#like damn i thought the complaints would go down once we got a new supervisor

[skeletxr]

Yall ever have coworkers who you adore but also are incredibly ~~sus~~ of them bc they complain about everyone who they're nice to

[basicjetsetter]

Part I

♡ Pairing: Peter Parker x Black!FemaleReader

▹ Warnings: Mild Language, Triggering Content

▹ Words: 4.6k

▹ A/N: Buckle in. This is going to be a long ride.

“No way!” Your friend Manda squeals. “Those were the exact words?!”

You smoosh a frantic hand over Manda’s mouth and shush her, then slightly pop up from your seat to scope out the packed bus, making sure none of your schoolmates heard her outburst. To your relief, only a few close students glance over with little interest and barely anyone in a wider radius catches Manda’s words over the buzzing clammer of other conversations. Blowing out a satisfied exhale, you turn back to your friend, removing your hand from her mouth with a teasingly reproachful frown. 

“Tell the whole world, why don’t you?” 

She giggles, “My bad. But can you blame me? This is huge!”

Thrilled warmth floods into your cheeks from her enthusiasm. She’s right. This is huge, and you might have secretly sought this exact reaction because only Manda’s trademark, earsplitting squeal stamps news with the seal of authenticity. It’s real. You heard your Destined Words.

The same jitters from when you woke up this morning skitter up and down your spine, sharpening your senses to the max, making it easier to recall the words that floated into your subconscious—words from a bodiless voice. Your Soulmate.

I’ve got you.

Your mind handles the precious words like a porcelain tea set, carefully deciphering the voice pitch and attempting to match it to a face, knowing its efforts lie in vain because the words’ owner only becomes apparent when they speak them to you.

Some inner part of you distinctly translates the words into a comforting assurance, an assurance one might receive after coming home from a long day’s work and walking into the soft embrace of a lover. It weaves itself around your mind like a consoling safety net, painting an image of a lover better than you’ve ever imagined and everything you’ve ever hoped for.

You couldn’t have hand-picked a better day than today, Midtown High’s field trip to the MoMA, to gush over the words with Manda while admiring spectacular, thought-provoking art pieces. One of the perks of going to Midtown High is their fantastic field trips. You circled this Friday on your calendar at the start of the semester because while you loved being in a school centered around technological sciences, you were excited to study artists’ colorful, eclectic expressions and how their cultural personalities materialize in the stroke of a paintbrush.

“You’re so lucky,” Manda says, trying to pull off a pout. Her vibrant smile triumphs. “Only three days after you turn eighteen, and you hear your Destined Words. I’ve got four more months before I file a complaint.”

You sympathetically rub her shoulder, her oversized, long-sleeved denim jacket rough to the touch. “It’ll come. Just don’t wait for it.”

“Oh, I know it’s coming. I just want it to be something as cute as yours, you know.” She shudders, “My cousin Alonzo said his Destined Words were ‘Sure, whatever.’ Can you imagine that? Finally being mature enough for your Soulmate and that’s the first thing they say to you? I mean, sure, he and Tanya are super cute together, but ugh. Those words?”

You snicker, “Let me guess. You’re expecting a grand gesture?”

Manda nods with a dead serious face, though she could never truly pull it off with her full lips and Cabbage Patch Doll cheeks. She’d have a better chance at getting away with murder than intimidating someone with her cute little frown. “If I don’t hear the words ‘Where have you been all my life, you breathtaking, drop-dead gorgeous goddess,’ then I’m demanding a full refund.”

You blankly stare at each other for a beat before you crack, both of you laughing until your sides ache and you’re gasping for air, not caring for the teachers' hushes from the front of the bus.

“I just can’t believe I finally hear the words, you know,” you say as the laughs fade. “It’s like a fairytale come true.” You lean your head against the cool glass window, watching the placid cerulean waves come into view as the bus drives onto a bridge. “I wonder what they’re like, if I know them. If they’re nice. My mom says she already had a mega crush on my dad, so when he said the words, it already felt like they were together.”

Manda sighs dreamily. “I bet they’re cute. And super smart. Those words seem kind of thoughtful, too, so that’s a bonus. And, hey, don’t worry so much.” She gently knocks her shoulder against yours. “They’re going to love you.”

You weren’t scared that they wouldn’t love you. Everyone who finds their Soulmate never doubts that that is their person. What pins a tiny knot of anxiety to the pit of your stomach is how it will happen.

As a young girl, you spent countless nights dreaming of the sequential events leading up to the day you finally met your Soulmate, orchestrating the moment like a scene from all the rom-coms you binged. Your person accidentally bumps into you either in a hallway or on the bus or in the lunch-line, gazes deep into your dazed eyes, then declares their love for you with some cliché phrase before scooping you into their arms and planting a kiss on your expectant lips.

I’ve got you.

The sweet words drifting in your head do their best to ease away the anxiety. You have nothing to worry about. The meeting will play out the way you fantasized, if not better. All because of those words.

“We’re all gonna die!” Ned Leeds shouts from the middle of the bus.

All heads snap to the right windows. In an instant, densely packed bodies swarm from the left side to the right, sandwiching together to search for what Ned was staring at, some opening the windows and craning their necks for a better look. You grunt as someone digs their elbow in your ribcage to see more, and you tensely shove them against the back of the seats in front of you before peering out of your window.

It’s a sight no eyes could miss. A large, metal donut levitates in the clear sky, an obstruction not there mere seconds ago. You gasp in wonder, but not fear. Surely, the Avengers, Earth’s mightiest heroes, will have this taken care of before the sun sets.

The bus driver, an old man with a smile as sly as a fox and pearly white hair, casually calls out, “What’s the matter with you kids?! You’ve never seen a spaceship before?”

“He’s got a point,” you shrug as Manda gapes at the driver with incredulous eyes, then rounds on you as you calmly sit back down. “We always get so worked up over these aliens, and nothing ever really happens. The Avengers got it handled.”

“You sure? Because that looks a little menacing.” Manda worries at her lower lip, anxiously sneaking peeks out the window. Many students stay plastered to the scene.

“Positive.”

✦ ✧✦ ✧

The appearance of the metal donut effectively sullies your experience of the MoMA. None of the tour guides thoroughly explain the paintings' and sculptures' meanings or historical relevance. Instead, they string together incoherent sentences about person, place, and time as they gape at the video feeds live-streamed to their phones. Even Manda stays glued to her screen, chewing on her lower lip so hard you're surprised she hasn't punctured it.

Fifteen minutes into the tour, aggravation chafes into you like sandpaper, rubbing your skin raw. You waited months for this trip. Months! You'd be damned if a few pesky aliens took this special day away from you. You weren’t afraid. You had no reason to be.

Fed up, you take matters into your own hands and stealthily break away from the group, tip-toeing back to an intriguing wall of paintings and observe it by yourself. 

One painting catches your eye early, drawing you to the middle of the wall to study it further. Its tag reads The Lovers, René Magritte, Paris, 1928, Surrealism, Oil Painting. There are two people, a man and a woman, painted with white cloths shrouding their faces as they share a seemingly intimate kiss. You lean in closer, noting the almost murky atmosphere and how it lends to the mystery of the kiss. What did Magritte want you to think when you analyzed this piece? What questions did she want you to ask? 

You derive two: Is love mysterious and complicated as the atmosphere suggests, or is it intuitive and straightforward as the veiled lovers suggest? And, would the love still be the same once they lift the veils?

Beep. Beep. Beep. All the phones in hearing range chime out three urgent trills, nearly ejecting your soul out of your body. Clearing your head with a shake, you pull your phone out of your back pocket. You don't even have to unlock it. The news alert flashes up like a hazard light. Tony Stark Missing.

You blink. What the hell is going on?

"Are you seeing this?" Manda whispers, sidling up to your side.

You nod, at a loss for words. Iron Man is missing? How? What happened? Did it have something to do with the metal donut? 

You blink harder and take another long look at the notification, hoping it was a typo or missing a few words, words like Tony Stark Missing Iron Man Suit. Hell, even Tony Stark Missing Cheeseburgers. Anything but what's on your screen.

Somewhere in the background, Mrs. Kramer, your Art teacher, roll-calls the students to the front entrance. "Okay, guys, time to cut the field trip short."

Your shoulders sag. This can't be happening. Is it really that serious?

"Peter? Peter?" Mr. Dell calls out, clenching onto a clipboard with shaking hands. "Has anybody seen Parker? Peter Parker?" he inquired, looking over the students' heads. A bead of sweat gathers on his forehead, even though there is virtually no heat in the building, and it's a breezy, 72-degree late-spring afternoon in New York City. "Where does this kid always sneak off to?"

Ned stuttered out, "He, uhm, Pe-Peter left early, sir. Family emergency."

"An emergency? Was it so important he couldn't at least notify the supervisors?" Ned bobbed his head up and down, keeping his eyes stapled to the floor in a manner that hinted at no further comment. Mr. Dell huffs, "Alright. But he's getting detention, and I have half a mind to put you in there with him, Leeds."

Ned's face screws up in a chastised grimace. "Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again."

Your eyes linger on Ned as he pulls out his phone and rapidly taps at the screen, probably sending a strongly worded text to his best friend, rebuking Peter for roping him into his antics and nearly earning him a week's detention. You don't know much about their friendship, but they appear tied to the hip at school. 

Ned's a nice guy. Reliant to a tee. You had the pleasure of partnering with him on an art project in Kramer's class a few weeks back, spending a considerable amount of time joking while diligently rendering an interpretation of Van Gogh's A Starry Night on a five-by-five foot canvass. During that time, he often complimented your paint-smeared overalls and your hair's ever-changing up-dos. He seemed like such a great friend to have.

Peter, on the other hand, is a tough nut to crack.

You only ever shared one class with Peter Parker. Spanish last semester. You remember him being too antsy for your liking, always checking his watch impatiently, answering questions too fast, bouncing his leg up and down, acting like he had someplace better to be and better things to do. His impatience never made sense to you until you heard some girls in the locker-room whispering about his Stark internship and how lucky he was to be working for the Tony Stark. 

When the internship suddenly halted, and Peter landed himself in the longest detention sentence you'd ever heard of, you started to take more notice of him only because he was around more often. He was sort of cute in a boy-next-door kind of way with his science pun tee-shirts and smooth, tousled brown hair. For a brief time, you fleetingly considered asking him to Homecoming, but the futility of such a question wasn't lost on you. He noticeably crushed on Liz Toomes, and you were confident Peter's pining for her meant destiny twined their paths.

But Liz is gone now, and there's a growing 90 percent chance Peter's set his sights on MJ. Brooding quirky girl ending up with boy-next-door, now that match made perfect sense, just like a rom-com, or even better, an 80's teen romance.

Manda tugs on your arm, her hands forming a shackle around your wrist. "Come on. They're getting back on the bus without us."

Sure enough, you two were nearly the last ones in the entrance, the remaining students filing out of the door. You rush after them and reach the bus doors right before they shut, huffing in unison. Manda doubles over and grasps her knees, heaving.

"Here," you gasp. "We're here."

Your driver tuts, swinging the doors back open. "Good thing you two made it in time. This bus waits for no one, not even me. Come on," he says, waving you inside. "Let's get this show on the road."

You trudge back to your designated seats, collapsing against the plastic covering as the adrenaline subsides, replaced with the forgotten dread of the trip's abrupt end. You lean over and peer out the left side windows when the bus rolls over the bridge again, surprise rattling ominously over your bones as you find the metal donut gone from the sky.

Where did it go? Did the Avengers get rid of it?

Your hand still clamps your phone. An annoying, slight tremble in your hands trips up your fingers as they try to type in your passcode, but you succeed on the fourth try. You scroll through your social media, hoping beyond hope that someone captured the Avengers' victory or something close to a victory, something that proves the news headline wrong. Stark's probably lying low, too beat down to show his face to the press.

The far-fetched lie makes you internally flinch. You don't know much about the guy, but you're more than a thousand percent sure Stark wouldn't hide from the press if he won anything.

A sinking horror clogs your chest as you obsessively watch clip after clip, onlookers recording some unconscious guy in a red cape being invisibly bound and trailing after the commanding hand of an elongated, greyish-blue alien. Spider-Man tries to get the red-caped guy back, swinging through the city and dodging billboards, his webs clinging to the departing ship's underside, Iron Man flying into the sky after them.

It’s bad. Oh, sweet heavens, it’s bad.

Maybe it’s not that much of a big deal. Yeah. Yeah, it’s probably nothing. The end of the videos suggested the Avengers gained the upper hand on the fight, so maybe, just maybe, the alien was fleeing—fleeing… with a captive. Hurtling off into God knows where with Iron Man and Spider-Man onboard.

It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. 

Your back flattens to your seat and your unseeing eyes meld to your phone, the thunderous beats of your heart stifling the rest of the world into silence. The air is thinning. 

Your ears are buzzing. 

A vice clenches your chest.

It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. 

The dubious mantra and vague words of your Soulmate blend into an all-consuming cacophony of words, gelling together in a chant of solace. 

It’s fine. I’ve got you. It’s fine. I’ve got you. It’s fine.

By the time the bus drops off the students at Midtown and you and Manda quietly walk in the direction of home, the mixture of affirmations fans away the panic settling around your chest, bringing back a semblance of your earlier confidence, or rather, what was left of it, which wasn't much.

Outside the apartment complex, an overwhelming amount of residents’ windows glow, most of them probably stuck to their couch, replaying the recent events on any major news network and speculating the whereabouts of our mightiest heroes.

It takes a while to dawn on you that you and Manda are the only ones standing outside. On the entire block.

Nothing stirs. Even the bodega on the corner appears closed for the day.

It's five o'clock on a Friday afternoon and there’s plenty of light left.

Emptiness pours out of every alley like ink spilling from a broken bottle, blotting the whole surface of the street with the absence of human activity. A tree's rustling leaves are so startling your breath locks up and you jump. Manda doesn't say anything, recovering from the sudden noise herself.

Leaving the deserted streets behind, you and Manda glumly walk up the steps of your apartment complex and up to your residence on the third floor. The apartment is eerily silent as you toss your keys on the kitchen counter and lock the door behind Manda.

"When are your folks getting back from their honeymoon again?" asks Manda, shrugging out of her jacket and toeing off her sneakers, leaving them propped against the wall by the door.

Habit controls your body as you open the fridge, grab two Sprites, set them down on the counter, then reach for the half-finished bucket of Red Vines from the top cabinet shelf. "Sunday morning, I think. They only have the weekend off. Want some pizza? I can call up Joe's."

"Please and thank you," she says, plopping down on the couch. The old thing croaks, its springs wheezing under the unwelcomed weight.

The maroon monstrosity is a family heirloom, dating back to your grandparents' time. Mom loves it, claiming it adds the right amount of character to the drab living space, knowing fully well that anyone with fashion sense would never describe any space she inhabits as drab. Dad is adamant that it's one spill away from handing in its resignation.

Picking up your house phone, you confirm, "Extra-large cheese and olives?"

You don't know why you ask. Ever since the inception of your infamous best friend "crash-overs," cheese and olive pizza starred as the staple meal: that, and a bucket of Red Vines your dad occasionally steals from. Maybe you asked for normalcy or maybe to confirm Manda's plan to stay for the rest of the night. What you do know is you don’t want to be alone.

She hums a distracted yes, turning on the TV and upping the volume to listen to Channel 10's news reporter recount the fight between Iron Man and the alien.

Though already burned in your memory, the images douse your body in bone-chilling fear.

You turn your back and dial in the order, not at all surprised that Joe's is still up and running. Once the employee confirms your order and promises a speedy delivery, you grab the drinks and candy and place them on the coffee table, ignoring the TV.

"C-can you turn it to something else?" you quickly pipe up as you sit next to Manda, unsuccessfully hiding the tremor in your words. "I don't think I can stomach the news right now."

"Yeah, sure." Slow and reluctant, Manda switches the input and goes into Netflix. "Anything you wanna watch?"

"Teen Wolf."

Manda groans, "Again? We've seen that a million times."

"Oh, come on," you groan back, playfulness strained in your words. "It's a classic. You can't say no to a classic."

She gives you a dour frown, one that still couldn't land an inch of seriousness on her amber-colored cherub cheeks, until she relents from the weight of your puppy dog eyes.

"Fine, but only because of Michael J. Fox. Next time, I'm picking."

Neither of you really pay attention to the movie or touch the pizza when it arrives. In fact, for most of the night, Manda scrolls through her social media, watching what you can only assume are today’s events. Sometimes she’d put the phone down when you politely asked, but it unfailingly ended up right back in her hands, so after a while, you stop asking. When the movie’s end credits roll around, and you dress into your pajamas, put away the remaining slices of pizza, and call it a night, both of you climb into your bed. She is still scrolling.

You try and force yourself into REM sleep, keeping your eyes shut until you hear Manda’s heavy breathing beside you. The clock on your nightstand reads 9:53 p.m.

Yawning, you curl up into a tight ball on your side of the bed and wish your mom and dad were here to help you get out of your head. Manda can’t do it when she’s so caught up in hers, and you don’t think you’d be able to tell her how scared you are. It’d only scare her more.

Tony Stark is missing. Manda would have screeched her head off by now if anything changed.

I’ve got you.

Yeah, but Tony Stark, the freaking Iron Man, is missing.

I’ve got you.

You can’t possibly understand how bad this is.

I’ve got you.

You audibly huff against the reassuring words, but they eventually do the trick in temporarily pushing the worry away, allowing you to fitfully slip into dreamless oblivion.

Seven hours later, you wake to a text from your mom. The sunlight is so bright in your room you lower your phone’s brightness all the way down, squinting at the small letters.

-Coming home early bbygrl. Dad says hi and he misses you lots hunny bun. xx

A titanic-sized weight lifts off of your shoulders—something you hadn’t even known was there until you re-read your mom’s text and verify the timestamp.

They’re on their way home, where it’s safe and you can all keep an eye on each other. Niagara Falls is just a six and a half-hour drive from here and Mom texted two hours ago, so they’ve got a couple hundred miles left. You don’t care about the distance. As long as they’re coming home, you’re fine. You can wait.

The morning’s activities in your residence pass into a weird déjà vu of last night. Manda is awake before you, sitting on the couch with a bowl of cereal in her lap and the TV turned on to Channel 10, the volume slightly lower from last night. A bit peeved, you ask her to switch it to some cartoons while you pour yourself a bowl of Frosted Flakes.

She goes back to scrolling on her phone, sparingly taking bites of her soon-turned soggy cereal. You perch on the arm of the couch, far away from Manda's screen, and munch on your cereal in silence. This whole situation sucks enough without Manda’s constant doom-scrolling, but her utter silence is wearing your nerves thin.

Three full episodes of SpongeBob play on before you heave tempered sigh and set your finished bowl of cereal on the table and face Manda.

“Do you have to do that?”

She doesn’t even spare you a glance. “Do what?”

Unbidden anger flows through you like magma spewing from a freshly erupted volcano, flaming into your veins and flaring your heart rate as you yank her phone away and toss it behind the couch.

Manda stares at you like you’ve lost your mind. She may be partially right.

“Why the hell did you do that?”

You scoff, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe I like talking to my friend once in a while. Maybe it’s mentally damaging to watch the same thing over and over and over again, and I was just trying to save you from brain rot.” You stand up and cross your arms over your chest, letting the rage propel your words. “Seriously Manda, give it a damn rest.”

“Why?” Manda crosses her arms too, glowering up at you, close to achieving a convincing frown. “Because you’re ‘positive’ nothing’s going to happen, right? It’s just aliens. No prob.”

You hold your tongue, waiting for her to air out all her frustrations because she’s right. She’s right to throw your words back at you. Yesterday morning you were totally sure of the Avengers, and not much has changed. You still firmly believe they’ll win whatever this fight is with the aliens, but you know scrolling through your phone for updates won’t do anything but boost your anxiety, like it’s doing to Manda.

When you think the coast is clear to speak, you lowly say, “I get it.”

“You get it? You get it? No, mama, you don’t get it. Because, see, if you got it, my phone wouldn’t be collecting dust behind your couch!”

“You needed a break, Amanda!” You shout back at her. “That phone’s never left your hand since you got here.”

She snaps her fingers as if she reached an epiphany. “Attention. That’s what it is. I haven’t given you enough attention today and you’re feeling left out of the spotlight. Newsflash, hon, the world doesn’t revolve around you. Other things are happening besides you hearing your Destined Words.”

“Wh-what?” you balk. “That… no, that’s not what this is about.” You’re not even sure where she even came up with the conclusion that you needed something as stupid as attention right now. Did she think you were that self-centered?

She cocks her eyebrow challengingly, “Alright, then tell me what it is. I’m all ears.”

“Me hearing my freaking soulmate has nothing to do with this! Nothing! And I’m not some attention-starved lunatic. Christ, Manda,” you roll your eyes, letting your hands fall with a slap against your sides. “It’s about you watching the news all day like… like this is the end of the world or something. We’ve gone through this. New York has gone through this. Alien attacks are nothing new, and I’m tired so sick and tired of you…”

You slow down, raising a soft hand to your chest—strange, tugging sensations sprout somewhere deep, deep down within you. So deep you're not sure it's actually there.

“Sick and tired of me what? What?” Manda pressed, the almost-frown lessening as your head tilts. “What’s wrong?”

You gradually shake your head. There’s no conceivable way to articulate what’s happening to you because it’s unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. You feel… tingly, like every single hair follicle on your arms and legs rise, standing on high alert.

“Something’s not right.”

The tugging intensifies dully. You gasp against it, desperately clawing at the front of your shirt with the pads of your fingers, seeking to protect something tangibly nonexistent. It’s like someone’s fingers pinch a taut guitar string inside your chest, pulling on it with increasing pressure, pulling it further and further until it can’t move an inch, holding it the apex in a deathly promise that, with one final tug, the string will give.

I’ve got you.

Everything happens within a second.

You whimper out an anguished yelp as the string abruptly snaps.

Manda leaps to her feet and grasps your shoulders, begging to help.

Then, right before your eyes, Manda’s body begins to dissolve.

“M-Manda...? Amanda, wait! NO!”

She falls away into a pile of ash on your floor.

You drop to your knees, screaming.

And so does the rest of the world.

...

Part II

[pikapeppa]

Abelas/Lavellan modern AU: Competent Professional

Chapter 2 of Inadvisable (professor Solas AU) is up on AO3!

In which Athera Lavellan starts her new research coordinator job with Professor Abelas on the wrong right foot.

Adorable art by my elf-lusting partner in crime @elbenherzart​!

~3000 words; read on AO3 instead.

- ATHERA -

Athera ran all the way from the apartment to the University of Orlais. Thankfully, it was only a twenty-minute walk, and by running she was able to cut the travel time almost in half. Still, showing up at her new job all sweaty and out of breath had not exactly been her plan. 

She skidded to a stop in front of the history building and paused and to catch her breath. When she was no longer huffing and puffing like a bronto, she straightened up and smoothed back her hair. “Okay,” she muttered to herself. “You can do this. You’re a competent professional woman. They hired you for a reason.” No matter that she’d never actually worked as a research coordinator before. 

Sure, she’d done all the duties of a research coordinator during the last couple years of working in Professor Kenric’s lab at Kirkwall University, but technically she’d still been a research assistant and not the coordinator, even if Kenric’s actual coordinator had been useless most of the time. 

Athera squared her shoulders. I’m done with that, she told herself. I’m the coordinator now. She would be taking her new job super seriously, and she wasn’t going to be forcing any of the research assistants to do her work for her. 

“You’ll be the best research coordinator Professor Abelas has ever had,” she told herself quietly. She quickly checked her watch — two minutes to spare, thank the Creators — and thus boosted, she made her way up the stairs and into the history building. 

She headed down the east wing, following the shiny new signs for the Ancient Elvhen Studies program. The program was relatively new at the University of Orlais, having only been established about five years ago. Even in that short time, it had become both famous and controversial. The Ancient Elvhen Studies program was technically part of U of O’s history department, but even that placement had been something of a controversy since the program encapsulated a range of disciplines including history, art, literature, and even traditional healing. 

When the University of Arlathan had finally agreed to collaborate with U of O, the Dean had originally wanted the program to be part of the school of fine arts. But Athera had heard that Professor Solas, Nare’s new supervisor, had insisted that they be situated in the department of history, and had refused to work at U of O unless the placement was made. 

Athera had also heard that Professor Solas had a reputation for being… mercurial, for lack of a better word. Aside from his impressive credentials and his famous fresco work, there was shockingly little personal information about him on the internet. Student reviews fluctuated between compliments like ‘he knows the answer to everything even though he’s an arts prof’ and complaints such as ‘he never gives an A’, studded with a few scathing reports that he could be a downright asshole when people asked questions that he thought were stupid. 

