Fiction: The Shepherd

Here's another dark one... actually, they're all dark, aren't they? But this one in particular, well, I warn those of you who are easily influenced: have a unicorn chaser ready after finishing this.

The Shepherd

At the end of the day, the kid is still by the side of the road. It’s possible that no one has picked him up because he looks wasted, and no one wants used goods. His shirt is the color of a badly-written B-movie script, first thrown away, then fished out of the trash and wrung dry of ideas. His denim jeans could be called faded blue, but they’re actually more of a tired grey. His bones are fused to the soles of his hiking boots, which are in turn fused to the concrete. He does not sit down, because that would make him look as though he were enjoying the scenery.

This is an almost funny thought, but it does not make him smile. The road lies dead from left to right, and he cannot see either end. No sign of the murder weapon, and the wounds have healed imperfectly, leaving black and tarry scabs behind to be picked at by passersby. The light leaving the sky washes out all vitality from the scene, making it difficult to distinguish the line between earth and air.

The kid brushes dark hair from his eyes and stares at the one-lane division of That Side from This Side. No cars have passed for so long that he can’t remember what direction they should be coming from. He decides that staring at the road is like staring at a pot of water, waiting for it to boil. So he opens up the backpack at his feet and goes through it, naming each item to himself to reaffirm their reality. In the face of the nothingness of his surroundings, the solidity of his possessions is reassuring.

Knife, he says, shirt, jacket, book. He packed this book with everything else because someone once told him it was good. He reaches for it, thinking to read the back cover, then realizes that he’s grabbed the wrong book from his mother’s bedroom shelf. This book is The Catcher In The Rye, by someone named J. D. Salinger. The inside cover tells him that the author has also written Frannie and Zooey. Instead of familiar, the kid just gets strange.

At the end of the day, the kid wonders why he left. He has a little debate with himself, playing both sides, watching the way the landscape thickens with the weakening of the light.

The kid is startled by a stab of white light and realizes that time has seriously passed. It’s too dark to read the face of his watch, so he knows it’s night. His eyes hurt from the light, which is coming from the headlights of a car approaching him from the left. By reflex, his thumb jerks out, intersecting the path of the car. The kid feels an odd irritation at this car, at the way it disrupts his control of the situation. When he was alone, all lines led nowhere. Now there is possibility again, and the kid is nervous.

The car comes to a stop with the front passenger door directly before him. The metal of the handle is muted silver, and smooth, and inviting. In through the door window, the driver is an eerie sight, illuminated by the fishtank-glow of the dashboard lights. His smile is welcoming enough to offset any unwholesome images, however, and the kid opens the door, grabs his backpack and enters the vehicle. The debate will remain unfinished, both sides winning and losing.

Inside the car, the usual things are said; about thanks, and destinations, and identities. Responses are given as by rote, spoken with one-half of the mind, the answers assumed to be correct. Afterward, for a while, there is silence. The kid looks at the window on his side, sometimes seeing what goes by outside, sometimes seeing himself, reflected in the glass. He pays no attention to the man driving.

The man wears thin-rimmed eyeglasses. His hair is thinning and sometimes his hands tremble. He keeps a loaded revolver beneath his seat, and intends to use it later tonight. He hopes that he won’t have to actually shoot the kid with it, but he doesn’t worry about that too much. Normally the threat is enough.

The man has done this before. He works in an accounting firm two miles away from his house. He is a competent worker, and makes no waves. He watches television at home and spends time in museums. He is invisible. When he passes people on the street, no one stops him to ask for the time, and no one hands him pamphlets. When he hurts, no one consoles him. When he laughs, no one hears him. When he kills, no one knows. He doesn’t matter. Things don’t happen because of him; things happen regardless of him. So sometimes he drives.

The kid is watching the outside go by. He picks points to stare at, and watches them pass. He tries thinking about his past, and the things he’s done that he can point to with any sort of emotion. Unsurprisingly, nothing comes up. The kid has been a good boy all his life. In fact, he has been so competent at being the decent sort that no one ever remembers him. There are no skeletons in his closet. He’s never gone to jail; he’s never gotten anyone pregnant.

If he had been bad, even once, he could use that to mark his place. He could point to that event and say Look, I’m no angel. I’ve been there. Or he could say That was where it all began to go wrong. Or, for God’s sake, he could even laugh and say Remember the time...?

But right now, he’s riding along a deserted road, driven along by a murderer and rapist, and he can’t say any of those things. He’s just looking out the window, letting it all roll by him.

The man next to him inserts a cassette into the dashboard, and music begins to play. It’s Aja , by Steely Dan. It’s nice. It complements the mood well. The man knows all the songs by heart. The kid knows a couple of the songs, but has never really paid much attention.

The man steals little sidelong glances at the kid while mouthing the lyrics along with the tape. The kid is fair-skinned, with hair that seems black in the low light. His nose tilts slightly upward, which the man likes. And he’s no smoker, for which the man is grateful, because he hates the taste of a smoker’s tongue. It makes him think about his father, who smoked all the time, and died of it after a prolonged stay in a local hospital.

The man has hated hospitals ever since his father passed away. That’s how he always thinks of it; not died, but passed away. Passed, like smoke between clenched teeth. Passed, and left a smell like a thing that had been used up. His father had been in the business of equipment rental. The business of using things up, until every iota of usefulness was gone, leaving behind something that just waited until the end, so it could leave a stain behind, to say that it once had been there.

