Disenchantment 13

*****

 

 

 

 

Mark arrived back at his apartment complex in the town of Castaic, inconveniently located outside of Santa Clarita in what Mark liked to refer to as a truck stop, the entire town being said truck stop. There was a small truck stop there, attracting those mighty vehicles to exit the freeway at either of the two exits into town, even though the place was so small that only a few truckers were able to stay the night, that rarely prevented the other drivers from getting off the freeway for fuel, or food, or to check for a space to park for the night, and it made driving around quite inconvenient, as the huge eighteen wheelers lumbered slowly along, too burdened to accelerate quickly. Well, Castaic was cheaper than Santa Clarita, and wasn’t too far out of the city in which he worked. He certainly couldn’t afford to live in Santa Clarita.

 

He heard the music coming from Hector’s apartment, incongruous rap music belching out into and tainting the night with the sheer volume. Other tenants, including the manager, seemed to fear Hector, and they were often quite reluctant to approach him with requests to lower his habitual noise-making activities. Mark let him blast his music for other reasons. As he came into the small courtyard, he noticed Hector lounging in a lawn chair outside his apartment, his fancy speaker plugged into a cheaper computer. The lyrics that were blaring out, if you could call them lyrics, were proclaiming for the millionth time how women should be paid to give the “singer” oral sex, or something along those lines.

 

“Hey ese, your dog woke me up again. You need to shut that fucker up.”

 

“Don’t sleep all day and he won’t wake you up.”

 

“I need my beauty sleep, homie.” Hector appeared to sneer at him, but Mark knew that Hector sneered at everybody, almost naturally, and Hector was very well aware that he did it, as it further improved his reputation for being mean.

 

“Also, Hector, it’s after ten, and you might be keeping other people awake right now. Or, does it only matter if someone wakes you up?”

 

“Fuck those putos, anyway.”

 

“Yeah, okay then...” Mark started up the staircase to his second-floor apartment.

 

“Hey man, you got any money?”

 

“Goodnight Hector, “said Mark as he hit the top of the landing and began unlocking his door.

 

Inside he could hear the scratching, whimpering and gurgling of Eddie, the pug. Many people had asked him in the past if he had named his dog after the dog in Frasier, and he usually just said yes, because he didn’t feel like talking about it, but actually his full name was Eddie the Head, or sometimes, if he wanted to be pseudo-formal, Edward T Head, named after a particular mascot.

 

“Who’s my good boy? Yes, who’s a good boy? Is Eddie a good boy?” asked Mark as he finally unlocked the door and entered the darkness of his apartment. Mark knelt over to pet and partially play with the pug, as it snorted and sneezed, and coughed and whined. Pugs were quasi-weird about being petted, and actually never seemed to understand the purpose of it, or enjoy it like other dogs did. So, Eddie, tried to playfully bite and lick Mark’s hand as he attempted to pet the fat, little thing.

 

By plan, the first thing to greet him, on the rare occasion that Eddie didn’t notice his arrival, when he opened the door, was his bookshelf in what passed as a foyer in his small apartment. On the top shelf, stood a bottle, three-quarters full, of Jim Beam. That was his drink of choice when he quit years ago. He liked to keep it there to remind him of his past, of his mistakes, of why he shouldn’t drink. It reminded him, every time he came home of what he used to be, and what he never wanted to become again.

 

Mark preferred Jim Beam, or he certainly used to when he drank, as it was a true bourbon, being from Kentucky, not like the more popular and more expensive Jack Daniels, a false bourbon, hailing from the state of Tennessee. It was kind of like those drinks made outside of the Champagne region of France were technically not Champagne, but instead sparkling wine, or whatever. Although, to be fair to Jack Daniels, he never saw it labelled as bourbon, just heard others refer to it as such.

