Sick Things, by Bud Sturguess - Available here, or in PDF form for free, upon request.
Billy Milton - self-righteous, naive, and heartbroken - is a conspiracy theorist newly released from a psychiatric hospital. He learns upon his release that his friend Maggie, with whom Billy is in love, is addicted to drugs and has disappeared. Billy's obsessive search for Maggie leads him to a local homeless shelter known as "The Zoo." Slowly, Billy becomes entangled in the stories of the downtrodden souls who inhabit the shelter. Before he knows it, his mission to expose plots and conspiracies is overwhelmed by his growing love for the forgotten lives at the Zoo - and his struggle to keep a grip on his mental health. Soon, Billy is involved in the recovery of a pregnant addict, the mysterious mission of a mafia hitman, the efforts of a local doctor to help those in need, and a hatred for a local drug dealer that can only end in disaster.
Chapter One
Bestiality is currently not forbidden by federal law in the United States.
Until very recently, this decade in fact, there were several states in which bestiality was only a misdemeanor. It was a felony in several other states, and the last few states to catch up on anti-zoophilia laws – Hawaii, Wyoming, New Mexico, and West Virginia – have only done so in this decade. Even so, it’s still not yet been made illegal on a federal level. I wrote to several senators and congresspeople, hoping to bring this unspoken issue to their attention.
It was then that I felt at my least sincere, at my very lowest – when I found myself writing the US Government for help. Bestiality makes strange bedfellows, I suppose. I even wrote to the President, but around the time I mailed my letter from the state hospital, the unjust and violent oil dispute with Venezuela (where wildlife trafficking is rampant) had begun to consume his administration further, so it’s doubtful he gave it ample attention.
Bestiality is a taboo subject, and not one that attracts an abundance of activism, probably due to its exceptionally appalling nature. There are no trending hashtags or celebrity voices raising awareness. But doesn’t its uniquely depraved character elevate the need to address this abomination? It baffles me that lawmakers in a country where such animal abuse is not addressed with far-reaching federal legislation don’t take the chance to raise this issue during their campaigns. They’d certainly secure the animal rights vote, meaning some Republican candidates might even garner votes from liberals who wouldn’t vote for them otherwise. (I’m surprised at the rampant stereotyping that occurs when I ask people if they can guess which states had no laws against bestiality until the 2020s. Instead of those previously mentioned, more often than not, the states they guess are in the Deep South, which I find prejudicial and narrow-minded. When it comes to addressing this issue, the South is actually far more progressive than the rest of the United States.)
While I was confined to the state hospital after my one-man protest at Dr. Alex Enders’ clinic, when I threw a Duraflame log through the window of the building, I was encouraged by my psychiatrist and counselors to pursue some other form of activism. To direct my passions to an issue unlike the one that led me to the clinic that ugly day. What they were telling me, in not so many words, was that my stance against the rabies vaccine was itself some sort of mental illness, or at least a product of my diagnoses. Some other form of activism, they implied, one that won’t rock any boats, is time better spent, activity less likely to get me into trouble. So, I was reduced to campaigning against bestiality.
(I did not, however, have any delusions that the Federal Government, despite its rampant corruption and infringements, was keeping tabs on my activity – I’m not so vain to think I’m so interesting that the US Government would take any pains to spy on me.)
I began writing letters to various lawmakers and animal rights groups while still in the hospital, not looking forward to continuing the crusade after my eventual discharge, knowing my heart was not with it as much as it should have been.
My disappointment certainly isn’t to say I think bestiality is an unworthy cause: more people should devote time and attention to issues that aren’t as “mainstream,” so to speak, as domestic abuse or Alzheimer’s disease. But I knew in my heart that I had been called, so to speak, to expose the evil of the rabies vaccine. It was my Moriarty, my Joker. I believed it was the reason I was put on this planet by whatever intellectual force that decides those types of things, should one exist. To expose the rabies needles for what they are – cold, needle-like weapons crafted by murder and lies. And now, my mission, and perhaps my very reason for being on Earth had been taken from me.
The following is from a pamphlet compiled from research by myself and three other fellow anti-rabies vaxxers from our online community. Though I was not ashamed of the title “anti-vaxxer,” and I didn’t shy away from it, it should be stressed that I was not an anti-vaxxer in the broad, blanket sense. My moral ire was aimed at the rabies vaccine, not vaccines as a whole. I suppose I walked a thin line.
