Crossed Wires

CROSSED WIRES
By
M.A. Santomieri







PART ONE
All The Live Ones



Meet Joe

He really wasn't a wise guy. He just thought he was. This was Joe's problem. At the tender age of 41, or was it 42? He thought his world was a mess; and yes it probably was, but he felt sane. He knew that there was more to life than this. He just knew it. He had to believe it. Something, or perhaps someone, inside of the infrastructure told him so. Something, or again that someone, inside of the alcohol clotted, gray mush between his ears was sending out S.O.S messages in a dozen broken languages, obscure symbols and hopelessly blended musical melodies… Murder by numbers, one-two-three, and then suddenly, looking for my lost shaker of salt in peter-weeterville. . .

Today, his all-broken and bent-up traveling road show found itself underneath an overpass on a South bound stretch of interstate that seemed not to be pointing South at all. The road show had dug in deep under the cement and steel overpass, setting up camp in a hopefully inconspicuous corner that appeared to be camouflaged with assorted branches, switch grass and discarded fast food trappings. Joe was digging through his ratty Viet Nam war surplus rucksack and was hell-bent determined to find at least one of the many purloined salt packs he damn well knew were there. He rummaged like a man thoroughly engrossed in some kind of life or death mission. One of those lost packs of salt had to be found, absolutely must be found, so as to go with his half-empty medicine bottle of tequila now lying precariously in the dirt and rock some ten feet below him. To add to the misery, the infernal thing was screaming up at him, blurting rude questions about musical composition titles and artists and about dead poets and their importance in the scheme of things and the importance of absolutely not mixing certain over-the- counter drugs with alcohol… and so such. It was becoming deafening, this interrogation by his medicine bottle, and the only the only music going through his head, in answer, was the same old Police tune: murder by numbers, 1-2-3, it's as easy to learn as your ABC…
He was down dire in the rabbit h*** now and he knew it. He knew this rabbit h*** perfectly. Hell! He and his rocket man road show had been in and out of its crooked and labyrinthine depths for the better part of a year now. Joe Alice-in-f******-wonderland-stuck-on-I-81-waiting-for-a-truck-to-stick-the-mirror-in-my-face Allen…Joseph Michael Allen and his Mysterious Talking Tequila Bottle Road Show were stuck in a one-h*** gig. Stuck and f*****…f***** like Chuck. And who the f*** is Chuck anyway?
This seemed important. Who is Chuck and why is he f*****?
Two hours, Joe thought feverishly, two f****** hours. The ebb and flow of the interstate was starting to get on his nerves. It was getting later and later in the day and even given the relative coolness of his place in his badger/rabbit h*** under the on ramp, it was getting hot. Damn hot. Where are all these people going? What do they do? Why can’t I remember what I do? Who the hell am I and why am I here? Where is here? As if to emphasize the point, he anointed himself with greasy, sandy dirt and banged his head on his knees for a few seconds.
He also wondered if they were going anywhere important and how come they couldn't at least stop and pick him up. But where am I going? And why? It was a lose-lose situation, he thought. Losing and losing seemed to be a key to his missing history. He was tired, roasting and in a bad mood and there was no background that wasn’t fuzzy or distant except for his ranting medicine bottle and the repetitive thought, Don’t these people know that I can help? I have a key, dammit…I have a f****** key…I just wish I knew where it goes…who the hell am I?

Somewhere along the way, after a failed first attempt, Joe took another semi-heroic tumble out of his rabbit h*** and victoriously retrieved his shouting tequila bottle—it almost begrudgingly told him where to find one of the salt packs, which were "gifts" from a Denny's restaurant at which he had afforded to stop and eat, several miles back. He wasted no time in proceeding to do the necessary, prescription shots.
After the first three whacks, the vile bottle quieted down some and he decided to worm his way back deeper into the overpass enclave. For whatever reason, he started scratching in the soil, digging out a little nest-like h***. It seemed like the logical thing to do. Building a little nest where I can lay little Joey eggs. He figured then to try to get some kind of comfortable, shut down the road show and wait it out until tomorrow. Tomorrow is what day? What year?
There would be another day and he had his salt and what little of his remaining tequila, its bottle having become mute at last; everything in Joe's messed up world was getting a little better with each dribble from it. His prescription was working just dandy, thanks.
He finally unfolded his sleeping gear, spread it out, snuggled under it and proceeded to nurse the last drops of his tequila prescription. Worming himself into a soft and comfortable place under the side of the on-ramp, Joey Allen and his road show folded up shop and went fast asleep. During his brief and wildly vivid dream-state, a series of scared questions and images came to him...

