In the Beginning

The magic began as an exercise for a creative writing class that is a requirement for my Creative Writing/Fiction Concentration with a Forensic Psychology double major. This was my first assignment in that class. They say art imitates life. I can certainly say that I have had individuals placed in my path that have inspired me, excited me, pushed me to put pen to paper and paint the pictures that I am able to create with my words. I invite you to join me on this journey as I pen a tale of loyalty, friendship, love, jealousy, hatred and greed. I am intensely proud of “Rallow” (the working title) and hope you grow to love my characters and their story as much as I love hearing them in my head and drawing them on paper. (with words of course!)

           I’m not one to be on the radar of the world. I like my life quiet, simplistic and free of the dramas that accompany the relationships with other human beings. He was the exact opposition of anything that I was. His voice had a melodic type boom to it, his truck damaged in the exhaust so that no matter where he might be going   he was preannounced. The whole world made commentary to who he was, crazy, insane, violent. Bad things happened to him in Kuwait, Iraq where ever it was that the marines had sent him and now he was a nuclear bomb with a fuse so short that you would burn your fingers with a lighter if you even tried to light it.

            I never really gave consideration to the fact I had not landed on his radar until the event came to pass. He stepped from the truck as I dragged a borrowed lawn mower down the side walk in the scorching July heat. My landlord was less than lax in the care of the yard where I lived. If I wanted my children to not be swallowed by three foot mosquito infested grass as they tried to catch fire flies in jars, I would have to handle the grass myself. Such was the way of my life. Anything that needed to be handled I would have to find a way to make it happen.

“Damn girl, you are making my dick hard,” he had to raise his voice an octave to catch my attention.

I stopped short raising my wrist to my forehead, wiping away the droplets of perspiration as I turned my face slowly in his direction. The vulgarity of his statement was not the least bit shocking. I had worked with men for years in the automotive business. This one fancied himself a cat who has discovered a plump mouse. He was bouncing the mouse back and forth between his paws before inserting his teeth deep into the rodents flesh.

I turned my gaze to meet his and grabbed his eyes with mine.

“Excuse me?” there was no smile. My body language offered nothing to set him at ease. I hadn’t been looking for this verbal exchange. I wasn’t going to be a willing participant in his game and at the same time wasn’t going to let him think that there was an ounce of fear or intimidation. I never really developed the good sense to be afraid of anyone.

Initially he met the gaze head on. He was surprised maybe even delighted. He had grown accustomed to immediately gaining the aggressive stance in any exchange he initiated. This was different. It was a challenge but by far not the one he was expecting. I could see him rapidly readjusting this game plan as he stepped forward in my direction.

“I’m Rallow, Sal Rallow, I’m sorry that was obnoxious it’s just so rare to see a woman motivate to do yard work.” he didn’t offer his hand unsure if I would allow a physical exchange.

“Well maybe you have the wrong kind of women in your life,” I let the corners of my mouth turn up in an offering of sarcastic indignation.

That began the first of several exchanges that finally amounted to a cup of coffee on my back porch in the early hours of the morning. He drank too much. He was in the throes of a violent breakup with a much younger girl. He mixed anti-depressants with alcohol consumption. He was violent. The police had long stripped his sniper rifles and various other firearms along the way. He was everything that should never have been sitting on my back porch and yet I could see past the exterior of what the world saw to so much more. He was kind, passionate, talented he loved deeply. He offered so many good attributes to the world. He was however haunted. He was haunted by the war, by sights and smells. He was haunted by the sound of gunfire, the smell of diesel, the hot desert air blowing sand violently against his skin. He was haunted by dead children and the sound of bullets piercing the flesh of women who had bombs strapped to their torsos.

“I don’t feel well,” Rallow whispered one morning as we passed on the street headed out to work.

“What’s wrong?”

“It just doesn’t go away; I can’t get away from it.”

For three days they contained him in the emergency psychiatric ward of the hospital. For three days, I arrived and curled up beside him in the tiny bed. I pressed my cheek against the warm flesh of his bare chest and listened to the strong lub dub beat of his heart as he dozed in and out of drug induced sleepiness. I told him my secrets, what terrified me as he twisted a piece of my hair gently about his finger. I told him things long buried inside me that brought the tightness of fear to my chest and tears to the corners of my eyes. I told him I knew the feeling how it keeps coming back and threatens to swallow you alive. He had the hospital bracelets about his wrist and yet, it was those bracelets that were setting me free.

