Sever Nigh

By Jim James

Globally, tens of thousands of children and women disappear each year, marketed like cuts of meat, sold into labor or sexual bondage, even in the United States. Many never see home again, and perish from drug addiction, murder or suicide.

Seventeen-year-old Linda McCulley is missing, abducted to Mexico by her mother’s boyfriend, and destined for sale into white slavery.

But Sever Nigh has an idea where she is and sets out to find her, plunging his life into chaos. Tracking Linda McCulley and her kidnappers to the Yucatan, he is ambushed, then rescued by a Mexican business magnate who discerns that Sever is behind what are known as the Zorro crimes.

When Sever’s vigilantism attracts the wrath of thwarted human traffickers and the suspicious eye of federal agencies, the noose of circumstance tightens; he’s caught between the criminals he fights and two governments that consider him the criminal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Oct 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483434896

Book preview

SEVER

NIGH

JIM JAMES

Copyright © 2015 Jim James.

Cover design by David A. Pitts, [e-mail]

Photo Credits:

Tybee Dock Evening by Rich Burkhart, photosbyrb.com

Angry Skies by Emily Stauring, [e-mail]

Boathouse at Ammersee, Fotosearch k11159029jpg

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3488-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3490-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3489-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015911128

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 10/5/2015

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

For all those disappeared from this fraught endeavor we call civilization.

True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it.

– Cicero

CHAPTER 1

A STORM WALL LOOMED over the Gulf of Mexico as my shore-runner slammed against the whitecaps that a chilly wind pushed across the dark water of Pine Island Sound.

A violent gust lifted the bow of the rubber boat and sudden fat drops of rain slapped my face. The massive cloudbank had obliterated the three o’clock August sun and lightning splintered blue-white through the black sky, as though a façade had fractured and hell’s cold light glared through the fissures. The weather had moved in a lot faster than I’d anticipated, and I cussed at myself for waiting too long to head back to the island.

A hundred yards ahead, the beach stood out stark white in the gloom. Thunder split the air and I cringed lower in my seat.

I ran the boat onto the beach, stomped the anchors into the sand, grabbed my bag and dashed through the rain toward the house.

The storm closed in with a vengeance as I deactivated the alarm and unlocked the door to the storage enclosure on the ground floor. I snatched the door shut behind me, and the wail and hiss of the gale against the house was audible over the sound of the big generator.

Damn. I wiped the water from my face with the crook of my arm. Welcome home.

I stepped onto a stainless steel square, coded numbers into a key-pad and the lift whirred upward. A locking mechanism released with a solid, precise click and a heavy hatch built into the floor above lowered several inches and slid into a recess. The lift ascended through a four-foot crawl space and stopped, and I stepped into my house and set my bag on the floor.

A three-sixty sweep to check a series of faint LEDs assured me nothing had disturbed the security system. Through the windows I saw the trees bend and sway, but the blow was muted beyond the thick glass and reinforced concrete walls.

I stripped out of my wet clothes, pulled on an old cotton robe, checked the safety on the Walther 9mm in the right pocket, and loaded the coffee pot. While the coffee brewed, I went through the house, room by room, floor by floor.

The squall line passed as I sat with a coffee, watching the rain stream down the floor-to-ceiling sections of glass. Flashes of white lit the sky and what I could see of the island and the channel.

Then the storm was gone as quickly as it had come. I went back upstairs to shower as the day lightened and the sun shafted through a break in the clouds far to the west.

I dressed and climbed a flight of steps to the rooftop deck, fifty-three feet above the ground, and watched the foul weather move toward the mainland. The channel, the sound, the other islands and the Gulf of Mexico stretched out before me. A fresh wound gaped in the canopy of trees on Greater Pine Island, where land had been bulldozed for another house.

I surveyed it all with the view of an osprey–the yachts coming in from San Carlos Pass, the sailboats in Charlotte Harbor, the water tower on Cabbage Key. The world was finally out there. But I couldn’t quite smile in resignation at the wry and troublesome thought that I had insured my reclusiveness with the remoteness of an island.

