One Safe Place (2 page)

He was an ex-college football and track all-American, but had he gone soft? Looking at the wasteland of a man sitting across from him caused anxiety to bubble under his skin. Why did he bring Psalms, a warrior, along instead of coming alone? Tylowe's mind skied downhill from Mt. Rainier and right into Lake Washington. He found himself sinking and going nowhere.

Tower of Power's horn section led the charge to “You're Still a Young Man” in his motorcycle helmet's stereo as he traveled to the prison that day. About a year or so ago, he started to question his life as it had become.

His body was fuller, but still toned. He'd lost the six-pack, but he had no hanging belly fat. Salt-and-pepper hairs graced his goatee, but the salt hadn't taken over yet. Women still made eye contact and pushed an aggressive agenda his way even though most knew he was married.

Meeah, his wife, acted like she loved to love him, but he questioned her true feelings. Why didn't she look at him like she used to? His mind wavered. He didn't think he heard sweet, little nothings of endearment anymore. Deep inside he knew she loved him, but to what extent—or was he being simple-minded and self-deluding? Time was messing with his mind.

With the kids grown and gone, were they the perfect married couple, getting up and doing what they did daily out of sheer habit? He sat in his chair with incomplete thoughts, sinking in to mental quicks and concerned about his worth. Elliot had caused disruption and death to Tylowe's heart before, and now Tylowe wanted to run back across the border.

Now, he sat at odds with why he would want to find Elliot's kids, the half-brother and half-sister of the stepdaughter he loved as his own, Mia. The two men sat and listened to Elliot talking of saving his kids with a coldness of disconnect mixed with logic and sheer smugness.

Elliot stood and nodded his head toward the exit door. He gave a dismissive motion to leave, and finally looked in Psalms' direction with a defying stare, as if he felt nothing could happen. Tylowe and Psalms stood.

“Report back to me when you have my kids.” Elliot's sewer voice flushed more arrogance in Tylowe's face.

Across the room, a chair leg must have slid on the cement floor with a fair amount of weight in the chair because it made a loud, high-pitched squeal. All heads in the room turned except for
Tylowe's. Standing directly in front of Elliot, Tylowe punched him in the mouth with such quickness it would resemble Floyd Mayweather knocking out Manny Pacquiao. Elliot started falling in slow motion sideways in Psalms' direction. Before hitting the ground, Psalms hit him with a left hook in his liver and kidney area. The punch swung like a sword. Elliot crumpled to the floor in a fetal position.

His foot twitched. Vomit drooled from between his bloody lips. He looked dead, but he made snoring sounds. People looked away quickly. The other prisoners told the visiting civilians to mind their own business. The guards came to attention.

“He'll wake up with a broken jaw, and will piss blood for a while, but he'll be okay,” Psalms said coolly.

Tylowe slowly slithered a word out of his mouth as if he were writing his name in snow with a long pee. He said a word that no one who'd ever known him would have thought he'd say, “Son-of-a-B-i-t-c-h!”

A female guard walked over. A tough, manly look characterized her face and body. Her body language signaled a fake confidence of being something to behold. Psalms assumed someone had told her that.

Her voice filtered through her nose with some anger. “He must have made an aggressive move, eh, and you two fellows defended yourselves? Eh?” Her questions met with deadpan faces. “Gentlemen, it looks as if your visit is over. Have a lovely day. We'll make sure your friend here gets back to his cell, after a stop at the infirmary. I understand one of you has a high-ranking U.S. governmental ID. The women prison guards will send you a thank-you card. How about that, eh?”

The guard looked at the two men. She rolled her lips, then pursed
them in an overt attempt to come across as sexy. She failed. She winked. Tylowe and Psalms pierced an analyzing stare at her stupidity. They both turned away and walked toward the exit.

“Popping him in his mouth, that was eight years too late, but still on time,” Tylowe said.

