Vapor Trails

Vapor Trails


He could hear the thick sound of the overnight train as it bent and navigated the steel beams of tracks well across the river, far beyond his window, and towards some location that he could only guess. That noise; potent and powerful, brewing through the spidery green mangroves and slicing past the clean bright white sailboat sterns that lingered in a shallow southern harbor. After that, the menacing steel reverberation stewed across a long lagoon, drifting obtusely with a moderate western wind, bobbing unknowingly across murky tea-colored salt water, and connecting, sonically, miles away, as it always did, with Earl’s ears.

Earl Anderson, he sipped his black tea, simmering as it was, and he absorbed that heavy and unconventional sound. It mowed down the characters of the lagoon; smashing past them with the unrelenting venom of a pure in-form forest fire. Earl would smell the sound of this, that simmering burnt swamp, well before that of a loud boiling locomotive running at a high and brutal strength. But that power, the action of metal on metal, the coy brutal reality of movement crossing his eardrums and connecting with his brain; indeed these things did register. That much was sure.

Across the river, over the dying and mangled mangroves, between the jittery super-electric cables, and across the barrier island that he found comfort in: the noise just pulsated. Until it hit his window, as it wound past expensive housing and ghostly manors, tubes of bile sewage and nests of blue-green songbirds. Here it came, and it will not stop, and really, how could it?

And after it passed through Earl’s ears (or around Earl’s ears), it would strike out like some over-confident mercenary towards the flat unyielding plains of the Atlantic Ocean and then spread outward into an oblivion to which he dare not define. Earl supposed. But on this sultry heavy summer night, as the humidity thumped with a vice-like intensity, and the songbirds kept quite quiet as they hid deep in their cool cocoons of moist palmetto palms, and his brain bulged against the coconut protective netting of his skull, he’d hear a great many things. And of all those things, it was color and movement that would always prove true, or the most true. Sound, at this time, was not to be trusted.

Salt slings so intensely in the dark muck of a deep lagoon of silt. Snook will gulp air trying to avoid it, herons will skim the tart brown waters of a burning lake possessing the corpses of that which will not survive, and that train, oh lord, will keep pounding. It will motor in between the lines-

“So let’s buy it, right?”

Bright lights, swirling bits of sugar ice rotating in terrible coordination, some strange mumbling behind him, a hint of winter-fresh in the air.

“What?”

“The donut, let’s take the plunge. Buy the thing. Credit-card?"

Earl looked behind him at a marginally impatient line of clientele from undisclosed locations and with unrequited destinations. They wore green, purple, black and yellow. Mostly. And in their arms they carried strange items, things that people go out of their way to get with a lot of provocation; items that fill some hyper needful void at the time. A lime for this margarita, or we need Tuesdays USA Today right now, or shrimp are best when frozen, they attract the best kind of edible beings. Indeed, these things needed at times unmoored from their relationship with normal speed.

And it was true; things of this nature were tucked carefully under their arms. And yes, some seemed more annoyed then others that Earl had just been dropped out of the dark ink overnight into this convenience store, but there were reasons for that. The Counter Girl certainly didn’t look annoyed, and he noted this when she snapped her petite fingers in front of his face after he had made a good careful observation of said line.

“Dude, donut is to be purchased, perhaps?”

“Where am I?” Earl responded quickly. A bit faster then she was ready for. He could feel that somehow. But she didn’t miss much of a beat.

“A Flash Stop Convenience Store, Moon-Spider, and what quadrant did you beam from?”

”What?”

“Jesus,” she impatiently showed her hand, “These people are going to rip you apart, as persons in a checkout line, literally, have the patience of a toddler, and you are testing the hell out of it. I’d just have to guess because you are quite high.”

”I’m not high.”

“Really wish we hadn’t ruled that out.”

Her blue eyes tried to locate Earls in a way that vastly overstepped the requirements of her job, and her pay, but the action fit quite nicely with her overall persona: Curls of thin blonde hair, a few indistinguishable tattoos in a few all too notable areas, the air of someone who’d been a bartender and knew quite well how to tend. He tried to avoid her gaze, moving his head systematically, and (he hoped) randomly enough in a fashion that she could not recognize, and a pattern she would not be able to keep up with. But she did. Easily. And she was a few inches from his face when the gasps and despairs of the line patrons began to fill the air with a toxic necessity.

”How much is my donut?” Earl finally said.

“Free, if you’ll take it and get to the back of the line,” Blue-Eyes said, or, now that Earl had dropped in late, forgetting his bullet-train departure time and connecting with something more solid, more local, and looking more closely, observing more acutely, he noted that her name was Linda.