My vantage point was a lot farther above the ground than I could have imagined as a kid growing up in one-bathroom cracker box houses with no air conditioning, and a washing machine on the back stoop, in neighborhoods where the homes faced mud-puddled streets and working-class men parked old cars and company service trucks in the yards.

For the time being, this was sanctuary after journeys to places my peculiar business sent me: after forays into the noise and tumult of other people’s lives.

From here I looked down from the isolation I suspected would not hold forever and watched this thing we call civilization creep toward me, one rooftop at a time.

My eye went to the horizon and I wondered how much longer this rare view of sunsets would be available to me. My days were wagered, and one move a fraction of a second too slow, a careless moment in which I left a trail, and I might not return. Or one day on a street somewhere when the hair stood up on the back of my neck, or in the belly of night when I woke from a dead sleep, I’d know they had come for me.

CHAPTER 2

I AM SEVER NIGH, finder of people, settler of scores. My name was once Nye, but I changed the spelling to cut a final tie with people I didn’t want to claim as family. The ironic reality in the name’s implication, my oldest friend once commented, fit like my own skin.

Having survived myself for fifty years to get to independence–or something that sometimes resembles it–I’ve chosen a life’s mission, an endeavor that has it all, I tell myself with sardonic grin: travel, adventure, noblesse oblige, no delegating, and the last word on everything. Plus the bonus package extraordinaire; boredom proscribed forever from my life.

Simply stated, I have become a vigilante.

I do the sort of thing glamorized in novels and film, where they don’t mention the tedium, the mind- and butt-numbing waiting, elbow-rubbing with the scrapings of humanity, the fear you smell in your sweat and taste in your throat. They don’t describe how it loosens the bladder and bowels, or shakes you like an alcoholic with the DTs.

Of course, in the jealous eye of State, what I do is not glamorous, nor do I mete out justice; to government there is no justice but that which is by its decree. Justice does not exist as a moral order, only as a legal finding.

I am afflicted with the quaint notion that the fundament of life is liberty, and, as with right and wrong, my perception of it is noumenal.

Rousseau said man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. A figurative reference, of course, but equally applicable in the context of physical tyranny.

It is the blunt abuse of the helpless that gnaws at me. I am compelled by those obscure little universes of misery in which a trap door hinges open beneath someone’s life and he falls through it into chaos, or in which the axis of a child’s existence warps and flings her outward, where she hangs on at the dim periphery of what used to be home and safety.

I have a problem with people who cause that kind of devastation. Violence against the defenseless provokes a particular anger in me.

Horace once said anger is a brief madness. I smile a little in amusement at that. I’ve been annoyed too long for there to be anything brief about it. Perhaps he referred to someone like Medea. Now she was truly beside herself; I’m just sorely vexed.

The anger of my early decades scattered family, friends and acquaintances, my brass-knuckled opinions banishing them with honed efficiency. But I gradually realized that the household I’d grown up in had left me, despite my earlier disavowal and contrary to my intentions, thoroughly predisposed to self-destruction. And by that time, years of tai chi had trained me to break and rupture, but had nothing on my ability to maim relationships.

But I made myself do better, quit trying to torture sincerity into a confession, realized that the knot of people in the environment of my youth was not a template for all humankind.

Eventually my wrath acquired discretion and focus and learned to wait, quiet and subjugated, behind smiles and tempered words, for something that deserved it.

Engraved over the temple entrance to the oracle at Delphi is this: Know thyself –Nothing to excess. The admonishment to know ourselves meant for us to recognize our limitations relative to the gods. And the instruction is still relevant today if you supplant gods with government. As to excess, the golden mean is fine, to a point. After that, Horace, it’s just an excuse for pacifists.

