Blue Stew (Second Edition)

by Woodland, Nathaniel

  Blue Stew

  •••

  By Nathaniel Woodland

  Copyright © 2012 Nathaniel Woodland

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1466451637

  ISBN-13: 978-1466451636

  3.7.12

  Contents

  Chapter 1 – Blue Perspective

  Chapter 2 – One Headlight

  Chapter 3 – Fire on the Hill

  Chapter 4 – Hanging and Banging

  Chapter 5 – Deserted Clues

  Chapter 6 – The Three-Scarred-Man

  Chapter 7 – The Light in the Night

  Chapter 8 – The Paper Scrap

  Chapter 9 – Blue Stew

  Chapter 10 – A New Outlook

  Chapter 11 – Housekeeping

  Chapter 12 – Victim Number Two

  Chapter 13 – Winter’s Embrace

  Chapter 14 – Final Words

  Chapter 15 – Loose Ends

  Chapter 1 – Blue Perspective

  Parked along the fringes of an abandoned hayfield, Franklin Gross sat alone in his Jeep. To friends and family, that was and would remain his name. To everyone else, after that night, he would come to be known as Victim Number One.

  Rain was falling in slow sheets over the field, pattering on the soft-top above Frank’s head like the drumming of tiny fingers. The sun had fought through the gathering clouds all day before conceding the weather to the night, retreating below a horizon of autumn-tinted trees. Sideways torrents had begun whipping up soon after, their ferocity broken only by short lulls, which was all that the current lazy rainfall would prove to be.

  In the off-white glow of the Jeep’s overhead light, Frank stared at the two-hundred dollars, fanned out between his thumb and forefingers. It is undeniable: anyone can remind themselves that the value of paper money is imaginary, and pretend that this awareness makes them as insightful as they want. However, to look at a handful of twenties and honestly see nothing but green-stained paper is something unique.

  That’s all that Frank—his narrow eyes glossing over with wonder—now saw.

  He would never be able to say when it happened, or what triggered it, but sometime after he had splayed the cash greedily before him, a lifelong perspective crumbled in his grasp and sifted away through his helpless fingers. The money now held as much worth as the napkins on his passenger-side floor.

  He began folding the money, frowning, trying to comprehend the significance he had seen in it minutes ago—the value that’d made him drive all the way out there in the first place. He squeezed along a crease: maybe if he formed the cash to be hard enough, he could do something with it . . . cut something with it . . .

  After a final emphatic pinch on the hardest corner of the folded twenties, Frank took the point and pressed it into his left forearm. His narrow eyes widened. He pressed again, much harder, and let out a slow breath. The folded green paper sank into his flabby arm, shifting his muscles and tendons. He kept pressing, eyes popping, eager for a sign of laceration.

  No blood was drawn before his fully-exerted right arm began to tremble, and then Frank’s face lit up madly, and he laughed. He didn’t stop until he started to sense the pressure on the twenties letting up, to his profound dissatisfaction. The muscles in his pressing arm were fatiguing.

  He was not strong enough. He needed to try something else. Looking about his Jeep, he saw only trash from fast food restaurants, bags of stale snacks, and the Styrofoam coffee cup that he’d emptied minutes ago. Nothing hard or heavy or sharp enough.

  He opened the Jeep’s door and stepped out into the stormy night, into a fresh mud puddle. Unconcerned about the cold water seeping through his boots and surrounding his toes, he waited an impatient second while his vision adjusted to the nearly imperceptible lighting outside.

  Dark shapes began to grow to his right, on the far side of the Jeep: a line of trees cutting off whatever infinitesimal moonlight and starlight seeped through the heavy clouds and rain.

  Looking down, just as he’d begun to twist his foot loose from the mud, Frank faltered: another dark shape had appeared.

