The Violence in Finding Heaven
It was raining the day Jack got off the bus. When he stepped through the screeching doors he was met with torrential skies, and a crowd just trying to get to the next stop. The clouds were as angry as his heart; the sky as dark as the world he left behind. The painted wild dog never imagined he’d return home, but he suffered too many scars on his spots to stay in love and broke. As he stepped off the platform he soothed his stiff brown fur, thinking on how best to tackle the chaotic crowd lingering around at the station. It was like all the others he had stopped in these few hours he was on the road. Bums slept on the benches, prisoners just getting out of prison shared a smoke at the doors, old women trying to make it to their grandkids, and teenagers escaping home. The staff was all pissed off, yet they remained to do whatever job they’d been given. Bus rides are not for those who are used the complacency of airplanes. The driver raised the under carriage of the bus and the people rushed to grab their luggage. Jack had none. He left all his clothes back in Alden with his ex. The morning he left, his husband had already gone off to work and the lights were shut off. Izzy was not the most supportive guy, but he loved him. Izzy was not someone you could love easily, and Jack hoped to have pieced together all the little cracks. You can’t piece together someone who hates themselves enough to spiral down to death before death comes to them. When they came to turn off the lights, Jack knew there was nothing more for him there. He put on whatever clothes he had, caught a cab to the bus and never looked back.
The station sat at the corner of farm to market road 521 and Thataway Road. Jack always questioned the reason behind the name of Thataway. It wasn’t the best name when giving directions. Jack stood at the edge of the station, watching the rain fall hard against the asphalt. Not a cab in sight, the painted dog was forced to remain in the broken part of town. Jack didn’t have a cell phone. He had no way to connect with the outside world aside from speaking to another person at the station. He thought of using a payphone, but most were ripped out of the walls. In the end, he settled for sitting on cigarette butts and cracked cement while he waited for a cab or for the rain to let up. He wasn’t about to get soaked.
There comes a point where everyone has to look at their past, because all the stories get tangled up in memory. Memory isn’t truth. It isn’t something you can hold on to. It exists make you feel like you got a history, but time changes all the images you hold in your brain, and there’s not a bullet you could push through it to make it all come out right. Jack meditated on his past as listened to the rain. When the painted dog closed his eyes, he stood face to face with his own stories. His fingers touched each one like a TV screen waiting to be selected. Pictures of his ex clouded each one as time moved.
A part of him felt like running back to Alden. Variations of shame shuffled through him, but he remained resolved. Leaving an entire life behind to start anew elsewhere wasn’t easy, but Jack was convinced it was the only choice he had. He couldn’t save the pile that was growing; he couldn’t stop Izzy from digging himself into the hole he created. It was time for Jack to save himself and leave buried alone to die. And though it sounded harsh, Jack put empathy out of his mind when he made his decision. Sometimes, you have turn off that part of your brain to save yourself, and Jack needed saving.
There are no saints left in the world. When you find that one person your body gets all twisted up, shaken round, and broken, you think they’re the only saint for you. But there are none anymore. You don’t meet them in coffee shops. Don’t see them in bars. You just see people; people who are eager to cut away at the best part of yourself. People who’ll amount to nothing more than a mistake down the road, and Jack found his mistake.
“I never thought I’d see you around this side of the country again.” Jack’s television memories stuttered at the sound of the voice. In one single moment, the rain had returned to his ears and he jumped upward to find its source. A lean, red panda stood at the dog’s side. His slender arms dangled from his shoulders as the wind briskly swept through his open plaid shirt, tight t-shirt remaining still. His fur glowed a dark maroon under the angered skies and fluorescent lights of the station’s patio. Allen wore tight jeans and sneakers as he stood with empty brown eyes filling with awe in the sight of Jack’s return. The painted dog wiped the dust off his black t-shirt and jeans. He was only slightly heavier than Allen, but carried none of the panda’s feminine figure.
“I never thought I’d return.” Jack turned his head from the person. His voice was direct. The words came out in a lazy militant march as if to not be rude, but to say that he wasn’t in the mood for seeing old faces. The painted dog smoothed out the fur of his head, not knowing what to do with his hands. His eyes tried to follow the pattern of the rain, but there was none. It was all a massive waterfall beating the earth.
“I suppose things didn’t work out with your fiancé. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” Allen spoke without an agenda, but he wasn’t opposed to the idea of mingling with an old flame.
