It wouldn’t be long now, the crows were flying and John L faced the long road. Each road had been longer than the last, each step offering more resistance. And John L was tired, man, the dust blowing in his eyes. The last case had left him stranded, like a reaching arm without a body. A rich lady contacted John L and called him to her home. A lady is like a woman, but with smoother lies. This lady was all alone. A sad thing. She hadn’t seen her husband in over a month. She showed John L a picture. The picture was like a face but faraway. John L took the case, it being his custom never to refuse a lady taller than himself. He would look for the man, uncover Levene. The case went on, at first giving a little and then not at all. Every now and then he would turn up a small piece of a clue, the gap between fleeting shadows. This life, it seemed, was mysterious. John L kept on, the case dogging him like red lines in his eyes. There’d be a dead body. A beautiful girl with no tongue. A torn ticket. A blank wall. What a fool he felt when he found the man, when he drove to the desert and he realised how his feet had not been his own, how the man and his wife, bored with themselves, had constructed a mystery for John L to solve. They had plotted their very own missing persons act to put some bone in their lives. They were lonely, knowing company only through humiliation. John L was nothing but a puppet. So, he let things carry through, let the strings pull. He drove to the desert, travelled along the earth, to find the man sitting in a remote cave, laughing as he approached, in his own piss, bearded and scrawny, demented by his own bad self and the mad crazy sun. John L looked at him, regarded him from the inside out. The inventor of a story, the author of John L’s life. He picked the man up, and threw him in the car. The funny thing was, during his investigations, John L had found at least three men who fit Levene’s description precisely, three versions of the man, all as worthy of his identity as the man himself. They shared the same memories, had the same thin hands. As an act of balance, John L had brought the three men with him and had left them all together in one ugly tangle of Levene. He had solved the case, whether or not it was real, whatever the case actually was. But now, it had left him beat. Clinging to a greasy line for these past years, it counted for nothing. It never did. It never could. What he did for others, how he reduced himself. This last fish had been cruel, against the grain of all good things. It was no different but it wasn’t the same. He felt like just a man. The true function of John L would never be revealed. A terminal man, forced to live forever. He carried on moving, on the wrong side of a sharp edge. He left his car behind, unloaded his past, one more time. He was going, getting there and gone. Man he was tired, beat. With dust in his eyes.The road he faced, in this pig heat, was littered with broken glass, as roads always are, in constant anger. He could walk it. He could do what he had done so many times before. John L could walk forever, a certain lever would be pulled, an internal window smashed and John L could just do it. He could just shit it out. When John L was blind, as a child, he learned magic. Since then, he could do anything. The sun slowed him down, the beam of his hat covering his eyes. He set himself in a pose of grim determination, in a bastard’s dance. But he was reeling. He couldn’t agree to go on. John L, opposing himself, broke into a run, off the road and across the dirt. John L kept running, on and on, further and further into unknown territory. The sweat soaked his black suit, his suit soaked into his bones. Gasping, gaping at the world. Suddenly he found himself staring at a perfect patch of grass. A beautiful apple tree stood there, not giving a shit and asking no questions. His eyes sought more. It made him think of all trees. He could go back, leave the tree alone, back to the next case, the next poisonous exchange. But he didn’t want to. He leaned on the tree for a while. It offered the safest support. He slunk down, looking up at the tree, lying down, saw the branches waving at the sky. He scratched a letter in the bark of the tree, maybe the beginning of something, or its very end. It was good to be away from the city, away from the horror eyes of cars. Not all things were always bad, out here. He’d been traipsing from gang plank to gang plank for as long as he could remember. Eventually he’d dive, cold bones into the ocean and it would take him in its welcoming swallow. John L stretched out, kicking off his shoes, always the sign, and placing his hat over his face. He decided to dream – to dream of a man and a woman, two shapes, two clods of lifestuff. They would be in love, these clods. The boy would be in trouble, the girl would need him desperately. Wild and crazy, the boy, like a punched ticket, small eyes looking for big times. The girl would be slim, hunting slow men, her body leaving their eyes sore and dripping. The girl would have a sound in her head, the sound she couldn’t get rid of. It would worry her night and day – a yellow and evil tune, the whine her daddy would make after crawling into her bed, a tune like a rag nailed to her shoulder. On the first day the boy strung her father from a tree and slit his belly like a pig. The blood running out from him, happy to be released. And the girl was charmed, pleased, she sat watching her daddy die. She was warmed by the heroic boy who had no sense of right or wrong, who only knew how to make her happy and trusted in that. She sat there, watching. She started humming the yellow melody, setting it free at last, back to the ears of the man twisting before her, hung on the tree he planted as a child. Funny it was, that her Daddy’s screams were in time with the tune, the tune he used to whistle from between his teeth, into her trembling ears. The boy put on a record and danced with the girl into the night, stealing the car and setting fire to the barn. Daddy danced no more. They drove along the road, the roof open, the wind, with them. They drove till morning and stopped by an old, abandoned farmhouse, another place where sad rural dreams had perished. Weeds poked through the windows like dead laughing eyes. They burned the car for warmth, and as an abstract show of reckless love. The explosions showed the sky. There would be other cars, more things to burn, more love to show.
The boy would dream of ways to disassemble himself, a green screw in his navel. He would half-wake and reach for the girl. And, for the first time, she was there. They drained the next few days in each other’s arms. An afternoon was spent sleeping. Another in a nearby lake, diving, naked. They thought things they’d like to happen. The boy then had the idea to teach the girl to shoot. A gun seemed important between them, a short violent life almost certain. Happiness would follow death or be damned. They used beer bottles as targets. The boy was deadly in every way – his eyes were rape and his hands screamed for murder. Glass couldn’t cut him and there wasn’t a knife that dared. He had an idea for something, something total, like a game that was real. He pointed the gun. His aim was true. The bottles smashed without choice. The girl flinched and giggled. The gun felt heavy and dead in her hands. She stroked it, trying to awake something inside. Her slim hips, full of raw sex, quivered as she weighed its scarlet history. She held it out in front of her unsteadily. She pulled the trigger and shrieked, knocking the top from the bottle. The second shot buried itself into an innocent fence that must have wondered why the hell. Urged by the boy, who was now thinking of her open legs, she took a third, wild shot, missing completely. She was almost thrown by the gun’s masculine thrust. She screamed with joy. Smiling, like a child. They heard a groan from across the field. She dropped the gun. The girl moved instinctively over to the boy, but the boy had already jumped the fence, his finger to his lips, walking low crouch, following the sound like a dog. The girl followed, tearing her dress slightly on a splinter in the fence, exposing herself ever more. They came upon a large apple tree that made them think of all trees, so typical was it of what it was. Under the tree sat a man, a hat covering his face, his shoes kicked to one side, his hand over the wound in his heart, blood running through his fingers, thickly down his black suit. The girl looked at the boy, somehow.
P. Cabrelli
