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Christmas Eve

The blackjack table giveth and the blackjack table taketh away. For a moment as small as a single breath, I had it. The problems in my life were fixed. My phoenix had risen from the ashes, and I was free. All I had to do was send a signal from my brain down to my legs, telling them to push my ass off the chair, turn my body around, cash my winnings, and walk towards the glowing red neon exit sign.

But every moment is fleeting. And inside each one of those minuscule bubbles is a decision that needs to be made. Many of them are small. Too small to really matter. Should I put my right arm through my T-shirt first? Or my left? Well, who really cares? Your day is likely to go on in similar fashion either way. Other decisions are bigger, like whether shoveling behind the car after a snowstorm is the right choice, or opting for the floor-it-and-hope-for-the-best method. Getting stuck is a son of a bitch, and you might be late for work. Depending on your temperament, the fire may last an hour or a day, but you’ll get over it. Unless you run down a kid or an old lady on Main street on your way to work in a fit of rage, it will be forgotten. And life will go on.

This decision, though. The decision to push my luck right off the edge of a cliff was a bad one. A calamitous moment that wouldn’t be forgotten.

When my brain finally sent the alert to get out of the casino, I walked to the red sign slumped like Quasimoto. Charlene always told me to straighten my posture, letting me know that how you present yourself on the outside plays a big part in how you feel on the inside. But walking out of that sinful place, my posture could have been as straight as the most perfect stalactite ever formulated, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. There was no recovering from this one.

As I pressed my drunken body against the heavyset doors of the Featherweight Casino, I’d never felt so despondent in all my life. There were moments as a kid when I’d wake up in the middle of the night to the graveyard silence of my house. I’d walk down the hall to see if mom was passed out drunk on the couch, or entertaining a friend in the bedroom. But when the realization that the house was vacant set in, I’d become disoriented and panicked. I’d believe that she was the damsel in distress that populated so many of my comic books that were piled in a Leaning Tower of Pisa next to my bed. I’d run outside, grab my bike and I’d take off down Tannery Road. 2, sometimes 3 o’clock in the morning, shouting my mother’s name. Those moments of feeling lost so deep inside a maze of your own mind that you were sure you’d never find your way out were no strangers to me, but this was the worst..

The Santa hat that was placed on me by the pretty brunette waitress who smiled as big and deep as a canyon flailed limbless in the wind. The waitress who smiled, winked, danced, clapped and laughed like a drunken frat girl who gets handed a joint filled with kitchen herbs and spices at a party just so everyone can see what a fucking fake she is. She slid me double and rum and cokes all throughout my almost pious ascent to infinity. But then when the dealer’s hand started bitch slapping mine, old Smiles R’ Us turned her attention elsewhere. Love you when you’re high, leave you when you’re low. John Lennon singing “nobody loves you when you’re down and out,” echoed in my head.

Now, the money I owed Billy Bigsby had vanished inside those rainbow coloured poker chips. Christmas Eve or not, there was no holiday spirit big enough to keep him from giving me the shit kicking of the century. Just a beating would take Billy’s heart growing three sizes inside of his massive chest like the Grinch. If I survived, now that would be a Christmas miracle.

But I had to admit the lion’s share of the blame. These guys were bad news. I knew it when I approached them. I knew it in the way they spoke to me, and the way they looked at me. Rather through me, like there was no human connection to be made. They didn’t see me as a being. As a soul, a consciousness. A father. A husband. Son. Brother. They saw me as collateral. Billy, through a simple look and a slight rise of the right side of his lip, conveyed the message clearer than any I’d ever received. He would stomp me out as quick and easily as an ant pitter pattering on stone slabs in the mid-July desert sun.

He loaned me the money, sure. He’d always loan the money. He had money to burn. And with his skyscraping interest rates, and his love of blood, there was no way Billy could lose. No way at all. It was your money, or your life. Both options made his pants tighten.

I bypassed the Dollar and cut through the parking lot of the Sacred Heart Church. Before I noticed myself doing it, I was yelling and cursing blasphemous names at the steel cross that stood like the eye of big brother on top of the large gothic structure. The church my mother dragged me to when the Sunday morning hangovers didn’t completely immobilize her.

