Bethel's Meadow (22 page)

I just couldn’t accept being anyone’s project.

I then thought that I should have paid better attention to my instincts when they had warned me that I wasn’t worthy of Glory, that I needed to get the hell out of her way. Why couldn’t I just learn to trust those instincts, my gut feelings?

As I got in my car and turned the ignition, I became convinced the whole thing was a setup. Glory had left me alone with that walking-disaster roommate of hers just to test me. She wanted to see just how broken I was.

I wanted to cry my eyes out. When was it all going to stop? Why did things have to be like this?

I wanted to fly away. I had enough money in the bank to take a long trip somewhere. I could find a safe haven. I could get away from the monsters on Dusty Pond. But dammit, I didn’t want to leave without taking someone with me, someone I truly cared about.

I pulled out of the parking space and got the hell out of Dodge. I wasn’t ever coming back.

Glory was one of
them
. She was with the outside world.

As I drove north on Dr. Phillips Boulevard toward my house, I’ll never forget what I felt. I felt sorrow and a tremendous sense of loss. I felt like I had just lost the best friend I could ever hope to have.

I thought we had something.

But it turned out to be nothing.

I felt alone.

And it just made me madder than hell.

This would prove to be a turning point for me. The only problem was that I was turning in the wrong direction. Things were going to get worse before they got better.

I just knew it.

25

I
WAS BLOTTO. As if the copious amount of wine I had consumed over at Glory’s place hadn’t been enough to fill my tank, I came home and ratcheted the drinking up a notch or two more. For my poison I chose an unopened bottle of ten-year-old Scotch whisky. It had been a birthday present from Sidebottom several years back. I’d never been big on liquor other than the occasional vodka and tonic, but this would do for now. Sidebottom had professed himself a connoisseur of single malts made in the Scotch highlands. He’d traveled to Scotland as a young man to apprentice under a world-renowned Scotch maker. His training hadn’t lasted a year before Sidebottom realized there was more money to be made in the information technologies field back home in the States.

I was partaking from a whisky glass that Sidebottom had packaged with the bottle. He’d said the glass was specifically crafted for the whisky drinking experience. While I knew nothing of the subtle differences between a Porto glass and a whisky glass, I really didn’t give a damn. I just knew the stuff went down my throat smoothly and allowed me to not give a shit about anything.

It’s funny what alcohol can do to the mind. You can get so drunk that you can’t tie your own shoes, and so wasted that you can’t fry a burger without burning the house down. You can forget your own phone number, lose all memory of what has occurred for the past forty-eight hours, and not even recall your own middle name.

But it has been my experience that alcohol can crack open the shell of my subconscious mind and release from it the tome that is the story of my life. While I may have temporarily lost the ability to dial 911, I could fully recall every single army song my father had sung to me when I was a boy. The only time he sang was during long car trips to vacation spots in Colorado, or when he got so drunk he could barely stand up himself.

You see, my father was a paratrooper. And there was one song he loved to sing more than any other. In fact, according to my old man, everyone in his unit had been required to memorize the lyrics. Well, I probably never could have made it as a paratrooper, let alone a good army soldier, but to this day I can sure as hell sing one song in particular. It’s a song that I can only seem to remember when I’m drunk—I could never pull it off sober.

So I grabbed my guitar and proudly sang “Blood Upon The Risers” (roughly to the tune of “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic”):

He was just a rookie trooper and he surely shook with fright

He checked off his equipment and made sure his pack was tight

He had to sit and listen to those awful engines roar

You ain't gonna jump no more

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

He ain't gonna jump no more

"Is everybody happy?" cried the sergeant looking up

Our hero feebly answered, "Yes," and then they stood him up

He jumped into the icy blast, his static line unhooked

And he ain't gonna jump no more

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

He ain't gonna jump no more

He counted long, he counted loud, he waited for the shock

He felt the wind, he felt the cold, he felt the awful drop

The silk from his reserve spilled out and wrapped around his legs

And he ain't gonna jump no more

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

He ain't gonna jump no more

The risers swung around his neck, connectors cracked his dome

Suspension lines were tied in knots around his skinny bones

The canopy became his shroud, he hurtled to the ground

And he ain't gonna jump no more

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

He ain't gonna jump no more

The days he lived and loved and laughed kept running through his mind

He thought about the girl back home, the one he’d left behind

He thought about the medicos and wondered what they'd find

And he ain't gonna jump no more

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

He ain't gonna jump no more

The ambulance was on the spot, the jeeps were running wild

The medics jumped and screamed with glee, rolled up their sleeves and smiled

For it had been a week or more since last a 'chute had failed

And he ain't gonna jump no more

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

He ain't gonna jump no more

He hit the ground, the sound was "SPLAT," his blood went spurting high

His comrades they were heard to say, "A helluva way to die"