But Professor Solas wasn’t the one that Athera was worried about. Professor Abelas, the program’s director and the head professor of literature and history, was the one that Athera would be directly answering to, and he was the one that she most wanted to impress. 

She still remembered their phone interview with a certain amount of trepidation. She was pretty sure she hadn’t said anything stupid, and she’d made sure to not talk too fast so she didn’t sound nervous, but Abelas’s tone still sounded faintly disapproving the whole time. 

Maybe that’s just how he always sounds, she thought. She hoped that he didn’t always sound that way, since it wouldn’t  exactly be fun to work with someone who always sounded slightly disappointed with everything she said.

In any case, it was sure to be an interesting job.

A minute later, she was facing the door to the Ancient Elvhen Studies lab. She took a deep breath — you’ve got this, you’re a competent professional, she told herself — then pushed open the door. 

The lab space was pretty standard university fare: a main area with a large meeting table, filing cabinets and heavily laden bookshelves around the edges of the wall, a couple of impressively tidy common-workspace desks, and a small kitchenette. Two short hallways branched off of the main room toward the east and west, and there were three people sitting at the meeting table: two elves, and to Athera’s surprise, a dwarf. 

They looked up at Athera’s entry. Athera smiled and tried not to look awkward. “Hi there,” she said. “I’m Athera, the new research coordinator.”

The petite elven woman hopped up from her seat. “Oh, another Dalish, how lovely!” she chirped. “Andaran atishan! Come on in, Professor Abelas will be expecting you, he’s just in his office.” She hurried around the table with her hand outstretched. “I’m Merrill, and this is Tamlen and Dagna. I’m in the fourth year of my PhD, and Tamlen is – oh, but listen to me babbling!” She patted her cheeks nervously. “You two should introduce yourselves!”

Tamlen chuckled and nodded a greeting to Athera. “Nice to meet you. I’m a part-time research assistant, doing my undergrad the rest of the time.”

Dagna waved cheerily to her. “I’m a PhD student too. Second year.”

Athera was already feeling more relaxed; they all seemed so nice. “Nice to meet all of you,” she said. “Are you Abelas’s students?”

Tamlen smirked, and Dagna let out a tinkling laugh. “Oh no, Professor Abelas doesn’t supervise students. Solas is our supervisor.”

Athera raised her eyebrows. “Abelas doesn’t supervise students?”

Merrill shook her head. “No. Too busy teaching and being the director, he says.”

Athera raised an eyebrow. “But he’s a tenured professor. How can he be tenured and not supervise students?”

Merrill, Dagna and Tamlen exchanged glances, and Merrill replied. “We don’t really know, to be honest. Professor Abelas runs the department and Professor Solas does the supervisor duties.”

Athera frowned. “That’s… really weird.”

“It has been working well since this program began,” a deep male voice said.

A hard stone dropped into Athera’s gut. Damn, she thought. She looked up at the east hallway to see a tall elven man standing there with his arms folded. 

He was surprisingly built for an academic, with broad muscular shoulders that his tweed blazer didn’t quite manage to hide. An impeccable white braid coursed down his back — probably the style in Arlathan, Athera thought, since it certainly wasn’t a look she’d ever seen in Orlais — and he was very handsome. 

Or he would be, if he wasn’t scowling at her. Unfortunately for Athera, his expression was just as disapproving as his smooth voice. 

She swallowed hard. You’re a professional woman, she told herself. Even if you insulted his management style right in front of him. She offered him what she hoped was a professional smile. “You must be Abelas,” she said, and she took a step toward him. “I’m Athera, the research coordinator.”

“It is Professor Abelas,” he said. “Come this way. I will orient you to the lab.” He unfolded his arms and raised his eyebrows at Merrill, Dagna and Tamlen. “You have introduced yourselves?”

“Yes, professor,” Tamlen said. 

Abelas nodded, then gestured for Athera to follow him and headed for the west hallway without stopping to check that she was following. 

Damn and double damn, Athera thought gloomily. She forced herself not to look at Merrill and the others as she followed Abelas down the west hallway. 

He gestured at a few closed doors. “These are graduate student offices,” he said brusquely. “A meeting room here for interviewing research participants. That room is the private library, including hard copies of research articles from the past ten years that are awaiting digitization and proper indexing.” He shot her a hard look. “Managing that will be one of your duties.”

“I’m aware,” she said, a bit more sharply than she intended.

His frown deepened slightly, and Athera forced herself to relax. “I’ll make that a priority,” she said in a softer tone. 

He nodded, then pointed at a polished oak door at the end of the hall. “Professor Solas’s office is there.” He gestured for her to exit the hallway, and she obediently headed back down the hall toward the east hallway instead, with Abelas — sorry, Professor Abelas — at her back. 

She tried to think of something intelligent to say, some sort of question that would make it clear that she knew her duties here, but her tongue was tied with awkwardness. Professor Abelas was so silent and stern, and his height was kind of intimidating, making her feel as though he was towering over her as he followed her down the hall. 

When they were in the east hallway once more, he broke the tense silence. “More graduate student offices here. An archive of Elvhen artifacts is in this room, which is kept locked at all times.” He pursed his lips before going on. “I will give you a key by the end of the week. In the meantime, you will ask me if you require access to that room.” 

Athera frowned slightly. Why was he reluctant to give her access to the artifact room? She would need free access to all of these rooms if he wanted her to do her job properly. 

“My office is at the end of this hall,” he said. He gestured for her to follow him. “You should check with me before making any significant changes to the way things are run here.” 

“I understand,” she said cautiously. She followed him into his office, which – unsurprisingly – was spotlessly clean and tidy. Austere, almost.

He sidled around his desk and pointed to a large whiteboard calendar on the wall, which was meticulously colour-coded. “Professor Solas and I have a shared calendar here. Our teaching schedules and monthly meetings are updated here, so you will know where we are at all times.”

“Why don’t you use an online calendar?” she asked.

His pale eyebrows rose slightly. “Excuse me?”

“An online calendar,” she said. “So you can share it between you and update it on your, um, on your phones…?” She trailed off at the deepening of his frown.

“Professor Solas and I have a system that has worked for over a decade,” he said. “We will continue to do it this way.”

She pressed her lips together, then nodded. If he wanted to live in the Exalted Age and use a whiteboard calendar, that was his prerogative.

He rested his fingertips lightly on his desk. “The students similarly use a whiteboard calendar to coordinate the use of the meeting room and other resources.”

Athera raised her eyebrows. “Okay, well, that just makes no sense. That has to change.”

Abelas recoiled slightly, but Athera pressed on. “Students’ schedules are changing all the time. With exams and deadlines, a shared online calendar only makes sense so they can input any changes immediately and have notifs — uh, notifications — to alert everyone to the changes. I’ll set that up immediately.”

“I did not give you leave to make such a change,” he said sharply.

“It’s a simple change that will streamline everyone’s schedules and increase the efficiency of your lab,” Athera insisted.

“That’s not how things are done here,” he retorted.

His tone was hard, and he was scowling at her now. The look on his face was making her heart race, but she inhaled slowly through her nose to keep her calm.

You’re a competent professional, she told herself. You might not have a fancy PhD and a post-doc and an entire lab under your belt, but you’re a professional too, damn it. 

She boldly lifted her chin. “You hired me to manage the research projects in your lab and to take over a number of your administrative duties. Isn’t that right?”

He folded his arms. “That was indeed the job description.”

“If that’s my job, why don’t you trust me to do it?”

“You lack experience,” he said, to her surprise and dismay. “And besides, hiring you was not my choice. Professor Solas insisted that I required… assistance.”

Athera recoiled slightly at this. “Well, I’m not here to be your assistant,” she said firmly. “I’m not here to just do what you tell me. I’ll evaluate the way your lab is managed, and when I’m finished doing that, I’ll tell you how I think things should change.”

He glared at her. His unusual golden eyes were practically sparking now, his long elegant fingers tense on the surface of his desk, and Athera forced herself to breathe through her anxiety as she stared into his eyes.

He finally grunted and sat in his chair. “Fine. But you will change nothing without consulting me first.”

She exhaled slowly. “I’ll check everything with you for the first two weeks. You should let me use my judgment after that.”

He narrowed his golden eyes. “You are making a great number of demands considering that it is your first day here.”

And you’re being an ass, considering that it’s my first day, she thought belligerently, but she kept that salty thought to herself. “I’m just trying to do my job,” she said evenly. “A job that you hired me for, whether you wanted to or not.” She gave him a knowing look. “I’m going to make your life easier, you know.”

“That remains to be seen,” he said. He reached for his mouse and started clicking around on his computer. “I look forward to the results of your… evaluation.”

His tone was dripping with disdain. What in the Void was his problem with her? 

“I’ll get to work, then,” she said. She shifted her bag on her shoulder, then realized something: she needed someplace to put her things, and to, well, do her job. 

“Where’s my office?” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “An oversight. Here.” He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a key, then held it out to her. 

She approached the desk and held out her hand, and Abelas placed the key in her palm. “The office next to this one is yours,” he said.

Of course it is, she thought glumly. Of course her office had to be right next to the grumpy director’s. 

“Thank you,” she said. She took a step back, then toyed idly with the key for a moment. This whole meeting had been unfortunately antagonistic so far, and Athera didn’t want to leave it on such a sour note.

She decided to try to lighten the mood a bit. “If we’re going to be neighbours, I hope you don’t mind music,” she said. 

A crease appeared between his brows. “Excuse me?”

“Music,” she said. “I listen to music all the time. It helps me to think. I, um, hope you don’t mind.”

His frown deepened. “What sort of music?”

“Dance music, mostly,” Athera said. “Pop, too, though I like more of the indie stuff.”

“Dance and pop music,” he repeated. 

He was staring at her now as though she’d grown qunari horns. She could feel her face prickling with discomfort. Why had she even bothered trying to lighten the mood with him? He clearly didn’t have a humorous bone in his body. 

She tried for a smile. “I’ll keep the volume down for now.” 

“That would be for the best,” he said.

She nodded and awkwardly backed out of his office. “Thanks for the orientation, Abelas. Professor Abelas,” she said hastily. 

He nodded. Already his eyes were on his computer screen, and Athera blew out a breath as she started unlocking her new office door. 

“Athera,” he called.

For some reason, a shiver traced down her spine at the sound of her name in his voice. She’d never heard her name before in an Arlathani accent, with the soft vowels and the gently rolled r. 

She swallowed hard and poked her head back in his office. “Yes?”

“Close the door behind you,” he said.

His eyes were still on his monitor. Athera frowned at his bluntness, then pulled his door shut without replying. 

Ass, she thought. She opened her office and put her bag on the desk next to the computer, then draped her coat over the chair and trudged down the hall back to the main area.

Merrill and Dagna were still there, and their faces were sympathetic. “Don’t worry,” Dagna said soothingly. “His bark is much worse than his bite.”

“I cried on my first day here,” Merrill confided. “During my whole first week, actually. I have an extra box of tissues in my desk if you need them.”

Athera chuckled. “Thanks, but I’m okay. I’m just going to jump right in and get to work.”

Merrill beamed at her. “That’s the spirit! And it really is exciting to work here. The artifacts they have in the back room are just amazing! I’m doing my thesis on one of them, actually, on the broken eluvian that was found in the Brecilian forest ten years ago. That’s one of the reasons that the professors came to Orlais, you know, so they could work with U of O on the eluvian project — oh, but you probably know that already…”

“I do,” Athera said. “But I’m just as interested as you are, so you can tell me all about it.”

Merrill did a little hop. “Wonderful! Well, it was shattered, as you know, and I was actually part of the archeological party who went out to the forest two years ago to recover more of the pieces! Creators, I tell you, it was such an amazing trip…” 

Merrill chattered on cheerfully about the eluvian, and Athera listened with one ear, but the rest of her mind was on Abelas and his bad attitude. The way he spoke to her was so unkind, like he thought she was just here to mess everything up. And the way he frowned at her with that scowl on his annoyingly handsome face, like she wasn’t qualified to make any changes to his precious lab…

He’ll see, she thought stubbornly. He’ll see how much more smoothly things will run here once I’ve gotten settled in. Athera was a competent professional woman, after all. She was absolutely qualified to do this job, and in no time, she’d learn the way the lab was run and she’d make it so efficient that Abelas would be sorry he ever doubted her. 

I’ll show him, she thought. She was going to make this lab the most efficiently run place in the department of history, and Abelas wouldn’t remember what his life was like without her. 

[healinghurtssometimes]

The Cycle (Pt. 1)

I’m not really sure where to start, so I’m going to opt for my current situation and how I got here. This blog isn’t meant for attention, but rather a way for me to get my experiences out in the open. Maybe some people will find this, relate, and somehow become my tribe. Let me tell you, I need good people. If you stick around long enough, I’m certain you’ll quickly start to see that. With that being said, I’m going to start with a very rough outline of the past 14-15 months.

For just a brief back story, I got offered the best paying job I’d ever had in January of 2017. A lot of stuff had happened (which I’ll cover another time) and I would have been stupid not to take the job when it was given to me. After 2 years, I got my Real Estate License since the company required it for all Property Managers, and I got promoted. The problem was that we were used to running our office with 3 Admins - one had been taken to fit a different role months earlier and still hadn’t been replaced, and I was the second one to be moved while the company STILL did not make an attempt to refill those roles until AFTER my promotion was finalized. I got stuck doing my job as an Admin AND my new job as a Property Manager with all training put on hold until those roles were filled, while also being expected to heavily assist in training the new Admins they hired since I had been there longer than the last Admin standing and was damn good at my job.

I then spent months filling multiple roles, being asked to train people coming into the new roles (including another Property Manager when I STILL wasn’t trained), and being asked regularly to go out of my way to do things face-to-face with/for my residents that was not being asked of my peers (many of which took up a substantial amount of time, like delivering portable AC units and having to walk through someone’s whole house with our Field Manager for maintenance complaints that I had no authority over). I BEGGED for help getting the new Admin team to fulfill the tasks I was trying to delegate to them, begged for training, begged for clarity on expectations that were never laid out. I begged for help for 6 months, and was consistently met with “we don’t have the resources,” “we aren’t properly staffed,” “there isn’t time,” etc. I was buried up to my nose from the day I took the position, and not one person agreed to help me dig myself out of the dirt. Instead, they buried me and then fired me for not being able to fulfill the role to their expectations (while the other two Property Managers weren’t expected to do ANY of the extra stuff they’d put on me to deal with). That was early September 2019. I filed for unemployment, and my now-former supervisor dug up information from my role as an Admin that had been approved by the District Manager at the time until they both got in trouble for letting me slightly stagger my schedule to make sure I could take care of my kids and be able to pay my rent after a HUGE change in the custody and child support of my children (a situation I’ll cover at another time). I didn’t get the notice letter for the unemployment appeal meeting until after it had taken place, about a week before Christmas, at which point I was VERY depressed, stressed, and couldn’t begin to fathom taking on a multi-million dollar company on my own. I now owe the state almost $900 in “overpaid unemployment benefits” that I have yet to be able to pay back.

I spent the next few months trying to find another job. Hoping to find something still in the world of Property Management, even if it wasn’t the same role or anywhere near the same pay or if it didn’t come with the same benefits. The company I worked for is well-known and very disliked by the ENTIRE property management community in the area I lived in at the time. They’re a very young company that is buying up houses left and right and helping make rent prices SOAR for those that aren’t able to buy a house (or just like renting instead of owning the home they live in for whatever reason) - they make it their goal year over year to increase renewal rates as much as they can get away with, knowing many people won’t do the research, question their numbers, or walk away from their house...they’ll just pay the rent increase and keep moving through their complaints of how high their rent is for the lack of improvements the company makes and their poor excuse of a maintenance department that’s directed to penny-and-dime every vendor and look for any reason the resident could possibly be held responsible for higher priced maintenance items. They’re in 20 different states and their maintenance department for their entire operation runs out of ONE state with a local “liaison” at each office that’s function is only for vacant homes. Hopefully they’ve changed some of this in the past year, but I don’t have any reason to believe they would have made things better for anything outside of their own bottom line. I won’t use their name because I don’t want to get sued, but if you know, you know.

I had to take the name of the company off of my resume, replaced with the word “Confidential,” in order to start getting call backs for interviews with other property management companies...all of which ended up being for apartment complexes where I was used to single-family and the two worlds are vastly different from one another. I had ONE company that actually offered me a job sometime around October/November 2019, and it turned out to be an absolutely awful situation to be in. They lied about what they offered for health insurance in my interview, treated their residents like garbage, their property manager played favorites and treated other staff like they were incompetent toddlers, leasing staff and maintenance weren’t allowed to communicate with each other outside of breaks and absolute emergencies, and operated with a LOT of drama. One situation got brought into our leasing office (while open to the public) where their outsourced IT guy and management proceeded to yell at each other in the lobby, calling each other things like “fucking liars” and just generally making a big scene, which made me incredibly uncomfortable to be around. I was already dealing with not having my much-needed anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications, and the way this company was operated was making my already spiraling mental health WORSE. So after a few weeks, I left knowing that they were not a good fit for me nor I for what they apparently needed. I applied for literally hundreds of jobs, got a few interviews, and never got offered another position.

All this time, I’m just trying to figure out how I’m going to pay my rent (my now ex-boyfriend’s parents were paying our $1500 monthly rent and all of our utilities at this point so we wouldn’t get evicted with my kids), how I’m going to pay my phone bill or my car payment, dealing with being uninsured and ashamed of the situation I was in, debt piling up all around me with no way out of it, no health insurance, battling withdrawal from my heavy dosage of SSRI drugs. I know I haven’t talked much about them here, but all of this was really starting to affect my children - who were only 5 & 7 at the time - which was really making the entire situation SO MUCH WORSE to deal with. I was self medicating with marijuana and was high 98% of the time, or in the process of getting high. While weed by itself is not an addictive drug, I developed a dependency on it like I had come to depend on my mental health medications, because it was numbing the reality of the situation I was in and helping keep me somewhat functional and kept me from falling deeper into the darkness as my world crumbled around me.

At the end of January, I finally decided that I couldn’t justify staying in the place I’d lived my whole life anymore. I had lost my job, all of my income, my health insurance...I was on the brink of losing my car, my relationship was failing due to financial strain (though I was also done with the relationship beforehand and started cheating on him before I lost my job anyway and was really only with him at that point for convenience...not a moment I’m proud of by any means), I wasn’t able to support myself or my kids and was no longer able to hide the situation from them for what it was. The only thing I was able to protect them from was KNOWING I was always high, which I’m sure from my own experience with my parents, they’ll end up figuring out when they’re older and weed is legal across the board. So I started thinking “what’s next, how do I change this situation?” 

By January 2020, I’d been back in contact with an old high school boyfriend for a number of months. Not only was he an old boyfriend, but he was also one of my best friends in the whole world. I trusted him with every fiber of my being, he is the only soul that knows me the way he does, and he has stuck by my side through all of the mud trudging I’ve gone through since I was 15 other than our own disastrously messy breakup. He was roughly 400 miles away from my hometown, and was the only viable option for me to ask for help in the form of a roof to look for work and try to get myself back up on my feet. So I took my kids to their dad (who is a very petty and ugly human) because he is/was at least financially stable, packed a few things, and went looking for work 400 miles away. 3 days in, I was offered a menial serving job...but hey, working on 6 months of no consistent job or income, it was better than what I was working with back home. I started that job the end of February. For anyone that’s been alive this year, you know what’s coming next...4 weeks later, the restaurant was shut down for COVID lockdowns, and I immediately started looking for another job to take on once those shutdowns were lifted. So now, I’m 400 miles away from my kids and my family, and I’m also unemployed.

I thought I found one doing leasing with an apartment complex. I got the job offer, the offer letter, was working on finalizing a start date even though some of their requirements were ridiculous (like not being able to how any semblance of a tattoo or piercing not in your ear and only being able to wear black and white on the job). Then I asked what they were doing to protect their employees, residents, and potential residents from COVID. I lost that opportunity for asking questions, because they were the ONLY complex locally that was not observing any pandemic-related precautions, and had referred to a colleague as a “titty baby” for simply asking them to step up their game by providing hand sanitizer and a thermometer for their offices. I opted not to go back to serving over precautions for COVID so I could still go home and see my kids again at my dad’s house, as my step-mom was dealing the return of her Breast Cancer after nearly 2 years in remission and no way of getting treatment until the doctors decided it was safe again for her to be in a hospital or cancer treatment center.

Realizing now that I’ve only gotten to sometime around April/May, I’m going to leave this post for now and come back for a Part 2. If you’re still reading this and are planning on returning for the next installment, thank you for taking this journey with me as I lay my life out one piece at a time in the hopes of healing.

[raendown]

Pairing: None Word count: 4419 Chapter: 2/4  Rated: T+ Summary: Months after the village is built Izuna is near his breaking point. Peace is nice, don’t get him wrong, but he could do without the pale shadow that follows behind him everywhere he goes. All he wants is to understand. What the hell is Tobirama’s obsession with watching him?

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

KO-FI and commission info in the header!

Chapter 2

“But why do I need to be in charge of it?” In spite of the usual efforts to sound more mature than his actual age, at the moment Hikaku treads dangerously close to a childish whine. Izuna is far from impressed.

“We need someone there to make sure people actually stay on task,” he says. “And we all know there’s no one better at killing a buzz than you. It’s a work site, people are gonna get rowdy, idiots are gonna want to show off. You’re basically acting as supervisor to make sure that no one gets out of hand or uses any chakra outside of strict working necessity.”

Scratching at the back of his head, Hikaku steps aside to let a man pass between them and then falls in to step beside Izuna again. His face takes on a dour expression for several minutes as they walk. By the time he orders his thoughts for whatever he wants to say they’ve already passed by several shops and turned down another street.

“I’m not exactly…the strongest guy around,” he says at last. The words sound as though they pain him to admit. Pride is a terrible affliction to them all.

“That’s fine. No one’s asking you to actually fight people. If they step out of line you tell them where to shove it. And if they try to start something you don’t think you can win then dodge like hell and report them. You know I’m always willing to crack a head for you if you need it.” Izuna grins as he claps his cousin on the back, shamelessly enjoying the bleak grimace he gets in return.

When the other falls in to a sulk Izuna lets him, too cheerful to be put off his own good mood. Plans to build the wall are progressing a lot faster than anyone expected after the council of elders had somehow all managed to agree on a single proposal in the first meeting. As a celebration of the workers going out to survey the initial measurements Izuna had invited Madara out for lunch. Unfortunately his brother is an absolute stick in the mud and had opted to stay home with some paperwork he apparently needed to get done so when Izuna passed Hikaku on his way in to the shopping district he cheerfully invited his cousin instead.

And even more cheerfully dropped the news that he is nominating Hikaku as one of the foremen for this upcoming worksite. Their lunch out has been a petty man’s delight as he enjoyed both the food and the look of exhausted irritation staring back at him.

“Come on, if we cut through here I think it leads out near the tailor’s and I need to put in an order for a new cloak.” With how the streets twist here and there Izuna is actually fairly proud of himself for remembering that. He pulls at his cousin’s shoulder until Hikaku follows along behind him with a tortured sigh.

“I thought we were going home now?”

“Oh stop whining or I’ll sit on you until you admit that you’re secretly an old man in an adolescent body.”

Even without looking he can practically hear the other pouting. “I’m nineteen!”

Izuna intends to shoot back with some quip about making his point for him. He’s interrupted before he can by the sudden appearance of two stocky figures in front of them, blocking the path in an unmistakably deliberate manner. One arm swings out instinctively to stop Hikaku and encourage the younger man behind him. His cousin might not be exactly weak but he is also enough of a level-headed realistic to step behind the stronger fighter without complaint.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” Izuna asks in a calm voice.

“Already done enough, haven’t you?” one of the men drawls. His accent is distinctly northern where the villages have all intermarried enough that none of the people living there can be said to carry even as few as three bloodlines.

“If I’ve already helped then I’m sure you wouldn’t mind stepping aside for us to pass.” Humor is, perhaps, not the best way to respond in this situation but unfortunately his mouth always works a little faster than his brain. Sometimes the words just sort of fall out of their own.

“Think you’re funny?”

Clearly these strangers do not appreciate his humor.

“Yeah I sort of think I am.” Izuna grins even as he curses himself for a trouble-seeking fool.