“Ex-husband now.” Jack didn’t want to say much more than that, but his heart was flooding his brain with words. He held every syllable back, but there was a part of him that wanted to tell Allen of how Izzy sliced open his heart and stitched it back together in all the wrong ways. Izzy was a jackknife; cut open the wild dog so deep but he didn’t mind the pain because when you love someone, you take all the nicks and cuts and put them up in a box. Leave it in the corner and hope it doesn’t pile high. It was as honest as it could get because not all love is honest.
Jack looked out at the streets. His chest rumbled with a mild pain that told him the bus ride back wouldn’t be so long, but he couldn’t go back. Going back would just open stitches he couldn’t handle, not at that moment.
“I’m…sorry.” Allen couldn’t say anything more. There wasn’t anything to say. “Hey, listen, if you need a ride, I can give you a lift. No charge, not this time at least” The red panda let an awkward chuckle tumble out of his mouth. It fell up his throat, made a rocky path against the smooth taste buds of his tongue then fell like a child to the floor. Already in an awkward situation, it was the only offer he could make.
“I wouldn’t even know where to go, honestly. I just sort of shuffled back here and well, I don’t know. I suppose just sleep here until I could figure something out.”
“Then come back to my place. You’ll at least get a couch to sleep on, figure shit out tomorrow.” Allen didn’t hesitate. A part of him still had feelings for the dog, though his heart knew they weren’t going to be reciprocated. He had been chasing Jack down hills that led to nothing before. He put the moves on the guy in high school, hit on him in college, Allen could never let him go. And what hurt him the most was knowing that there was no future for the two. There was only awkward conversations and watching each other make the same mistakes. It was a frustrating relationship they shared, but Allen wouldn’t let go of it. He just followed and hoped for a little in return. And when nothing showed up, he would say nothing and go back to the cycle.
Jack weighed his options. He stared at the cold concrete walkway and the other folks without homes setting up camp, trying to keep out of the rain. He wasn’t sure why the red panda would offer anything to him, but there was a sliver inside him that was thankful for the offer. The rest of him twisted internally. He wasn’t in the mood to be hit on, or to talk about the failures of his marriage. He wasn’t in the mood to be consoled, but more than anything, he wasn’t ready to disappoint another man in his life.
“Do you remember that game we played, where we drove up the hills, going him, and closed our eyes to see heaven? You got to see heaven every once in a while, Jack.” Allen tugged on Jack’s arm, becoming more assertive. He wasn’t going to take any answer aside from yes. No maybe’s. Just a yes. Jack let a hard sigh escape his lungs and caved into the hard offer before. He only nodded off and started to walk.
Jack wasn’t totally sure of what heaven looked like. He always imagined it to be the white cloud nonsense preached about with the fundamentalists. He couldn’t break that stereotype. He couldn’t believe it to be anything more than that. Naked angels, harps, conservatives…
They walked in silence. The rain still hammered down on the couple, but they said nothing. No small talk. No awkward chit chat. They only spoke in silence, and when they made it to Allen’s giant diesel fueled truck, Jack sighed one final time before journeying down the backroads of his country home. Things were much quieter in the country. Instead of cars honking and people cursing, it was rain and the sounds of the wind blowing through.
They sped off towards the woods of his home. Everyone there had their own secluded place. The trees covered everyone’s sins and there wasn’t a builder brave enough to demolish the town, not when the people create their own militias and the police are on their side. Mockingbird was a place that said “Don’t fuck with us. We ain’t gonna take no shit.” And so the rest of the country left them alone. Forgot about them as they do with most small towns. Unlike the rest, however, Mockingbird survived.
Allen wasn’t the best of drivers. As he sped down the deep hills of the south Jack began to wonder how they ever survived the thrills of driving blind. As the trees became blurs, he closed his eyes and tried to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But he saw nothing. There was only dark. There was only an abyss, a disjointed sense that there was something at the end of all the darkness he saw, but seeing nothing. He could feel the warmth of light. He could tastes the cold hair of death, but there was never anything to see. And maybe that was all there was to the end of life. Maybe that was the clouds were the illusion all along. Who was he to know, a soul living in a world of knives and no sympathy?