Maybe that’s why the man likes driving so much. Because when he hits this road, he always finds something waiting, something used and ready to die. Like the kid.

The kid doesn’t know that he wants to die. He wants to do something with his life, to make an impact, to find his niche. He does all things well, but no one thing best. Not like the people in school, whom you could isolate and determine that this woman is an artist or that this man is in marketing . That’s home base to them. That’s their field of expertise. The kid wants so much to belong to something concrete and provable. Something to set down in black and white.

Outside his window, the world goes by. The kid makes out shapes from the passing hills and the distant lights and the silhouettes of interlocking tree branches. Against these backdrops, anything can be shown. Anything can have a context and not feel out of place.

The kid sees himself on his first date, with a girl whose name he no longer remembers. She drove. And after the dinner and the movie, in her backseat, she wouldn’t let him take her panties off, so he ripped them off and ripped her open, because it had been her first time and she wasn’t at all ready --

But that didn’t happen. The kid may be tired, but he knows that they went home right after the movie, and said goodnight and goodbye, and never went out with each other again. Yet there they are, right outside his window, in the dirt, in the darkness. Thrashing about in the tall grasses and stones. He watches himself slap her two times in succession and force her legs apart, using the weight of his body to hold her down. He sees it.

The man notices the kid stiffening in his seat and knows he’s seeing something, just like all the others. Something important. The man is glad, because this means that everything will go just like normal. The man is happy to provide new life to the used-up things in the world, who all eventually meet him by the side of the road. It’s good to undo the work of his father. Because he’s the only one who can. It makes perfect sense. The father, inhaling the lives of people, his wife and son, taking long drags and releasing the smoke. Burning down the house. The son, saving the ashes, and coaxing a last spark to burn brighter than all the rest. It feels good to redeem and revitalize the way that he does. The man starts to hum along with the music.

The kid watches for hours. The blood flying from a battered face, the face of an old acquaintance who once broke a favorite toy of his. He didn’t really do this. But there goes the tooth, pounded forth from the gum with great force. The imagined sound of the child’s cries lost in the wind.

The kid watches himself bleeding to death from self-inflicted lacerations on both wrists. He did this well, too. First cut down, then across. It’s very peaceful, and the kid dies contented. Except that he didn’t.

It’s all real as anything has ever been. All the paths that were never taken, all the unconscious or beaten down thoughts have resurfaced and the kid gets to watch them all happen. They take their time. Now, the deliberate destruction of the car, the mother’s car, and the deferred punishment that was always too awful to even contemplate, laid out bare for him to see. The first injection and the first withdrawal, and the overdose. The shouting match between himself and his father, and the cutting of the cord. The long separation between visits to the care home, the open disgust at what his mother has become. All the abandoned and twisted joys, shown in better detail than even memory could provide, because he isn’t remembering them. The remnants of a splintered life, cast into a pyre, and set alight. But how they burned.

The kid knows, with queasy certainty, that he can still play. He’s young yet. He could open the door and jump, and roll and skid into the darkness, and live out these fantasies. Something would finally happen , and he would be the cause. He hears Donald Fagen say I’ll make it this time; I’m ready to cross that fine line.

The man is happy. Things are going according to schedule. Donald Fagen agrees. This is for me, the essence of true romance.

He reaches down beneath the seat and fondles his gun briefly, before bringing it up to rest upon his lap. He begins to find a suitable place to pull off the road and become invisible again. He has come to the place where he feels useful again. Here, where the numbers don’t matter, and the people don’t matter, and being invisible is a good thing. Like ether, which is good because it makes you sleep, and lets you dream.

The kid wants to know what the point is. He wonders why he left. Did he want to do good? To do bad? All he has to do is look out the car window to see what good and bad look like. He’s got that. Did he want to make a difference? Maybe. Maybe he can make a difference by stepping outside and dancing in the dust by the side of the road. He can be the person he’s always wanted to be, free of restrictions and his father’s desire that he be a good boy.

But look at what’s outside. Violent acts and violent thoughts. Is that all there is to being different, to being more alive? Is that all he’s missed by being so normal and decent all his life? He wonders why he left.

He watches the passion plays outside and knows: he didn’t belong. It’s not predestiny, or anything like that. The town he left behind already had violence. It already had lust and greed. It had everything a thriving town needs to grow. And the kid, with his perfect, sane life didn’t belong. There’s no longer a place in the world for good. For competent.

He gets it now. He understands. His eyes are open and he hears everything.

Well the danger on the rocks is surely past

There were never, ever enough victims. And lacking the natural ferocity of the predator, and without the impetus of enmity, without enemies, he couldn’t be prey. Not in that town.

So he left. Caught a ride.

Still I remain tied to the mast

The kid likes this song. He’s never really heard it before, but it was always there to listen to. Been there for years, in fact. The message finally got through.

The kid looks over from the window and sees the gun on the man’s lap. And he knows he’s made the right, final decision.

The man looks over, and sees the old spark flare up in the kid’s eyes. He’s beautiful like this. The man replays such moments over and over while he totals up rows and columns of figures at his desk. He thinks of his father, and how he died for his sins. It’s worth it for this rebirth.

There’s such love between these two people right now. It’s really a much better feeling than the kid has felt for a long time. And it’s such a good song.

Could it be that I have found my home at last?

* * *

Coming up, the longest short story I've written yet.

I crawl like a viper through these suburban streets
Make love to these women, languid and bittersweet
-- "Deacon Blues", Steely Dan