LIFERS Chapter Eight
By sabital
- 452 reads
After dropping off the shoebox full of crap at the stationroom, and like he told Hal he’d done with the girl’s car, Billy rolled the investigator’s black Taurus into a water-filled clay pit and watched as its back-end disappeared into the murky depths. He was then supposed to go straight to the town hall to join the rest of them and wait-out the oncoming storm, but Billy didn’t want to do that; he had a far more pressing engagement, one that involved his new convertble.
And so what if he didn’t get rid of it when he was told to, he doesn’t have to do everything Robertson wants, besides, he’d have plenty of time to dump it later. And what Robertson didn’t know about, Billy didn’t care about.
He’d parked the car in the woods near to where Old Liberty road was bordered by six disused clay pits, each of which had over the years filled with rainwater, and that was the sole reason the people of Martinsville never went near the place.
As he made his way, Billy recalled the whooping Hal dished out to him in front of those pretty young girls. He also recalled how embarrassed it made him feel, and how any small amount of dignity he might have had in himself was shattered in that instant. He knew it wasn’t because he used Hal’s name in front of them, even though that was still a no-no, the real reason Billy got slapped good and hard was because he allowed that investigator to get away from him.
‘Hey, Robertson, y’ugly fuck,’ he shouted to no one but the night air. ‘You thought the car was going to disappear, didn't you? Well guess fuckin’ what, ya pock-marked pin-cushion … it din’t, and now it’s mine. So fuck you, Robertson. Fuck you.’ That made him feel a lot better, and if Robertson was standing before him he’d say it to his rain-mashed face.
After trekking between the pits and being careful not to slip into one of them, Billy eventually arrived at his new car.
‘My very first soft-top,’ he said, like a kid looking at his new bike.
He opened the trunk taking out the two suitcases and the black holdall he told Hal he’d burned earlier, and after putting all three on the rear seat, he climbed in the front ready to have a good rummage.
He heard the soft rumble of thunder rolling in the distance and looked skyward through the windshield to see a black canopy stretching from one horizon to the other. Then a flash of lightning dragged his ever-waning attention back toward Martinsville. He smiled; the rain was at least an hour away, maybe two, so he had more than enough time before he had to get to the town hall. And he’d never been wrong about the rain in the fifty-eight years since his injection.
He moved the holdall to the front passenger seat and opened the two suitcases on the back seat. All he found were girl’s clothes and cosmetics, all of it useless to him. He then unzipped and opened the holdall to find a hairdryer, a few hairbrushes, some more cosmetics, perfume and deodorants, and a travelling iron, and all like the rest, useless.
‘Ho-lee shit,’ he shouted, ‘weed … and papers.’
Billy stuck his nose in the small bag and grinned as he breathed in the green shrub’s pungent aroma.
‘Wow,’ he said, enthused by his find. ‘This is good stuff.’
He soon got to work on his “honed” spliff-making technique, which in all honesty, wasn’t as honed as he’d liked it to have been. Eventually though, and after half a pack of torn papers, he had a thick, extra long joint nestled between his lips.
He lit his work of art and pulled the dense smoke into his lungs, and then coughed violently for half a minute.
‘Wow,’ he said again, and took another pull, and then another, and, just before the many cannabinoids started to take effect on his judgement, Billy pulled the car’s ignition key from his pocket -the one he took from the bunch before giving them to Hal- and with a quick twist, the engine did nothing. He repeated the action several more times, but ended up with the same result.
‘Fuckin’ piece o’ shite,’ he said. ‘Start, ya stupid mother-fuckin−’ and finally the engine roared into life. ‘Woo-hoo.’
Next he started to poke around with the stereo, twisting its knobs and pushing its buttons.
‘On …’
He could read that word so he pushed the button, but other than a bluish-green backlight illuminating the device, nothing happened. He moved along the display.
‘Vol … vol-ooo … vol-ooo-mee? Humph …’ he frowned.
No chance, for all the sense it made to him it might as well have been written in that Hydro-gliff stuff he thinks he’s heard of, or did he just invent that word? He shrugged, took another two pulls on his spliff and twisted the knob anyway.
Triumph at last, and he liked it, he’d never heard anything this strange before, or this loud, and the singer did more shouting and screaming than she did singing, but still he liked it, so he cranked up the vol-ooo-mee button as high as it would go and sang along to lyrics he didn’t know or understand.
By now the car had started to fill with smoke, so Billy tried the driver’s window but the handle refused to turn; not a problem though, when you’ve got a convertible. He climbed out to unclasp the roof from the windshield and peeled it all the way over before sitting back in the driver’s seat and making himself comfy.
This had to be by far the best day he’d ever had in his life, and even though it pained him to do it, he decided he'd have to drive the car into one of the clay pits after all, but not until he finished his smoke at least.
As it was and always had been; Billy never got a regular supply of pot, or any other narcotic for that matter, so it wasn’t long before he was unequivocally stoned out of his tree. In fact, the first track of the CD was still playing at full blast and the joint only half burned.
He let his head flop backward over the top of the seat as he again looked skyward. He stared at the blackness above and started grinning to himself, though he wasn’t sure why. And then he giggled like a schoolgirl because he remembered he’d got one over on Hal, or maybe it was because he could finally get high? Or because he’d just invented a second new word for today? “Hydro-Spliff”. Or maybe it was neither of those things. Either way, he couldn’t give a hoot in hell what the reason was.
As the minutes continued to tick by, the storm gained momentum, its intensity growing as the roiling black clouds scraped across the tree tops and the ever-nearing thunder began to vibrate the air. Billy, however, couldn’t hear or feel any of this over the thumping noise of the music, nor did he see the first raindrops as they slithered down the windshield.
Billy fisher was totally out of it.
- Log in to post comments