Disclaimer-
S.E. Hinton owns The Outsiders. Charles Bukowski owns Love is a Dog from Hell.
Author's Note-
So, I'm trying to write again. This is another Tim Shepard centric-fic, second person point-of-view, which ties into a previous one-shot I've already written, Blue Eyed Boy, solely centering on Tim's reflection about Dallas' death. Scenes from Remember Me (a one-shot centering around the relationship between Sylvia and Dallas) and Inhale (centering around Tim's life before the events of The Outsiders) may also be noted at, but will be vague in context.
It's not necessarily required to have previously read Blue Eyed Boy or Inhale to understand The Festering of a Wound, but I encourage it only because you'll get a better insight into why Tim acts, thinks, and feels the way he does. Other than that, I hope you enjoy, and constructive criticism is very helpful, if you have any.
"one day Manuel returned to the place, and
she was gone -
no argument, no note, just
gone, all her clothes
all her stuff, and
Manuel sat by the window and looked out
and didn't make his job
the next day or the
next day or
the day after, he
didn't phone in, he
lost his job, got a
ticket for parking, smoked
four hundred and sixty cigarettes, got
picked up for common drunk, bailed
out, went
to court and pleaded
guilty.
when the rent was up he
moved from Beacon street, he
left the cat and went to live with
his brother and
they'd get drunk
every night
and talk about how
terrible
life was.
Manuel never again smoked
long slim cigars
because Shirley always said
how
handsome he looked
when he did."
- Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
September 1966-
Tim.
He exhales your name and it sounds like all the color is dropping out of the world and fading into sepia tone. There is yellow acid on your shirt and green speckles of sea glass on black asphalt, red stars in your eyes and the mint candy you're sucking on is sour, like you've just chewed through a lit cigarette and decided to toss some lighter fluid down to keep everything inside of you from coming back up and exposing itself—the rotting organs and black blood and mauled bones no one is ever allowed to see.
You hate being drunk, but right now, at this moment, you'd do anything under the sun to get a fucking drop of whiskey down your throat. The ground under your feet is shaking so hard—or maybe it's just you—that you have to sit down.
Knees pulled to your chest, head between your legs, eyes shut tight—that's the only thing they ever taught you at Santa Maria Del Popolo, God forbid anyone decided to bomb the church next door and take your sorry-ass private school with it.
Static rips through the dry night air from the car's windows and you swallow down the bile burning the backs of your teeth to enamel. He says your name again—Tim—although this time it doesn't sound so distorted and foreign but louder, so deafening you want to pull a Vincent van Gogh and cut off your own ears just to make it stop, make time and the world and breathing stop.
You open your eyes and can't see anything but blurred headlights and a hand, reaching out for yours.
The only moments you allow yourself to remember are cut-up fragments of a person you used to be, wanted to be, could never be.
Gray snow dark enough it could be considered black; low laughter and worthless sneers and scuffed boot marks on hardwood bar floors and the bittersweet smell of cigar smoke lingering on leather jackets; brown liquid, the color of piss, sitting in a bottle shoved away in your closet waiting for you when you got home; chapped lips, rubyred and frozen around your cock, waiting for your hands to tilt her head this way or that, because she wasn't your girlfriend and you weren't her father.
They are fleeting, worthless memories, but they keep you from thinking—at least, for a little while—that Dallas Winston was dead long before he hit the ground. Until the knots in your stomach retie themselves around each other and the restless twitching in your limbs start again because you want to hit something, hit anything, and you're choking on your own spit because you're trying to forget how to forget.
You curl your fingers into your palms, and when you open your hands you're not surprised to see somebody else's blood pooling from your fingernails.
The alarm clock on the bedside table screams in fat red letters that it's sometime past two in the morning and not yet near five o'clock in the afternoon. Too delirious to have finished crawling towards the bed, you lay down on the floor and stared up at the ceiling for what felt like hours, sweating everything and your balls off.
According to Dr. Curly Shithead Shepard, you have a fever. One-hundred-and-three-point-one degrees Fahrenheit. You're too poor to afford any insurance, let alone go to the hospital and get admitted. What little money you do earn from a part-time job working with Darrel Curtis at some construction company has barely been able to keep the bills from overflowing the mailbox, and it's only a matter of time before the house gets foreclosed on and Angela realizes that you're not as smart as your high school diploma says you are.
The bedroom door creaks open and you see a shadow press itself into the walls. Black on white, your bastard of a brother is your best half and your worst self all at once and you can't say you're proud to be related to him, but right now he's the only reason why you're still here, breathing, alive, and you fucking hate him.
He'd found you just when you'd finally succeeded in losing yourself; the least he can do is leave you the hell alone, although no matter how much you will yourself to believe it, you know he won't.