Meet Jenna

Jenna Carpenter became sentient during a very weird time. It was a weird time because there was a war going on somewhere in a place called the Middle East. Someone called The President had determined that during that year the world would change profoundly to the bad and that all freedoms and things like that would go away if war was not waged. Jenna didn't ever really think about it. She just thought that her mom was weird about it and generally weird anyway. Jenna didn't think much outside of her own box. The Berlin Wall, the Maginot Line, the sharp bamboo fences in Cambodia, the Demilitarized Zone in Korea…Jenna vaguely knew what they had been constructed for but couldn't understand their underlying purposes in the least bit. The Great Wall of China baffled her most of all. Her thoughts on the subject were very simple: Why keep all the people away? You could have helped. If you all had worked together, the world would be better.
When Jenna was twelve or so, she started to have seizures. Her very protective mom didn't understand this phenomenon at all and the child’s doctors were unable to determine any reasonable cause. Jenna’s recollection of the times she spent during those "blank spaces” was that she had been busy talking with God. Needless to say, her mom was insanely worried about that last bit. My little girl is in touch with God? This was certainly unacceptable behavior in the single parent Carpenter household. My daughter is not a freak or a retard— she can’t be just like her father! No, no, don’t go there!
Meanwhile, Jenna was all about talking to God. Why not? His voice was her best friend, her secret friend. In fact, she had been talking to "The Boss" since she was three or so (she didn't call him The Boss until much later, after her first job, but that part of the story will come at a different time). At first she didn't recognize the meanings of words like power and the infrastructure, concepts that often crept into her conversations with the sometimes mysterious God. For her, at the age of three, the whole thing was an amusement, a mystical toy to be played with. It proved also to be a helpful way for her to get upright and learn to move on two legs more fluidly. She was nearly fully mobile by then, a circumstance certainly not unnoticed by her mother.
As she got older, in fact, she realized that her little chats with the voice in her head were becoming progressively more and more productive in both provocative and very real ways.
She realized that she could manipulate mathematical structures better than her friends and that she had a natural gift for teaching others how to use the tools she seemed to instinctively possess. Further, several foreign languages came to her as easily as sound travels: she'd hear someone speaking in French, say, and after consultation with the voice would know nearly exactly how to communicate. The same held for German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and a few others. If anything at all baffled her, all she had to do was ask the voice. The answers came quickly and succinctly. When she started to answer mommy's questions without seeming to think about it, her mother got increasingly more afraid of her. And her abuse of her freakish, adopted daughter became more frequent, subtle and sinister. She’s some kind of witch, I know it! That was after a couple of drinks.
By the time Jenna turned seventeen, she had become a strikingly beautiful young woman. Her hair was an unusual auburn color, with flecks of dark brown and shades of dirty blond. Her eyes were sky blue with little bits of a hard-to-describe green in them. She spoke shyly but clearly, not at all in the sing-song way so many of her peers. Her speech was not at all childlike, and she had an oddly graceful demeanor about her that baffled just about everyone she met. This was clearly evident by the attention paid to her by her teachers and by the more than attentive attraction she garnered in her post pubescent, testosterone-twisted male peers.
Most people, including peers of both genders, had always thought that maybe she was bit retarded or perhaps some kind of savant. She never tried to interact unless engaged to do so, yet was top graded in every class that she attended. She appeared to have no particular hobbies but at the same time seemed genuinely interested in everything and everyone she encountered. If she wanted to, her cohorts had often thought,--particularly the boys!—she could easily have been a cheerleader, class president or even a prom queen or some such if she had decided to break out of whatever shell she was in. The boys in school almost unanimously thought she was drop-dead gorgeous; but because of her apparent unavailability, she was surreptitiously dismissed as way whacked out, off limits. Those that had tried to get close to her universally got a warm, beautiful test pattern.
