Runner
A Short Story
Phil once saw a fellow soldier gut shot while riding in the back of a deuce-and-a-half. They had been yelling their conversation over the rumble of the big truck's engine, delighted that the monsoon rains had finally ended another season of sogginess. Suddenly, the man's face had gone slack; he had taken a sniper's round directly into his upper intestines. What Phil recalled most clearly was that both of them were amazed how such a large hole could be exploded into the middle of a man's body without there being any pain whatsoever. They laughed about it, as both lay at the side of the road, waiting for the medic to break open a vile of morphine.
"Hey! I don't need that shit!" the man with the exposed entrails had exclaimed. "I don't feel nothin'!"
A wearied look traveled across the medic's face. "Better lie still, man, and let me get this stuff into you. It never hurts at first; it's the shock. But believe me, it's gonna hurt like hell in a minute." Within moments, the wounded G.I. was screaming his agonies across the jungle's canopy for all to hear. Just before the chopper arrived to airlift him away, his eyes assumed a moist, glassy stare, a red foam drippled down his chin, and Phil knew that he had stopped shrieking because he was dead.
The recollection of this event was compressed into a flashed fragment of memory at precisely the moment when, almost two years later, Phil's perceptions progressed from a numbed shock to a creeping fire of pain as lumps of meat were gouged from his left buttocks and the palm of his left hand. When Malcolm, the driver of the Triumph 750 motorcycle on which Phil rode as passenger, had first let loose the clutch, rudely dropping the transmission into first gear, Phil had clung tightly to the fellow's waist; but when the clutch was popped from second into third gear, the front wheel rose up to meet the sky, and Phil was airborne, momentarily suspended like an astronaut sitting in gravitation free space, his legs still bent at the hips, extended straight out before him. Then, a lunar probe returning to earth while continuing to accelerate with the vicious velocity imposed by gravity, his flesh burrowed deep into the unforgiving macadam. Or, more accurately, it bore into him. As his posterior yielded to the road's surface, he instinctively extended his left hand in order to avoid head-to-concrete contact. All of this, spontaneously and without time for the most rudimentary form of rumination, except for the memory of his once wounded companion.
Just before the pain rushed in like a river of sensation let loose from behind an abruptly demolished dam of insouciance, Phil registered surprise and moderate disappointment. He wondered vaguely if he too would die before the chopper arrived. His only utterance, a slurred, "...shit", as he considered the improbability of an army Medivac helicopter along the back roads of northern Florida.
Having ridden without incident behind his new-found biker friend for several days, despite the continual reveries shared with other similarly inclined and mobilized bohemians, Phil had come to view his recent circumstances as a serialized, self-induced epoch over which the ordinary forces of nature had no sway. This brusque meeting of soft tissue with rigid roadway now opened a new chapter of vulnerability in a months-long saga of randomness and fear. For, since his return from the putrescence of Southeast Asia, he had lived in the manner of a nocturnal quadruped, doggedly avoiding his tormentors. These molesters were, to his mind, anyone with a rank higher than his own of Private First Class. This left open the possibility of harassment from virtually everyone within the armed service in which he found himself imprisoned. A prison, he often silently noted, he had built by himself, for himself at the same moment he threw away its key with a simple signature at the bottom of a set of enlistment papers.
He had crafted one mistake and misadventure after another since that moment almost three years earlier until, here he sat, on the side of a strip of highway, small portions of both his hand and his backside smeared across the blacktop a hundred feet behind him. Staring down at where he cradled his mangled paw, he could see its entrails bulging through the freshly rent flesh, grisly organic versions of the hidden wheels and gears that do the work of every machine, regardless of how glossy or seamless its exterior disguise. Phil envisioned another ghastly scene behind him, the blood soaked insides of his backside now made involuntary inhabitants of his sweat and blood drenched outsides. He speculated silently on the malleability of flesh, wondering why it could not be fashioned like clay, a missing clump simply pressed back into service where it had been removed by a modifying sculptor from a work in progress. Was this not, after all, the way the Master Craftsman had molded his original creation? Perhaps God had made Eve out of a gob from Adam's rump, he thought; right after the poor guy's Harley ran head on into the Tree of Knowledge. With the completion of this absurd notion, Phil fell forward into blackness.
