HOME | DD

Description
The whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the “Watchtower” itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you’re out, you’re dead. This pitch is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff. It’s no wonder they keep getting busted.
-Charles Bukowski
~
A stick finally got thrown in the spokes after a particularly slanted Friday night. I had skipped out of the factory early and ducked into Brogan’s, a bar about a block away from my apartment that was known locally for being the only building so full of sweat and rot that the walls grew scabs. I had already been sipping from my flask all day, par for the course, so when the bartender brought whiskey, it served me well. I met the kind of woman you meet at Brogan’s, some deflated pixie who couldn’t get noticed elsewhere, and things went the way they go.
When I woke up she was wearing the shirt of my alma mater, still sweat-stained, the logo starting to fade. She was sitting on the corner of the mattress. At her feet the remains of a cigarette lay moldering on a plate I had left there. She just sat, staring into the middle distance, enjoying what was apparently her second smoke of the day. Beautiful.
“Oh Christ.” I sat up and sighed at the familiar headache.
“Oh, hey,” she said.
“Yeah, hey.”
“What’s all that writing up on the walls?” Ash fell to the floor as she waved her cigarette in a circular gesture. The black letters were scrawled on all four walls of my room, big, drooping, painted on sentences.”
“It’s literature,” I coughed, “poems and shit.”
“What’s it about?” She leaned in towards me, smiling. I was still naked under the sheets. Her blond hairs were all over the place. Don’t even think about it, I told myself.
“Well that one by the window’s called ‘why the fuck are you still here?’.”
She drew back in anger. Is she not used to this? I wondered.
“Dontcha even want to know my name?” She rose from the mattress.
“Why would I?”
She put the cigarette out on the bed and marched toward the door.
“Don’t you take that shirt!” I yelled as she stumbled into her shoes. She took it off and threw it to the floor and left wearing nothing but her overcoat. I went to the bathroom and dry heaved until a thick brown paste leaked out. It was spicy, but not in any way that resembled food. My eyes caught the passage written in the corner:
Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing. –S.
I lurched back to my bed and moaned to myself and eventually slept.
When I woke up again it was 1 p.m.
“Oh Christ.” I repeated, this time to an empty room. Days like these are why I don’t have mirrors. I turned on the news and turned up the volume before I got in the shower. Apparently somewhere far away a suicide bomber had killed nine people at an outdoor market. I’m hungry, I thought.
I spilled out the front door of the building and squinted, walking south toward State Street.  It was hot out, and the liquor simmering in every tiny aperture of my skin was all I could smell. Cars coughed by, and the shoulders of an occasional pedestrian would bunt me off course, and a fucking goddamn police siren started off.  My eyes felt like they were turning to plastic, hard and dry. I was pouring sweat. The buildings seemed to bend over me. Across the street was a pan handler. Instead of crossing I took a right toward the parking garage. In two hours, I was in my car, pulling into the parking lot of a diner, two hours from the city. Across the street were two houses and a cow pasture.
Inside everything was mint green and cream colored: the booths, the tile, the counters, the waitresses. It was like one of those chain reproductions of a fifties diner except it was at least that old. The panels in the ceiling were stained smoke gray and a thick black crust had built up all around the big flat top range behind the counter. If you went to this place and didn’t order coffee and pie, you’d be a goddamned philistine.
“Sit anywhere you like. I’ll be with you in a second.” She carried a box into the other room. She had red hair, tied back with a bandanna. She wore tennis shoes. She chewed gum. Her name tag read Linda. It was too damn perfect.
As I finished my fourth cup of coffee, a couple kids, looked to be about fifteen, walked up to the jukebox.
“I’ll pay you five bucks not to play whatever it is you’re thinking about playing.”
One looked genuinely shocked that I was able to speak.
“All you had to do was ask,” scowled the other before they slumped back to their table, mumbling to their friends about it.
“Well now, that wasn’t very nice.” Linda sauntered up to the table.
“Well, Linda, I’m hung over.”
“I can’t see how you’re still feeling bad with all the Irish you’ve been putting in your coffee.”
Truth was I felt fantastic. I had emptied my flask into the 4 cups, and the sap was rising. Linda started to pour me a fifth.
“Don’t worry about it,” I stopped her, “I gotta get going.”
I left before she could come back with the check. I couldn’t handle any more of the awkward flirting that was sure to come with it. When she came back from the room with the register in it, she’d only find the lone twenty dollar bill and two kids at the jukebox.