We’d walk up the cracked stone steps and be greeted by a tall slender Irishmen named Father O’Connell. My mother would tell me to sit as still and silent as a corpse as the preacher went through his animated verses and psalms. Using his old bony fingers like they were electrical currents attached to a sky of great beings. He’d raise them in the air as though he could bring down the earth to crush the great sinners under the weight of omnipotence.

My mother would stare at him in awe as though he were a God himself, and not just one of millions of middlemen. Messengers. Devotees, who hoped that through a white collar and a rosary, they could gain access to treasures and pleasures far beyond anything the earthly plains could offer. But then, Father O’Connell was just another man. Another man who thought with the head below his Bible Belt. Another man who walked out my mother’s door after the pounding on the wall had stopped. Just another sick man.

Christmas Lights shined through Annandale. Long strips of bulbs illuminated the eaves of these old working-class homes. Then there were the Griswold families from National Lampoon, spending a king’s ransom on shit that would be boxed up and thrown in the attic or basement the day after tomorrow. But hey, they’d get their picture taken, with their fake smiles, fake love, fake lives for the small town paper. Hurrah.

Then Charlene’s voice returned to tell me it was okay for people to just enjoy things. Not everyone had an ulterior motive for each breath they took. Most folks took them just because they came, and the thought of another one coming in right behind didn’t fill them with self-loathing. Happiness didn’t make everyone want to self-sabotage their lives, and ensure, out of some form of self-fulfilling prophecy, that they deserved unhappiness. Let the people blow up their 30 foot Frosty the Snowman. Let those people smile like serial killers for the paper. Because you know what, Danny? Those people are having a hell of a lot better Christmas than you are. It isn’t their fault that you’re a drunken gambler who, despite your wife’s many tearful pleas, pissed away all your family’s money, and if that wasn’t bad enough, you decided to ask Billy Fucking Bigsby for a loan. And what did you do with that money? Oh right. Scattered in the wind. And now you’re walking through town trying to come up with a solution to an unsolvable problem. You’re avoiding the inevitable. Your life, Danny. Your life. It’s OVER! I repeat. It’s Over!

For a split second, I think of going into the Dollar and asking Billy for another loan. 5 grand, 10 max. Just enough to get back to the table. Get back to the felt and watch Miss prissy bitch show me the time of day once again. Once I beat the dealer at his own game.

But the thought’s short-lived, as Billy’s reaction pushes out all semblance of hope. He’d either express amusement at my begging, or he’d be savage with his brutality. Billy was capable of both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, each within a snap of a finger of each other.

That thought takes me back to the first, and only time I asked the devil for a loan. Walking towards the bar, and pausing at the door. Knowing that it was the point of no return. Knowing that only a certain kind of desperation created through a complete and irrational kind of self-destructive behavior could lead me here. Billy’s clientele were all people with less control over their own beings than cattle inflicted with mad cow disease. So, he always looked calm, because in his line of business there wasn’t a worry to be had. Who amongst the tainted souls that came to him on hands and knees that stuck to spilled alcohol on the floor, and looked up to him like he was a Protestant King in times of great famine, would challenge him?

I walked in, and any chatter that might have been taking place amongst the regulars stopped abruptly. They looked at me like I imagine the guards on death row look after the last rites have been spoken and there’s nothing left but the mile.

Billy had a young woman on his lap. Christ, she couldn’t have been older than 18 years old, and my guess was that she was younger. He turned in his chair, placing his hand of cards on the table, and began to sing. “Oh, Danny boy. The pipes. The pipes are calling. From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.”

The men who sat around the table, and the rest of drunken regulars who formed a slumped semi circle around the bar, didn’t know if they should laugh, or clap, or remain as silent as ghosts. They looked nervous. The wrong decision never went over lightly with Billy.

“Come on guys, lighten up. Have a laugh. It’s on me.”

Then they began to laugh. I asked for the loan, gripping my ball cap like I was wringing out a soaking wet towel. And he just said yes. Yes, of course. No problem. Anything to help. “George, get the man his money. He’s good for it.” He said and turned back around. I stood, too scared to move for a few moments before eventually mustering the courage to spiral my body back towards the door.