 

He had lost himself an AA sponsor for his stubbornness and insistence on keeping the bottle of Jim Beam in his house. The guy just didn’t understand Mark’s motivations. If he fucked up and drank, then he fucked up and drank, having the bottle in the apartment wouldn’t change that, Mark figured, and he appreciated the self-instilled symbolism that he had given the bottle, and he truly felt that it was much more of a prevention than a temptation. So, the past few years he had continued to attend AA without a sponsor, and work on his twelve steps by himself.

 

The air in the apartment was slightly cool, but Mark went over to the wall to turn down the temperature of the central air conditioning. It was odd that he had to waste the money in the winter. It was just too hot to leave Eddie home alone all day. Pugs were notoriously bad at dealing with extreme temperatures either hot or cold, and it could literally kill them if the temperature was too extreme one direction or the other.

 

He noticed a pile of shit sitting in the kitchen, brazenly existing where it absolutely should not be. In addition to being temperature sensitive, having respiratory and brain issues, and issues about being left alone that resulted in rebellious damage to their owner’s property, pugs also were quite difficult to housetrain.

 

“No!” he yelled at the dog, but that was the extent of it. He didn’t catch the dog doing it, but he did suspect Eddie knew that he had done something wrong. He picked up the hairy little ball of fat grunts, walked over to the sliding glass door in his kitchen, and opened it, depositing the dog with the smashed-up face on his balcony. As he watched, Eddie peed, so at least he didn’t have to clean up any urine. He figured he would leave him out a little longer, as a punishment of sorts. It was too hot to walk him. In a normal year it was too cold to walk him in winter and too hot to walk him in summer, so he usually did his business on the balcony, with the exception of about four months of spring and fall, when the weather permitted Eddie a walk. Being a small, easily tired creature, Mark didn’t think pugs required the same amount of exercise as other breeds.

 

It had been a long, grueling day. Mark was a postal worker, and part of his route had to be done on foot, so the brutal heat was getting to him, really zapping his strength. It was only supposed to be in the summer. He actually loved the colder winter weather, but he wasn’t getting that this year. If this crazy weather kept up, he might never get that again. He still had over ten years until retirement, and didn’t know if he could do that.

 

It was funny, a few years back the United States Postal Service, the only government entity that paid for itself, via postage stamps, had been on the verge of collapse. UPS and Fed Ex were taking over most packages as most people began to pay their bills online. Sure, many older people still sent checks in the mail, and many businesses still chose to mail out advertisements, but it wasn’t enough to keep up with costs and retain all employees, let alone continue to pay those that retired. It was easier for most people, and much more convenient, to take care of both business and personal correspondence online. Luckily, Amazon had struck a deal with the USPS and once again, the post office was able to pay for itself. However, things had to be altered, having mostly packages and very little in the way of traditional letters was something the post office still hadn’t been able to proficiently adapt to dealing with. The lack of ingenuity was making Mark’s job more stressful.

 

Mark sighed. It was going on 11:00 PM, crazy ass Oren had asked him to go look out in the weeds with him after he had gotten off of work, calling out his wife’s name on the side of the road like a lunatic. That poor guy was losing it. Mark had willingly gone, but he certainly hadn’t wanted to. He wasn’t sure if he believed Oren or not. Part of him wanted to, another part of him needed to.

 

Oren had been going back out to the place that Perry had disappeared every night. Mark joined him on night five. They had had more conversations, primarily revolving around what Oren called; “Two moons time,” that he had claimed that the hooded, Reaper-type figure had said, interpreting it as “two moon’s,” meaning maybe two nights. Mark had offered up the opinion that it was two months, or two periods of the moon’s cycle, which he thought was twenty-eight days. Since Perry was nowhere to be found, along with all the other craziness, on the second night, Oren also came to consider it likely that it was two months, but that didn’t stop him from going back out there, repeatedly.

 

That evening Oren had told him that the cop, Hornblende had been there the night before. Hornblende was the same cop that had been assigned to Mark’s son, for all the good it did him. Mark wasn’t really certain that he wanted to see the cop again. He was also certain that the cop might find Oren’s weird, nocturnal activities to be suspicious, and he told Oren as much, but it didn’t seem to faze Oren one bit.

