Justice: Subsection 1.5

Continued from: Justice: Subsection 1.0:

I remembered something. Something salvaged from the sawtoothed scrapyard at memory's edge, consigned there in the long ago as a matter of practicality.
There was something else, I said. Something better. Stranger.
The brows crept up the dessicated scalp as the man glassed me over the rim of his beverage.
I've never told a soul this before. But I'll never see you again, so what the hell. This was also a long time ago. I was a young man and I had a summer to myself in the mountains. Real mountains and really to myself. A privilege. One day I was out kind of patrolling the slope above where I lived with my rifle. Just looking around, hoping maybe to get a shot off at a rabbit. Out of the corner of my eye I see some movement through the branches. It's a squirrel, has to be. I duck behind a tree and wait.
I finished my beer in a gulp and looked down at the bar, unsure how to go on.
Well, the man said. Unburden yourself.
Let me just get straight to the point. I shot the squirrel a few minutes later. Nice big one. Big billowing tail. I got my knife out to dress it, the way you do. First I spilled the guts, then I dug through the diaphragm. Hooked my finger around the cardiovascular system and gave a tug. You have no idea what it was like to this this. The fucking heart was artificial. A fucking electromechanical pump with a battery and wires and tubes and everything. Strike me dead by lightning right where I fucking sit if it wasn't so.
The man smiled mildly, never diverting his eyes. He raised his glass and drank, but very quickly as if our time had turned precious. All mirth was gone from his face when he rested his glass on some of the bartop's carved sentiments.
Now you're talking. Course, whether I believe it or not is another question. But I think your ear may be worth the telling, my friend. Now, the strangest thing I-
Hold up. I'm sorry. I want to hear you out, I do. I also happen to know you'll spill it. You've been dying to tell me from the minute you sat down. But I'm on a roll here. I keep remembering things. So if you'll indulge me, if you'll just forbear a minute.
He puckered his lips scantly, expressing the dormant cruelty of a thin-lipped judge, if that makes any sense.
All fired up with no one to talk to, eh? Go on then. Spill your soul.
I motioned at the bartender with a whipping motion. He understood and poured me a shot from the whiskey bottle capped by the tin horseman. This was personal and I needed fortification.
All right, old man. Just hear me out. I think this one'll get you.
I sipped and remembered those shriveled legs poking out from the institutional gown flapping on the sterile wind, the proud eyes forever agape at the void, distant clamor of sirens ferrying the newly dead and dying in their batches.
It's like this, old man. I had this friend. A much older man, a kind of mentor to me. A good man.
Some words feel good on the tongue: A good man.
What was he?
Doesn't matter. The point is that he was right in the head. Proud, fair. The body was a different story. Problems, problems, problems. Liver, lungs, blood, all of it fucked up, you know. All of it slowly catching up to him as the years pass in the way of things. By and by he comes to dying. Barely able to stand, shaking like a leaf, stinking to hell. He'd never been one to seek medical treatment, but in the end a few of us just rounded him up and took him to the hospital, clawing and yelling. Of course the situation was as hopeless as it looked. The doctors took one look at him before prescribing an opiate and carting him off to the hospice ward. He yelled at us from the gurney, said not to come looking for him in the fortress. We could find him on the reaper's common, whatever that meant. And not to come looking for him in the fortress. Before leaving we asked the doctor how long he gave him to live, and his answer was two days. They have their ways of knowing, I guess--here I raised the whiskey to my lips and just kind of sniffed at it before going on--So I come back the next day with another friend he'd meant a lot to and ask to see him and they say he's gone. Just like that. When we asked if we could see the body the nurse said we hadn't understood, that he'd risen from his bed and shuffled off and escaped, unlikely as it seemed. So we left and started walking around, asking ourselves what the hell he meant by reaper's common. We walked around for a long time that night and saw a great many sad things, but I'll cut to the chase. We found him laid out at the foot of a bridge pier, dead. Just wearing his hospital gown with his hollowed old man's legs poking out onto the concrete. His eyes were open and there was this fucking smile on his face. But his hands were folded neatly over his chest, his feet were evenly arranged, and there was a ratty little pillow under his head. A fucking pillow. Someone had tidied up his corpse, composed it, you know? As if there were some vagrant freelance mortitioner patrolling the forgotten parts of the city. When we leaned down for a closer look there was a little bouquet of weeds fluttering in his cold hand. I thought it was a kind of miracle, you know? I mean going out...you know...on your own terms and, and...to be treated with dignity like that...I don't know what to say.
Tears were streaming down my face, and the old man sat quietly by as I mended my facade.
That's it, he said. I downright like you. You ready for the story now?
I nodded.

