After high school, his first real job had been counting dollar bills in somebody’s basement. From there, he moved on to weighing cocaine to be placed in rolled up paper bags.
He’d advanced through the years, and never had to apply for anything, so the empty boxes and spaces on the paper in front of him loomed like angry eyes.
Bede had hardly listened when Micah had droned on about coming to a crossroads in your life and how to take steps to make good decisions. Break down the issue. Talk it over with your friends. Weigh the consequences.
That last had been, Bede was sure, an unspoken warning about making bad decisions, the kind that would land your ass back in jail.
Bede had done his five years, and he sure didn’t want to end up behind bars again. But what else was there for him? A return to the neighborhood in Denver, somehow get his own place back, the one he’d shared with Winston? Except Winston wouldn’t be there.
Going back to Denver without Winston seemed surreal, meaningless. While he knew everybody there, they would be looking at him with sympathetic eyes, and not one of them, notone, would understand what he’d gone through. The scream that tore his heart out as he watched, handcuffed, unable to help, as Winston died in front of him.
Bede was sure that to the cops it hadn’t mattered that a drug dealer was bleeding out, just like they didn’t care when a whore got messed up in a back alley when she’d gone there to hook up with another john so she could make her monthly rent.
Well, was the unspoken opinion, she was just a whore, after all.
Likewise, Winston had just been another drug dealer.
In his three-piece suit, he had risen through the ranks till he only dealt with high-level suppliers, the ones who could afford to rent out entire floors at the Oxford Hotel in Denver. Who had contacts on the coast or on the border and could ship in cocaine by the truckload.
For Bede, the lowlifes in his world had been those junkies who would do anything for their next fix. This had nothing to do with Bede, of course. When Bede happened to see a junkie on thestreet, he might briefly wonder if he’d been involved in the sale of whatever made the junkie’s teeth fall out, their bones rattle beneath their skin. But he never slowed down.
He’d never really understood what it felt like to be like one of those whores or junkies on the other end of that kind of derisive opinion. That is until he’d been arrested and incarcerated, treated like he was less than dirt beneath a guard’s boots.
But now, sitting in a beautiful glade, at a picnic bench that still smelled of new paint, looking at the view of a glass-surfaced lake reflecting the long, imposing beauty of the ridge behind the pine trees, maybe it was time to turn over a new leaf. Become a guy who raked leaves from his lawn in the fall and shoveled snow from his front sidewalk in the winter.
He’d never cared about any of that before, and now the application was showing him how hopeless it all was to become a regular guy because how was he supposed to fill out this dumb form? It was an assignment like back in school, and he had not studied.
Even if he did fill out one of the blanks with where he worked: 319 Adams Street (sometimes), or how long he’d worked there: two years, or who he’d worked for: Ralph the Mouth—there was no way Ralph would be willing to validate that, yes, Bede had been his best delivery boy for those two years.
If Bede put any of that on the form and Ralph found out? Ralph would kill him, and then the cops would have another dead body on their hands.
Even if Ralph didn’t find out and kill him, Bede was a convicted felon.
He might—might—be able to get a job at a car wash in Cheyenne, or one of those dingy breakfast diners that seemed to spring up like dandelions only to go under inside of six months because too many people were getting food poisoning.
It was that or go back to Denver and wade through all the crap only to end up in a Winston-less world, all alone, and with most of his regular contacts and customers being suspicious that he was wearing a wire.
It would take years to build up enough trust to be able to get his old reputation back. Years before, he could afford the kind of three-piece suits he’d so loved to wear. He didn’t really know any other kind of life, but what choice did he have?
It was a fucking crossroads, wasn’t it. The fucking counselor had said it was, like he knew what Bede was up against, and it made him want to slap Micah good and hard.
Bede had skills, just nothing anybody in the real world would want.
He tossed the clipboard across the surface of the picnic table where it caught on something and teetered at the edge, threatening to fling itself to the grass.
“Something I can help with?” asked Galen’s voice from behind him.
Bede turned, and if a fresh breeze sprang up all around the second he clapped eyes on Galen, it must have been a fluke. But no. The surface of the lake ruffled in response, and the air smelled like warm pine needles.
“No,” said Bede, reaching for the clipboard, ignoring, or trying to, the soothing calm that Galen brought with him that surrounded him like a cloak.
Of course, the answer was no. No, he didn’t need help. No, he didn’t needGalenhelping him. No, he didn’t want to create a new life for himself.
His answer had to be no, because otherwise it’d be yes. Yes, he wanted help—needed it—but no, he did not want Galen to see him at his lowest point, where he’d so painfully come to the realization that if he wanted to move on, he’d have to make somehard decisions, and figure out how to go back to square one without totally demeaning himself.
“Seriously, no,” said Bede as Galen slid along the bench on the other side of the picnic table.
So now that pretty face with its flushed cheeks and on-the-edge of laughter gray eyes, that mess of hair suddenly Bede could see himself sliding his fingers through—all of this was framed beautifully by the pine trees, the gray ridge, and the bowl of blue sky.
