Chapter 2: your face was turned up into rain as you watched me
Daryl doesn't think of himself as a prophet.
He's wrong about a lot. He looks back at his life and he thinks it would be fair to say that he's been wrong about most things. He gets it into his head that something is a certain way, and then it turns around and it isn't that anymore. He wants to believe something, he almost does, and it bites him in the ass. He has faith in something, almost to the point of certainty, and it collapses. Sometimes it feels like he's being purposefully fucked with. He tries to just not do it anymore. Predict things. It's way better to take it moment by moment, see where he is when the next one is over.
But he was right about two things.
He wakes up feeling like shit.
And what happened the night before doesn't feel like it happened at all.
He stays where he is, sitting up on the ratty sofa in the shithole one bedroom apartment above the garage of the feed-&-seed, which his current asshole boss - name of Elmer, and boss is a polite term for someone shoving very little money at him under a table - has tossed at them for the purposes of sleeping in. He's pretty sure it was recently used only for the storage of things designed to attract the maximum amount of mustiness. He can hear Merle snoring deafeningly in the bedroom. Which means Merle hasn't choked on his own vomit in his sleep, which is good.
Daryl supposes.
His head is throbbing like someone is punching it from the inside, every single particle-wave of light is far too bright, his mouth tastes like the bottom of an ancient ashtray, he's sure he doesn't smell all that good...
And there was this girl.
There was the rain, and the road, and then there was the moon and puddles and before that a song, and there was this fucking girl.
He rakes a hand into his hair and stares at nothing, and just for the moment he forgets about his head and his mouth and everything else in favor of this thing that feels at once like a dream and like one of the most vividly real things that's ever happened to him.
Well.
He has to attempt to shower, he has to get dressed, he has to make sure Merle doesn't seem likely to die while he's gone, and he has to stumble downstairs and do whatever the fuck the guy wants him to do so he can get paid, so he and Merle have money for booze and Merle has money for drugs until they wander on down the road to wherever else they're going next, because so it has gone and so it goes and so it ever shall be, so help him God.
But there was this girl.
Fuck.
In the next fifteen minutes he's moderately showered, has grabbed a stale donut from a days-old box on the counter of what they kindly think of as a kitchenette, has checked one more time to make sure Merle is alive, and is heading downstairs to the store to do whatever the guy's cooked up for him to do today.
And he's not thinking about that fucking girl.
Morning - such as it is - is occupied by cleaning up the stockroom. The stockroom is filthy and full of mice, and Daryl wanders around with a broom and sort of looks at them scurrying around and doesn't do a whole lot about it. If it was allowed to get into this state, Elmer must not care terribly much about it in general, and probably won't notice if Daryl leaves it in mostly the state in which he found it. He clears away a lot of the loose seed, anyway. Sweeps up some straw. The mice...
He likes them. He has no real qualms about killing them, and he would do so if he cared enough, but he has nothing against mice. They're living their lives. They're doing what comes naturally. They are, he supposes - as far as it goes - free.
He drops into a crouch, broom in hand, and watches them for a while. They're sleek, well-fed, not afraid of him.
Somewhere overhead, Merle is probably stirring. Rousing himself to what passes for consciousness. Taking a little snort of crystal, maybe; he doesn't use it to the point at which Daryl would start becoming seriously alarmed, but he says it wakes him up, gets him moving, and he's not nice when he's had it - not that he's particularly nice anyway - and Daryl knows that things there are on a long, slow decline. They have been for years. Maybe for a lot of both their lives. They didn't start at a very high point, and since he picked Merle up from his last stint in prison and they started moving - in no particular direction, just sort of in ever-widening circles - things have been slipping lower and lower.
He's keeping himself together. Mostly. But Merle is slowly falling apart.
He knows this. He also knows there isn't much he can do about it. Merle does what Merle wants. Merle doesn't listen. Merle talks about being older, taking care of his baby brother, but Daryl is well aware that more and more of the time he's taking care of Merle.