“I doubt this donut is free, Linda. This is a capitalist establishment is it not? I’d doubt that-”

”Done,” she said, and did in one solid motion. And she tossed the chocolate donut at Earl (he didn’t even like that flavor?), and fingered the next person in the line very literally. The large women behind him with the USA Today and an eight-pack of tampons filled the void very quickly, and with cash. Grunting slightly as she did so, expelling some exhaust of pity, but mostly of frustration. And as she did so, Earl shuffled absently out the door propelled mostly by general dislike and with a chocolate donut in his mouth, and as he hit the humid nighttime air he felt his lungs explode with something that must be the southern opposite of jet-fuel.

And he was about to ponder how, exactly, he got here, in this dark night of Redbox’s, dull donuts, and pregnant fat women pretending they still needed tampons when a squad car slid carefully but viper-like into the slot he was zoning into. Earl was occupying the space above said slot, breathing in its oily hot air evaporation, and rubbing his temples a bit. Trying to connect these things to that thing, and wondering if at any point he should have asked Linda out, but also countering the beautiful visage of the girl he called his own into the equation.

But by then, the officer was up in front of him, and these questions registered late and without reservations, if nothing else. He’d have to save them for later.

“Earl, having a good evening?”

She knew his name!

“I…don’t know? Donuts are good. Who are you?”

Another distorted face giving him a contracted and difficult to read look. An agent of the They patrol, finding a target, or just fumbling onto one, as they do, and now beginning to collect facts. These facts could later be composed, by whomever, and be retold, endlessly, timelessly, as a story. Earl was pretty sure he’d read it.

“Officer Daniels, or Marge as you sometimes call me, or Miss M, if you’re being a bit to casual, but rarely do you flat not recognize me….”

“Miss M. I see it now-”

“Which makes me a bit concerned about your general state of mind at this time Earl.”

“You sure you’re Miss M?” Earl leaned in to get a look at her name-tag. He had to bend his knees a bit to get to that level, a level he could read from, and as he did she kept her arms glued to her hips. Watching Earl closely, not making any direct movement of yet, sweating not an ounce on even such an oppressively hot night, with lingering solar radiation ejaculating out of every piece of carbon and nitrogen in the world around them, just looking for contact. She….stood….motionless. Until, that is, a late night wasp zipped past her, a huge one, well off course, meandering, a bit too casual itself, and Officer Daniels (as she claimed to be) snapped the insect out of the thick night air with a singular and intense move. She grabbed it with two hands, shot from the hip; one pinched the bugs head, and the other, dangerously, clawed into that meaty area just before the stinger. Holding the fluttering wasp at about chest level, as Earl still peered around for a name tag, she then sprung her hands outward and tore the creature in two. The two pieces hit the ground softly. No longer of use to each other, but twitching and trembling nonetheless, hoping for something that was not to come.

Then Officer Daniel’s took two large boldly coordinated steps forward and absolutely crushed both pieces. The dark black boots took no mind.

“Yowser,” Earl muttered. He finally realized she had no tag on.

“Yowser, indeed my night-time wanderer. Do you think I dealt with that situation to harshly? I’ll answer for you,” and she took a step further now, as close to Earl as she could get. “No, and it gave me deep, resounding, animalistic satisfaction. I enjoyed it Earl. Enjoyed it more then sex. It was sex.”

Earl was wishing to be back in that disgruntled line. Miss M, Officer Miss M (he was at least fairly sure now), was in a strong mood tonight with all certainty. A wave not to be ridden without consequence.

“You smell like Marijuana, Earl. Heavily.”

“No ma’am. Wish I could though. Smoke that is, of course, not smell like marijuana, I don’t think that’d be desirable in a generic sense. Anyway, these days and nights-“

“Earl.”

“get me high enough as is. The buzz of a bee alone makes my cortex explode with ultra-violet color, and I can’t even imagine adding a weak hallucinogen to that-“

“Earl.”

“straw house built on a sand structured cliff edge, with the wind tearing at my every vein-”

“Earl.”

“and I’ve never had a reason to give that wind more velocity then what it can muster off of its own mechanisms. If these currents that push me around get any more gumption and I’m apt to take flight into the upper atmosphere, into the stratus, with no ceiling to slow me down. And who knows what awaits me in the cosmos, and even more so, where’s the guarantee that I’ve followed the proper peanut trial? If, as you well know, as everyone does, one has ever even been left.”

She waited a tick patiently

“You done?”

“I’m not high, Miss M. Conventionally.”

Officer Daniels eyed him in the sulky night in a deep seated way that went far past her usual vague resentment that Earl was starting to remember. He could feel and see the obvious question in her taunt wrinkled face: Did he actually just make some sort of disconnected sense?

He smirked and smashed the rest of his donut into his mouth.

But Miss M’s expression lasted as long as a gust of tropical wind through the mind of stoic barn owl. The officer regained her focus, adjusted the belt that held her weapon quite tightly and reached into her shallow skin tight pockets. From it, emerged a small bag that she smacked quickly and smoothly (as possible) into Earl’s once un-opened palm.

“Take this,” she said, “Discreetly, of course, to our benefactor, my dear little Earl, and for christsakes, as I always say, don’t make a bigger mistake then that of your own inception.”