“Right.” One of the men turns his head to spit before cracking his knuckles. “I’ve been waiting years to get you alone. Then some people came ‘round our little hamlet talking about peace and a village where we can all be happy and sunshine together and I thought to myself ‘well now, isn’t that just an opportunity?’ And here you are.”

“Here I am.”

“My sister never took another step after you left her for dead. Now she spends every day with this look on her face like she wishes you would have just finished the job.”

A wash of sad understanding turns over in Izuna’s belly. Not guilt because he’s sure he had a reason for whatever he did, he’s never been the type for unnecessary slaughter, but the aftermath of their duties as shinobi is never pleasant to think about. One of the first lessons he’d ever been taught was how to put it all out of his mind lest it drive him to madness thinking about the things he’s done. It doesn’t take a genius to understand the sort of revenge this man is after; obviously he’s never been able to put what happened to his sister out of mind.

For perhaps a sliver of an instant Izuna considers trying to talk his way out of this but even as the idea enters his mind he cast it aside. The anger staring back at him is not the sort of anger that can be talked aside. Unfortunate, that. There goes his good mood.

“Hikaku,” he murmurs quietly, “I want you to stay out of this.”

“But-!”

“Just watch the street and make sure no one else gets involved, alright?” Keeping both eyes on the man already reaching for a poorly sharpened kunai, he waits until his cousin assents with a low grunt. Then he nods and put his trust in the other to keep out of the way.

Eyes narrowed, body language more aggressive by the moment, the stranger doing all the talking gives a harsh snort. “You must be proud of the pain you’ve caused. I’ve always enjoyed taking the pride out of men who don’t deserve it. Hurting you the way you hurt her is going to be fun, I’ll make sure to mark this day on my calendar and celebrate it every damn year.”

Izuna is already imagining the lecture Madara will give him later on setting an example for others, how they are supposed to be the pinnacles of peaceful behavior towards their new allies. He spares a moment to scowl mentally for the one who has seen most of his violence over the years. What use is having a stalker if Tobirama mysteriously disappears the only time it might be useful to have him around?

Of course, the moment he finishes that thought the two men move towards him and then every body present freezes as another appears between them. Exasperation and relief flood Izuna’s veins in equal measures. Tobirama says nothing in either greeting or explanation, merely stands like a statue with his back to the one he’s spent most of his life trying to kill. Leaning to the side puts Izuna at just the right angle to see his rival’s face and wonders at the look of sheer ice in those deep red eyes, narrowed in to a cold glare that would have frozen the blood of bigger men than the ones he has turned it on now. Nice as it is of him to give these idiots pause in whatever stupidity they had been about to commit it’s still baffling for Izuna to find himself standing behind a wall of pale flesh like some damsel that needs rescuing.

And all in utter silence.

Now faced with twice the skill as they had been a moment before, the would-be attackers seem to rethink their options, eyes darting between Tobirama’s immovable stance and Izuna’s raised eyebrows. The one who has so far done all the talking keeps his eyes forward when he cranes his neck to whisper behind himself. Wariness has already filled the second man, frustration clear on his face even as he shakes his head with obvious regret.

“Let us have five minutes with him,” the first one says finally, attempting to bargain with Tobirama. “Rumor says you follow him around like a shadow; obviously you don’t trust him. You wouldn’t shed any tears if something happened, yeah? No one has to know you were even here.”

They wait but Tobirama makes no move to reply, only continues staring the pair of them down. It’s difficult to decide whether his ability to remain so completely still is more impressive or eerie but Izuna supposes it doesn’t matter much when it is clearly serving its purpose. All confidence drains away to leave both of the strange men looking increasingly nervous as the minutes ticked by. Eventually the one in front grunts and scuffs one foot against the dusty ground.

“Whatever. Pair of goody-two-shoes softies now that you’ve got a pretty little treaty to hide behind and all. Just you wait, Uchiha. There won’t always be a Senju bodyguard around to protect you.” With a sharp gesture he motions for his companion to follow and backs away slowly until he can lose himself in the crowds just beyond the alley.

“Hn, won’t I?” Izuna murmurs unhappily under his breath.

Although he’s sure the words do not carry across the space between them, Tobirama turns and meets his eyes with the anger in his face draining away to leave him blank once more. For some reason the sight of him is unutterably irritating.

“Thanks oh so much for the help but you know I could have taken those two with both eyes closed, right? I don’t you to rescue me.” Snorting quietly as he hears his cousin splutter behind him, Izuna shakes his head. “Seriously, is this what you were following me around for? I don’t know if you were hoping for a life debt or something but no way am I declaring some bullshit like that when I could have taken care of this on my own.”

“Izuna!” Hikaku whines and pulls at his sleeve but he shakes the man off without looking.

“Go on then. Was that what you wanted? For the love of chakra just say something!”

Tobirama tilts his head slowly to one side. “Your brother was looking for you,” is all he says, leaving them to wonder if he intends that as a convenient excuse for his presence or this is a paltry attempt at moving the focus away from himself. It’s a lie either way. His brother knows exactly where he is.

With no further words Tobirama turns and walks away in a plain declaration that he considers this nonexistent conversation over. Not even when Izuna hollers after him loud enough to attract attention from both ends of the alley does he look back, leaping up on to the rooftops where, even more annoyingly, his chakra doesn’t go farther than a couple of roads away. Considering how close he tends to stay lately it’s sort of a miracle he goes even that far.

“Do you think anyone would notice if I murdered him in his sleep?” Izuna grumbles.

“Yes,” Hikaku answers in a flat voice. “Many people. Not the least of whom would be his own sibling.”

“Just a little bit?”

“No.”

It proves difficult but he manages to resist the urge to cross his arms. “Ugh, fine. Come on. I can stop by the tailor’s another day, let’s just head back home. Madara’s gonna love this.”

One glance is all it takes to see that Hikaku understands his sarcasm. At least the familiarity of rolling eyes lifts his spirits a bit. He is still frowning as they turn for home, however, working though everything that’s just happened in the span of about five minutes. For all that he hadn’t believed in peace himself for many years, apparently he’s allowed himself to grow complacent in just a few short months of it. Getting jumped is surprising enough already considering how few people would dare to challenge his reputation but having someone go to all the trouble of joining their settlement just to challenge him specifically is a dedication to hatred beyond even his own ability to carry grudges. Then to have Tobirama of all people step in like some volunteer policeman? He feels almost tempted to check himself for signs of whiplash.

Hikaku stays with him until they are well within the boundaries of the Uchiha compound, probably worrying that he might wander off and get up to no good. Which, he can admit, sounds fairly relaxing at the moment. Nothing helps him let off a bit off steam more than pulling a good prank or two on his fellow clan members. Unfortunately he’s had to rein himself in a lot more often to make a good image for anyone watching the Uchiha a little too closely, putting their best foot forward until the gathered clans are all on more solid footing with each other. It’s a shame, really. Behaving is boring.

Left alone only a few streets away from his home, Izuna spends the last few minutes’ walk trying to figure out how to describe what has just transpired without making it sound like some weird over exaggeration. He wanders up their walkway with an absent thought that it looks like the grass seeds they planted are finally sprouting, green shoots rising from bare dirt to stand proud with no help from the mokuton they still deny needing, and scowls to know that it is now perhaps a little late in the season. They will die before they have a chance to live. Perhaps to take advantage of the help Hashirama offers will be necessary after all next year. Madara looks up as Izuna enters their home and matches his frown as though by instinct.

“What’s your problem?” he demands.

“Grass is finally growing,” Izuna mumbles as he kicks off his shoes. “And I got jumped in an alley. Sort of.”

Madara's paperwork drifts slowly down to his lap, eyes narrowing behind the reading glasses he so shamefully hides away from most people, fingers already tapping random patterns against his thigh with rapid thought.

“You look remarkably unruffled for someone who just got jumped.”

“Didn’t exactly turn in to a fight. Almost, there were two of them and one was saying something about me hurting his sister, but we got interrupted.”

“By?” his brother prompts him when he doesn’t go on.

Shuffling in to the room, Izuna flops down in the closest armchair and rolls his eyes. “Who do you think? My biggest fan showed up and just stood there like a ghostly statue, stared the two idiots down until I guess they decided they didn’t want to fight me and him at the same time.”

He feels almost flattered to see Madara set his paperwork entirely aside. As the years go by his brother has grown to be more and more of a workaholic, always needing to be productive and taking less time to simply relax, almost as though he were trying to fill some kind of hole in himself. Izuna wonders sometimes if the man is lonely but he never asks. Romance is generally one of the topics they try not to talk about beyond warning each other to go sleep somewhere else for a night on rare occasions.

“Just like that?” Madara asks eventually. “He showed up out of nowhere to just…stand there?”

“Pretty much. It was weird. When I tried to tell him I had the situation handled all he said was that you were looking for me and then he disappeared like he does except he didn’t go far. Do you think he even realizes that I’m a trained fucking shinobi and I can track chakra like everyone else if I put some effort in to it?”

Several minutes pass without answer but he knows his sibling well enough to know that Madara is only mulling the situation over in his head. Much to the contrary of what most people think, he does have the ability to think before he speaks; it’s just that he loses that ability when his emotions are high and that tends to happen a little too easily. Especially around the two Senju brothers. Both of their one-time enemies have their own way of evoking emotion fairly easily from those around them.

“I can’t say I know what’s in his mind but from what you’ve told me I don’t think he cares whether you know he’s there or not.” Madara hums as though considering his own statement.

“That’s just weird,” Izuna grumbles. “This whole thing is weird. People are actually starting to talk about it, do you realize that? And some of the rumors going around are wild! I’m pretty sure the man isn’t following me around because he’s secretly in love with me.”

“You never know,” Madara points out with the careful thought on his face morphing in to sly teasing.

“Oh don’t even suggest it,” Izuna shoots back, nose wrinkling with distaste.

It isn’t that Tobirama is particularly unattractive. Quite the opposite, actually; he’s been unfairly attractive since the rest of them were all gangly teenagers hating him a little more for having never suffered the indignation of a pimple at the end of his nose. Rather it’s the idea of trying to make a relationship work with someone he would constantly be comparing himself to that balks him. Being competitive is simply in his nature and Izuna is self-aware enough to admit that being so close in power to his partner would leave him feeling childishly not good enough.

His eyes close as he realizes that now he is worrying about this ridiculous possibility he hadn’t even given credence to until he was teased about it. Madara, the bastard, snickers at him from across the room.

“Maybe I can shake him if I volunteer to take a few missions,” Izuna muses aloud. “He’s really not harming me in any way but it’d be nice to not feel eyes following me around all the time. That plays havoc with all the years I spent training myself to be hyper aware of anyone watching me. I keep thinking he’s about to attack.”

“Afraid you’ll lose?” His brother pretends to nod in sage agreement, to which he lifts his middle finger.

“Don’t project your own insecurities on to me, old man.”

The wave of profanity that crashes over him in response flows in one ear and out the other as Izuna tunes it all out with the ease of practice. He is already trying to remember the mission list that got posted this morning and whether there had been anything on it which might keep him away for a few days just to relax, to breathe without having to wonder if red eyes might be watching his every movement.

Getting out of the village will be good for him anyway. It will be interesting to see how the climates have changed in the area with the forming of Konoha and all the other lands following their example. When the only thing he needed to call himself was an Uchiha there had been certain cities and towns that welcomed him with the relief of knowing he would protect them if need be while others had watched him pass through their lands from behind closed blinds, reporting every movement to the other clans they were allied with. Now that he carries with him the weight of Konohagakure on his shoulders he wonders how those same eyes will watch him. Friendly, the ally of his allies? Or will suspicion and prejudice linger as they all pretend that it doesn’t here in the village itself?

It feels strange to hope that lingering prejudice is the only reason Tobirama keeps following him around but Izuna finds his thoughts wandering back to the rumors of a strange romantic obsession and shudders, pushing the idea away as quickly as it returns to him. Some time away will hopefully clear his mind and allow him to come back to this odd situation with fresh eyes. Maybe then he will be able to see past the things he is afraid of finding to spot the real reason.

Like any good plan, however, it is subject to unexpected changes. Namely the innocent smile on Hashirama's face the next morning as he stands in the man’s office and stares with abject horror.

“You want me to what?”

“Accompany Tobirama on his mission! It’s a simple delivery but our intelligence says that Iwa shinobi have been spotted in the area and they’ve been doing everything they can to sabotage our efforts in reaching out to new allies.” His eyes turn soft in the way that says he is slipping away in to dreamy thoughts. “Normally I would send Touka with him, they’ve always worked well together, but then something Maddy said made me realize that it would be really good to make a show of unity, you know?”

“Unity.” Izuna parrots the word faintly, hardly able to believe his ears. He is going to kill his brother for this.

With an oblivious nod Hashirama goes on. “Yes! The biggest concern we see from the clans we’re reaching out to is their doubt that this peace is real. What better way to convince them of our sincerity than to see you and Tobi working together?”

“That’s very sound logic,” he has to admit. “Terrible, awful, and disgustingly sound logic.”

“Isn’t it? When I told Tobi my idea all he did was stare at me without saying anything. I would have thought he’d be proud of me for coming up with such a clever idea.”

Doing his best to ignore the most powerful man in the nation pouting at him like a child asking for sympathy, Izuna draws in a deep breath and lets it back out slowly. Of course his old rival had only stared. The man is probably leaping for maniacal joy on the inside to be handed such a perfect excuse to continue stalking him from even closer than usual. So much for getting some time away.

“Looks like I don’t have much of a choice but to accept,” Izuna mumbles more to himself than to Hashirama. After making a point to seek out a mission for himself it will only make him look like a dissenter if he refuses to work this one simply because of who he’s been asked to work with.

“Excellent! Right, I have a copy of the mission details here if you’d like to take the scroll and look it over. You’ll be leaving in two days so don’t worry about rushing, there’s plenty of time to get things together or find someone to cover your work. I know Tobi hates to come home and find his paperwork has piled up.”

“Does he now?”

The other man beams at his rhetorical question, clearly mistaking it for interest, and continues to blather on long past the point when Izuna stops listening. Now that he’s been enjoying the benefits of it for months he will be the last person to declare this peace a mistake but Izuna will freely and eagerly state for anyone who asks that he regrets the effects it seems to be having on Tobirama. Or more accurately he regrets that it has given the man chances such as the one he finds himself falling in to now.

Quietly planning revenge on his own brother for having any part in saddling him with this doom, Izuna allows Hashirama's voice to wash over him like a constant stream as he unrolls the scroll to peruse its contents. The mission itself doesn’t seem too complicated, typical first contact stuff, a good show of cooperation and goodwill before they saunter on home again. It’s ironically just the sort of thing he’s been hoping for. Of course, he’s been hoping to go alone or perhaps to drag Hikaku along with him. Now he is to be saddled with an extra shadow to follow along behind.

A little piece of home to come with him, he thinks wryly.

“Much as I appreciate your stellar conversation”-Izuna interrupts the flow of words without guilt the moment he is finished reading-“I do believe I should go set my paperwork in order now rather than leaving it until the last minute. Whoever takes up my duties while I’m gone won’t appreciate a messy filing system.”

“Yeah, Tobi’s always on my back to be less messy. I won’t keep you then!”

Izuna nods and turns away. He makes it all the way to the door and twists the handle when his attention is called back to see Hashirama’s face take on a hesitant, almost pensive expression.

“Thank you for accepting this mission. I know the two of you aren’t close the way Maddy and I are but I think…this will be good for him.” He says nothing more than that, no explanation for such cryptic words, and once again Izuna finds himself wondering whether this man knows what sort of behavior his sibling gets up to at every opportunity.

Rather than ask he simply nods and turns back to the door again. Tobirama tends to stay farther away whenever he keeps within the boundaries of the Uchiha compound. If he is to be denied the space he’s been trying to create for himself then Izuna very much intends to spend as much time as possible on his own before several days of having to walk side by side with his own unexplained stalker. Maybe – and it’s a big maybe – he might be able to force some sort of clue out of the man while they’re alone in the wilderness for days on end.

A man can dream, even if he dreams of nothing more than an answer to his questions.

[missixo]

St Balderich Slays the Dragon [8/19]

01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 (on tumblr)

This fic (on AO3)

Pairing: Balderich/Mondatta

Summary:  The humans are right to fear omnics and what they can do. What he can and will do to humanity. He is Jörmungandr, and he will see humanity fall.

St Balderich Slays the Dragon

Chapter 8

MD catches up with Broom more after returning to his office, settling into his new chair that they stole out of a storage room. They shrug and wave off his concerns. “It was collecting dust, figured none of the doctors would miss it.”

He laughs and nudges over the examination stool, an invitation for his friend to sit down. “I fully appreciate your pragmatism in this, I promise. Have you been able to find the part for Ozzie’s foot yet? You must be able to afford it by now, even on an omnic supervisor’s pay.” The thoughts of how little he and other omnics make compared to human counterparts almost sour his mood, but he chooses not to focus on it - for the moment. ‘Pay gaps won’t be an issue too much longer if I get my way.’

They take the seat with a small sigh from their vents, relaxing worn pistons and joints after two days on shift. “Still hunting. It’s a delicate part, and she’s an older model, so even the knock-offs are pricey. I’m looking at other options at this point; can’t get much more expensive than it is now.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure something out. Let me know if you need anything; I’m not the greatest at holding on to cash at the moment, but I’ve still got something in the bank.”

After Broom and his team are gone, MD spends the next two days getting settled in, putting his personal effects where he wants them, and in general rearranging the room as equipment is brought in. Each piece shrinks the space further and further, until it’s down to something he feels he can manage. It becomes a little cramped if any three Crusaders try to come in at once, but the limitation only makes it more his space and less open to invasion.

***

Miracle of miracles, Balderich gets no complaints about the new medic for a whole three days after the... memorable introduction. Of course, the first complaint he hears isn’t official by any means, simple lunchtime conversation, but that doesn’t make him any less concerned when he hears Andrea further down the table, rubbing his arm where a small bruise is blooming around an injection site.

“It’s got all the charm you’d expect from an omnic. I don’t sit perfectly still, and the thing sees fit to hold me down like an unruly child!”

It. Thing. A small slip, but massive for the implications. The words immediately reduce the omnic to lesser - something hardly worth anything, disposable and entirely replaceable without note. Balderich grits his teeth. He requested the omnic because he has a personality; it’s not the best one by a long shot - he’s so far prickly on a good day, and Balderich doubts they’ve seen a bad day yet.

“Andrea, a moment with me?” He makes a beckoning gesture.

“Yes sir.” The Italian is clearly confused, but follows him outside the mess hall. “Sir?”

Balderich speaks low, knowing this is not going to be well received, more so than censure usually is. “I know you are not particularly fond of omnics, but please. He is your medic, not a toaster, and not one of those rust buckets that try to shoot us. I know he is not the most pleasant individual, but that does speak to his individuality. He has an identity, and I am asking you to respect that. Are we clear?”

Andrea swallows, looking like he just sucked a lemon. “Yessir. May I be dismissed, sir? I would like to finish my lunch while it’s still warm.”

“Dismissed.” He follows Andrea after a minute, intent on finishing his own lunch even though his appetite is suddenly gone.

***

MD hits the BX for some rags and cleaner so he won’t have to constantly bother Broom and his crew for basic cleaning, but when he gets there he realizes he still needs a decent set of curtains for the windows and a privacy sheet for his cot… The space is rather plain at the moment… A new plant wouldn’t go amiss either.

He stops himself at the curtains and sheet, plus three small plants, and some cord to make a hanging planter. So much for money management there.

***

Jörmungandr checks his security feed for the fourth time in twenty-four hours the next day between patient check-ups. There has to be a way he can get back inside without having to walk through the middle of the hospital. He’s just missing something… He wasn’t necessarily close to getting to the fifth floor yet, even when he was outright living at the hospital, but now it’s so much harder with the fact he has to get in the damn building in the first place.

He’s just starting to look for other points of ingress when MD’s next patient comes in to review his medical file and he has to back out of the feed again. Back to updating medications, taking blood samples, and scheduling booster shots. Code-rotting boredom is what this job is.

***

Two days after he tempts fate once again - ‘I really need to stop doing that.’ - MD is woken by an alert on his HUD and banging on the medbay door accompanied by shouting. He pulls up the notice before he reaches the door and freezes, standing in the middle of the room.

THE CRUSADERS’ BARRACKS NOW UNDER QUARANTINE DUE TO POTENTIAL H3N2 FLU OUTBREAK.

ALL CRUSADERS ARE TO REPORT TO MEDICAL UNIT MD-8178 FOR EVALUATION AND RISK ASSESSMENT.

QUARANTINE WILL REMAIN ACTIVE UNTIL MEDICAL UNIT MD-8178 DECLARES RISK OF INFECTION SPREADING: NEGLIGIBLE.

… He just woke up. But he opens the door and tries to talk over them - difficult enough when they’re all calm - getting progressively louder, “If you would all get in a single file line, I will run the assessments as quickly as - I need you all to quiet - Just get in a line and -”

Ok. He’s not putting up with this, his day is starting great enough already. He ramps up the volume and gives them a lovely feedback shriek for a perfect five seconds. Next, a moment to let their ears stop ringing... “Get in a single file line and I’ll figure out which of you were dumb enough to get sick and bring this quarantine down on all of us. When your exam is complete, go wait in your quarters until I issue the results. No one is to be wandering the corridors during this time. You get caught, you go on report, and you will get caught.”

***

As he takes temperatures and checks for other symptoms, he revisits Hell Week and wants to strangle the omnic of almost three months ago. He’s still catching the fallout, unbelievable. Most of the organic bastions keep quiet, and he does end up checking that no one has any ruptured eardrums. An airhorn might have been kinder, but convenience and hindsight and all that. One or two still give him nasty looks - particularly that Italian - but there are witnesses so he counts himself safe enough.

He saves Balderich for last. “Colonel, provided you are not one of the possibly-infected, I think I will bring the list to you in your quarters and have you inform the men about who will be under stricter quarantines.”

He looks at him oddly. “Any particular reason why?”

“Because I need them as cooperative as possible, and they will take the idea of being confined to quarters for several days much better if it isn’t coming from an… from me. Turn your head, I need to check your eardrums.”

Balderich watches the omnic out of the corner of his eye. “... You are scared of us.”

MD hums, a note of ‘duh’ tucked in the sound. “I am am omnic living surrounded by men whose careers boil down to destroying omnics. I understand one phrase for such a situation is ‘sleeping in the lions’ den.’ Your eardrums appear to be undamaged, send me a note if you notice any sudden changes in balance, or a ringing in your ears, and I’ll come check on you in quarters.” MD turns away to dispose of the cap on the otoscope when a hot, heavy hand wraps tight around his forearm.

An automatic response to unexpected restraint kicks in and curls his fists tight, otoscope creaking under the pressure. His head swings around, looking for the delicate bone at the temple as his target. Balderich is just sitting there, relaxed except for the hold on his arm. MD warily lowers his unrestrained hand and drops the now destroyed tool in the bin with a hollow clank of metal on plastic. “Colonel, what exactly are you playing at?”

“This is why I requested you for our medic.”

“What? Why?” Requested him? Because he’s willing to crush his skull under threat?

The insane human has the audacity to shrug at him. “You don’t respond like most of the omnics on base. You have personality. What you just did in response to my actions is very similar to what a human would do.”

‘Well that’s just rude.’

“I requested you because I am worried my men are forgetting that - while they are, yes, protecting humanity - we are fighting for our way of life, which includes omnics like you. Some of them have come to think that all omnics should be destroyed, for safety, but if we did that every time part of a group became a threat to the world, most of my men’s grandparents would never have been born, after the Wars over a century ago. We would be in eastern France or western Poland right now - maybe even southern Denmark - instead. I understand that you are scared, but please do not let it stifle you.”

They sit there for a few minutes, looking at each other, evaluating. MD slowly relaxes his other fist in Balderich’s grip as fans kick on and a few small vents pop open. Balderich is watching the light from the window play on pale metal when the omnic lets out a strange sound - ‘Was that a squeak?’ - as he finally responds, rushed, “Thank you, Colonel, but I need to get these results together. I’ll bring them by your quarters later.”

He’s very quickly ushered - pushed, really - out and the door shuts behind him, the tint on the inset window going totally opaque. He stares at the probably-locked door, stunned, as he mutters to himself, “What just happened there?”

[whiteblazingphoenix]

It’s about atmosphere, not money

So there’s been a problem brewing at my workplace for some time.

