From a Dead Sleep (16 page)
“I’ve never seen nothin’ like that, brah!” the loudmouth chortled as he delivered a firm, jovial slap to the back of Sean’s shoulder. “I mean . . . I mean . . . I don’t even think I’ve
heard
of something like that! I’ve seen a cue ball go in on the break. I’ve seen the eight go in on the break. But both?! Holy fuck!”
Curly placed a hand on the loudmouth’s shoulder like a parent redirecting their child in a less dangerous path, but he was swatted away.
“You know what? You know what?” the loudmouth badgered. “I’ve gotta call my bro. He ain’t gonna believe this shit!”
While he dug into his pocket to retrieve a cellphone, Sean stewed, barely able to see straight. He’d already made it clear to the gleeful punk that he didn’t like being touched. He liked losing even less. But beyond personal space issues and his competitive nature, he had just lost every cent in his pocket, in the middle of nowhere, nearly 700 miles from where he needed to be. And the worst thing about it was that he’d done it to himself . . . again.
A few more seconds went by before Sean heard the music of the jukebox again; he homed in on his surroundings. He turned to the small cocktail table beside him where his bottle of beer sat. He wanted to crawl down as deep into its throat as he could and let the demons erase his thoughts and worries. But beside the bottle, he also saw the pot of well-worn tens and twenties curled up tightly, and newfound clarity spared him from collapsing over into the abyss.
He stole a glimpse at the bouncer whose face played host to half a smirk and half a grimace, unifying the collage of post-game attitudes that composed the bar’s patronage. Sean’s eyes went back to the money, then to the door. The loudmouth was preoccupied with his phone, but he could sense Curly beside him, waiting for Sean’s large body to move aside so he could collect the winnings.
No one in the bar knew who Sean was. The bartender hadn’t ID’d him. He never laid down a credit card or wrote a check. No one would have passed his car on the way in. It was still at the other end of the lot, parked in the dark. To them he was a belch in the wind. He stood his ground, keeping his body between Curly and the table while pretending he wasn’t aware of his presence. He looked for security cameras along the walls and ceiling. He saw none. He looked at the money again, then the bouncer, then the door. He could hear the loudmouth still behind him, jiving away on his phone in homie street-slang. He felt Curly step in closer.
Sean positioned his pool stick so he could hold it with both hands, horizontally in front of him. When he saw the bouncer hold his mug of coffee to his lips, it was then or never. In a flash, he spun around to face Curly and lunged forward, using both arms to drive the stick against his chest and shove him violently backwards.
Sean didn’t look at his casualty’s face, but he could only imagine the pain wrenched across it as the swell of his back was driven into the edge of the pool table. Sean released the stick with his right hand and launched a colossal round-house punch square into the unsuspecting loudmouth’s face, nearly impaling his own cellphone through his glasses. When he spun again, he barely noticed Curly’s writhing body on the floor as he quickly grabbed the wad of cash and shoved it deep into his pocket on his way to the door.
The coffee mug had fallen from the bouncer’s hand and spilled its brown warmth across the bar. His stool overturned and crashed to the floor as he leapt to his feet.
Sean heard a snarling, incoherent scream from the bartender as the bouncer charged at him. He wasn’t going to make it out the door without a confrontation, and he’d known this before he’d even dropped Curly. As the bouncer rounded the corner of the bar, Sean held the pool stick in both hands and choked down on it like a baseball bat. The bouncer saw it coming and raised his forearms in front of his face. Sean went lower, sending a devastating swing across the exposed upper chest of the stocky man. A sickening crack could be heard as the stick snapped in half. Sean knew he had gotten him good and watched him drop to the floor, but the guy still had some fight left in him. Sean suddenly felt the bouncer’s thick forearms clamped around his ankle like the teeth of a bear trap. An anchor, weighing Sean down and keeping him from escaping.
“Get off!” Sean roared before grabbing a wooden barstool and smashing it across the bouncer’s back and shoulder.