  There was someone there. Someone lingering, motionless, at the edge of the small, faint pool of light cast by the Jeep’s interior light. It was a man—Frank squinted through darkness and rain to see—a man with long hair that had formed to his head and down his neck, soaked. Along the man’s left cheek were the shadows of three deep scars.

  He was holding a large hunting knife.

  Frank looked at the knife. No fear sharpened his gaze. If anything, there was resentment.

  The man with the three scars looked at the folded twenties still between Frank’s fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” he spoke, but the note of raw excitement in his voice betrayed the apology. “Even though we couldn’t get any work done in this weather, this still was not a fair deal for you and your time, was it?”

  So he understands, thought Frank, relieved. That’s just what he had been thinking.

  “No. No not really.”

  “You know, I envy you. And, come one glorious day, I will follow after you. But, for now, I propose a new deal: the money for the knife.”

  Frank’s skepticism was plain to see. Hadn’t he thought that the original arrangement had been too good to be true, but then, a forty minute drive later, what did he have to show for that? Ten small pieces of flimsy paper, nothing more. And now this man was offering to take back the flimsy papers in exchange for a large, solid hunting knife? Why?

  “Because I wouldn’t want to wrong an enlightened man,” explained the three-scarred-man, oddly in tune with Frank’s patterns of thought. He held out the knife.

  Like a timid dog being offered a treat, Frank approached slowly and made the swap in one fast motion, handing off the folded cash and snatching away the knife. He retreated back against his Jeep and stared at the blade, greedily, much as he had—for some unclear reason—done when this same man had handed him the two-hundred dollars, some time ago.

  After a moment, the scarred-man prodded, “You’re starting to see the truth of what surrounds you, Mister Gross. You know what to do. Give it a try.”

  Frank looked up at the man, and then back down at the knife.

  He ran a fingertip along the blade with moderate pressure, and the skin cut easily, and the blood poured freely.

  It was then that another—much larger—lifelong perspective fluttered away, as though it’d only ever been a sketch on a thin sheet of fabric. Like how he’d looked down at the paper money and sensed its weight and significance strip away, Frank looked down at his hands, his arms, his legs, his whole large body, and he saw, effectively, nothing.

  His life had amounted to nothing. His life could only ever amount to nothing, for he was nothing more than tumbleweed, rolling through an infinite desert. His eyes, his ears, his limbs, his organs, his brain . . . his whole body was the sum of a pointless assortment of particles that, by chance, had collided and balled together over millions of years. If his body had one true use, it had been to obscure the reality of the world with arbitrary lies . . . but now that one use had evaporated, somehow.

  Frank saw the only thing to do, come to this point.

  How to go about it was less certain. Sure, he could just stab himself into oblivion, and that would be fine and good . . . but it didn’t seem apt. Frank wanted to crush the lies that had defined his existence, not pokes holes in them.

  His night-vision had continued to improve. With wild enthusiasm he looked around, seeking inspiration, and immediately he saw his Jeep. He touched the metal hood. It was a heavy piece of machinery. Earlier that day it had been his life’s pride and joy—the modest pinnacle of his achievements—but
now it held potential value of a much different kind.

  An idea came to Frank, a vision, half-baked out of delirious excitement. He tossed the knife through the door that had remained open, onto the Jeep’s passenger seat (it would’ve been a shame to discard such worthy a tool into a puddle, even if he now believed he had no use for it). He then started to slog through the mud, towards the tall row of perfect black which signified the beginning of the forest.

  Filled with awe, his eyes danced about as he walked. He saw the dark forms of the four cars owned by the four other men who’d come that night to receive useless cash from the three-scarred-man. Frank wondered where they were. He would’ve liked to share with them his enlightenment, but even then he was too selfish to consider anything that might delay his plan.

  He would’ve been happy to learn that the four other men were already on his same—unique—level, anyway.

  Frank came to a stone wall that drew the faded line between trees and grass. He jerked up the nearest, largest slate rock from the stone wall. His eyes rolled into the back of his head as the rock strained his back and shoulders beautifully, cutting up his palms. In some ways he wished his Jeep was farther away as he staggered back towards it, his upper-body stressed near to its breaking point, the large rock digging deep into his midsection.