For much of the week, I work the closing shift during which time I’m supposed to tidy the entire front of the shop all by myself while also manning the till. While there’s usually not too many customers sometimes there’s the odd unexpected surge. Normally I can do this with little to no problem though feeling like a yo-yo gets kind of old.

My assistant manager started to give me additional tasks to do during this time, such as filling an entire trolley of stuff into the fridge. This is where the problem started. I was simply left these things to do in addition to doing all my tidying and serving customers. I started to feel as if I was being given an unreasonable amount to do and not enough time to do it all in.....so relations between me and this manager became pretty strained to the point that I began to just ignore her. (I’ve never been great with confrontation).

She finally confronted me about the silent treatment one day, but did I get an apology? Nope. Instead I got told that this what I was expected to do (which by the way, was news to me at the time) and I ended up being the one having to apologise just to try and calm things down. Granted, maybe my reaction to the situation wasn’t the best but it was the better course than just blowing up in someone’s face. However I was still left feeling stressed and made to feel like some kind of villain.

Still, I noticed that I wasn’t getting these trolleys or other jobs to do during my tidying/till phase anymore. I thought that was the end of it, even though it seemed to cost me what friendship I’d previously had with the manager. It wasn’t something that I’d wanted to happen but at that point I just accepted it.

Fast forward to this week and the week before that. A new supervisor’s been around for a little while and she’s kind of unpopular with most. She works at a million miles an hour and seems to expect everyone else to do the same even if they’re not physically capable of doing so....such as myself. I think you can see where this is going.

For most of last week, she seemed to be on my case, telling to me to ‘do this, do that’ and starting this whole giving me things to do during tidying again. However my problem with her is HOW she talks to me; she seems to look down on me as if I’m never dong anything at all. She also has a really nasty habit of somehow deciding to tell me to do something when I’ve literally just finished doing something else like serving customers, staring at me as if I did nothing for the last few minutes.

This also came to a head again that Thursday, where she not only gave me the trolley for the fridge but also stressed the ‘20 minute time limit’ for the perishables that go in there, something I’m well aware of already. She expected me to fill a whole trolley in 20 minutes while also serving customers that showed up. It was the second part that she seemed to forget about and sure enough, I had to go and serve a fair queue of people at one point.

I heard her go on about the damn 20 minutes again. I decided to let her know calmly that I couldn’t be in two places at once. Her response? “You need to be faster then. Everyone else can do it, so why can’t you?”

To say the least, this royally ticked me off. I was working as fast as I can go, stressing myself out to try and finish everything in my shift time. Unfortunately it’s where I also messed up...because my reaction was to spend the rest of the shift in a really foul mood, to the point of slamming a box down in frustration. More on that later.

That Saturday I had a word with the regular manager about the supervisor’s actions towards me. The response was a bit of a shock....without going into too much detail, this supervisor’s burying herself in her work to forget about her other problems. The manager had previously worked with her at another shop for 6 months and grew accustomed to how she works and interacts with others. I thought this supervisor was out to get me but the manager assured me that this was not the case.

With this in mind, I wet to work yesterday knowing I would be in with the supervisor and made a concerted effort to be friendly and helpful towards her. We even had a little laugh here and there and got a decent bit of work done that morning. It was actually pretty pleasant.

Cue the end of my shift. Out of nowhere I get called into the office by the assistant manager (the same from before)....and it was the supervisor who passed the message on. She exited stage left.

I then ended up getting chewed out for ‘my attitude’ and the tidying up that I apparently didn’t do. There was a photo of a small corner of the front that I’d left empty? I’d only done that because the items next to it would not have fitted properly and it wouldn’t have looked neat, by the way. Maybe it was my bad but it was hardly worth being made to feel like shit over.

She proceeded to bring up Thursday’s moment with the supervisor as well as our own issues that I described earlier. I was also dawdling at the till at certain moments as well and multiple people had complained about me (FYI, the only times I am stood at the till are when there are customers nearby who seem like they’re heading over or when I literally have nothing left to do).

She told me that I needed to be faster and do whatever I given to do with no complaints. She told me all this without the slightest bit of respect for me, completely shoving my feelings on the matter to one side.

I am sick and tired of being treated like some kind of machine, being told that I’m not good enough and that I need to be ‘faster’. I go as fast as I can, I am not the most physically capable person in the world. All the times I’ve done good are completely ignored, only any mistakes I make get noticed (and I’m not perfect, I know I’m not). In the 6 and a half years I’ve worked there I’ve never felt so alienated or disrespected, not even by troublesome customers. It’s gotten to the point where I’m literally dreading walking in there each day. I’ve been stabbed in the back by at least three people (the assistant manager, supervisor and at least one other) and no longer feel as if I can trust anyone there. I want to leave, not because I want a better paying job (should also add that I get paid peanuts for putting up with this as well) but because the atmosphere has become so toxic and unforgiving.

Trouble is, I’m stuck there. There are no better paying jobs near where I live; they’re either zero hours, not enough hours or they want way too much qualification/experience. I’m trapped in this job that’s become a personal hell for me and I can’t walk out because my entire life will collapse in on itself if I do.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. :(

[captain-zajjy]

Solstice, Chapter 4 - A Final Fantasy XV Story

Pairing: Ignis x Female Original Character

AO3 | Chapter 1 2 3

A/N: This chapter takes place a couple of days after the first boss fight with Loqi. 

“Ow,” Valeria hissed.

The young medicus-in-training jerked his hand away from her stitches, and his supervisor clucked her tongue.

“You have to leave the antiseptic on for at least five seconds,” the supervisor said. “Regardless of the patient’s complaints.”

“S-sorry,” the trainee stammered out, although it was unclear to whom he was apologizing. He placed the medicine-soaked cloth back over the stitches just below the hollow of Valeria’s shoulder, and she girded herself against the sharp, stinging sensation suddenly radiating from her wound, while the trainee audibly counted to five. The Empire must have found that Insomnian refugees made the perfect subjects for training new recruits; the Niffs barely saw them as people, after all.

“Now, examine the integrity of the stitches,” the supervisor instructed. When the trainee medicus leaned in for a closer look, Valeria purposely clutched the sheet covering her breast a bit closer to her chest, causing the young man to blush profusely. Making Niffs uncomfortable, no matter how moderately, had been her sole means of entertainment these past five days since they invaded.

“Have you been using your arm?” The supervisor asked, almost accusatory.

“I’m trying not to, but it’s a little hard to get dressed,” Valeria admitted.

“Well, get someone to help you,” the senior medicus replied. “A couple of these stitches are close to tearing.”

“It’s kind of difficult to find help when you killed pretty much everyone I know.” Valeria glared at the older woman, daring her to look away first.

Someone suddenly shouted something about an officer, and then all the Imperials in the infirmary tent were on their feet, snapped to attention, the trainee a beat behind the rest. A blonde-haired man in a black breastplate with a large bandage covering the lower-right half of his face limped through, heavily favoring his right leg. Valeria assumed he was there for treatment, but he seemed to be questioning people, eventually stomping his way over to her.

“Valeria Soleil?” he asked, reading from a clipboard supplied by one of two soldiers flanking him.

This time, Valeria’s attempt to better cover herself was involuntary. They know you’ve been talking to Ignis, she thought, panic flooding her every synapse.

“I...” Fright had rendered her mind useless as she searched for a response, something - anything - to get her out of this.

“That’s correct, sir,” the medicus supervisor said, attempting to hand the officer Valeria’s medical file. He waved her off. Valeria wanted to take the sheet she was using to cover herself and strangle the woman with it.

“You ran the power company?” The officer asked, still looking at his clipboard.

“Uh...yes?” Valeria answered uncertainly. What did that have to do with Ignis and the Prince?

“Good. Meet me outside when you’re done here.” The officer turned, dragging his bad leg toward the tent entrance, while Valeria goggled at his back. What the hell?

“I’ll finish here,” the supervisor said, quickly grabbing clean bandages to cover Valeria’s stitches.

“Who is that?” Valeria asked, as if learning the man’s name would somehow allow her to make sense of the situation. If she was in trouble, if they suspected she knew Noctis’s whereabouts, certainly they wouldn’t be acting so casual. Would they?

“Someone important,” the senior medicus snapped, pressing the adhesive of the dressings into place.

“Brigadier General Loqi Tummelt,” the trainee said, adding, “Uh, I think,” when both Valeria and his supervisor stared at him.

“Hurry up,” the supervisor barked, unceremoniously tearing the sheet away from Valeria’s chest as the trainee went bright red. I’m wearing a bra, you fool, she thought, and the supervisor more or less shoved her shirt back over her head.

With her clothes back on and her left arm once again secured in that Gods forsaken sling, Valeria was left with a choice: she could leave via the opposite exit of the tent and run...and run and run and run, somehow find a way to escape the city and survive the wilderness of Leide with no supplies and one working arm. Or, she could do as instructed and meet the officer outside. He’s injured too, she reminded herself - barely able to walk from the looks of it. If something was amiss, she could still make her escape.

Valeria took a deep breath and stepped outside. The officer and his two lackeys were indeed waiting for her; the two soldiers’ faces were concealed behind polished helmets, but in the morning sun, she noticed that the officer was incredibly young - almost certainly younger than herself.

“What’s this about?” she asked, careful to stay out of his arms’ reach.

“Brigadier General Loqi Tummelt,” the officer said, briskly affecting an Imperial salute. “We need your help re-establishing power to the city.”

The power. Valeria’s relief was so immense she nearly snorted with laughter. “Why in the hell would I ever help you?”

Loqi seemed prepared for the question. “If we can re-establish power to the residential districts, then most of the people here can go home. You’re helping them, not me.”

Home. The word hung in the air, shimmering and enticing, just out of reach. “Downtown?” she ventured, unable to keep the hope from her voice.

“Only some outlying neighborhoods,” Loqi said, his expression impassive to her plight. “The city center’s too badly damaged to let anyone inside.”

Dammit. Still, she could hardly say no to helping her fellow Lucians. “It’s going to take a lot more than me to get the reactor working.”

Loqi shook his head and then grimaced, as if it caused him pain. “We just need to tap into the power grid - our magitek generators will supply the energy. I was hoping you could give us the master plans.”

“They were in company headquarters, which were downtown. Backup copies were in my mother’s townhouse, which was also downtown.” Valeria glanced at his right leg. “We could still search for them in the rubble, I guess.”

“Crap,” he muttered, almost petulantly, finally betraying his young age.

Valeria smirked, tapping the side of her head. “Fortunately for you, I’ve got about seventy-five percent of it up here.”

“You do?” Loqi’s blue eyes went wide. Bandage on his jaw aside, he wasn’t a bad-looking guy, although the baby-face look was decidedly not her type.

“The primary substations, anyway. Which is what you need access to.”

“Here.” Loqi handed Valeria the clipboard. It held a map of Insomnia with her name and ID number scribbled in the top corner. There was a circle around the downtown area of the city that included the Citadel, the rest broken up into numbered quadrants. “We need to restore power to One and Two.” He indicated the western half of the city with a pen.

Valeria plucked the writing instrument from his gloved hand and began to roughly draw in the actual city sectors to the best of her memory. There were six within the area Loqi had indicated.

“Wait, this doesn’t even make sense,” he said, frowning at the map. “This one is so small, and then this area is huge...”

Valeria wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. Don’t quit your day job, kid. “It’s based on power consumption, not geography. So, the small area here is the manufacturing district, and then this large one is mostly parks.”

“Huh...” Loqi studied the map for a few more seconds before breaking into a grin, made rather lopsided by the bandage covering half his jaw. “Looks like you just won me five hundred gil, ma’am.”

“What?”

“Got a bet with my lieutenant, who’s been put in charge of sanitation. To see who could get their part up and running first.”

Valeria narrowed her eyes. A bet? She wanted to slap him right in his damned wound. I’m glad this is fun for you.

“First of all,” she looked Loqi in the eye, “Don’t call me ‘ma’am.’ I’m not that much older than you. Second...” People’s lives are not a game. Rather than speak her mind, she forced herself to return his smirk. “Sanitation can’t run without power. You play dirty, Brigadier General.” The playful, almost flirtatious tone of her voice made Valeria herself feel ill. But that old adage about catching more flies with honey usually held true.

They prioritized the residential sectors, and then she accompanied Loqi on one of those big, inelegant-looking transport ships to a large, working-class neighborhood just south of the Imperial camp. To Valeria’s great dismay, a cadre of magitek troopers followed them down the empty street.

“What are those for?” Valeria could swear she felt the muzzles of the rifles trained on her back, but every time she turned around, the MTs held their guns at inattention, ignoring her completely.

“Daemons,” Loqi said, wincing with every slow step.

She opened her mouth to say there were no daemons in the Crown City, not outside of photos and old men’s stories...but that was no longer true. The King’s magic had protected them, and the King was gone. Damn you all.

“Do you really think there are daemons here?” she said instead. The sun was still hanging fat and bright above them.

“Better to be safe than sorry. And,” there was a definite note of frustration in Loqi’s voice, “it’s going to be a little while before I’m in fighting shape again.”

“So, you’re usually on the front lines,” she ventured.

“I was stationed at the Norduscaen Blockade,” he said. “Now, I’m stuck here until my wounds heal.”

“I see.” Valeria turned this information over in her mind. It wasn’t surprising that the Empire would reassign an injured officer to administrative tasks; what was noteworthy was that he wasn’t comfortably ensconced behind a desk somewhere, but instead dragging his injured leg all over the city. It wasn’t just a reassignment - it was a punishment. The blockade must have fallen then, she thought. Valeria hadn’t heard anything about it, but then, the refugee camp was rife with misinformation anyway: half the people believed the official word that Prince Noctis was dead, while the other half insisted that King Regis was holed up in the city somewhere, waiting to launch his counterstrike.

So, I’ve got a young officer fresh off a major failure. She’d have to play this carefully - very carefully - but she had every confidence she could, in fact, play him like a deck of cards.

Valeria accompanied Loqi to a working-class neighborhood just South of the Imperial camp and showed him to the power substation located underground along the subway line, scratching out a bunch of calculations to determine just how much energy the Empire’s magitek generators would need to produce to properly supply the area. Her phone had been vibrating almost non-stop in her pocket; Ignis, she suspected, but could hardly take a call from the Prince’s retainer with an Imperial officer looking over her shoulder. When she at last returned to her bunk, she finally went to check her phone, but was interrupted by a now-familiar voice.

“You were gone for a long time.”

Valeria stuck her phone back in her pocket and turned to face Felix, the kid who’d lent her his phone charger that first day, sitting cross-legged on his cot. After noticing his Academy uniform jacket, she’d struck up a friendship of sorts with the young teen - he didn’t say much, spent most of the day glued to games on his phone, but she could hardly blame him for that. Valeria didn’t ask, but it was obvious he was every bit as alone as she was, his parents likely killed in the invasion along with her mother.

“Trying to help get the power back on, so we can all go home.” Valeria tried to give him her best smile, although she wasn’t certain it was very convincing. She no longer had a home to return to, and he probably didn’t either.

“You wanna play King’s Knight later?” she asked. Felix shrugged. They’d already played a few times, and Valeria had purposely played her bad cards, letting him win. She decided to take his ambivalent gesture as tacit assent.

“I just have to make a phone call, then we can play,” she said, going back to her own cot to sit down. She pulled out her phone and hunched over to obscure the screen from any prying eyes.

Six missed calls from...Dad. Dad. She exhaled in irritation. Took you long enough. Bracing herself for his incoming bullshit, she dialed him back.

“Hello? Hello?” Panic was evident in her father’s voice, and she might have even felt sorry for him if it hadn’t taken him five damn days to check in on her.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Oh, honey...” Her father let out a long sigh of relief. “I was so worried about you! Are you okay, sweetie?”

“Dad, it’s been five days,” Valeria said.

“I know, sweetie. I’m so sorry. My girlfriend and I were out camping and I only just heard the news. You’re not hurt, are you?”

Girlfriend. The word made Valeria want to vomit. How old is she this time?  The last one had been closer to Valeria’s age than her father’s.

“Mom’s dead,” she said flatly.

“Oh, I...” her father went very quiet. “I... I’m sorry to hear that, honey.”

“Are you?” Valeria snapped, her free hand balling into a fist, causing her wounded shoulder to twinge. Now you can marry your damned girlfriend.

“Valeria, you know things were complicated with me and your mother, but this... This is terrible.”

“Yeah.” She didn’t try to keep the resentment from her voice. How could her mother have still cared about this guy? “Sorry to bum you out on your date.”

“Valeria, don’t be like that. I know you’re upset-”

“I watched them shoot her,” Valeria said through clenched teeth. “Where were you? Why weren’t you here?”

“Sweetie...”

Valeria felt her tears, hot and salty, rolling down her cheeks. Why did you leave me?

“I’m going to hop on the next ferry to Galdin and come get you,” her father went on. “Can you meet me there?”

“No.” Valeria swiped her face with the back of her hand and placed the phone back to her ear. “Don’t bother.”

“You can stay with us in Accordo. You’ll be safe here.”

Us. He was talking about his girlfriend - whoever she was this time. The woman he’d been shacking up with when her mother was killed. She'd rather take her chances with the Niffs.

“I’m fine,” Valeria said. “I don’t need your help.”

Her father let out a long sigh. “If that’s what you want...” It only made her angrier that he acquiesced immediately, that he didn’t insist on rescuing her - like a father should. “But if you change your mind, I’ll come for you.”

He was about ten years too late for that.

Ignis stood on the balcony of the Amicitia’s suite at the Leville, the scorching temperature in Lestallum finally having dropped to something bearable after the sun set. Upbeat music from a pickup band in the street below drifted up to where he stood, mingling with the sound of Iris, Prompto, and Noctis talking inside the hotel room. Gladiolus sat on the bed opposite them, browsing the sort of magazine one should probably never look at in front of one’s sister (“The articles are really well-written, Iggy”).

A happy enough scene now, but there was still an edge to Noctis’s voice, and several hours earlier, when Ignis had settled into the bath, he’d overheard Iris crying to Gladio about their father’s apparent death in the adjacent room.

We’ve all put on our brave faces, Ignis thought, leaning against the exterior wall of the suite and staring up at the stars. It was something he liked to do when he had a free moment at home - stand on the small terrace of his apartment, take a few deep breaths, and gaze up at the heavens, reminding himself that the world was much wider than himself, the Prince, and the Crown city. He missed home, missed the familiar comfort of his own apartment and his own bed, missed the familiar rhythm of running errands for Noctis throughout the day.

Now, it was all gone. That life was as dead as their late King, as ruined as their once great city. And this sort of wistful dwelling on the past would accomplish nothing, would not aid Noctis in his upcoming fight. Ignis turned to rejoin the group when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket.

Valeria. If there had been any way for him to get her safely out of Insomnia, he would have taken off right then and driven through the night (as much as he hated doing that) to retrieve her. But his duty came first.

“Iggy?” Valeria sounded a bit more like herself, much to his relief, but there was a definite tension in her voice, a hesitation that instantly concerned him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. Aside from the obvious.

There was a long sigh on the other end of the line. “I guess there’s no nice way to put this... Your uncle’s dead. I’m sorry, Iggy.”

Ignis inhaled sharply, his free hand tightening on the railing. In his heart, he’d known this all along, since he first heard of the attack. Even so...

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For letting me know.”

“I’m sorry,” Valeria said again.

Uncle... He had been the closest thing Ignis had to a father, at least that he could clearly recall, and yet all Ignis could feel at his passing was a vague sense of emptiness. Perhaps, with all the terrible news of the last week, he’d simply become numb to grief.

Still, he was eternally grateful to his uncle for taking him in after his parents had died and raising him, perhaps not exactly as a son, but the man had done the best he could with a child he’d never asked for. Uncle...thank you.

“Iggy? Are you okay?”

“Yes.” It was more than half a lie. “How are you bearing up?”

“Fair, I guess. I’m bored out of my mind,” she said, her tone shifting to something more casual. “And my stitches are starting to drive me nuts.”

Ignis’s head snapped up. “Stitches? You’re injured?”

“Oh.” Valeria let out a sheepish laugh. “I guess I forgot to say. It doesn’t really hurt anymore, just itches like crazy.”

“Valeria.” Ignis assumed the tone that always sent Noctis and Prompto running, the one that even Gladiolus didn’t try to argue with.

It worked on her too. He didn’t even have to speak his question aloud. “I... I got shot. The night they attacked.”

Ignis’s eyes went wide, the ground lurched under his feet. “They shot you?” Those bloody Niff bastards.

“Shot me, and then patched me up. I still don’t get what they’re playing at.”

Ignis was still fixated on the fact that she’d been hurt. Shot, for Gods’ sakes. “Where?”

“It was through the muscle,” she explained. “Just below my collar bone. No lasting damage, I don’t think.”

“Gods damn it,” he growled. He knew it was impolite to curse in front of a lady, but couldn't help himself. ‘No lasting damage’ didn’t erase the fact that the Niffs had tried to kill her.

“I’m fine, Iggy. Obviously,” Valeria said. “Like I said, it’s really more annoying than anything.”

He shook his head, rage swelling behind his eyelids. “They’ll pay for this, Valeria. I swear to you.” For hurting her, killing her mother, his uncle, their King. For everything.

“How very gallant.” There was a playful edge to her voice, one he was well familiar with, although he wasn’t sure if it was at his expense this time.

“I’m serious, Val.”

“I know you are. Let me help.”

Ignis blinked. “What?”

“Let me help you,” she repeated. “I’m here with them. I can gain their trust, listen in on their plans. I’ve already been working on one-”

“No,” Ignis interrupted her, adamantly shaking his head even though she couldn’t see him. “That’s too dangerous.” You’ve already been shot.

“Dammit, Ignis. You’re not the only one who wants revenge.”

Ignis began to pace the little balcony. The woman could be bloody stubborn when she wanted to be - usually an admirable quality, but not when her well-being was at stake. “No, but I’ve trained for this.”

“And I haven’t? Half of my job was telling people what they wanted to hear.”

“Your life wasn’t on the line.” She wasn’t the only one who could be stubborn.

“Fine,” she snapped. “Give me the Prince’s phone number, then. I’ll deal with him directly.”

Blast it, Ignis thought. Did she really just ask to speak to his manager? “You’re bloody impossible, do you know that?”

Valeria scoffed. “Look who’s talking. Listen - I’m going to do this, with or without your ‘permission.’ A little direction, however, would be nice.”

Ignis took a deep breath, trying to stem his annoyance. “I... I need you to be safe. Please understand that.” He may have prepared himself for the news about his uncle, but her...just contemplating that possibility left him shaking.

“I know, Iggy,” she said softly. “Just trust me to know what I’m doing, okay?”

He knew her verbal tricks well enough to recognize when she was using one on him - playing dirty, as it were. “Very well.” To respond with anything else would have been insulting. “Allow me to get back to you with ‘instructions.’”

After repeatedly begging Valeria to be careful and bidding her a good night, Ignis returned the phone to his pocket and rested his elbows on the balcony railing, hanging his head. Uncle...

Out of their entire group, it seemed only Prompto had emerged from Nifleheim’s attack without losing someone in his family. He said his parents had made it out of the city in the evacuation and made for Accordo immediately.

If only Valeria had escaped as well. Ignis understood her need to be useful all too well, to be actively working toward some sort of goal, but he couldn’t help feeling that she was dangerously out of her depth. The Empire had proven their capacity for treachery and duplicity extended far beyond any of their worst assumptions.

“Yo, Specs.” Ignis turned to see Noctis sliding the suite’s balcony door closed behind him.

“Another headache?” Ignis asked.

Noctis shook his head. “You alright?”

“Fine,” Ignis replied automatically.

Noctis cocked his head and arched an eyebrow; the expression was as good as ordering Ignis to speak his mind.

“I...” It took more effort than he expected to keep his voice level. “I’ve just received word that my uncle was killed during the invasion.”

Noctis ground his teeth and joined Ignis in leaning over the balcony railing. “...Dammit,” he murmured. After a while, he added, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s hardly your fault, Noct.” Ignis knew the attack on Insomnia was weighing heavily on the Prince’s conscience, and the last thing he wanted was to add to that burden.

“It was my dad’s,” Noctis replied petulantly.

“No,” Ignis corrected him once more. “The blame for all of this falls solely on the Empire.”

“Yeah, but he knew!” Noctis shouted. Behind them, Ignis could see Iris and Prompto freeze in their conversation, peering out through the glass door. He held up a hand to indicate that everything was fine. “He knew, dammit,” the Prince went on, muttering. “He knew people would die.”

Ignis sighed, knowing that one day King Noctis Lucis Caelum might very well face a similar impossible decision. And though it would be Ignis’s job to advise him on such matters, it wasn’t the same as actually having to make the call.