My colleagues who assisted in the research for this pamphlet were Trina H. Dewey, LL.D. (Pepperdine University) of Bakersfield, California; RaiderRon77 from Bryan, Texas; and Mean_Mrs_Mustard from Mesa, Arizona.
Mad Ahabs: The Truth About the Rabies Vaccine
“It is, we suppose, quite predictable for a pamphlet of this substance to begin with reference to the JFK assassination. But, although we do posit that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the lone gunman in the assassination, and did indeed act alone as the Warren Commission later concluded (hastily but nonetheless accurately), it is rather his victim that we dispute.
“In an exchange of e-mails with a former CIA official who requested to remain anonymous, it was revealed to us that the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 did not end as told, that is, with President John F. Kennedy agreeing to remove American missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union removing theirs from Cuba. Those events did indeed transpire, but Fidel Castro, feeling like a “third banana” in the scenario, insisted on one trophy – President Kennedy himself.
“JFK, agreeing to sacrifice himself for the safety of the world, was clandestinely flown to Havana on November 12, 1962, where he would remain imprisoned for the next three years. It was only tragic coincidence that negated his value and leverage to Cuba in any future plans they had with the President, whatever they may have been.
“When Kennedy was secretly exiled to Cuba, he was replaced for public and television appearances by a double named Herman Farina, age forty, an actor and former aviation mechanic. Wisconsin born, Farina was a childhood friend of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Farina was apparently deeply in debt to the mafia (any particular “family” to which he was indebted is unknown). In a last ditch effort to avoid wearing “concrete shoes,” Farina contacted McNamara on September 30, 1962. At first, McNamara simply wished him luck and dismissed his old friend’s problem, but when Castro demanded Kennedy in exchange for restraint from nuclear activity, knowledge of Farina’s JFK impression, which he had performed in night clubs and comedy venues all over the US, and his close resemblance to the President, gave McNamara the idea to simply use Farina as a double for the President, to keep the public from any knowledge of the switch. Surgically cosmetic changes to the comedian’s eyes and lips were performed. It seemed like a preposterous long shot, but amazingly, it worked.
“With Mrs. Kennedy and her children bereaved of their husband and father by communist politics, Herman Farina was, on camera at least, the “new” President Of the United States. It was only fate that ended his new career; on November 22, 1963, Farina, posing as Kennedy as was his public duty, was shot and killed in Dallas by a small-time communist radical, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was himself none the wiser to the ruse than any other American. Farina’s body was soon after dumped in Martha’s Vineyard.
“With the American public believing the real Kennedy to be dead, Castro knew no one would believe his Kennedy was the real Kennedy and abandoned his future plans, whatever they may have been, involving the now-former President. Kennedy had been undergoing intense communist indoctrination since his imprisonment began (oddly enough in a heavily secured suite in Castro’s own palace), according to a former member of Castro’s security team, who requested to remain anonymous in an interview via phone. The indoctrination “therapy” seemed to be having an effect on Kennedy, who had begun keeping a diary in May of 1963. In it were brief essays on communism and what he gradually came to see as the evil of capitalism. After two more years of captivity and indoctrination, Kennedy was allowed to leave his “prison” in Castro’s palace as a citizen of Cuba under the new name Juan Monardies.
“In 1966, after several rumors of JFK sightings in Cuba became a liability to Castro, he had John Kennedy / Juan Monardies sent back to the US, the ousted President agreeing to keep the entire fiasco secret and to never leave Florida, where he could be monitored by Cuban agents under threat of harm to Jacqueline Kennedy and their children. It was in late 1967 that Kennedy met actress Raquel Welch in Tampa, and the two began a discreet affair which led to Welch’s impregnation in February of 1968. Kennedy, having managed to keep his true identity from Welch, looked for help from the undercover Cuban agents assigned to monitor him and an abortion was arranged.”
[Note: Raquel Welch was the actress on the poster in Andy Dufresne’s cell in The Shawshank Redemption – not the black and white poster, but the poster at the end, the one which hid his escape tunnel.]
“On March 31st of that year, Usurper / President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek a second full term in the Oval Office. Longstanding enmity between Johnson and former Attorney General and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy hardened LBJ’s determination not to see RFK grasp the now-open Democratic nomination for President. Near the end of May, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara brought to Johnson’s attention a very new mind control drug that had hastily been developed by the Pentagon. A former aide to Secretary McNamara, who gave his story under the pseudonym “D.C. Campbell,” told these authors through e-mail exchange that the drug had been developed from the fetal tissue of John Kennedy and Raquel Welch’s aborted child. Mr. Campbell stated: “The unknown existence of the fetus to the public proved it to be an ideal source of tissue for the mind control drug experiment.”