---
First, nausea; then an electric bolt of pain that looped from up here to down there and back. Perception modulated between these sensations; occasionally the journey from the realm of agony to that of elliptical queasiness came to an equilibrium that gave equal caliber to the nerves which registered both perturbations. At least I'm not dead, the thought came. Unless hell was, as the nuns had once taunted him, no more than the registration of pain.
A bandaged claw, where nerve endings screamed instantly of the exclusivity of their existence, raised itself into the air. The idea "my hand" became associated with the tormented tentacle that dangled in mid-air. A spasm of retching, and the hand was forgotten, retracted towards the horizontal torso to which it was attached, this motion causing, in turn, the body to swivel involuntarily, bringing with it another eruption of torture, a burning sensation from a lower place. "Branding iron", dawned the next cognition, and with that thought came all the rest which constitutes conscious identity.
He knew he was a Private First Class named Phil, on the couch where his host, Malcolm, had allowed him to sleep since responding to the universal plea of an extended thumb two weeks earlier along a deserted stretch of highway in the middle of Florida's panhandle. Much had transpired since Phil had devolved from AWOL hitchhiker to the battered body laying prone on a stranger's furniture.
How had Malcolm and the other bikers gotten him back? Probably, he mused, by splaying his limp carcass over the back of the motorcycle like a hunter's trophy after the kill. He thanked whatever gods may be for unconsciousness, realizing his measure of present discomfort must be but a pale reflection of the sensations that madly ran up and down his spine between injuries and brain during that terrible journey from accident scene to living room sofa.
He tried to sit, and another excruciating surge of undiluted pain shot from his hand to his backside and back again. The throbbing in his palm was a rhythm so pronounced that he feared his heart had been transplanted there as part of some grotesque experiment while he had remained unconscious. Achingly groping around this torso with his one still functional appendage, he felt the rough outline of dried gore and torn fabric. To his horror, Phil realized that blood from the newly chiseled maw below his belt line had congealed pants with wound, as if the cloth invented by Levi Strauss had always been an integral part of his anatomy. Revulsion led to reflexive action without calculation of the consequences, and as his hand tore away the fabric from the crater's edge, it brought with it new shards of tender tissue. He screamed, and the world went dark again.
---
Discomfort distorts the yardstick of time. How long he had been prone upon the couch, waking and repeating the ritual of tearing his tattered jeans away from the festering laceration, Phil did not know. Occasionally, the singularity of his distress was interrupted by the angry mask of Tina, Malcolm's wife, leering down at him through the haze of his anguish. Sometimes the voices of Malcolm and Tina floated overhead from a distant room, arguing his fate; he knew Tina considered him to be as unwelcome as she did unsavory.
"I want his stinking ass out 'a here, Malcolm," he heard her screech. "You can't give a home to every fuckin' bum you scrap off the road!" "When he gets better, baby, I promise. You can't expect me to throw him out now. The guy's all busted up..." For the leader of a leathered motorcycle crowd, Malcolm was remarkably soft spoken. Especially when compared to the clamorous whine of Tina's utterances. Her voice always entered the atmosphere at the same taut pitch, a tightly torqued instrument sounding as if all of life's occurances overwhelemed its owner and that she wished to convey this rare gift to all within earshot. The simplist task became gargantuan when she articulated its necessity, taunting the listener to respond to her hysteria. Regardless of how innocuous its content, each sentence she invoked rose in amplification, the final word extended into a wail of wretchedness.
