Faces in Time (21 page)

The limo parks in Omar’s long driveway, and Omar gets out first, being the closest to the door, followed by Chester who has moved around Rhonda in order to hold her hand as she exits.

Breaking his attention from her hand in his, something is moving along the far side of his car. He can see it peaking just slightly into the passenger windows as it slinks along.

“Rhonda,” he says pulling her to her feet and grasping her hand firmly, “you need to get inside Omar’s house with the others now.”

“Wha—”

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“Someone’s by my car. Go inside now, and I’m going to check this out.”

“No, you can’t—”

“Too dangerous for you. Please, go now.”

As soon as he sees her heading toward the house following Omar who is opening the front door, he runs toward his car.

His eyes focus on the dark spot near the passenger window that he saw move a few moments ago. He approaches the car from the street side, hoping to trap the mysterious trespasser between the street and the houses.

As he nears, the spot turns away and runs.

Chester
can see it’s a man about his size, wearing black with a matching baseball cap. Chester sprints after him, having trouble catching up with the man in black. He stares at his target and notices something odd about his movements. They’re familiar, but he can’t quite place them.

Chester shouts, “Hey, stop! What the hell were you doing by my car?”

The man makes no effort to do so or to divert his attention to the face that is yelling at him.

He runs toward the driveway of one of Omar’s neighbors. Two cars sit in the driveway. A dark blue split-window Stingray Corvette and a new Jaguar. The man slows his pace slightly and lifts his arms as he steps between the two cars. Chester sees the unnecessary movement to avoid damaging the automobiles, and he knows exactly who the would-be saboteur is. Chester makes his way between the cars, but he bumps them slightly with a knee and an elbow.

The man runs down the side of Omar’s neighbor’s house and grabs the top of the six-foot wooden fence.

Chester
can see the man’s awkwardness in pulling himself over the fence, and he stops pursuing him, knowing this would not be the place to confront him. Too many people around, including Rhonda. Especially Rhonda.

He walks back out of the side of the neighbor’s house and between the two shiny cars. Rhonda sees him immediately, and the sadness on her face lightens some. She runs toward him.

“Chester, are you alright?”

“Yeah, everything except my ego. Got outrun pretty good.”

“I was so worried that you were gonna get hurt. Looked like you were going to catch him on side of the house.”

“He jumped the fence, and I couldn’t get myself up there fast enough.”

“Good! I’m glad that you’re safe. He could’ve hurt you. Could’ve had a gun.”

He kisses her on the forehead, “Rhonda, I need to check out the car. Will you wait with the other writers? I’ll walk you back over there.”

She nods her head and follows closely beside him.

As they approach the bewildered writers on the lawn, Omar calls out, “Chaz, are you alright? What the hell was all of that?”

“Just some punk trying to break into my car. I’m going to check it out and see if there’s any damage.”

“Who knew our new writer was a superhero?” says Omar as Chester walks away.

Laughs.

Mirkwood, one of the staff writers says, “Naw, it’s a buddy of his that he paid to pretend to break into the car so he could chase him off and look tough in front of Rhonda.”

They all laugh except Rhonda who watches him approach the car.

A pair of snips lies on the ground near the front passenger tire. The black rubber grips with the thin green stripe stir a memory in his brain. They’re from the first set of tools that he bought after arriving in L.A. Later, he’d use and break most of them working on the same car they were meant to damage this evening.

He leans over and looks under the front passenger tire. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he moves to the gas filler cap, removes it, and looks for traces of anything that shouldn’t be there. It smells solely of gasoline, and there are no traces around the filler tube or cap to indicate any unwanted additives.

He thinks he must have arrived and scared the man just in time. He picks up the snips, not wanting to leave anything with fingerprints on it that might lead back to his past self, revealing the dual existence of Chester Fuze.

He decides he’ll start the car while Rhonda’s still a safe distance away in front of Omar’s house. He can see her talking to the other writers while keeping her eyes on him; her face is still panicked.

Chester smiles, waves, and hopes he’ll still be grinning after turning the key in the ignition.

Skin shriveled and pruned, the inside of his mouth gritty from the murky water that had seeped in, and his lungs pounding roughly, his body produced a sickly wheezing with a spattering rattle of thick saliva battering about his mouth and throat. A chunk of the fluid landed on the corner of his mouth, saggy and lifeless along with a handful of other little spatters about his chin, lips, and nose.

His left leg wound was an angry red and throbbed at a faster rate than the rhythm of his breathing.

He felt that his exhaustion and injuries were consuming more and more of his depleted energy. The pace of the insatiable aching in his pounding chest, the throbbing in his calf, the rattling in his throat, and the worn pain over every piece of muscle and skin, it all seemed to keep speeding up.