"How are you feeling?" He asks, his voice an octave higher than it should be, and once again you're thankful for all this darkness, this empty space around you, ready to swallow you whole if you'll let it—because if he were to turn on the light and find you on the ground with your face all twisted up-like, he'd probably shit his pants and then some.
So you roll onto your side, wooden splinters digging into your arm, and say the first word you can think of, the letters rolling off your tongue and strangling into something that sounds like fine but sounds more like gin, or thyme.
You've always been a loner, and because of this one of the acquired social skills of so-called small talk is nonexistent. You don't like talking in general, so conversations with other people are usually very awkward and straight-laced, long lapses of silence usually easier to listen to than someone else's voice.
A couple of minutes pass by, and its quiet enough that you have to hold your own breath just to make sure he's still breathing. From the odd angle you're lying at, if you lift your head up you'll be able to see the tips of his sneakers, faded and worn-out from when they used to be yours.
Curly sighs, all the polluted air rushing into his mouth, and you imagine him running a hand down his face, exasperated because, oh dear Lord, "you haven't eaten in days, Tim", and you wonder when you started to go missing.
Your voice comes out muffled, face pressed into the floorboards. "What day is it?"
"Monday."
That means it's been two days since you've had a cigarette, two days since you've had a shot of whiskey, two days since Dallas stopped breathing, the fucker…
Shit.
You swallow in the dust on the floor and cough hard enough a wincing pain shoots down your ribcage.
The rumble was Saturday night, but there are still open cuts on your lip waiting to be covered, palms scarred with gravelly bits of dirt and rocks; bruises and blood smeared on your face from your broken nose that you haven't set back. Your arms and legs are deadweights, and you feel as if you have been tossed into the ocean and are slowly sinking, farther and farther down until you finally succumb to the blackness of the tide rolling over your head.
Curly's voice, however, pulls you back. "Do you remember what happened?"
"What the fuck kinda game are we playin', kid, Twenty Questions?" You don't mean to sneer at him, and your face burns, though you're not ashamed.
That night you'd gone to Buck's as usual to get drunk, celebratory-like, and, about an hour later, shitfaced and hollow, refused a ride from Steve Randle and tried to find your way home using the streetlights as your guide. You'd given up about a couple of blocks from your neighborhood, and Curly had found you lying in the gutter, passed out and covered in your own vomit.
You don't remember much of what happened after that. Only that, sometime between the rumble ending and your long walk home, the Cade kid had died in his hospital bed and Dallas had been shot down in a parking lot because he'd done what you could never do: torn off his skin and exposed himself underneath all those swirling lights—the deepest, darkest parts—words wrapped around his spine and cigarettes stuffed between his arteries.
Suicide—in a sick, twisted kind of way, you think it's almost a funny word, except you're the one that got away, survived. Is left to believe it when there is nothing really left to believe, after all.
Tuesday is marked by a period of blackness and sleep.
The day of the funeral—Wednesday—is colorless, a watery sunrise and the taste of vomit in your mouth as you stand in the shower, trying to scrub off the imaginary feeling of everyone else's' hands on your skin so hard that, afterwards, blood is swirling down the drain and the tips of your fingers are raw, nails bitten down to the quick.
You've always hated funerals—the last one you went to was for your mother's estranged brother, Allen—the person you'd been named after, who lived off cigars and Italian food and smelled like moth balls whenever he rarely visited. You were thirteen; he was fifty-three.
Time changes people. It's a common fact, whether you like it or not, and as each minute passes with you standing in front of the mirror forcing a comb through your damp hair, the steam dripping off the glass, you wonder when you started to look less like yourself and more like a stranger, one you didn't recognize at all.
"Well, aren't you a sight for sour eyes."
She turns on you almost instantly, eyes half-closed and bloodshot, flecks of mascara dancing on her too-prominent cheekbones that poke out from under her pale skin. Her hair is two shades darker than it was the last time you saw her, posture slouched, heels sunk into the mud.
She tilts up her chin to look at you, voice quivering when she says, "You look nice," and you feel ashamed that you haven't seen her since God knows when. You're painfully reminded that she would've been a beautiful woman if she wasn't such a whore. How could you have forgotten that?
"Thanks." Your response is dry and ungrateful.
For once, however, you're glad you're not the only one precariously avoiding eye-contact with the crowd surrounding the two caskets ready to be swallowed up by the ground. You can't focus on anything—your nerves are twisted and torn, fingers tapping against your thigh—one two three, one two three—the faces all streaming into one person, their head bowed, white shirts and black slacks and shined shoes.
You take another step forwards, closing the distance between you and her. The Father's words are lost in the way Sylvia sounds when she croaks your name—Tim—and the sharp, distant pain of how her fingernails feel digging into your arm, trying to hold onto the life you both couldn't save. It is closure; at least for a little while, but like everything else, will never be enough.