A Debt to Society

By Ron Weiford

A Debt of Society is about a man who believes life has been unfair to him and he deserves to even the score anyway he deems to fit. John decides to teach the world a lesson until he is satisfied that his debt is paid in full.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781682139943

Book preview

cover.jpg

A Debt to

Society

Ron Weiford

Copyright © 2020 Ron Weiford

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-68213-993-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-68213-994-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Homecoming

Men at Work

After the Job

Yesterday

Places out of Time

Planning

Punishment

Backslide

1

Homecoming

My mother and your mother were hanging up clothes. My mother socked your mother right in the nose. What color was the blood? Green. G-R-E-E-N spells green. And you are not to be it!

This thought repeated itself in the man’s head as the Greyhound eased its way from dark into early dawn. The trip from Chicago to Baltimore had been an easy and uneventful one, and the man was very grateful.

He pushed his seat from recline to upright and peered outside the broad window. As the bus backed its residents into the proper slot, he took a few minutes to reunite himself to the surroundings.

Little seemed to have changed in the terminal, except perhaps for the five or six Dobermans being led around the property by the security staff. The man took notice of the muzzles on the snouts of the huge dogs.

This, he thought, would be a happy occasion for many of the people who accompanied him on this long journey. Meeting with friends or family, waiting for them on the long platform. And even though the seat next to the man had been vacant for most of the ride, except for a period of three and a half hours when he underwent an interrogation of numerous questions about his life, politics, marital status, and reason for traveling in the first place.

The woman had been dressed in tight corduroy pants, a startling contrast to the bright orange blouse and a massive amount of costume jewelry that hung from her wrists and adorned almost every finger on both hands.

The man guessed that the woman, whose name turned out to be Markie and M to her friends, must have weighed in at three hundred plus pounds.

An old saying occurred to the man, told to him by his grandmother who had died in this state so many years before: When you look good, you feel good; when you feel good, you do good.

If there was any truth in this than must have been deathly ill with one foot in the grave. M had gotten off at a small fifteen-minute stop somewhere in the dark. But the man knew that even if the seat next to him was empty, he wasn’t exactly riding alone. It was spring, but there was still a chill in the air this morning to warrant a jacket. For once he was glad that he had few possessions, only two barrel bags and a carry-on bag. John Williams stepped out of the bus and headed around the side of silver body to collect his luggage from its belly.

Those two blue ones, John said to the handler as it was passed to him, were his entire world. More important than clothes, they’re his most cherished part of himself, his diary and dream book. He decided to keep with him in the bag, dangling from his shoulder.

If you asked him why he clung to these writings, John would have said that he was very afraid to lose them.

In reality, he was afraid that someone would read those words and believe what they implied—insanity.

The diary had been John’s idea. Going back two years, it entailed all or most of the things he did or fantasized about those years and before. When the worst had actually started, he could not say. The dream book was born as a suggestion from a psychiatrist, Sam Dulles, who liked to be called Sammy for reasons known only to himself.

After several hours of thinking, John finally complied with the doctor’s request, though never really revealing what he wrote on those pages.

John couldn’t help smiling now when he remembered how easy it had been to fool ole Sammy and all the other bastards and/or bitches who had come before.

He had rigorously done his homework and knew when to say yes, no, or nothing at all. All the psychological tests had been frivolous and had proven nothing.

Medication had helped control what John had written, but no cure had ever been in sight. Now standing among these familiar streets, feeling the breeze, John could feel the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

It was light now and probably half-safe to walk the distance to a nearby motel. With bags in hand, John made his way to the Marriott where a doorman promptly met him. How may I help you? said the man behind the desk.

A nametag revealed the man to be Jeff. Jeff seemed in need of several pots of coffee and a shower after smiling and pretending to give a fuck about his current employment. Without wasting time, John signed, paid, and secured a room on the fifth floor. Alone in the elevator, the sounds and voices tried to penetrate his mind.

I’ll grab a quick shower, he thought, then take my pills and try to get a few hours’ sleep before someone from housekeeping knocks to see if I need anything.

Outside, it had started to rain.

***

In the dream, he was ten. John was with his grandmother and his sister, Donna. His aunt and uncle had taken them on a trip to Virginia, and everything was going great as far as John was concerned.

As they glided down the interstate, the clouds began to darken as if night were suddenly upon the five of them.

A forgotten conversation was in progress when the car began to swerve and slide. As John looked through the windshield, all the cars within sight were also out of control. About fifty yards ahead of them a giant crevasse was opening up and swallowing the automobiles like toys.

John pleaded to his uncle to please slow down, slow down, but his uncle was no longer behind the wheel. In his place was a creature straight from hell. It turned to look his way and smiled.

Blood covered the beast as if someone had torn the flesh from its bones.

John began to cry and look for the others. But they had

disappeared.

