Another Runner in the Night
Jefferson Lee Turner didn’t bother to bait his hook. He hadn’t in years. It wasn’t a speckled trout he hoped to land; it was something more essential that needed reeling in, something he couldn’t explain to anyone, certainly not to his chapter-and-verse-quoting, sixty-year-old father, a man hamstrung by grief who had turned to Jesus after his wife succumbed to the ravages of a painful, incurable cancer. His father’s newly-acquired religiosity, along with Jeff’s own physical impairment and his mother’s death, had left the thirty-four-year-old with no alternatives, other than despair.
All he could do to gather his wits and unburden himself from the gloom that made each day a living hell was to clamber, each evening at dusk, cautiously, on all fours, down Elm Creek’s steep embankment and sit beside the trickle of water, listen to the gentle rhythm of the stream and the rustling of the leaves and hope against hope that he might get lucky. Whatever demons that dwelled within him needed to be exorcised. He felt like Saul must have felt as he packed his bags for his journey to Damascus. Only Jeff was going nowhere. He was stuck right where he was.
Unfortunately, unlike the tent maker from Tarsus, Jeff wasn’t one to put all that much store in fortune nor had he ever persecuted anyone, not deliberately. During those long nights, both in and out of military hospitals and now at home in the bed he’d slept in as a child, he’d come to the conclusion that things just happen, for better or for worse. Shit happens, so reads the bumper sticker. In Jeff’s case: it happened too often.
The army had exacted its costly toll—that was obvious—but he’d lost much more than merely a good portion of his hip, his intestines and his bladder in that combat-support hospital in Kandahar. He wasn’t sure what else had been extracted. Though he had his suspicions.
Jeff worried that his splintered spirit might have been misplaced by harried surgeons as he lay unconscious on that table, a twenty-year-old, not-entirely-innocent carcass on a sterile slab, a human sacrifice to an insatiable god that demanded more than anyone should ever be asked to offer, to a vengeful deity, a far cry from his father’s humble carpenter.
Talk about luck, in their haste, the doctors must have neglected to reinsert a vital part of him that they’d had to remove to get at his injury. Whatever a soul is, Jeff’s seemed to be missing. Foretold in the stars? Hardly. An oversight? More than likely…but still a terrible blunder. Jeff had decided that his ill fortune was nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time…with the wrong surgeon on duty that morning. If that was luck, good or bad, he wanted no part of any of it ever again.
Jeff sat beside the stream on the smooth boulder he’d sat on as a boy. The damp, slippery bank of Elm Creek, where he’d fished with his father back when he was an as-yet-unbaptized, skin-and-bones child and his father was a handsome young man in overalls and a red and blue flannel shirt, offered a familiar, reassuring fragrance, the pungent, earthy musk of moist soil and rotting limbs from the ancient, overhanging trees.
Saved? He wished. But not really. It wasn’t until he came home a cripple with a catheter and foley bag, that his ma and pa drove him into town for the cleansing of his soul. Too damned late. The damage had been done. There was a cavity within him that even Jesus couldn’t fill.
Jeff’s fishing line, dubious, dried-out nylon that came with the cheap rod and reel his pa had scrounged up for him, dangled in the resolute trickle of water. His mind wandered across the past seventeen years and over how everything can change with one false step. Jeff (due to a wicked dose of good luck?) survived the explosion that morning, sort of…but with something essential unaccounted for, and a life ahead of him that didn’t add up to much of anything, nothing more than a disfigured, grotesque man with a metal crutch to prop him up so people could gawk at him whenever he passed. Then there was the matter of the bags strapped to his leg to catch and store his bodily discharges, hardly the sort of thing well-mannered people wanted to think about. Folks wanted their heroes intact and tidy.
Jeff, over the years, had mastered the art of avoidance and solitude; he had little, if any, desire to have anything to do with the friends he knew back when he was a celebrated student and athlete, a boy townsfolk pointed to and nodded. Yes, they all agreed, that youngster will make something of himself. But, no, he hadn’t made a dent in the wall between being somebody and being nobody. He was little more than one of those pitiful recluses who live in their parents’ homes, only to venture out once the sun set and no one would see them.
For nearly thirteen years, since his discharge, Jeff hobbled or sometimes crawled down the steep, mossy embankment at dusk. He enjoyed watching the fireflies cavort and dazzle above the darkening water while he drifted in and out of recurring disjointed memories of figures the likes of Stan Reedy, the farm boy from Iowa who stepped where he shouldn’t have, and others, some, whose names and faces were lost due to a massive concussion and to heavy doses of morphine, some, whose names he could recall, and still others he couldn’t, bearded men in sandals and women in burqas who muttered curses under their breaths whenever he came in contact with them. Countless faces, white, brown, black, mostly friends, a few enemies, that haunted every moment of every day.
