Curse: The end has only just begun Read online

  The late afternoon sun began to hide behind the mountains as Ron set out to leave after a long day of tedium. He couldn’t wait to hear the hum of asphalt under his wheels, as a day spent with Fog Lake’s lone funeral director had given him a chill that wiggled into the marrow of his bones. The walls of the funeral home were lime green, and most of the windows were glazed by the touch of nicotine. The furniture creaked and the makeup job done on his grandmother was downright deplorable, but for all this, nothing disturbed Ron more than Morton, The Mortician, Ansell himself. He was a portly creep with a sweaty bald head and a gut that peaked out from the bottom of his shirt if he raised his arms too high. He smiled a lot, but never laughed, even as he made wildly inappropriate remarks about his young niece, who moped around and masqueraded as an employee.

  The cemetery, which would forever hold the earthly remains of Emilia, was unkempt. The soil was loose, and barren earth peaked through the grass, while in other places, shoots and weeds raged on unchecked. Most every stone inside the grip of the small cemetery was placed crooked and washed clean by weather. Even her marker, chiseled days before, already looked aged. Once Ron laid an ordinary collection of flowers over her grave and suffered the strange glances cast by the few others that attended the burial of his grandmother, he quietly stepped away. Ron made his way down the undulating terrain and through the rusted gate of the church yard. As the outsider approached his car, he sighed to himself as an uneasy feeling of observation crept over him.

  Across the broken road, he spied a couple of teenagers who studied him like an exotic animal caged in a zoo. The pair couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but childhood innocence was a trait that neither possessed. The boy, a crooked, rusted rail of a man, already had crude tattoos on his arms and an equally crude hunting knife slid into his belt. He stared at Ron though narrow eyes and only diverted his gaze to spit tobacco juice. The girl, possibly the young man’s sister, or just his dirty plaything, was thinner and similarly weathered. Her bony legs were shrink-wrapped inside a pair of dirty jeans. Her top was pulled up and tied into a knot above her stomach. Her ribs showed through the skin, and her spindly fingers brought a cigarette up to her sloppily painted lips. She brushed a hand through her frazzled hair and turned her head to whisper something to her companion. His mouth bent into a murderer’s grin. The crooked wound that split his face exposed yellow teeth. The burning sun reflected off the boy’s knife blade, and shot its rays from the metal. It seemed to float in the air like a spectral warning, a promise of violence. It was then that Ron slid his key into the door and welcomed the relative safety that his car offered.

  As Ron drove away from the site of the paltry service, he tried his best to forget the stares that had been cast his way. But to remove the patina smeared over him from Morton was a task that would require advanced scrubbing. Fortunately, Ron would have the time. A long drive awaited him, the task coming to his raw nerves like a blessing. He was to head back to sunny Sarasota, Florida, and what a welcome sight it would be. He made his home there and was on the staff of the Single-A baseball club in town. He also doubled as a scout for the lower level affiliates of the Cincinnati Meteors. An expansion team to Major League Baseball, the Meteors filled the void left years before by the dissolving of the storied Reds. The team had adopted the moniker as tribute to Cincinnati being widely regarded as the birthplace of American astronomy. The upstart Meteors, however, were anything but magnificent. The rough edges of the young franchise suited Ron though, as he found it difficult to remain employed with the more established clubs.

  It was never his intention to stay a minute longer in Fog Lake than was necessary, as he was eager to leave and get back to the work that awaited him at home. But Ron always found it difficult to prioritize. With his advanced knowledge of baseball, he should have been the manager of a big league club. Such things never happened to break his way. His ideas of what was important and valuable differed too much from those in the front offices, and so he got left behind in the trenches. On his way out of town, Ron drove past a sun-scorched baseball field, and as though pulled by forces unseen, he found himself parking his car. This was the sort of whimsical behavior that always got him into trouble. He was obsessed with finding that elusive diamond in the rough. A pursuit that usually amounted to nothing more than wasted time and gasoline.