 

He walked back to look at the bottle of Jim Beam. It would be easy to take it down and have a drink, listen to some rock, instead of that incessant rap coming from Hector’s place. It had always felt very good to have a drink. The first few were great; it was later drinks that would get him in trouble.

 

The reason Mark wanted to believe Oren was because his own son, Mattie, had disappeared a few years back. Poor kid was only seven. Mark had been married at that time, and lived in a much nicer place as well. That was before his divorce, before his alimony, before his life had gone to shit. His ex-wife got the house, and he got to spend what little was left of his salary, after his former wife got her share, on this shitty apartment.

 

Mark was still hopeful, as his son was never found, that he was still alive somewhere, even somewhere as crazy as what Oren had described. He knew Oren’s desire to want to believe he would get his wife back, to believe it was possible. Mattie had been missing for years, and despite the statistics related to the matter, stating that if he wasn’t found within a few days, then chances were very good that he never would be found again. The odds were also in favor of the unfortunate fact that if he was found, he would no longer be living, but Mark never gave up hope, odds could always be beaten on occasion, or they wouldn’t be odds at all.

 

Mathew Dylan Nicastro had disappeared at the age of seven years old from a safe community, walking back the length of a mere ten houses down the street of a very safe neighborhood, in broad daylight. No one had seen anything, according to the police, according to Hornblende. Oren had hired a private investigator to help look for Mark’s son. Oren was always a good friend, and took his friendship duties quite seriously. It was odd to Mark that Oren would spend all the time, effort, and money on his son’s disappearance, as Oren was quite charming and had many friends, whereas Mark did not.

 

Not a day went by when Mark didn’t think about his son. Time cauterized the injury somewhat, helped it heal, but the wound was always there, a hole, an emptiness that couldn’t be filled with anything. It was winter when Mattie disappeared. Mark would stay up late at night, on the back patio of a house that now belonged to his ex and was no longer his, to feel the coldness of the night creep over his body, and he couldn’t help but just feel that his son was so very cold at the time, in the middle of winter. These thoughts of his son being cold were, of course, highly irrational. If he had been kidnapped, he was probably inside somewhere and quite warm, and if he had been killed, then the cold didn’t matter so much anyway. Still, the thoughts haunted him, and he felt the deepest sympathy for his son out lost and confused in the coldness.

 

The cold seemed a distant memory in the perpetual heat that enveloped the earth on that December night. Mark sighed, and looked at the bottle again, even ran his hands along it, but didn’t pick it up.

 

“I won’t drink tonight,” he said to himself. “If I didn’t hit the bottle when Mattie disappeared, and I didn’t hit the bottle when Kristen fucked everything that moved and took my house, then I won’t drink tonight.” Mark decided to take a shower. He was hoping that he would have an appetite before he went to bed.

 

Thirty minutes later he was lying in bed, Eddie at the foot, chewing on a rawhide treat, snarling, grunting, sneezing, and overall just making a massive amount of noise for such a small creature. He hadn’t eaten. The heat of the day had absolutely drained him and stolen his appetite with no intention of returning it before dawn. He decided to get up a little earlier with the hope of having a big breakfast before work.

 

When there was an occasional pause in Eddie’s munching and breathing, he was able to hear Hector’s music, still audibly displayed for the entire complex to hear. He much preferred the sound of his grunting, and later snoring, dog.

 

Sleep didn’t come as easily as it usually did, so he remained awake and thought for a time, and decided on something. There was actually a suspect in his own son’s case, a former neighbor that had been extremely weird, but he also had a lot of knowledge about mythology, and ancient religions. The guy was a cult waiting to happen, but Oren had done so much for him, that he felt that he needed to return the favor. He was off in two days and would go visit the guy. Maybe there was nothing to learn. Still, he owed Oren. It wouldn’t kill him to try.

 

Satisfied that he might be able to do a little something, Mark rolled over on his side and was soon asleep.