As I took my first, maybe my second, step, Billy said. “You remember Bernie Geraghty?” Bernie was, of course, a big story in our small town. Everyone knew the name. He had become posthumously famous after being found in an empty boxcar down at the rail yard, with a couple dozen stab wounds, a torn out eye, burnt flesh, and a whole myriad of other contusions and dismemberments.

“Yeah” I said.

“Outstanding debt” was all he answered. Then George smiled the evilest, most vile grin I’d ever witnessed, and placed the duffel bag in my hands.

“Good luck at the tables, Charlie Babbitt” Then the bar erupted in degenerate laughter..

Charlene, I can’t go home. I can’t go home. I want to so goddamn bad. But I can’t. I can’t walk up our stairs and see you sleeping peacefully inside of our bed with little Jamie in the bassinet next to you. I can’t look at you or him and let the voices of your folks reassure me that I was never good enough. That you were foolish for taking a chance on me. Foolish for loving me, as though love was something even remotely in our control. I just can’t.

The whistle of the last freight train being built before Christmas sounded in the distance. They’d be heading towards the Iron Bridge soon. The sound was like an epiphany, and I knew that the only way out of my predicament was out of my life.

I started towards the edge of town. My legs hurt. But they’d get a rest when I sat on the frozen ties, and waited for the God of Labour and Steel to take me home. “I’m sorry,

Charlene. I’m sorry, Jamie. But you’re better off without me.”

Then I walked against the cold wind, trying to convince myself that Billy Bigsby wouldn’t hurt my family because I was a coward. But the thought wouldn’t stick.

—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The same dream. The same damn dream every night. The tracks. He’s there and I’m parked right across the road at the vacant lot that used to be an Esso back in the 90s. I’m in the cab. I see him sitting there on the ties, with his legs crossed like he is chanting some kind of mantra. Praying to a Hindu God or something. I reach for my seatbelt, but it’s stuck. Then the strap wraps around my neck like a noose. It presses tight against my throat. I reach out my hand and scream his name, but there are no words. There’s no oxygen. Then a bright light. The headlight of the 347 heading east towards the sawmill in Cannery. It’s blowing its whistle. My boy still sits and at the last second, he looks over at the cab that I’m in, winks and says, “It’s all your fault.”

I’m up. My round belly is caked with sweat and it’s gyrating in and out at a speed that I know is not sustainable for my heart. The coughing fit begins. A couple of small ones to kick off the party, then the Goliath’s that stem from deep down. Down in my sternum, traveling up through my lungs, bringing with it a pound of mucus, and sometimes his red mistress. One after another, my throat burns like battery acid has just been poured into my mouth. I’m hitting my chest like a human defibrillator. Please stop. Jesus Christ. Stop.

Eventually, the fit slows. I can take in air again without choking on my own saliva. The coughs eventually subside down to throat clearing, and I think it’s over. In and out. In through your nose, and out through your mouth, just like Martha used to say when I was having one of my Everest-sized panic attacks.

Martha.

Then the vomiting starts.

I aim for the small basket garbage bin that’s been placed at the foot of my bed, for instances just like this one (I’m a regular bill of health, I know). But most of it hits the linoleum and the cracks in between the tiles. A place nearly impossible to clean. That is, unless I rip up all the flooring and get it redone, which I’ve been lying to myself about doing for the better part of a decade.

After the vomit subsides to dry heaves, I drag myself to the shower, and let the hot water beat off my face for as long as the tank will allow it. Which is about fifteen minutes, twenty tops.

Once I’m out, I look at the clock and see that it’s quarter to 10 p.m. It’s Christmas Eve. My cab is sitting outside. I know Reggie told me to take the night off. There wasn’t anything going on except maybe a couple of middle-aged partner swapping parties up in the Glendales. But even that wouldn’t be worth the skin off my ass, he told me.

“It’s far up in the country, and the stingy pricks never tip, anyway. So, it ain’t even worth your time, Gil. Stay home. Enjoy it.”

But what was there to enjoy here? I looked around the trailer. A picture of Martha was still magnetized to the fridge. Martha, in her graduating year of med school, back in 78. Then there was a picture of me and the Rangers in Quang Tri back in 68, and below that was…Christ. My boy. There wasn’t anything to enjoy here. The place was empty, except for beer cans scattered over the floor like my own private landfill, and the few pictures that brought back pain worse than any physical ills I’ve ever experienced..

