“Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”
Job 5:7
The Toyota slowly came to a stop and then an idle. Leland stared pensively at the five men who blocked the road. Lucie-gal let out a low growl.
“Easy, girl.”
Leland gripped the pistol in his lap. He had never killed anyone before.
Leland only smoked on occasion to bandage his soul; it was usually a kind of ritual that occurred with a glass of bourbon next to a fire pit. Not often. But for effect, he pulled a Marlboro from the breast pocket of his shirt, lit it, took a deep drag, and let the smoke drift through the crack of the window. The buzz, artificial as it might be for an occasional smoker, steeled his resolve.
“We’re not stopping here, girl,” he quietly said to Lucie-gal. He stabbed the half-spent cigarette into the cup holder of the center console.
He opened the door and stepped out, tucking the pistol in the front of his pants, obscured from the prosecutors beyond the door.
“Where we going?” a toothy, gaunt man asked, while rhythmically patting the thick end of what looked like a piece of steel pipe about one inch in diameter and about two feet long.
Nearly bald, his red and grayish hair that encircled the sides of his head puffed out and looked like one of those neck pillows people use on long plane rides.
Leland took a few steps toward the miscreants, but not before shutting the door so as to keep Lucie-gal inside. He shut the door gently, like trying to avoid alerting a sleeping passenger at a rest area.
Lucie-gal protested with aimless barking, telling her master, “Don’t go!”
“Quiet, girl. It’s OK.”
“I’m just trying to get to the river. What are you fellas up to?”
The gaunt, neck pillow toothy bastard in a sour, yellow-colored tank top stepped forward.
“Well, this is our road and no one passes unless they pay a toll.”
“So you guys are basically the revenue service your daddies hated and hid from when they were running moonshine stills in this part of the world just a couple generations ago?”
“Screw you.”
“Sorry, you’re not my type,” Leland quipped.
“You ain’t gettin’ through here. That’s the story. This is our town, our road, and we’re done with all you loafers passing through. You’re gonna turn around and go back to where ever you came from; but not before we get a look at what you’re travelling with. And not until you leave us that dog.”
Bad move.
Leland looked over the men’s shoulders at the road beyond. He let out a deep sigh and looked down at his feet.
He then asked his last and final question.
“Are you the same group who burned down all those houses on High Street?”
Neck pillow didn’t say a word but the tobacco-stained corner of his mouth rose ever so slightly.
A once-competitive shooter, Leland quickly drew his .9 millimeter from beneath his shirt, shot the gaunt toothy bastard in the forehead and was already drawn on the rest of the group before they could gather the flaccid tobacco spit in their mouths.
With his gun in their general directions, he waited for the next one to make a move. With their mouths open, some dropped their guns while two of the men moved the barricades and slowly backed up, submitting to Leland’s force over the situation.
“Kick those guns this way,” Leland demanded, nervously.
The men fumbled with their feet, attempting to move the guns closer to Leland.
“Fine! Pick them up and toss them this way. But don’t try anything or I’ll do to you what I just did to your friend. My God! What the hell is wrong with you people? All I wanted to do was get home and now I’ve gone off and killed a man!”
“He was bad news. We were all afraid of him,” said one of the men, a slow, portly bald spectacle. “You did us a favor getting rid of him.”
“Yeah, which one of you will take his place?” There was no response. Just more forlorn looks in their eyes. These were men who were bankers, accountants, contractors. Men who had a life before the fallout. They somehow became tangled up with a ruffian and acted like looters after a hurricane.
The men, with their heads held low, kicked the dust beneath their feet, like punished children after a schoolyard fight.
Leland, with a watchful eye on them, picked up their guns and clumsily tossed them into the back seat.
By experience, he knew by their weight some guns weren’t even loaded. He put the Toyota in drive. His hand holding the gun that killed the leader still quivered for a bit. Lucie-gal stepped on the center console while Leland gathered his thoughts. Her barking stopped when he re-entered the cab of the truck. She snuggled her snout on his shoulder and whimpered before removing it and began breathing heavily again.
He lay the gun in his lap and with both hands wiped away moisture from his eyes, as if trying to bring them into focus. He put the truck in drive and slowly drove past the mob. He watched carefully, his eyes darting back and forth as he passed them, training on the rearview mirrors, wanting to make sure no one would try to be a hero.
Leland drove hard and fast for a couple of miles. The engine revved and Lucie-gal even sensed things were going by too quickly. She whimpered and lay down in the floorboard. With Leland, paranoia set in. He kept looking into the rearview mirrors, wondering if a gang of thugs were on their way after him. Suddenly, Leland slammed on the breaks, the truck careening to the right and then the left, dust stirring past from the tires, before coming to a screeching stop.
He buried his head in the steering wheel and sobbed like a baby. “Oh God, help me!” He carried on a mournful soliloquy between God and himself. Though he knew his decision was the only way to survive, he was smothered in the deep throes of sorrow. He had second thoughts about shooting the man. He wondered what alternative could have made the situation better. What would his father have done, he thought. “I would have killed the bastard,” a voice said assuredly.
