A Final Sort of Healing

This is different from my usual work.

A streak of neon green from the sign of the bar across the street flashed briefly and repeatedly in the puddles of the alley. Then night was dark; the rain of earlier in the evening had ended, leaving the sky clear of any light-reflecting clouds and the chill air heavy with damp. The stink of rotten garbage from the cans lining the alley walls pervaded the area, and the puddles themselves were swirled with the rainbows of oil slicks. Cigarette butts, bottle caps and the smashed remains of the bottles themselves littered the length of the alley.

Nate pushed himself back against the brick wall and shivered in his thin jacket. Even though he was cold, he was fairly dry, having spent the rainstorm in a store perusing items that he couldn’t afford to buy just so that he could be warm and out of the elements for a while. He winced slightly as his belly pinched. It was doing that more and more lately; he thought perhaps the lining of his stomach finally had holes eaten in it. You could only abuse things for so long before they wore out.

A sound behind the nearest set of trash cans startled him and Nate jumped, turning quickly to see who or what might be there, but there was nothing. He relaxed again; it must be a rat or one of the scrawny cats that hunted them through the night. He twitched and rolled his head around, loosening the neck muscles. He hoped Charlie would hurry; he was getting really edgy.

He didn’t know how he ended up in this stinking, rancid, cold hell. Nate didn’t know if the Hell they preached about in the homeless shelters was real, but this Hell he lived in certainly was. He remembered being a kid, warm and safe, eating soup and sandwiches at the kitchen table. He remembered curling up in a warm bed at night, feeling loved and safe. He remembered teachers and gold stars on his homework and riding his bike across crunchy autumn leaves and Christmas trees and baseball games – but somewhere it had all gone wrong and now he was riding a nameless horse towards an inevitable anonymous and ignominious death, chasing something that didn’t even really exist. Soon – and he knew it would probably be sooner rather than later – he’d just be just another dead addict on a slab, waiting to be buried in a potter’s field grave. He didn’t think anyone would even bother to identify his body; no one who had ever cared knew where he was anymore.

He had tried to quit, especially at first, but that hadn’t gone well. The pull of the drugs was more than he wanted to fight. He had tried again, later, and again, when love and friends and family still mattered, and people he had once cared for had begged him to quit. He found that he loved the drugs more, and now he didn’t even think about quitting, for that matter, didn’t even think about anything except the next fix, the next high.

Nate drew a deep shuddering breath and watched the misty cloud it formed as he exhaled.

A stray dog came wandering down the alley; Nate knew the dog and it came wagging over to him for a scratch and maybe a treat. Nate gave it the scratch, but he didn’t have anything for a treat. All of his money went to his needs, and these days, food wasn’t usually one of them.

The night wore on and a breeze came up, sweeping the garbage stink out of the alley and replacing it with the smell of cooking meat from a restaurant upwind. Nate sniffed it,  and for a moment thought about following his nose to the food, but he needed to meet Charlie instead. He didn’t have enough money for both.

Charlie was late tonight and Nate was moving past edgy into frantic. He heard a scraping behind him and whipped around He spotted a figure the right size for Charlie coming down the alley. Nate backed up into a doorway and waited.

“Sorry I’m late, man. Had a problem and needed to ditch it before I came,” Charlie’s rough voice hissed at him. He put out a hand, and Nate slapped the tattered bills into it. Charlie’s other hand pushed a small package into Nate’s other hand and then Charlie was sauntering out of the alley onto the sidewalk and he was gone.

Trouble? Nate hoped that there wasn’t a cop tailing Charlie tonight. He didn’t want to get grabbed and taken to the station before he had his fix. Withdrawal in a cell wasn’t something he enjoyed.

Nate slipped out of the doorway and turned to go deeper into the alley but before he had taken more than two steps, he felt someone behind him. He didn’t even stop to think. He whirled, pulling out the  knife he kept ready to defend himself as he did, and thrust. He wasn’t losing this fix.

As he felt the knife meet resistance and then plunge into soft belly flesh, he looked into the face of the person who had come up behind him. The face was twisted in shock and pain – and it wasn’t a face Nate had expected. It was an old man, a bum who was often found in the company of the stray dog who had wandered through earlier. The old man was no addict out to steal Nate’s fix. He was homeless and mentally ill and harmless, and was probably looking for the dog. As Nate gasped with horror and pulled back the knife too late, he felt the gush of warm blood on his hand in quantities that said the old man was dead, even if he was still standing. Then old man slumped against Nate and fell to the alley surface, his hand landing in the puddle that still flashed green with the neon sign.

Nate’s heart was pounding and his mouth was dry and his stomach felt like it was going to jump right up his esophagus and out of his mouth. Heaving, he staggered away from the old man and leaned against the wall, retching and trying to bring up the bile that was all his stomach held.

He heard pounding footsteps and a cry. That was right, Nate thought, the old man usually traveled with a younger fellow, a veteran who had never left the war in his mind and tried to drink the memories away…Nate found himself grabbed and whipped around  and slammed against the rough brick of the wall with the dirty, bearded face of the man in his. “You bastard,”  hissed the man, his breath a foul stew of unbrushed teeth and cheap 80 proof, “you lousy, junkie bastard!” And then the man’s hand darted in and out in a gesture much like the one Nate had used a few minutes ago. The man swung away and left at a run, leaving Nate propped against the wall and the old man lifeless nearby.

Nate could feel pain, but against the pain of his addiction, it wasn’t really there. He felt the warmth of the blood soaking his front and running down his legs, despite the hand he held pressed against his belly. The blood flowed over his fingers, mixing with the old man’s blood already drying there. Nate slid down the wall. His heart was thundering, racing in an effort to get blood to his brain – the blood that was dripping to the asphalt in a rhythm with his pumping heart. He made a strangled noise deep in his throat, but mostly what came out was a rush of air.

The pain was worse now, and as he folded over on his side, curled in a fetal position not unlike the way he had curled in his safe, warm bed as a child, it occurred to him that it strange that he should die this way. He had thought he would just nod off and never wake up, or seize his life away in convulsions, dying from an overdose. Taking another life and then forfeiting his own in the same way was something that had never occurred to him.

And then, as blackness finally closed around him, he thought that perhaps now he might finally be healed, that for him there was nothing else besides death that would be able to make him whole again. What he hadn’t taken from himself with the drugs, he had taken from himself with one impulsive stab of a knife into an innocent man.

A choked laugh was his last sound, and then Nate was still, his hand lying in the same oil-slicked puddle as his victim’s, the green neon sign still flashing away over both of them.

-She Wolf ©2009