So, at a stage in life where I seem to have suddenly arrived at mid-years, sucker-punched by time, I find people and settle scores. And this public service, the benefactor of which I hide even from its recipients, has been branded vigilantism.

CHAPTER 3

ELLIOT SUMMERFIELD SAT ACROSS the table from me, peeled the skin from a lychee and chewed the flesh away from the seed. He held another of the small, reddish-purple fruit, turned it thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger. Would you say it has a brittle skin or a soft shell? He didn’t look at me when he spoke, as though there might have been someone else with us, and it was of them he asked. Perhaps there was, he once mused, another present, always looking on, welcome or resented; it explained why so many people talked–apparently–to themselves. Gratifying company for him, I’m sure, since I often didn’t respond to question or comment. But we had been friends for decades, and he had long ago accepted my lapses into silence.

The scent of oleanders wafted up from the grounds and triggered a memory, an emotion that moved through me undefined as wind against cornsilk, and I started to tell Elliot, but the things I would once have talked about fell dead in my throat, and I could only listen to my meditative friend’s unexpectant questions, and my own weak refrains of something that petitioned resurrection.

Treetops stirred in the breeze, fronds scraped like the dry, unexcitable voices of the wizened, and for miles the water of Pine Island Sound glinted like cut glass under the parched sky. On the far side of Boca Grande Pass, the lighthouse stood watch over Gulf mariners.

Elliot fell asleep and left me with my thoughts, and the purview of the Other, whom I had come to accept, an historian with a stern view of things, and who marched me often and without warning into the past.

…I was fifteen, out of school for the summer, on the way to Florida to stay with a friend left behind when my father and mother moved us to another state. They were glad to get me out of the house for a couple weeks so their conflict could find unrestricted expression.

It was hot, and we’d ridden, my father and I, with the decade-old Cadillac’s windows down, for six hours. The window on my side was stuck inside the door, and I’d gotten wet in a rainstorm. The car smelled of dampness, burnt motor oil and hydraulic fluid.

The trip had started out quiet, since we didn’t talk much. And because we were fixtures in each other’s life, we didn’t find the silence unusual. But I watched my father’s face a lot. It seemed a necessary thing, like a sailor checking the barometer.

The atmosphere went from neutral to pensive to sullen as we rode into the July heat. This distressed but didn’t surprise me. There had come to be an inevitability about time spent around my father.

A tire blew on the outskirts of Tampa, and we pulled over into a rain-puddled parking area in front of a boarded-up building on Highway 301. My father–Case, his name was, and I thought of him that way most often–shoved the gear shift into park, got out and slammed the door. I waited at a distance while he dug jack and tire tool from the trunk and threw them to the ground.

Get that spare out of there.

I reached into the trunk without comment.

Answer me when I say something to you!

Yes, sir. I eased the tire out and onto the ground.

He fitted the jack into the stand, jammed it into place and pumped the handle, the muscles in his arms straining against his shirt sleeve. I watched the base of the jack press into the crushed shell fill as he loosened the nuts on the wheel and finished cranking. The car groaned.

Roll that tire over here. He pulled the flat from the lugs and tossed it several feet.

I rolled the tire to him and noticed for the first time that the sidewall had separated from the rim.

It’s flat! Why the hell didn’t you say so!

I didn’t realize–

You took it out of the trunk! Are you blind!

The blood had drained from his lips, and I felt my throat constrict with fear as he stood over me with fists hard as tree knots. Then a helpless, wasting rage ran through me. I didn’t see it was flat!

His hands moved, and I flinched, jerked as though electric current jolted me. He unbuckled a wide leather belt and ripped it from his trousers, tearing belt loops away from their stitching, and drew it back. I would not let myself run or even back away. The belt came down on my shoulder with a force that made me yelp. When it came the second time, I grabbed it. He yanked, took me with it, and slung me off my feet into the edge of a puddle, on all fours, one elbow, knee and face in the water. I stood and spit bits of shell.