It was dark as I approached the bridge leading back into the city, and when I caught sight of the skyline, my guts boiled, and I pulled off to the side of the road. I just sat there. I sat there for a long time. The reflection of the lit up steal and glass was flickering in the river. My apartment was there. The factory was there. My son was buried there. I went back to the liquor store I’d seen about 15 miles back, I bought a fifth of whiskey and just kept driving west.
~
I woke up hot at two in the afternoon the next day, curled up in the back seat of small Japanese car in a Wal-Mart parking lot somewhere in what I thought was Pennsylvania. I could still feel the slight hum of the liquor, somewhere around the base of my skull. Thank god for that, I thought. I walked up to the vending machines out front and bought a cola and a bottle of water. I drank the water on the way back to the car. Sitting in the front seat, I filled the empty bottle half full with whiskey and the other half with the soda. I drank staving off the eventual hang over.
I drove until I saw a payphone. I was calling David. We had gone to school together and he was pretty much all I had left of a friend though we hadn’t talked much in recent. David had done things right. He was married and worked for a newspaper. He embraced the TV-dinners and lawn mowing Saturdays, never completely serious about it. It was like he was putting a note of sarcasm on his life and it amused the hell out of him. He picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hillford residence.”  He over-enunciated the words.
“David, its Tom.”
“Tommy! Comrade! You could have at least pretended you wanted to sell me some insurance or something.”
“Yeah, sorry, I’m half drunk.”
“That’s really great, Tommy. How’s the 401k?”
“Shouldn’t you be getting to church about now? Coaching little league?”
“I called in sick with an existential crisis.”
“How’s Diane.”
“Still my wife.” He shouted across the house, “Honey! It’s Tom. Tom Harris. He wants to know how you are….She says she’s stalwart, Tom.”
“Christ,” I laughed, “Anyway, I just wanna tell you I’m driving.”
“You’re driving?”
“Yeah, just driving…and drinking.
“Of course.”
“I don’t know where I’m going or when I’ll get back to the city or anything.”
“Shouldn’t you have done this like ten years ago?”
“Probably.”
“Well if you make it to Oklahoma, our couch awaits you.”
“You’re too kind. Anyway, I’ll see you around.”
“Hope so.”
I got back in the car. I kept driving.
~
It was about nine o’clock and I was driving down this two lane road in the middle of somewhere. I shut off the headlights for a moment. Complete darkness. The window was down and the night felt cool and real. When the lights were back on I saw something far off in the distance, a man. As I approached he stared blankly, like he was talking to a bank teller, simply gazing at my two headlights cutting through the ether. He stood straight up. A stream of blood ran from the corner his forehead down the side of his face to his mouth. His arms and legs were caked with mire. There had been draught all over this state and behind him his car was diagonal, nose down in the bed of a drying pond. It looked like it had been dropped from an airplane. He was tall, with ropy arms and a shock of short thick hair. He made no motion for me to stop, he simply offered himself to the headlights as evidence of his plight. I didn’t have the mental energy to justify ignoring him to myself. I pulled up next to him and he leaned forward as I rolled down the window. On his neck were the words IN OMNIA PARATUS, tattooed in thick block text.
“I need a ride.” It didn’t sound like a request. I immediately regretted slowing down, pulling over. This guy was going gut me, cut my throat, put an ice pick to my eye, decorate his room with my genitals. I popped the trunk.
“Put your shoes back there. I think there’s a drop cloth, wipe some of the shit off yourself.” While he was behind the car I thought about driving away. Instead I reached into the back seat and grabbed the measly tire iron that had come with the car. I tucked it between my seat and the door, where he couldn’t see it. He came back around the car slightly cleaner than before. I unlocked the door and he opened it and swung himself into the seat in a motion so quick, so fluid, that it would’ve made a lifelong ballerina cry. It was then that I noticed he had unscrewed the license plate from his car and was holding it, along with the registration, in his lap. On his hand was a wedding ring. He licked some blood from off his cheek.
“I only need to go about 30 miles.” Christ! Where is he taking me? I thought.
“What happened?” I pulled back onto the road.
“What’s it look like happened? I was drinking with this guy, Spider. So I started driving home and next thing I know I’m in a lake. I don’t fucking know.”
“Spider.” I whispered to myself. We rode on.  My radio hadn’t worked for a couple years, and the quiet in that car was awful. The engine whirred and the tires and the occasional bump would cut the silence. Finally the dam burst in my psyche.