As Jack held his eyes closed, his mind started moving further back in his memory. He started seeing Allen more, the weasel of his past fading into something distant like the moon, but still visible. Allen was moving closer to him in each image that flashed by his eyes. Jack never wanted to be bound to his country-bumpkin home, but a piece of him always wondered if that was all there is. What was really out there in the world aside from what he has already seen? He got a taste of it in Alden. He tasted city ashes and burned his lungs on all the towering buildings only to find the same emptiness as his home. There was nothing fulfilling anymore, but in each old polaroid that flashed before him, Allen was there. Allen was following him—and he never noticed. He knew the red panda had a thing for him. He knew of the boy’s feelings for him and he couldn’t return them. He couldn’t place them neatly in Allen’s body. He just kept taking, and taking until Izzy came along. Jack never realized the extent of Allen’s pain in each rejection. Rejections because he wanted to get out. He wanted to see what this whole world was about. And when he finally saw the dingy alleyways and city bars, he saw they were no more different than home; and when he came back home, Allen was there, like he always had been. He traded money for gold, but the gold was false. Everything he chased every was false. And he had nothing but the home that moved on without him, and a guy that couldn’t let him go. When he realized how far Allen had gone for him, his heart opened up all over again.
Allen had his hand resting on the seat between them, the other on the steering wheel going faster than the suggested speed limit. Sixty-five miles an hour was a decent speed, but the red panda had a demon in his foot and he pushed that up to eighty. He had driven these roads for years and there wasn’t a bump he didn’t know about. The roads were like snot under his tires. He blew through the deep hills and forests, eager to get to his home, eager to help the old flame again, waiting for the disappointment as it always came. There are just some people you can’t let go of, and Jack was simply one of them.
The storm was not letting up. It was a fierce anger from nature, an anger that couldn’t be calmed easily. Nature was pouring every last ounce of energy over the town below while Allen’s truck drove through quick turns and deep curves.
“How far are we?” Jack asked his driver. It had seemed like a lifetime being on the road, but when you’ve been on a bus for eleven hours only to hop into another car, time slows down immensely.
“You can’t go anywhere in this town without driving a good forty-five minutes, man. We still got a good fifteen before we make it home.” Jack tilted his head toward the window. The blurring trees made him sick inside. He was not used to warp speed in a truck, at least not for a long time. He remembered when he lived with his ex, that the weasel would always drive like an old woman, lost, confused, and begging for a smoke. He wasn’t prepared for Allen’s driving. Jack rested his head against the seat, thinking that another fifteen minutes wouldn’t be so bad. He lifted his hand and rested it on Allen’s, as he moved through all of his television memories, he realized he had been chasing the wrong dreams. There was nothing out there in the world for him, but there was something waiting for him when he returned. What more could he ask for? What more did he need? His fingers wrapped through Allen’s nimble sticks that were attached to his hand.
Allen’s arm tensed up when the wild dog slid his hand over him. He didn’t imagine the outcome would ever come to light, but his hand was entangled now with the one guy he’d been chasing after for years. As he drove, he looked down to see if it were real or if his mind were creating illusions. When his eyes darted from the road to the hands intertwined, his heart fell into his stomach. He couldn’t think of words; all he could do was squeeze the dog’s hand as if to say, “finally…” When Allen got back to the road, he noticed a car at the last minute, stopped on the side. The red panda slammed on his breaks, tires screaming against the asphalt. His truck slides into the skid, the speed toppling over the massive vehicle. They rolled violently down the road, slamming into the stopped car and hanging on the side. Jack and Allen’s bodies were tumbling around like clothes in a dryer, heads hitting through their windows, hands still gripping each others, Allen screamed when they were tossed around in the truck, his wrist shattering between them, but he would not let go. Jack closed his eyes as he held on, a small glow appeared in his distance. While he was tossing around inside the cluttered beast he could finally see heaven. He could finally see the end an arm’s length away. And when the light hit his face, he heard Allen call out to him. Jack was not ready to reach the long sought resting spot; he still had Allen following him.
When the truck stopped, they stared at each other, not ready to accept death, but knowing it was only a second away. The truck leaned over the edge of the roadside, the drop prepared to carry them down to the dingy bottom. The forest was ready for new meat in its soil. Allen pushed himself up with his one good arm and kicked out the glass of the windshield. He did everything to pull his body out, then turned around and grabbed Jacks arm. Jack, disoriented didn’t see the large drop below him as he thrust his seat belt off and jumped for the exit. Their faces dripped with blood. As Jack was pulled out, the truck made its final descent into the deep forest below, scraping Jacks leg, as if to try and take him with the vehicle. When the wild dog hit the concrete, he clung to the red panda, not ready to lose the one gift in his life.
Broken down, Allen grabbed onto his new partner. They let the rain wash the blood off of them as they waited for help. And while a car slowed down in the distance, Jack leaned into Allen’s ear and whispered, “I finally got to see heaven.”
