The last of the real morning had shredded by the time I decided to go and take in the lay of the land. I needed more proof of this place being a haven before it could have any strong odds of becoming My New Home.
Uncle Oliver had a very strong chance of coming after me if he learned where I was, and… well. He didn’t make much of an illusion of holding powers of nature at his beck and call, but he’d held sway in Dawson Ridge still. Just because you lose your crown doesn’t mean people stop calling you Your Majesty overnight.
I’d occasionally had nightmares of him and his stupid hat on my way out of Pennsylvania. He’d be walking up to me, wearing his slacks and jean jacket, as I lay stupefied by sleep paralysis. On the side of the road, under a bush, inside a bridge’s shadow. He’d step lively, stop when he loomed overhead like a starving bear, and stared down at me with his keyring twirling around a finger.
“What a prize,” he’d chuckle. “Look at what Sarah loved. And now you’re here.”
Then his eye would come drifting down, smiling with hate.
When you had a person like that interested in your welfare, you needed assurances.
Before I forget, let me set the record straight. I don’t hate my mother, even though she was right there when I was getting the ill-treatment-horror of the day a lot of the time. Oliver Decimos had the charisma of a gangster, horrible and wonderful for his foes and friends. You went along with what he wanted or you suffered, sometimes both. If Mom ever tried to step in and redirect him instead of blunting his issues, she’d have gotten the back of his hand or worse. She contributed to my misery by coming up with punishments for me… but without her suggestions and arguments on how to discipline me, I probably wouldn’t have survived until I managed to escape.
When the thing you want most and the people who control your life the most refuse to meet, some seam in the machine has to give.
Patricia wanted to show me the local sights first, but sadly that had to take a back row seat. If the admittedly promising situation so far wasn’t quite sufficient, better that I leave now and tear the bandage loose. That idea made me upset. I so dearly wanted to stop running before I hit the Atlantic Ocean and had to trek toward Massachusetts and Rhode Island, or Canada. Maybe that wasn’t in the cards. To compound that problem: money. No hands-out beggar was I, waiting for a dollar fish to come to my net, but I also couldn’t breed quarters or easily make an investment that guaranteed the exchange of labor for pay. You didn’t hire a migrant worker for six hours doing anything really consequential. You found someone who’d stick around at least a short while, or with proof of competence and special skills.
Even so, I’d made it with next to nothing before. Comparing poverty and captivity, I’d take the first any day.
I decided the next thing that had to happen was an inspection on how poisonous the town was to outside observation. The few places around the area, the neighboring villages of… let’s call them Grinder’s Switch and Sundial and Greenloop – I needed to understand what they imagined when someone said “Bezoarville.” If they considered the place as a backwater, or better yet some kind of colony of the ill, then that would serve as maybe the best imaginable testimony in favor of staying put. If they considered the place as a good vacation destination (or worse yet, a location with terrible problems but extremely notable reasons for outlanders to visit), that would serve very much the opposite goal. I wanted this place to not only have warning signs around the border of town, but mental blocks to dissuade the very idea of tourism.
After all, much harder to investigate persons-of-interest when they fall off the map.
On the positive side of my research, this did not take very long at all to investigate. The first happy sign was when, funnily enough, I learned there were no buses in any direction that crossed town lines. There was a historical-society-worthy set of tram cars that would bring you around within the confines of Bezoarville, every one of which seemed to be piloted by sweaty and ill-tempered men with very short legs.
I’d never done much map reading, just figured that I should head either East or West from Dawson Ridge when I skipped town, and West seemed a bit iffy if only because I worried I’d just keep marching into the Midwest until the rest stops got too far away for survivable travel on foot. North of Pennsylvania, of course, is the sort of land where I couldn’t hope to live through the cold season, unless I stayed close enough to home that getting found out would have been a given. South? Mom might have come from that direction in the distant past, but anything above eighty degrees Fahrenheit made me itchy and annoyed.
All that said, I still managed to uncover a lot of useful truths in a bit under nine hours. Talking to people in Grinder’s Switch and Greenloop, they knew of their neighbors decently well. Yes, their little enclave had that really unfortunate tendency toward illness, and something about a nuclear plant being problematic, and it would be preferable to nearly anything else that business didn’t involve crossing the border.
