094.

God, that boy sure can run.  Frank watched him from the window.  Billy made it from the machine shed to the gate on the far side of the fence in span of a slow blink.  He could probably get a track scholarship if he got his grades right.  Get a management degree and really run the farm right.  Grow it.

“I’ve owned this place fifteen years and I’m just another worker on it,” he muttered to himself.

“What’s that, Dad?”

“Billy?”  He turned, expecting to see his nine-year-old son.  How’d he get inside so fast?  No, it was some skinny accountant type instead.  “Sorry, I…  how’d you get in here?”

Concern flashed across the accountant’s face and left resignation and weight behind.  “What are you looking at out there, Frank?”

“Billy just bolted across the field like nothing.”

“He loves to run, doesn’t he?” asked Bill.

“Sure does,” answered Frank.

093.

“So we’re in that movie where Andy Warhol meets Jim Morrison.  You know the one?”

“I think so.”

“Well, when Warhol meets Jim he hands him this telephone.  It’s the old rotary style from when we were kids.  Remember those?  Right.  So Warhol’s all nervous and he shoves the phone into Jim’s hands.”

“Tells him he could talk to God with it.”

“Right.  So Stevie and I are watching all this and thinking the same thing.”

“You want it.”

“Exactly.  And Stevie was just the guy to take it.  We’re in a movie; who cares?  He rushes up and just grabs the thing.  I bolt out a different door and run into an alleyway off screen.”

“Did it work?”

“Don’t know.  Stevie was running across the street when the fucking thing rang!  He stops to answer it right in the middle of the street and a bus plows him over.”

092.

Neither the soft blue paint on the walls nor its earthy accents made the room appear any less accusatory.  Even the carnations and baby’s breath shoved into a slender vase across the room seemed to look at him suspiciously.  The crowd around his bed definitely looked at him suspiciously.  

The doctor asked “Do you know what year it is?”  Geoff answered.  “Do you know who the President is?”  Geoff answered again.  

“Can you tell me your name?”  Geoff couldn’t.  A woman beside the bed began to cry.

“Do you know who these people with us are?”  Geoff didn’t.  

The crying woman rushed to the bed, leaned over him and took his hand.  The plunging neckline of her blouse dangled open loosely in front of him.

  

She looked at him expectantly.  He looked down her shirt at a sheer lace bra.  “Do you know me?”  Geoff didn’t.  

"Yes.  Yes I do."

091.

He never knew a ghost could be so alive. While he sat morose in black, she danced around in day-glow colors so bright her shirts looked like they needed electricity. When he observed life unfolding around him, certain as most ghosts were that he saw the tangled and intricate workings of it click like the sprockets of a mechanical watch, she jumped into the works and spryly shot her hands through the spinning spokes like it was a game.

Because it was to her. She wasn’t an unobtrusive audience to what surrounded her. She wiggled her fingers in people’s faces.  She mooned sour-faced old farts. She’d follow one person around for days (just as he followed her,) learn everything about them and move on to the next.

“How can you get so invested in these people?” he asked.

“I don’t know.  You tell me. You’re the one who’s still breathing.”

090.

“It’s over there.”  Her hand shook when she pointed.  “I’m not touching it.”

“Only fifty dollars?”

“Yes.  Take it.  I don’t want that thing in my house.”

*

He contemplated selling the tablet computer online.  The hardware sold for ten times that on its own and the story behind this one would push the price way up.  

It had to be one of the last units out of the Chinese plant -- before public backlash over the working conditions there forced the company to switch its manufacturing to some unknown Brazilian concern.

He opened the box and underneath the tablet sat the neatly placed human finger.  Some workers killed themselves from the stress of the plant.  This guy just gave up a finger.

He switched it on and the background image was a smiling family.  Then a hand missing a finger reached up from the screen and grabbed his face.

089.

“Yeah, you got to know someone to get on there,” Wilcox said of the plant.  “Same  as anywhere.”  The kid hoped Wilcox would be his someone.

“Then you get to build shit.”

“Pieces of shit.  You never see the whole thing.”

“You’re doing something!”

“And every week you have to come up with a new safety recommendation.”  Wilcox pulled from his beer.  “Identify some unsafe practice and fill out a form.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Do you realize that presupposes there is enough wrong there for a hundred employees to be able to come up with a new hazard each week?  That’s over five thousand safety hazards a year.  Do you want to work at a place like that?”

“Ah, every place has something.”

“Five thousand somethings.”

“It’ll pay for my truck, the rent…”

“And all the beer you’ll need after.  You want a paycheck kid, not a job.”

088.

Tommy looks ridiculous in that coffin.  Arms all crossed.  I know it’s uncouth to say, but that shit is fucking funny and if Tommy were here watching this spectacle he’d be laughing too.  Then we’d sneak off into the bathroom for a couple bumps to get us through the rest of this church business.  It’s already taking forever.  

Tommy was good for that: a puff, a bump…  something to pick up those in-between times.  Of course he never had shit once we got anywhere.  I always figured it’d even out in the end.  

Did it even out?  

Doesn’t matter.  He’s up there in that ridiculous suit his mom probably bought yesterday.  Some preacher who probably hasn’t seen him since Sunday school is quoting the Bible.  Bring out some of that wine!  Jesus’s blood will make this all right.  Not some Bible verse.

It’s not like he had to watch Tommy go.