Vagrant Minds

By Blaine Mooneyham

Marcus Riley was having the best day of his life until a near-fatal car accident left him brain-damaged, bruised, and broke. Two years later, he coincidentally finds himself living in the same homeless camp as the man who had rescued him and left a note in his pocket to find him after his recovery. Before he could thank the man who saved his life,

• Language: English
• Publisher: BM
• Release date: Jul 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737577010

Blaine Mooneyham

Blaine Mooneyham attended Northeastern State University and graduated in 2006 with a Bachelor of Business Administration. He currently resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma with his wife where they own a small business

Book preview

1

The Promotion

Riley, popped up on Marcus’s computer screen on his company’s internal instant messenger. He hated it when his boss reached out to him like this when he sat in his own office only thirty feet away, looking through a glass window at the showroom floor. He would never say anything after either, just let the one word hang in thin air until he got a response.

Yes? Marcus Riley typed back.

"Get your ass back to my office when you get a sec." That was what his boss should’ve led the conversation with and now a brand-new layer of suspense was added. His boss’s keyboard apparently remaining in a constant state of all caps would only increase his anxiety.

But those were Marcus Riley’s most feared words and this exact messenger conversation happened on almost a daily basis. It wasn’t for any particular reason that he feared those words. He had worked at Metro Furniture and Mattresses for over five years and had never once been written up. But something about the eagerness when his boss called him back to his office tensed him up every time.

It was usually just to get a feel for what was happening out on the showroom floor or to talk about his beloved Cowboys and how much the refs were idiots for calling a bad play on last Sunday’s game. If he would just go up to him like a normal person when he wanted to have a conversation, it would probably add a few more years to his life and a couple less premature gray hairs that were starting to come in. Boss man probably got a thrill out of it. That or he wouldn’t be caught dead seen talking to one of his sales people out on the floor.

Yes Mr. Shapiro? Marcus asked as he cautiously stepped foot in his manager’s office.

Have a seat Riley. You want a water?

No, thank you.

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Randy’s wife got a job offer in Arizona and they’ll be moving there next month.

That’s the first I’ve heard. Who’s going to take over his team?

Well, that’s why I called you back here. You’ve been with us for almost as long as any other sales rep and have the highest numbers on the floor so I wanted to offer you the job. Do you feel like you could be a team leader?

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you thinking of me.

It’s going to be a little extra responsibility. But with more responsibility comes more pay. You’ll make close to the same commissions you’re currently making on sales but you’ll also get a ten percent override on your team’s sales. That’s the positive. The negative is you’ll have to work about five to ten hours extra per week and some of the customers that come in, you’ll need to hold off on rushing to help them and let someone on your team assist as you probably know. Questions? Think you’d be interested?

A hundred percent I’m in. No wife, no kids. I can work extra hours. I think I’m your man sir!

That’s what I like to hear boss, his superior said to him as he was getting out of his chair. Marcus hated it when he called him boss too. Or when anyone called anyone that for the record. First of all, he was not the boss. Second of all, the man didn’t need to say anything that made him sound any whiter than he already was. There’s a third reason too but he couldn’t remember at the moment.

But now that he was going to be a team leader, he might not mind people calling him that so much anymore. He kind of liked the ring it had to it.

Thank you again, sir. I really look forward to this opportunity.

You’re welcome. You deserve it, he congratulatory told him with a handshake as he made his way out of his office. Oh, and Marcus?

Yes sir?

Do you like Stevie Wonder?

Umm, he’s ok. I guess?

Did you watch the Cowboys game Monday night?

He thought he knew where this was going. He should’ve seen it coming. Marcus always walked into dumb jokes. What? Something about him reffing and not seeing the defensive interference on the touchdown pass I’m guessing?

No, I was going to say that was his brother that had refereed.

He didn’t let him finish his joke. Marcus just waved his hand down low and shook off his old man humor and walked out the door but he could hear his boss yell out, And they say that Stevie has the best eyes in the family! They’d always had a good relationship and could joke around with each other, but when someone had the power to cut off a person’s source of income at any time, he or she would still have to hold back some.

Marcus was ecstatic on his fifteen-mile commute home after work. It wasn’t like he won the Texas lottery but it was definitely a step in the right direction. This had been the only real job that he’s had since graduating high school six years ago.

He was going to go to college but the furniture market was good to him in the beginning. He couldn’t have made any more money as a nineteen-year-old at the time than what he was making at Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex’s largest furniture store. Now that he was turning twenty-five, he was still making the same, maybe a little more, but it just didn’t seem as much. Inflation had caught up to his income and it seemed that the older he got, the less money was worth—and the more a person would want. Not necessarily him, as he was never a big spender or show off, but he was human after all.