He’s a bit old for a belt, ain’t he?

The deputy sheriff stood spread-legged, self-important and amused, a thumb hooked in the waistband of his trousers. I looked past him, at the traffic stopped at the intersection, where people stared from their cars.

Case slung his belt into the old Cadillac and didn’t say a word.

Need a lift to a station? The deputy nudged the spare with the toe of his boot.

Yeah, I reckon, Case said.

The deputy nodded at me. You guard the car, son. He wiped his forehead and neck with a handkerchief, glanced up at the sky. Welcome to Flor’da, boys. Sombitch is hotter’n a redhead in heat.

The two men left, and I waited in the glare of the midafternoon sun. Sweat ran down my arm and stung my elbow, and I realized I was missing some hide. My face was wet and stinging before I knew I was crying, and I made myself quit and walked over to the car and looked in the outside mirror at the raw places on my nose, mouth and chin.

I counted the money in my pocket again, just to make sure. Seventy-two dollars and change. My vacation stash, earned from gathering and selling pecans. I walked across the road to a phone booth, leafed through the book and called for a cab.

It took so long to arrive that I thought Case would show up first. I stared down the highway in the direction he’d headed. The car groaned and I glanced at the jack. Its base had dug further into the ground, at an angle.

The yellow taxi finally crossed through the intersection, and I flagged it down. I grabbed my suitcase and put it on the rear floorboard of the cab. An unshaved elderly man, cheeks sunken from missing teeth, tobacco stains at the corners of his mouth, sat on the opposite side of the seat, a tin can propped on one knee.

Where to? the driver asked.

The bus station.

That’s about fifteen miles, kid. About three dollars, probably.

I’ve got money. I stood beside the door, looking down the road, then at Case’s car.

I’m not paying to sit here, the old man sputtered. You made me ride all this far out of my way to pick up this young’un.

The driver turned in his seat. We waiting on anybody else, kid?

I looked hard down the road and didn’t spot a police car. I forgot something. I’ll be right back.

Time’s a’wasting, and so’s your allowance.

I walked over to the Cadillac, pretended to check the back seat and leaned against the door. The car groaned, then lurched to the side with a short screech and crashed onto its axle.

The cab driver’s jaw dropped. What the hell?

I got in the back seat and shut the door. Please, mister, I need to get to the bus station. My momma will think nobody’s coming to meet her.

The old man grunted and spat into his can, then turned his watery eyes on me and sucked his gums. I couldn’t tell whether he grinned or sneered.

Elliot shifted in his chair. Your jaws are clamped tight. Tell me what you were thinking and I’ll spring for dinner.

Thought you were asleep.

That’s a trick old men pull to keep an eye on things. So, what was it?

I raised my eyebrows at him. Four men. And a car.

His mouth drew to one side. What about them?

Long story.

I’ve got plenty of time.

I smiled into the face of my ageing friend and mentor, his skin creased and loose, hair gone sandy-white, fingers stiffened from arthritis. "You don’t have that long."

He smiled back, looked at me through eyes that had never sanctioned a lie, and it almost seemed a nod of agreement.

A few days later I boated Elliot Summerfield to the marina where he had left his rental car and I hugged him goodbye.

CHAPTER 4

IT HAD BEEN IN winter that I met Elliot Summerfield for the first time, when I was a troubled sophomore in high school.

I had no idea I was troubled. Fist fights, inattentiveness, poor grades and dismissal from class struck me as unremarkable, like the living room in the house where I lived, full of uncomfortable, spring-shot furniture, not welcome, but unavoidable.

Elliot was the headmaster at a private school across town, and a friend of the principal where I attended. I was tasked one day to deliver a package.

I drove down granite-curbed streets overhung with bare sycamore and pecan and hickory limbs, the fragrant smoke of burning leaves rising from the lanes behind manicured brick homes. A black yard man looked up from his raking as my car rattled by. The windows in the houses seemed to gaze down with complacent indifference.