“I’m Tommy Harris.”
“Sullivan Gray,” came the reply.
“What do you do?” He asked after awhile.
“I worked in factory. We made baby shoes.” I shifted in my seat. Something about the word “we” didn’t sit right with me.
“Baby shoes!?” He laughed. “Goddamn.” Everyone laughs.
“But I guess I don’t do that anymore. Now I’m driving.” He nodded slightly at this. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What do you do?” There was a pause.
“You know, this and that. I-” he stammered, “I do what I have to!” I put my hand down at my side. He continued. “I come back from two goddamn years in the war! What am I supposed to do? Sell cars?” My grip tightened around the tire iron. We rode in silence. Eventually, we came up behind an SUV, lit up on the side of the road. Well, here’s Spider, I thought. The old “I got drunk and crashed my car into a pond” routine.
I slowed slightly as we passed by. There was a woman, lit up by the headlights, her hands on her forehead, staring down at something.
“Stop the car,” he said it forcefully. I pulled up the tire iron. “Stop the car!” He was yelling. I slammed on the breaks about 50 feet from the woman. He jumped from the car before it had fully stopped and ran over to the woman. I jogged behind him. She was crying. Staring at her feet. Their lay a dog on his side. His head, a forty-five degree angle from his writhing body.
“His neck’s broke,” said Sullivan. The woman kept crying. The dog’s breath was coming out in short, wheezing coughs, not enough air to whine. Sullivan got on one knee over the animal and pulled a knife out of his alligator boot. It shone in the headlights before he flicked it in one quick, precise motion. Blood shot onto his jeans and shirt and face. He had cut halfway through the dog’s neck. It gave one more pant and lay silent. The woman was sobbing. Sullivan turned and walked back to the car. When I caught up he said, “I’m gonna need that drop cloth again.”
We were driving through dark woods.
“We’re almost there,” he said.
“Did you get that tattoo for the army?”
“Kinda,” he said. “In Omnia Paratus,” he slid stained red fingers across the letters. “It means prepared for all things. It’s my old regiment’s motto, the 18th.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You know you didn’t need that tire iron.”
“Yeah I figured that out.”
“Plus, it wouldn’t have done you any good anyway.” He laughed.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-seven? You must have been a goddamned old man over there.”
He nodded. “Take the next right.” The headlights tore the woods in half, lighting up the occasional trailer. “When we were there, and someone would die, you know what we did? We’d talk shit about them. First thing we’d do. My friend Derek got shot in the face searching some fucking dirt-hole house, and that night we all said what we hated about him. ‘Fucking guy told the worst jokes. Chewed with his mouth open. Probably a queer. Well, he’s sucking dicks in hell now.’ That’s what I said. That’s how we did it. It kept us from missing anybody…It’s up here on the right.”
I drove up to the house. It was a bright blue color, two stories. I think thew call it ranch-style or some damn thing. On the front stoop was a girl, smoking under a flood light, about twenty. She wore navy gym shorts and a white t-shirt cut off above the belly button. Her brown hair cut short, boy-short.  On her feet were two worn out woven huaraches. She went inside when we pulled into the driveway.
“Huaraches.” I said to myself.
“What?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Was that your wife?”
“Sister,” he said, “Look, you did me a big favor tonight. More than you know. Come in and have a drink.” Again, it wasn’t a request. I wanted to quit while I was ahead with Sullivan Gray. But wasn’t this kind of thing why I was driving in the first place?
We sat on the stoop. He had brought out two mason jars full of an orange concoction he called his “special recipe.” I could taste gin. It was ice cold and I drank deep.
“It’s good.” I said.
“Here I’ll get you another.”
And he did. And another. And we drank and talked and fired his gun into the woods behind the house and the night melted.
When I woke up it was early, like nine, and my head felt dense and dead. It hurt. The menu for some action dvd was blaring from the television and curled up next to me on the couch was Gray’s sister. I tried to remember her name. Hayley, I thought, yeah Hayley. Spooning on a blanket on the floor were Sullivan and his wife. She was topless, her brown hair cascading over her breasts. Christ, I thought. I got up without waking anyone and found my shoes and shirt and pants and walked to the door. I looked back at Hayley, passed out on the couch.
“Huaraches.” I whispered to myself before I walked out the front door. It had rained late last night and the air felt cool and fresh and good. I got back on the road, found the nearest town, ate breakfast, bought a map, and drove west.