"Malcolm, for Christ's sake, we're out of milk! Go get some fucking miiiilllk!", Phil had heard her yell the day before the accident. He was still in awe of her ability to transform single syllables into multiple trills. He knew it would not be long before Malcolm would sheepishly approach him with a pronouncement of eviction. Yet each time he tried to roust himself, he could not muster the steely intent needed to fight through the palpability in his hand and buttocks, because the severity of his dual injuries was equally as inspiring as Tina's lack of affection. When he peeled back the home-made bandage wraped round his hand, he could study the muscles and tendons that bulged and writhed well above the surface of the wound which regurgitated them. His attempt at cutting away the protruding meat with a pair of scissors the day before had led only to a further paroxysm of immeasurable pain. He knew his posterior wound faired no better and that, unless tended to, his pants were destined to become a permenent addition to his left hindquarter.
"Malcolm", he croaked through cracked lips. "I can't take it anymore, man. I gotta get to a doctor."
---
Polished metal and the smell of alcohol; everything clean, including his now professionally bandaged lesions. The young doctor studied him with a practiced apathy, long enough to inform Phil that he had been made. Which wasn't a task requiring graduate school study skills; in this, the Era of the Absent Without Official Leave Soldier, the countryside was littered with hollow-eyed young men who, while trying to hide their closely cropped hair and military field jackets, hit the road in search of escape from an armed force in thrall to the nation's most unpopular war to date. The hemorrhage of Government Issue Joe's had become, like Phil's festering wounds, a national pustule, disgorging thousands of disillusioned youngsters into the back alleys and onto the interstates of America's landscape. There were so many in recent months that in a pathetic effort to stem the gush, the army had placed a $25 bounty on the head of each missing soldier, hoping to pique the interest of the country's underpaid local law enforcement officials. The capture and return of a couple or more runners each week was at least a modest bonus for those cops bored with their usual preoccupations of rounding up petty theives, drunks and other small town roustabouts. It would be this exact humiliation that would end Phil's odyssey within a matter of days, as he was rounded up for mere lunch money by an off-duty Virginia state trooper.
At the moment, as the physician tended to his injuries and his ignominious capture loomed in the unseen future, Phil's mind smoldered with odious memories of how his present predicament had begun. When he made the drunken decision to make a dash for freedom several weeks earlier, he had been as typically ill-prepared as the many who had gone before him. For several days prior to his unrehearsed hegira, Phil had groused continuously about his commanding officer's refusal to accept as fact Phil's off-base employment, a part-time job as a disc jockey at a local radio station. Phil clung to this vestige of civilian life like a rock climber who dangles at the end of his safety rope after falling towards the abyss.
He had stood ramrod straight before Captain Delmar G. Gaston the day his clandestine civilian occupation had been officially unveiled. The Captain informed him that he had almost driven off the road, no doubt with glee, when he had heard the unmistakable sounds of the voice he loved to loath coming from his car radio one recent afternoon. It had been one of those flukes of fate; Gaston never deviated from his usual diet of hay seed music reminiscent of his back woods roots. For a few moments on that fateful afternoon, he had decided to see what other goober music he could find on the dial, when he had stumbled across Phil's mellifluous parlance wafting across the airwaves. Phil could but imagine the Captain's eyes focusing with the intensity of the predator, as he recognized his unmistakable Northeastern nasality, the vocal intonations of that young troublemaker who the Captain had been trying to find some excuse for filing formal charges against ever since the insolent buck had been assigned to his company. The fourth generation army officer, whose sensibilities were offended by the very existence of this snot-nosed Yankee "bouy", confronted his most despised subordinate with the assurance of a scrapper about to pounce on an opponent that weighed in at half his size.
"Yew knew the rules' round here fer you took that job, private; no civilian employment off the base without permission from yer commadin' offcer. An, that's me; an, I din give you no permission, bouy. Yer ass is mine now, son..."