His father, being a vet from a different age when men were tested and weren’t often found lacking, found his way back home with enough medals to drown a wet three-legged cat. Leland often felt small in the shadow of his father’s war accomplishments and had no intention of joining the armed forces before or after college. His father was disgusted with his son’s decision to pursue law school rather than a stint in the Marines. But his disappointment was quickly interrupted with a short bout of stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which led to a quick and miserly death.
Leland was so busy with classes he hardly noticed the gap of time between the day his father called to tell him of his cancer diagnosis and the day of his death. The hospice nurse called one early Spring morning to let him know Leland’s father’s death was imminent.
Leland jumped in his little red Volkswagen Jetta, which posed its own problems because of his height, and headed home from Gainesville.
He didn’t make it in time to say goodbye. His father was gone, slipped away into the ether of eternal endlessness just moments before Leland made it to the front door. When Leland arrived at the home in Pensacola, he tentatively opened the door and walked up the stairs to where his dad’s body lay. The hospice nurse stood at the top of the stairs, dressed in a formal white nurses uniform that looked acquainted with a horror character from an old film. She quietly took Leland by the hand, her face sorrowful. She let out a gentle sigh and slowly opened the door to his father’s bedroom. Leland saw a dead man on the mattress but hardly recognized him. The last time he saw his father he was a Brutus of a man, hulking 6-foot-3 linebacker type quality with a buzz cut, a barrel sized chest and a flat stomach. Even for an older man, Leland’s dad fit the part of a war hero. But the cancer shrunk him down to a pulverized version of his former self. He was thin in the thinnest of places. His face was already grey. His cheeks were sunken and looked like they were processed through a meat grinder. His neck bare and wrinkled, the skin gripping the wiry muscles that led to the base of his skull. There was no heaving, no breathing, but Leland imagined his ribs protruding with every breath. Leland sat in a chair that was prepared for him next to the bedside. It was Spring. The windows were open. The cool breeze encouraged the gentle laced curtains to waffle back and forth. Despite death, the gentle movement of air could be felt throughout the room.
Leland held his father’s hand, which got colder by the minute. The hospice nurse was charged with certain decisions. There were no other family members and Leland was too “distracted,” in the words of his father, to handle such affairs.
Leland’s father left his life as neatly as he lived it. He had his “affairs in order,” as people often say. He left the river camp to Leland, and despite disapproval of his career choice, he left him enough money to finish school debt-free.
The two weren’t on the best of terms after Leland left home for college. His father helped pay for things, but quietly resented his son’s career choice over the military. It was personal for him.
The turmoil began years earlier.
Leland as a teenager without a mother, often found himself doing things that were not appropriate. He partied with friends and came home so drunk he banged on his dad’s window to let him in. His dad ran off girls who didn’t belong in the house after the late hours of the evening. Leland often challenged his father to hand-fisted duels. This was foolish. His father could have had both hands tied behind his back and still wrap his son in cellophane, stuff him in a cardboard box and mail him to the middle of the Mojave Desert. But Leland as a young, egotistical handsome man didn’t know just how pitiful and helpless he was. He was grieving in his own way. No mother, nothing sensitive or graceful in his life. He couldn’t explain it but he felt the lack of love reverberate all through his body, every day.
His father tried to teach him life lessons but they often devolved into verbal spats, abrupt breakups as the two separated and went their own ways.
There was one time when Leland’s father did have a soft moment toward his son. Leland was 19, in between semesters and home. The two had been fighting and cursing one another for the two weeks of Leland’s break.
His father sat on his deck looking out toward the deep endless Gulf and several fingers deep in his bourbon. He called out for Leland.
The young man opened the screen door. The noise of the rushing waters, ebbing and flowing, was an uneasy racket. The moon dragged the sea back and forth on the horizon.
“I want you to know something,” his father said, with a speech slightly slurred but familiar to Leland.
”I’ve never meant to hurt you. I love you. I love you like those waves love to move back and forth. It’s not something I can help; it’s just there. My love for you will probably end when I’m dead, but until then you’re stuck with it.”
Leland was surprised by his father’s one and only confession. Like a deathbed plea for God’s forgiveness, his father made his peace with Leland, whether he was prepared or not.
His father didn’t yet know he had a worm of cancer burrowing it’s way through his soon-to-be-devoured body. Perhaps in his soul, a premonition of sorts told him, a quiet Holy voice told him, “make it right.”
Leland’s dad slid the screen door open, went to the kitchen counter and dumped another glut of bourbon in his glass before climbing wearily up the stairs to his bedroom. His bedroom door shut quietly and slowly. Nothing was ever said beyond that night about that frail act of forgiveness.
In the gulf-moon light that plumbed the depths of the gulf waters, Leland lazily twirled his glass, the melting ice dinging the edges like muted bells. He nursed his glass and inhaled the salty sea air, knowing a thousand other personal pleas of forgiveness we’re being uttered across the broken world.
Months later, sitting next to the lifeless body, Leland finally accepted his father’s pitiful plea for forgiveness.
Turmoil and anxiety quickly set in. So much was not said that could have mended old wounds. Nothing seemed to be in its right place. Leland let go of his father’s cold hand and quickly fled down the stairs of the home, bursting through the door, the screen door slapping violently against the doorframe as he left. He entered the warm blanket of humid air and found the nearest bar and met his match with a half-dozen golden lagers.
To be continued…