The stool splintered at its base, and Sean felt the bouncer’s grip loosen. He yanked his leg free and was halfway out the front door before he turned to the cute blonde girl inside whose mouth had dropped open wide. He flashed her a parting wink.
He then fled into the darkness with his legs moving as quickly as his overweight frame would allow. He wheezed in the cool, night air, not looking back until he had practically made it to his car. Even from his distance, he could see the outside bar door propped open by someone whose head appeared to be swinging in multiple directions.
He knew they’d spot him once the dome-light in his car came on, but he was far enough away for it not to matter. He jammed his hand deep in his pocket to grab his keys, and seconds later, one of them was turning in his ignition. The engine cranked, and the obnoxious sputtering of the shot muffler ripped through the night. He popped the car it into drive, keeping the headlights off so as not to illuminate his license plate. The old Nova flew across the parking lot as the engine roared with exuberance. In the rearview mirror, he thought he saw someone running across the parking lot. Seconds later, he noticed faint brake lights facing away from the entrance of the bar.
Fearing that someone might be trying to follow him now that streetlamps had given away his position, Sean turned on his headlights and took the on-ramp heading west back on to the interstate. Once he was convinced he could no longer be seen from the exit, he slowed down to a near stop before crossing through the high grass in the median and onto the east-bound lane. This was easy with such sparse traffic headed in either direction. He sped up and crossed the off-ramp bridge of the town he’d just left, wondering if any of the cars headed in the other direction were looking for him. He paid attention to his speedometer, making sure he wasn’t over the limit. Someone back at the Cuckoo’s Nest would surely call the cops or the highway patrol, and he wasn’t going to get pulled over long enough for them to put two and two together.
He straightened his legs and pried the wad of cash out of his tight pocket. He held it up to the dashboard lights and counted it while his thighs hugged the steering wheel. Nearly two hundred dollars. He howled at his rare victory, as anarchistic as it was.
Fifteen miles down the road, he spotted a low-lying motel sign along an off-ramp. With the neon-pink vacancy light flickering on and off under the promise of a $25 room, he decided to invest some of his new cash in a decent night’s sleep before another long day of travel. The place looked like a dump from the outside, but the unlit parking lot located in the back away from the interstate and frontage road was an asset. It was highly unlikely that anyone from the bar could have identified his car in the first place, but there was nothing wrong with a little extra caution.
Once inside his musty room, Sean took a long shower that drifted between hot and cold water on its own terms. By 12:30 a.m., he was sacked out in his boxers between a springy, queen-sized mattress and a multicolored bedspread that reeked of a smell he couldn’t identify.
As he lay there alone feeling a little too warm, listening to outside traffic and watching passing headlights glide across the dingy wall opposite the window, he briefly drifted back to that memory of when he was seven and got lost in the forest while looking for Bigfoot. The memory had somehow fluctuated into something different, however. It no longer ended with Sean’s uncle finding him freezing and alone in the forest. It ended with Sean finding Bigfoot and kicking his hairy ass.
Monday
T
he pulsating screech of a small, digital alarm clock coated with the grimy smudges of fingerprints from past occupants tore Sean from a lumbering sleep. He hadn’t set the alarm, but he was relieved that the guest from the previous night presumably had. Eight-thirty in the morning. He stared at an egg-shaped, reddish-brown water stain on the ceiling for a minute or so before he heard the slamming of two car doors just outside his window. He lurched over to the drawn blinds to make sure the police hadn’t come for him, but before he even reached the glass, the loud voices of two Spanish-speaking men squelched the worry. They seemed to be arguing. Their conversation was soon muffled out by a loud car engine that torqued to a start.
Cursing his own grogginess, Sean stumbled around in the dark. With the window facing the opposite side of the building from the rising sun, his body was convinced it was earlier than it actually was. He got dressed in the previous day’s clothes and thumbed through his road atlas.
On his way to his car, he tossed his room key with its orange, plastic key chain shaped like a diamond across the check-in counter in the motel office. The kid working the desk paid him no attention and instead doodled pictures of rock band insignias in a wide-ruled notebook with a dull pencil.