And then she licked the nape and side of Earl’s neck in one long fluid motion, evacuating every flake and bit of salt, and she gave a brief but non-seductive bite to his right earlobe on the way out.

Car doors then slam, engines reverse, loads taken off, the officer disengages; released back into the tinfoil night to hunt her prey (and, pray), and lights will howl and whistle. As she blew out of the Flash Stop, Earl again remained motionless, ride-less, compensating his current situation with all those that had come before it. He could feel the stiff stubborn weight of that baggie in his hand, but the load of its meaning meant more then he could bare at that moment, on this stoop, in front of a convenience store that he frequented way to often to not be identified (although, the new-girl appeared to have no recollection of him, thus far), not entirely sated, and confused of his next move.

At then, he smelled smoke in the air, but not that of a deep simmering swamp fire in some distant western land, a smell which he’d inhaled many times before and connected deeply within his being. It was something more acid, but no less sinister, and much closer in proximity. It was Linda on her smoking break, suddenly sitting on a picnic table hallowed out by Carpenter ants, plagued by storms and violent sunrays, awaiting its moment for reason. She had been absorbing large parts of the Earl/Officer Daniel’s interaction, deducting what she could, when she could. Earl turned on his sandals and looked back her, hoping perhaps she was some oracle of white flame guidance in an otherwise rudderless pirate ship of a night.

In full: seductive smile, with some visible thoughts but few guidelines as to where they may lead behind that smoky haze and the highlighted black locks of her long hair.

“The officer your girlfriend?” She asked without a drop of sarcasm, and the lack thereof back-washed into some sort of intentional linguistic relay that Earl couldn’t quite identify.

“My girlfriend has long slender legs,” Earl said.

To which Linda blew out a slinking wormlike flow of yellowish smoke and smiled menacingly. She then put the cigarette out quickly and said: “Then I guess the more pertinent question, my late-night zombie, would be to ask you what she smashed into your hand?”

And then Earl, finally, looked down into his palm to find out for himself exactly what, indeed, was he grossly transferred. It looked powdery, white, but with a strange hint of wintergreen coloring, especially near the center of the grains. The bag screamed disaster ahead in its mere existence; a train conductor more then content to start pulling down on the horn miles before the rails ended. He was trying to figure out a solid answer for Linda, and then he heard quick talking at close range.

“It is death in a bag, you stupid loon, and she’s been trying to kill me for some time. How could you not know that? But no matter. I’m three to four, and sometimes five, steps ahead of her Earl. Every time, buddy. Every fucking time. Your visit, this attempt, is just another amateur hour. Another afternoon in the cages with the slow balls as they say, and I’m locked in on them fella’. Locked in on the major league speed. I’m a high-caliber rifle that is routinely maintained by the finest mercenaries in the history of Moscow, and my targets never miss. Precision. I deal in it. It is my trade.”

Earl looked up from his hand and found himself no longer in front of a Seven-Eleven, but on the 12th floor (roughly) of some inconspicuous office building overlooking the shallow murky river that flexed through the town he believed he lived in. He was in a conference room, and every light was turned to full white intensity. Earl felt like a constellation unfairly singled-out by an unremorseful black hole, and the corners of the envelope were closing quickly.

The man yammering away in front of him wore an all black suit with buttons made of pure Aztec gold and bright jade alligator slacks. He was pacing about furiously, and shaking around his glass of cheap bourbon (at this point, mainly ice) in some oddly dramatic way. It brought his being into a sort of focus.

Mental transportation, Earl thought, my oldest foe.

“Who are you?”

The man’s green eyes focused right into Earl’s with sudden fury, and he slammed his glass into a nearby wall. Staining it lightly although immediately.

“Who am I, Earl Anderson?” He said with true astonishment. “I am the atom bomb. And you, are the trigger that’s always sent at me. The final firing code.”

He kept pacing.

“Care for a drink Earl?”

“Some clean vodka maybe, I’m-”

But in an instant the dark-suited man was right in his face. Snapping through the room like an old awful dream remembered far too quickly, and he grabbed the edges of the brown leather office chair Earl was now sitting in, gripping them with particular passion.

“What was the first comedy with both Peter Sellers and Woody Allen in it?” He asked.

At his neck veins bulged with no place else to retreat, and his face scanned Earl’s looking for the slightest trace of an answer.

“Casino Royale?” Earl mumbled randomly. The answer coming from no place in particular. Where was he? Peter Sellers never interested him, but that answer only seemed to ratchet up the dark-suited mans intensity.

“Which one,” fingers digging into the chair deeper, eyes seemingly on the very edge of what an eyeball could physically handle.

“What’s your name again, guy?”

“Which one!”

And, to add to this, the Dark Suited Man whipped out a bold but small silver pistol deep from his jacket, and held it against Earl’s thinly protected rib-cage.

