by Joseph Xand
"Stand up."
It was Phillips. He sighted down the rifle, centering the sights on the back of the man's head.
The man rose slowly, raising his hands at the same time, but still facing the river.
"Turn around."
The man turned, shuffling his feet one at a time, and faced them.
"That your truck back there?" Phillips asked.
The man, without moving his head, made eye contact with each of them. Eventually, he settled on Phillips and the gun pointed at his face. "Yes."
"Thought you said we had everything."
"Phillips, stand down," Beechum said.
"Man lied to us, Beech."
"Look. I didn't think about the truck, okay? You can have it, too. It's got a hole in the radiator, so you'll have to keep filling it until you can find a replacement, but it's yours. I could use the exercise, anyway."
"You tryin' to be funny?" Phillips took a step towards the man.
"No. No, I was just—"
"We got a fuckin' comedian here, Beech."
The man stepped back and nearly tripped over his circle of rocks.
"No, I—"
"Phillips! I said stand—"
"Dad!"
Suddenly, guns pointed towards the culvert and the echoing voice within it. The voice of a girl. She couldn't have been more than nineteen. Startled, she stood just inside the culvert and raised her hands.
Beechum looked back at the man, who was lowering his own hands, as if deflated. The man shook his head and eyed the ground. His face had lost all color.
"Well, well." Phillips licked his lips and smiled. He turned the gun back to the man while Cadagon kept his trained on the girl. "And you said you were alone."
"Dad, what's going on?"
"Nothing, sweetie. I'm just talking to these men."
"You lied to us twice," Phillips said.
"I know. I'm sorry. I was just protecting my daughter. You can understand that, right?" The man started side-stepping towards the culvert.
"Phillips—" Beechum started
"Stop moving," Phillips said.
The man stopped. He looked at his daughter, gave her a half-hearted smile and a nod (It's okay, honey. Don't worry.) and looked back at Phillips.
"You do have everything, though," the man said. "I promise you that."
Phillips cocked an eye towards the girl. "No. We don't have everything. Not yet."
"Beechum, don't hurt them," Meyers urged. She and Murphy stood at the edge of the woods. Everyone turned to them.
"Goddammit, Murphy. You were supposed to keep her back," Beechum said.
Murphy shrugged. "We heard voices."
The man moved towards his daughter again. Phillips heard him and spun the rifle around.
"I said, don't move."
This time, the man ignored the order. Instead, he ran faster to get between his daughter and the gun.
"Hey!" Phillips yelled.
"Phillips, no!" Meyers tried to pull away, but Murphy held her firm.
"Phillips—" Before Beechum could finish, bullets sprayed from Phillips's automatic rifle. The man's body jolted with each bullet, and then he collapsed into his daughter. Both of them fell into the rushing shallow water.
This time, Murphy couldn't hold her. Meyers yanked out of his grasp and ran towards the culvert.
Beechum and Phillips beat her there. Together they tugged the man off the girl. She was alive, but gargling blood. There was a hole in her chest from a bullet that had passed through her father.
"Fuck!" Phillips said. He stood and kicked at the water. Beechum leaned against the wall of the culvert.
Meyers rushed past them and fell on her knees next to the girl. She pressed her hands against the bullet hole. "Give me something to stop the bleeding!"
"She's gone, Meyers," Beechum said.
"She's still alive!"
"There's nothing you can do!" Beechum grabbed Meyers under the arm and pulled her to her feet.
"She's still alive!" Meyers said again, fighting against Beechum's tightening hand. But she looked down at the girl again and found she was wrong. The girl was still. Her mouth was open and her eyes were fixed on the ceiling of the culvert in a glassy gaze.
Meyers pulled away and ran at Phillips. "You son of a bitch!"
She tried to slam him into the wall, but wasn't strong enough. He pushed her back instead and pointed a finger in her face. "You wanna watch how you talk to me, bitch. I'll fuckin'—"
Then Phillips did slam into the wall. Beechum was strong enough.
"I told you to stand down!" Beechum screamed. His voice reverberated down the tunnel.
Phillips shoved him away. "Get your fuckin' hands offa me!"
"You didn't have to shoot them!" Meyers yelled over Beechum's shoulder
"I wasn't tryin' to shoot them!" Phillips stepped far enough away so Beechum couldn't reach him.
Beechum shook his head. He turned to leave the culvert. He grabbed Meyers roughly and pushed her towards Murphy.
"What?" Phillips said to Beechum's back. "You think I wanted her dead? It's his fault." Phillips pointed an accusing finger at the dead man lying in the water. "He shoulda stopped moving when I said."
Beechum said nothing. He walked past the other men back the way they'd come. Murphy and Meyers followed. Cadagon and Fuller turned as well.
"Where you goin'?" Phillips called after them. "We gonna check the truck on the way back? See what's in it?"
Beechum stopped at the edge of the trees and turned around. Everyone stepped out of his way so he could see Phillips clearly. "No, you check the truck! You do it! But before you do that, you make sure those two don't get back up. We're going back to camp."