Unknown to all was that she was in fact a cheerleader of sorts. Jenna Carpenter was cheering on a very different squad. Yes! She had friends and—Wow!--those friends held on to her very tightly. With unspoken unanimity, they were sure they were somehow protecting her.
The fact of the matter was vice versa. Jenna held her few friends very tightly indeed. Of course! Jenna talked with God and she chose her friends wisely and helped them however and whenever she could. This was Jenna fact.
One sunny and cool afternoon right after school let out, she and two of her closest friends decided to venture to the nearby Outlet Mall, ostensibly to shop for clothes. It wasn't anything special, no special occasion, just friends going shopping. Jenna liked the Mall for various reasons, the least of which being shopping for clothes, but she especially liked the two girls who accompanied her that day. Her “best friend” Anna Williams (whose family had gotten her a car for her seventeenth birthday, a couple of months back), was almost a diametrical opposite of Jenna in terms of outward personality: she was a varsity cheerleader and had the giggly, buoyant, energetic rah-rah thing down to a science. Also, like Jenna, she was uniquely blond and fell into the category of what the boys called “HOT!” What lay beneath that well groomed exterior is another story entirely.
Jenna’s “second best friend” more closely resembled someone who one would think—mistakenly—Jenna should look like. Kylie Minh was a petite, bright-brown-eyed girl with long black hair and a wickedly acerbic sense of humor. Her sense of the absurd was so keen she could whittle with it when so inclined. She was the comic relief in the group, and under any circumstance where mirth was needed to lighten things up, Kylie applied her talents with glee. Another thing about Kylie, too: the boys didn’t say it out loud but they thought she was as “HOT!” as the other two, but in a way they were still too young to truly understand.
The teachers and counselors at May-Lyndhurst High School (at which the three girls were then-- finally!—seniors) often thought curious thoughts about these young ladies. These thoughts were fraught with macabre Elizabethan witch references and un-holy trinity stories and other such nonsense. They couldn’t say why, if asked.
When the trio of friends got close to the Mall, which was a little over a mile away from their school, there seemed to be some kind of crazy mess and confusion going on all around. The police were everywhere and the parking lots and the doors to the shops that they had hoped to shop in were all taped or being taped off. Dogs were sniffing and dragging their uniformed masters all about. Jenna closed her eyes for a minute…and the blood! The blood is everywhere! And there was an overwhelming image of a man in her mind: a man spitting tobacco on her. Jenna immediately demanded from her secret friend an answer to what was happening. All she got back was kind of like the static fuzz you hear on a badly tuned radio.
She tried harder. Her friend, God, seemed not to be paying any attention to her at all that day.
Not even in the least bit. She was confused, hurt and a little afraid.
Anna rolled the driver side window of her almost new car down and asked an obviously scared patrolman: "What’s happening here, officer?"
“Look miss, you girls just turn it around and drive straight home now, okay?"
Anna persisted: "What happened? Why all the ambulances and the dogs?"
The cop winced. "Look, little lady, this is not a good place to be right now! You guys go home. Go now!" He pulled out his baton and pointed somewhere. "Go now!"
As if radio controlled, Anna turned the car around, found an opening to the main road and left the vicinity in short order. All the while, Jenna craned her neck, kept looking back.
Something was horribly wrong. She wondered, nearly furious, why her secret friend had evaporated on her. There had to be a reason for the madness she had just seen: there just had to be.
How come her secret friend was dead silent? Was there some reason? He (It?) was always there to answer unanswerable questions. This wasn't fair. She was becoming uncharacteristically hysterical.
A flurry of sharp words came then: Your mom?! That man spitting is...
Then, along with a sudden rush of abject horror, came more of her secret friend's words.
Jenna would never be the same. She would never, ever, be the same.
A bewildered and scared patrolman at the mall said later that he had heard in the distance the most horrified and sorrowful scream he had ever heard in his whole life.