He was alone with this horror determined to drive the Buick into the widening gap. Blood gushed from the eye sockets of the monster, splashing the steering wheel and dashboard, turning everything a dark red. John could hear the thing laughing and singing a song from his childhood, a song he had put together when the neighborhood kids would gather to play tag. It was his song. This motherfucker was singing the lines from the tune that he had chanted on the long bus ride. John screamed louder, and the singing abruptly stopped.

As the large brown Buick reached the edge of the hole, where lava and fire were spewing high into the sky, it turned for one last glance. John was now looking into his own bloody, skinless face, a face with all the hate in the world behind its lifeless grey eyes.

***

John sat upright in his bed, not knowing if his last scream was audible or only in his mind. Turning over, he stared at the television in the corner of the room and took several deep breaths. The nightmares had gotten steadily worse over the last six months.

John had first tried to defuse them by taking a double dose of medication before bedtime. But lately, sticking to the prescribed amount of Haldol, he decided to let them proceed along their own path. Maybe this way he might discover their dark secrets. God knew that John had tried other avenues to rid himself of these sleep visitations. The doctors had been over a decade before to relieve him of his so-called malady. Using terms from borderline personality disorder of schizophrenia, the doctors had tried relentlessly to free John from his personal demons.

The result of endless medications and countless hours of therapy had only deepened his condition and turned him against all manner of outside help.

These years, John had begun to call the application years, had brought him to despise doctors of all kinds. He had humored his latest head shrink, Dr. Robert Billy, who seemed to have more intense problems than John himself, to obtain the scripts for the many medications he now took.

If anything, the doc had only given him a reason not to trust anyone with two first names. He had decided that he had more than any of these arrogant SOB, and that he would ultimately be the one to keep or destroy his mind. Actually, John confided to anyone who cared to listen, that he had come this far after so much mind-altering bullshit with the number of brain cells he now had to work with. In reality, he knew that he had drunk away many of the cells himself. John rubbed the residue of sleep from his eyes and headed toward the bathroom.

He was aware of the song trying to begin within the confines of his head.

My mother and your mother, shut up, my mother socked, shut up!

John turned the tap and splashed cold water onto his face.

Holding the edges of the sink, he studied his reflection in the tiny mirror. At age forty-one, he had managed to retain much of his youthful image.

Thinking back, he looked much as he had in high school except for the hair, which he now wore short, unlike the long mane he proudly stated in the old snapshot resting in his wallet. John pushed away from the mirror and urinated in the blue water. As he flushed, the anger, which often followed these dreams, threatened to worm its way out. While John struggled to keep his composure, someone began to rap on his door.

Coming, John yelled in a shaky voice.

John turned the flimsy dead bolt, which seemed to be part of every motel.

The young woman in the housekeeping uniform seemed to be in her early twenties. It seemed like an odd hour to clean rooms, but he had other things on his mind. John couldn’t quite make out the nametag on the woman’s chest because of the flowing red hair.

Clean your room, sir? she asked this in a dialect John guessed could have been from Texas.

Looking at her, he suddenly wished that he knew this young girl better. He could see her coming home and telling him how her day had went.

How he would listen intently as she droned on about the slim guy in four fifteen or the obese woman in three twelve who had leered at her in jealousy.

Yes. He would listen. He had become very good at listening.

All the years. Years of sitting still and quiet as doctors probed to find reasons for his discomfort. He had smiled and nodded as these unimaginable people mapped out the rest of his life.

What would happen if he did this and didn’t do that? Yes. He had listened.

And he was good. Now, in the seconds it took to say yes, he knew how he would please this woman with the red hair. Best not to think along those lines just yet. Let’s not jump the gun. There was a time for everything.

So John listened. Although he was not particularly hungry, he also learned that you had to feed the machine. John had realized that everything could be put in very simple terms. The body was nothing more than a machine that served its owner until it ran completely out of gas. We all ran out of gas sometime.

He would feed his machine and exercise it well, until it could no longer feed.

Let the doctors, lawyers, and thinkers of the world complicate things. John knew how simple matters really were.

He started down the green-carpeted hallway towards the elevators.

As he pushed the square button, now aglow with life, John glanced back the way he had come. The red-haired girl with no name had her cleaning cart parked outside his room. Toilet paper, glass cleaner, vacuum machine, and bottles with names like New Tile and Flush Away. Everything a person needed to accomplish the effect of walking into a new room. John wondered, as he often did in places like this, how many machines had run out of gas in these brand new rooms.

The elevator arrived to take him down.

He was glad to see that it was empty. John stepped out of the humming elevator. It was still early, and the only people here were the ever-present patrons who sat in the elegant wingback chairs pretending to read a magazine or newspaper.

John was sure that he had seen these same life-like mannequins, or their offspring, in lobbies across America.

He wondered if they were paid or if they had some kind of union.

John Williams waved a good-morning to the desk clerk and pushed his way through the glass doors and out into the spring air.

It was time to feed his machine. Two years earlier, while he was still with his ex Lori, they had discovered a small but beautiful restaurant named simply the Inn.

Now that the rain had stopped, he decided to walk the three blocks Lombard Street to see if the eatery was still in existence.

He took his time, letting the past catch up