Shut Down Strangers by Dan Davis
Since Sissy could roll a joint better than any of them, they delegated the task to her, and as a reward for her services she took the first hit and passed it to Saul, who took a hit and passed it to Mike, who took a hit and passed it back to Sissy.
The building creaked around them, decades of rotting lumber and crumbling brick inching toward their final demise. Susie leaned her head against the wall behind her and said, “Dammit.”
“What are we gonna do?” Saul said. The firelight played shadow games across his face, but his bruises were still clear enough.
“Head out,” Sissy said. “What else can we do?”
“But I like it here.”
“We all do,” Mike said. “Hell, there was this girl I was supposed to see this weekend.”
Sissy laughed. “Mike with a girl?”
“Fuck you.”
“No. I’m just saying, you’re always talking about not mingling with the locals.”
“Most locals don’t look like her.”
“This is what we get for coming to Nebraska,” Saul said. “I mean…goddammit!”
“It’s not like we were gonna live here forever,” Sissy told him. She held the joint up between her fingers, eying it, turning it over. After a few more moments of contemplation, she put it back between her lips. “I mean, just yesterday you were talking about leaving next week.”
“Next week. And not with a fucking shiner.”
“Don’t piss off the cops,” Mike said. He smiled.
Saul flipped him off but didn’t say anything, and in a moment all three of them were laughing. They passed the joint around until it was finished, then Saul and Mike laid down with their heads towards Sissy, who closed her eyes and began humming a song she’d heard on the radio. The fire crackled softly, its heat washing over them, almost unbearable. It was July in Nebraska, they didn’t really need a fire but for some reason Mike couldn’t picture them without one. And not just to keep away the rats and snakes, either. The fire just seemed right.
“What’ll we do about the car?” Saul said.
Mike heard Sissy’s shirt rubbing against the wall as she shrugged. “We’ll just hitch a ride with Steve and Carol. It’ll be uncomfortable, but it’s not like we haven’t done it before.”
“But it’s our car.”
“It’s my father’s car,” Mike said. “And they’ll call him, and he’ll either come get it or have somebody get it for him. And plus, he’ll know we’re alive, so our folks won’t be worrying so much.”
“You’re trying to tell me there’s a silver lining here. That’s easy for you to say—you’re not the one disfigured.”
“Disfigured.” Sissy snorted.
“People just don’t understand.”
“Exactly.”
“I mean, why the hell did we even stop in a backwoods shit hole like this? We knew what we were getting ourselves into, right? Another visit from the sheriff, a few more complaints about loud noises we didn’t make and stealing we didn’t do. And now this.”
“You’re supposed to go with the flow. You know fighting back only causes more trouble. This is about peace, remember.”
“Just because I’m living like a goddamn gypsy doesn’t mean I’m not a person anymore. Somebody starts shoving me around—I shove back.”
“Not when they have a badge,” Sissy said. It sounded like such a deep philosophical statement, the three of them kept quiet, pondering it over. Mike pictured a cop from a few towns back, a bronze-toned behemoth who had actually pulled out his nightstick and was advancing on Mike and Saul when Sissy had stepped between them. The cop may have harbored a deep-seated disgust of hippies stemming from his Bible-thumping-Jesus-humping upbringing, but he was still a good ol’ boy and wasn’t about to hit a girl he wasn’t married to. Mike had seen, physically manifested, what he’d previously only heard in raised voices or read in blind news articles: hatred, pure and unadulterated enmity that had no roots and no limit. It was the ugly face of humanity that Mike had hit the road to fight (or avoid, he wasn’t sure which); and instead, he’d come face-to-face with it, and finally, here in Who-Knows-Where, Nebraska, that hatred had struck the first blow.
And of course we aren’t going to strike back.
But why? Peace? What Mike felt welling up inside of him, what he figured Saul felt as well, wasn’t peace—he wasn’t sure what it was, but it definitely wasn’t peace. There was fear in there, but also bloodlust, and something else—bravado, machismo, call it what you will. A strange cocktail that churned in his stomach and made him imagine taking that officer’s nightstick and beating him over the head with it, again and again, saying something defiant in the process, something that Dennis Hopper would say in the movies, something badass.
“We’ll leave in the morning,” Sissy said. Her voice was a whisper, barely audible above the fire. “We’ll keep going west.”
“To where?” Saul said.
She hesitated. “To where they understand.”
Saul grunted, but his dissent didn’t go further, and he and Sissy drifted off into another contemplative silence.
Mike waited for the conversation to start up again, waited for the opportunity to say what he was thinking, but the moment never came. After a few minutes, he turned his head and watched a dark shape moving over near the far wall, barely visible beyond the reach of the firelight. A rat. Its shape drifted along the periphery of the darkness until it suddenly disappeared—presumably into a hole in the wall, but Mike couldn’t shake the notion that the rat had simply vanished into the shadows themselves.
Dan Davis was born and raised in Central Illinois. His work has appeared in various online and print journals. You can find him at www.dumpsterchickenmusic.blogspot.com.