Once Edmund had stopped swimming, drifting, and getting knocked around in the current, his physical needs not only caught up with him, but ran him over, forcing his body to pump blood, breathe, and hurt faster and faster until he could not keep up. Having what little vigor he had left to keep alive sucked out of him at an escalating pace, he closed his eyes accepting the fact that it would be all for him. The relief of sleep would be the last thing that he would know before his body ceased to be alive.

Death scared him, but deep down he hoped it would be a clean slate, a chance to start over. He believed all of his problems in life were because he was dealt a bad hand, not attributing any of his terrible decisions or behaviors to himself but to bad luck.

He was certain things would have been better if he was born into someone else’s life. Getting a new hand would be another chance. As in most else in his life, he knew he was wrong, that there’d be a penalty for all he’d done, no clean slate, nothing left to gamble; and knowing he was wrong has always given birth to an anger inordinately larger than the seriousness of the subject.

His thoughts were hostile and dark, and his only glowing gem in the darkness was that they didn’t catch him. He made it. He would die free of any man having any authority over him.

He beat them.

Even if it cost him death, he beat them, glowing in hatred the whole way.

That was sixteen hours ago. He had crawled into the patch of rozo cane knowing nothing about his surroundings except he was out of the river whose endurance had long outlasted his own and showed no sign of relenting. With vision as lame as a newborn, he felt that he had pulled himself out of one world and into another.

He couldn’t have found a better hiding place in the immediate area even if he had been fully aware to choose one. The tall rozo stalks at the river bank provided him secrecy and held enough solid mud together to keep him from sliding back into the water or being seen by the passing boats. There he slept the heaviest sleep he’s ever known, his right shoulder sinking nearly four inches into the mire during its course.

Now, his eyes flutter, little flecks of river and shore sticking to his lashes. The long, skinny shape of the rozos, the color of the mud, the stickiness all over his skin, the subtle warmth of the overcast setting sun, and the stale scent of the stagnant water trapped in the mud of the bank creeping up his nose and seasoning his thoughts: all of it enters his head, making it a cluttered, unsorted, and untraversable chamber, the only prevailing thought being
Where am I?

River grime covers the inside of his ears, but filthy fingers are not able to dig out the grit, only capable of adding to it.

His hand dives into the slop of embankment, diving just past his wrist before gaining enough leverage to lift himself up. Looking around the area, he knows it’s the Mississippi. Looking for any type of a landmark, he tries to figure out where his body has crawled ashore in the river’s two thousand plus long vein down widely varying temperatures, altitudes, and cultures.

Surely, he knows he’s down current from the prison, somewhere between his escape and the mouth of the river where it meets the Gulf of Mexico. But, that stretch covers a long area. The further he’s made it away from the penitentiary, the less intense the search will be for him where he has landed.

New Orleans
is in the path. Being the most populated area in the rest of the river’s course, it would be a poor destination for him, despite having grown up in Riverview, a suburb just outside of the city, living most of his life one block off Planeline Hhway.

It’s also the place where he committed his crimes, and more importantly the place where the police arrested him for each of his offenses, the few that they’ve discovered anyway. It would be logical that the local law enforcement would be keeping an eye out for him to return to the area.

Being on foot, half his body caked in river mud, his hair dirty and unbrushed, and with two obvious wounds on his calves underneath his torn and stained pants legs, he’d blend in as well as a female streaker in a monastery.

The first feeling to strike him besides his general soreness and the tender wounds on his calves is the acute stabbing pains in his stomach.

Prison food did little to satisfy, and he never fed himself good food before being incarcerated. Cooking is something he’s despised. Usually a girlfriend or a female hanging around to share the drugs would take care of the meals. When they were scarce or incapacitated, he’d order pizza or hit up a drive-through. Through all of that, he’s never felt any hunger like this. His food choices may have been poor, but he always made sure he grabbed it in large quantities. Intense hunger is something new to him.

It’s been two days since he’s eaten. He broke out of the prison before breakfast, having not eaten since dinner the night before, slept none, ran all day, swam for much of the night until exhausted, passed out in the rozos all morning and nearly all of the daylight hours.

All of his energy being completely spent plus the long hours without eating have left him primally famished. It swells so much that he hates the rozos for not being edible, the river for not being drinkable, and the air for not smelling like anything appetizing or anything other than revolting, stagnant, marshy shore.

Hatred and hunger push him to move. Standing, he sees the faint outline of a bridge named after a crooked politician and knows he’s not far from the place where he was born, maybe fifteen miles, nor is he far from uniformed men with guns who are looking for him.

His sour-tasting mouth utters, “Cursed.”

The hunger grows.