“An Arab Palestinian who had come to the CIA’s attention, Sirhan Sirhan, who was known to have zealous pro-Palestinian political stances, was chosen as the test subject. Robert Kennedy had publicly expressed devotion to Israel and supported its military. Sirhan was arrested on June 2, 1968 in Los Angeles for “suspicion of robbery” by a CIA agent posing as an LAPD officer. He was taken to a secret Government lab in San Ysidro, administered the drug, and over the next two days instructed to gun down Robert Kennedy. The effect of the drug, one observer noted, was like that of hypnosis. On June 5th, under what was essentially hypnosis, Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. Kennedy died a day later.
“Lyndon Johnson then ordered the murder of John F. Kennedy in Miami. He was shot and his corpse was dumped at a site known to be a body dumping ground used by local drug lords. Sirhan Sirhan, meanwhile, was thrown under the proverbial bus by the US Government, and was tried and convicted for the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
“Incidentally, a British doctor who had participated in the development of the aborted fetal tissue into the mind control drug noted that many of the other “ingredients” could possibly be used to treat rabies, and much more effectively than the vaccine developed in 1885 by Louis Pasteur.
“We ask you to imagine, dear reader, no doubt able to discern for yourself right and wrong, the needle being administered to some poor babe – perhaps your own – the parents completely ignorant to the source of their precious child’s “treatment.” The source was life extinguished by deception and a bloody plot that culminated in murder.
To a child, skin tender with innocence, the needle is like a harpoon entering its skin, like some weapon of a mad Ahab concocted by the corruption of the United States Government. This is no way to prevent or treat an illness. Physical conditions must not be addressed with moral ailments far more destructive than the physical disease itself. This is neither ethical medical practice or human decency.
“We humbly beseech you, dear reader, to look into your own heart and ask yourself, is it right to treat my precious child with a vaccine born of such lies and death? Is there no better way to protect my young ones from rabies? Can the human race, in all its technological and medical advances, not develop a better formula with a clear conscience? A treatment not worse than the disease?
-W. W. Milton
and faithful partners.”
[Note: Ahab was the maniacal sea captain in Moby Dick who was obsessed with killing a whale.]
The harpoon. By the time I was released into society again, I didn’t even think of vaccines when I thought of harpoons. Not even the smallpox vaccine and its exceptionally ominous bifurcated needle. I only thought of the harpoon they used on Maggie.
But Maggie was no whale. She was a goldfish in a merciless ocean, pursued by another demented Ahab. These Ahabs, the ones who destroyed Maggie, sought not to expand her mind, nor for her to kiss the sky. They were simply sadists who sought to infest the earth and its bodies with poison for profit.
If you can believe such, the theft of my life’s purpose of exposing the truth of the rabies vaccine was only the second most devastating change to my life when I was released from the hospital.
Maggie had disappeared from the face of the planet. From what Patrick, my boss and the founder and owner of Burns Auto, told me upon my return, she’d “got into some dark stuff.” To put a simple and ugly story even simpler and uglier, she’d been introduced to heroin and meth (that is, methamphetamine) by the scum of the earth. She became inevitably addicted and fell apart, as one does, and vanished. Slipped away into some other dimension, it seemed. Like the Nanjing Battalion, the crew of the Mary Celeste, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and the body of the real Ron Paul, Maggie had disappeared without a trace.
Maggie was Margaret Morning Glory Mare. Her mother named her such because her grandmother loved morning glories (a type of flower). Maggie always said she wished her grandmother had loved a flower with a simpler name, like roses or irises. She also hated the name Margaret. Not only did she despise the alliteration of Margaret Mare, she said, “it’s an old lady’s name. I don’t qualify for the name Margaret yet. I haven’t earned it – I haven’t broken my hip or said racist stuff at the dinner table.”
I suggested the nicknames Magpie, or, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Marge. She “wasn’t feeling them,” especially “Large Marge.” So I called her Maggie. And she called me Billy.
After she disappeared, I wouldn’t let anyone call me anything else. I’d been called Wyatt all my life, due to my father also having been named William. My mother forbade my father from making me a junior, for the reason that I might be given a silly nickname to differentiate from my father. Among the most repulsive options were “Little Bill,” “Billy Boy,” “Buffalo Bill,” and “Bubba.” My father compromised and gave me a different middle name than his, to avoid siring me William Milton, Jr.