“And I’m giving you one chance, Earl.” He pulled the hammer back, his hands visibly shaking, sweat beginning to pour down his face, a sudden steady trickle of blood masquerading politely out of his left ear.

Earl took no offense, but the ride was indeed getting dark tonight…

“Are you actually asking me if Peter Sellers and Woody Allen were in a recent and weak James Bond, or the mid-60’s spoof of the novel with the same name? Is that really what you’re putting a gun to my chest over? I don’t really need to answer that do I?”

And just like that the man clicked down and re-suited his silver death dealer with strange ease. Then he jumped away from Earl like he’d been hit with a static charge and raced back over to the mini-bar in the back corner.

“My name is Grisham,” he said over his shoulder.

It went in and was not processed by Earl into anything that seemed to be connected to his past.

“You’re serious aren’t you?”

“About the movie, Grisham?”

“No,” he sighed quickly, “although I have no idea how you knew that-”

“Blockbuster employee training video, class of ’89. That vodka-”

“About not knowing who I was. You really don’t know do you?”

Earl certainly did not, but at this point a bluff seemed like the best hand, or at least the only hand. Facts were backfiring all around him, common sense notions of illusion and primal truth seemed to find no discernable place at the dinner table. Nevertheless, Earl was trying to sort some of this cosmic flotsam. Cops licking his neck, late-night frogs as heavy as Fall grapefruits and hanging just as low. Pearly pieces of fraction humanity; and finally at this dark hour, Earl felt a spike of pain in not understanding the players in this collection of colors, no matter how hollow and bellicose they may be. It stung his temple with electric power.

“None of this has context to you Earl?”

“I’ve never been one for it.”

“Sad, sad, sad. For without context a fight is just a fight. It’s in the nuances that we understand the battles intricacies. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Do what?”

Earl found himself rapidly saying this not within that post-modern mess of a miniature downtown skyscraper, but in Grisham’s green 1967 Mustang blazing down US-1 as they both smoked over-sized cigars. Colors beamed and boomed around him, melting into a vicious kaleidoscope of speed and mid-city sprawl; with its possessive oranges and low-level shrubbery, absorbing the pair as they rocketed at a massively high speed into the night. Earl found himself fiddling with a GPS unit that seemed to have little chance of working. A light seawater rain dripped down around them connected to a sudden midnight down-burst of onshore winds from the nearby Atlantic Ocean. Cracks in the pavement shuddered and shifted; sensing the deep heaviness of the molecules they lit aflame with overall momentum. Small yellow crabs scuttled in front of the quickly rotating rubber tires only to be transformed resolutely.

So Earl said: “Where are we going Grisham? How’d you even get me in here?”

“14.57 minutes since we’ve been in this car for those two questions to come out of your mouth you strange bastard. I had the over myself.” And Grisham reached into one of his suit pockets, removed a crisp fifty dollar bill, and tossed it out the window. It whipped away behind them to join the ether.

Earl didn’t like the way Grisham was licking his lips and physically moving in that black leather seat. Just in general.

“To a place where death is no longer our enemy,” he answered flatly.

“That’s a bit abstract for me,” Earl said. Or yelled, the sea-winds cackled around them with loud and manic intensity.

“Goblins of our Ticonderoga like mountain marsupials. Weeds to be simply wed.”

A move for clarification: “I delivered the package, you have it, and my job is, I think, done. At least on my side of the equation. Where are you driving me to?”

Grisham shot him a weird sideways look that beamed forced blankness.

“Thought you weren’t one for context, Earl?”

Rapidly, he bounced around a slow moving Purple van (LCD screens bright in the backseat, windows tightly tinted), and started cackling manically over the din of the wind. Earl kept a square eye on him. Still awaiting some reason for this high-speed endeavor, an undertaking to which he didn’t appreciate being proxy to in the first place, of course, but one that he was undeniably absorbed in at this point.

“We’re going to kill that police officer, Earl. What did you call her earlier? Officer M, I think?”

And with this little announcement it become immediately clear to Earl that the physical proximity between himself and Grisham needed to be expanded greatly, and, as soon as possible. A quick mental distraction was the first order. Grisham certainly seemed like a man that only needed a launch-pad to assist in diatribe.


“I see,” Earl said (yelled). “Do you think natural disasters are occurring more frequently?”

The man named Grisham itched at his chin demonstratively, and finally took the sawed-off shotgun that he’d been holding out the window (so that’s what he’d been holding) and deposited it lazily on the dashboard in front of him. It clanged down with both menace and reluctance. Earl felt it was more of the latter. And he wasn’t quite sure how many, and where they may be for that matter, guns Grisham might have hiding around this mean American machine.

They suddenly lit into a right corner, dismissing a red-light completely, and then Grisham floored it fully; the car shuddered due north, pointing like a doomed space capsule into the upper atmosphere, and Earl felt his skull become absorbed into the small tight headrest around it. Grisham cleared his throat mildly through the turn.

