Rare Air
Part Ten
I didn’t look at the mayor, or the others in the crowd who pulled or kicked at me. I took a page out of Kelly’s book and I looked at the loud mouth asshole directly. “Do you want to try and stop me, asshole?” He didn’t have eyes for me anymore, suddenly he didn’t have words either. I looked at someone in the group I did know and I pointed down at Drew. “Bury him next to sheriff Andrews up on the hill, do it for her, please.”
I was already pretty much packed by the time the mayor came in waving that stupid red bandana at me. “I know he was one of yours, Kelly too. They were your people. I get it. I’m your people too though. You have to be bigger than the moment. People are dumb and reactionary. They panic and they find ease in justifiable violence. I know the three of you found plenty of that out on the road. We need you here, I need you.”
Regardless of the fact that the kumbaya speech was a bad way to sell me on anything, there was just the plain and obvious fact that I could smell the mayor for who she was and deep down, she fucking knew it. After all those months of worthless and empty “be better” self-help bullshit words I finally got to see the small, tired and scared, person who had been hiding behind it all.
Boys and girls, you don’t want to pull at the curtain behind the big mirage, you don’t want to watch the sausage get made because this is an ugly soylent world and when you realize what really decides how your world works you will get sick to your stomach.
The mayor of Nothingsville looked at me as I finished packing my things and she whispered, “If this is about that loud mouth, Doug, or any of his people who came at you. I get it, I’m willing to look the other way. You do what you have to do, I just need order here.”
I finished stuffing my things in my C-bag, including Kelly and Drew’s picture ID’s, the closest thing I had to a scrap book of our times together, and I walked past the mayor. There was nothing to say, nothing worth saying. If I had told her the only way to keep hold over the masses was to grease it up and bend it over, she probably would have gritted her teeth and obliged.
Whores learn how to pick their clientele, politicians never do.
My last rounds of that little, limited civilization included a preemptive looting of the old HQ and a rifling of what amounted to our infirmary. I could feel eyes on me from the outset. The asshole, Doug, and his ilk were already wise to me and my moves.
I headed up the trails and above the river and I stopped just long enough on that rough trail to watch a few people dig a hole and toss Drew into it without ceremony. That wasn’t good enough but as always in life, it would have to do.
I watched them and I remembered the day after Kelly’s heroism in Centralia. We were all desperate and hungry and we came across the body of the leader of the red necks from the night before. Kelly and I both laughed, but Drew, he stopped and knelt and started to loot the fucker for some of the everyday essentials. Drew did the same thing three days later at a campground where Kelly and I both checked out. There must have been a dozen of them, probably more. They were all soft and fly ridden, rigor had already come and gone and rot had set in. We were ready to move on, sight on scene, but Drew shrugged and wadded in and came back with enough supplies to keep us all going for two more days.
Kelly could deal with murderers and vandals just as I could make with the killing when the time came, but neither of us could handle the already dead like Drew could. He saved us a few times with that stiff upper lip, wade in, routine of his. Mass suicides and killing fields weren’t about to keep him shy of a meal.
I was a few hundred feet up an overgrown trail, climbing up the side of a mountain in rural fuck all Washington state before I realized how important and irreplaceable the third member of my constant party had been and how I was going to miss him. Realizing that somehow unlocked all the grief I had buried for Kelly too and it was my time to cry my eyes dry.