Description
The whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the “Watchtower” itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you’re out, you’re dead. This pitch is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff. It’s no wonder they keep getting busted.
-Charles Bukowski
~
A stick finally got thrown in the spokes after a particularly slanted Friday night. I had skipped out of the factory early and ducked into Brogan’s, a bar about a block away from my apartment that was known locally for being the only building so full of sweat and rot that the walls grew scabs. I had already been sipping from my flask all day, par for the course, so when the bartender brought whiskey, it served me well. I met the kind of woman you meet at Brogan’s, some deflated pixie who couldn’t get noticed elsewhere, and things went the way they go.
When I woke up she was wearing the shirt of my alma mater, still sweat-stained, the logo starting to fade. She was sitting on the corner of the mattress. At her feet the remains of a cigarette lay moldering on a plate I had left there. She just sat, staring into the middle distance, enjoying what was apparently her second smoke of the day. Beautiful.
“Oh Christ.” I sat up and sighed at the familiar headache.
“Oh, hey,” she said.
“Yeah, hey.”
“What’s all that writing up on the walls?” Ash fell to the floor as she waved her cigarette in a circular gesture. The black letters were scrawled on all four walls of my room, big, drooping, painted on sentences.”
“It’s literature,” I coughed, “poems and shit.”
“What’s it about?” She leaned in towards me, smiling. I was still naked under the sheets. Her blond hairs were all over the place. Don’t even think about it, I told myself.
“Well that one by the window’s called ‘why the fuck are you still here?’.”
She drew back in anger. Is she not used to this? I wondered.
“Dontcha even want to know my name?” She rose from the mattress.
“Why would I?”
She put the cigarette out on the bed and marched toward the door.
“Don’t you take that shirt!” I yelled as she stumbled into her shoes. She took it off and threw it to the floor and left wearing nothing but her overcoat. I went to the bathroom and dry heaved until a thick brown paste leaked out. It was spicy, but not in any way that resembled food. My eyes caught the passage written in the corner:
Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing. –S.
I lurched back to my bed and moaned to myself and eventually slept.
When I woke up again it was 1 p.m.
“Oh Christ.” I repeated, this time to an empty room. Days like these are why I don’t have mirrors. I turned on the news and turned up the volume before I got in the shower. Apparently somewhere far away a suicide bomber had killed nine people at an outdoor market. I’m hungry, I thought.
I spilled out the front door of the building and squinted, walking south toward State Street.  It was hot out, and the liquor simmering in every tiny aperture of my skin was all I could smell. Cars coughed by, and the shoulders of an occasional pedestrian would bunt me off course, and a fucking goddamn police siren started off.  My eyes felt like they were turning to plastic, hard and dry. I was pouring sweat. The buildings seemed to bend over me. Across the street was a pan handler. Instead of crossing I took a right toward the parking garage. In two hours, I was in my car, pulling into the parking lot of a diner, two hours from the city. Across the street were two houses and a cow pasture.
Inside everything was mint green and cream colored: the booths, the tile, the counters, the waitresses. It was like one of those chain reproductions of a fifties diner except it was at least that old. The panels in the ceiling were stained smoke gray and a thick black crust had built up all around the big flat top range behind the counter. If you went to this place and didn’t order coffee and pie, you’d be a goddamned philistine.
“Sit anywhere you like. I’ll be with you in a second.” She carried a box into the other room. She had red hair, tied back with a bandanna. She wore tennis shoes. She chewed gum. Her name tag read Linda. It was too damn perfect.
As I finished my fourth cup of coffee, a couple kids, looked to be about fifteen, walked up to the jukebox.
“I’ll pay you five bucks not to play whatever it is you’re thinking about playing.”
One looked genuinely shocked that I was able to speak.
“All you had to do was ask,” scowled the other before they slumped back to their table, mumbling to their friends about it.
“Well now, that wasn’t very nice.” Linda sauntered up to the table.
“Well, Linda, I’m hung over.”
“I can’t see how you’re still feeling bad with all the Irish you’ve been putting in your coffee.”
Truth was I felt fantastic. I had emptied my flask into the 4 cups, and the sap was rising. Linda started to pour me a fifth.
“Don’t worry about it,” I stopped her, “I gotta get going.”
I left before she could come back with the check. I couldn’t handle any more of the awkward flirting that was sure to come with it. When she came back from the room with the register in it, she’d only find the lone twenty dollar bill and two kids at the jukebox.