“Why did he only try to protect me? My life isn’t worth more than your uncle’s, or Gladio’s dad, or anyone else...” Noctis said quietly, his knuckles going white as he gripped the railing.

Ignis frowned. “Unfortunately, that’s simply not true.” When Noctis turned to glare at him, he explained. “Only your line can collect the Royal Arms and wield the power of the Crystal. And, in a more practical sense, the Crown Prince serves as a rallying point for our fractured kingdom. A light in the darkness, as it were.”

Noctis’s scowl deepened. “I don’t want to be ‘more important’ than anyone else.”

“A testament to how well your father raised you, I think,” Ignis said. “I’m sure there have been many princes who felt quite the opposite.”

In response, Noctis sucked his teeth and rolled his eyes.

“Noct, we all want to go home,” Ignis said softly. “We all want to wake up to find this was a terrible dream. But we owe it to those who perished to persevere, to take back what was lost. Whether we like it or understand it is of little consequence.”

Noctis’s shoulders slumped. “Dammit, Specs. You always gotta be right, don’t you?” he lamented.

“My speciality.” Ignis forced a small smile. “But just because you’re moving forward doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to feel things along the way, you know. A king is just a man, after all.”

“Yeah,” Noctis said, staring at his shoes. “Definitely feeling the ‘just a man’ part lately.”

Ignis put his hand on the Prince’s shoulder. “I’m with you, Noct. To the very end.” No matter where my heart is pulling me.

[nowontheroad]

It was a horrible crew of men, men with cop-souls, all except Remi and myself. Remi was only trying to make a living, and so was I, but these men wanted to make arrests and compliments from the chief of police in town. They even said < that if you didn't make at least one a month you'd be fired. I" gulped at the prospect of making an arrest. What actually' happened was that I was as drunk as anybody in the barracks -the night all hell broke loose.

This was a night when the schedule was so arranged that 1 was all alone for six hours-the only cop on the grounds; and * everybody in the barracks seemed to have gotten drunk that' night. It was because their ship was leaving in the morning. < They drank like seamen the night before the anchor goes up. I sat in the office with my feet on the desk, reading Blue Book' adventures about Oregon and the north country, when suddenly I realized there was a great hum of activity in the usually quiet night. I went out. Lights were burning in practically every damned shack on the grounds. Men were shouting, bottles were breaking. It was do or die for me. I took my flashlight and went to the noisiest door and knocked. Someone opened it about six inches.

"What do you want?"

I said, "I'm guarding these barracks tonight and you boys are supposed to keep quiet as much as you can"-or some such silly remark. They slammed the door in my face. I stood looking at the wood of it against my nose. It was like a Western movie; the time had come for me to assert myself. I knocked again. They opened up wide this time. "Listen," I said, "I don't want to come around bothering you fellows, but I'll lose my job if you make too much noise."

"Who are you?"

"I'm a guard here."

"Never seen you before."

"Well, here's my badge."

"What are you doing with that pistolcracker on your ass?"

"It isn't mine," I apologized. "I borrowed it."

"Have a drink, fer krissakes." I didn't mind if I did. I took two.

I said, "Okay, boys? You'll keep quiet, boys? I'll get hell, you know."

"It's all right, kid," they said. "Go make your rounds. Come back for another drink if you want one."

And I went to all the doors in this manner, and pretty soon I was as drunk as anybody else. Come dawn, it was my duty to put up the American flag on a sixty-foot pole, and this morning I put it up upside down and went home to bed. When I came back in the evening the regular cops were sitting around grimly in the office.

"Say, bo, what was all the noise around here last night? We've had complaints from people who live in those houses across the canyon."

"I don't know," I said. "It sounds pretty quiet right now."

"The whole contingent's gone. You was supposed to keep order around here last night-the chief is yelling at you. And another thing-do you know you can go to jail for putting the American flag upside down on a government pole?"

"Upside down?" I was horrified; of course I hadn't realized it. I did it every morning mechanically.

"Yessir," said a fat cop who'd spent twenty-two years as a guard in Alcatraz. "You could go to jail for doing something like that." The others nodded grimly. They were always sitting around on their asses; they were proud of their jobs. They handled their guns and talked about them. They were itching to shoot somebody. Remi and me.

The cop who had been an Alcatraz guard was potbellied and about sixty, retired but unable to keep away from the atmospheres that had nourished his dry soul all his life. Every night he drove to work in his '35 Ford, punched the clock exactly on time, and sat down at the rolltop desk. He labored painfully over the simple form we all had to fill out every night-rounds, time, what happened, and so on. Then he leaned back and told stories. "You should have been here about two months ago when me and Sledge" (that was another cop, a youngster who wanted to be a Texas Ranger and had to be satisfied with his present lot) "arrested a drunk in Barrack G. Boy, you should have seen the blood fly. I'll take you over there tonight and show you the stains on the wall. We had him bouncing from one wall to another. First Sledge hit him, and then me, and then he subsided and went quietly. That fellow swore to kill us when he got out of jail-got thirty days. Here it is sixty days, and he ain't showed up." And this was the big point of the story. They'd put such a fear in him that he was too yellow to come back and try to kill them.

The old cop went on, sweetly reminiscing about the horrors of Alcatraz. "We used to march 'em like an Army platoon to breakfast. Wasn't one man out of step. Everything went like clockwork. You should have seen it. I was a guard there for twenty-two years. Never had any trouble. Those boys knew we meant business. A lot of fellows get soft guarding prisoners, and they're the ones that usually get in trouble. Now you take you-from what I've been observing about you, you seem to me a little bit too leenent with the men." He raised his pipe and looked at me sharp. "They take advantage of that, you know."

I knew that. I told him I wasn't cut out to be a cop.

"Yes, but that's the job that you applied for. Now you got to make up your mind one way or the other, or you'll never get anywhere. It's your duty. You're sworn in. You can't compromise with things like this. Law and order's got to be kept."

I didn't know what to say; he was right; but all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.

The other cop, Sledge, was tall, muscular, with a black-haired crew-cut and a nervous twitch in his neck-like a boxer who's always punching one fist into another. He rigged himself out like a Texas Ranger of old. He wore a revolver down low, with ammunition belt, and carried a small quirt of some kind, and pieces of leather hanging everywhere, like a walking torture chamber: shiny shoes, low-hanging jacket, cocky hat, everything but boots. He was always showing me holds- reaching down under my crotch and lifting me up nimbly. In point of strength I could have thrown him clear to the ceiling with the same hold, and I knew it well; but I never let him know for fear he'd want a wrestling match. A wrestling match with a guy like that would end up in shooting. I'm sure he was a better shot; I'd never had a gun in my life. It scared me even to load one. He desperately wanted to make arrests. One night we were alone on duty and he came back red-faced mad.

"I told some boys in there to keep quiet and they're still making noise. I told them twice. I always give a man two chances. Not three. You come with me and I'm going back there and arrest them."

"Well, let me give them a third chance," I said. "I'll talk to them."

"No, sir, I never gave a man more than two chances." I sighed. Here we go. We went to the offending room, and Sledge opened the door and told everybody to file out. It was embarrassing. Every single one of us was blushing. This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink the night? But Sledge wanted to prove something. He made sure to bring me along in case they jumped him. They might have. They were all brothers, all from Alabama. We strolled back to the station, Sledge in front and me in back.

One of the boys said to me, "Tell that crotch-eared mean-ass to take it easy on us. We might get fired for this and never get to Okinawa."

"I'll talk to him."

In the station I told Sledge to forget it. He said, for everybody to hear, and blushing, "I don't give anybody no more than two chances."

"What the hail," said the Alabaman, "what difference does it make? We might lose our jobs." Sledge said nothing and filled out the arrest forms. He arrested only one of them; he called the prowl car in town. They came and took him away. The other brothers walked off sullenly. "What's Ma going to say?" they said. One of them came back to me. "You tell that Tex-ass son of a bitch if my brother ain't out of jail tomorrow night he's going to get his ass fixed." I told Sledge, in a neutral way, and he said nothing. The brother was let off easy and nothing happened. The contingent shipped out; a new wild bunch came in. If it hadn't been for Remi Boncoeur I wouldn't have stayed at this job two hours.

But Remi Boncceur and I were on duty alone many a night, and that's when everything jumped. We made our first round of the evening in a leisurely way, Remi trying all the doors to see if they were locked and hoping to find one unlocked. He'd say, "For years I've an idea to develop a dog into a super thief who'd go into these guys' rooms and take dollars out of their pockets. I'd train him to take nothing but green money; I'd make him smell it all day long. If there was any humanly possible way, I'd train him to take only twenties." Remi was full of mad schemes; he talked about that dog for weeks. Only once he found an unlocked door. I didn't like the idea, so I sauntered on down the hall. Remi stealthily opened it up. He came face to face with the barracks supervisor. Remi hated that man's face. He asked me, "What's the name of that Russian author you're always talking about-the one who put the newspapers in his shoe and walked around in a stovepipe hat he found in a garbage pail?" This was an exaggeration of what I'd told Remi of Dostoevski. "Ah, that's it-that's it- Dostioffski. A man with a face like that supervisor can only have one name-it's Dostioffski." The only unlocked door he ever found belonged to Dostioffski. D. was asleep when he heard someone fiddling with his doorknob. He got up in his pajamas. He came to the door looking twice as ugly as usual. When Remi opened it he saw a haggard face suppurated with hatred and dull fury.

"What is the meaning of this?"

"I was only trying this door. I thought this was the-ah- mop room. I was looking for a mop."

"What do you mean you were looking for a mop?"

"Well-ah."

And I stepped up and said, "One of the men puked in the hall upstairs. We have to mop it up."

"This is not the mop room. This is my room. Another incident like this and I'll have you fellows investigated and thrown out! Do you understand me clearly?"

"A fellow puked upstairs," I said again.

"The mop room is down the hall. Down there." And he pointed, and waited for us to go and get a mop, which we did, and foolishly carried it upstairs.

I said, "Goddammit, Remi, you're always getting us into trouble. Why don't you lay off? Why do you have to steal all the time?"

"The world owes me a few things, that's all. You can't teach the old maestro a new tune. You go on talking like that and I'm going to start calling you Dostioffski."

Remi was just like a little boy. Somewhere in his past, in his lonely schooldays in France, they'd taken everything from him; his stepparents just stuck him in schools and left him there; he was browbeaten and thrown out of one school after another; he walked the French roads at night devising curses out of his innocent stock of words. He was out to get back everything he'd lost; there was no end to his loss; this thing would drag on forever.

The barracks cafeteria was our meat. We looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and especially to see if any of our cop friends were lurking about to check on us; then I squatted down, and Remi put a foot on each shoulder and up he went. He opened the window, which was never locked since he saw to it in the evenings, scrambled through, and came down on the flour table. I was a little more agile and just jumped and crawled in. Then we went to the soda fountain. Here, realizing a dream of mine from infancy, I took the cover off the chocolate ice cream and stuck my hand in wrist-deep and hauled me up a skewer of ice cream and licked at it. Then we got ice-cream boxes and stuffed them, poured chocolate syrup over and sometimes strawberries too, then walked around in the kitchens, opened iceboxes, to see what we could take home in our pockets. I often tore off a piece of roast beef and wrapped it in a napkin. "You know what President Truman said," Remi would say. "We must cut down on the cost of living."

One night I waited a long time as he filled a huge box full of groceries. Then we couldn't get it through the window. Remi had to unpack everything and put it back. Later in the night, when he went off duty and I was all alone on the base, a strange thing happened. I was taking a walk along the old canyon trail, hoping to meet a deer (Remi had seen deer around, that country being wild even in 1947), when I heard a frightening noise in the dark. It was a huffing and puffing. I thought it was a rhinoceros coming for me in the dark. I grabbed my gun. A tall figure appeared in the canyon gloom; it had an enormous head. Suddenly I realized it was Remi with a huge box of groceries on his shoulder. He was moaning and groaning from the enormous weight of it. He'd found the key to the cafeteria somewhere and had got his groceries out the front door. I said, "Remi, I thought you were home; what the hell are you doing?"

And he said, "Paradise, I have told you several times what President Truman said, we must cut down on the cost of living." And I heard him huff and puff into the darkness. I've already described that awful trail back to our shack, up hill and down dale. He hid the groceries in the tall grass and came back to me. "Sal, I just can't make it alone. I'm going to divide it into two boxes and you're going to help me."

"But I'm on duty."

"I'll watch the place while you're gone. Things are getting rough all around. We've just got to make it the best way we can, and that's all there is to it." He wiped his face. "Whoo! I've told you time and time again, Sal, that we're buddies, and we're in this thing together. There's just no two ways about it. The Dostioffskis, the cops, the Lee Anns, all the evil skulls of this world, are out for our skin. It's up to us to see that nobody pulls any schemes on us. They've got a lot more up their sleeves besides a dirty arm. Remember that. You can't teach the old maestro a new tune."

I finally asked, "Whatever are we going to do about shipping out?" We'd been doing these things for ten weeks. I was making fifty-five bucks a week and sending my aunt an average of forty. I'd spent only one evening in San Francisco in all that time. My life was wrapped in the shack, in Remi's battles with Lee Ann, and in the middle of the night at the barracks.

Remi was gone off in the dark to get another box. I struggled with him on that old Zorro road. We piled up the groceries a mile high on Lee Ann's kitchen table. She woke up and rubbed her eyes.

"You know what President Truman said?" She was delighted. I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief. I was getting the bug myself. I even began to try to see if doors were locked. The other cops were getting suspicious of us; they saw it in our eyes; they understood with unfailing instinct what was on our minds. Years of experience had taught them the likes of Remi and me.

In the daytime Remi and I went out with the gun and tried to shoot quail in the hills. Remi sneaked up to within three feet of the clucking birds and let go a blast of the .32. He missed. His tremendous laugh roared over the California woods and over America. "The time has come for you and me to go and see the Banana King."

It was Saturday; we got all spruced up and went down to the bus station on the crossroads. We rode into San Francisco and strolled through the streets. Remi's huge laugh resounded everywhere we went. "You must write a story about the Banana King," he warned me. "Don't pull any tricks on the old maestro and write about something else. The Banana King is your meat. There stands the Banana King." The Banana King was an old man selling bananas on the corner. I was completely bored. But Remi kept punching me in the ribs and even dragging me along by the collar. "When you write about the Banana King you write about the human-interest things of life." I told him I didn't give a damn about the Banana King. "Until you learn to realize the importance of the Banana King you will know absolutely nothing about the human-interest things of the world," said Remi emphatically.

There was an old rusty freighter out in the bay that was used as a buoy. Remi was all for rowing out to it, so one afternoon Lee Ann packed a lunch and we hired a boat and went out there. Remi brought some tools. Lee Ann took all her clothes off and lay down to sun herself on the flying bridge. I watched her from the poop. Remi went clear down to the boiler rooms below, where rats scurried around, and began hammering and banging away for copper lining that wasn't there. I sat in the dilapidated officer's mess. It was an old, old ship and had been beautifully appointed, with scrollwork in the wood, and built-in seachests. This was the ghost of the San Francisco of Jack London. I dreamed at the sunny messboard. Rats ran in the pantry. Once upon a time there'd been a blue-eyed sea captain dining in here.

I joined Remi in the bowels below. He yanked at everything loose. "Not a thing. I thought there'd be copper, I thought there'd be at least an old wrench or two. This ship's been stripped by a bunch of thieves." It had been standing in the bay for years. The copper had been stolen by a hand that was a hand no more.

I said to Remi, "I'd love to sleep in this old ship some night when the fog comes in and the thing creaks and you hear the big B-O of the buoys."

Remi was astounded; his admiration for me doubled. "Sal, I'll pay you five dollars if you have the nerve to do that. Don't you realize this thing may be haunted by the ghosts of old sea captains? I'll not only pay you five, I'll row you out and pack you a lunch and lend you blankets and candle."

"Agreed!" I said. Remi ran to tell Lee Ann. I wanted to jump down from a mast and land right in her, but I kept my promise to Remi. I averted my eyes from her.

Meanwhile I began going to Frisco more often; I tried everything in the books to make a girl. I even spent a whole night with a girl on a park bench, till dawn, without success. She was a blonde from Minnesota. There were plenty of queers. Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar John I took out the gun and said, "Eh? Eh? What's that you say?" He bolted. I've never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country. It was just the loneliness of San Francisco and the fact that I had a gun. I had to show it to someone. I walked by a jewelry store and had the sudden impulse to shoot up the window, take out the finest rings and bracelets, and run to give them to Lee Ann. Then we could flee to Nevada together. The time was coming for me to leave Frisco or I'd go crazy.

I wrote long letters to Dean and Carlo, who were now at Old Bull's shack in the Texas bayou. They said they were ready to come join me in San Fran as soon as this-and-that was ready. Meanwhile everything began to collapse with Remi and Lee Ann and me. The September rains came, and with them harangues. Remi had flown down to Hollywood with her, taking my sad silly movie original, and nothing had happened. The famous director was drunk and paid no attention to them; they hung around his Malibu Beach cottage; they started fighting in front of other guests; and they flew back.

The final topper was the racetrack. Remi saved all his money, about a hundred dollars, spruced me up in some of his clothes, put Lee Ann on his arm, and off we went to Golden Gate racetrack near Richmond across the bay. To show you what a heart that guy had, he put half of our stolen groceries in a tremendous brown paper bag and took them to a poor widow he knew in Richmond in a housing project much like our own, wash flapping in the California sun. We went with him. There were sad ragged children. The woman thanked Remi. She was the sister of some seaman he vaguely knew. "Think nothing of it, Mrs. Carter," said Remi in his most elegant and polite tones. "There's plenty more where that came from."

We proceeded to the racetrack. He made incredible twenty-dollar bets to win, and before the seventh race he was broke. With our last two food dollars he placed still another bet and lost. We had to hitchhike back to San Francisco. I was on the road again. A gentleman gave us a ride in his snazzy car. I sat up front with him. Remi was trying to put a story down that he'd lost his wallet in back of the grandstand at the track. "The truth is," I said, "we lost all our money on the races, and to forestall any more hitching from racetracks, from now on we go to a bookie, hey, Remi?" Remi blushed all over. The man finally admitted he was an official of the Golden Gate track. He let us off at the elegant Palace Hotel; we watched him disappear among the chandeliers, his pockets full of money, his head held high.

"Wagh! Whoo!" howled Remi in the evening streets of Frisco. "Paradise rides with the man who runs the racetrack and swears he's switching to bookies. Lee Ann, Lee Ann!" He punched and mauled her. "Positively the funniest man in the world! There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito. Aaah-how!" He wrapped himself around a pole to laugh.

That night it started raining as Lee Ann gave dirty looks to both of us. Not a cent left in the house. The rain drummed on the roof. "It's going to last for a week," said Remi. He had taken off his beautiful suit; he was back in his miserable shorts and Army cap and T-shirt. His great brown sad eyes stared at the planks of the floor. The gun lay on the table. We could hear Mr. Snow laughing his head off across the rainy night somewhere.

"I get so sick and tired of that sonofabitch," snapped Lee Ann. She was on the go to start trouble. She began needling Remi. He was busy going through his little black book, in which were names of people, mostly seamen, who owed him money. Beside their names he wrote curses in red ink. I dreaded the day I'd ever find my way into that book. Lately I'd been sending so much money to my aunt that I only bought four or five dollars' worth of groceries a week. In keeping with what President Truman said, I added a few more dollars' worth. But Remi felt it wasn't my proper share; so he'd taken to hanging the grocery slips, the long ribbon slips with itemized prices, on the wall of the bathroom for me to see and understand. Lee Ann was convinced Remi was hiding money from her, and that I was too, for that matter. She threatened to leave him.

Remi curled his lip. "Where do you think you'll go?"

"Jimmy."

"Jimmy? A cashier at the racetrack? Do you hear that, Sal, Lee Ann is going to go and put the latch on a cashier at the racetrack. Be sure and bring your broom, dear, the horses are going to eat a lot of oats this week with my hundred-dollar bill."

Things grew to worse proportions; the rain roared. Lee Ann originally lived in the place first, so she told Remi to pack up and get out. He started packing. I pictured myself all alone in this rainy shack with that untamed shrew. I tried to intervene. Remi pushed Lee Ann. She made a jump for the gun. Remi gave me the gun and told me to hide it; there was a clip of eight shells in it. Lee Ann began screaming, and finally she put on her raincoat and went out in the mud to find a cop, and what a cop-if it wasn't our old friend Alcatraz. Luckily he wasn't home. She came back all wet. I hid in my corner with my head between my knees. Gad, what was I doing three thousand miles from home? Why had I come here? Where was my slow boat to China?

"And another thing, you dirty man," yelled Lee Ann. "Tonight was the last time I'll ever make you your filthy brains and eggs, and your filthy lamb curry, so you can fill your filthy belly and get fat and sassy right before my eyes."

"It's all right," Remi just said quietly. "It's perfectly all right. When I took up with you I didn't expect roses and moonshine and I'm not surprised this day. I tried to do a few things for you-I tried my best for both of you; you've both let me down. I'm terribly, terribly disappointed in both of you," he continued in absolute sincerity. "I thought something would come of us together, something fine and lasting, I tried, I flew to Hollywood, I got Sal a job, I bought you beautiful dresses, I tried to introduce you to the finest people in San Francisco. You refused, you both refused to follow the slightest wish I had. I asked for nothing in return. Now I ask for one last favor and then I'll never ask a favor again. My stepfather is coming to San Francisco next Saturday night. All I ask is that you come with me and try to look as though everything is the way I've written him. In other words, you, Lee Ann, you are my girl, and you, Sal, you are my friend. I've arranged to borrow a hundred dollars for Saturday night. I'm going to see that my father has a good time and can go away without any reason in the world to worry about me."

This surprised me. Remi's stepfather was a distinguished doctor who had practiced in Vienna, Paris, and London. I said, "You mean to tell me you're going to spend a hundred dollars on your stepfather? He's got more money than you'll ever have! You'll be in debt, man!"

"That's all right," said Remi quietly and with defeat in his voice. "I ask only one last thing of you-that you try at least to make things look all right and try to make a good impression. I love my stepfather and I respect him. He's coming with his young wife. We must show him every courtesy." There were times when Remi was really the most gentlemanly person in the world. Lee Ann was impressed, and looked forward to meeting his stepfather; she thought he might be a catch, if his son wasn't.

Saturday night rolled around. I had already quit my job with the cops, just before being fired for not making enough arrests, and this was going to be my last Saturday night. Remi and Lee Ann went to meet his stepfather at the hotel room first; I had traveling money and got crocked in the bar downstairs. Then I went up to join them all, late as hell. His father opened the door, a distinguished tall man in pince-nez. "Ah," I said on seeing him, "Monsieur Boncoeur, how are you? Je suis haut!" I cried, which was intended to mean in French, "I am high, I have been drinking," but means absolutely nothing in French. The doctor was perplexed. I had already screwed up Remi. He blushed at me.

We all went to a swank restaurant to eat-Alfred's, in North Beach, where poor Remi spent a good fifty dollars for the five of us, drinks and all. And now came the worst thing. Who should be sitting at the bar in Alfred's but my old friend Roland Major! He had just arrived from Denver and got a job on a San Francisco paper. He was crocked. He wasn't even shaved. He rushed over and slapped me on the back as I lifted a highball to my lips. He threw himself down on the booth beside Dr. Boncceur and leaned over the man's soup to talk to me. Remi was red as a beet.

"Won't you introduce your friend, Sal?" he said with a weak smile.

"Roland Major of the San Francisco Argus," I tried to say with a straight face. Lee Ann was furious at me.

Major began chatting in the monsieur's ear. "How do you like teaching high-school French?" he yelled. "Pardon me, but I don't teach high-school French." "Oh, I thought you taught high-school French." He was being deliberately rude. I remembered the night he wouldn't let us have our party in Denver; but I forgave him.

I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk. I began talking moonshine and roses to the doctor's young wife. I drank so much I had to go to the men's room every two minutes, and to do so I had to hop over Dr. Boncceur's lap. Everything was falling apart. My stay in San Francisco was coming to an end. Remi would never talk to me again. It was horrible because I really loved Remi and I was one of the very few people in the world who knew what a genuine and grand fellow he was. It would take years for him to get over it. How disastrous all this was compared to what I'd written him from Paterson, planning my red line Route 6 across America. Here I was at the end of America-no more land-and now there was nowhere to go but back. I determined at least to make my trip a circular one: I decided then and there to go to Hollywood and back through Texas to see my bayou gang; then the rest be damned.