Army officers were notorious for their love of closely cropped hair. But nowhere during his hitch had Phil seen such an intimately shaven pate as that which peaked the skull atop of Gaston's muscle-bound neck. In lieu of eye contact during these increasingly frequent encounters of terror and interrogation, he had elected to stare directly at his superior's hairless crown, becoming disquietingly familiar with the ridges, grooves and scars that formed the map of the captain's off-hours bar brawling career. It was to one of these familiar landmarks that Phil directed his gaze as he wheezed forth his defense.
"Sir, I didn't ask permission 'cause I knew you wouldn't give it, and I needed that job, sir; I'm sorry, sir, but I really..." Phil could see the small veins in Delmar's forehead bulge as the man screamed his interruption inches from his face. "Yer sorry, awright, soldja; yer the sorriest son'fabitch I ever seed."
Of all things about Delmar, Phil hated his Southern affectations the most. They were continual reminders of his own status as a Yankee expatriate, marooned in the environs of rural Georgia among alien beings who continued to fight a civil war they had lost a century before. The irony of having escaped without physical harm from civil strife in Viet Nam, only to be assigned to this place of emnity where hatred had been transported intact from one generation to another since the mid 1800's, did not escape Phil's acute sense of the sardonic. He knew he was hated by the residents of this region, both for who he was and for what he represented. A package deal, as it were; personal and sectarian enmity all rolled into one nightmare.
When he had returned to the States with a full year of his hitch left to serve, it had not occurred to him that some place on the planet could be worse than where he had just spent the previous twelve months. Yet the army was always capable of out doing itself with unpleasentness, and his final assignment had indeed proven every bit as disagreeable as his previous tour of duty. Every onerous aspect about it stood symbolized before him in the person of Captain Gaston, embodied in the bad breath and spittle spewing forth from the wet cavity of Delmar's mouth, the orifice of a man who had made it part of his career profile to dismantle Phil bone by bone. In the Captain's mind, such a dissection would be but just punishment for a loathsome young man who incarnated all that was unruly about an entire generation of unwilling soldiers.
"Git yer ass back to the barracks, Private, and ferget about bein' a disk jockey. Yer a fuckin' soldier, son, and that means you cain't breath unless I tell yew to. Yew got that!?"
"Yeah, got it". Phil's voice was shadowed with implied sarcasm. "Yew address me as 'sir', bouy, or I'll stick yer ass in the stockade right now! Understood me, soldja?"
Phil noted that Delmar's eyes were extended beyond their sockets. Preferring to interpret his commanding officer's last question as rhetorical, he withheld a verbal response, and simply brought his right hand up to his temple in the half-hearted imitation of a salute which Gaston had come to recognize as Phil's signature gesture: not unskillful enough to be interpreted as insubordinate, but disingenuous enough to be clearly nonmilitary.
---
"Both of these injuries are a mess."
The sound of the physician's voice brought him back to the present moment.
"Why didn't you get them taken care of right after the accident?"
"No insurance."
This was Phil's first utterance of truth in recent memory. He chose this over contrivance because of the exhaustion associated with the continual manufacture of new lies.
The doughy flesh around the care giver's eyes softened with compassion. "Listen, kid, I've got some forms to fill out. Why don't you get dressed, and I'll be back in a few minutes".
Phil was staring vacantly at the floor and didn't bother to look up. He knew he had been offered an avenue of retreat, but could not muster an appropriate gesture of gratitude, another potential source of enervation. He heard the door slide shut. Taking his cue from the empty room, Phil struggled to get back into his jeans. They were stiff with dried offal, and he almost put this foot through the opening where the left hip pocket once was, rimmed now with desiccated gore. He vaguely considered the merits of a laundromat, but thought even this ordinary amenity too much a luxery for a man of his current status -- a runner with no place to hide. He limped towards the side door of the emergency clinic, stopped to make a final check of the hallway, and stepped into a nearby back street.