  He rounded on the driver-side door, and then, with a gasp, threw the muddy rock onto the floor, near the pedals. He climbed in after it. With muddy, bloody hands, he put his keys into the ignition and twisted. The Jeep rumbled to life. He held down the brake and put the car into drive.

  That was when Frank hesitated, only then beginning to comprehend the complexity of the challenge he had created for himself. He slid the seat all the way back and squeezed himself down onto the floor with the rock, taking his foot off the brake pedal and swapping it for a hand.

  He would have to do this fast. His head went light as he visualized himself running out in front of the moving Jeep and being popped like a puss-filled bug by its big off-roading tires.

  With one hand on the brake, he put the other on the rock. He couldn’t stand to think about it any longer. He grabbed the rock with both hands and pulled it onto the gas pedal.

  The engine screamed and the Jeep lurched. Frank smashed his head on the bottom of the steering wheel, flailed his feet around desperately, and almost fell out of the car, but old reflexes made him grab onto the wheel and hook a knee onto the floor.

  This was never going to have worked, he realized in that moment of disarray. The Jeep was already pealing through the mud. He would never have been able to get in front of it before it got away, even if he’d been in much better shape.

  He dragged himself up into the driver’s seat, let the door flap shut of its own inertia, and took the wheel, straightening the roaring Jeep as it tore up mud and grass.

  Maybe the three-scarred-man could’ve helped? He seemed to have understood . . . Where had he gone? No matter; too late now.

  Frank took in a long breath and switched on the headlights. It was okay, he told himself. There were other satisfactory ways to do this. He had driven up a long, straight hill on his way here, nearby. He could get some serious speed going down it.

  Idly, he reached for the hunting knife beside him as he directed his Jeep in crazy zigzags across the dark, wet field. He brought the knife to his nose. The crash at the bottom of the hill was the cake, ultimately, but Victim Number One couldn’t resist a small taste of the frosting first.

  Chapter 2 – One Headlight

  The etiquette was not clear on this one.

  Walter Boyd was reasonably certain that he was driving to his own surprise intervention, brought on by a solid year of drug and alcohol misuse.

  Walter wondered, was this at all like a surprise birthday party, in that it’d be expected of him to act taken-aback regardless of the transparency of the setup? Following that, could it deflate the whole event if he didn’t blink when they laid it on him that that night’s dinner party actually had a greater purpose? Might his friends think him a bit of a jerk for showing no effort to play along?

  Walter smiled to himself. Of course he knew that the analogy was broken and that the question of etiquette was a farce. The element of surprise in this kind of thing is only practical—so the target of the well-meaning incursion won’t get scared off. No one cared what he knew as long as he showed up. Nevertheless, the thought amused Walter on a weird level, and weird thoughts were about the only ones that didn’t either bore him or depress him those days.

  A strong gust of wind made Walter’s rusty green van wobble, snapping his train of thought. The rain followed, redoubling its onslaught on the windshield. He ticked the wipers up to full speed.

  It was nighttime and visibility had now gone from very poor to laughably bad. Thankfully, Walter knew those roads as well as water knows a river, and at any rate, the greatest threat to Walter’s drive remained his van’s regular habit of dying in the rain.

  For half a year now, something under the hood would break the whole machine if it got too wet. Once, driving through a large puddle had been enough to short-out the right wire or get water into the wrong mechanism. Waiting hours, sometimes overnight, had always proved to be an effective remedy, and Walter refused to bring the vehicle into the local repair shop. It wasn’t a matter of laziness or money—humanity’s favorite deterrents—no, he enjoyed breaking down. It always provided a fresh escape from his life of apathy and substance abuse, walking long distances in the rain, propositioning help from strangers.