He started out on a base pay salary but by his second year, he was already the leading salesman on the floor. So, he opted out of the comfortable W-2 salary in exchange for a higher 1099 hundred percent commission schedule, which netted him about an extra ten thousand per year. Since then, his pay had remained pretty level and he’d been waiting to make the next step up the corporate ladder. But Marcus wasn’t the promotion-asking type. He figured with a strong work ethic and not pissing too many people off, they’d eventually come to him. Which they did, it just took a little while longer.

Now he was going to have to go back on salary and other people’s work ethic would determine his paycheck. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that yet. These thoughts were bouncing around in Marcus’s head as he was pulling out on the interstate in his small sedan that he’d owned since he was twenty.

Nevertheless, he was over the moon. It was springtime, his favorite time of the year, and the weather was perfect. He rolled down the window and hung his arm out. One of his favorite Bob Segar songs was on the radio. It reminded him of growing up and taking road trips with his parents. They’d listen to the entire Against the Wind cassette, flip it over to side B, and start over. By the time they got to their destination, the tape would be hanging out of its plastic casing so much, it would take all day with a pencil through the reels trying to put it back in for the ride home.

He didn’t see his parents very often these days so anything that reminded him of them, he held dear. They were retired and were living their best life. They only had one child to raise and after he graduated high school, they wasted no time in buying a sailboat to spend their remaining years out on the ocean, making many trips between North and South America.

Marcus had been dating the same girl now for three years. Although she hadn’t brought up the whole engagement thing, he could tell at any moment she was ready to bust out the ultimatum.

The only thing that had ever stopped him was the comfortability of the situation. Why complicate matters if they were both happy? It wasn’t just with her, his whole life had been that way. He could’ve easily got a promotion two or three years prior, but he never asked. He figured asking would put a mark on him. Like the higher ups would know that if they didn’t give it to him, he might would go look for work elsewhere so then they’d look for reasons to fire him. That had never been him though. He was as loyal as a three-legged dog.

He’d lived in the same apartment for three years and could count on one hand how many sick or vacation days he’d taken in that timeframe. He used the same roads to and from work each day, not because it was the quickest route but because it was the safest and that was what Marcus Riley was—safe.

It was a new day though. A new beginning. He decided he wasn’t going to take his regular route. He wasn’t even going to stop and get his five o’clock pick-me-up coffee he normally got. Which was crazy for Marcus. Instead, he decided to do something crazier.

Go buy an engagement ring.

They had never looked at rings together but his girlfriend, Shyla, had hinted at what she liked. White gold band, princess cut diamond and nothing too gaudy. It didn’t have to be expensive as long as it came from him and he made an effort at proposing and not throw it at her during some late-night fight. She knew that wouldn’t happen though because any time they started to argue about something, Marcus would go Charlie Chaplin on her and sit on the couch and not say a word. She almost wished he’d put up more of a fight and bring some spark back.

He got off the highway and pulled into a gas station parking lot. He grabbed his phone out of his pocket and started searching for jewelry stores near him. He was in a ritzy part of town, so naturally most of the jewelry stores were out of his price range.

He decided he’d go to the mall that was about eight miles from where he was at, that way he could go to four or five stores all at one time and have a bigger selection. He pulled back onto the onramp in his Nissan Sentra and listened as the annoying GPS lady gave him directions. He’d lived in the metroplex his entire life but a person could live there nine lifetimes and still get lost. Plus, he typically stayed in his area of town. It went back to his issue with being comfortable.

He pulled off the highway onto the service road and drove for a quarter of a mile before coming to a stoplight. As he was sitting there waiting for the left turn signal to come on, he saw a beggar holding up a sign asking for money a few feet away from his car.

Normally, he’d probably look straight ahead and pretend like he didn’t see him. But his feel-good endorphins were surging through his body just waiting to escape. He’d probably make the beggar the beneficiary to his bank account if he only asked. He reached into his pocket and grabbed a ten out and handed it to the gentleman holding the sign up.

Thank you. God bless you sir, the guy said as he gave him an appreciative wave as Marcus returned the gesture.

The DFW area was so large that some of the traffic lights behaved in different ways. For instance, the area that he was from, the left green turn light came on first along with the left green turn light for the traffic coming the opposite direction. Then those lights would go off, allowing for the people going straight to scurry along.

Marcus had stayed so confined in his area that he didn’t realize this. Or completely forgot. Because in this area, the left green turn lights didn’t come on until the end of the cycle, after everyone going straight had went.

Which was what messed him up next. He saw green and didn’t register that it wasn’t for him. So, as he was turning left to get on the cross-street, he got slammed in the dead center of the passenger side door by a large pickup truck that had already worked its way up to thirty miles per hour coming from the opposite direction.

