shredded and curled into itself against a piece of dark metal, somehow smug even now.
"Mornin," Russell mumbled, once I was standing beside him. He stared down at the remains of the laptop, as if he didn't remember how it had gotten there.
I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything. The grassy meadow beyond the giant oak sparkled with morning dew, dense enough to feel on my skin. The ground rose steadily as it reached the treeline, the forest...and then it was the face of a lush, green mountainside, sunrise creeping over its sheer edges. We watched the dawn swell into true morning, the sky a shade brighter with each heavy blink...until it was blue and cloudless, blooming, drowning us in gold.
I rubbed the last bits of gunk from my eyes, finally awake. "Morning," I managed to say.
I glanced at Russell. He was still gazing off at the sunny mountainside, still caught in a dreamy trance. His messy red hair seemed a touch less vibrant in this harsh light, flecked here and there with silky gray strands. The pale skin of his face seemed to droop from the handsome symmetry of his skull, the scruff on his throat more ragged than virile...but his eyes were worse than any of it. They were distant, sinking into their sockets above twin beds of sagging purple flesh, as if his very thoughts were aging him. He seemed spent, worn out...old.
He blinked slowly, took a deep breath, and let the steel wrench swing lazily against his knee. "Had a dream last night," he said, as if I'd asked. "Dreamed you were gone when I woke up. Just up and left. Wasn't pretty like this, though...more stormy, like..." He took a deep breath, leveled himself out. "I thought I might've dreamed the whole thing up. You showin up, everything after...like you were a ghost, or something. But you were still here when I woke up, real as anything...and then I guess I remembered this damn thing was here too, and I didn't want the filthy goddamn thing in my house for one more second."
"I don't blame you."
He drove his heel into the smiley-face, grinding it down into the soil. "I thought about just sellin it...or maybe even sending some of those videos to the press down there, like you were gonna do. Show that whole damn town what he really was..." He scattered the rest with a mean kick, lost in the grass. "This made a lot more sense, though...once I realized I was doin it, anyway. And this is just the start. There's a lot of shit just like it that I need to get out of my house...my life..."
"Did you want me to go?" I asked, hearing only what I was afraid he'd say.
"Go...?" He was clearing up now, glancing over at me. "Nah, man. I mean...that's not what I'm sayin. I mean, not right now. I just..."
He took a deep breath, leveled himself out...but I knew he was relieved, because he didn't have to be the one to say it. "I'm sorry, Mike. You don't gotta go right this second or anything - but I don't think it'd be a great idea for you to sleep here again."
"I don't blame you," I said again, robotic.
He sighed, somehow more tired than I was. "I mean, I'll get some food in you, get you cleaned up and all, but...I just think it'd be better for both of us, at least for now. We're still too close to it, you know? To what happened. We still have to figure ourselves out, and I don't want either of us to get..." He swallowed. "I don't want us to slip into old habits, bad habits, when we should be learning how to pick up new ones. That make sense to you?"
"Yeah..." My face was getting hot, tightening up at the edges. It bit my cheek hard, just enough to keep the wetness out of my eyes.
"Good. That's good," he said, pulling into himself...and the spell of the morning was broken. "Are you gonna be okay?" he asked, forcing it out of his mouth. "About...you know. What I told you last night, about the Chief, before we went to..." He grimaced and swallowed hard, Adam's apple gliding along his throat...choosing his words carefully. "Before you passed out."
I wanted to cry again, wanted to bury us both in an avalanche of rage, and grief, and feeling, desperate to make any sense of it...but I kept my spine straight, pretending to pull away as well, because that was all he wanted us to do. I owed him that much, at least.
"Don't worry about it, man. I'll be fine."