Major was thrown out of Alfred's. Dinner was over anyway, so I joined him; that is to say, Remi suggested it, and I went off with Major to drink. We sat at a table in the Iron Pot and Major said, "Sam, I don't like that fairy at the bar," in a loud voice.

"Yeah, Jake?" I said.

"Sam," he said, "I think I'll get up and conk him." "No, Jake," I said, carrying on with the Hemingway imitation. "Just aim from here and see what happens." We ended up swaying on a street corner.

In the morning, as Remi and Lee Ann slept, and as I looked with some sadness at the big pile of wash Remi and I were scheduled to do in the Bendix machine in the shack in the back (which had always been such a joyous sunny operation among the colored women and with Mr. Snow laughing his head off), I decided to leave. I went out on the porch. "No, dammit," I said to myself, "I promised I wouldn't leave till I climbed that mountain." That was the big side of the canyon that led mysteriously to the Pacific Ocean.

So I stayed another day. It was Sunday. A great heat wave descended; it was a beautiful day, the sun turned red at three. I started up the mountain and got to the top at four. All those lovely California cottonwoods and eucalypti brooded on all sides. Near the peak there were no more trees, just rocks and grass. Cattle were grazing on the top of the coast. There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street, and the eleven teeming hills.

I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I'd fall down as in a dream, clear off the precipice. Oh where is the girl I love? I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had looked everywhere in the little world below. And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded-at least that's what I thought then.

12

In the morning Remi and Lee Ann were asleep as I quietly packed and slipped out the window the same way I'd come in, and left Mill City with my canvas bag. And I never spent that night on the old ghost ship-the Admiral Freebee, it was called-and Remi and I were lost to each other.

In Oakland I had a beer among the bums of a saloon with a wagon wheel in front of it, and I was on the road again. I walked clear across Oakland to get on the Fresno road. Two rides took me to Bakersfield, four hundred miles south. The first was the mad one, with a burly blond kid in a souped-up rod. "See that toe?" he said as he gunned the heap to eighty and passed everybody on the road. "Look at it." It was swathed in bandages. "I just had it amputated this morning. The bastards wanted me to stay in the hospital. I packed my bag and left. What's a toe?" Yes, indeed, I said to myself, look out now, and I hung on. You never saw a driving fool like that. He made Tracy in no time. Tracy is a railroad town; brakemen eat surly meals in diners by the tracks. Trains howl away across the valley. The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled-Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragrant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments. The madman was a brakeman with the Southern Pacific and he lived in Fresno; his father was also a brakeman. He lost his toe in the Oakland yards, switching, I didn't quite understand how. He drove me into buzzing Fresno and let me off by the south side of town. I went for a quick Coke in a little grocery by the tracks, and here came a melancholy Armenian youth along the red boxcars, and just at that moment a locomotive howled, and I said to myself, Yes, yes, Saroyan's town.

I had to go south; I got on the road. A man in a brand-new pickup truck picked me up. He was from Lubbock, Texas, and was in the trailer business. "You want to buy a trailer?" he asked me. "Any time, look me up." He told stories about his father in Lubbock. "One night my old man left the day's receipts settin on top of the safe, plumb forgot. What happened -a thief came in the night, acetylene torch and all, broke open the safe, riffled up the papers, kicked over a few chairs, and left. And that thousand dollars was settin right there on top of the safe, what do you know about that?"

He let me off south of Bakersfield, and then my adventure began. It grew cold. I put on the flimsy Army raincoat I'd bought in Oakland for three dollars and shuddered in the road. I was standing in front of an ornate Spanish-style motel that was lit like a jewel. The cars rushed by, LA-bound. I gestured frantically. It was too cold. I stood there till midnight, two hours straight, and cursed and cursed. It was just like Stuart, Iowa, again. There was nothing to do but spend a little over two dollars for a bus the remaining miles to Los Angeles. I walked back along the highway to Bakersfield and into the station, and sat down on a bench.

I had bought my ticket and was waiting for the LA bus when all of a sudden I saw the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks come cutting across my sight. She was in one of the buses that had just pulled in with a big sigh of airbrakes; it was discharging passengers for a rest stop. Her breasts stuck out straight and true; her little flanks looked delicious; her hair was long and lustrous black; and her eyes were great big blue things with timidities inside. I wished I was on her bus. A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world. The announcer called the LA bus. I picked up my bag and got on, and who should be sitting there alone but the Mexican girl. I dropped right opposite her and began scheming right off. I was so lonely, so sad, so tired, so quivering, so broken, so beat, that I got up my courage, the courage necessary to approach a strange girl, and acted. Even then I spent five minutes beating my thighs in the dark as the bus rolled down the road.

You gotta, you gotta or you'll die! Damn fool, talk to her! What's wrong with you? Aren't you tired enough of yourself by now? And before I knew what I was doing I leaned across the aisle to her (she was trying to sleep on the seat) and said, "Miss, would you like to use my raincoat for a pillow?"

She looked up with a smile and said, "No, thank you very much."

I sat back, trembling; I lit a butt. I waited till she looked at me, with a sad little sidelook of love, and I got right up and leaned over her. "May I sit with you, miss?"

"If you wish."

And this I did. "Where going?"

"LA." I loved the way she said "LA"; I love the way everybody says "LA" on the Coast; it's their one and only golden town when all is said and done,

"That's where I'm going too!" I cried. "I'm very glad you let me sit with you, I was very lonely and I've been traveling a hell of a lot." And we settled down to telling our stories. Her story was this: She had a husband and child. The husband beat her, so she left him, back at Sabinal, south of Fresno, and was going to LA to live with her sister awhile. She left her little son with her family, who were grape-pickers and lived in a shack in the vineyards. She had nothing to do but brood and get mad. I felt like putting my arms around her right away. We talked and talked. She said she loved to talk with me. Pretty soon she was saying she wished she could go to New York too. "Maybe we could!" I laughed. The bus groaned up Grapevine Pass and then we were coming down into the great sprawls of light. Without coming to any particular agreement we began holding hands, and in the same way it was mutely and beautifully and purely decided that when I got my hotel room in LA she would be beside me. I ached all over for her; I leaned my head in her beautiful hair. Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it.

"I love love," she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girl soul, and I told her that. She confessed she saw me watching her in the bus station. "I thought you was a nice college boy."

"Oh, I'm a college boy!" I assured her. The bus arrived in Hollywood. In the gray, dirty dawn, like the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner, in the picture Sullivan's Travels, she slept in my lap. I looked greedily out tine window: stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, the whole mad thing, the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America. We got off the bus at Main Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston-red brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a big city.

And here my mind went haywire, I don't know why. I began getting the foolish paranoiac visions that Teresa, or Terry-her name-was a common little hustler who worked the buses for a guy's bucks by making appointments like ours in LA where she brought the sucker first to a breakfast place, where her pimp waited, and then to a certain hotel to which he had access with his gun or his whatever. I never confessed this to her. We ate breakfast and a pimp kept watching us; I fancied Terry was making secret eyes at him. I was tired and felt strange and lost in a faraway, disgusting place. The goof of terror took over my thoughts and made me act petty and cheap. "Do you know that guy?" I said.

"What guy you mean, honey?" I let it drop. She was slow and hung-up about everything she did; it took her a long time to eat; she chewed slowly and stared into space, and smoked a cigarette, and kept talking, and I was like a haggard ghost, suspicioning every move she made, thinking she was stalling for time. This was all a fit of sickness. I was sweating as we went down the street hand in hand. The first hotel we hit had a room, and before I knew it I was locking the door behind me and she was sitting on the bed taking off her shoes. I kissed her meekly. Better she'd never know. To relax our nerves I knew we needed whisky, especially me. I ran out and fiddled all over twelve blocks, hurrying till I found a pint of whisky for sale at a newsstand. I ran back, all energy. Terry was in the bathroom, fixing her face. I poured one big drink in a water glass, and we had slugs. Oh, it was sweet and delicious and worth my whole lugubrious voyage. I stood behind her at the mirror, and we danced in the bathroom that way. I began talking about my friends back east.

I said, "You ought to meet a great girl I know called Doric. She's a six-foot redhead. If you came to New York she'd show you where to get work."

"Who is this six-foot redhead?" she demanded suspiciously. "Why do you tell me about her?" In her simple soul she couldn't fathom my kind of glad, nervous talk. I let it drop. She began to get drunk in the bathroom.

"Come on to bed!" I kept saying.

"Six-foot redhead, hey? And I thought you was a nice college boy, I saw you in your lovely sweater and I said to myself, Hmm, ain't he nice? No! And no! And no! You have to be a goddam pimp like all of them!"

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Don't stand there and tell me that six-foot redhead ain't a madame, 'cause I know a madame when I hear about one, and you, you're just a pimp like all the rest I meet, everybody's a pimp."

"Listen, Terry, I am not a pimp. I swear to you on the Bible I am not a pimp. Why should I be a pimp? My only interest is you."

"All the time I thought I met a nice boy. I was so glad, I hugged myself and said, Hmm, a real nice boy instead of a pimp."

"Terry," I pleaded with all my soul. "Please listen to me and understand, I'm not a pimp." An hour ago I'd thought she was a hustler. How sad it was. Our minds, with their store of madness, had diverged. O gruesome life, how I moaned and pleaded, and then I got mad and realized I was pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench and I told her so; and before I knew it I picked up her red pumps and hurled them at the bathroom door and told her to get out. "Go on, beat it!" I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever. There was a dead silence in the bathroom. I took my clothes off and went to bed.

Terry came out with tears of sorriness in her eyes. In her simple and funny little mind had been decided the fact that a pimp does not throw a woman's shoes against the door and does not tell her to get out. In reverent and sweet little silence she took all her clothes off and slipped her tiny body into the sheets with me. It was brown as grapes. I saw her poor belly where there was a Caesarian scar; her hips were so narrow she couldn't bear a child without getting gashed open. Her legs were like little sticks. She was only four foot ten. I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon.

13

For the next fifteen days we were together for better or for worse. When we woke up we decided to hitchhike to New York together; she was going to be my girl in town. I envisioned wild complexities with Dean and Marylou and everybody-a season, a new season. First we had to work to earn enough money for the trip. Terry was all for starting at once with the twenty dollars I had left. I didn't like it. And, like a damn fool, I considered the problem for two days, as we read the want ads of wild LA papers I'd never seen before in my life, in cafeterias and bars, until my twenty dwindled to just over ten. We were very happy in our little hotel room. In the middle of the night I got up because I couldn't sleep, pulled the cover over baby's bare brown shoulder, and examined the LA night. What brutal, hot, siren-whining nights they are! Right across the street there was trouble. An old rickety rundown rooming house was the scene of some kind of tragedy. The cruiser was pulled up below and the cops were questioning an old man with gray hair. Sobbings came from within. I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

South Main Street, where Terry and I took strolls with hot dogs, was a fantastic carnival of lights and wildness. Booted cops frisked people on practically every corner. The beatest characters in the country swarmed on the sidewalks -all of it under those soft Southern California stars that are lost in the brown halo of the huge desert encampment LA really is. You could smell tea, weed, I mean marijuana, floating in the air, together with the chili beans and beer. That grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night. Everybody looked like Hassel. Wild Negroes with bop caps and goatees came laughing by; then long-haired brokendown hipsters straight off Route 66 from New York; then old desert rats, carrying packs and heading for a park bench at the Plaza; then Methodist ministers with raveled sleeves, and an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals. I wanted to meet them all, talk to everybody, but Terry and I were too busy trying to get a buck together.

We went to Hollywood to try to work in the drugstore at Sunset and Vine. Now there was a corner! Great families off jalopies from the hinterlands stood around the sidewalk gapping for sight of some movie star, and the movie star never showed up. When a limousine passed they rushed eagerly to the curb and ducked to look: some character in dark glasses sat inside with a bejeweled blonde. "Don Ameche! Don Ameche!" "No, George Murphy! George Murphy!" They milled around, looking at one another. Handsome queer boys who had come to Hollywood to be cowboys walked around, wetting their eyebrows with hincty fingertip. The most beautiful little gone gals in the world cut by in slacks; they came to be starlets; they ended up in drive-ins. Terry and I tried to find work at the drive-ins. It was no soap anywhere. Hollywood Boulevard was a great, screaming frenzy of cars; there were minor accidents at least once a minute; everybody was rushing off toward the farthest palm-and beyond that was the desert and nothingness. Hollywood Sams stood in front of swank restaurants, arguing exactly the same way Broadway Sams argue at Jacob's Beach, New York, only here they wore light-weight suits and their talk was cornier. Tall, cadaverous preachers shuddered by. Fat screaming women ran across the boulevard to get in line for the quiz shows. I saw Jerry Colonna buying a car at Buick Motors; he was inside the vast plate-glass window, fingering his mustachio. Terry and I ate in a cafeteria downtown which was decorated to look like a grotto, with metal tits spurting everywhere and great impersonal stone buttockses belonging to deities and soapy Neptune. People ate lugubrious meals around the waterfalls, their faces green with marine sorrow. All the cops in LA looked like handsome gigolos; obviously they'd come to LA to make the movies. Everybody had come to make the movies, even me. Terry and I were finally reduced to trying to get jobs on South Main Street among the beat countermen and dishgirls who made no bones about their beatness, and even there it was no go. We still had ten dollars.

"Man, I'm going to get my clothes from Sis and we'll hitchhike to New York," said Terry. "Come on, man. Let's do it. 'If you can't boogie I know I'll show you how.'" That last part was a song of hers she kept singing. We hurried to her sister's house in the sliverous Mexican shacks somewhere beyond Alameda Avenue. I waited in a dark alley behind Mexican kitchens because her sister wasn't supposed to see me. Dogs ran by. There were little lamps illuminating the little rat alleys. I could hear Terry and her sister arguing in the soft, warm night. I was ready for anything.

Terry came out and led me by the hand to Central Avenue, which is the colored main drag of LA. And what a wild place it is, with chickenshacks barely big enough to house a jukebox, and the jukebox blowing nothing but blues, bop, and jump. We went up dirty tenement stairs and came to the room of Terry's friend Margarina, who owed Terry a skirt and a pair of shoes. Margarina was a lovely mulatto; her husband was black as spades and kindly. He went right out and bought a pint of whisky to host me proper. I tried to pay part of it, but he said no. They had two little children. The kids bounced on the bed; it was their play-place. They put their arms around me and looked at me with wonder. The wild humming night of Central Avenue-the night of Hamp's "Central Avenue Breakdown"-howled and boomed along outside. They were singing in the halls, singing from their windows, just hell be damned and look out. Terry got her clothes and we said good-by. We went down to a chickenshack and played records on the jukebox. A couple of Negro characters whispered in my ear about tea. One buck. I said okay, bring it. The connection came in and motioned me to the cellar toilet, where I stood around dumbly as he said, "Pick up, man, pick up."

"Pick up what?" I said.

He had my dollar already. He was afraid to point at the floor. It was no floor, just basement. There lay something that looked like a little brown turd. He was absurdly cautious. "Got to look out for myself, things ain't cool this past week." I picked up the turd, which was a brown-paper cigarette, and went back to Terry, and off we went to the hotel room to get high. Nothing happened. It was Bull Durham tobacco. I wished I was wiser with my money.

Terry and I had to decide absolutely and once and for all what to do. We decided to hitch to New York with our remaining money. She picked up five dollars from her sister that night. We had about thirteen or less. So before the daily room rent was due again we packed up and took off on a red car to Arcadia, California, where Santa Anita racetrack is located under snow-capped mountains. It was night. We were pointed toward the American continent. Holding hands, we walked several miles down the road to get out of the populated district. It was a Saturday night. We stood under a roadlamp, thumbing, when suddenly cars full of young kids roared by with streamers flying. "Yaah! Yaah! we won! we won!" they all shouted. Then they yoohooed us and got great glee out of seeing a guy and a girl on the road. Dozens of such cars passed, full of young faces and "throaty young voices," as the saying goes. I hated every one of them. Who did they think they were, yaahing at somebody on the road just because they were little high-school punks and their parents carved the roast beef on Sunday afternoons? Who did they think they were, making fun of a girl reduced to poor circumstances with a man who wanted to belove? We were minding our own business. And we didn't get a blessed ride.

We had to walk back to town, and worst of all we needed coffee and had the misfortune of going into the only place open, which was a high-school soda fountain, and all the kids were there and remembered us. Now they saw that Terry was Mexican, a Pachuco wildcat; and that her boy was worse than that.

With her pretty nose in the air she cut out of there and we wandered together in the dark up along the ditches of the highways. I carried the bags. We were breathing fogs in the cold night air. I finally decided to hide from the world one more night with her, and the morning be damned. We went into a motel court and bought a comfortable little suite for about four dollars-shower, bathtowels, wall radio, and all. We held each other tight. We had long, serious talks and took baths and discussed things with the light on and then with the light out. Something was being proved, I was convincing her of something, which she accepted, and we concluded the pact in the dark, breathless, then pleased, like little lambs.

In the morning we boldly struck out on our new plan. We were going to take a bus to Bakersfield and work picking grapes. After a few weeks of that we were headed for New York in the proper way, by bus. It was a wonderful afternoon, riding up to Bakersfield with Terry: we sat back, relaxed, talked, saw the countryside roll by, and didn't worry about a thing. We arrived in Bakersfield in late afternoon. The plan was to hit every fruit wholesaler in town. Terry said we could live in tents on the job. The thought of living in a tent and picking grapes in the cool California mornings hit me right. But there were no jobs to be had, and much confusion, with everybody giving us innumerable tips, and no job materialized. Nevertheless we ate a Chinese dinner and set out with reinforced bodies. We went across the SP tracks to Mexican town. Terry jabbered with her brethren, asking for jobs. It was night now, and the little Mextown street was one blazing bulb of lights: movie marquees, fruit stands, penny arcades, five-and-tens, and hundreds of rickety trucks and mud-spattered jalopies, parked. Whole Mexican fruit-picking families wandered around eating popcorn. Terry talked to everybody. I was beginning to despair. What I needed - what Terry needed, too - was a drink, so we bought a quart of California port for thirty-five cents and went to the railroad yards to drink. We found a place where hobos had drawn up crates to sit over fires. We sat there and drank the wine. On our left were the freight cars, sad and sooty red beneath the moon; straight ahead the lights and airport pokers of Bakersfield proper; to our right a tremendous aluminum Quonset warehouse. Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing. This we did. She was a drinking little fool and kept up with me and passed me and went right on talking till midnight. We never budged from those crates. Occasionally bums passed, Mexican mothers passed with children, and the prowl car came by and the cop got out to leak, but most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by. At midnight we got up and goofed toward the highway.

Terry had a new idea. We would hitchhike to Sabinal, her hometown, and live in her brother's garage. Anything was all right with me. On the road I made Terry sit down on my bag to make her look like a woman in distress, and right off a truck stopped and we ran for it, all glee-giggles. The man was a good man; his truck was poor. He roared and crawled on up the valley. We got to Sabinal in the wee hours before dawn. I had finished the wine while Terry slept, and I was proper stoned. We got out and roamed the quiet leafy square 'of the little California town - a whistle stop on the SP. We went to find her brother's buddy, who would tell us where he was. Nobody home. As dawn began to break I lay flat on my back in the lawn of the town square and kept saying over and over again, "You won't tell what he done up in Weed, will you? What'd he do up in Weed? You won't tell will you? What'd he do up in Weed?" This was from the picture Of Mice and Men, with Burgess Meredith talking to the foreman of the ranch. Terry giggled. Anything I did was all right with her. I could lie there and go on doing that till the ladies came out for church and she wouldn't care. But finally I decided we'd be all set soon because of her brother, and I took her to an old hotel by the tracks and we went to bed comfortably.

In the bright, sunny morning Terry got up early and went to find her brother. I slept till noon; when I looked out the window I suddenly saw an SP freight going by with hundreds of hobos reclining on the flatcars and rolling merrily along with packs for pillows and funny papers before their noses, and some munching on good California grapes picked up by the siding. "Damn!" I yelled. "Hooee! It is the promised land." They were all coming from Frisco; in a week they'd all be going back in the same grand style.

Terry arrived with her brother, his buddy, and her child. Her brother was a wild-buck Mexican hotcat with a hunger for booze, a great good kid. His buddy was a big flabby Mexican who spoke English without much accent and was loud and overanxious to please. I could see he had eyes for Terry. Her little boy was Johnny, seven years old, dark-eyed and sweet. Well, there we were, and another wild day began.

Her brother's name was Rickey. He had a '38 Chevy. We piled into that and took off for parts unknown. "Where we going?" I asked. The buddy did the explaining-his name was Ponzo, that's what everybody called him. He stank. I found out why. His business was selling manure to farmers; he had a truck. Rickey always had three or four dollars in his pocket and was happy-go-lucky about things. He always said, "That's right, man, there you go-dah you go, dah you go!" And he went. He drove seventy miles an hour in the old heap, and we went to Madera beyond Fresno to see some farmers about manure.

Rickey had a bottle. "Today we drink, tomorrow we work. Dah you go, man-take a shot!" Terry sat in back with her baby; I looked back at her and saw the flush of homecoming joy on her face. The beautiful green countryside of October in California reeled by madly. I was guts and juice again and ready to go. "Where do we go now, man?"

"We go find a farmer with some manure laying around. Tomorrow we drive back in the truck and pick it up. Man, we'll make a lot of money. Don't worry about nothing."

"We're all in this together!" yelled Ponzo. I saw that was so-everywhere I went, everybody was in it together. We raced through the crazy streets of Fresno and on up the valley to some farmers in back roads. Ponzo got out of the car and conducted confused conversations with old Mexican farmers; nothing, of course, came of it.

"What we need is a drink!" yelled Rickey, and off we went to a crossroads saloon. Americans are always drinking in crossroads saloons on Sunday afternoon; they bring their kids; they gabble and brawl over brews; everything's fine. Come nightfall the kids start crying and the parents are drunk. They go weaving back to the house. Everywhere in America I've been in crossroads saloons drinking with • whole families. The kids eat popcorn and chips and play in back. This we did. Rickey and I and Ponzo and Terry sat drinking and shouting with the music; little baby Johnny goofed with other children around the jukebox. The sun began to get red. Nothing had been accomplished. What was there to accomplish? "Mariana" said Rickey. "Manana, man, we make it; have another beer, man, dah you go, dab you go!"

We staggered out and got in the car; off we went to a highway bar. Ponzo was a big, loud, vociferous type who knew everybody in San Joaquin Valley. From the highway bar I went with him alone in the car to find a farmer; instead we wound up in Madera Mextown, digging the girls and trying to pick up a few for him and Rickey. And then, as purple dusk descended over the grape country, I found myself sitting dumbly in the car as he argued with some old Mexican at the kitchen door about the price of a watermelon the old man grew in the back yard. We got the watermelon; we ate it on the spot and threw the rinds on the old man's dirt sidewalk. All kinds of pretty little girls were cutting down the darkening street. I said, "Where in the hell are we?"

"Don't worry, man," said big Ponzo. "Tomorrow we make a lot of money; tonight we don't worry." We went back and picked up Terry and her brother and the kid and drove to Fresno in the highway lights of night. We were all raving hungry. We bounced over the railroad tracks in Fresno and hit the wild streets of Fresno Mextown. Strange Chinese hung out of windows, digging the Sunday night streets; groups of Mex chicks swaggered around in slacks; mambo blasted from jukeboxes; the lights were festooned around like Halloween. We went into a Mexican restaurant and had tacos and mashed pinto beans rolled in tortillas; it was delicious. I whipped out my last shining five-dollar bill which stood between me and the New Jersey shore and paid for Terry and me. Now I had four bucks. Terry and I looked at each other.

"Where we going to sleep tonight, baby?"

"I don't know."

Rickey was drunk; now all he was saying was, "Dah you go, man-dah you go, man," in a tender and tired voice. It had been a long day. None of us knew what was going on, or what the Good Lord appointed. Poor little Johnny fell asleep on my arm. We drove back to Sabinal. On the way we pulled up sharp at a roadhouse on Highway 99. Rickey wanted one last beer. In back of the roadhouse were trailers and tents and a few rickety motel-style rooms. I inquired about the price and it was two bucks. I asked Terry how about it, and she said fine because we had the kid on our hands now and had to make him comfortable. So after a few beers in the saloon, where sullen Okies reeled to the music of a cowboy band, Terry and I and Johnny went into a motel room and got ready to hit the sack. Ponzo kept hanging around; he had no place to sleep. Rickey slept at his father's house in the vineyard shack.