“Whatever the timing, it's going to be a bitch sitting in prison with his jaw wired shut. Any street cred he had in this place will be challenged, unless he has protection. Oh—and uh—you might wanna brush those pieces of teeth out of your knuckles,” Psalms said, and nodded toward Tylowe's hand.

Tylowe raised his hand, and saw imbedded teeth in his knuckles. Almost the coolest dude around had lost his suave demeanor by slugging Elliot. His rare burst of anger took over for any pain he should have felt.

“Let's go get you a tetanus shot,” Psalms said.

After some medical attention to Tylowe's hand, the two caught the train back across the border, leaving their motorcycles in the basement of a building that used to belong to Elliot, but was now owned by Tylowe.

The headphones over Tylowe's ears kept the noise of the train out, and song after song played from his favorite band, Incognito. Their groove helped to ease deep thoughts as they glided along the train rails. Near the Canadian-American border, the train crossed over a bridge near an ocean view. It sparkled with sunset reds, causing a trance.

“Deep waters, I'm drowning…deep waters, slowly drowning.”

The song had nothing to do directly with his life, or his current obstacles, but maybe it did. His love, his wife, Meeah, was waiting to pick him up at the train station. She and Tylowe were drifting. He smiled at the blue water with red highlights of sunset and
thought,
When love is good it may seem like you're floating, but when love is struggling, it can be compared to drifting—drifting apart.

He turned the music down on his tablet and used it to write what he still had hope in.

As One

She is not perfect enough in her own mind

She is she, and she is all I want, as she is

But I'm a man with faults and sins

I'm not perfect

Why?

Because of what's inside me, and outside of me and plus things outside my control

I'm too short with this, and I'm too tall with that

I'm too narrow, but on any given day I'm too wide

But when she looks to me, talks to me, and touches me

She makes me all right

Yet I want to give her more

Reason being, she gives understanding that we are in this together to learn and overcome

Her softness is a high that leads me to be better and to do better

To recognize what is in my power and what is not

She holds me up high

Would never tear me down

For that kind of love

I seek ways for her to stay in love, and want to give her reasons to forgive my short comings

Confused at times she may be

Only because at times I can become lost in direction

Her response is soft and guiding, non-judgmental

She is essential to my existence

My soul is in emotional poverty without her

Her faith is challenged at times

Man is always trying to play God

I need her and God to save me

She tells me, I'm all she needs and wants

We are in this world together as one

The train rolled back into Seattle. Tylowe and Psalms agreed to meet in a day or two to devise a plan.

Meeah, Tylowe's wife—the ex-wife of Elliot Piste—picked them up at the train station. They dropped Psalms off at his property. Tylowe had another issue. She asked about the small bandage on his hand, and he blew it off as nothing, no big deal. He had other problems, yet their marriage—was it in trouble? Problems and their priority was a problem in itself.

I
t's morning, and her nipple has been between my lips since first light. I suckle as I tread back and forth from dreams to waking with sweeping thoughts moving in angles of time. I often solve problems in my dreams—letting dilemmas drift like beach wood floating out at high tide and then settling on the shore at low tide. Like each wave, volumes of thoughts flood my mind and the washout leaves me with objectives and schemes.

I am safe with her. I don't know if it's manly or not to suck on her breasts as if I'm four months old and not have a sexual thought, but I feel safe. Nothing else matters when I'm this close to her, even though she gives me worry. The world could explode, but this room would survive with her firm, gumdrop nipple between my tongue and the top of my mouth. I drink her skin ever so gently, but as if I'm sucking survival.

I dream, hoping the world won't shatter around me. A fractured humanity surrounds us. A man walked into a Seattle restaurant, and for no reason, gunned down ordinary folks who were enjoying a meal. A mother taught her mentally troubled son to shoot guns of mass destruction, and then he turned the guns on her and twenty-six other people. For every one of us, it wouldn't take much more than a grain of sand from the universe to send any one of us to an end. A negative, reactive, evil heart can seemingly end the world in a heartbeat.