“Clearly, Earl, we can now better document death in its most massive and sudden form, but we gleam precise little from these images because we just don’t know death. We’re advanced, but more technologically then psychologically, at least as a mass, so these shifts come off as bubbles to be popped in due time. It’s the infinity that we approach singularly as individuals-“

Huge branch in the road, avoided deftly, with eerie precision, and Earl started searching for the silver lock along side the car door with even more desperation.

“that causes us to attach some meaning to every aspect of our being, only to watch as these causes get mowed down so easily and with such clarity. It fills us with pure horror, Earl. And why shouldn’t it? Any other response would be almost evolutionarily irresponsible. And so in terms of natural-”

Earl cracked open the metal beam that created the cars door handles, and at high-speed, on a wet and vividly humid August night, tucked and rolled right out of that green 1967 Mustang. He bounced along rough cut grass, hoping for the grace of soft sand, but thinking only to get as far away from that awful doomed coke-addict as he could.

Then gravel savaged his midsection, puncturing shallow but true, and the dust of a marginally kept highway filled his lungs tightly full until they felt like over-achieving bags of microwave popcorn. Splinters of long forgotten pencils and canoes stuck into his skin without hesitation. Rolling, rolling, and rolling. Turning into a meaty human tumbleweed. Glass, lottery tickets, shreds of poorly made tire, regret, sadness, salt from long dead oceans, wasps killed from the malfunctions of their surroundings, cigarettes defunct of nicotine; all bounced around, through and into Earl as he became a heat-shield re-entering the reality of solid unmovable ground.

But then, Earl came to a stop on the side of that road. All hands on deck.
He picked himself up slowly, poking at different body parts to feel for sharp irregularities, but finding little. And he watched as Grisham barreled down the road in the distance, guns pointed heavenly, seeming to make no notice of his sudden departure.

”What am I doing here?” Earl said aloud, to himself, alone in the dark night.

No response. Check after the beep.

However, there was a Sub-Stop looming in front of him with some bright yellow preordained beauty. De-Lish-Us. And Earl started levitating towards it, and like so many wayward travelers before him, didn’t feel entirely that he was in the correct place, at the proper time, until he was in those doors absorbing that smell.

Indeed, yes, things we’re working in locomotion now. Grisham was somewhere deep in the night, driving away and towards any pain he could bite into, probably losing lots of spittle into the passenger seat and growling at creatures that only existed in the centrifuge, and no doubt recognizing the lack of an Earl in the most creative sense possible. The bag, and Miss M’s baggage along with it, humming further up the road, and further away from Earl. No sarcastic counter girls poking away sharply at his dotting consciousness, and, finally now, some dinner.

And so, after he’d entered the store, scrapped and burned, but no worse for the wear in a traditional sense, he chuckled to himself for the first time in the night. Once there, he found concave glass, assorted meats, and vegetables. In some random order that future alien civilizations wouldn’t even understand. And after noting the veggies, there was Jefferson, the mustached greasy multiplex of a sandwich artist with his paper hat that allowed ample airflow, and he and Earl stared at each other for a moment that passed literally no cognitive thought between the two. A pair coming from very different angles on the pool table.

“It’ll be?” he said, after what could have been anything from 45-minutes to 5-seconds of silence between them.

Earl thought to himself quickly, Round Two: Sandwich Edition.

“A foot-long turkey, whole wheat, and let’s get lettuce, quarter inch thick tomato, black olives, the big ones, mustard, sliced jalapeno, salt and pepper, American cheese, yellow, of course, oil and vinegar, and toast that for thirty-seven seconds.”

“Yeah that sounds good actually….” Earl heard himself saying as he, once again, swiveled around on his sandals to see who was talking behind him from the blankness of the night. But he didn’t really need to turn around to know.

“And you might as well make that a double order, Jefferson,” Officer Daniel’s said crisply.

She said all this staring directly at Earl, her dark aviator glasses still on through the spasms of the deep night, her deputy badge looking polished and recently arrived, and her short cropped brown hair lightly peppered with the misting rain still falling outside. A wade of thick purple gum smacked around her stern jaws with a pinball tables calculated randomness and simultaneous calculation. Everything was in place.

“Yes ma’am, Officer Daniels”, he heard the slimy young man say behind him.

“Marge, to what do I owe this pleasurable reunion?” Earl said.

She tipped her aviator glasses down just a notch with a tap of her pointer finger, and for the first time, tonight anyway, Earl could see the tight iris’s of her solemn brown eyes searching him fully. Her eyelashes were so much longer and more feminine then he could have expected, and, if he didn’t know her better, or at least have some distant recollection of her general personality, it almost looked like she was pouting.

“My dear sweet Earl, did the night go well?”

“Well is such a relative term….”

“You seem scrapped up, or, if I didn’t know any better, it looks like someone pushed you out a fast moving car.”

“Yes, many things happen in these dark cruel nights Marge.”

She, once again, moved in to a closer range.