The day was warm, the early fall sunshine of northern Florida belying Phil's gloomy mood. Looking back to earlier that morning when he had finally mustered the fortitude needed to lift himself from Malcolm's couch, he recalled Tina's icy facade hovered inches from his own ashen mask. "When you get patched up, why don't you keep on moving..." This came as neither a question nor a statement, rather as an inflexible demand laced with ominous implications to which Tina gave voice in her next glacial declaration. "You shouldn't stay too long in any one place; don't want the MP's to find you, huh...?" He had blinked once toward the space Tina claimed to occupy, as if he had been momentarily distracted by the retrieval of some long lost memory. Turning to Malcolm, he reached up and settled his uninjured hand on his shoulder.
"Listen, man, I really appreciate all you done for me..." The sentence trailed off, Phil sensing his benefactor's anxiousness as he shifted from foot to foot, his eyes skulking from Phil to the burning ember's of his wife's silent stare.
"Better get you seen, man; we shouldn't of let it go this long..."
The drive to the clinic was completed in stillness, both men knowing they would never see one another again.
---
Instead of returning to his barracks as ordered, Phil had done what he enjoyed doing most since his assignment to the Signal Corp school at Ft. Gordon, Georgia: deliberately disobeying the direct orders of that knuckle dragging buffoon and son of the Confederacy, Captain Delmar G. Gaston. He compounded his offense by not only leaving the base without permission, but by heading directly to the nearby radio station, into the forbidden realm of his civilian vocation of afternoon drive-time DJ. Each weekday, for the past two months, Phil had shed his army fatigues like a dried snake skin, slithering away from his mid-afternoon military duties as the maker of films which exhorted his contemporaries to drive safely when off duty by displaying for them images of the broken, decapitated bodies of traffic accident victims. After escaping this macabre task, Phil would sit contentedly amongst the albums scattered about the small radio studio from which his show was broadcast, clad in the secular attire that symbolized his recalcitrance and momentary autonomy.
"It's sixteen minutes past the hour, 78 sultry degrees in downtown Augusta. Here's Nancy Wilson, ready to cool you down with, 'The Best is Yet To Come'." Such forms of innocuous communication with an unseen audience had become an umbilical connection between Phil and the longed-for world of noncombatant normalcy. Yet even after establishing a beachhead on this island of asylum, he could not escape the madness that had come to possess him over the past twenty-four months. Many afternoon programs were presented under the dank cloud of Phil's favorite reality killer, alcohol, consumed in measures that made him a potentially prime candidate for a scene in one of his own safety horror films. One particularly memorable shift had been completed after he swallowed a portion of what the off base drug house he frequented called "the best blotter Acid on either side of the Mississippi". How curious, Phil thought as he ingested the purple slice of paper, that the language of Madison Avenue had permeated to the darkest crags of the blossoming drug sub-culture of the early 1970's.
That afternoon's platter spinning was the longest show ever to have aired, by Phil's accounting. He could swear that a record which normally ran under three minutes took hours to play that day. And each weather forecast or other utterance he managed to squeek over the open microphone took similarly excruciating time frames to accomplish. Often, he closed the mike uncertain if what he had said formed the most fundamental of sentences. A portion of his brain told him that he was to offer the listener the latest time/temperature update, but that part of his head connected to the headset would hear only the vaguest semblance of language, a concoction of vowels and consonants that might better have resembled man's first attempts at verbalization eons ago.
"Da tim id fortain befur free; ant eets worm. Woof! Eaty-ate!"
Somehow, these indiscretions went unnoticed by the station's program director, or by anyone else. Probably, Phil mused, because what happens on a tiny radio station in a backwater Georgia shit hole goes as unnoticed as everything else in a place where nobody pays much attention to anything except the price of sorghum.
He was certain the night he and another liquor-sodden soldier fired up the AM/FM transmitter of the daytime only station, that trench coat clad denizens of the Federal Communications Commission would descend upon the wee hours pirate program and cart off its progenitors to a life of maximum security. Perhaps that's why he continued with such antics; any fate seemed a reasonable alternative to the one he now suffered, a string of interminable days subjected to the orb of inverse military logic.