I saw him on the street yesterday.

“Can I stick my penis in your mouth?” Rallow yelled from up the street where he had parked the rumbling annoying pickup truck.

I smiled and flipped him my middle finger as I pulled my hood up and trotted to a jog in the opposite direction.

The fall had arrived and concluded the summer of my American soldier.

The Conception of the Character Rallow.

Sal lifted the paper cup to his lips and slowly sipped the dark liquid through the plastic space broken open in the lid. The lid jabbed his lower lip drawing the slightest bead of blood to the skin. He without thought crossed his tongue over the injury brushing away the evidence that the injury had ever transpired. The old white van was cold, ice cold as he sat staring at the yellow house. He let his eyelids close slowly over his emerald green eyes as he rested his head against the cold pleather surface of the headrest.

            “Like this pull it like this,” Daddy instructed pulling the string to the kite taunt is his five year old hand. The sun bounced off the cherubic blonde curls that circled his head. The skin on Daddy’s hand was rough and calloused from work but felt warm and safe wrapped around his small child sized hand.

            “Look at him go Daddy! Look at him fly!” He cheered with delight as the colorful dragon kite danced across the sky.

Sal startled and sat up running his hands absently over his head. The curls were gone. He shaved them. Every other day he took the razor to his skull. It was a rite of passage of sorts. Who he was before his father keeled over his heart seized within his chest, before the Marines, before working his way up the Madison County police department to Narcotics was gone. The little boy with the colorful dragon kite dancing across the sky was gone. He didn’t need those pretty shiny curls bursting all over his head reminding him about a life that was best long forgotten.

You would never guess his age. He remained ever youthful even as he hit his fortieth birthday. He worked out once maybe twice a week his muscles well retained the arduous eight years that he had spent in the Marines. He reached six feet, although appeared much taller at times again the result of his military training, he stood erect, proud. His smile lit up his face that made him appear all the younger although it wasn’t with great frequency that anyone was graced with a smile. Most got the simple turn up of the sides of his mouth before a diatribe of sarcasm spilled from it.  Women found him attractive. A few whispered nothings and they were in his web. He’d toy with them a little more before wrapping them up, draining the life from them and tossing their carcasses away. There has been one, one and there would never be again. Each and every single one that came along after her wake would pay for her transgressions. He followed Deniro’s policy from the movie “Heat” he didn’t keep anything in his life that he couldn’t leave in thirty seconds flat. It was simply easier that way.

She came bouncing from the steps and flounced a thick black hood up over her auburn hair that had been twisted up in a sloppy knot.  She headed in the general direction of the park at the end of the street. He leaned back glancing at the clock on the console of the van. It was 2:52 A.M. He almost felt a pang of sadness as he grabbed the surveillance camera from the seat and tossed up his own hood. He didn’t want it to be her again. He wanted it to he him. They had enough to take him down already. Over twelve sales of various narcotics to confidential informants, hours of recorded footage sale after sale.  He would let her get about thirty paces ahead before attempting to follow. She definitely had a sixth sense about her and often times would spin around and stare directly at where he was hiding watching recording what she was doing. He didn’t want to arrest this one. In the brief exchange that they had shared over the lawn mower, she had that look. She had seen things along the way things that she pushed to the darkest recesses of her mind and pretended that they were not there. She was haunted.  He knew her ex from the peppered file of domestics. Their relationship had come to a screaming halt when he choked her half to death and left her for dead on the front lawn. He thought for sure she was dead because she had pissed all down her legs as she went limp his nails tearing into the flesh of her neck.  He did eighteen months for assault three and unlawful restraint. She had never been arrested. She had association with plenty of scum bags yet nothing had every really stuck to her. She reached the park and dropped to the ground and stretched her muscles out before standing and breaking into a sprint. He watched in fascination as she ran pushing herself full speed to the point of having to stop and throw up behind a bench. Her telephone chimed inside her hood.

“Asshole calling, theres an asshole calling! There is an asshole on the line!” She tossed the phone to the grass and broke back out into a sprint.

He smiled in the darkness. She would be a kindred spirit if only she were on the right team.

He would just have to get her on the right team.