”They do Earl, they do,” and she dropped her voice down a few octaves, nearly a whisper, “but was our package delivered?”

“It indeed was, but…”

“But….”

“But I don’t believe it was consumed, or absorbed in anyway, if that is what you wanted.”

Marge sighed briefly and then snapped a quick pace back out of Earl’s general space. Some strange tension seemed to reverberate out of her being in the same movement. Her dark round sunglasses returned to their normal broadcasting position.

“I see. Well, some things are for the best I suppose. We’ll try again on nights with less desire I suppose.”

And she said this in her stern authoritative tone, but it didn’t ring as true as Earl would like it to. Something was a bit bent out of shape here, strange misplaced file cabinets, cherry lozenges with nothing to sooth and no where else to go. Earl took a chance with his standing in Officer Daniel’s heart and took a shot to sort these misconceptions out.

“Why are you trying to kill Grisham, Marge?”

“Who? Oh, David. Well, it’s a matter of the heart Earl. And never, ever, say the words Marge, Kill, and Grisham in the same sentence to me again.”

“I hear he still loves you, Officer Daniel’s,” Jefferson chimed in helpfully.

To this, she tipped her sunglasses back down again in a flash, but Earl could see no sign of mercy in her brow this time.

“You mind your sandwiches, Jefferson,” she snapped, “And be so kind as to not speak of things to which you can never know. Especially love.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Jefferson the Sub Artist looked right back down to his sandwich making, avoiding Officer Daniel’s tight plum draining glare, which she held fiercely for at least eight more seconds. Then she flipped her glasses back up, continued chewing her gum, and swung her attention back to Earl. Outside the light rainfall had increased to a hammerhead drone, as bulbs of rain the size of golf balls pummeled the weak roof and slender glass above and around them. Deep offshore, the rare flash of nighttime sea-lighting slashed and burned the sky around it and strobe-filled pulses of menace marched towards the shoreline.

“David, Grisham, as you call him, did something unforgivable to me Earl. Something I can’t abide by, and so I seek vengeance. Would you do any different?”

“Well I don’t know what he did.”

“Sure you do, it’s the same feeling for all of us. He hurt me deeply. Grisham found my weakest point and held it up for all to see.”

“Officer Daniel’s,” Jefferson tip-toed in, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but honestly, past the turkey, I don’t really know what you wanted on these sandwiches. You said it really quick.”

“Damn it young man, you don’t take notes on these things? No way of recording it?”

”No ma’am.”

“Well gather something to write with and kindly do so this time.”

“Yes ma’am.”

He quickly shuffled over and grabbed a pencil and a greasy sheet of paper with rapture like attentiveness. Earl was eyeing the seeds glued within the pizza-slice cuts of bulbous red tomato, so many per piece, it was a wonder they didn’t grow everywhere, like common weeds. And what a complicated connection that they were entwined in, filaments in the teeth of a long line of spiky plant creatures.

“All right then, I’ll go through this slowly. Jefferson?”

Earl heard the distinguishable sound of a No.2 pencil hitting the ground from a certain height.

“Jefferson?”

He looked up from his tomato inspection. Jefferson was staring past Marge with his jaw slacked even much more then it usually was. Much more. His eyes were wide, veins struggling to keep fluid pumping, with glands working overdrive without the usual help of blinking. He stood motionless, his hand still in position to write, but with no mechanism to do so.

Marge and Earl turned slowly, and together, in a singular motion, to look back the glass door and the figure now occupying it.
In the doorway Grisham, David Grisham, stood soaking fully wet in his black suit. A tight red fedora had appeared along with the shotgun from earlier, which now occupied his right hand, and a secondary pistol, which appeared to be a Glock of some sort, a dark black one, in the other. As if the rain had purged him of some level of violence, he came in shaking not at all, but the large cigar he’d been smoking all night was now but a nub of freakish orange fire burning stubbornly through the onslaught. Yet, the rain intensified, almost trying to prove its importance in a night with brutality and fear coming from all angles.

“Jefferson.”

“Mr. Grisham.”

“Earl.”

“Grisham.”

A long, statically fearsome pause.

“Marge.”

“David, my dear.”

In the stained epoxy speakers above them all Roundabout from Yes started playing to a notably louder and more intense level then it had been in the previous amount of time they’d all occupied this meat covered place. Just as swiftly as this aspect was noticed by Earl Anderson, and right around when Chris Squire really starts setting that bass line in deep, a crushing bolt of molecule melting lighting easily destroyed a transformer across the street from this late night sandwich establishment, and the lights, and the Yes, immediately went dark. Only Jefferson took notice as he dove hopelessly under his metal booth; all other parties didn’t even flinch. Earl was sure they’d all visited the deep end of the pool before, and lifeguards were never required at this particular district.

Now the store was lit by nothing more than the flashes of late-summer lighting strikes, and the haunting misinformed glow of the two emergency flood lights on the left-side wall whose lenses were all but covered by the carcasses of a thousand dead and stale insects.

