Renewal 6 - Cold (9 page)

Juannie looked up at Arturo, expecting him to defend her. He just shook his head at his wife.

“You’re taking her side?” Juannie asked, her whining bubbling through bloody lips.

“I’m taking
our
side,” Arturo said, indicating the whole room. “Beth’s right. Even your little boy does more work than you. Everyone here does whatever it takes to survive. You do nothing, except eat, get in the way, and make more work for everyone else. In case you didn’t notice, everything is different now. There’s no more room for spoiled princesses.”

“What kind of man are you? You don’t even take up for your wife,” Juannie said, groping for traction with dripping disdain.

“I’m the kind of man who drives into Armageddon and gets shot in the leg to save his wife, and keeps working anyway. You reward me by sitting on your ass and embarrassing me every day. I made a mistake. I should have left you to fend for yourself. I’m sure you would have pedaled that pretty face soon enough.”

Juannie’s surge of fury brought her to her feet, breathing hard enough to speckle Arturo’s face with tiny drops of blood. She swung her arm wide to deliver a slap to his face, but he caught her wrist mid-swing and squeezed it hard enough to bring a fresh surge of tears to her eyes.

He held her locked in position, and said his final words to his wife. “I brought you into this, and I apologize to everyone here for that. If you work, you can stay, but you and me... We’re done. If we ever find a judge again, I’ll make sure that’s official. Get out of my sight.”

Arturo released Juannie’s hand and waited for her Latin temper to rise to a boil. He had seen it often enough to expect it. Instead, she stepped back and searched his eyes for any sign of leeway. She saw nothing. It was like a whole new set of eyes staring back at her, a different man. She scanned the room for any support and still saw nothing. She turned and climbed the ladder, crawling out of sight.

George ducked through the tunnel after a few seconds. He stepped to Arturo’s side and placed a big farmer’s hand on his shoulder. “Takes a strong man, Arturo. I’m sorry.”

Arturo gave George a wilted nod and ducked out of the packed room to apologize to his son.

We all assumed that Juannie was on her way for another extended stay in the outhouse, but we were wrong. We stumbled across her body seven months later. She had managed to walk almost a mile in the bitter cold.

End Part 6

Author’s notes:

I suppose the theme for Part 6 is, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Bill follows his moral compass to rescue the State Police in Nashville and collects a powerful and sinister new enemy in the process. Arturo drives to hell and back to save his wife from the Breakdown and gets himself shot on the return trip. For his trouble, he discovers that he has married a beautiful but useless woman. There are bound to be limits to the legendary luck of the Carter clan.

I found Juannie hard to depict in that light. It’s much easier for me to draw a negative male character than a negative female one. I expect that I’ll get better and learn to spend more time in the gray areas of real life where no one is purely good and no one is purely bad. In the meantime, we have Juannie, who is not necessarily a bad person. She is simply unequipped for the harsh change in her reality. She grew up like a Latin princess, married a man who maintained the tradition just for the joy of being married to a beautiful woman, and suddenly found herself dumped into a world where nobody had the resources to hold up her privileged way of life. Instead of accepting the fact, she resisted as any spoiled child will resist. When push came to shove, she still resisted. With no margin for error, she paid the price. Her final act of defiance leaves a child behind, one who will struggle to understand,and a husband who will pay in guilt, like any other survivor of suicide.

As for Bill, he’s always been swimming upstream. It makes sense to me that when the supports of society get yanked from underneath us, anyone who survives would naturally fall back to a more primitive form of society. I’m defining “primitive” as the norm for earlier times in our own history. I’m also assuming that we consider our democracy advanced, although recent events might make me argue that assumption. In Coffee County, life has taken a feudal turn. It’s not formalized. No one who found themselves in the position to take power was likely to be enough of a historian to set up a complex system of ranks and responsibilities. They simply divided themselves into haves and have-nots, and the haves make the rules.

It’s no accident. I see ourselves trending in that direction every day. We live under laws that benefit the haves and barely make sense to the rest of us. We lose a little liberty every time a new pile of paper winds its way through Congress, chock full of hidden pieces that have nothing to do with the theme of the document. We have outrageous societal demands for safety and security and handing our responsibility to anyone who will take it. We treat our children like blank slates, filling them with ideas that even they know go against the grain of human nature, and then wonder why they snap somewhere along the way. Then we fill them with Ritalin so they will be calm enough to stay out of the way of our overly busy lives. But I digress... Badly.

In Bill’s case, he’s built the lone holdout against a feudal society that could go on forever. He has always known what that means, that sooner or later, he will grab the tiger by the tail. That tiger is mean and well-armed. Bill represents a bit of our own American past, the part where we decided that we did not want to be ruled by an ivory tower king who never walked among us, who made arbitrary decisions about our lives without so much as a Gallup poll to check how we felt about it. In response, we grabbed our own historical tiger by the tail and came up with a system to prevent those kinds of rulers in the future. Of course I’m oversimplifying, but here we are, still ostensibly living under those documents, and day by day we are losing the ideals on which they were written.

I’m writing this story now to remind myself, if no one else, that those ideals matter and that we should pay attention to the health of our own principles. Even if good deeds go hand in hand with punishment, they are still worth doing.

About the Author:

Creative people tend to be lousy at self-promotion, and I fit the cliché almost perfectly. After many years of asking myself why I have anything to say that is worth writing, the answer can only be that I have finally, in middle age, managed to make enough mistakes to say something solid about how not to live life. If I hold up a mirror to my own life, I get a backwards reflection that may actually contain some value. More importantly, I have been fortunate enough to know many people who may have suffered, but did so with far more skill and grace than I have, and they set a solid example for a realistic method of how to live well.

In the meantime, I live in Washington with my wonderful wife, who happens to be one of those good examples, and our five rescue dogs, who manage to encompass an entire school bus full of joyous, childlike personalities. And to add to the rapidly mounting collection of loose fur and allergens, I also share the house with two cats; one with no social boundaries, and one who is
nothing but
social boundaries.

In a difficult denial of the self-promotion bit, I must suggest that you stop by my semi-neglected blog and leave me a note. That way, I’ll be able to say that not everyone who signs up is preparing a spam attack.  http://www.jfperkins.com

Thank you for reading.

JF Perkins