It was dark as I approached the bridge leading back into the city, and when I caught sight of the skyline, my guts boiled, and I pulled off to the side of the road. I just sat there. I sat there for a long time. The reflection of the lit up steal and glass was flickering in the river. My apartment was there. The factory was there. My son was buried there. I went back to the liquor store I’d seen about 15 miles back, I bought a fifth of whiskey and just kept driving west.
~
I woke up hot at two in the afternoon the next day, curled up in the back seat of small Japanese car in a Wal-Mart parking lot somewhere in what I thought was Pennsylvania. I could still feel the slight hum of the liquor, somewhere around the base of my skull. Thank god for that, I thought. I walked up to the vending machines out front and bought a cola and a bottle of water. I drank the water on the way back to the car. Sitting in the front seat, I filled the empty bottle half full with whiskey and the other half with the soda. I drank staving off the eventual hang over.
I drove until I saw a payphone. I was calling David. We had gone to school together and he was pretty much all I had left of a friend though we hadn’t talked much in recent. David had done things right. He was married and worked for a newspaper. He embraced the TV-dinners and lawn mowing Saturdays, never completely serious about it. It was like he was putting a note of sarcasm on his life and it amused the hell out of him. He picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hillford residence.”  He over-enunciated the words.
“David, its Tom.”
“Tommy! Comrade! You could have at least pretended you wanted to sell me some insurance or something.”
“Yeah, sorry, I’m half drunk.”
“That’s really great, Tommy. How’s the 401k?”
“Shouldn’t you be getting to church about now? Coaching little league?”
“I called in sick with an existential crisis.”
“How’s Diane.”
“Still my wife.” He shouted across the house, “Honey! It’s Tom. Tom Harris. He wants to know how you are….She says she’s stalwart, Tom.”
“Christ,” I laughed, “Anyway, I just wanna tell you I’m driving.”
“You’re driving?”
“Yeah, just driving…and drinking.
“Of course.”
“I don’t know where I’m going or when I’ll get back to the city or anything.”
“Shouldn’t you have done this like ten years ago?”
“Probably.”
“Well if you make it to Oklahoma, our couch awaits you.”
“You’re too kind. Anyway, I’ll see you around.”
“Hope so.”
I got back in the car. I kept driving.
~
It was about nine o’clock and I was driving down this two lane road in the middle of somewhere. I shut off the headlights for a moment. Complete darkness. The window was down and the night felt cool and real. When the lights were back on I saw something far off in the distance, a man. As I approached he stared blankly, like he was talking to a bank teller, simply gazing at my two headlights cutting through the ether. He stood straight up. A stream of blood ran from the corner his forehead down the side of his face to his mouth. His arms and legs were caked with mire. There had been draught all over this state and behind him his car was diagonal, nose down in the bed of a drying pond. It looked like it had been dropped from an airplane. He was tall, with ropy arms and a shock of short thick hair. He made no motion for me to stop, he simply offered himself to the headlights as evidence of his plight. I didn’t have the mental energy to justify ignoring him to myself. I pulled up next to him and he leaned forward as I rolled down the window. On his neck were the words IN OMNIA PARATUS, tattooed in thick block text.
“I need a ride.” It didn’t sound like a request. I immediately regretted slowing down, pulling over. This guy was going gut me, cut my throat, put an ice pick to my eye, decorate his room with my genitals. I popped the trunk.
“Put your shoes back there. I think there’s a drop cloth, wipe some of the shit off yourself.” While he was behind the car I thought about driving away. Instead I reached into the back seat and grabbed the measly tire iron that had come with the car. I tucked it between my seat and the door, where he couldn’t see it. He came back around the car slightly cleaner than before. I unlocked the door and he opened it and swung himself into the seat in a motion so quick, so fluid, that it would’ve made a lifelong ballerina cry. It was then that I noticed he had unscrewed the license plate from his car and was holding it, along with the registration, in his lap. On his hand was a wedding ring. He licked some blood from off his cheek.
“I only need to go about 30 miles.” Christ! Where is he taking me? I thought.
“What happened?” I pulled back onto the road.
“What’s it look like happened? I was drinking with this guy, Spider. So I started driving home and next thing I know I’m in a lake. I don’t fucking know.”
“Spider.” I whispered to myself. We rode on.  My radio hadn’t worked for a couple years, and the quiet in that car was awful. The engine whirred and the tires and the occasional bump would cut the silence. Finally the dam burst in my psyche.