In a slick moment, Earl felt the weight of the large aviators that Marge had just peeled off as they were pressed softly into his tea-stained hands. And he watched with some amount of unconnected horror as the officer started walking slowly towards the gun-wielding man in some strange stutter steps that belied affection in their very being.

“Jefferson, better make it three of those subs while you’re hiding under there,” Grisham snapped off randomly.

“Those are still on me, David,” Officer Daniels said as she approached. “You put that shotgun down, and we’ll have a little sit-down dinner here. Just us.”

Lightning cackling vibrantly outside. Bread now half-baked in the stalled powerless oven behind Jefferson’s slick head. Earl standing in stasis, hoping for once that one of his random mental ejections would come through and pay off for a change. Anything but this scene.

Grisham decided to smack a shot off into the ceiling for reasons only known to his tightly coiled brain. A metallic sound hums around the store, screaming like a jet-engine, absorbing every yard of cubic audio space it can get into, pinging off of old cigarette stained rafters and plywood, the buckshot ricocheting for a relentless amount of time. And even Earl hits the deck at this development. From his perch on the upswept tile floor he can see that Marge hasn’t made a move for her weapon, or stopped her slow walk towards the highly-amplified man at the door.

“You keep sending him, I keep pushing him away. Isn’t it about time we grow up?” Grisham said.

“I’m not sure what that means. Especially vibrating from your tongue,” the Good Officer said.

“He doesn’t even know why he’s a part of this.”

“He was there.”

“He still doesn’t know, somehow.”

Marge sighed, and turned towards Earl.

“How can you not know, Earl? That didn’t even occur to me. You were there that night.”

“What night?” Earl said hands still atop head on the floor. “The night where-”

“Makes no matter. Flames drop their fight more commonly by exhaustion then by pure water. I still don’t like the idea of your actions Marge.”

“Wait, he calls you Marge too Miss M!”

“It’s my name dear little Earl. And enough out of you.”

Power became suddenly restored to reveal David Grisham’s current stance more clearly. Favoring one bad leg, that long scratched up rifle looking somehow less menacing under the radiating beams of pristine white light, and the steady streams of sea-rainwater poured down around him in some logical way, as if assisted by a skin-centric canal system that kept things just so. How they had to be.

But the rifle was still pointed at Marge. No matter how it was illuminated.

“Leave luck to heaven, David.”

He laughed, and it came off as authentic, even light-hearted.

“Nintendo,” he said shaking his head.

“Roughly. And so accurate on deep summer nights.”

“You could have shot me when I pushed that door open. Of course you know that. You’ve been trying in a subverted manner, but you had the chance to do so legitimately, behind the badge at that. And you didn’t.”

“We both know I was never really trying.”

“I didn’t,” Earl chimed in.

Simultaneously, and to a mark, they both fired at Earl: “Shut up and mind your floor.”

Then Grisham sighed and grinned.

“Speed limits bend but don’t break, darling,” he sharply pulled the hammer back and pressed the gun deep into Officer Daniel’s gut. “And maybe this time I am trying.”

Miss M, Marge, Officer Daniel’s, creature of the Law, night rider with no master, the wasp never to be caught, had visible lines of make-up stained tears meandering their way down each of her cheeks. She looked plainly smaller, physically, in an instant. But in that moment she grabbed that gun around the midsection and actually pulled it deeper into herself, until she was but a few inches from Grisham’s face, and she smiled fully, contently.

She took a hand affectionately around Grisham’s neck and turned his head slightly. Then she whispered into his ear softly for about a minute, with Grisham nodding and, even, laughing quietly, at certain intervals.

And for one moment, in a single space in the cosmos, all seemed lucid within those arbitrary confines between those disjointed souls.

When Officer Daniel’s stopped whispering, Grisham unhinged his weapon, kissed her lightly on the cheek, and just as suddenly as he’d appeared, he turned to leave. Making a sharp about face, he snuffed his still smoldering cigar out on a trash can, pulled his collar up, and stepped into the now light rain and distant thunder to face the world as he could see it.

It would be the last time Earl would ever see the man.

Officer Daniel’s had her head down for a few beats. Was she thinking? Praying? Crying? Earl had no feel for either, but when she snapped back to Officer Daniel’s had her large aviator glasses back firmly glued to her face, and her expression was a masterpiece in blank emotion. Looking down at his hands, Earl could not fathom how the glasses no longer resided in them. Of course, why would they be? Things will go where they are needed, and where they are ordained. Just like people.

“Done with those subs, Jefferson?”

But the back-door was wide open and Jefferson, at some point in the melee, ran deep into the night, to the white noise infinity that the Jefferson’s of the world were always scrambling around in absently. Earl felt this to be true so very deeply.

Officer Daniel’s shook her head. “For shame. That boy doesn’t have a strong bone in his body. And his heart….well, I pity him.”

“Heaviness doesn’t favor those with the wrong hydraulics for the job, Miss M.”