There aren’t as many lightning bugs as there used to be, he thought as he watched the magical creatures’ brilliant display of aerobatics. Like everything else, they’re vanishing, giving way to extinction. Everything seems to be dwindling with only a remnant left behind to remind us of what once was, a not-so-subtle reminder of an Eden that had wriggled right out of our grasp. As was the case with himself, he feared. His own life had been mishandled: he wasn’t whole—something was missing. He worried that too much of himself had slipped away and could never be recovered.
A boy, maybe twelve years old, freckled, rusty-haired, stood above him on the bluff that overlooked the creek. On more than one occasion, Jeff had spotted the spiny figure silhouetted at the top of the rise as the moon angled its way over the line of pines that stood like sentries a few hundred yards upstream. So far Jeff had managed to ignore the ornery-looking backwoods urchin, but he suspected that tonight his luck had run out.
A stone plopped into the water in front of Jeff. The boy, apparently pleased with his well-placed toss, sneered down at Jeff, not menacingly, simply damned-sure of himself.
“Mister,” called the boy, “you ain’t gonna catch no fish in that creek.”
Jeff blinked then looked up at the kid. “I caught plenty right here back when I was your age,” he said. “I reckon I still could, if I wanted to.”
The boy slid down the embankment on the seat of his already soiled britches and stood defiantly on the other side of the creek. “My pa says that farmers upstream dump manure into that water and no fish other than some kind of a freak could survive in it.”
“Then it’s good thing I don’t bait my hook.”
The boy laughed. Two missing teeth provided ample evidence of his backwoods origins. “Then what’s the point of fishin’?”
Jeff smiled. “Sometimes, there is no point. Sometimes you just do what you enjoy doing. If there aren’t any fish in this creek, so much the better.”
The boy stared blankly at Jeff. Finally, he said, “My pa knows you. He says that you got all messed up in some damn war.”
Jeff smiled. “I guess that’s a good way of putting it.” He studied the youth. “Who’s your father?”
“Owen Ruck.” The youngster grinned. “I’m Owen Ruck Junior.” He fidgeted as if he’d taken on a load of mud in his pants as he scooched down the bank. “My pa says you were a pretty good basketball player and that you ran track. That you never lost a race. He says you thought you were a bigshot. But then you joined the army and now you just sit around and feel sorry for yourself.”
“I was a good ballhandler. And I had a good outside shot.” Jeff sighed. “I ran the four-hundred and the eight-hundred.” He shook his head. A strand of his hair rested on his moist forehead. He needed to ask his pa to give him a trim. “As far as feeling sorry for myself, I guess I do.” He grinned at the waif. “Do you play ball?”
“Nah, Pa says it ain’t nothin’ but a waste of time. He told me that you got a medal for gettin’ shot and that the government gives you a lot of money for just doing nothin’.”
Jeff shook his head, then gazed at the unkempt boy. “I got medals, yeah. But money…not that much.”
The boy’s eyes, gray as the early-evening sky, fixed on the faux fisherman. “Did you kill anyone in that war?”
“Owen Ruck Junior.,” said Jeff. “Being in a war…it’s not like in the movies. Mostly it’s just a lot of sitting around doing nothing. When we went out on patrol, we were almost always in armored vehicles. Whenever I saw the enemy I didn’t recognize him—sometimes it was a woman. They blend into the population. The man that waves to you today might be out to get you the next time you see him. The woman who mumbles as she passes by you might just want to gut you if she got the chance.”
“But you got shot.”
“Shot? No. A friend of mine and I walked outside the perimeters of our compound, He stepped on a mine, sort of like the traps you and your friends set out in the woods here, and the next thing I knew, I was in a hospital with my body all mangled up.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Couldn’t you see it?”
“We weren’t careful enough,” said Jeff. “We were someplace we shouldn’t’ve been, doing something we shouldn’t’ve been doing.” He stopped. “We were on duty and we snuck out to buy some magazines and cigarettes from an Afghan who worked right there in our compound. Nothin’ heroic in that.” He grinned. “Getting your hands on some things in Afghanistan isn’t that easy. We screwed up. We might’ve been set up. No one knows.”
“What happened to the other guy?”
“He died on the spot. I was lucky, I guess.” Jeff inhaled, held his breath, then said, “I wouldn’t call it luck though.”
After a long silence, the boy said, “My ma said that you were handsome when she knew you.”
Jeff grinned. “And what’s your mother’s name?”
“Mavis Ann. Mavis Ann Ruck. Though she used to be Mavis Ann Briggs.”
Jeff stared at the boy. After a long silence, he asked, “Mavis Ann is your mother? My god, I knew your mother.” He stopped short of telling the boy about the nights he and the boy’s mother had wrestled in the bed of his pa’s Chevy pickup, how they’d somehow, inadvertently managed to consummate their going steady back in the twelfth grade. They’d kept at it until he enlisted. Everyone expected that he’d marry Mavis Ann, but some maniacs flew airplanes into buildings and Jeff got caught up in all of the patriotic fervor. “No one told me Mavis Ann had married Owen Ruck.” On those nights in the pickup truck, two decades earlier, he had felt lucky. Maybe, to some degree, when it came to certain matters, he really did believe in good fortune.