So, I grabbed my coat, hat, a pack of Luckies and walked to the taxi. Picking up the radio, I said,

“Yeah, Reggie. It’s me. I’m just going to drive around town for a while. If there’s nothing, I’ll drive my old tired ass back home and hit the head, alright?”

Reggie sighed into the mic. “You old bastards don’t know how to do anything but work, do you?”

“It ain’t work, if you love what you do, hoss.” I answered, and this gave the dispatch a small laugh.

“Yeah. Reggie. No problem. Merry Christmas, ya mutt.”

“Back at you. You poodle.”

The snowfall was picturesque as I pulled out of College Road. The kind of Christmas Eve you wished for when you were a kid watching Charlie Brown, or one of those stop motion classics from the 60s. Rudolph, The Little Drummer Boy, and the one with Burgermeister Meisterburger.

Despite the financial crisis that plagued this town, along with most other industrial towns across the globe, the Christmas spirit didn’t collapse with it. If anything, it seemed like many of these middle-class homes had added to their repertoire of an all-out-see-it-from-space Christmas menagerie. A big fuck you to whoever was looking down on them.

It put a smile on my face. This was a tough place. And the fat cats on Wall Street, playing Russian roulette with the money of millions of people, weren’t going to knock us back into the caves, etching petroglyphs on the stone walls. We would persevere.

Even the drunk yelling profanities at the church steeple was still wearing a Santa hat.

I drove down King and turned left on Main Street in front of the bank, where I slowed to a crawl before parking in front of a performance by our town’s own Jameson Weller. Jameson was sitting on a milk crate strumming his acoustic guitar and singing his heart out to the vacant stores. I turned down Springsteen crooning “Merry Christmas, Baby. You surely treat me ni-iiii–ice” and rolled down the window.

In front of him were scattered framed portraits that he painted. He wasn’t even selling them. They were free. He was singing CCR with his eyes closed, and God knows where he thought he was. Madison Square Garden maybe, because he sure didn’t think he was on the corner of Main Street in front of the United Bank singing to the wind. Or maybe he did. I guess I don’t know what was swimming around his head. And who was I to talk? My head wasn’t swimming so much as pounding from the near fatal heart murmuring-vomit attack that plagued me not long ago.

“I’m your biggest fan,” I yelled, and his eyes opened with a startle before realizing who it was.

“Ain’t hard to be the biggest when you’re the only one.” He laughed.

“Gotta start somewhere.”

“I’m almost 60 years old. I’m too old for starting anything.”

“That’s not the attitude.”

“It’s the only one I got. Any requests?”

“How about warming up in the car and checking the lights?”

For the past few years, since Ben died, I drove Jameson around town on Christmas Eve to see the displays. Jameson was an old war vet like myself and a semi-popular folk musician back in the singer songwriter haze of the 70s. The lyrical poetry of Jim Croce, with a deep from-the-sternum rasp of Dave Van Ronk one reviewer wrote.

He had done pretty well for himself. A few club/cafe tours, but he never made the jump. He came back to town and worked at the paper mill for a few years. Got married. But eventually the war, and his failed dreams of stardom, took its toll. For the next couple of decades, he was in and out of the psych ward in Lone Pine. Now, he was living in a shelter, playing songs, writing poetry, and painting. Living a life of artistic integrity, he called it. Not caring for the money. Doing it for the peace of the mind. Doing it for the wind.

I don’t really know why I took it upon myself to be his busted-halo guardian angel. But I suppose it had something to do with a deal or bargain between me, the big man upstairs, Jameson, and my son. A lost soul for a lost soul, maybe? I don’t know.

All I do know is that Ben needed me his whole goddamn life, and I wasn’t there. Waking up in the morning and seeing that bright orange flame rise from the east would always serve as penance for that. But maybe doing this could alleviate some kind of pain. Maybe it could put me in good graces with the man upstairs, and maybe, just maybe, if there is such a place, allow me to see my boy once again. It was a fairytale; I know. But a broken man needs some faith to cling on to, even if it’s paper thin.

Jameson got up, walked over to the cab, threw his guitar in the trunk, slammed it shut and hopped in the front seat. I patted him on the shoulder before pulling out and heading for our annual sojourn.