  There really wasn’t a parking lot. A savaged piece of grass spilled over from the proper field beyond, and so Ron found it as good a place as any to rest his car. Like the ocean at night, the automobile glittered as it sat between rotted trucks and other broken relics of a time passed by. A game was about to start, and, although this experience likely promised to be pathetic and jejune, he slid himself onto the highest portion of a wooden bleacher. It was dry and split. Any slide too aggressive and the wood would surely deliver a generous number of splinters into Ron’s ass, but still, for reasons unknown, he sat.

  It was an adult recreation league, and, to little surprise, nearly all of the players were beer-gutted men in their thirties. Each one of them fancied themselves a cross between the physical skills of Mark McGwire and the intellect of Tommy Lasorda, but, assuredly, most of them knew far more about Budweiser than baseball. The play was sloppy, hilarious at times, but Ron dared not to laugh. In fact, he didn’t do much of anything. Anonymity was a shield, and he felt cautioned to hide behind it.

  The top of the 1st inning felt as if it took an eternity, but, finally, it came to a painful end as the second baseman took a spiked shoe to the shin as he miraculously applied the tag for the third out. The runner argued loudly with the umpire, and a fist-fight nearly ensued. The crowd seemed to enjoy this. Small bits of trash were hurled onto the playing surface and obscenities mingled among the air. Children wetted the soil with spit and offered their own chorus of vulgarities to the din. So far, things had gone worse than Ron would have guessed, but he silently vowed to at least suffer through one complete inning.

  Up 2-0, Amil Young’s team took to the field for the bottom of the 1st inning. The first couple of batters were taken apart with such fluidic ease that Ron nearly missed the pitching clinic that was suddenly on display. He watched as the third batter went down on three pitches, two straight fastballs, which had to approach 90mph, and a brutal sinker that died right over the heart of the plate.

  Intrigued by the scrap of a sample that he was given, Ron decided to watch a little more. During the top of the 2nd inning, he studied the young man. The pitcher sat quietly on a bench that ran along the left side of the field. As he sat apart from the rest of his team, Amil looked thin, not just from genetics, but also thanks to a lack of nourishment. His young skin was already browned and lined from a life spent outdoors. His face held a patchy beard that most dirty, twenty-year-old men are apt to wear, and, from under a batting helmet, a shrub of wild hair poked out. Aggravated by the humidity, it was long overdue for a trim.

  Ron was attuned to the body language of a ballplayer. He could tell exactly what they were thinking, or so he liked to boast. He could watch men sit as still as stones and practically read their thoughts. He could observe as an on-deck batter overanalyzed his last plate appearance, or a pitcher as he agonized over how to strike out a power hitter. But Amil didn’t appear to do anything as he sat. To Ron, it didn’t seem as though Amil was thinking about baseball.

  Once in the batter’s box to face the opposing pitcher, he grounded out, meekly, to 1st base. That was the third out, and so he kept walking to the pitcher’s mound among mild applause. He plucked his tattered glove from the dirt and set to work. Like a machine bent on an unattainable perfection, Amil dispatched the next three batters in order. He didn’t celebrate this accomplishment or acknowledge the sparse audience. He didn’t seem to notice that anything of note had happened at all.

  As he sat quietly on the bench again, Ron could sense as a true love of baseball swirled within Amil. The lack of competition couldn’t nurture that love, and with opportunity never placed among the spectators, disinter
est dominated. But he knew that behind those pale blue eyes a desire for something much greater lingered. Baseball wasn’t just a game that Amil enjoyed, it was his only sanctuary. A frayed rope that kept him from the bottom of all that life in Fog Lake threatened to deliver. It was then that Ron reevaluated the object of his rapt interest. Yes, this young man did indeed harbor a love for the game, but it was desperation that radiated from him above all things. Amil was frantic to be more than Fog Lake would allow. He was desperate to leave the only home he had ever known.

  After the first batter of the 3rd inning was retired, Amil became bored. He picked a splinter from his hand and stared off into the distance once more. He looked beyond the mountains and the brilliant, orange penumbra that lined them. He remained that way for the duration of the inning, looking past the decay of his town into the enormity of the world beyond.