When Sean stopped later for gas at a station along the exit, he grabbed two overcooked hotdogs and a Coke from the connected convenience store. A wrinkly faced woman in her fifties with wiry hair and a peach-fuzz beard worked the register. She told Sean the dogs had been sweltering under a heat lamp all night and she was about to throw them out. That was fine by Sean, who got them for free.
With the hotdogs stacked in aluminum foil sleeves and cradled above his forearm as if he were holding a football, Sean’s gut sank the moment he stepped outside of the station. A teenage girl with long, blonde hair was walking toward him on her way up to the entrance of the station. Her head was tilted down as she intently shuffled her hand through her denim purse, searching for something inside it. At first glance, he was sure it was the waitress who had sat next to her boyfriend in the bar last night. He swallowed before stepping aside to let her pass, worried she’d lift her eyes at any moment to recognize the man who’d run out of the bar in the midnight hour with a couple hundred dollars that wasn’t his.
Her head did rise, but a sigh of relief rather than a gasp was the reaction that dropped from his mouth. It was a different girl. A woman, really, whose older age became apparent when her sunken eyes revealed themselves. It was merely her button nose that made her appear more youthful.
The side of his mouth curled before twisting into a full-fledged grin. This didn’t go unnoticed by the woman, who brandished him a thoroughly annoyed glare in return, as if she thought she was being ogled by some creep who didn’t deserve to be breathing the same air as her.
Back in the car and on the road again, the miles and miles of flat farmland that surrounded him on both sides as he roared down the highway were now entirely visible under the bright sun. They were spread out across the vast horizon and served as a testament to how far he had already come. He knew the landscape would change significantly as he swung up to the north.
His thoughts leapt back to his brief run-in with the woman at the gas station and the scowl she had flashed him. It was either her face or the expression on it that reminded him of someone from his past. After a few seconds, he realized who. Susan. She was a woman he had once gone on a date with a few years back. Similar build. The same button nose.
He had met her in the back office of a ranching equipment warehouse just east of Lakeland. She was a receptionist. Sean was there for a two-night job, watching over a couple of high-end tractors that were being stored for an expo in town. She’d been friendly with him during the stint and had engaged him a few times in some small talk that he didn’t find irritating like he found it with most people. He noticed as she was signing the invoice check to Hansen Security on the last day that she wore no wedding ring. He built up enough nerve to ask her out, and he was pleasantly surprised when she accepted.
He had never felt comfortable dating. He found it to be a tedious, completely unnatural ritual of portraying something that he just wasn’t: a charming, considerate person. Numerous times throughout his life he’d heard the standard advice, “Just be yourself.” It’s what his sister, Diana, would tell him. It’s what the talking heads on daytime television talk shows would say. However, the phrase always struck him as cynical and simplistic, because it had to have been concocted by someone who had clearly never met a man like Sean Coleman.
Even back in high school it was difficult. He played football, a warrior’s sport where female fans typically swooned over the combatants. They never swooned over him, though—at least not the ones from his own school. Most high school girls in Winston had grown up alongside him from an early age, sharing small classrooms where he often occupied a corner at the command of spent teachers. The local girls knew all there was to know about Sean Coleman, and if they ever forgot, their parents would remind them. He would get some attention from the groupies he’d meet at away games, but it would never take long for their interest to dry up as well.
He learned that wisdom didn’t accompany age when it came to courting women. In fact, meeting people became a more grueling process as the years passed him by. He was well aware that he wasn’t getting any younger. The scant, gray hairs that stemmed up from his scalp were gaining friends. The joints in his knees were growing tighter. The meter on his bathroom scale seemed to be laughing at him.
He fancied himself a rugged individualist, but he knew loneliness, and he didn’t like that time sometimes felt like a persistent adversary intent on condemning him to a fate of solitude. Whenever his uncle would give him a hard time about women, Sean would insist that he was happy with the bachelor life and planned on avoiding marriage like the plague, but that was a lie. Sean suspected that all men who talked like that were lying. He had no interest in being terminally single.