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Order this writing in the book Roll the Bones the cc&d Sep.-Dec. 2020 magazine issues collection book		get the 424 page Sep.Dec. 2020 cc&d magazine 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Leaving Town

Westley O. Heine

    Harry lay in bed listening to the magnetic tape peak and pop as it strung through his stereo. “Is there anything better than music?” he thought. “It gives us something to love without the burden of it loving us back.”
    Harry was drinking his breakfast. The beer rested on his gut, and empty ones were vaguely thrown toward the garbage. Most were on the floor. He knew he had to do something other than just stare at the wall all day. The white walls mocked him like an empty canvass.
    “This city is killing me,” he said as he swung his latest empty can at the trash. He missed again.
    It was another festering heat wave. The air felt like soup. The liberals said it was another sign of global warming. The conservatives said it felt like the South. In the street ghosts limp around with dirty white t-shirts hanging over shoulders, air-conditioners dripping from lead paint windows, and Mexican ice cream carts playing jingle-bells.
    Harry preferred cold beer. He lay on his empty blue mattress with a fan propped in the window to reel in the air. It was his day off because he didn’t have a job.
    Harry grabbed his phone and checked his messages. There was a woman’s voice in his mailbox. It was a voice he knew but wasn’t sure if he wanted to get to know her any better. “Women are like gambling. Get out while you’re ahead...”
    Get out? He had to get out. Something had to change.
    “Oh sweetheart,” he said to the blank walls. “Why do all the messages you leave sound rehearsed?”
    The same list of options rang in his ears: Go look for a job. Go down to the bar. Get another twenty-four pack, stay in, and maybe paint something on that fucking blank wall. No, then he’d have to stare at it from then on, and it might reflect something about himself that would be worse than the emptiness.
    “I guess I’ll go get some more beer.” He just woke up and already he was looking to pass out. Some habits die hard like looking both ways on a one-way street.
    Then there was a horrific noise like a chainsaw. Suddenly there was blood, bones, and feathers everywhere. A bird had flown full speed into his high-powered fan. It was immediately shredded, and spattered all over his naked body.
    He leaped up. Harry was shaken into cold paranoid awareness. He first thought that it was a prank. Was some asshole neighbor slinging dead birds from the fire escape into his room?
    So Harry stuck his head out the window, “You mother-fuckers! I’ll bite out your throat and spit what I find into your fucking face!”
    But no one was out there.
    He began to sober up as he showered. He washed off the blood and splinters of bone. He started to think that only a bird soaring on its own could get fast enough to shred itself.
    Harry was drying off with a dirty towel when a song came on, one he knew well, but he didn’t know the name. It reminded him of the country, the long horizons, where you can smell the life in the air. He thought he’d take a bus and go visit his sister, who still lived in that small forgotten town. A little distance would give him some perspective. The city seemed ancient and doomed.
    So Harry threw his clothes into a duffel bag and flew out the door. He was moving faster than he had in weeks. “I’m leaving all you fools behind,” he thought.
    He got to the elevator and pushed the button. As he waited he taped his foot restlessly. When the elevator door finally opened there was a crumpled old woman inside. He’d seen her around before. She was Asian, at least in her eighties, and very frail. A stiff wind would put a dent in her quivering flesh.
    She began to leave the elevator. She didn’t seem to see Harry. Harry stepped back to let her inch by, hobbling along on her cane. The impatient elevator door sprang forward and would have pushed her over if Harry hadn’t shot his arm out to alert the sensor.
    He’d seen the old woman around, but never on his floor. Then he noticed that she didn’t have her glasses on. She always had her glasses on. She slowly turned right and inched down the hallway as he stepped onto the elevator. The button for the seventh floor was pushed.
    Harry stuck his head back into the hall. “Um, excuse me. Do you live on the seventh floor?”
     She didn’t speak English, but what else could he do? The sound of his voice made her turn back towards him. She looked around examining the hallway. Even though the floors were identical something wasn’t right and she knew it. So she got back on the elevator with Harry.
    He asked again, pointing at the button, “Do you live on the seventh floor?”
    She peered at the buttons, close enough to smell them, and then said something in her nasal language.
    The door opened to the seventh floor. The lights in the hallway were out. She poked her head though the door nervously. Harry offered her his arm and began walking her down the hallway to the right.
    It was dark but the management had opened the fire escape door at the end of the hall to let in some light. It suddenly struck him, what a terrible scene this was. How bad this must seem to the old woman? He’s leading her down a tunnel of light. Death seemed to be mocking her.
    Harry thought, “This was no way to spend your last days: alone, blind, can’t walk or take care of yourself, surrounded by people speaking strange languages, and being lead down a dark tunnel by some fuck up who secretly can’t wait until his good deed was done.”
    She slowed his pace down at the second door on the left, and raised her shaking hand full of keys. She slipped the key into the door, but the lock wouldn’t give. Instead the door opened from inside. A large and sleepy black man was standing there in his socks and undershirt.
    She was still on the wrong floor. Harry started leading her back to the elevator. Her pace grew even slower. Harry cursed the city for conspiring to keep him there a moment longer. Then he noticed she was crying. Her tears were silent, and spouted out randomly as if there wasn’t enough moisture in her pruned face to form the next drop.