She turned quickly at him: “Does anyone ever know what you’re talking about Earl of Anderson?”

“I don’t even think I do. I bet Jesus felt about the same way.”

“Makes sense, makes sense…” she said in a cracking voice. And she radiated a certain weakness, a lack of fight, and Earl could suddenly feel the now vacant energy she’d poured into getting Grisham to lower that weapon. Somewhere deep and dark within himself he wondered if she’d ever again have that very personal and beautiful hyper-kinetic detonation of humanity zapping through her stringy blue veins.

“Well, you want a ride home?” She said.

And just like that they we’re in her squad car. Blistering along near dunes suffocating with sea-grape and smashing past every sulfur soaked front-lawn that would dare interfere with that vibrant momentum. There were many. Marge had her squad car lights on and her head slightly down, as if she couldn’t quite believe how fast she was going. But the numbers on the dashboard did not lie as they touched triple digits, and the engine growled and consumed the orange air around it as it pummeled through early morning suburban side roads and soon to be crowded workday thorough-fairs. With the tinted windows tightly up, and the air-conditioning vibrating at full serve, all this seemed distant and alien; a bio-luminescent snow-globe of slowly evolving human accumulation. Halogen buzzards circling the black-hole of what was once nature but was now purely manicured pieces of existence, identifiable mainly in the Ones and Zeroes.

“You know, this is the first time tonight I understand the moments and reasons that I’m moving from point A to point B, Marge,” Earl said with half a sub in his mouth as the lights curled around him.

And Officer Daniels, Marge, said: “If you believe that, than I badly misjudged you.”

“I don’t understand.”

She looked at him quickly, and as she did, she turned her squad car sharply left, down the block Earl’s house must be on, and slipped sideways, like a rally car on coke and grease, right into the entrance of his front lawn. Then she slammed the brakes, grinding up weeds and whole decks of brown sod, as she slid and shimmied to a savage stop on his front lawn. In the grill of her mean machine Earl’s plastic mailbox stuck firmly and with truth.

She pulled her parking break.

“I mean, the reasons we get from somewhere to somewhere else are always a joke to us. It’s the time spent when we’re in these places, these veins in the current that make context. The in-betweens, if you will, the commercials of our existence; banal bits information that carry us to the next page. And if you, Earl, didn’t realize that before tonight, then I misjudged you. Badly.”

Earl absorbed this, at the end of his officer assisted car ride, near the end of a deep night, and felt pure fear and fear alone.

“Marge, what’s between the lines is the only thing that’s important to me. And I’ve never been allowed to see it. ”

She stared at him briefly. Then she unhinged the parking brake, and pulled the car into reverse.

“Yes you have. You just ignore it. Like so many others. Now get out.”

“I will, but-“

“Just, get out.”

The immediacy of the request knocked those static spectacles off her timid nose. Earl did not flinch: He needed one more question.

“What did you say to Grisham to make him lower that gun?”

But when he said this he was outside the squad car, and unable to stop Marge from leaving. Standing in his front lawn with crumbs on his face, cuts bleeding slightly, and a giant crimson sun rising with majestic purple and yellow pieces of bombastic pixilated existence cracking the horizon of the deep dirty ocean that generally maintained his footing in this, the real world, as was to be understood, and Marge soaked him in for one more moment: metastasizing his relevance.

“The same thing we say to anyone who’s broken,” she said, over the hum of her county owned V-8. “Goodnight Earl.”

And she was gone. Leaving Earl in front of his house: distant and unsure.

He turned to look at the place that was his casa, or so he had been led to understand, and meandered his way through a side-door he knew oddly well, and inside. Cool dank unsettled air-conditioning clung to his pores on the interior, and he shuffled towards what he knew must be his room. Past the closet, past the pizza boxes, past the pain and the pictures, and as he approached the door, the place we he always started and usually ended, he noted the bright lights emanating out from the scrap of terrazzo before him.

And when he pushed the door open, there was, entirely naked in the early morning sunlight, a girl with one long slender leg in the air as she curled a black fishnet stocking off of it. Reveling in the different pace in time that only owls and bats could really appreciate.

She sparked to consciousness at the site of Earl, and he immediately knew why: these things were set-up for him.

“Hey, baby,” She said.

“Hello my dear,” Earl said.

She eyed him toe to head. Earl hated it. Hated every piece of it. And he just knew what she’d say next, but indeed those long legs could only allow a man so much hate.

“Did you get my donut?” She said.

His breathing became more rapid, his eyes dilated and extreme, and the voices from the night before distant and brutal. And deep in the early morning light, through the muck, across the shallow river and its many mud-printed storks and cranes, into the small spasm of his open window behind this beautiful girl, Earl could hear the pure rapid-fire sound of a roaring train in a dead still morning. It was finding its next turn, its next piece of metal to absorb, and looking for distance.

Earl said: “We name colors. We understand sound.”

And into the ether he was gone again.