The boy swatted at the mosquitos that swirled around his head. “When they found out you was living out here with your pa, my pa and ma got into a big fight over it. I was just a kid, but I heard ‘em. Then when your ma died, my ma wanted to go to the funeral, but Pa wouldn’t let her.”
Jeff shrugged. “It wasn’t much of a funeral. Just my pa and me and some preacher from the church my pa goes to in town.” He looked at the boy. The kid seemed more interested in the mosquitos than in what Jeff had to say. “My mother’s buried right up there behind the house.” He took a deep breath. “I wish your mother had come that day. It would’ve been good to see her.”
“Pa wouldn’t let her.”
Darkness had settled in. The crickets chirped slowly. The boy wiped his muddy hands across the front of his ragged sweatshirt.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?” asked Jeff. He fixed his gaze upstream. He didn’t want to appear overly eager for information on his old girlfriend and her family. The boy wasn’t the brightest kid in the county, but he, like most everyone, could tell when someone was fishing for information.
“I got two sisters,” Owen Ruck Junior said. He tossed a twig into the stream. It floated toward the ocean like a message in a bottle from a captured saint. “Sissy. She’s seven and a pain in the butt. And Sunny, she’s a teenager. She’s seventeen and thinks she knows everything. Ma lost a boy between me and Sissy.” He grinned. “Sunny and pa don’t get along. She’s taller than pa and he don’t like that one bit. She’s almost as tall as you.”
“You’ve got a sister named Sunny?” Jeff cleared his throat. “And she’s seventeen?” He picked a pebble from atop the boulder and tossed it into the creek. His heart thumped like the bass line in a Metallica song. Sunny, he thought. The nickname Mavis Ann used to call me. It came from some old song from the sixties she liked, a song her mother sang to her when she was a baby.
The boy spit. “Her real name’s Sunshine,” he said. “Ain’t that a stupid name?”
Jeff shrugged. No, it wasn’t. Not if the name meant something to the girl’s mother.
The boy sniffled, then said, “Before your ma died, she used to come and visit with my ma and she brung Sunny dresses and ribbons for her hair, even though Sunny was eight or nine years old and didn’t much like wearin’ fancy clothes. But my pa put an end to that. He don’t like folks snoopin’ ‘round our place that much.”
Jeff took a deep breath, then asked, “And you’re sure that your sister’s seventeen? Not fifteen? Or sixteen?”
“I’d should damned well know how old my own sister is, shouldn’t I?” The boy sneered. He was bored—who wouldn’t be—with a crippled-up former soldier who had no interesting war stories to tell.
“Could you say hello to your mother for me?”
The boy laughed, shook his head and, again, spit. “No, sir. I ain’t gonna do that. If my pa knew I was here talkin’ to you, he’d give me a blisterin’. I don’t think he likes you much. And he didn’t like my ma visitin’ with your ma. He thinks your pa’s some kind of Jesus nut. No, sir. I ain’t tellin’ no’un nothin’.”
Disappointed, Jeff nodded. He couldn’t pressure the boy.
The kid kicked at the mud and leaves, then said, “They say that you and your kin are related to Robert E. Lee. Is that so?”
Jeff chuckled. “I suspect just about everyone in the South thinks they’re related to Robert E. Lee. You just might be related yourself. Who knows? But, I don’t much expect it matters who you come from, but where you’re going.”
The boy huffed then turned back toward the bank he’d descended.
Jeff watched Owen Ruck Junior scamper up the hill like a mountain goat pursued by a cougar. The ragamuffin had the same rambunctious skills Jeff once had, as well as the same cocksure air about him that had made Jeff a competitor on the basketball court and at the track. Like Springsteen wrote, thought the corporal, “Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.” Whatever the hell that meant. The water in the creek trickled a little louder against the rocks, louder than it had earlier.
Why hadn’t his mother told him about Mavis Ann? Why hadn’t he asked? And Sunny. What about Sunny?
A curtain of darkness, as thick as his own dread, fell upon one more day. But tonight, the curtain had a slight tear in it; a beam of light shone through. Jeff clawed his way up the creek’s bank. He’d go into the house and sit with his pa as the defeated man pored over his Bible verses, in search of what? Only the old man knew. Jeff would read and puzzle over Faulkner, a man he wished he could’ve known. His pa had been decent enough to check the book out from the library for him to read. His pa said it would do him good. And, so far, it had. The hill, on this night, wasn’t nearly as steep as it had been every night for the past thirteen years. If possible, once his pa drifted off to sleep, Jeff would struggle down the narrow steps to the basement where, decades ago, he’d played pirates, soldiers and marbles with his friends. His high school yearbook was stored away somewhere down there. He couldn’t bring himself to ask his pa where it might be. He’d have to find it for himself.
David Larsen is a writer and musician who lives in El Paso, Texas. Over the past two years his stories and poems have been published in more than thirty literary journals and magazines including The Heartland Review, Cholla Needles, Aethlon, Oakwood, Floyd County Moonshine, El Portal, and Change Seven.