It worked out well for me in any case, as I could never be William Milton, suffix or not. Just as Maggie felt she hadn’t earned the name Margaret, I felt I’d not earned the name William Milton. To me, it would be akin to calling one’s self Ghost Rider while having no flaming skull on your shoulders, no motorcycle, no sense of hellbent vengeance. My father was William Milton. “Will” to friends and family. Never Billy.
When Maggie slipped away, I became Billy Milton. It was my way of hanging onto her. My psychiatrist, his nurses, and his student doctors called me Mr. Milton. That was fitting, as only strangers call one another mister and missus. And I had no desire to know them anymore than that. They were strangers who pretended not to think I was an absolute lunatic of a neanderthal.
I believed Maggie and I were in the gradual throes of being brought together forever. And I believed we were, instead, wed by a ceremony of separation, the closeness of which I intended never to break. Love’s mind was bursting with mad genius, and she had her hands full when shaping us, like two play-dough figurines in a cosmic game of Cranium, the part where you have to shape things out of play-dough, a cosmic play-dough unreachable to our fallible human hands. That’s what Love was doing for Maggie and me – shaping us, when Fate and Destiny slapped Love’s work from her hands and called her an idealistic troglodyte.
The first time I saw Maggie, her first day working in the front office of Burns Auto, I didn’t believe she was really there. There was no way she was real. She must have been the carefully crafted product of a factory that makes androids of deceptive beauty, I reasoned. Maybe the Night Surgeons had put something in the drinking water. No one could be that beautiful and still be so real. No one could be that beautiful. No one could be so beautiful but so obviously in pain.
I didn’t have the delusion that she was some hologram designed by the “men in black” or some other such absurd conspiratorial boogeymen. Still, she seemed too gentle, too cool, too real, to be real.
Maggie was tall and thin, with olive skin, long arms, and dark brown eyes that always looked so tired. Maybe that was what made her seem so smooth and so cool in everything she did. As if she were disengaged in whatever she was doing, but her beauty overwhelmed the disinterest and made her seem somehow interested, but still too cool for the room, too cool to be doing whatever she was doing. Her hair was auburn, almost the color of a frozen piece of high quality steak. She always wore it up in a tussled bun. I never once saw Maggie with her hair down while she worked at the shop.
She always wore black. She didn’t work in the garage, so she didn’t wear the standard blue coveralls like the rest of us. Whether it be a black t-shirt with black yoga pants, or a long-sleeve black summer dress, she was always in the garb of a mourning widow. It fit her perfectly: those eyes that always looked so tired were eyes one would see at a funeral, a wake that had taken a long and difficult trip to reach.
But she spoke gently, not lifelessly or melancholically. Her soft, husky voice contradicted that sadness in her eyes. It was a voice you’d hear not at a funeral, but at a wedding, the less hammy and sappy of them, reciting some poignant but brief custom vow. Her lips were full, not quite plump, but full. When she smiled, it was never a big, toothy smile. She never showed her teeth when she smiled. Her full lips would curve upward with all their might, but were too weary to form a proper beam.
Maggie must have been two, maybe three inches taller than me. The first time I saw her smile was when I told her Patrick should appoint her as the Vice President in Charge of Reaching Things on the Top Shelf. It was also the first time I heard her laugh. It was so strange hearing such a soft but whimsical laugh come from such a sad face.
To this day I feel stupid for being shocked that she’d been using methamphetamine. I would have been shocked that she was partaking in any type of narcotic, but meth as I understood it was an ugly girl’s drug. It was one of those Southern, trailer trash addictions. I suppose I was just as ignorant and prejudiced as those who assumed bestiality only existed in the cotton states. When Patrick told me she’d eventually been led further into darkness by means of heroin, in my idiocy and ignorance it made more sense. Heroin is a New York drug, and Maggie looked as if she belonged in Greenwich Village, reciting poetry at a coffee house. But the poisons of man know no state or cultural boundaries, and they don’t seek only those into whose crowds they can blend.
Once, she called the garage on a day she’d called in sick and was absent from work. She asked specifically to speak to me. She asked if she could borrow fifteen dollars for gas, but she refused to meet me at the garage to retrieve it.
“I just can’t go there today,” she said.
I thought it odd, but reasoned that maybe she was playing hooky and didn’t want Patrick to know. We all have those days, I suppose. She asked if I could meet her behind the Dollar General across the street. When I gave her the money, she tried to give me some history books in return, as she knew I enjoy such things. She also had in her car a pile of old pulp romance novels. But I wouldn’t let her part with her books.