He talked my ear off, like I was sure he would, barely letting me get a word in edgewise. But it was fine. It was nice. People who don’t get to talk much spend most of their days listening. And you’d be surprised what a person can learn with open ears and a closed mouth. Most of us go through life, living with a paradoxical principle.

Jameson knew everything that was going on in this town. Just from walking around, playing music, sitting in bars, standing in line at the soup kitchen. He listened, he learned, and created art through the broken tales of the disenfranchised.

“I was down at The Dollar a few nights ago.” He said. “Billy and his crew were there, ya know?”

“Oh yeah. Wouldn’t be The Dollar without its chief patron.” I answered, thinking about Billy as the fat loner kid who grew up two trailers down from me. His mother, who owned a sex shop downtown, was ripe for teenage brutality. An onslaught of taunts from little sexual deviants. A father who always had some kind of cash on him, but no one knew what he actually did for that money. He always had the bills stuffed into his thick woolie socks that were placed inside sandals, no matter what time of year it was.

He’d sit outside drinking beer, listening to the ballgame on a little transistor radio. Always half drunk, joking, laughing, swearing, seeming to have an inside joke with every kid, mom and dad in the neighbourhood, well, except for Billy. The rest of the world got his light, and the darkness was saved for the boy.

Billy would come home from school, sometimes a shoe missing, sometimes a bloody nose. Sometimes torn shirts and pants. Sometimes just crying. His old man would ask him what happened, before gripping his ear tight enough to rip it off as clean as a sheet of paper in a notebook.

We’d peer outside our window, pretending we were doing lawn work, or getting the mail, going for a bike ride. The public tune-ups were like a car wreck. You didn’t like what you saw, but you couldn’t look away either. Our trailer park congregation stared intently like it was a scene of a TV show, and not the harsh realities of College Street.

To the old man, everything was Billy’s fault. Whether it was rumours of his mother fucking the customers at the sex shop, or his father’s reputation as a man to be taken seriously, Billy was always ripe for his father’s wrath. His son was weak. His own flesh and blood, not only the laughingstock of the trailer park but of the city as a whole.

Well, Billy boy got the last laugh on that one. His father wanted a monster to carry around his sins after he died? He got that.

And the night he killed his old man, when Sheriff Pangborn knocked on my trailer and asked me about Billy. For some reason still unknown to myself, I became his alibi.

Without skipping a beat, I told the sheriff he was down at the quarry with me during the time the man was killed. Skipping stones. Talking about getting laid. You know? The shit kids do, and the shit kids talk about.

Billy became a monster, and through that development, there was always guilt on my part. It’s just that when a man has been kicked around his whole life, I always thought a hand to pick them up would steer them right. Of course, I was wrong. But Billy never forgot the brief conversation I held with the Sheriff all those years ago.

He gave me a card not long after he had anointed himself the King of Annandale, and told me it was a get out of jail free card for when I needed it. It was still placed in my wallet, behind an old picture of me and Martha, drinking beer and laughing on the bay.

Jameson snapped me back into reality. “You listening, old boy?”

“Sorry. Sorry. Go on.” I answered.

He snickered and rolled his eyes a little before jumping back into his story.

“Anyway, some poor guy comes in looking for a loan. Lost the family’s money by playing fast and loose with it. And apparently, he went to double on that cash across the river at the casino. Doesn’t the guy lose it all? The crazy bastard is now in deep for 40, 50 thousand dollars and apparently he’s wandering around town drunk as a skunk with a santa hat on.”

“What? Wandering around town with a Santa hat on?”

A brief vision of the stumbling man screaming, Fuck You at the steeple of the Sacred Heart, came into my mind. I had laughed at him, thinking of him as nothing more than a merry drunk stumbling his way through the holidays.

“I think I saw him.” I said. “Jesus’ information travels fast. How did you hear this so fast?