He lay there rolling 'round in the welter of his gore

And he ain't gonna jump no more

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

He ain't gonna jump no more

There was blood upon the risers, there were brains upon the 'chute

Intestines were a-dangling from his paratrooper suit

He was a mess, they picked him up and poured him from his boots

And he ain't gonna jump no more

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die

He ain't gonna jump no more

After I finished the song I laid down my guitar and stepped outside to relish the cool April evening air. I gazed into the starry night and thought about my old man. I’d lost my father when I was barely ten. I’d always felt that my life would have been different—a lot better—if he had hung around just a little while longer. It wasn’t his fault that he himself had gone
SPLAT
from a paratrooper accident, but I’d always directed my hate toward him when everything went sour in my life. As I aged into my twenties and thirties, I continued to curse the man for having left me as soon as he had.

But now, at just this very second, I realized how harsh and unfair I had been all those years. All I wanted now was to hear his voice, to have him tell me what to do with my life, how to get out of this emotional funk I was mired in, how to deal with Caitlin and Samantha, how to laugh off my troubles the way he’d always laughed off his own. Nothing could touch my father. Not the Viet Cong, not the fact that he’d been a neglected orphan himself, and not anything else life threw at him. He was a tough bastard. If he saw the mess I was in now he’d know just what to do. He’d guide me through it and then we’d laugh about it all afterward.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, addressing the Holy Spirit. “Why’d you take from me the only guidepost in life I’d ever had? For what purpose?”

I bowed my head and walked back inside. My father would have said there was no use in questioning God, because God was basically a hands-off kind of a guy. It was up to me to make good of my life. He’d say there’s no use in feeling sorry for yourself, because no one would give a shit if you did. It is nothing but wasted energy and is counterproductive.

But I couldn’t help it. Yes, it was the booze directing my thoughts now, but I missed my old man so much that I started to cry. As the tears kept gushing out of my eyeballs, I flopped on my bed and prayed for sleep:

God, please just give me a few hours of slumber. And please tell Daddy how much I love and miss him.

It was a good thing I didn’t have a gun that lonely and desperate night. I’m ashamed to admit that I would have eaten a bullet if I had.

26

J
UST LIKE THAT! and it was Friday night.

Maybe I’d slept a bit in the previous few days since my disaster dinner date at Glory Nolan’s place, maybe I hadn’t. It depends on how you define sleep. There were occasions while watching TV that it appeared basketball games had jumped ahead in time by five or ten minutes on the game clock, seemingly in just the blink of an eye. On Wednesday afternoon I was waiting for a red light to change at an intersection in Windermere, where I must have had some sort of a blackout, because the next thing I recalled was sailing through a red light at another intersection in Dr. Phillips two miles away. Scared to death and feeling very fortunate that I hadn’t killed anyone, I pulled into a grocery store parking lot and called Vernon and asked him to please come pick me up. His girlfriend accompanied him to drive my car back home.

“I need you to get yourself together, old man,” Vernon had said with understanding and kindness but also with unmistakable firmness. “Your body can’t handle what you’ve done to it by coming off of the meds. You’re a manic-depressive, dammit. Just accept that and deal smartly with it. You’re unable to sleep because you’re self-medicating, and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. I’m giving you the rest of the week off. Find someone that can moderate your condition and get you the sleep you need. Please don’t self-destruct on me. I need you.”

But self-destructing is exactly what I was doing. While my judgment had been sound enough in determining that I needed to quit driving for a while, I was still idiot enough to have accepted Sidebottom’s invitation to the party at Bay Hill I was now attending. I had taken a cab to get here. I already had it in my mind that when I left, it’d be with a woman who’d take me to wherever we decided.

The hostess of the party was a slim but heavily made-up bottle blonde of about forty years who possessed brand-spanking new store-boughts that jutted out all the way to damn near my chin; her fully erect nipples were pointing straight up to the crystal chandelier above us. I knew the remade tits were of recent vintage because I had met her a few weeks ago, either at a party or a bar. She’d already had big hooters then—I didn’t see the point of adding on. Her name was Donna, and she talked so rapidly that I was convinced she was jacked up from a generous hit of cocaine. And in this crowd, cocaine was never a bad guess.