Then, she gave me a side-hug. That side-hug was the catalyst, the tipping point that sent me spiraling in love with her. I desperately wish I hadn’t. When you fall in love with someone, you put a filter on your eyes and brain that makes it easier to ignore the red flags that dot the field of your love like the red poppies of Flanders Fields.
As time and our friendship went on, Maggie was always broke. I should have known something was amiss, and I should have asked her – no – I should have demanded to know what was going on, instead of giving her money every time I could tell she wasn’t eating, or when she needed help with rent or a bill for this or that. She very seldom directly asked me, mind you, nor did she sneak it into conversation to drop a hint.
I often overheard her on the phone with her mother, who must have called her at least three times a week from her native Canada. I never heard Maggie ask her for any kind of help. I didn’t eavesdrop (though I suppose I actually did), but the only thing I ever distinctly heard Maggie say was after the call had ended: as if it were a ritual, she always repeated to herself, “I’m not my mom. I’m not my mom...”
And of course, there was Candyman.
Candyman was a banty rooster in human form who came into the front office perhaps twice a week with the express purpose of talking to Maggie and Maggie only. He never smiled. He never looked happy. Sometimes I thought he must have been some kind of android disguised as a person, as no human being could keep such a poker face while speaking to a collection of such beautiful atoms and tender carbon as Maggie. But, somehow, he never displayed any delight in seeing her.
I hated it when he came into the office. The guy had scruffy facial hair, the hair of someone who can’t grow a proper beard or mustache, but in denial, he tells himself his wispy, dirty growth is sufficient to pass for manhood. Maybe that’s why he was such a sharp dresser – his newly pressed button-down shirts and corduroy jackets took the attention from his pathetic facial hair. He was likely the same age as me, in his late twenties, yet hadn’t registered the hint that the love between his face and his hair follicles was not meant to be. But those crisp jackets and vulgar JC Penney shirts did their job of distracting from it.
The suspicion that this dandysprat was Maggie’s “sugar daddy,” as the crass term goes, led the boys in the garage to call him “Candyman.”
My jealousy would tumble into the caverns of hate when I saw him hand her money. Every time he came into the office, he leaned on the counter and talked to her like a father lecturing a child, and invariably handed her a few bills of cash. It made me want to be rich, beyond JC Penney rich like Candyman, to discover a treatment for rabies that didn’t come from conspiracy and evil, to get rich from it, set up a few charity hospitals, and buy Maggie a big house all her own.
I think of it now, and I absolutely hate that feeling. The desire to do good in the world because you hate someone that much, rather than loving people with as much, if not more, genuine feeling than you hate the person you despise.
Though Candyman gave her money every week, and she earned a regular paycheck, Maggie was routinely short of funds. I should have known something was amiss. But what really should have set off my alarms was how erratic she became. Toward the time I was hauled away to the hospital, the week of the fiery protest in April, it had become characteristic of Maggie to ramble when she spoke, to jump from one topic to the next, sometimes to the point that I couldn’t make heads or tails of the point she was trying to make.
My last day of work, before the event that led to my hospitalization, Patrick was noticeably irritated with her. Whenever a customer came inside, she would hurry into his office, exclaiming she was afraid of whoever had just walked into the building, no matter who it was. Even a shrunken old woman who came to pay her bill for a blinker repair sent her into a panic. Patrick grudgingly went to the front counter and tended to the customers, while Maggie sat in his office, chewing her thumbnail, a look of frantic worry attempting to invade the cool beauty of her eyes, like a Germany of fear breaking the Maginot Line of her tender face.
Oddly enough, the first time she ever behaved erratically in any form was what led to us becoming actual friends. Though she’d already nicknamed me Billy, and I her Maggie, we were still only work associates until that Friday in January. She’d worked at Burns Auto for three months or so by then. That day, she looked more tired than usual, but she was also quite jumpy. She was frazzled, dropping things, behavior that belied how cool and calm she usually was. Suddenly, there came the sound of sirens, growing louder, getting closer to the shop. While working in the garage with the boys, I panicked and excused myself to the bathroom. I didn’t even think to listen long enough to differentiate between the sound of ambulance, fire or police sirens.
I discreetly left the garage and ran into the repo barn next door, thinking it to be a secure hiding place. I dove into the back of a recently repossessed orange Subaru, only to find Maggie already there. She looked at me, surprised and almost ashamed, like a child caught doing something they shouldn’t. She laughed a little nervous laugh.