In that regard, the day of his unplanned departure was only slightly different than others which had preceded it. This time, instead of heading to his illicit occupation slightly inebriated, Phil was entirely intoxicated, a state not easily achieved by a young man whose recent life had set new standards for alcoholic befuddlement. The impending tragedy was further complicated by his unwitting, unfortunate mode of transport, another olive drab clad miscreant named Art Armstrong. One of Phil's talents which Captain Gaston most feared was his ability to lure others into the mire of his discontent. Phil viewed this deftness in a different light; he merely drew the attention of his already cheerless associates to their status as unimportant canon fodder. In the world according to Phil, it wasn't much of a leap to convince even the most passive reprobate that his load was as heavy as it was repellent, and should therefore be borne no more. He achieved his convincing with such panache and jaded humor that all within auditory range were susceptible to his wiles.
So it was that day with Arty. A family man with a young wife and two toddlers, Arty had sympathetically resolved to help Phil achieve a modicum of the freedom which eluded him, the freedom Arty had already secured through his standing as father and husband. His marital chains had ironically ensured him of the privilage to procure off base housing for himself and his family, to find after-hours employment which could enhance his meager military wages and, the most coveted symbol of emancipation of all, to own and navigate his own private automobile. Arty had thrown his arms around Phil in a gush of pity during an earlier drinking spree together, and intemperately agreed to drive Phil to his radio job each afternoon. This, in an unspoken exchange for Phil's wild energies. In keeping with the old adage that the grass is always greener elsewhere, each man wanted, at least in part, what the other possessed. Phil wanted the mobility that came with Arty's position as head of household; Arty wanted to vicariously experience Phil's unabashed abandonment to all things unpredictable and most things unlawful.
Arty's car, not much by most measures of material attainment, was a battered 1964 Bonneville convertible which Phil could not have coveted more had it been a star ship equipped with faster-than-light capabilities. It was, in fact, a perfect replica, excepting the color, of the car which Phil had stolen as a drunken teenager and from which, miraculously, he had walked away unscathed after transforming the vehicle into a heap of steaming, twisted metal and broken glass by driving it head on into a weeping willow tree at 50 miles per hour. Seeing Arty's car for the first time was, for Phil, like witnessing the reassembly of the legendary Phoenix, albeit a bird with a new paint job. He could not have been more thrilled had he been present for the First Coming.
On the fateful day in question, however, Phil's rage blinded him to all aesthetics, including his lust for Arty's wheels. Fueled by free-flowing quantities of a local potion that less than half a century earlier the locals might have been arrested for distilling in their bath tubs, Phil was in rarefied form. Arty had never seen quite as riled, nor quite as toxic, either. This time, he thought hazily, Phil's legendary ability to absorb massive amounts of booze while remaining articulate enough to fool traffic cops, was going to drown in the flask of White Lightening which Phil was using to punctuate his tirade. For every swig he gulped, he offered the bottle to Arty, who also never met a raised container of hooch he could resist.
"Fuck 'em! Right in the ass, Arty, that's what I say. Ram it to 'em 'till their turds pop out their eyes..." At this stage of intoxication, Phil's ability to conjure imagery became severely impaired, reduced to crude, repetitive references to human orifices and their real or fancied functions. In between every sentence, Phil made liquid noises which Arty couldn't identify as strictly human. But his judgment was also undergoing a transformation, back through each stage of sentient evolution, inevitably destined for arrival at a limbic level of consciousness, sharing a perception of reality with the planet's reptiles. It took little time for Arty to join in with his own artless representations about buggering their common unnamed enemies.
"Fuckin' right, Phil. Ram 'em till they split in two...!"
This reduced level of idea exchange continued until they were in the parking lot of WNEK, where Phil was scheduled to go on the air in fifteen minutes.