    Back in the elevator he hit the button to the first floor. He was going to get the landlord. She would know what floor the old woman lived on. The woman kept crying all the way down, still hanging on his sleeve. He kept saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll find your door.” She couldn’t understand him.
    In the lobby one of the maintenance men was waiting for the elevator.
    Harry asked him in English, “Do you know where she lives?”
    He answered in Spanish but seemed to understand. He took her hand and led her back up into the elevator. Harry hoped that he understood.
    Harry got back to his quick pace as he crossed the lobby and hit the street. A block away was the bus stop that would take him to Union Station where he could get on a Greyhound out of town.
    Harry got stuck by the Sears Tower at rush hour. A flood of business people lined the sidewalks. A buzzing monologue began in his mind: “Everyone is going one way and I’m going the other like a fish swimming up-stream against the current. I see the tired experience molded faces, eyes full of opinions, worries, love. They don’t want to see me, and they don’t want me to see them. When our eyes meet they scowl at me for peeking at their souls.”
    He wasn’t getting anywhere zigzagging in and out of bodies. So he sat on the sidewalk with his back against the side of a building. A blind man came towards him with his cane, his antennae leading him along. Tap, tap, tap, whack! The cane hit Harry in the face. The blind man didn’t seem to notice and kept going tap, tap, tap down the sidewalk. Harry burst out laughing. He looked like a madman as more people passed. Even the rush hour panhandlers gave him a crossed look.
    He regained himself. “You know you look bad when the bums stop asking you for change.”
    When he got to Union Station Harry grabbed a bus schedule. His bus wouldn’t leave until six-thirty. So he went downstairs to the bar, ordered a Guinness, and put his feet up on his duffle-bag watching the crowd. Wrinkled faces of old gangsters their skin becoming unraveled in smoke and scars. Bib-overall boys in the corner throwing darts and nursing bottles of piss and spit. A bleach-blond let leg out looking to satisfy an itch and pass it on.
    He ordered another beer and looked out through the glass into the vast hall, now warping in vague forms of humanity and light. Bloated tourists wandered around dressed in plaid and pastels. One took a picture of a dying old Rasta-man sleeping on a bench.
    Finally the bus was due. Harry boarded and paid for his ticket. He took a seat in the back. Outside the heat finally broke and the rain started to come down.
    No sooner were they on the highway and the symphony of cellphones began. Games beeped, girls gossiped, videos blared, and music leaked out from tiny speakers sounding like insects screwing. “If a baby starts crying call your mother and put it on speaker phone,” he saved his sarcasm for himself.
    When you hear only half the conversation it always sounds sexual: “Make sure its moist... Yeah that’s how you make it... Yeah... yeah... Yeah, ah huh, ah huh, that’s it... Yes, I’m on my way... I’m coming.”
    The bus slowed just before the airport. As the traffic began the horns started like the first lesson of elementary school brass band. Electric billboards flashed advertisements for penis enlargements, SUVs, hair-loss supplements, handguns, and descriptions of stolen cars so people could inform the police as they drove.
    As the bus entered each suburb the traffic slowed more and more. Each town was like another ring of hell keeping him from leaving. His half-sleeping eyes flew over the sprawl through the many checkpoints of class-infrastructure: summer houses sparkling on hillsides and eventually turning into suburban grids. The amount of vegetation was slowly increasing. Road cops were hiding in their white cars as if they were the white blood cells policing the highway like a vein.
    Bridges bended over brown rivers tinted by bark, silt, battery acid, and cold sewage. Below were sand dunes where the river people peek out of abandoned cars and shabby tents, girls with no confidence stripped to feel special with Velcro un-tucked, and the laughter of boys palpitating their Adam’s Apples like croaking frogs hiccupping through gaps of rotted teeth. Inbred beings composed of soft reddish genital tissue. A cool wind against their skin conjures a rash that instantly puffs up like cheese. This mucus is a defensive shell where sausage-warts hatch alien fetuses. Some of the inbred mutants run up to the cars at tollbooths selling trinkets. One smeared his gooey face across the side of a bus window leaving a foggy stain. His desperate eyes burned into Harry’s brain.
    Harry’s eyes dissolved down the long road of infinite telephone poles. The landscape squared off into controlled plant growth. “It was already the future when I was born,” he thought. “We’ve reduced the world to geometry, sliced nature into a grid. People are buying water in tiny little bottles because the tap is so bad. They eat processed space food while watching blood sports. Couples can get face transplants so they don’t have to grow old looking at each other. If that doesn’t do it for you, switch places during a midlife crisis by getting a sex change to spark up the marriage.”
    Harry leaned his head against the window. Looking through the rain at his reflection something hit him. It was as if he was staring at a secret. His inhuman shell dissolved like acid on his flesh. He saw himself bare, no cool chip on his shoulder, no more indifferent defiance. His mouth started laughing but his eyes were full of horror, urgent, bulging, pressing, hysterical. All that was left was the ugly animal.
    The bus slowed to a crawl.
    He was just like the rest of humanity. “Maybe we should forgive ourselves,” he thought. “But if we did how could anyone make things better? No. Forgiveness was a sedative. Forgiveness was the easy way out.”
    Then the bus stopped.

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