“I heard the sirens,” she said quietly. “The cops scare me.”
“They scare me, too,” I replied. Then, after somewhat of an awkward pause while we stared at one another, I asked, “Were they police sirens? Maybe it was an ambulance.”
“No, they were definitely cop sirens. They’re like Hendrix’s guitar. You know it as soon as you hear it. You know it’s not Jack White or somebody, you know?” Maggie said.
I didn’t tell this to Maggie, but I’d been wary of the police ever since Dr. Enders’ clinic filed their first complaint when they discovered and confiscated my (admittedly cheap and ineffective) surveillance equipment in their waiting room. The police came to my apartment and told me not to go back unless I had a serious medical issue that needed tending. They also made sure to emphasize how gracious it was for the doctor not to press charges. I was indignant.
This was Dr. Enders’ second office, a free clinic for indigent patients. It was too much, seeing the spread of this moral abomination in syrup form spreading to the salt of the earth, so to speak, the most humble among us. After the incident with the bugging equipment, I went to the police, provided my findings about the rabies vaccine, and insisted Dr. Enders’ offices be closed and raided, his records seized. I was given a restraining order against the doctor himself for my efforts.
When I heard the sirens that day in January, I thought maybe the police had found more of the recording equipment they’d missed the first time and were coming after me to lock me up, or turn me over to the Night Surgeons. Only now does it occur to me that no one would have sent a caravan of squad cars, sirens blaring, to apprehend the village idiot.
Maggie evasively explained why she was afraid of the police, saying rather shyly that she’d failed to pay a fine for a traffic violation, and another for being caught with a controlled sedative that hadn’t been prescribed to her, which she had borrowed from a friend for her anxiety.
When she asked me likewise, I didn’t mention my illegal and idiotic surveillance. Instead I gave another story, albeit a true story, just not the one over which I was so exceptionally worried: I explained I’d been researching diseases in New Guinea, and in doing so I’d happened upon several photos of the indigenous tribes of the land, among them a picture of several young men in their “birthday suits,” so to speak. This made me uneasy, as I didn’t know if the lads in the photograph were of a legal age. If not, my computer now held the memory bytes of illegal images.
“I feel gross about the whole thing,” I told her truthfully.
“Well,” Maggie shifted in the seat and tapped the back of the driver’s seat with her foot. “I’ve heard you talk about...um...diseases. I mean, you know. The stuff you do...”
I braced my guts, not knowing if she was clenching a verbal fist of ridicule, or something more innocent.
“...and, you could prove really easy that you were just researching diseases and stuff, since that’s what you’re kind of known for. And if the guys in the picture were underage, it was just an honest mistake. You didn’t go to the Dark Web to find them, did you?”
She smiled slyly, with a mock stern expression, raising her eyebrow.
“Nooo, no, nothing like that. It was Wikipedia.”
Maggie tried to stifle a hard chuckle, her full pink lips blowing together. “I think you’ll be fine,” she said.
We must have sat in the back of the Subaru for almost an hour and a half, just talking and talking. Though, I did a lot of listening, too. Maggie had come to Whistling Elk, California from Steinbach, Manitoba. “I literally threw a dart at a map,” she said. She wanted to get away from her mother, by whom she felt she was being negatively influenced emotionally.
“I think her anxiety was starting to rub off on me. I was anxious when she was anxious. I was negative about everything when she was negative about everything. It was like a spell or something. But it went from being anxious about what was gonna come in the mail that day to being anxious about every little thing in my life. Where was I going? What was I doing? Would I ever be somebody or would I just be nobody? I just needed to get away for a while. I needed to put some distance between me and that kind of energy. I think I’m trying to prove to myself that it’s her, not me. That I haven’t been permanently affected by all that fear. That I’m not the one who’s afraid all the time.”
Maggie picked imaginary lint from her shirt and pants. “I’ll go back someday. But I have to prove to myself it’s not me. That I’m not the one who’s scared all the time,” she said, as we cowered in the backseat of a Subaru because we heard sirens that had long passed.
“I just don’t want to live that way,” she concluded. “I refuse.”
I felt sad when she said she’d eventually return to Canada. I didn’t want her to ditch her mother forever, but I didn’t want to lose this human being that made my day so much brighter, though she didn’t know she did so. My brain fumbled to find something to say.
“I can’t tell you what the mailman will bring,” I told her, “but I do know you’ll never be nobody. You’ll always be somebody. Everyone is somebody. The challenge is being somebody who does what’s good and what’s right. And I have no reason to think you can’t meet that challenge. Never think you’re nobody.”