  Ron was struck, for he discovered that this wasn’t a simple yokel, peering ignorantly into nothingness. Amil was something more. Ron was convinced he could feel as the young man’s mind drifted into other areas of thought, as he gazed the horizon and pondered the mysteries of the world beyond the stagnant waters of Fog Lake. Amil had a thinker’s sensibilities. This shone through, as his eyes were in constant observation of something. It would certainly be an unforgivable shame to allow any measure of a mind to waste away in a place such as this. Almost on cue, the prince rose from his trance and assumed his throne back on the pitcher’s mound. Night fell, and the small collection of lights that still functioned burst to life. Ron watched in awe as a suppressed artist painted the same magnificent picture seven more times over. As Ron sat under the stars, he was enslaved before this theater of athletic supremacy, and he forgot completely about his long drive back to Sarasota. The display set before him had dominated his mind, and when the game came to a predictable end in the bottom of the 9th inning, Ron nearly lost Amil as he quickly exited the darkened field.

  Beside a concession stand, which went extinct sometime around the death of Disco, was where Ron caught up to the enigmatic ballplayer and offered him the deal. Amil leaned against the disintegrating structure and picked flakes of paint from the dry wood as he listened to the pitch. The sky above was black and the stars beyond elaborately decorated the mountain tops as Ron continued to sell the greatness of Single-A ball. It was an overwrought exercise in redundancy. In fact, during the latter part of their conversation, Amil began to wonder why the sell was being pressed so hard. Did Ron actually believe that satisfaction could be found wasting away on the shabby rosters of post high school rec leagues?

  The deal to join the Sarasota Suns, long winded and beset with an inessential number of incentives, was sealed with a handshake. Ron and his newest prospect walked back to the punished grass that bore the weight of Ron’s late model Chevy Impala, shook hands again, and then parted. As Amil watched the silver Impala disappear into the blackness of a Fog Lake night, he finally felt what it meant to have a future.

  Over the next week, Amil quit his job at the Fast Fill Gas Station and packed a few necessary items. He got drunk at a local tavern and made out with Sherry Wilson. Sherry was the rough-and-tumble type, and Amil endured a rowdy bit of teasing over his intimacy with the bruiser. All the same, a few laughs were shared with his reject friends before he staggered back home to the trailer that he shared with his cousin, Bump.

  The next day, Amil kicked off his last hurrah as a resident of Fog Lake by attending the local fair. He made himself sick on corn-dogs, and lost twenty dollars playing the money wheel. With his gut twisted and his wallet bereft of cash, he took a seat on the hitch of a rickety pop-out trailer. He watched old Lightning Mike as he ran the Ferris wheel and nodded off periodically from the woes of narcolepsy. Amil ducked his head to avoid interactions with those he knew, and was made uncomfortable as he noticed Colleen Adkins working the kissing booth. She was thirteen and a little dim. With Amil’s boots stuck in the muddy ground, he listened to the twang of old banjos as it mixed with the hypnotic rhythms produced by carnival attractions. He rose from the rusted steel of his seat, zigzagging around stray dogs and wandering chickens. He made for home.

  Amil threw together a suitcase, and, aside from his grandmother, he told no one of his destination. It didn’t feel necessary to relay this news. Fog Lake and all its trappings were better left alone and ignorant. That night, Amil was uncharacteristically quiet, even by his standards. He was in the kitchen, which was placed uncomfortably close to his tiny bathroom, nibbling on the remains of some grilled cheese that Bump had made. His cousin stumbled out of a bedroom, burning through the wreckage of a small joint, when he asked Amil if he wanted to go grab a beer.

  “No man, I’m just gonna hang back,” he muttered.

  “What?” Bump questioned with a drawl, a look of confusion smeared across his face.

  “I said I don’t wanna go.”

  “Why not? Sherry and her friends are gonna be there. You know how them girls get when they’re all coked up. And I have it on good authority that they’re gonna be blowing the good shit tonight,” Bump said through a grin of decaying teeth, as he tapped his pocket.

  “Not interested, dude,” snapped Amil.

  Bump shrugged his shoulders. “Your loss, Cuz.”