Meet Bobby

Once born as Robert Joseph Mitterando, the man now known as Bobby "Mitts" Mitterando was extraordinarily unhappy with his fifty six years on planet Earth and everything else that had to do with it. In a word, Bobby felt f*****. He felt so f*****, in fact, that he told his company's boss to stick it up his wazoo and that the next phone call he would get would be from his invisible lawyer.
Bobby was on a roll. Even in his hospital bed, Bobby felt his sanity so clearly that he wanted very badly to beat it flat with a ball peen hammer. Stroke by stroke. millimeter by millimeter.
Mitts knew all about working metal. He knew a lot about a lot. Fifty six years on planet Earth could do that to a human being like Bobby. But right now, laying in his hospital inflicted pajamas in a VA hospital bed, he felt rightly and properly f***** like Chuck. F***** like Chuck, Bobby thought. And who the f***-all is Chuck anyway? Over and over again. Damn Chuck and his little dog straight to hell!
No, dumb ass! A big old dog! His name is Nixon!
He wondered where that thought came from, vaguely. But now he was too busy trying to remember.
Bobby had been working in a boat yard in an obscure part of Newport News, near Virginia’s famed Chesapeake Bay. Though primarily a journeyman ship fitter, Bobby was anything but a one trick pony. He'd been involved in all phases of ship work for the better part of twenty years and had gained a reputation as the go-to guy for pretty much anything going in whatever yard he might be employed. He was a skilled welder, all around superior craftsman and a qualified maritime engineer. Most recently, he was the supervising Q.A. expert at a small but prestigious boat building and refitting company where he had spun his hat for the better part of the last five years.
With the exception of the company's owner, Bobby was held in very high regard by all of his employees and co-workers alike. The Big Boss, however, did not care for Bobby in spite of all of his talents or popularity. For whatever reason, the Big Boss hated Bobby's guts. For whatever reason, he hated them entirely.
The final solution came by accident, or an accident to be precise. Bobby was supervising the overhaul of two bow thrusters on a nearly brand new commercial fishing boat in the company's dry dock, down on the James River satellite facility to the company. He had tasked two crews to remove what appeared to be defective original equipment and was awaiting the new units with increasing anxiety. While the port crew had successfully removed their unit, the starboard crew found themselves wondering what to do to remove very stuck piece of broken metal from a relatively small h*** without having to take a torch or some other equally invasive tool to it. It was late in the second day of the project and cutting the piece out would mean more time in the dock; this would cost money to both the company and the owner of the boat and thus was potentially a Very Big Problem. Bobby was in no mood for Very Big Problems.
Consistently, Bobby had an almost supernatural knack for solving engineering problems. He could see the infrastructure of machines like an X-ray could see the infrastructure of human bodies. He could generally come to the right solution to any problem in very short order. He had a weights and measures system in his head that was honed down to the microgram, the millimeter, a vast memory of parts and part numbers and a thorough command of just about every technique invented by man to fix mechanical things. Bobby was a machine savant.
"Hey, Mitts," came a gruff voice over Bobby's walkie-talkie.
"Go ahead, Earl. What's the problem?"
"Two of the splines jerked out last time she rolled and are embedded in the tube. There ain't no way to do this clean, buddy."
Bobby understood his good friend's verbal short-hand perfectly. F***** like Chuck, he thought.
"Best case scenario, Early?" Bobby said, wishing for an answer he knew wouldn’t come.
"Best you come take a look, Mitts. This ain't gonna be my call."
"Roger that. I'll be down there in a few. Knock your guys off. It's already past four."
"Roger. See ya in a few. Out."
Bobby was up in the main yard, about two hundred yards from the dry dock. There was no sign of the anticipated parts truck and, again, it was getting late in the day. It was obvious to Bobby that this problem would take a little longer than the average to unscrew.
Bobby walked over to one of the supervisors at the yard's main tool shack and asked him to keep an eye out for a truck coming to the front gate. The super shrugged a no problem and said that he'd keep an eye open for anything that might come in. He said he was working a double anyway and that he would probably be around for another few hours. Bobby thanked him and began to trudge toward the dry dock and the stupid-ass nearly-new fishing boat that was ultimately going to cost him his job.