Maggie played with her hands after I gave my brief, hokey speech. She was probably as embarrassed as I was when someone said something positive about me. I could never accept it. I simply didn’t know how. Maybe I simply lacked the humility required to accept a good word.
“Thank you,” she eventually said, softly of course. “I’d like to move down to Half Moon Bay someday, just for a little while. I saw the name on the map and it sounded nice. I love pictures of beaches. I’ve still never seen an actual beach in person since I came to California. Can you believe that?”
“I can believe it. I avoid them. I’m very aquaphobic,” I replied. “I had a fascination with books about the Bermuda Triangle when I was a kid. They scared me so bad I never learned how to swim.”
“I can teach you to swim, you know,” Maggie said.
Butterflies led an air assault on my stomach.
“What do you think causes all those disappearances?” she asked.
Don’t say extraterrestrial forces.
“Magnets. Magnetic quirks. Magnetic phenomena in...on the surface of the seabed.”
“Yeah?” Maggie looked out of the window thoughtfully. “I think it’s aliens.”
I asked her about her father.
“Well. When I was nine, he went out for a pack of cigarettes.”
“Oh...ohhh. I see...”
“Yeah...he’s been searching for that perfect brand for fifteen years now.”
[Note: “Going out for a pack of cigarettes” was once a code a deadbeat father would use when announcing he was leaving the house, but planning never to return. It started in the 1940s, when a person could easier leave their family and start a new life without being found. It gradually wore off as technology made it more and more easy to track everyone’s whereabouts. I suppose there are some benefits to our governments knowing where we are at all times.]
“He lives in Saskatoon now, the last I heard,” Maggie went on. “He got remarried and had another kid. But he left them, too. He just can’t find that perfect cigarette. He’s looking for the holy grail of cigarettes, I guess. But. At least then my mom and I knew it wasn’t just us that...that made him want to go away to look for it.”
The more we talked, we discovered we have the same birthday, May 18th, me being two years older. She asked me about my parents. I explained that my mother was killed in a car accident when I was seventeen. I told her that’s why I went to Perdida County Community College to learn to be a mechanic and specialize in brake repair and maintenance. It had been faulty brakes that caused my mother’s accident. I told her about my father, who had died the year before when he was poisoned by the VA Hospital for reporting patient abuse. I went on about having two older half-sisters from my mother’s first marriage, and several nieces and nephews, adding limply that we never speak.
“Why not?” Maggie asked.
I had the nerve to shrug as if I didn’t know why. Then, I lied. It was a small lie, but it was a lie, and I was lying to someone who was being so open and vulnerable with me. “I think it’s resentment,” I said. “Resentment to my being a half-brother from a man who wasn’t their father. They simply never saw me as a full brother, I suppose. Which is fair, because by definition I am after all a half-brother.”
I didn’t mention how my preaching about the rabies vaccine and disapproval of their children being filled with the world’s wizardry had probably had something to do with our slow estrangement. It’s not lost on me that my views and zeal have alienated a lot of people who might have otherwise been part of my life. Which makes it all the more amazing that I was eventually able to talk about those views with Maggie.
Already weighing with the guilt of my dishonesty, like an Atlas carrying a globe of dishonesty on his shoulders, shoulders weak from conscience, I tried to change the subject. But I went right to the rabies vaccine. Maybe it was a subconscious transition, being that I’d lied about why my sisters and I had drifted apart. I took a Mad Ahabs pamphlet from one of the pockets of my coveralls (yes, I did keep a few on my person at all times). I timidly asked, “Would you care to read this sometime? I mean, when you get a few minutes.”
“There aren’t any pictures of naked New Guinean guys, are there?” she asked.
I laughed. A legitimate, unadulterated laugh.
Maggie took the pamphlet. I knew she thought it was nonsense. But one mustn’t be thin-skinned when they believe something so controversial. Or when they believe anything, I suppose. Their beliefs will make them much more miserable than beliefs already make a person.
“You wrote this?” Maggie asked.
“Well, I co-wrote it.”
She looked it over again. “Will you autograph it?”
I felt my eyes widen with surprise and confusion at not hearing any condescension in her voice. I signed the pamphlet. And, I dotted the i in Billy with a smiley face. I would have dotted it with a heart, but that would have been far too forward this soon.
“Do you have many friends?”
I didn’t know why she asked that. Maybe she simply somehow knew.