  Once he heard Bump pull away on the blasted Honda that he fancied a Harley, Amil stepped outside. He glanced down the road at Miller’s Hardware. It had closed up some years before, after Mr. Miller had died of a massive heart attack. Right there at the counter, too. The old bastard had fallen forward into a candy dish and off to the nevermore. The sign outside the store was almost too weather-beaten to read, and the front door hung crooked from its hinges, as some kids pried it open a while back. Amil turned his vision to the house across the street. It belonged to Anden Dixon, a rather violent prick whose body was aged well beyond its forty years. Five years earlier, Anden’s wife, Nancy, had been found dangling from a belt in the barn out back. As it turned out, she couldn’t bear one more beating.

  There wasn’t much else to look at from the vantage of Amil’s front yard, or rather the mud mush that Bump plowed through with a weed-eater from time to time. He thought about his first cigarette. It was smoked at a friend’s house, two streets over. His first beer was sampled there as well, and his first sexual encounter took place in the bathroom of the old junior high school that stood a half mile away. He could practically spit on the cemetery that housed his mother’s earthly remains, and the notion seemed rather tempting. Amil had never had much use for the church that stood adjacent to the graves, although he did rob the collection plate once as a boy.

  As the sticky air greased him in its film, he felt gnawed to pieces by the reality that the whole of his existence had been lived within about a five-mile radius. But had he really lived at all? Life was supposed to be a journey. It was supposed to be interesting. Some boldly suggested that the adventure offered was meant to be fun. Amil wasn’t so sure about that, but he knew one thing for certain: he was done suffering the nothingness that Fog Lake offered. He felt around in his pocket and dug out his keys. After returning inside to grab a Sony Discman that should have died with the 1990s, he bid his tin-can home adieu and sped west. Spinning the second Days of the New album as loud as he could in an effort to drown out the scream of his 1979 Ford pickup, Amil put the pedal down until he crossed over into Kentucky.

  Once in Ashland, it didn’t take him long to locate the Greyhound Station. Amil parked his vintage POS, which he had no intention of ever returning to claim, and purchased a ticket to Florida. The haul to Sarasota would be long, but it mattered not. The longer it took, the farther he would be from Fog Lake. Such a proposition sounded as close to paradise as a trouble-stirring boy from Virginia could hope to find.

  The sun raged hot over the tobacco fields of the Carolinas, but Amil saw nothing except the insides of his own eyelids during this time. It wasn’t until they crossed into Georgia that the escapee from Fog Lake arose and again joined his semi-conscious companions.
There wasn’t much to see out his window. The massive southern state looked pretty much the way he envisioned it would. The only peculiarity that did catch his eye was the utter lack of anything that resembled a hill. The land was unbelievably flat. It was as though the world could stretch on forever.

  The landscape of Florida however, was something far different. With the hum of the tires playing soundtrack to his vision, Amil was captivated by the wetland’s cypress trees and the grip of the Spanish moss that seemed determined to strangle everything that it could. Nearly every road, cut straighter than the most perfect of lines, was bordered by tall trees. They were horribly thin, and bereft of branches, save for small clusters placed near the top. As they pressed deeper south into the slim state, the foreign geography continued to fascinate the vagabond, only then, he was treated to a discomforting feeling. It was only May, but already the oppression of the Florida sun baked its way through the windows of the bus.

  Amil shuffled in his seat, a failed attempt at dodging the boiling spears sent down from the sun. He pulled his headphones off and glanced around the bus. Until this point, he hadn’t bothered to examine another soul that was along for the ride to Florida, and this realization struck him. He was truly in his own world of one. A cell only he could see, a box built to shield him from the ugliness of common circumstance. Charlie Manson could have been seated across the aisle, and Amil would have remained ignorant to the fact. He hadn’t noticed the young mother of two brats as she sat stone-faced and exhausted. He could have sworn that the black chick in the halter top hadn’t been there at all before. Seated behind her was an old man who incessantly scratched his crotch. Hopefully that was all he was doing, but who would be foolish enough to assume such innocence? The hammers of geriatrics might have robbed the old man of proper function, but a predator still shifted behind his cloudy stare. Amil slid back into the sticky embrace of his seat and shut his eyes.