Not the worst looking wreck if someone had drove by and had seen it. The damage to the cars anyways. But bad enough to send him flying out his window as he never rolled it back up and put his seatbelt on after stretching to hand the homeless man some money.

Ten yards away from his vehicle, Marcus lied bleeding out on the hot concrete sidewalk, only a few steps away from the homeless man. Lights out.

2

Recovery

No one was in Marcus’s room when he woke up three days later. His parents were still his emergency contact but were unreachable. Most likely somewhere off of the coast of Ecuador where you couldn’t even get a cell phone signal if you were the commander and chief of the United States. Even if they could get a signal, part of their plan for retirement was to declutter their lives, and that meant no more answering phone calls while they were away.

His left leg was itching like crazy as his mind started to focus in on where he was at and why he was in this unfamiliar room. Once he realized he was lying in a hospital bed, he looked down to find the source of the itch and seen his leg was in a cast.

He tried to hoist himself up to relieve himself but when he did, it felt like he did all of the right motor functions to sit upright but nothing happened. He tried again and was still lying in the same position. Why wasn’t this working?

Marcus looked around the room and noticed a couple of flower vases and some Texas Rangers memorabilia on the window sill. Someone that he knew had definitely been there to visit he thought to himself. He finally found the button to call for the nurse and pushed it. A moment later, a nurse by the name of Jerry walked into the room.

Hey, good to see you’re awake Mr. Riley, he said. Don’t try and move yet. I’m going to call Dr. Edwards in.

What time is it and where am I at? was what Marcus thought he said out loud. It was what he said in his head and what registered anyways. What came out of his mouth was, What… and nothing else.

Don’t try and speak either. You’re under a lot of medications right now.

Nurse Jerry was cut off by a knock at the door. And without an invite into the room, Dr. Edwards came inside and pulled a chair up to Marcus. He rested a clipboard on his knee and scribbled something down on it.

Marcus, I’m not sure how much you remember. You were in a terrible automobile accident and have suffered multiple broken bones and brain trauma. Your thoughts are probably very cloudy right now. I don’t want you to think too hard. Just relax the best you can. We’re going to keep a close watch on you. There is a small chance we might have to perform a craniotomy to remove part of the cerebral contusion. Your girlfriend, Shyla, has been here off and on the last few days. I’ll have Nurse Jerry call her and let her know you’re awake. Can you understand what I’m saying? Don’t speak, just nod your head.

Marcus nodded his head very slightly.

This is good. Are you thirsty? Would you like some water or juice?

He gave another shake of the head yes.

Nurse Jerry, please get Marcus a glass of water while you’re at it.

A moment later, the nurse brought him a glass and held the straw up to his mouth for him. He tried to seal his mouth around it but it felt like he had lost most of his strength, even in his lips. So, half of the water spilled out of his mouth onto his chin and hospital gown.

Your girlfriend said she’s on the way and will be here in about thirty minutes, Jerry said to him. Let me adjust your pillow and why don’t you rest a little more until she arrives.

The doctor and nurse left the room and Marcus closed his eyes but when he did, it caused him to only focus on his terrible migraine that he didn’t realize he had until then. He wished they would have at least turned the TV on for him before they left the room so now, he was lying in the quiet and couldn’t go to sleep and this was going to be the most boring thirty minutes of his life.

He had so many questions. He tried to speak out loud but the words wouldn’t come out. He couldn’t even form a complete sentence in his head, how was he going to be able to talk to anyone. He wished he could tell them to hold off on calling Shyla. The last thing he wanted was for her to see him like this.

Marcus tried to think back to what happened. He remembered the wreck. And he remembered looking up at the homeless man using his own shirt to tie a tourniquet around his leg. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure if that was real because it seemed so hazy. But his current situation did too so maybe he was still dreaming. He couldn’t remember the events leading up to the wreck and he couldn’t remember his promotion nor why he was going to the mall.

His thoughts were broken up by his girlfriend walking in the room. She had a slice of his favorite dessert, turtle cheesecake, with her. Too bad he couldn’t eat it.

Hey baby, I’m so glad you’re awake, she said, stroking the back of his head. Look who all came to see you.

Shyla picked up the get-well cards and brought them over to him and started reading them out loud, starting with hers first.

I can’t wait for you to get better. When you do, we should get a cabin out at the lake for the weekend like we keep telling ourselves we’re going to do. Just me and you. I’ll make it worth your while. She didn’t show him the lipstick imprint she left below the last sentence though.

"This one’s from your boss. Hey sport! Hurry and get better. I can’t have my number one sales guy off the force for too long. Messing with you. But my thoughts and prayers are with you."

The next one she read wasn’t on a get-well card, just a folded-up piece of paper that she had found in his pant pockets. "I’m not sure who this one is from. I hope you’re ok. I did everything I could to try and save you. If you make it through this, please look me up. I’ve been worried. Sam Gilley. Do you know who that is?"

