Heidi searching... and finding

I didn’t even know I still had it. Well, kind of did, but kind of forgot too.

“What is this?” She asked. “It’s not a guitar,”

“It’s a computer input device,” I said.

Foot tapping. The way they do. She sputtered.I

“You make me run your ‘Command Center’ like some clerk when you are sitting on top of Next Gen computer technology the whole time? Am I right?”

I told her I might have misled her. Because I wanted her to be alive five or ten years from now.

That’s when she lost it. I can’t remember everything she said. Here’s an approximation:

“You don’t get it, do you? I’m here because there’s something about you that gives me hope. I walk your dogs, I cook your meals, I try to keep you from sinking into the blues I know you stew in. But it’s four years now I’ve just been here, and you tell me nothing. Nothing. Any other man would have jumped me by now, but not you. I gave up on that a long time ago. Why am I still here, looking after an old cripple who never tells me anything? Did you even look at the painting I left for you?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was accurate.”

“So you really are the ‘Snakeman’ in the manuscript?”

“Yes.”

“How many have you killed?”

“I don’t know. Lots, I guess.”

She sat down. My living room inside the station. The back seat of a Chrysler Imperial. Nearly pristine. Took me quite a while to find it. She crossed her legs, like she was making some kind of  point, and started rambling again. Her voice was softer, reaching, at first.

“Johnny Dodge. They do talk about you in the pines, you know. I used to think they were all liquored up morons telling stories they’d told each other so often it was all just drunk garbage. ‘Cause I saw you, kind and smart and decent. Was I wrong the whole time? Am I just another dumb bitch wasting her life on a bad boy she can’t see for who he is? What the fuck did you do all those years ago? And don’t tell me I’ve never seen how fast and fierce you can be.”

She laughed. “I told myself it was because you were a writer, a poet even. But I’ve never seen you write anything. The other answer is that you’re just a fucking killer.”

I don’t know. How do you answer a teenager, well, young woman now, after a few years of taking things for granted? I hadn’t been paying attention. My fault, obviously.

So I caved. “What do you want to know?” And I told her everything. Almost everything.

“Alice Hate?” She asked at length. “Why I’ll never be in the picture?”

“Yes. Of course. You’re too young to understand.”

She snorted like the young filly she was. “Killer I can believe. Poet is harder. Show me a poem you wrote for Alice.”

I showed her what I wrote the night before. I couldn’t read it out loud.

“Some day is life
I break rules
You die anyway
And I won’t let you
I still know some
Thing I have
Lost forever
And dying is forever
Living now for you
My Alice”

She drew herself up. Stood up. Said, “That’s not the writer from Punk City they described to me. I could compete with that. I can’t compete with Alice Hate. And then she flounced away.