“I’m Tommy Harris.”
“Sullivan Gray,” came the reply.
“What do you do?” He asked after awhile.
“I worked in factory. We made baby shoes.” I shifted in my seat. Something about the word “we” didn’t sit right with me.
“Baby shoes!?” He laughed. “Goddamn.” Everyone laughs.
“But I guess I don’t do that anymore. Now I’m driving.” He nodded slightly at this. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What do you do?” There was a pause.
“You know, this and that. I-” he stammered, “I do what I have to!” I put my hand down at my side. He continued. “I come back from two goddamn years in the war! What am I supposed to do? Sell cars?” My grip tightened around the tire iron. We rode in silence. Eventually, we came up behind an SUV, lit up on the side of the road. Well, here’s Spider, I thought. The old “I got drunk and crashed my car into a pond” routine.
I slowed slightly as we passed by. There was a woman, lit up by the headlights, her hands on her forehead, staring down at something.
“Stop the car,” he said it forcefully. I pulled up the tire iron. “Stop the car!” He was yelling. I slammed on the breaks about 50 feet from the woman. He jumped from the car before it had fully stopped and ran over to the woman. I jogged behind him. She was crying. Staring at her feet. Their lay a dog on his side. His head, a forty-five degree angle from his writhing body.
“His neck’s broke,” said Sullivan. The woman kept crying. The dog’s breath was coming out in short, wheezing coughs, not enough air to whine. Sullivan got on one knee over the animal and pulled a knife out of his alligator boot. It shone in the headlights before he flicked it in one quick, precise motion. Blood shot onto his jeans and shirt and face. He had cut halfway through the dog’s neck. It gave one more pant and lay silent. The woman was sobbing. Sullivan turned and walked back to the car. When I caught up he said, “I’m gonna need that drop cloth again.”
We were driving through dark woods.
“We’re almost there,” he said.
“Did you get that tattoo for the army?”
“Kinda,” he said. “In Omnia Paratus,” he slid stained red fingers across the letters. “It means prepared for all things. It’s my old regiment’s motto, the 18th.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You know you didn’t need that tire iron.”
“Yeah I figured that out.”
“Plus, it wouldn’t have done you any good anyway.” He laughed.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-seven? You must have been a goddamned old man over there.”
He nodded. “Take the next right.” The headlights tore the woods in half, lighting up the occasional trailer. “When we were there, and someone would die, you know what we did? We’d talk shit about them. First thing we’d do. My friend Derek got shot in the face searching some fucking dirt-hole house, and that night we all said what we hated about him. ‘Fucking guy told the worst jokes. Chewed with his mouth open. Probably a queer. Well, he’s sucking dicks in hell now.’ That’s what I said. That’s how we did it. It kept us from missing anybody…It’s up here on the right.”
I drove up to the house. It was a bright blue color, two stories. I think thew call it ranch-style or some damn thing. On the front stoop was a girl, smoking under a flood light, about twenty. She wore navy gym shorts and a white t-shirt cut off above the belly button. Her brown hair cut short, boy-short.  On her feet were two worn out woven huaraches. She went inside when we pulled into the driveway.
“Huaraches.” I said to myself.
“What?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Was that your wife?”
“Sister,” he said, “Look, you did me a big favor tonight. More than you know. Come in and have a drink.” Again, it wasn’t a request. I wanted to quit while I was ahead with Sullivan Gray. But wasn’t this kind of thing why I was driving in the first place?
We sat on the stoop. He had brought out two mason jars full of an orange concoction he called his “special recipe.” I could taste gin. It was ice cold and I drank deep.
“It’s good.” I said.
“Here I’ll get you another.”
And he did. And another. And we drank and talked and fired his gun into the woods behind the house and the night melted.
When I woke up it was early, like nine, and my head felt dense and dead. It hurt. The menu for some action dvd was blaring from the television and curled up next to me on the couch was Gray’s sister. I tried to remember her name. Hayley, I thought, yeah Hayley. Spooning on a blanket on the floor were Sullivan and his wife. She was topless, her brown hair cascading over her breasts. Christ, I thought. I got up without waking anyone and found my shoes and shirt and pants and walked to the door. I looked back at Hayley, passed out on the couch.
“Huaraches.” I whispered to myself before I walked out the front door. It had rained late last night and the air felt cool and fresh and good. I got back on the road, found the nearest town, ate breakfast, bought a map, and drove west.