IN MY TIME OF DYIN'
Chapter I: Walking Blues
A slamming car door interrupted the silence that had fallen on the desolate neighborhood. Even the stray cats and dogs had suspended their visceral calls in anticipation of the storm to come. Although the tension was palpable, a tiny figure made it's way up the concrete porch steps to stand in front of a rickety door. The paint had long since peeled away any color that had once graced it's exterior. The wind surged around the house, leading her to believe that the silence had all been in her head. The sounds of animals in the dumpster returned to her as she raised her hand to knock on the rotten wood that served as an entrance into hell itself.
Six weeks. It had been six weeks since anyone had heard from their brother. Going to the police had proved to be fruitless, as had pinning flyers up on lampposts and placing them on car windows. No amount of prayer had brought him home. It was as if he had dissolved into the earth. A shudder ran through her. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Although the police had been reassuring, their attitudes reflected the truth. They were more than likely searching for a body. Their search had been delayed once, only briefly, after their father had died. Knowing that their brother hadn't heard about the accident goaded them into looking harder. Scouring the places that they had been too afraid to search at first.
Her brother was a junky. Recovering. There is no such thing as a recovered junky. That's what he had told her. You always struggled with the thirst, the need. Every day was an uphill battle to hold onto sobriety. The death of their mother had tested them all. Each one had failed in their own way. Shawn began using, their father started drinking again, Beth had tried to kill herself and Maggie had spiraled into an oblivion of sex and disillusion. Apparently everyone in the Greene family was prone to self destruction. Now they were all recovering in their own way. Except their father. Daddy was dead and Shawn didn't know.
The darkness moved fast. Although it was still the afternoon, the shifting clouds had blotted out the sun. She glanced over at the car one more time, but Maggie was looking down at her phone and did not meet her gaze. They had been going into these places together since they figured there would be safety in numbers. At this point, they had been to so many and all with very little incident, that it now seemed redundant for them to go in together. She rapped on the door just before the first clap of thunder rang out. She knocked one more time for good measure. When nobody answered, she turned the doorknob. As she suspected, it gave easily. She swung the door open and stepped timidly inside.
The smell. She would never forget the way this place smelled. Vomit, urine, blood and something else too vile to imagine. She was convinced that it could raise the dead. She was rooted in the doorway, surveying the filth around her. She picked the collar of her cotton shirt up and placed it over her nose. Wading carefully through the refuse of broken pipes, needles and food garbage, she quietly passed a couple sleeping on a dirty worn out sofa. It's pink petals and aqua swirls had seen their peak in the 70's. She could already tell that neither body belonged to her brother. To her left, she noticed scribbles on the wall. Someone had drawn an eye, over and over again. She followed the path of the eye and it led her from one room and into another. It was like an ominous, all knowing, guide in the darkness. Through a partially busted window, she could hear and see that the rain had started to bare down on the parched, grassless front yard. Strikes of lightening illuminated the room, making it seem even more eerie and menacing.
She passed quietly through the living room and into what seemed to be a place for a small dining room. There was no table, only blankets and a few bodies strewn across the floor. Nothing but the bugs were moving. She could hear the flies droning nearby. She walked quietly to each blanketed body and gently shifted them until she knew definitively that none of these people were her brother. As she was walking away, she heard a quiet moan. Stopping suddenly, she felt a light pressure on her ankle. Squealing, she jumped clear of the grasping fingers.
A large man was lying curled up on the floor. His dirty wife-beater was stained with blood and snot. She quickly surveyed his body. His eyes were black and swollen. They were crusted and scabbed over from lack of care and activity. She dropped to her knees next to his arm and placed her fingers gingerly against his neck, both searching and praying for a pulse. It was faint, but steady. Pulling out her phone, she quickly text her sister and slid the phone back into her pocket. She leaned over to shake him gently. Her ministrations were ignored. He wasn't lucid enough to respond.
She could feel her heart beating wildly in her chest. Vulnerable and exposed. She was not confident that the man's attacker was not still in the house. The guy had been seriously worked over and more than likely just left on the floor to die, but she could not be entirely sure. She needed to finish searching the house over for Shawn and then get out. She shoved herself up and onto her feet. With one more glance downward, she willed her legs to propel her forward and guide her safely through the rest of purgatory. The air outside had cooled the house substantially, but the heat inside was still stifling. Beth could not guess how long the place had been without circulating air. She could feel the sweat dripping into her eyes as she moved silently through the kitchen and towards the back rooms. She found more sleeping bodies, but still no Shawn.
In the back room, she could hear noises behind the door. It didn't have a knob so when she reached out her hand, the force caused the door to open. She immediately regretted her carelessness. Her eyes landed on a woman, her greasy brown hair ratted and slick, was just visible between a man's legs. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his eyes on the ceiling. The subtle bobbing motion of her head caused Beth's cheeks to flush red with embarrassment. Before she could turn around and make her escape, the man locked eyes with her and gave her a small wink. He theatrically gripped the woman's hair in his hands and brought her head down a little harder. She could still hear soft moaning as she ran back to the body by the kitchen.
Maggie was already standing over him with a skeptical look on her face.
"God Beth, he smells dead." Maggie pulled her shirt over her nose in a direct mirror to her sister's earlier actions.
"He's not, I checked for a pulse." Beth dipped back down on her knees beside the body and gently shook him once more. Her movements elicited a slight groan, but nothing more.
"We need to call the police, let them get him to a hospital." Maggie started to pull her phone out of her back pocket.
"No! we can't. Look at him. They are just gonna let the nurses clean him up and then they will take him to jail. It isn't going to do him any good being locked up and besides. What if he knows something about Shawn. If we basically send him to jail, he wont trust us enough to talk. Let's take him home. Clean him up."
"He's not a stray." Her sister countered, giving her a look of both pity and annoyance. "We can't just take him home. He's a stranger and we definitely aren't equipped to deal with his withdrawals. There is no telling what he's on or what else he needs to be treated for. It just isn't gonna work."
Beth stood up and stubbornly wrapped her arms around her torso, a defense mechanism learned in her younger years. "We're taking him. Daddy would have." She set her eyes squarely on her sister.
Maggie shook her head and Beth knew that she had won this one. Together they maneuvered the man into a position where they could both sling one of his heavy arms across their shoulders. The man was a slab of muscle and they soon realized that there was no way they were going to be able to stand him up and carry him out. Instead, they each grabbed a large boot clad foot and began to drag him. It was slow going because they also had to shift garbage out of their path. The black scribbled eye watched them drag their unconscious load through each room. Tracking their progress. The rain outside had picked up and the wind was howling miserably. It was as if the house knew that they were trying to steal back a soul from it's devilish clutches. The thunder cracked loudly. After getting the man into the living room by the door, Maggie quickly ran to the car. She drove it up over the curb and brought it as close to the raggedly covered porch as she possibly could.
Beth had managed to find a blanket that nobody was using. It was stiff and had dried into a position that looked something like a japanese fan. By the time her sister had parked the car, Beth had managed to work it into something that resembled a blanket. She figured it could save the man's skin from being scraped up on the concrete porch steps. She tossed it out and her sister resumed her position. They both grunted as they drug the heavy body out onto the porch and slid it across the dirty blanket. Together they managed to put the man in the back seat, leaving the nasty, crusted blanket behind for the denizens of the crack den to reclaim.