"Where do you live, Ponzo?" I asked.

"Nowhere, man. I'm supposed to live with Big Rosey but she threw me out last night. I'm gonna get my truck and sleep in it tonight." Guitars tinkled. Terry and I gazed at the stars together and kissed. "Manana" she said. "Everything'll be all right tomorrow, don't you think, Sal-honey, man?"

"Sure, baby, manana." It was always manana. For the next week that was all I heard-manana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.

Little Johnny jumped in bed, clothes and all, and went to sleep; sand spilled out of his shoes, Madera sand. Terry and I got up in the middle of the night and brushed the sand off the sheets. In the morning I got up, washed, and took a walk around the place. We were five miles out of Sabinal in the cotton fields and grape vineyards. I asked the big fat woman who owned the camp if any of the tents were vacant. The cheapest one, a dollar a day, was vacant. I fished up a dollar and moved into it. There were a bed, a stove, and a cracked mirror hanging from a pole; it was delightful. I had to stoop to get in, and when I did there was my baby and my baby boy. We waited for Rickey and Ponzo to arrive with the truck. They arrived with beer bottles and started to get drunk in the tent.

"How about the manure?"

"Too late today. Tomorrow, man, we make a lot of money; today we have a few beers. What do you say, beer?" I didn't have to be prodded. "Dah you go-dah you go!" yelled Rickey. I began to see that our plans for making money with the manure truck would never materialize. The truck was parked outside the tent. It smelled like Ponzo.

That night Terry and I went to bed in the sweet night air beneath our dewy tent. I was just getting ready to go to sleep when she said, "You want to love me now?"

I said, "What about Johnny?"

"He don't mind. He's asleep." But Johnny wasn't asleep and he said nothing.

The boys came back the next day with the manure truck and drove off to find whisky; they came back and had a big time in the tent. That night Ponzo said it was too cold and slept on the ground in our tent, wrapped in a big tarpaulin smelling of cowflaps. Terry hated him; she said he hung around with her brother in order to get close to her.

Nothing was going to happen except starvation for Terry and me, so in the morning I walked around the countryside asking for cotton-picking work. Everybody told me to go to the farm across the highway from the camp. I went, and the farmer was in the kitchen with his women. He came out, listened to my story, and warned me he was paying only three dollars per hundred pounds of picked cotton. I pictured myself picking at least three hundred pounds a day and took the job. He fished out some long canvas bags from the barn and told me the picking started at dawn. I rushed back to Terry, all glee. On the way a grape truck went over a bump in the road and threw off great bunches of grapes on the hot tar. I picked them up and took them home. Terry was glad. "Johnny and me'll come with you and help."

"Pshaw!" I said. "No such thing!"

"You see, you see, it's very hard picking cotton. I show you how."

We ate the grapes, and in the evening Rickey showed up with a loaf of bread and a pound of hamburg and we had a picnic. In a larger tent next to ours lived a whole family of Okie cotton-pickers; the grandfather sat in a chair all day long, he was too old to work; the son and daughter, and their children, filed every dawn across the highway to my farmer's field and went to work. At dawn the next day I went with them. They said the cotton was heavier at dawn because of the dew and you could make more money than in the afternoon. Nevertheless they worked all day from dawn to sundown. The grandfather had come from Nebraska during the great plague of the thirties-that selfsame dust cloud my Montana cowboy had told me about-with the entire family in a jalopy truck. They had been in California ever since. They loved to work. In the ten years the old man's son had increased his children to the number of four, some of whom were old enough now to pick cotton. And in that time they had progressed from ragged poverty in Simon Legree fields to a kind of smiling respectability in better tents, and that Vas all. They were extremely proud of their tent.

"Ever going back to Nebraska?"

"Pshaw, there's nothing back there. What we want to is buy a trailer."

We bent down and began picking cotton. It was beautiful. Across the field were the tents, and beyond them the brown cottonfields that stretched out of sight to the brown arroyo foothills and then the snow-capped Sierras in the morning air. This was so much better than washing dishes South Main Street. But I knew nothing about picking cotton. I spent too much time disengaging the white ball from crackly bed; the others did it in one flick. Moreover, fingertips began to bleed; I needed gloves, or more experience. There was an old Negro couple in the field with They picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience the grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; the moved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bag increased. My back began to ache. But it was beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth. If I felt like resting I did, my face on the pillow of brown moist earth. Birds an accompaniment. I thought I had found my life's work. Johnny and Terry came waving at me across the field in hot lullal noon and pitched in with me. Be damned if lit Johnny wasn't faster than I was!-and of course Terry twice as fast. They worked ahead of me and left me piles clean cotton to add to my bag-Terry workmanlike pile Johnny little childly piles. I stuck them in with sorrow. What kind of old man was I that couldn't support his ass, let alone theirs? They spent all afternoon with me. Wt the sun got red we trudged back together. At the end of field I unloaded my burden on a scale; it weighed fifty pound and I got a buck fifty. Then I borrowed a bicycle from of the Okie boys and rode down 99 to a crossroads grocery store where I bought cans of cooked spaghetti and meatballs, bread, butter, coffee, and cake, and came back with the on the handlebars. LA-bound traffic zoomed by; Frisco-boy harassed my tail. I swore and swore. I looked up at dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life an better chance to do something for the little people I love Nobody was paying any attention to me up there. I shot known better. It was Terry who brought my soul back; on the tent stove she warmed up the food, and it was one of the greatest meals of my life, I was so hungry and tired. Sighing like an old Negro cotton-picker, I reclined on the bed and smoked a cigarette. Dogs barked in the cool night. Rickey and Ponzo had given up calling in the evenings. I was satisfied with that. Terry curled up beside me, Johnny sat on my chest, and they drew pictures of animals in my notebook. The light of our tent burned on the frightful plain. The cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights.

In the morning the dew made the tent sag; I got up with my towel and toothbrush and went to the general motel toilet to wash; then I came back, put on my pants, which were all torn from kneeling in the earth and had been sewed by Terry in the evening, put on my ragged straw hat, which had originally served as Johnny's toy hat, and went across the highway with my canvas cotton-bag.

Every day I earned approximately a dollar and a half. It was just enough to buy groceries in the evening on the bicycle. The days rolled by. I forgot all about the East and all about Dean and Carlo and the bloody road. Johnny and I played all the time; he liked me to throw him up in the air and down in the bed. Terry sat mending clothes. I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be, in Paterson. There was talk that Terry's husband was back in Sabinal and out for me; I was ready for him. One night the Okies went mad in the roadhouse and tied a man to a tree and beat him to a pulp with sticks. I was asleep at the time and only heard about it. From then on I carried a big stick with me in the tent in case they got the idea we Mexicans were fouling up their trailer camp. They thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am.

But now it was October and getting much colder in the nights. The Okie family had a woodstove and planned to stay for the winter. We had nothing, and besides the rent for the tent was due. Terry and I bitterly decided we'd have to leave.

"Go back to your family," I said. "For God's sake, you can't be batting around tents with a baby like Johnny; the poor little tyke is cold." Terry cried because I was criticizing her motherly instincts; I meant no such thing. When Ponzo came in the truck one gray afternoon we decided to see her family about the situation. But I mustn't be seen and would have to hide in the vineyard. We started for Sabinal; the truck broke down, and simultaneously it started to rain wildly. We sat in the old truck, cursing. Ponzo got out and toiled in the rain. He was a good old guy after all. We promised each other one more big bat. Off we went to a rickety bar in Sabinal Mextown and spent an hour sopping up the brew. I was through with my chores in the cottonfield. I could feel the pull of my own life calling me back. I shot my aunt a penny postcard across the land and asked for another fifty.

We drove to Terry's family's shack. It was situated on the old road that ran between the vineyards. It was dark when we got there. They left me off a quarter-mile away and drove to the door. Light poured out of the door; Terry's six other brothers were playing their guitars and singing. The old man was drinking wine. I heard shouts and arguments above the singing. They called her a whore because she'd left her no-good husband and gone to LA and left Johnny with them. The old man was yelling. But the sad, fat brown mother prevailed, as she always does among the great fellahin peoples of the world, and Terry was allowed to come back home. The brothers began to sing gay songs, fast. I huddled in the cold, rainy wind and watched everything across the sad vineyards of October in the valley. My mind was filled with that great song "Lover Man" as Billie Holiday sings it; I had my own concert in the bushes. "Someday we'll meet, and you'll dry all my tears, and whisper sweet, little things in my ear, hugging and a-kissing, oh what we've been missing, Lover Man, oh where can you be . . ." It's not the words so much as their great harmonic tune and the way Billie sings it, like a woman stroking her man's hair in soft lamplight. The winds howled. I got I cold.

Terry and Ponzo came back and we rattled off in the old truck to meet Rickey. Rickey was now living with Ponzo's woman, Big Rosey; we tooted the horn for him in rickety alleys. Big Rosey threw him out. Everything was collapsing. That night we slept in the truck. Terry held me tight, of course, and told me not to leave. She said she'd work picking grapes and make enough money for both of us; meanwhile I could live in Farmer Heffelfinger's barn down the road from her family. I'd have nothing to do but sit in the grass all day and eat grapes. "You like that?"

In the morning her cousins came to get us in another truck. I suddenly realized thousands of Mexicans all over the countryside knew about Terry and me and that it must have been a juicy, romantic topic for them. The cousins were very polite and in fact charming. I stood on the truck, smiling pleasantries, talking about where we were in the war and what the pitch was. There were five cousins in all, and every one of them was nice. They seemed to belong to the side of Terry's family that didn't fuss off like her brother. But I loved that wild Rickey. He swore he was coming to New York to join me. I pictured him in New York, putting off everything till manana. He was drunk in a field someplace that day.

I got off the truck at the crossroads, and the cousins drove Terry home. They gave me the high sign from the front of the house; the father and mother weren't home, they were off picking grapes. So I had the run of the house for the afternoon. It was a four-room shack; I couldn't imagine how the whole family managed to live in there. Flies flew over the sink. There were no screens, just like in the song, "The window she is broken and the rain she is coming in." Terry was at home now and puttering around pots. Her two sisters giggled at me. The little children screamed in the road.

When the sun came out red through the clouds of my last valley afternoon, Terry led me to Farmer Heffelfinger's barn. Farmer Heffelfinger had a prosperous farm up the road. We put crates together, she brought blankets from the house, and I was all set except for a great hairy tarantula that lurked at the pinpoint top of the barn roof. Terry said it wouldn't harm me if I didn't bother it. I lay on my back and stared at it. I went out to the cemetery and climbed a tree. In the tree I sang "Blue Skies." Terry and Johnny sat in the grass; we had grapes. In California you chew the juice out of grapes and spit the skin away, a real luxury. Nightfall came. Terry went home for supper and came to the barn at nine o'clock with delicious tortillas and mashed beans. I lit a wood fire on the cement floor of the barn to make light. We made love on the crates. Terry got up and cut right back to the shack. Her father was yelling at her.; I could hear him from the barn. She'd left me a cape to keep warm; I threw it over my shoulder and skulked through the moonlit vineyard to see what was going on. I crept to the end of a row and knelt in the warm dirt. Her five brothers were singing melodious songs in Spanish. The stars bent over the little roof; smoke poked from the stovepipe chimney. I smelled mashed beans and chili. The old man growled. The brothers kept right on yodeling. The mother was silent. Johnny and the kids were giggling in the bedroom. A California home; I hid in the grapevines, digging it all. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.

Terry came out, slamming the door behind her. I accosted her on the dark road. "What's the matter?"

"Oh, we fight all the time. He wants me to go to work tomorrow. He says he don't want me foolin around. Sallie, I want to go to New York with you."

"But how?"

"I don't know, honey. I'll miss you. I love you."

"But I have to leave."

"Yes, yes. We lay down one more time, then you leave." We went back to the barn; I made love to her under the tarantula. What was the tarantula doing? We slept awhile on the crates as the fire died. She went back at midnight; her father was drunk; I could hear him roaring; then there was silence as he fell asleep. The stars folded over the sleeping countryside.

In the morning Farmer Heffelfinger stuck his head through the horse gate and said, "How you doing, young fella?"

"Fine. I hope it's all right my staying here."

"Sure thing. You going with that little Mexican floozy?"

"She's a very nice girl."

"Very pretty too. I think the bull jumped the fence. She's got blue eyes." We talked about his farm.

Terry brought my breakfast. I had my canvas bag all packed and ready to go to New York, as soon as I picked up my money in Sabinal. I knew it was waiting there for me by now. I told Terry I was leaving. She had been thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.

"See you in New York, Terry," I said. She was supposed to drive to New York in a month with her brother. But we both knew she wouldn't make it. At a hundred feet I turned to look at her. She just walked on back to the shack, carrying my breakfast plate in one hand. I bowed my head and watched her. Well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again.

I walked down the highway to Sabinal, eating black walnuts from the walnut tree. I went on the SP tracks and balanced along the rail. I passed a watertower and a factory. This was the end of something. I went to the telegraph office of the railroad for my money order from New York. It was closed. I swore and sat on the steps to wait. The ticket master got back and invited me in. The money was in; my aunt had saved my lazy butt again. "Who's going to win the World Series next year?" said the gaunt old ticket master. I suddenly realized it was fall and that I was going back to New York.

I walked along the tracks in the long sad October light of the valley, hoping for an SP freight to come along so I could join the grape-eating hobos and read the funnies with them. It didn't come. I got out on the highway and hitched a ride at once. It was the fastest, whoopingest ride of my life. The driver was a fiddler for a California cowboy band. He had a brand-new car and drove eighty miles an hour. "I don't drink when I drive," he said and handed me a pint. I took a. drink and offered him one. "What the hail," he said and drank. We made Sabinal to LA in the amazing time of four hours flat about 250 miles. He dropped me off right in front of Columbia Pictures in Hollywood; I was just in time to run in and pick up my rejected original. Then I bought my bus ticket to Pittsburgh. I didn't have enough money to go all the way to New York. I figured to worry about that when I got to Pittsburgh.

With the bus leaving at ten, I had four hours to dig Hollywood alone. First I bought a loaf of bread and salami and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country on. I had a dollar left. I sat on the low cement wall in back of a Hollywood parking lot and made the sandwiches. As I labored at this absurd task, great Kleig lights of a Hollywood premiere stabbed in the sky, that humming West Coast sky. All around me were the noises of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career-this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot John.

14

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert-Indio, Ely the, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

We arrived in St. Louis at noon. I took a walk down by the Mississippi River and watched the logs that came floating from Montana in the north-grand Odyssean logs of our continental dream. Old steamboats with their scrollwork more scrolled and withered by weathers sat in the mud inhabited by rats. Great clouds of afternoon overtopped the Mississippi Valley. The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She was nearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She bought my meals; my sandwiches were all gone. In exchange I told her long stories. She was coming from Washington State, where she had spent the summer picking apples. Her home was on an upstate New York farm. She invited me to come there. We made a date to meet at a New York hotel anyway. She got off at Columbus, Ohio, and I slept all the way to Pittsburgh. I was wearier than I'd been for years and years. I had three hundred and sixty-five miles yet to hitchhike to New York, and a dime in my pocket. I walked five miles to get out of Pittsburgh, and two rides, an apple truck and a big trailer truck, took me to Harrisburg in the soft Indian-summer rainy night. I cut right along. I wanted to get home.

It was the night of the Ghost of the Susquehanna. The Ghost was a shriveled little old man with a paper satchel who claimed he was headed for "Canady." He walked very fast, commanding me to follow, and said there was a bridge up ahead we could cross. He was about sixty years old; he talked incessantly of the meals he had, how much butter they gave him for pancakes, how many extra slices of bread, how the old men had called him from a porch of a charity home in Maryland and invited him to stay for the weekend, how he took a nice warm bath before he left; how he found a brand-new hat by the side of the road in Virginia and that was it on his head; how he hit every Red Cross in town and showed them his World War I credentials; how the Harris-burg Red Cross was not worthy of the name; how he managed in this hard world. But as far as I could see he was just a semi-respectable walking hobo of some kind who covered the entire Eastern Wilderness on foot, hitting Red Cross offices and sometimes bumming on Main Street corners for a dime. We were bums together. We walked seven miles along the mournful Susquehanna. It is a terrifying river. It has bushy cliffs on both sides that lean like hairy ghosts over the unknown waters. Inky night covers all. Sometimes from the railyards across the river rises a great red locomotive flare that illuminates the horrid cliffs. The little man said he had a fine belt in his satchel and we stopped for him to fish it out. "I got me a fine belt here somewheres-got it in Frederick, Maryland. Damn, now did I leave that thing on the counter at Fredericksburg?"

"You mean Frederick."

"No, no, Fredericksburg, Virginia!" He was always talking about Frederick, Maryland, and Fredericksburg, Virginia. He walked right in the road in the teeth of advancing traffic and almost got hit several times. I plodded along in the ditch. Any minute I expected the poor little madman to go flying in the night, dead. We never found that bridge. I left him at a railroad underpass and, because I was so sweaty from the hike, I changed shirts and put on two sweaters; a roadhouse illuminated my sad endeavors. A whole family came walking down the dark road and wondered what I was doing. Strangest thing of all, a tenorman was blowing very fine blues in this Pennsylvania hick house; I listened and moaned. It began to rain hard. A man gave me a ride back to Harrisburg and told me I was on the wrong road. I suddenly saw the little hobo standing under a sad streetlamp with his thumb stuck out- poor forlorn man, poor lost sometime boy, now broken ghost of the penniless wilds. I told my driver the story and he stopped to tell the old man.

"Look here, fella, you're on your way west, not east."

"Heh?" said the little ghost. "Can't tell me I don't know my way around here. Been walkin this country for years. I'm headed for Canady."

"But this ain't the road to Canada, this is the road to Pittsburgh and Chicago." The little man got disgusted with us and walked off. The last I saw of him was his bobbing little white bag dissolving in the darkness of the mournful Alleghenies.

I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wild-buck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy.

That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station masters threw me out. Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control. All I could see of the morning was a whiteness like the whiteness of the tomb. I was starving to death. All I had left in the form of calories were the last of the cough drops I'd bought in Shelton, Nebraska, months ago; these I sucked for their sugar. I didn't know how to panhandle. I stumbled out of town with barely enough strength to reach the city limits. I knew I'd be arrested if I spent another night in Harrisburg. Cursed city! The ride I proceeded to get was with a skinny, haggard man who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. When I told him I was starving to death as we rolled east he said, "Fine, fine, there's nothing better for you. I myself haven't eaten for three days. I'm going to live to be a hundred and fifty years old." He was a bag of bones, a floppy doll, a broken stick, a maniac. I might have gotten a ride with an affluent fat man who'd say, "Let's stop at this restaurant and have some pork chops and beans." No, I had to get a ride that morning with a maniac who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. After a hundred miles he grew lenient and took out bread-and-butter sandwiches from the back of the car. They were hidden among his salesman samples. He was selling plumbing fixtures around Pennsylvania. I devoured the bread and butter. Suddenly I began to laugh. I was all alone in the car, waiting for him as he made business calls in Allentown, and I laughed and laughed. Gad, I was sick and tired of life. But the madman drove me home to New York.

Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. The high towers of the land -the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born. I stood in a subway doorway, trying to get enough nerve to pick up a beautiful long butt, and every time I stooped great crowds rushed by and obliterated it from my sight, and finally it was crushed. I had no money to go home in the bus. Paterson is quite a few miles from Times Square. Can you picture me walking those last miles through the Lincoln Tunnel or over the Washington Bridge and into New Jersey? It was dusk. Where was Hassel? I dug the square for Hassel; he wasn't there, he was in Riker's Island, behind bars. Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? I had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too. I had to panhandle two bits for the bus. I finally hit a Greek minister who was standing around the corner. He gave me the quarter with a nervous lookaway. I rushed immediately to the bus.

When I got home I ate everything in the icebox. My aunt got up and looked at me. "Poor little Salvatore," she said in Italian. "You're thin, you're thin. Where have you been all this time?" I had on two shirts and two sweaters; my canvas bag had torn cottonfield pants and the tattered remnants of my huarache shoes in it. My aunt and I decided to buy a new electric refrigerator with the money I had sent her from California; it was to be the first one in the family. She went to bed, and late at night I couldn't sleep and just smoked in bed. My half-finished manuscript was on the desk. It was October, home, and work again. The first cold winds rattled the windowpane, and I had made it just in time. Dean had come to my house, slept several nights there, waiting for me; spent afternoons talking to my aunt as she worked on a great rag rug woven of all the clothes in my family for years, which was now finished and spread on my bedroom floor, as complex and as rich as the passage of time itself; and then he had left, two days before I arrived, crossing my path probably somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio, to go to San Francisco. He had his own life there; Camille had just gotten an apartment. It had never occurred to me to look her up while I was in Mill City. Now it was too late and I had also missed Dean.

PART TWO

1

It was over a year before I saw Dean again. I stayed home all that time, finished my book and began going to school on the GI Bill of Rights. At Christmas 1948 my aunt and I went down to visit my brother in Virginia, laden with presents. I had been writing to Dean and he said he was coming East again; and I told him if so he would find me in Testament, Virginia, between Christmas and New Year's. One day when all our Southern relatives were sitting around the parlor in Testament, gaunt men and women with the old Southern soil in their eyes, talking in low, whining voices about the weather, the crops, and the general weary recapitulation of who had a baby, who got a new house, and so on, a mud-spattered '49 Hudson drew up in front of the house on the dirt road. I had no idea who it was. A weary young fellow, muscular and ragged in a T-shirt, unshaven, red-eyed, came to the porch and rang the bell. I opened the door and suddenly realized it was Dean. He had come all the way from San Francisco to my brother Rocco's door in Virginia, and in an amazingly short time, because I had just written my last letter, telling where I was. In the car I could see two figures sleeping. "I'll be goddamned! Dean! Who's in the car?"

"Hello, hello, man, it's Marylou. And Ed Dunkel. We gotta have place to wash up immediately, we're dog-tired."

"But how did you get here so fast?"

"Ah, man, that Hudson goes!"

"Where did you get it?"

"I bought it with my savings. I've been working on the railroad, making four hundred dollars a month."

There was utter confusion in the following hour. My Southern relatives had no idea what was going on, or who or what Dean, Marylou, and Ed Dunkel were; they dumbly stared. My aunt and my brother Rocky went in the kitchen to consult. There were, in all, eleven people in the little Southern house. Not only that, but my brother had just decided to move from that house, and half his furniture was gone; he and his wife and baby were moving closer to the town of Testament. They had bought a new parlor set and their old one was going to my aunt's house in Paterson, though we hadn't yet decided how. When Dean heard this he at once offered his services with the Hudson. He and I would carry the furniture to Paterson in two fast trips and bring my aunt back at the end of the second trip. This was going to save us a lot of money and trouble. It was agreed upon. My sister-in-law made a spread, and the three battered travelers sat down to eat. Marylou had not slept since Denver. I thought she looked older and more beautiful now.

I learned that Dean had lived happily with Camille in San Francisco ever since that fall of 1947; he got a job on the railroad and made a lot of money. He became the father of a cute little girl, Amy Moriarty. Then suddenly he blew his top while walking down the street one day. He saw a '49 Hudson for sale and rushed to the bank for his entire roll. He bought the car on the spot. Ed Dunkel was with him. Now they were broke. Dean calmed Camille's fears and told her he'd be back in a month. "I'm going to New York and bring Sal back." She wasn't too pleased at this prospect.

"But what is the purpose of all this? Why are you doing this to me?"

"It's nothing, it's nothing, darling-ah-hem-Sal has pleaded and begged with me to come and get him, it is absolutely necessary for me to-but we won't go into all these explanations-and I'll tell you why . . . No, listen, I'll tell you why." And he told her why, and of course it made no sense.

Big tall Ed Dunkel also worked on the railroad. He and Dean had just been laid off during a seniority lapse because of a drastic reduction of crews. Ed had met a girl called Galatea who was living in San Francisco on her savings. These two mindless cads decided to bring the girl along to the East and have her foot the bill. Ed cajoled and pleaded; she wouldn't go unless he married her. In a whirlwind few days Ed Dunkel married Galatea, with Dean rushing around to get the necessary papers, and a few days before Christmas they rolled out of San Francisco at seventy miles per, headed for LA and the snowless southern road. In LA they picked up a sailor in a travel bureau and took him along for fifteen dollars' worth of gas. He was bound for Indiana. They also picked up a woman with her idiot daughter, for four dollars' gas fare to Arizona. Dean sat the idiot girl with him up front and dug her, as he said, "All the "way, man! such a gone sweet little soul. Oh, we talked, we talked of fires and the desert turning to a paradise and her parrot that swore in Spanish." Dropping off these passengers, they proceeded to Tucson. All along the way Galatea Dunkel, Ed's new wife, kept complaining that she was tired and wanted to sleep in a motel. If this kept up they'd spend all her money long before Virginia. Two nights she forced a stop and blew tens on motels. By the time they got to Tucson she was broke. Dean and Ed gave her the slip in a hotel lobby and resumed the voyage alone, with the sailor, and without a qualm.