The thing I saw wasn't a thing, really. Not something really to be seen either. It was a series of events that I lived through when I was a young man living with my friends. Living the way we wanted to. A great luxury, and the only freedom. I guess we had what you'd call a commune. Now, we hadn't ended up there straight out of the womb. Most of us had come up through the normal institutions that mold our young, and what we were doing was running away from all that as fast as we fucking could. And let me tell you before I get into too much detail---there was the seed of something amazing there. Something like freedom, with enough food and love to make it work. Shit. I think I only really know the meaning of food of all those words. Point being there was something to it. We were going places. Spiritually.

I, your narrator, inclined my head in interest, motioning discretely to the barman for another beer.

Our little community had 9 members at the time. Now there were defections and additions pretty often. But at the time I'm talking about we were nine. Pretty good people too. We lived in a big old three story house owned by my uncle, who was not only wealthy but also favorably disposed to what we were trying to do. Theodore Cheesegrave, a libel lawyer with a famous practice and a reputation for winning cases that seemed impossible. From us he required nothing more than upkeep. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a little gardening, touching up the paint where it peeled, buffing the floors, whatever. He would come visit us once every couple months, smoking his corncob pipe and looking around with this air of benevolent confusion. I think he got some pretty big kicks out of the contrast between the house and its occupants. It burnished his credentials as an eccentric, appealed to his pride.
At any rate, one of the people living with us a woman named Vanessa. Now Vanessa was what you might call a four alarm fire. I mean just hands on your knees tongue flapping eyes all big gorgeous. What she saw in us, who could say. Which is exactly what I mean. Her just being there meant that we that we had the magic. Do you see what I mean? We live in different times now, dark fucking times, but what we had there was a commune where gorgeous women, there were others, would come live with us because we were where the hope was. Vanessa would have been 27 or so at the time. Naturally, she loved to garden. Hoe, shears, spade, rake, you could pretty much always count on seeing one of those in her hand. She grew the usual things. Spinach, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes and what have you. There was also a shaded patch in the corner of the yard cooled by this little brook that she devoted to growing mushrooms. Chantarelles, I think, and portabellas. There were regular cooking mushrooms too, even some spurious fungi that got more than one of us good and sick. We ate pretty well in those days.

He drew on his beer and gave a short, bleak laugh.

Another thing about her was her voice. Her singing voice. She sang as she gardened, sang when she cooked, sang in the shower. Never real songs. Just notes, words, trills. Sometimes she'd get stuck in a loop and sing the same damn thing the whole afternoon. It would have been enough to drive you nuts if it hadn't been for the rest of her. And the inanity of what she sang about, Christ. You'd have thought her short a few cards upstairs if you never saw her when she wasn't singing. She also sang when she made love, as I knew from personal experience. No--let me go on. Her voice wasn't lovely. It was too weak and sad for that, haunting in its way. There was some beauty to it, there's no denying it, but it didn't accord with the rest of her. It was like something you'd hear from a wilting flower. I mean if it could sing. Who knows why, that's just the way her voice was. Maybe we should have known what would happen.

As you can imagine, Vanessa was the source of more than her fair share of trouble. At least two guys and one gal that I can remember had left us because of her. Hopeless loves for the guys and hopeless jealousy for the gal. And they were better off for leaving.

He sipped again, deliberately. A new gloom had overspread his face when he looked up.

This is what happened. After being pretty free with herself for a long time, Vanessa settled down into a relationship with one of us, a called The Camel. He was called that because he was strong as an ox (or a camel) and whenever something heavy needed carrying he was the one to do it. He also had a nasty temper and smoked Camels like it was his job, often to keep a lid on his emotions. He was from Bakersfield, California too, which I guess made the name even better. The Camel and Vanessa had been in a relationship for maybe two or three months when he had to leave for a week to bury his father and settle the estate and what have you. During that time I was working on building a new shed in the back yard. A really mammoth shed, almost like a miniature stables. The initiative had come straight from the desk of Uncle Theo. His motivation was to lower the value of the property prior to the next tax assessment. He was never going to sell anyway, and I guess he thought that an unsightly shed would sway the man he referred to as the assessor-parasite into a lowball appraisal. Point being that I was back in the yard spending my time with Vanessa most days. I'd always felt some flirtatious electricity between us, and this situation was more or less a crucible for that energy to run its course. You could also look at it this way, as I certainly did: The more we talked, the less she'd sing. I remember she kept making these comments about the tools I was using and especially the way she'd roll the words, words like hammer or wedge or nail or, even especially, words like plow or rake or turn and earth and yield, just roll them around her mouth, voluptuously, like she needed to extract the marrow from them before letting go.

I think you can tell where this is going. Yes, we ended up going for a roll in the hay, in this case almost literally. It happened on the raw plywood floor of the halfbuilt shed. We strewed a bag or two of grass clippings on it for comfort. What can I say? It was good. I guess she liked it too, because it happened again, this time in her room. Except this time it wasn't good, because The Camel walked in on us just as she was beginning to climax, which I knew for a fact because she had burst into song. It was horrible.

(To be continued shortly)