“Not as many as I had when I was a kid, in Point Pleasant.”
“Where’s that?”
“West Virginia.”
“Point Pleasant, West Virginia. That sounds nice. I wish my dart had landed there.”
“It’s quite tiny.”
“But it sounds so quiet.”
“If you only knew...”
Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “Wait. I know that name. I heard it on a documentary. There’s some kind of flying monster there, right?”
I stifled a groan. “Yes. That’s where the Mothman was seen.”
“I remember the name of the town because I thought, that sounds like a nice, quiet place to live. A great place for a monster,” Maggie said.
“A great place for a monster, indeed,” I replied. “They’ve got a statue for him and everything. They practically worship it like a Babylonian image. Babylonian, I tell you, Maggie.”
Maggie gave me a look. I instantly knew what she was thinking. My words betrayed my disbelief in the Mothman, yet she’d just read my outrageous pamphlet, and had no doubt overheard me telling the boys in the garage about the human colonies on Mars. But it wasn’t a look of condescension. It wasn’t a look of bemusement.
It was the look of someone trying to figure out someone else.
At that moment my heart and stomach fluttered with butterflies of humanity. If there were such a thing as the Butterfly Man, he’d have materialized then and there in the back of that Subaru, a manifestation of how important I suddenly felt to someone else. Maggie’s look was the look of someone who cared enough to think, to try to understand another human being. Though, her sleepy-cool demeanor hid any tear-jerking gooeyness of such a sentiment.
“You don’t think the Mothman is real?” she asked.
“Well...yes and no. Let me explain.”
I almost lost my train of thought and my canned information when Maggie turned in the seat to face me, resting her elbow and leaning her face in her hand, offering me her full attention. It almost triggered a malfunction of my entire neurological skeleton.
“I...you see, the...” I finally collected myself. “Well, there was certainly something in the skies over Point Pleasant, but it was no half-moth, half-man hybrid.”
“No?”
“No. It was completely inanimate. It was an experiment by the Government – ours, you know – for use in the Vietnam War.”
“Typical,” Maggie said.
“Right? The CIA put a chemical they’d developed into the town’s drinking water, to induce hallucinations. Then, they used a crudely made drone shaped like a winged beast-man to induce panic in the townspeople, which was intensified by the chemical they’d concocted.”
My tongue became twisted when I said “chemical they’d concocted,” which made Maggie laugh. A small, cool giggle.
“Like the Scarecrow did in Batman Begins,” she said. “I see.”
I nodded and said, “exactly!”, though I’d never seen the movie.
I went on, “Thus explaining the red glowing eyes, the huge fluttering wings, the shriek that the creature was reported to emit. They hoped, the Government that is, to do the same in Vietnam, to disorient the superstitious Vietcong.”
“Did they ever actually use the Mothman in Vietnam?”
“They did, but they didn’t bother tainting the water with the hallucinogens. The military assumed the Vietnamese were so primitive that they’d shrink in terror at seeing anything unusual in the sky. But, each drone was immediately shot down and repaired by the Vietcong, who flew them into North Vietnam to carry intelligence reports. It backfired on the US Government, and I can’t say I feel sorry for them. They thought the Vietnamese were stupid, superstitious neanderthals rather than reasonable people like us, who do the reasonable thing and shoot at whatever scares them.”
Maggie continued to gaze, studying me. My heart felt still and fragile. I felt it could be pushed into the sea like a helicopter during the evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon. But this helicopter was not being pushed into the South China Sea – this helicopter heart was in danger of falling into the South Sea of Love.
I had to say something before I underwent a mental breakdown from the overwhelming beauty of Maggie’s gaze. And yes, I do assert to you that it was indeed a gaze.
“The Mothman was asinine indeed...” I fumbled for a segue, something to counsel this burgeoning friend. “As absurd as our fears. Some of our fears, anyway. We run in terror from hybrid creatures in the sky, but if only we’d face them, we’d find them to be only drones. I mean, not that there aren’t things in the sky that should truly scare us. But...um...our fears are only true monsters if we let them become such.”
The garage fell even quieter. We’d been hiding in the Subaru for well over an hour. We must have both realized it at the same time. Maggie and I exited the vehicle and looked at each other like two children who had just hidden in a closet from a monster, and had just figured out that said monster was only the sound of the air conditioner. Embarrassed, but ready to convince each other there had truly been a monster.
As we slinked back to the shop, Maggie sighed.
“I think I’d rather be chased by the Mothman than chased by myself.”