F***** like Chuck, Bobby thought. This had become his mantra with this project: f***** like Chuck. It seemed like nothing was right with this son-of-a-b****-of-a-boat to begin with. Wrong parts for the wrong systems, wrong this, wrong that. He sincerely hoped that in the long run the owner would finally make enough money to pay the damned thing off and then scuttle the f***** somewhere. He also sincerely doubted it. So it goes with the rich and the unintelligent, he often thought.
On the day of the accident, Bobby's chronic arthritis was starting to flare up in his left knee and by the time he reached the dock and his co-worker Earl Sandling, the pain was getting more than annoying. He reached into his shirt pocket for an Advil and found the bottle there, empty. F***** like Chuck, he said to himself.
"What's the rub, Early?" he asked, trying not to wince with the growing fire under his left knee cap.
Earl Sandling was in his mid fifties, like Bobby, but he was taller: he was about six feet tall and as lanky as a man could be. He looked almost skeletal, with drawn features and graying hair peeking out from under his safety hat. His normally blue-on-gray eyes were tired and red around the irises. He looked as tired as he probably felt, Bobby thought.
"This ain't good for the home team, Mitts," he said in his gruff, cigarette sand-paper voice.
Bobby looked up at the h*** where the problem lay. A solid-structure, four-footed access ladder was snuggled up against the hull of the boat, its top most step being just about two feet under the aperture under consideration.
"That bad?"
"Probably worse," said Earl. He threw a cigarette butt down and lit another one.
"Best you take a look."
"Roger that. What'd the boys from the company have to say?"
"F***** from the get go, they said. Wrong installation with the wrong bow thruster for the class of boat. Screwola." Earl reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out yet another cigarette from a partially crumpled soft pack and lit it with the ember of the one he had just lit. He realized what he had just done and with an almost nervous twitch flicked both of the cigarettes to the ground.
"Screwed the-f***-ola," he said, taking a deep breath, craning his head up toward the h*** in the bow of the boat. "Two more days, my guess."
"Wonderful," Bobby said. "Just wonderful." Even before he looked at the problem he had that sinking feeling that this would get really ugly with the powers that be. They had another contract due into the dry dock the following night. This was now becoming a Big Money Problem.
And big money problems always meant big headaches for Bobby and his crew.
"All right then. Let's have a look-see."
Bobby mounted the steel ladder and began the twenty step trip up to the sixteen inch diameter h*** in the boat's starboard hull. His left knee felt like someone had put a blow torch to it and he was getting progressively more annoyed with reality. The vagaries of age were one thing: this boat was really starting to piss him off.
When he got to where he could see inside the bow thruster shaft he realized that his friend wasn't off the mark. The main parts of the unit had been removed but he could see that the damage left was pretty dramatic from all practical points of view. The what- should-be-smooth was now dinged and dented and there were two small pieces of the thruster spline embedded about midway, deeply wound into the steel. To the untrained eye, this might amount to not much but to Bobby this was a f*** of a lot more than a money problem. If they wanted to fix it and fix it right, this problem would take days of very expensive time.
"S*** on stick!" Bobby shouted down to his friend.
"See what I mean?!"
“Oh, yeah!” Bobby reached for his cell phone, tucked in his left shirt pocket. "It’s time to call the f*** heads!”
He flipped the phone open and with his right thumb began to press the button that speed-dialed a very dreaded number. That’s when his left knee, in one painful strike, gave out completely. Phone flying off to points south, he began a slow, almost comical decent down twenty steel ladder steps, holding on as hard as he could to each one as he slid and tumbled.
F***** like Chuck, he thought before he hit the dry dock floor with a sickening, vaguely audible smack. That was the last thing he heard before he lost consciousness.
That was it, except for the faint barking of a dog: name is Nixon, dammit.