  The green van would break down that night, but it would have nothing to do with the weather.

  Returning to where his head had been before nature’s inconsiderate interruption, Walter decided that, nonexistent etiquette aside, it would just be boring to pretend to be surprised when the dinner party was revealed to be a facade. However, he saw some potential in the option of turning the impending guilt-trip upside-down on his unsuspecting friends. Variations of this sort of response worked their way through Walter’s brain, making him chuckle at how cruel it would be: “Christ, it’s about time already, guys. I’ve been killing myself; some friends you all are . . .”

  Grinning, Walter checked the time: 8:25. He was supposed to have been there at eight, but it’d been a long time since anyone had relied on him to be punctual. He also guessed that Nigel and Henry—both lifelong buddies from childhood to their current state of young adulthood—would not be too disappointed if he didn’t show up altogether. That prospect likely was tied to the reason why Nigel, the host of the gathering, had dropped some clues as to the true nature of the dinner party over the phone last night, seemingly tipping him off. Although both cared for him and had already expressed, in their own ways, disapproval at his dark lifestyle shift, the pair weren’t the types to engage in this sort of direct confrontation.

  Jamie Astley was Nigel’s recent girlfriend of three months. In the sparse time they’d spent together, Walter had already received an earful from her about how drugs and alcohol had ruined her mom’s life. He was sure that the suspected intervention had been of her design. If he was right, it would make his planned reverse guilt-trip all the more biting for his friends.

  A flash of light into his high-peripheral vision had Walter step on the brakes. His eyes darted to his rearview mirror. Relief eased his guilty conscience when he saw that the light hadn’t been from police sirens. A pair of headlights from a car a considerable distance behind him flickered as they slid from left to right and then left again, recovering from a bout of dangerous fishtailing.

  Looking back ahead, through the thin, loud waterfall being fended off by rubber sticks on his windshield, over the night- and rain-smothered stretch of road covered by his own headlights, Walter now acknowledged that the black asphalt was coated with wet autumn leaves. Walter had driven this road to work that day, and the recent barrage of rain and wind had more than doubled the ground’s accumulation of leaves.

  Walter slowed his car some more.
<
br />   The theme song to The Sting started playing from Walter’s pocket. He struggled to extract his cell-phone from his tight blue jeans, and by the time he got it out the call had been disconnected. He knew why: he had just started down a long straight road, heading into a valley cut out by a winding river, and it was a known dead zone for cell-phones.

  Looking at his phone, Walter saw what he expected to see: “1 Missed Call From: Nigel Kensington.”

  Poor Nigel, reminisced Walter spontaneously. Nigel had suffered through most of junior high being addressed by his classmates, in haughty British accents, as “Sir Nigel Kensington, Esquire.” However, that petered out early on in high school when a certain boy-wizard invaded America’s pop-culture, and the unluckily-surnamed Henry Potter took up the totem as the school’s favorite British-accented name. Of course, “sir” was dropped and “esquire” was replaced with an overdramatic “The Boy Who Lived.”

  Over a protracted string of years, the people Henry associated with finally became bored of the practice. Recently, it had seemed as good as dead. That was, until a memorable party just one month ago. Walter didn’t remember the party, blacked-out drunk as he was, but the story as he heard it—and he would always listen to its retelling with a sick grin on his face—was that he had done multiple lines of coke in the bathroom, and then, for the rest of the night, whenever he saw Henry, he would shout at the top of his lungs with his eyes bulging crazily, “The Boy Who Lived!”

  Another, brighter flicker of light from his overhead mirror had Walter look up again. The driver behind him evidently hadn’t learned any lesson from their previous scare, as they had more than halved the distance to Walter’s slow-going green van, and had just straightened out another treacherous side-skid.

  “Fucking moron,” muttered Walter as he slipped his phone back into his pocket. Nigel’s house marked the point on the far side of the valley where cell-phone service returned, so there’d be no worthwhile opportunity to return the call.