“Probably did. With a debt like that, what was it Springsteen said? A debt no honest man can pay. Anyway, a couple of Billy’s goons stumbled by before you got there, laughing and tossing a few pity bills my way. I think one of em is shacked up with one of the waitresses at Fairweather. Guess she was the one who put it on him and got him drunk enough to place overly confident bets that eventually blew up in his face. They say the casino loves her. She knows every gambler’s limit. She can read when they’ve just had enough to feel like betting big. ”

We drove around for a while longer, still no word from dispatch. The snow fell heavier, and so did my thoughts. Jameson continued to talk, and I looked over several times to see him with his head leaned up against the window. Talking just to talk at this point. Not really caring if anyone was listening. Or just assuming that I’d given up trying altogether.

I felt guilty, sure, but every time I tried to be present, the man in the Santa hat came to mind. I didn’t know his story, and of course, many of the people who went to Billy were really no better than he was. Just more desperate. But others were victims of a crisis that they had no more control over than the weather. Christmas was a time of great suffering for those without any hope,

After about a half hour or so, I brought him back to the United Bank. He thanked me, and I told him not to.

“Sorry, Jameson. Just that kid with the Santa hat. Something about him and Billy. Just making my stomach turn, ya know?”

Then it was his turn to pat me on the shoulder. “I know you blame yourself for Billy and your boy. But it’s killing you, you know? From one soldier to another. You look like shit, friend. Find peace before it’s too late.”

I laughed. He smiled, got up and grabbed his guitar from the trunk, before heading back to his home on the milk crate. I watched him for a minute and saw him finger pick the song that earned some form of national notoriety back in the spring of 73.

Lost in the Yesterday’s. Words that couldn’t be any truer. It was a lovely song. And I felt a mix of nostalgia, peace, and anger. Anger that guys like Jameson would always get the short end of the stick. Guys like Billy, with money, women, and connections, would forever control the way things were. Keeping things from being the way they should be. While people like Jameson, and I suppose myself, would wander around in a hamster’s wheel. Going nowhere.

The snow was now falling harder, and the picturesque movie quality of it had lost its magic. Now the tires spun at every turn, illuminating the dashboard like its own set of Christmas lights. Ronnie checked in to ask if I’d just go home, and I told him not yet, even though the heat in the car was making my eyes heavy. But with sleep came nightmares, and I was scared to death that the next time I had an episode like the one I just had, it would be my curtain call. Dead in a trailer, found facedown in a pool of his own vomit. Now there was a gravestone marker.

Despite fighting against sleep with every fibre of my being, I could tell I was losing the battle, because in the rearview mirror, Ben sat staring out the window, just like Jameson had, only moments ago. And just as soon as he appeared, he vanished.

I rubbed deeply at my eyes, truly wondering if I’d ever been this tired. Probably back in Vietnam, but it was too long ago to remember, and fatigue could slide off your back like monsoon rain on a flak jacket when you were young. Tired was a simple inconvenience. Now it clung like a leech and spread like cancer. There was no escaping it.

Again, Ben appeared. He looked like he did when he was 17. Tall and thin like a beanstalk. In the days of playing basketball, working out, and running across the river at the beck and call of his first love. Jemma. Running across the bridge in sub-zero temperatures because she said she was lonely. Oh, to be young again.

“Put on some weight, would ya?” I said, knowing that those words drove him batshit back in those days. Protein, creatine, heavy weights at the gym, stuffing himself full of calories, and he still weighed no more than a 150 lbs soaking wet. And standing at 6 foot 3, that was something that bothered him greatly. Bambi on Ice, his friends called him. Clumsy as all hell. But a good kid. Great kid. Smart as a whip, and driven, like his mother. The only attributes I ever gave him were his flat pug-like nose, and a fear of failure, and disappointment that led to heavyweight bouts with depression.

“Maybe I could steal some of yours, eh?” He answered, and I laughed. I wondered if I’d be awakened from my semi consciousness at any moment in a ditch, or maybe I just wouldn’t wake at all. Flattened by a semi. Could have already happened, I supposed. I could be dead right now. But I didn’t feel that way, though I guess I’d have no way of knowing what it felt like. Dead or not, being able to speak to my boy again was something that I wasn’t going to pinch my skin to awaken from.

“Yeah, yeah. That would be nice if life worked that way, wouldn’t it?” He just smiled and nodded and resumed looking out the window. Days and weeks, and months on end praying for a moment like this, and I couldn’t think of a word to say.

So, eventually I just simplified my guilt.

“I’m sorry, kid.”