Everyone disappeared into the brush. Phillips stared at the trees long after Fuller, the last in line, pushed through them. Finally, Phillips pulled out a half-crushed pack of cigarettes and shoved a crooked one in his mouth.
"You wanna watch how you talk to me," Phillips said through clinched teeth while he lit it.
* * * * *
Despite her discomfort and despite the father and daughter she'd seen murdered that day, Meyers was nearly asleep when Beechum's silhouette appeared in the doorway.
Normally they strapped her down on her back in the rear of the five-ton each night so tightly that she could barely move any part of her body. Tonight, though, Beechum had ordered the men to cuff her to the bathtub fixtures in the small bathroom of the office he'd chosen as his quarters for the night. At first, Meyers assumed Beechum wanted her for himself that night. None of the other men seemed too interested this evening in having a go at her. But so far, he hadn't so much as touched her.
But now he was standing at the door, a battery-powered lantern on a table behind him, staring at her. She woke up when she heard him breathing. In his left hand, his thumb and forefinger barely grasped a nearly-empty bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon.
"Wanna hear a poem?"
"You're drunk," Meyers said.
"What gave it away?"
Meyers said nothing.
"Makes it easier to remember, for some reason."
Meyers was still. She couldn't see his eyes, but she knew he could see hers.
"Anyway, it goes like this:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
<
br /> And that has made all the difference.
That's it. You ever heard it?"
At first Meyers wasn't sure if she should respond. If he even wanted a response. What road was he planning to venture down now?
"Yeah," she said finally. "I remember it from Sunday school. Robert Frost, I think. So you went to church when you were little, and they made you memorize a poem. So what? Apparently none of it sank in."
Beechum mumbled something Meyers couldn't hear.
"Huh?"
"I said I learned it in prison."
Meyers was quiet as Beechum turned up the bottle and swigged down the last of the bourbon. He tossed the bottle behind him blindly and it bounced off the carpet.
"I was down for meth."
"Buying or selling?"
"A little of one. Too much of the other. I was three years into a twenty-five year bid. Wasn't my first rodeo. Got into a fight and as punishment they sent me to a new prison."
Neither spoke for several moments. Finally, something dawned. Meyers sat up, but her handcuffs, far too tight, dug into her wrists. She settled back down again.
"In Upstate New York. That's why we're going there, isn't it? Why? Because you know it so well?"
"I was there fifteen years before the world went fucked. By that time, I was king of the castle."
"Jesus Christ, Beechum. You killed Moss and the others and committed mutiny and now you're dragging us halfway across the country, for what? So you can relive your goddamn glory days?"
Beechum pulled a loose cigarette from the front pocket of his shirt. He put it in his mouth slowly and let it dangle there a few seconds before he found the lighter in the same pocket and lit up.
The light was brighter than expected and Meyers had to squint. Even so, she could see the red in Beechum's eyes. Probably from the liquor.
He took a long pull from the cigarette, held it, then blew out of the corner of his mouth so as to filter the majority of the smoke into the hallway.
"I was there a few days, still trying to get a feel for the place, you know, when some guys approached me. Wanted to know what I was about. Wanted me to prove myself.
"There was an old man in another unit. He'd smarted off to one of their guys and now they wanted to teach him a lesson. Rough him up. Put him in his place."
"Let me guess. He was a sex offender."
Beechum shrugged. "The place was low security. No one checked paperwork there. But he fit the bill. Old and fat. White. Kinda weird.
"Anyway, like I said, he was on a different unit, and that unit was a medical unit, so he wasn't easy to get to. Never went to the chow hall because his meals were brought to him. Never went to rec. His unit had its own rec area. But he taught a class in the education department. Education was near the medical unit, and once a week he had someone wheel him over to his evening class. Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Wasn't a popular class. Mainly faggots were all that took it.
"To get close to him, I was gonna have to get a little culture. So I signed up. Spent the first three weeks kinda casing the place. Seeing if I could see a way to get him alone. Figure out what his routine was before and after class.
"Then at the end of the third class he passed out the Frost poem. Only it didn't have the poet's name on it, and it didn't have a title. Just a bunch of words on a page. Said it was our homework. Wanted us to look it over and be ready to comment on it the next week.
"Well, I don't give a shit about poetry. I just assumed wipe my ass with it as study it. But later that day, back in my cell, I did look at it. And then I kept looking at it. Then I couldn't stop looking at it."
Beechum took another drag. This time he blew the smoke into the bathroom.
"You know, they say that with art, you can go your whole life not knowing anything about nothing. That maybe you wouldn't know the Mona Lisa from some kid's stick-figure drawing. But then one day, you'll be somewhere and you'll see a painting and it'll stop you in your tracks. They say, it'll speak to you somehow, like it's speaking straight to your soul.
"That's what that poem did to me. I read it over and over and over again. Soon I didn't have to read it at all. I'd memorized it. To this day, I remember every word…every comma…everything."