I entered the grounds of Hawthorne Academy. Its wrought-iron gates had been swung back, and my old heap creaked past lantern-crowned stone pillars. I parked next to cars that made mine look like scrap metal and walked through the misting rain to the main entrance. Red clay from my schoolyard had stuck to my shoes, and I tried to remove as much as possible on the slate flagstones and the mat outside the massive doors. I stepped into the cavernous lobby and headed toward the reception counter.

You have the books for Mr. Summerfield. A tall, graying woman looked somewhat in my direction.

I glanced down at the sealed box I carried. Yes, ma’am, I suppose.

Down this hallway to the third door on the left. She gestured with a thrust of her arm.

My steps echoed along the polished board flooring to the third door, which stood open.

Come in, Sever. Elliot Summerfield looked up from the papers on his desk and stretched his face into a welcome.

I had expected someone much older, but he was early thirties, lean, had sandy-red hair, and the coloring of someone who spent time outdoors. He reached out his hand to me and we shook. Have a seat. Just drop the box beside the chair. Give me one minute to finish with something here.

From those first words, I never felt an awkward moment in his presence. While he made notes and sorted papers, my eyes roamed the floor-to-ceiling bookcases and I watched the rain course down the panes of the colonial windows, the stillness of leafless trees silhouetted black against the sullen Georgia day.

Life was too cloistered here, the spirit sodden with an unmoving, soundless futility, a malaise I could not have put in those terms at the time; there was a stolidness that sent me retreating into thoughts of sun-burnt and storm-torn Florida skies, of shelter that felt thin and impermanent, that could not muzzle the shout or bridle the dash into days that suggested endlessness.

My gaze fell on a primitive style painting of browned, bare-breasted women among palms and thatch huts, with mountains in the background. I didn’t want to take my eyes from it, to return to the staid and stolid confines of life in Georgia.

Gauguin, Elliot said, and studied it for a few moments. Then he nodded at the one other painting in the room. "Van Gogh. Apple Orchard in Spring. A thought shadowed his face. It is beautiful, but cold, and seems to make a promise. The trees are budding, and milder days are yet to come. He nodded at the Gauguin. But this one, its sun is on your face, its aroma deep in your lungs, its dust on your feet. It makes no promise, for it requires none."

I looked back and forth between blossoms at the edge of winter and a land at the far rim of my imagination, and held for the first time the concept that something beautiful could leave you wanting and unsure or take you simply because you could not help being taken.

They were acquaintances, you know, Elliot said. Shared living quarters for a short time. Had a notion they’d start a school in the south of France, but they fell into mutual dislike.

And so it went, as though there never was a getting to know each other, rather a conversation and friendship that suddenly existed because I walked through a doorway. It remains inexplicable, and the one effortless accomplishment of my life.

CHAPTER 5

SUNDAY MORNING I RAN the boat down to St. James City on the south end of Pine Island and had breakfast at a canal-front restaurant full of people. It was a discipline I inflicted upon myself to avoid getting too used to my own company.

I read the paper as I finished my coffee and wondered when the waiting would end; a month had passed since I had tracked down Duane Bates. That had taken a little over five weeks, a lot of it spent living in a travel trailer and hanging out in neighborhood bars and restaurants where the entrees were deep-fried and the salad was iceberg lettuce. I’d developed an allergic reaction to country music and breaded food.

Sir, can I clear that stuff out of your way?

I nodded at the waitress behind the counter and in a flash a bill replaced my plate. It was my cue to relinquish the seat. I left payment weighted under a salt shaker and threaded my way through a knot of table vultures gathered inside the front door.

At home I took a Bloody Mary to the third-floor deck and thought about Duane Bates, six feet, two inches and a hundred ninety pounds of sinewy meanness. After some digging, I’d tracked him to a trailer park a hundred miles from his home, where he had moved in with a stringy, hollow-eyed blonde who tended bar at a place called Blown With The Wind.