“Sorry for what?” He answered, taking his head off the glass.

“For not being there.”

“You were there.”

“For not being what you wanted, I mean. Someone can be there physically, without actually being there, ya know?”

“Sure, I do.”

“I was caught up in the vicious cycle of working, drinking, gambling, and I realized too late.”

“Remember the old Esso?” He changed the subject. The one by the tracks?

“Yeah, of course.”

“I have a strange memory of that Esso. You were standing in the line. I must have been about ten years old. You were standing there in your dirty work overalls, work boots with the laces dragging on the floor. I always wanted to run up and tie your boots when they looked like that. I was looking through the small section of comic books and in the back was a magazine with plastic over it. Me being a kid, I thought it was some rare comic, and I pulled it up and with an issue of Hustler. Remember that? I stared at it in a trance, and your laughter took me out of it. I turned around, and you were looking at me with a proud smile. You told me there’s nothing better on earth than that. Though you gotta be careful. You tousled my hair, and we walked out. It was a silly memory, but it just made me smile because mom would have blown her lid had she seen me looking at that magazine.”

“You’re right about that.” I laughed as we pulled into the vacant lot. Only concrete and a solitary fuel pump remained. Lost in the Yesterday’s was ringing in my ear. “Don’t care about tomorrow’s, cause I’m lost in yesterday. Why does the sunshine always have to fade away?”

I couldn’t see the tracks because of the heavy snow. I could barely see a few feet ahead of me. The car idled, and my boy was gone. Now was the time to pinch my forearms and see if I was still among the living. I squeezed, leaving a nail mark. That must have meant something. Besides, I was still tired as hell. In heaven, hell or wherever, would I still be wrought with the exhaustion of an old out of shape cabbie? That seemed unlikely. But I guess not impossible.

Then across the street at the tracks, I swore I could see some red hidden beyond the white. I gave my face a couple of light slaps, followed by a harder one. Then I focused my eyes. There was red. Maybe it was the hat. The Santa Hat. Maybe that was why my boy brought me here. To the place where his life ended. So, maybe I could save this guy’s life. A soul for a soul? It’s all your fault, was what he said in the dream. But maybe that had a double meaning. Maybe he was talking about his death. But possibly, he was talking about retribution. A deal with the big man upstairs. That saving this man’s life was my fault, too.

Then the whistle and lights from the 327 knocked me out of my trance. I got up and opened the door with quickness and desperation that my heart clearly did not appreciate.

Just as soon as I got up, the pain returned. Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bommobommbommbombombobmbobm. My heart was in a desperate race, and it felt like my chest was caving in. Like my heart was racing to get out before it shut.

Fighting the pain and shortness of breath, I made my way across the street, the red becoming more apparent now. There was a steep incline where the snow went up to my knees. Trudging through it made me throw up twice. The second time, there was no mistaking the red in the snow.

Christ, this wasn’t good.

Something told me I wasn’t going to get out of this one. I clutched my chest, and saw the drunken man from the Sacred Heart Church sitting and crying, his hands to his face. Bombombobmbombobmobm. Slow down. Christ, please, slow down.

“Come on, pal. You don’t want to do this.”

He looked up at me slowly. “I’m dead, anyway.”

I sat down next to him, trying to catch my breath. “It’s okay, dad.” I heard Ben say. “You can help him.”

I reached into my wallet and hauled out the stained and crumpled card that had been handed to me by the devil all those years ago. “Here, take this.”

“What’s this?”

“Give it to Billy, alright? He owes me. He owes me big. Got him out of a serious jam when we were younger and he told me if I was in one, to use it. Give it to him, okay? Just please get the hell off the tracks.” I coughed up more blood into the snow.

“Jesus, man. Are you okay?”

“Just get out of here. The train is coming, man. You don’t want to do this. Please.”

He looked at it for a moment, flipping it back and forth, wondering if this was some kind of trick. Like maybe I was sent by Billy to get him back to the bar. But Billy wouldn’t waste the time. If the train was going to do the work he had planned, then let it. Dead is dead. It didn’t matter to him how it happened.

“Please get off.”

The train was coming now. Blowing its whistle as heavy snow fell.

“Please, get off.”

We locked eyes.

“Please.”