"Hold up, hold up, stop the car, stop the car, man! Jesus H. Christ!" Phil seemed not to notice in the midst of his urgency that Arty had already pulled to a stop and thrown the transmission into Park. "Fuck this. I'm too drunk to go in there. Tell you what we're gonna do, Arty baby; we're gonna turn this heap of shit around, head down that long, lonesome highway, and never look back. Wadda ya think about that, fuck face...?"
"You know, man," Arty slurred, "you got this way of makin' a guy really feel good about himself, know wad I mean? So, I'm a fuck face, drivin' a heap of shit; but I ain't so ugly, and my car don't stink so bad that you don't want me to turn around and drive you....where'd you say, ass wipe...?" "Arty, arty...come on, just figures of speech, OK, man? I'd never fuck your face...and you know I love yer heap! Anybody who drives a car that gets three gallons to the mile on yer salary is my kind of moron! Come on, big guy, think about it. Whad's there to lose? Another reveille formation? Policing the company grounds for cigarette butts? An ugly wife and two screaming kids?
With this last remark, Arty reflexively balled his hand into a fist and, reaching up and over Phil's clumsy attempt to ward him off, buried his ham-sized hand into the side of Phil's face. Anesthetically inured beyond pain's domain, Phil shook his head once and continued undeterred. "Oh, jeez, sorry man; yeah, the bitch is a beautiful person, and those kids are really special..."
Like uncounted others of working class origins before him, Arty had married young and without forethought. The consequences were a quarrelsome relationship with his wife and a lack of parenting skills that made it easier to complain about his noisome urchins than to engage constructively in their rearing. Phil's sardonic observation cut deeply, leaving Arty sullen, silent, and vulnerable to Phil's next prodding foray.
"Come on, Arty, to hell with everybody. We got almost a half bottle of sauce, a full tank of gas, and I've got some pocket money." He leaned in, as if preparing to kiss Arty gently on the ear. Instead, he crooned softly, "Let's do it, Arty. I swear, man, this will be so much fuckin' fun..."
Turning his face towards Phil, Arty's nose almost bumped into Phil's Grecian proboscis. Grinning widely, he placed his open hand squarely in the middle of Phil's face, and pushed him hard across the seat. As Phil crashed in a heap against the passenger side door, Arty let out a glass shattering yell, and both men collapsed into a spasm of adolescent laughter. Arty threw the car into drive and spun out of the gravel driveway, spewing a shower of small rocks in dual geysers behind both rear wheels. As they careened into the deepening dusk, they left behind a trail that reeked of overheated engine and burning rubber. A discerning nose might also have detected the lingering aroma of gin wafting in the late summer air.
---
Five hours later, Arty's head throbbed with fear. As the effects of the alcohol had inexorably ebbed like a sobering tide, his mind had become increasingly inhabited by demons of remorse and regret. Images of his irate wife and inconsolable children wafted up at him from the dusky horizon that stretch beyond the end of the rural Georgia highway he had been driving along since the euphoric departure from the radio station's parking lot. Phil, meanwhile, careened to ever greater heights of inebriated bliss, as if the decision to desert his post had at last unleashed his most primal desires for freedom. Singing wildly, if rarely on key, he continued to slurp the remnants of their dwindling libations, in part to bolster Arty's flagging resolve.
"...white bird must fly or she will die...!" Come on, Arty, you know the words. Hells the matter with, huh? You said nothin' for miles".
Staring sullenly ahead, Arty gripped the steering wheel tighter, a gesture perhaps meant to steady his voice for the pronouncement he had been trying to make for more than an hour.
"We gotta go back, Phil. This was a stupid idea. I got a wife and kids. And I'm due to get out in six months. Shit, man, if we turn around now, we'll be back in time for reveille tomorrow morning and..."
Phil screamed his interruption. "I'm never going back, man! Never! I'm all through with that shit..."