Marcus gave a slight nod to indicate no.

Hmm…strange. He drew a little flower next to his name. How do you feel? she asked him.

I da da da, he tried to get out of his mouth but the words just wouldn’t seem to come out. It made no sense. He knew how to respond to her answer but it was like his brain didn’t know how to communicate with his mouth. This was the first moment he realized his injuries were not limited to external damage alone.

He closed his eyes in frustration. It felt better that way. The bright lights and the white walls of the room were killing his head. He could feel her hand on his hand but it made no difference to him if she was in the room or not. If he couldn’t communicate with her, he was just a burden that someone had to feel sorry for.

He was drifting in and out of consciousness when all of a sudden, it felt like his whole entire body was tingling. And then he became cold. His mind felt like it was playing tug-of-war with darkness and reality. And the more time that passed, the more the darkness was winning.

He didn’t want to give into it but it felt so much better than trying to fight it. Slowly, he let the darkness take over his whole body. First, in his brain and then he could feel the tension let loose in his neck. Then his arms and fingers relaxed. Then Marcus let loose into his catheter and his toes went numb.

It didn’t matter that after he shut his eyes after looking at his would-be fiancé one last time, that he’d never see her again. Maybe if he remembered why he was in the accident in the first place, he would fight a little harder to stay awake. The morphine drip seemed to take most of those cares away though. His whole life was about to be turned upside down.

3

Under a Bridge

That was how Marcus Riley ended up living under the Freedom Street bridge two years later. After a series of brain scans, operations, rehab, prescriptions, more scans, different rehabs, and a follow up list of other procedures longer than a Lynyrd Skynyrd guitar solo, his small bank account had completely depleted itself five times over.

When he had transferred from the W-2 position to full on 1099 sales contractor, he lost his small health insurance policy. No biggie, he was still young and invincible, right? Just not invincible enough to take on a large pickup truck in a small sedan.

In the beginning, he tried filling out all of the assistance programs that were available to him until he could get back on his feet. But reading the long questionnaires and not knowing how to answer them only brought immense headaches, leaving him to storm out of whichever welfare office he was at back to ground zero. It was almost as if he wanted to be denied any type of financial assistance. He never took a handout his entire life from anyone and he wasn’t about to start. And his parents would’ve been more than happy to help him out if they weren’t in even a worse position themselves.

Shortly after they received the news of their son’s accident, they turned their beloved sailboat around somewhere off of the coast of Duncan Town in the Southern Bahamas. Halfway between there and back to the mainland of the United States, his father suffered a major heart attack, leaving him dead on their vessel and leaving Mrs. Riley with her husband’s corpse to care for.

Mr. Riley had always done all of the navigating himself and his wife had only tended to a few small tasks. She placed an oversized towel over her late husband and made the distressed call for help. But after losing her husband of forty years, her mind was not in any shape to remember the least bit of how to navigate the rough waters they were in. By the time the Coast Guard pinpointed her whereabouts and were able to make it to her, the small boat had already capsized and Mrs. Riley’s body was never recovered.

Marcus’s parents didn’t have a large nest egg for him to inherit. They had invested everything into this new care-free, sail around the ocean retirement plan. Their goal was to have their two-hundred-thousand-dollar boat paid off by the time they were in their mid-seventies and then he’d be able to sell it after they passed. Instead, the lienholder ended up inheriting it on the upside-down note that they carried, leaving Marcus with nothing.

He tried to go back to work. He did go back to work but unfortunately his employer reneged on the previous promotion they offered because the position had to be filled immediately and since nothing was in writing yet, he was still just the same old contract salesmen he’d always been.

A hundred percent commission furniture salesman had to be really good at what they do to make a decent living. And to be really good, you had to be able to communicate and have razor sharp answers for every question thrown at you. That was pretty hard to do for someone that had suffered severe brain trauma and memory loss.

So, if someone asked Marcus, What’s the lifespan on a microfiber couch? and he had to run grab a handbook to answer every question they could’ve answered themselves by a quick search on the phone, you could assume he went from top salesman to bottom salesman almost overnight.

On top of that, he hadn’t seen Shyla since that last cloudy brief moment lying in the hospital room. He wasn’t sure if she couldn’t take it or what happened. All he knew, was he never saw her again after his multiple brain surgeries that left him hungry and lonely and broke. Medical bankruptcy was not a fun thing to go through and definitely wouldn’t advise it for anyone.

His whole life he’d always been so content in not wanting to change a thing and now as he was sitting under the bridge, all he wanted to do was change everything. But it was just so damn hard to pick yourself up when it felt like it was you versus the world.

There was no one to