A nice man with a handkerchief said he had a cousin in Bezoarville. He showed no interest in visiting, though he would take care of said cousin if the opposite sort of visit ever happened. My reasons for asking were what, exactly? That was a tad invasive, no?
Three women out eating lunch stopped arguing about their favorite sitcoms’ best plots and worst actors just long enough to call me “curious” before saying they’d visited the town once and it was fun, and also a bit odd. Nothing specific. “Odd.” It was pretty remarkable how much their friends and neighbors ignored or just avoided Bezoarville, true, especially compared to expectations. “Yeah, sure! Let’s head up the road and check out that cinema! But not if it’s over THAT direction.” They’d never ignored the question, precisely, but they’d never not ignored it either.
A young mother with a short but active son and a child on a leash made a few ominous statements, in between managing her kids. They didn’t have much of a concrete body to them, more a direction. They aimed suspicion at “those people” and what might have been implications of witchcraft, along with vague indications that I might not be trustworthy by extension. I guess she thought of my potential new hometown as… what’s the phrase? “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
This all pleased me.
Given the animosity and general lack of back-and-forth between Bezoarville and the regional ecosystem, at a guess the rest of the world heard about the place – if at all – as character-poor and mildly dangerous. Would Uncle Oliver be willing to believe his niece set up shop here? Probably, in due time. Would he leap to the conclusion that it made for an ideal hidey-hole above all other places at the very instant he learned of its existence (presuming that he ever did)?
No. No, he wouldn’t.
This partly satisfied the Plan. I’d never gotten around to giving it a formal name, let alone writing it down, but my aim of securing a new life for myself had three broad-strokes stages. As some of the Pennsylvania Dutch speakers I’d known liked to put it, Alles Anfang sind schwer. “All beginnings are hard,” or thereabouts. That described the daunting profile of the first stage – go and find a place far from home and circle it like a buzzard, assuming it proves suitable. Take precautions; secure bolt holes, obtain tools for protecting myself, learn the lay of the land so a midnight flight remains possible in the grimmest circumstances. Make traps and dead-drops and prepare in case someday, somehow, that natural disaster of a man found me again. Probably it would end with me putting knives and hammers and such all over my domicile, but that was a Future Me problem.
The second stage of the Plan had to do with something more… domestic. Get lodgings. Set myself up as a hooked-in but not strictly vital member of the local environment. With pay and a place to set one’s head, you can live virtually anywhere in this country, even if you don’t have a life. As a certain Mr. Rale of Dawson-Maple High’s economics class said at the beginning of every semester, though: “Food necessary, happiness optimal, riches appreciated.” Hermetic subsistence doesn’t need a smile, and it barely needs other people.
That was the third and arguably scariest stage of the Plan.
No, not really. But it scared me a lot. “Go out into the world, make friends and acquaintances, and in due time become your own person.” The sort of thing that would take years, and without a hundred kinds of tiny support it might take decades. I hadn’t been actually going in the direction of the seaboard for years, but – as hinted before – the act of giving up most of your good fortune in life performs paradoxical changes even within days of making the shift. Suddenly, the mind stops panicking at the idea of losing everything. At the same time, when you acquire pretty things, or substantial conveniences, you will hold onto them so very very tightly.
“It’s a pretty day,” I said to myself. “Pretty and warm without being hot. Just enjoy it.”
Okay, my internal voice told me back. Just let me rub fingers over the contour of these thoughts one more time.
“No,” I said, more quietly. “The Plan isn’t a guarantee of success. Follow it, don’t become it.”
Follow it, don’t become it. That’s kind of catchy.
“Thanks, I wish I knew where it came from!”
Don’t worry about it, just keep it in mind.
“I’ll try.”
Spending lots of time in your own company can make it easier for you to lose the center of gravity for your mental gyroscope.
“Get back to it!” I told myself.
My self said something indistinct in return, and the wheel in the sky kept on turning.
Three blocks from my final reconnaissance that day, I stopped, head creaking right, and rocked back onto my rear foot.
In front of me, a stationery store; behind, a duplex with an office set above a subs-and-spaghetti place with the unfortunate name of Switch ‘Wich. You couldn’t call their separation a “road” unless it widened two steps’ worth or so. The smell of the alleyway I was passing had a bit of the stab of garbage. Trash cans with wax paper sheets distributed the majority of the smell, though a surprising amount of spring morning freshness was coming from the swaying trimmed-down trees parked in the alley as well. Past the first of these trees lay a pile of mismatched trash.