Joe Again

After sixteen days (or so?) of doing what he didn’t know, Joe got up off of his dusty ass and decided to take himself and his road show out of their h*** and go try to find this girl that had been in his dreams for years. He knew this was going to be no easy gig, for f****** sure. First of all, he was still very drunk and the other thing was trying to figure out exactly where in hell he was specifically and where he was in relation to the universe in general. Neither task seemed to show any promise: the highway below was not happening and there seemed no end to it in either direction. The girl’s voice, he thought, where was it? He opened his eyes, blinked and closed them again. He tried very hard to shout out to her. Nothing.
Right about then the road show gang started hissing and cursing: “We’re thirsty now! We want the dancing bottle now! We’re hungry now!”
“Shut up!” he howled. The sound of his own voice startled him. How long has it been since I’ve actually talked? F*** me…the girl is… is in serious danger!
As if on cue, an invasive, stabbing, thrusting rush of torment and pain came over him…big pain. Pain like being stabbed in the head with a with a splintered stick…pain like having fish hooks attached to your nuts and being hung by them…pain like being….being grudge f***** in every body orifice by herd of pissed off rhinos…
Was the girl doing this to him? How? Why? They always talked whenever she seemed to need help fixing what ever she might need to fix. In his mind, she seemed to feel him to be some kind of semi-omniscient brother who was always there to help...not this!
Right now, all Joe could feel was pain, misery and blood…lots and lots of blood. And a disturbing image of man spitting tobacco juice at him...or her?
“Your Mom!?” Joey screamed out loud, “What? Why?”
The next terrified shriek that came into his tequila deranged brain made him instantly fall into a near catatonic paralysis. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Further, he seemed to move into another dream like state, swamping his already shorted out head: he was tumbling down a flight of steel stairs, a ladder to some kind of pavement hell, screaming to himself: “F***** like Chuck, f***** like Chuck!”
What the f*** now?! Joe was losing what little was left of his mind: had to be! A psychotic break... And now I’m f****** psychically teleconferencing!?
It was then that he lost complete consciousness and rolled out of his rabbit h***, like a dusty sack of rotten potatoes, downward toward a now groggily awakening highway.
The new day woke up without his consent.