Ed Dunkel was a tall, calm, unthinking fellow who was completely ready to do anything Dean asked him; and at this time Dean was too busy for scruples. He was roaring through Las Cruces, New Mexico, when he suddenly had an explosive yen to see his sweet first wife Marylou again. She was up in Denver. He swung the car north, against the feeble protests of the sailor, and zoomed into Denver in the evening. He ran and found Marylou in a hotel. They had ten hours of wild lovemaking. Everything was decided again: they were going to stick. Marylou was the only girl Dean ever really loved. He was sick with regret when he saw her face again, and, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Dean; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad. To soothe the sailor, Dean fixed him up with a girl in a hotel room over the bar where the old poolhall gang always drank. But the sailor refused the girl and in fact walked off in the night and they never saw him again; he evidently took a bus to Indiana.

Dean, Marylou, and Ed Dunkel roared east along Colfax and out to the Kansas plains. Great snowstorms overtook them. In Missouri, at night, Dean had to drive with his scarf-wrapped head stuck out the window, with snowglasses that made him look like a monk peering into the manuscripts of the snow, because the windshield was covered with an inch of ice. He drove by the birth county of his forebears without a thought. In the morning the car skidded on an icy hill and flapped into a ditch. A farmer offered to help them out. They got hung-up when they picked up a hitchhiker who promised them a dollar if they'd let him ride to Memphis. In Memphis he went into his house, puttered around looking for the dollar, got drunk, and said he couldn't find it. They resumed across Tennessee; the bearings were beat from the accident. Dean had been driving ninety; now he had to stick to a steady seventy or the whole motor would go whirring down the mountainside. They crossed the Great Smoky Mountains in midwinter. When they arrived at my brother's door they had not eaten for thirty hours-except for candy and cheese crackers.

They ate voraciously as Dean, sandwich in hand, stood bowed and jumping before the big phonograph, listening to a wild bop record I had just bought called "The Hunt," with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray blowing their tops before a screaming audience that gave the record fantastic frenzied volume. The Southern folk looked at one another and shook their heads in awe. "What kind of friends does Sal have, anyway?" they said to my brother. He was stumped for an answer. Southerners don't like madness the least bit, not Dean's kind. He paid absolutely no attention to them. The madness of Dean had bloomed into a weird flower. I didn't realize this till he and I and Marylou and Dunkel left the house for a brief spin-the-Hudson, when for the first time we were alone and could talk about anything we wanted. Dean grabbed the wheel, shifted to second, mused a minute, rolling, suddenly seemed to decide something and shot the car full-jet down the road in a fury of decision.

"All right now, children," he said, rubbing his nose and bending down to feel the emergency and pulling cigarettes out of the compartment, and swaying back and forth as he did these things and drove. "The time has come for us to decide what we're going to do for the next week. Crucial, crucial. Ahem!" He dodged a mule wagon; in it sat an old Negro plodding along. "Yes!" yelled Dean. "Yes! Dig him! Now consider his soul-stop awhile and consider." And he slowed down the car for all of us to turn and look at the old jazzbo moaning along. "Oh yes, dig him sweet; now there's thoughts in that mind that I would give my last arm to know; to climb in there and find out just what he's poor-ass pondering about this year's turnip greens and ham. Sal, you don't know it but I once lived with a farmer in Arkansas for a whole year, when I was eleven. I had awful chores, I had to skin a dead horse once. Haven't been to Arkansas since Christmas nineteen-forty-three, five years ago, when Ben Gavin and I were chased by a man with a gun who owned the car we were trying to steal; I say all this to show you that of the South I can speak. 1 have known-I mean, man, I dig the South, I know it in and out-I've dug your letters to me about it. Oh yes, oh yes," he said, trailing off and stopping altogether, and suddenly jumping the car back to seventy and hunching over the wheel. He stared doggedly ahead. Marylou was smiling serenely. This was the new and complete Dean, grown to maturity. I said to myself, My God,, he's changed. Fury spat out of his eyes when he told of things he hated; great glows of joy replaced this when he suddenly got happy; every muscle twitched to live and go. "Oh, man, the things I could tell you," he said, poking me, "Oh, man, we must absolutely find the time- What has happened to Carlo? We all get to see Carlo, darlings, first thing tomorrow. Now, Marylou, we're getting some bread and meat to make a lunch for New York. How much money do you have, Sal? We'll put everything in the back seat, Mrs. P's furniture, and all of us will sit up front cuddly and close and tell stories as we zoom to New York. Marylou, honeythighs, you sit next to me, Sal next, then Ed at the window, big Ed to cut off drafts, whereby he comes into using the robe this time. And then we'll all go off to sweet life, 'cause now is the time and we all know time!" He rubbed his jaw furiously, he swung the car and passed three trucks, he roared into downtown Testament, looking in every direction and seeing everything in an arc of 180 degrees around his eyeballs without moving his head. Bang, he found a parking space in no time, and we were parked. He leaped out of the car. Furiously he hustled into the railroad station; we followed sheepishly. He bought cigarettes. He had become absolutely mad in his movements; he seemed to be doing everything at the same time. It was. a shaking of the head, up and down, sideways; jerky, vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing the legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands, rubbing his fly, hitching his pants, looking up and saying "Am," and sudden slitting of the eyes to see everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs and talking, talking.

It was very cold in Testament; they'd had an unseasonable snow. He stood in the long bleak main street that runs along-the railroad, clad in nothing but a T-shirt and low-hanging pants with the belt unbuckled, as though he was about to take them off. He came sticking his head in to talk to Marylou; he backed away, fluttering his hands before her. "Oh yes, I know! I know you, I know you, darling!" His laugh was. maniacal; it started low and ended high, exactly like the laugh of a radio maniac, only faster and more like a titter. Then he kept reverting to businesslike tones. There was no purpose in our coming downtown, but he found purposes. He made us all hustle, Marylou for the lunch groceries, me for a paper to dig the weather report, Ed for cigars. Dean loved to smoke cigars. He smoked one over the paper and talked. "Ah, our holy American slopjaws in Washington are planning further inconveniences - ah-hem! - aw - hup! hup!" And he leaped off and rushed to see a colored girl that just then passed outside the station. "Dig her," he said, standing with limp finger pointed, fingering himself with a goofy smile, "that little gone black lovely. Ah! Hmm!" We got in the car and flew back to my brother's house.

I had been spending a quiet Christmas in the country, as I realized when we got back into the house and I saw the Christmas tree, the presents, and smelled the roasting turkey and listened to the talk of the relatives, but now the bug was on me again, and the bug's name was Dean Moriarty and 1 was off on another spurt around the road.

2

We packed my brother's furniture in back of the car and took off at dark, promising to be back in thirty hours -thirty hours for a thousand miles north and south. But that's the way Dean wanted it. It was a tough trip, and none of us noticed it; the heater was not working and consequently the windshield developed fog and ice; Dean kept reaching out while driving seventy to wipe it with a rag and make a hole to see the road. "Ah, holy hole!" In the spacious Hudson we had plenty of room for all four of us to sit up front. A blanket covered our laps. The radio was not working. It was a brand-new car bought five days ago, and already it was broken. There was only one installment paid on it, too. Off we went, north to Washington, on 301, a straight two-lane highway without much traffic. And Dean talked, no one else talked. He gestured furiously, he leaned as far as me sometimes to make a point, sometimes he had no hands on the wheel and yet the car went as straight as an arrow, not for once deviating from the white line in the middle of the road that unwound, kissing our left front tire.

It was a completely meaningless set of circumstances that made Dean come, and similarly I went off with him for no reason. In New York I had been attending school and romancing around with a girl called Lucille, a beautiful Italian honey-haired darling that I actually wanted to marry. All these years I was looking for the woman I wanted to marry. I couldn't meet a girl without saying to myself, What kind of wife would she make? I told Dean and Marylou about Lucille. Marylou wanted to know all about Lucille, she wanted to meet her. We zoomed through Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, and up to Philadelphia on a winding country road and talked. "I want to marry a girl," I told them, "so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can't go on all the time-all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something."

"Ah now, man," said Dean, "I've been digging you for years about the home and marriage and all those fine wonderful things about your soul." It was a sad night; it was also a merry night. In Philadelphia we went into a lunchcart and ate hamburgers with our last food dollar. The counterman- it was three A.M.-heard us talk about money and offered to give us the hamburgers free, plus more coffee, if we all pitched in and washed dishes in the back because his regular man hadn't shown up. We jumped to it. Ed Dunkel said he was an old pearldiver from way back and pitched his long arms into the dishes. Dean stood googing around with a towel, so did Marylou. Finally they started necking among the pots and pans; they withdrew to a dark corner in the pantry. The counterman was satisfied as long as Ed and I did the dishes. We finished them in fifteen minutes. When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York. We swished through the Lincoln Tunnel and cut over to Times Square; Marylou wanted to see it.

"Oh damn, I wish I could find Hassel. Everybody look sharp, see if they can find him." We all scoured the sidewalks. "Good old gone Hassel. Oh you should have seen him in Texas."

So now Dean had come about four thousand miles from Frisco, via Arizona and up to Denver, inside four days, with innumerable adventures sandwiched in, and it was only the beginning.

3

We went to my house in Paterson and slept. I was the first to wake up, late in the afternoon. Dean and Marylou were sleeping on my bed, Ed and I on my aunt's bed. Dean's battered unhinged trunk lay sprawled on the floor with socks sticking out. A phone call came for me in the drugstore downstairs. I ran down; it was from New Orleans. It was Old Bull Lee, who'd moved to New Orleans. Old Bull Lee in his high, whining voice was making a complaint. It seemed a girl called Galatea Dunkel had just arrived at his house for a guy Ed Dunkel; Bull had no idea who these people were. Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser. I told Bull to reassure her that Dunkel was with Dean and me and that most likely we'd be picking her up in New Orleans on the way to the Coast. Then the girl herself talked on the phone. She wanted to know how Ed was. She was all concerned about his happiness.

"How did you get from Tucson to New Orleans?" I asked. She said she wired home for money and took a bus. She was determined to catch up with Ed because she loved him. I went upstairs and told Big Ed. He sat in the chair with a worried look, an angel of a man, actually.

"All right, now," said Dean, suddenly waking up and leaping out of bed, "what we must do is eat, at once. Marylou, rustle around the kitchen see what there is. Sal, you and I go downstairs and call Carlo. Ed, you see what you can do straightening out the house." I followed Dean, bustling downstairs.

The guy who ran the drugstore said, "You just got another call - this one from San Francisco - for a guy called Dean Moriarty. I said there wasn't anybody by that name." It was sweetest Camille, calling Dean. The drugstore man, Sam, a tall, calm friend of mine, looked at me and scratched his head. "Geez, what are you running, an international whorehouse?"

Dean tittered maniacally. "I dig you, man!" He leaped into the phone booth and called San Francisco collect. Then we called Carlo at his home in Long Island and told him to come over. Carlo arrived two hours later. Meanwhile Dean and I got ready for our return trip alone to Virginia to pick up the rest of the furniture and bring my aunt back. Carlo Marx came, poetry under his arm, and sat in an easy chair, watching us with beady eyes. For the first half-hour he refused to say anything; at any rate, he refused to commit himself. He had quieted down since the Denver Doldrum days; the Dakar Doldrums had done it. In Dakar, wearing a beard, he had wandered the back streets with little children who led him to a witch-doctor who told him his fortune. He had snapshots of crazy streets with grass huts, the hip back-end of Dakar. He said he almost jumped off the ship like Hart Crane on the way back. Dean sat on the floor with a music box and listened with tremendous amazement at the little song it played, "A Fine Romance"-"Little tinkling whirling doodlebells. Ah! Listen! We'll all bend down together and look into the center of the music box till we learn about the secrets-tinklydoodle-bell, whee." Ed Dunkel was also sitting on the floor; he had my drumsticks; he suddenly began beating a tiny beat to go with the music box, that we barely could hear. Everybody held his breath to listen. "Tick . . . tack . . . tick-tick . . . tack-tack." Dean cupped a hand over his ear; his mouth hung open; he said, "Ah! Whee!"

Carlo watched this silly madness with slitted eyes. Finally he slapped his knee and said, "I have an announcement to make."

"Yes? Yes?"

"What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

"Whither goest thou?" echoed Dean with his mouth open. We sat and didn't know what to say; there was nothing to talk about any more. The only thing to do was go. Dean leaped up and said we were ready to go back to Virginia. He took a shower, I cooked up a big platter of rice with all that was left in the house, Marylou sewed his socks, and we were ready to go. Dean and Carlo and I zoomed into New York. We promised to see Carlo in thirty hours, in time for New Year's Eve. It was night. We left him at Times Square and went back through the expensive tunnel and into New Jersey and on the road. Taking turns at the wheel, Dean and I made Virginia in ten hours.

"Now this is the first time we've been alone and in a position to talk for years," said Dean. And he talked all night. As in a dream, we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother's door at eight A.M. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed. He was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms. You remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!" He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. "And not only that but we both understand that I couldn't have time to explain why I know and you know God exists." At one point I moaned about life's troubles-how poor my family was, how much I wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter. "Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up. My head rings!" he cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes- that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails. "Since Denver, Sal, a lot of things- Oh, the things-I've thought and thought. I used to be in reform school all the time, I was a young punk, asserting myself-stealing cars a psychological expression of my position, hincty to show. All my jail-problems are pretty straight now. As far as I know I shall never be in jail again. The rest is not my fault." We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road. "Think of it," said Dean. "One day he'll put a stone through a man's windshield and the man will crash and die-all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way 1 am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us-that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel" (I hated to drive and drove carefully)-"the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side." There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. He used the word "pure" a great deal. I had never dreamed Dean would become a mystic. These were the first days of his mysticism, which would lead to the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days.

Even my aunt listened to him with a curious half-ear as we roared back north to New York that same night with the furniture in the back. Now that my aunt was in the car, Dean settled down to talking about his worklife in San Francisco. We went over every single detail of what a brakeman has to do, demonstrating every time we passed yards, and at one point he even jumped out of the car to show me how a brakeman gives a highball at a meet at a siding. My aunt retired to the back seat and went to sleep. In Washington at four A.M. Dean again called Camille collect in Frisco. Shortly after this, as we pulled out of Washington, a cruising car overtook us with siren going and we had a speeding ticket in spite of the fact that we were going about thirty. It was the California license plate that did it. "You guys think you can rush through here as fast as you want just because you come from California?" said the cop.

I went with Dean to the sergeant's desk and we tried to explain to the police that we had no money. They said Dean would have to spend the night in jail if we didn't round up the money. Of course my aunt had it, fifteen dollars; she had twenty in all, and it was going to be just fine. And in fact while we were arguing with the cops one of them went out to peek at my aunt, who sat wrapped in the back of the car. She saw him.

"Don't worry, I'm not a gun moll. If you want to come and search the car, go right ahead. I'm going home with my nephew, and this furniture isn't stolen; it's my niece's, she just had a baby and she's moving to her new house." This flabbergasted Sherlock and he went back in the station house. My aunt had to pay the fine for Dean or we'd be stuck in Washington; I had no license. He promised to pay it back, and he actually did, exactly a year and a half later and to my aunt's pleased surprise. My aunt-a respectable woman hung-up in this sad world, and well she knew the world. She told us about the cop. "He was hiding behind the tree, trying to see what I looked like. I told him-I told him to search the car if he wanted. I've nothing to be ashamed of." She knew Dean had something to be ashamed of, and me too, by virtue of my being with Dean, and Dean and I accepted this sadly.

My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness. But Dean knew this; he'd mentioned it many times. "I've pleaded and pleaded with Marylou for a peaceful sweet understanding of pure love between us forever with all hassles thrown out- she understands; her mind is bent on something else-she's after me; she won't understand how much I love her, she's knitting my doom."

"The truth of the matter is we don't understand our women; we blame on them and it's all our fault," I said.

"But it isn't as simple as that," warned Dean. "Peace will come suddenly, we won't understand when it does-see, man?" Doggedly, bleakly, he pushed the car through New Jersey; at dawn I drove into Paterson as he slept in the back. We arrived at the house at eight in the morning to find Marylou and Ed Dunkel sitting around smoking butts from the ashtrays; they hadn't eaten since Dean and I left. My aunt bought groceries and cooked up a tremendous breakfast.

4

Now it was time for the Western threesome to find new living quarters in Manhattan proper. Carlo had a pad on York Avenue; they were moving in that evening. We slept all day, Dean and I, and woke up as a great snowstorm ushered in New Year's Eve, 1948. Ed Dunkel was sitting in my easy chair, telling about the previous New Year's. "I was in Chicago. I was broke. I was sitting at the window of my hotel room on North Clark Street and the most delicious smell rose to my nostrils from the bakery downstairs. I didn't have a dime but I went down and talked to the girl. She gave me bread and coffee cakes free. I went back to my room and ate them. I stayed in my room all night. In Farmington, Utah, once, \\ here I went to work with Ed Wall-you know Ed Wall, the rancher's son in Denver-I was in my bed and all of a sudden I saw my dead mother standing in the corner with light all around her. I said, 'Mother!' She disappeared. I have visions all the time," said Ed Dunkel, nodding his head.

"What are you going to do about Galatea?"

"Oh, we'll see. When we get to New Orleans. Don't you think so, huh?" He was starting to turn to me as well for advice; one Dean wasn't enough for him. But he was already in love with Galatea, pondering it.

"What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I just go along. I dig life." He repeated it, following Dean's line. He had no direction. He sat reminiscing about that night in Chicago and the hot coffee cakes in the lonely room.

The snow whirled outside. A big party was on hand in New York; we were all going. Dean packed his broken trunk, put it in the car, and we all took off for the big night. My aunt was happy with the thought that my brother would be visiting her the following week; she sat with her paper and waited for the midnight New Year's Eve broadcast from Times Square. We roared into New York, swerving on ice. I was never scared when Dean drove; he could handle a car under any circumstances. The radio had been fixed and now he had wild bop to urge us along the night. I didn't know where all this was leading; I didn't care.

Just about that time a strange thing began to haunt me. It was this: I had forgotten something. There was a decision that I was about to make before Dean showed up, and now it was driven clear out of my mind but still hung on the tip of my mind's tongue. I kept snapping my fingers, trying to remember it. I even mentioned it. And I couldn't even tell if it was a real decision or just a thought I had forgotten. It haunted and flabbergasted me, made me sad. It had to do somewhat with the Shrouded Traveler. Carlo Marx and I once sat down together, knee to knee, in two chairs, facing, and I told him a dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City. "Who is this?" said Carlo. We pondered it. I proposed it was myself, wearing a shroud. That wasn't it. Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die? In the rush of events I kept thinking about this in the back of my mind. I told it to Dean and he instantly recognized it as the mere simple longing for pure death; and because we're all of us never in life again, he, rightly, would have nothing to do with it, and I agreed with him then.

We went looking for my New York gang of friends. The crazy flowers bloom there too. We went to Tom Saybrook's first. Tom is a sad, handsome fellow, sweet, generous, and amenable; only once in a while he suddenly has fits of depression and rushes off without saying a word to anyone. This night he was overjoyed. "Sal, where did you find these absolutely wonderful people? I've never seen anyone like them."

"I found them in the West."

Dean was having his kicks; he put on a jazz record, grabbed Marylou, held her tight, and bounced against her with the beat of the music. She bounced right back. It was a real love dance. Ian MacArthur came in with a huge gang. The New Year's weekend began, and lasted three days and three nights. Great gangs got in the Hudson and swerved in the snowy New York streets from party to party. I brought Lucille and her sister to the biggest party. When Lucille saw me with Dean and Marylou her face darkened-she sensed the madness they put in me.

"I don't like you when you're with them."

"Ah, it's all right, it's just kicks. We only live once. We're having a good time."

"No, it's sad and I don't like it."

Then Marylou began making love to me; she said Dean was going to stay with Camille and she wanted me to go with her. "Come back to San Francisco with us. We'll live together. I'll be a good girl for you." But I knew Dean loved Marylou, and I also knew Marylou was doing this to make Lucille jealous, and I wanted nothing of it. Still and all, I licked my lips for the luscious blonde. When Lucille saw Marylou pushing me into the corners and giving me the word and forcing kisses on me she accepted Dean's invitation to go out in the car; but they just talked and drank some of the Southern moonshine I left in the compartment. Everything was being mixed up, and all was falling. I knew my affair with Lucille wouldn't last much longer. She wanted me to be her way. She was married to a longshoreman who treated her badly. I was willing to marry her and take her baby daughter and all if she divorced the husband; but there wasn't even enough money to get a divorce and the whole thing was hopeless, besides which Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

The parties were enormous; there were at least a hundred people at a basement apartment in the West Nineties. People overflowed into the cellar compartments near the furnace. Something was going on in every corner, on every bed and couch-not an orgy but just a New Year's party with frantic screaming and wild radio music. There was even a Chinese girl. Dean ran like Groucho Marx from group to group, digging everybody. Periodically we rushed out to the car to pick up more people. Damion came. Damion is the hero of my New York gang, as Dean is the chief hero of the Western. They immediately took a dislike to each other. Damion's girl suddenly socked Damion on the jaw with a roundhouse right. He stood reeling. She carried him home. Some of our mad newspaper friends came in from the office with bottles. There was a tremendous and wonderful snowstorm going on outside. Ed Dunkel met Lucille's sister and disappeared with her; I forgot to say that Ed Dunkel is a very smooth man with the women. He's six foot four, mild, affable, agreeable, bland, and delightful. He helps women on with their coats. That's the way to do things. At five o'clock in the morning we were all rushing through the backyard of a tenement and climbing in through a window of an apartment where a huge party was going on. At dawn we were back at Tom Saybrook's. People were drawing pictures and drinking stale beer. I slept on a couch with a girl called Mona in my arms. Great groups filed in from the old Columbia Campus bar. Everything in life, all the faces of life, were piling into the same dank room. At Ian MacArthur's the party went on. Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight. He began to learn "Yes!" to everything, just like Dean at this time, and hasn't stopped since. To the wild sounds of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray blowing "The Hunt," Dean and I played catch with Marylou over the couch; she was no small doll either. Dean went around with no undershirt, just his pants, barefoot, till it was time to hit the car and fetch more people. Everything happened. We found the wild, ecstatic Rollo Greb and spent a night at his house on Long Island. Rollo lives in a nice house with his aunt; when she dies the house is all his. Meanwhile she refuses to comply with any of his wishes and hates his friends. He brought this ragged gang of Dean, Marylou, Ed, and me, and began a roaring party. The woman prowled upstairs; she threatened to call the police. "Oh, shut up, you old bag!" yelled Greb. I wondered how he could live with her like this. He had more books than I've ever seen in all my life-two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls, and such books as the Apocryphal Something-or-Other in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn't give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life. Dean stood before him with head bowed, repeating over and over again, "Yes . . . Yes . . . Yes." He took me into a corner. "That Rollo Greb is the greatest, most wonderful of all. That's what I was trying to tell you-that's what I want to be. I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it."

"Get what?"

"IT! IT! I'll tell you-now no time, we have no time now." Dean rushed back to watch Rollo Greb some more.

George Shearing, the great jazz pianist, Dean said, was exactly like Rollo Greb. Dean and I went to see Shearing at Bird-* land in the midst of the long, mad weekend. The place was deserted, we were the first customers, ten o'clock. Shearing came out, blind, led by the hand to his keyboard. He was distinguished-looking Englishman with a stiff white collar, slightly beefy, blond, with a delicate English-summer's-night air about him that came out in the first rippling sweet number! he played as the bass-player leaned to him reverently and} thrummed the beat. The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless! except for his wrists snapping the brushes. And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music I picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that's all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the swear poured down his collar. "There he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean's gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn't see. "That's right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. "God's empty chair," he said. On the piano a horn sat; its golden shadow made a strange reflection along the desert caravan painted on the wall behind the drums. God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn't know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea that we were smoking; Dean had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive -the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.