If you keep on the road for long enough, you begin to notice the difference between junk and trash. That old ball-peen hammer sticking out between those plastic bags, that was trash. You know that old saying about trash.
Long enough to almost reach the ground if I slid it through a belt loop, the thing had a scarred and half-useless face on its head. I had to clean some grease off where its rubber grip was starting to crack with age. Also, it had a bit of a smell. If the print running down its side was to be believed, though, it had a titanium core.
Holding it felt like puzzle pieces meeting.
“Well, this calls for a celebration!” I said.
“What sort of celebration?” asked the gas station clerk ten minutes later, as I dropped a six-pack and my ID and some of my dwindling store of dollars in front of him.
“A celebration of finding a means of self-defense as my spirit animal, and it representing a new lease on life!” I said thirty minutes later, a shiny sweat-covered beer bottle in one hand, my hammer in the other, and a stupid smile on my face.
“HWORF!” I added an hour later, crossing the border back into town, bent over as another bezoar came sliding free with the grace of a figure skater on sandpaper.
“What I wouldn’t give for one of these tram operators to make just a single stop inside each other’s routes,” I groaned, not looking forward to the long walk to a station from such distant parts.
But the prospect of trying new things was a pleasant distraction, all told. It gave me strength, that thought of mulling over happy things and forgetting about sad ones.
It was a good idea when I found that hammer, and decided to bring it along for the ride. THAT was not my mistake.
My big mistake came when sliding the wrong level of celebration from the “bad” column to the “good” column.
When you’re in the dunce corner of life, you want to pull open your own chest and pin a sheriff’s star in your ribcage. You hear somebody telling you about an idea and how bad it is, you get ambushed by an inquiry as to how good or bad or otherwise your current plan of action will become in the fullness of time, and you suddenly get the urge to rip yourself open and point to your seal of office. “Quiet, I’m the authority around here” doesn’t get triggered often, of course. You ask for kindness, and you accept the terms, and that’s now a fact of life. You throw yourself on others’ mercy only by giving up the idea that you’re above such things.
But sometimes, that needs to all get left behind so you can do something, wise or stupid, on your own terms. I’m not worthless! Look at how worthless I’m not! Reach out and grab a bag of Tootsie Rolls or whatever you prefer. Draw a big peace sign on the bark of fifteen trees with a flake of rock.
Get drunk.
In all fairness, I’d never crossed that line before. Giving up sobriety wasn’t new, but in the neck of a brown glass bottle danced a little Oliver. Beer felt like a wire noose around my soul and he was holding the other end. Just…
Remember that I needed both to feel alive and feel numb. The Right to be Wrong required exercise.
Several minutes or days after spending some precious green stuff, and the clerk at the counter checking my old high school’s student ID, I was moving down the road with the intent of making my way back to Bezoarville’s bustling central area. If I’d started my journey at a different time or place, the escapade would have ended up with me maybe getting in trouble with one of Patricia’s rants on tap, or running into an annoyed sheriff. I wouldn’t have tied the extra cord closing my garbage bag onto my wrist. My ideas would have had few odds of bringing me happiness, and also would have kept me on the straight and narrow.
Everything went the way of the average Brothers Grimm tale when I tripped on the shoulder of the road and fell down into the ditch running alongside it.
To be honest, most of the events of that day had low to moderate haziness thanks to the weirdness of my sudden change of fortune. Novelty tends to add a greasy, slippery cloud over parts of sensation, after all. My day also got supermassively blurry between the visit to that convenience store and ending up literally flailing with the hope of becoming upright and returned to the blacktop.
At some point, I became convinced that the road was holding me back. The destination of the place I’d slept the night, and heavily indulged in food, lay in THAT direction. In fact, I saw that the easiest path forward had little to do with the tram service. I’d just stop trying to get up the incline, pull my carcass onto the forest carpet, roll over the ribs of tree root knots rising from the thick needle blanket, and keep walking in a more or less straight line toward civilization. It would short circuit my journey by quite a good distance. After all, I remembered the rough shape of some of the roads veining this area of region, and they came much closer than the next junction along the big road heading East from central Bezoarville called… let’s say, Carriage Lane.
So I began walking with more pep and purpose, initially propelled by the confidence of the ignorant, and began veering northward as well as westward.
It also ended up being in the direction of trouble.
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