Thirty-four
During the walk into town, Tom Bigger worked up an appetite.
At a convenience store that offered prepackaged deli creations, he bought a submarine sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke.
A couple of customers shied away from him. The clerk had served him before, however; she took some of his panhandled money and gave him change without saying a word to him, without glancing at his face.
In a nearby park, under an old iron lamppost that provided more atmosphere than light, Tom sat on a bench that looked out onto the street. He watched the passing traffic as he ate.
Behind the bench rose an enormous phoenix palm. During the lulls in traffic, he could hear rats agitating one another in their nest high in the crown of the tree.
Tom didn’t have much overhead, but panhandling alone couldn’t pay for his needs. Every other month, he took a bus to the nearest city and, working at night, stole enough to cover his expenses.
Primarily, he burglarized suburban homes where a lack of lights and a few days’ of newspapers scattered on the driveway suggested he would not risk coming face-to-face with a homeowner.
If he found a likely target walking alone on a lonely street, he robbed him at gunpoint. Tom’s face and the pistol turned even strapping young men into situational pacifists.
The gun wasn’t loaded. He didn’t trust himself with cartridges.
He never worried that in a frenzy of self-hatred he might kill himself. Suicide required either more courage than he possessed or more despair than afflicted him.
His hatred was directed inward, his rage outward. With bullets in the weapon, he would sooner or later kill somebody.
From experience, he knew that once he indulged in a vice, that indulgence became a habit, then an obsession. Murder would be no less addictive than tequila or weed, or the other drugs that he consumed so recklessly when he could get them.
He was a lot of things, none of them good. He dreaded adding murderer to the list of words that described him.
As he ate the sandwich, his mind reeled back more than once to the incident in the bluff-top rest area.
Initially, he had been astonished. Astonishment turned to shock that rendered him bewildered and emotionally numb. On the walk from his cave to the town, numbness relented to a creeping disquiet.
Watching the passing traffic, Tom saw a bumper sticker that proclaimed I STOP SUDDENLY JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT.
Across the street, a multiplex was playing a movie about the end of the world.
In memory, he heard a fragment of what at the time had seemed to be a perpetual argument, conflict without end.
“Why are you doing this, Tommy?”
“Just for the hell of it.”
“You’re throwing away your life, your future.”
“There isn’t a future. It’s the end of the world.”
“It isn’t the end of the world.”
“Bastards like you are the ones destroying it.”
“How can you talk to me like that?”
“How can you be the shit you are?”
The fitful breeze brought a handbill to his feet. In the wan lamplight he saw that it was for a restaurant called Magic Pizza.
After a moment of consideration, he carried the handbill, the sandwich wrapper, the empty bag of potato chips, and the half-empty bottle of Coke to the nearest trash can and threw everything away.
He needed a joint of sinsemilla. Local authorities were tolerant of the discreet use of pot. He took the tin of hand-rolleds from his backpack, fished a joint from the supply, and put the tin away.
Deeper in the park, he found a more secluded bench.
He had a butane lighter. He struck the flame but didn’t light the joint.
If he smoked one, he would smoke a second, perhaps a third. He would wash away the pot taste with tequila. In the morning, he would wake up behind a screen of bushes, with dirt matted in his beard stubble and spiders in his hair.
The creeping disquiet inspired by the incident on the bluff was growing into a motivating apprehension.
He put away the lighter. Instead of returning the joint to the stash in the tin, he shredded it in his fingers and scattered it on the breeze.
This action so surprised him that for a moment he seined the air with his fingers, trying to recapture the debris that he’d cast away an instant earlier.
Already, the disquiet that thickened into apprehension was further thickening into dread.
While he’d been eating a late dinner on the first bench, he was given signs from which he deduced where he must go. He suspected that time was running out for him to do what he must do.
The thought of riding for three hours in a bus chilled him. If this weight of dread became too heavy, he would feel oppressed in a bus. Claustrophobia would overwhelm him.
Intuition told him to begin the journey on foot. He set out for the coastal highway.