What does all that mean? I don't know. I dabbled in music and played sports in college against the best to get a higher degree of education in the ABCs. The ABCs can never teach us to stop the evil of the XYZs. Mainly what I can do and what I do is fix people's problems. By nature I'm a soldier—a bodyguard—who at one time signed my life over to my country to die for someone I was to protect for my daily bread—bread as in my money. I am an ex-Secret Service agent.

For sure, I'm not one to analyze myself for what I do. I let others question the sanity of my reality; although, how someone might go about probing into me, they should tread lightly.

I've been in a semi-fetal position most of the night, glued to her sweet potato-colored skin, feeling safe. She is my soul mate, without being my lover.

My lips stay connected to the solace of her breasts as I peer over at her slightly cleft chin. When she smiles, her cleft goes deeper; when she's sad, it can grow wider. Her full bottom lip hangs ever so slightly enticing me to suck on her nipple harder.

The window is open a bit, and the smell of the Puget Sound's ocean water floats in. The bottom edge of the curtain rumples in the breeze. The filtered brightness is making me squint, but I still see dust particles floating in the air. I hear a loud motorcycle; it's most likely a youngster. The revs are too high for early morning, at least before it's time to show off while cruising around Alki Beach. A moment later, another motorcycle goes the other way; whoever that is, they are proud of their Harley—the low rumble is smooth. Listening is survival.

A ferry horn blows in the distance. She pulls her nipple out of my mouth abruptly, and sits up and swings her feet out of bed.

“PB, you want some grits? I have some turkey sausage.”

I grunt. She understands my stares, grunts, and sighs although our times together have always been limited. It's been months since I last lay down next to her. A troubled woman since she was birthed in to a family of dysfunction, it seems she loves trouble in an illogical sense. It seemed that she'd been self-serving most of her life, for her own survival. Now it seems she is helping to serve others who have troubles. I always worry about Evita. She is never too far from trouble. I have worried about her since we were kids. I've been her savior—many times. When those times occur, I wonder if she lives close to the edge just so I can save her. Then again, that's what my psychological evaluation from the United States Armed Forces said. I have a rescuer syndrome to a certain degree—and that's good, if you are paid to fight, kill, or protect.

My friend Mintfurd has said, in street terms, I have a Captain-Save-A-Hoe compulsion. He would be one of the few men living to say such a thing, because I trust him, and know what he really means.

I have saved Evita more times than I can remember. She is not the only one I have saved or rescued, but for her to live, I would give my life. It's a love thing that I have no words to explain. It's not that she has ever done one damn thing for me. That brings into question, is love about what someone has done, or is it just birthed into our emotions like a flicked-on light switch? Or maybe a light with dimmer control?

Evita is strangely beautiful. Her brown skin turns copper when she tans. She is not pretty, but strangely beautiful. Most men won't turn their head on a first look, but if she stares at you, you see it. You almost don't want her to smile, not because her teeth are bad, but because her lips are spread wide and full; you get lost in them. Her eyes are narrowly close but are opal dark, and round. She is
the reflection of a black woman, showing a mix of Native American complexion on her skin. Her hair—au naturel black. I can comb my thick fingers through it and not get tangled. It goes down to her middle back. When it's wet, her hair takes on a curly perm appearance. It looks like nothing could go through her hair, not even a bullet. Like me, a blended mix of bloodlines highlights her features.

Her family, like my black grandfather and many Northwest long-timers, came back to the States after World War II, or the Korean War, and stayed in the Northwest. They thought, why in the hell enlist in the Army to get away from the Jim Crow South, then taste freedom, and then go back down South? No. Hell no!

Servicemen returned to the States by planes and big ships after surviving on foreign soil and finished serving their enlisted time on military bases near the Seattle-Tacoma area. Those men heard, “Hey, boy!” less often, and found work for decent wages instead of in cotton fields. They found jobs in steel mills and shipyards, railroad yards, and maintenance-type jobs at the Boeing Airplane Company, instead of the back-breaking, disrespectful, sharecropping jobs of the South.