I had pulled into the park with my old pickup and twenty-foot travel trailer and the last name of Kurtz. Inside a squat and soiled concrete block building with a window air conditioner humming in the wall, Ida Sparks, President-General Manager, as the nameplate on her desk said, pocketed my cash. Nuanced, acrid odors of fresh and old sweat permeated the room. At a small table by the back wall stood a diminished quick-eyed man eating a sandwich. Ida Sparks sat spread over most of two side-by-side straight-backed wood chairs and gulped breath between short sentences. This is a nice fam’ly place, Mister…

Kurtz.

Mr. Kurtz. We don’t like no trouble here. It ain’t fancy, just clean and cheap. Laundermat and shuffleboard right here. For your convenience and relaxing. She rolled her small brown eyes and gestured with her head. Sparky here don’t put up with no nonsense.

I nodded at him. He brushed crumbs onto the floor, hitched his trousers and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

Sparky’ll get you set up.

I turned toward the door.

The little guy stayed put. Ida, his registration–

Sparky!

He started.

Sparky!

He hurried across the room. Alright, Ida, I was just thinking–

Don’t try me today. Ida Sparks turned from white to red, quivered like gelatin. She fanned herself with a magazine and sucked air. I’ll register him later. You know I’m not feeling good right now.

The little man looked miserable. Sorry, Ida. Should I–

Do what I tolt you!

I opened the door. The eunuch almost stepped on my heels.

Sparky?

He stopped and looked back.

Bring me some Co’colas after. They might settle my stomach some.

Sparky told me where to park my trailer, then made the necessary connections. He didn’t look me in the eye once, and walked away without a word when he had finished. I went inside my trailer and looked out a window. From my position, I had a direct view across the dirt circle drive to where Duane Bates had taken up residence.

Fifteen or so other trailers, in varying stages of deterioration, were scattered among the oaks and pines. In front of one, two little girls played house with the pieces of a plastic crèche. The door of the trailer next to Duane Bates swung open and a woman sat down on the threshold, her feet on a step, and lit a cigarette. She stirred with her finger whatever was in her glass and drank. Her hair was uncombed, and she sat slump-shouldered, arms resting against her thighs, and worked on the drink and the smoke, pulled a last drag and flipped the glowing butt into the yard. Behind her, in the blue, pulsing light of a television, a man was stretched back in a recliner.

I wanted to pull up stakes and drive away. Was any idea I had of justice worth being here? I stood for a moment with my eyes closed and thought of home, my soaring house on my island, a refuge I had made for myself, far from this and everything in between. That was my world, not this place and these people; these people so recognizable, their demeanor so familiar, they could have been the family photos I dropped into a gas station trash barrel one day years ago, sent off with the refuse of the unknown. I breathed in slow and deep. I was just passing through.

I looked again at the two little girls who set dirt-smeared with their eye-level view beneath the trailers. They had turned on a water hose, and scooped mud into a collection of empty food jars. They didn’t talk. As they finished filling each jar, they added it to others aligned in neat rows atop an empty wire spool, a rusted tool box, a concrete block, the tailgate of a pickup truck. I studied their faces and tried to fathom what thoughts their young minds held, what they felt while they squatted in life’s dirty, cluttered spring.

The door to their trailer opened and a woman stuck her head out. Turn that hose off, girls. Madonna, don’t let your sister git dirty. We got to go see if your daddy’s paycheck is ready and buy some groceries.

For weeks I lived with my soul shriveled, revulsion and anger pushing up in me like a tumor. I went days without shaving, wore frayed tee-shirts, stained trousers and scuffed work boots. I ate breakfast at Violet’s Kitchen, my old truck anonymous among the others. I had lunch and dinner at Big Daddy’s Barbeque and The Highway Diner and Trucker’s Haven. I shot pool or sat for hours nursing beer or mixed drinks in Blown With The Wind. Duane was the type who frequented these places,