Meet Dave
Dave Randall was only two hundred seventy miles or so away from pay dirt. Unfortunately, he had been hauling for the better part of the last two hundred miles on little sleep and more Mountain Dew than should be legal. He had practically fallen asleep while they were preparing his load in Allentown and to counteract this he chugged at least a six pack of the green, highly caffeinated, crud. He very seriously had to piss like a Texas donkey, to eat, to shower and to crash.
Only forty miles to Mikey Blue’s, he thought. Mikey Blue’s was a medium sized, highly anticipated truck driver’s Shangri-f******-lah, just off of the I-81 near Mount Jackson. There he could not only take that badly needed piss, get some reasonable facsimile southern home cooking, a carton of relatively cheap cigarettes(he’d been out since two smokes past Allentown and was getting way too edgy) and an hour in one of North-Western Virginia’s hottest all you can take showers. God that sounded good! The only problem with the showers was just that, they stayed hot for f****** ever. Though he was ambivalent about the temperature of the shower he was sure as hell bent certain about the crash that would follow.
What he wasn’t prepared for was what he saw as he zipped under an overpass just passed a mile marker he didn’t register. It first looked like a sack of trash, but it actually moved and waved its hand.
Not being in either an altruistic mood or paying much attention in general, he ignored the gesture and hauled on a second or two longer until something like he had never felt before smacked him right between the ears. Three voices nearly tore his head off at the same time and hollered at him: STOP! Go back!
No more Mountain Dew for me, bartender, he thought.
Then it happened again!
He hit the skids (voluntarily or involuntarily, he wasn’t sure) and the smell of burning brakes and transmission fluid permeated the air, smelling much as it smells when you follow a long haul truck up and down a very steep mountain highway. As it would turn out, this was a very steep highway…but not vertically. There would be a considerable horizontal hike back to that sack of waving trash in that peculiar part of the world…a part of the world into which Dave Randall just got goat-roped. Incidentally, accidentally or otherwise…he was going there.
No more f****** Mountain Dew for me. Ever! Straight for the hard stuff at Mikey’s, damn sure! Picked a totally shitty month to quit drinking.
He backed his rig up for a few feet and decided that his bladder needed more attention than the worry of what had just happened. He shut the rig down, not knowing exactly why he did so, and jumped out of his cab, hastily unzipped the fly of his faded Levi 506’s and bled the weasel, uncaring about the possibility of being seen by passersby. When he was done, he had the forethought to crawl back up into his cab and turn on his emergency lights and to grab a couple of reflective hazard triangles to set out.
That done, he began the ensuing sixty or so yard walk toward the waving sack of trash, thinking it was one of the weirdest, scariest walks he’d ever been on. I have got to be losing my mind! Picked a very bad week to quit drinking...
The closer he got to the spot, the more sense the sack of trash made. It was a guy, damn it all; that much he could tell by what appeared to be a scraggly bearded face poking up out of the weirdness. The poor bastard was waving one arm frantically at something other than Dave and squirming around in a big tangle of what looked like hay, road trash, a camouflage jacket and a surplus gear bag.
Closer yet, Dave made out words: “F*** this s***. Shut up! No, we can’t get up, you f*** weasels! No more dancing bottle, you alcoholic bastards!” And the guy just kept going on and on like that until it seemed like he finally took notice of approaching visible company.
“You okay, pal?!” Dave called, feeling it a stupid question just as soon as he asked it.
By the time Dave was within tossing distance, the guy had righted himself suddenly, brushed away some debris from his lap and abruptly sat cross legged, training his head directly toward the bewildered trucker. He blinked several times and whacked himself forcefully on his forehead.
“Who are you? You’re real.” He whacked himself again. “Right? You’re real?”
Dave wasn’t exactly sure how to respond. What was real and what wasn’t was becoming an increasingly moot point to him right now.
“As far as I know, partner. I think.”
Dave was right upon the guy now. He looked down and what he saw was both weird and funny and absurd and not the least of it, very confusing. He stared, unable to put it together: an unshaven guy with longish black hair, gray around the temples and in his quarter inch or so of beard. He had red rimmed blue irises for eyes, dressed in a desert camouflage top and dirty, well worn denim jeans, desert gear boots...and around him was all this flotsam of road trash, leaves and twigs and an open desert camouflage gear sack, out of which had spilled a bizarre collection of empty bottles, salt packs, candy bar wrappers, empty jerky pouches and, incredibly, two sizeable wads of what appeared to be twenty dollar bills.
The guy saw Dave staring and immediately gathered his gear back into his bag. He looked up at him with a hard, nearly lucid expression. “What!? Never seen a f***** up, incredibly rich and totally psychic alcoholic before?”
Joe looked to his right side: “Shut the f*** up, dammit!” he said to his road show.
Dave took a step back. “I...um, well. Is there anything I can do to help?” He felt stupid one more time.
Joe closed his eyes and yet again smacked himself squarely on the forehead.
“Got tequila?” he mumbled. “I really need booze now. I will pay exorbitantly.” He returned focus with that hard, semi-lucid stare.
This time, Dave made a decision. He wasn’t sure why, but he made it. “I have a bottle of Jack Daniels in my cab. For roadside emergencies. I suppose this qualifies?”
Joe looked down at himself and his surroundings for a few long moments. “I will pay you dearly,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it. Can you walk? What’s your name?”
“I think so, and why so many f****** questions?” Joe whacked himself again.
“Sorry. I’m Joe, Joe Allen. Please, just let me have a couple of drinks and I’ll be able to better explain. I promise. I’ll be better, okay?”
With an almost feral grace, Joe jumped from his lotus sitting position into a wobbly four limbed stance, almost like a truncated push up position. He then righted himself, taking big deep breaths on the way up. Dave was thinking yoga, which confused him even more.
“Not yoga,” Joe breathed, and began to wobble. “Northern Si-Lum frigging Kung Fu. Side of Tai Chi. With two breaths you get egg roll.” He smiled wanly.
“Did you just read my mind?!” Dave said, getting scared again.