A long silence followed; neither man looked at the other. Without fanfare, Arty pulled over to the road's shoulder and turned off the engine. Crickets and other harbingers of a summer's night in Georgia drifted through the open car windows. In choosing the words that came next, Arty modulated his volume downward to reflect the atmosphere of the setting and to underline the depths of their opposing convictions about the continuation of their adventure.
"Phil, listen to me. You know I dig you, man. I really like hanging out with you. You make me laugh! And I feel ..I dunno...I feel free when I'm doin' stuff with you. Like when we blasted out of town this afternoon; man, what a rush! Right then, I though, 'I'm never goin back'. Just like you. But, hey, man, the whiskey's worn off, and I got to think about my family..."
Again, only the sound of crickets filled the void. When Phil failed to respond, Arty reached in front of him and opened the passenger side door.
"I'm turnin' back, Phil. You can close yer door and get some sleep. Or you can get out here. Right now..."
The last of the day's sunlight disappeared behind the tree line in the distance. When Phil's voice came, it too was soft and subdued, betraying no trace of the afternoon's cavorting.
"Arty, I can't handle another day of it. Be good man; look me up if you ever get to Canada."
He slid off the seat and closed the car door, looking out into the darkness where he would soon be walking, rather than gazing back into the blackness of where he had been. Arty dropped the transmission into drive, pulled across the road, and aimed the car to the north for the trip back to the fort.
Phil stood in the somber silence, still refusing to look towards the retreating automobile. Only when the last sounds of Arty's car faded away did Phil turn slowly and face in the direction of the receding vehicle, now only a Doppler sound nearly absorbed by the night
His voice was barely a whisper. "You fucking coward..." Tears rolled down both his cheeks, but Phil's granite expression did not change. He plunged his hands into the pockets of his army field jacket and resolutely strode into the evening's gloom.
---
Could that have been only one month ago? There had been enough adventures, high and low, to have made for a year's worth of excitement. And here he was on the road again. Despite the throbbing insistence of his newly acquired wounds, Phil's determination had hardened after his four weeks on the run. He should have headed right for Canada from the start, he told himself, but that was whiskey out of the bottle. He had needed time to adjust to the idea of a lifetime of camouflage, and hanging with Malcome and his gang had given him the seasoning required to face the future as a full-time fugitive. The only certain component of the years ahead was that he would live forever outside the ordinary framework of fellowship, never revealing his identity or his past to others again. The price he would pay for his self-discharge from the army was the highest he could have paid, and he was finally willing to obligate it all if it meant not having to live another day of the military life he had come to loath. A recent collect phone call to Bill, a friend back at the base, confirmed that there was nothing to beckon him back.
"Phil, zat you?? Where the hell you been?? Where are you?" His friend, the company clerk, had hesitated before accepting the long distance charges.
"Well, I ain't there, that's where I am. What's up with you, Billy?"
"Uh...not much, man. So...um...you comin' back, or what?" There was an unusual strain in his friend's inquiries. Phil wondered why Bill sounded so panicked.
"Naw, don't think so. I just wanted to get some of my stuff. Do you think you could manage to box some of it up and send it to my folks place?"
"Can't do that, man..."
"Whadda ya mean, you can't do it?"
There was static on the line, and for a moment, Phil thought Bill had hung up.
"I sold it all, man..."
"You...what??"
"Arty said you was never comin' back. I figured you wouldn't be needin' any of yer stuff anymore...so I sold it. Got a really good price for all yer albums."
"You sold my records..."
"Yeah, like I said I...
Resisting the temptation to smash the receiver back in its cradle, Phil let the phone drop from his hand. He stood motionless, staring vacantly ahead, while a small voice continued to chirp into empty space from the telephone dangling from the end of its cord. Oblivious to his surroundings, Phil spent a few moments running through a silent inventory of the personal belongings he would never see again, then walked away from the phone and his immediate past at Fort Gordon, Georgia.
He headed straight to the first north bound highway he could find, and stuck out his thumb.