"It should speak to you, Beechum. It's a poem about redemption. It means that there are two paths we can take in life. And if we ever find we are on the wrong path, we can always go back and take the other. Why do you think he was teaching it in a prison?"
Meyers's eyes had adjusted somewhat and see could see a shift in Beechum's facial structure. He was smiling.
"I couldn't wait to get to the next class. He was gonna ask for comments and I was gonna to give them. Hell, I'd even made pages of notes of what I wanted to say. I was gonna be the first one with my hand up.
"But when class started, he didn't ask for comments on the homework. Not at first. Instead he gave everyone another copy of the poem."
Meyers furrowed her brow.
"Do you know the title of it? Of the poem?" Beechum asked.
Meyers waited for that smile to go away. For the silhouette of his head to return to normal. It didn't.
"Yeah. Everyone does. There's a whole series of Christian books with the same title based on the poem. It's called 'The Road Less Traveled.'"
Beechum chuckled. He shook his head and dropped his half-smoked cigarette to the floor and crushed it.
"So, he passes out this poem again, but it wasn't the same poem. Not exactly. There was some new lines now. Right after the part about the path being grassy and wanting wear. Four new lines:
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Beechum didn't speak for a moment. He let the words sink in.
Finally: "You see, those four lines are always left out when they teach the poem in church or where ever. Because those lines tell truths that no one wants to admit. There are two paths, but one path is really no better than the other. You can take either one, and if you find your walking knee deep in shit, then if you go back, the other is only gonna lead you knee deep into shit.
"And the title of the poem isn't 'The Road Less Traveled.' That's the title these churches or whatever give it because it makes it seem like the author is proud of the path he's chosen. The real title is 'The Road Not Taken.' The real title sounds like the author's regretful of his chosen path, but not because he should have taken the other, but because the other was no better than the one he's on.
"The old man didn't teach that poem to tell us that we still had a shot at redemption. He taught it to tell us that there was no such thing. That our paths were chosen for us long before we ever took our first breaths, and that we'd better stop hoping for anything better."
Meyers's heart pounded. "You did it, didn't you? You beat him up. But not because of what his crimes might have been or because he dissed one or your friends—"
"They weren't my fuckin' friends." Beechum snapped. "And I never gave a fuck about that man's past. You don't think I know the kids I hurt dealing meth?"
"Let me finish. You beat him up because he'd given you the slightest hope for salvation, and just when you were ready to walk towards that light, he extinguishes it. You think he took away any chance you had to change your ways. To be a better person. Beechum, that's not true. I don't care what some eccentric old man tells you about the meaning of a few lines from a poem. It's never too late—"
"I killed him."
Meyers stopped talking. She could hear herself breathing and knew Beechum could hear it as well.
"What?"
"I wasn't purposely trying to make it look like an accident, but I heard that's how they wrote it up. By the sixth week, I'd realized the old man took a piss in the education restroom just before each class began. I waited in one of the stales. When it was done, I went to class. Acted surprised when the teacher didn't show, l
ike everyone else. I heard he slipped in some water on the bathroom floor and busted his head open. I doubt anyone put Columbo on the case. It was just another dead old man in a prison. I was never even questioned."
"Christ, Beechum…"
"He was the first person I ever killed. The last until Moss."
"And you've left a nice trail of bodies since then. Keene and the others. Travers. Those people today."
"That man was as good as dead the moment that girl opened her mouth. You think Phillips was gonna leave without her? You think that man was gonna sit back and let us take his daughter? Besides…I didn't kill them—"
"You might as well have." She was yelling now. "None of us would be here if not for you."
"I didn't kill that old man because of what he told us about the poem. Not exactly. Not because he'd somehow gotten my hopes up and then stomped on them, like you say."
"Then why?"
"I killed him because no one has any right to teach a poem like that to a man like me. Because I can't get the fuckin' thing out of my head. Who am I to have something like that in my head?"
"The girl and her father didn't have to die—"
"Have you heard a fucking word I've said?" he yelled. His voice was deafening in the small room. "I don't know who you think I am, but I'm not your nigger-in-shining-armor! He died back in Kentucky!"
"You're giving Phillips too much leash."
"Just what do you think would have happened to that girl had she lived? Huh? I think you should know better than anyone. And then what would have happened to you? Phillips has been telling me how tired he's getting of you. How you're used up. Where would you be if that girl were here now?"
"You're letting him control you."
"Fuck you! No one controls me!"
"Beechum—"
But he was turned around and walked out the doorway. He kicked the bottle on the way. She heard it shatter somewhere in the next room.
* * * * *
The next morning, the men were by the trucks, packed and ready to go, but Phillips wasn't among them.
Beechum went back inside and pounded on the door of the office where Phillips had slept. Or so Beechum thought. He hadn't seen Phillips since he'd barked orders at Phillips next to the river. Maybe he had decided to head out on his own.