Isn't he working now? Isn't he pulling in the money? Not dealing drugs, which increasingly Merle isn't equipped to do? Not B&E jobs, which Merle occasionally talks about doing - with great enthusiasm - but which both of them know he would probably fuck up? Get caught? Get hauled in? Have it discovered that he broke his parole almost two years ago, get locked up again and maybe not get out this time for fifteen years? Twenty?
Get old in there?
Daryl tells himself he doesn't want that. That he'd do anything to keep that from happening. To his big brother. To the only one who was ever there for him.
Most of the time he manages to believe it.
Most of the time he imagines that he's content to just keep moving, because it's safer that way, and anyway he was never good at settling anywhere, and who knows, maybe if they keep moving they'll get the fuck out of Georgia, of which he's frankly beginning to tire.
Once or twice he's tried to talk Merle into that. Cut west, check out Alabama, down into Florida, maybe... Fuck, north to the Carolinas, north might be a nice change. He doubts Merle would be into north, probably better luck dangling something like Miami in front of his nose, though Daryl thinks Miami sounds kind of like his half-articulated idea of Hell for a whole bunch of reasons. But nothing so far.
Just circles. Just... this.
At least he knows this.
He lights up a cigarette, smokes it down to the filter, crushes it out and leaves it for the mice to do whatever they want with it. He gets up and goes back into the main store, doesn't perceive Elmer anywhere around - his heavy, vaguely asthmatic breathing and his tendency to throw things onto and off of shelves when he wants to move them being somewhat hard to miss - so he heads for the door, swipes at a rack of dangling windchimes on his way past and sends them into a clanging mess of sound. He turns the OPEN sign to CLOSED and steps out onto the pavement.
It's raining again.
He stands for a moment, head tilted slightly up. The rain is heavy, though not as heavy as it had been the night before, and the sky is low and sullen gray, stubbornly holding back the sunlight. It's Sunday morning, and Main Street - in which he's standing - is closer to empty than not. People in church, people sleeping in. The street itself is like so many other main streets he's seen in so many other crappy little towns: a few stores - clothes and household goods and a Kroger further down with its shopping carts crowded haphazardly in the parking lot. A music store that boasts of its willingness to buy CDs and which looks like it's on its way out. Cafe. Non-chain coffee shop and its Starbucksian nemesis across the street. Bar. Other much shittier combination bar-liquor store way down at the far end, which contains the floor off which he scraped Merle the night before and which possesses the parking lot in which he narrowly missed taking a punch shortly after.
Two churches. First Methodist. First Baptist. Whatever.
He's already soaked. He doesn't want to go back inside. He doesn't want to go back up to the apartment. They don't own an umbrella. He starts to walk.
Just for a moment - a weird, crazy moment - he thinks about walking all the way out of town and continuing down the road and just... not stopping. Just leaving.
Or maybe there's someplace else he could go.
He stops across the street from the First Baptist Church and ducks under the awning of a pharmacy, palms water and his wet hair out of his eyes, checks to make sure that both his pack and his lighter are sufficiently dry, and lights up another cigarette. The wet in the air makes the smoke even thicker, and there's something about it that he likes. He exhales a long stream of it and leans back against the brick, feels his clothes hanging heavy on his body, and doesn't think about very much for a few minutes.
Service is over. People are streaming out through the white double doors, opening umbrellas, running for cars. He watches them, half focused - families, friends, good Christians, good people of the community. He blows smoke in their general direction.
And there's the girl.
She's crowded under an umbrella with a boy who might be her boyfriend or might be her older brother - brother, Daryl thinks, because the kid doesn't look at all hungover and there's something about the way she's pressed close to him that looks more like siblings than anything else - and she's laughing at something. She's also accompanied by a pretty, older dark-haired woman and a white-haired man who might be her grandfather but who, he guesses, is actually the potentially murderous Daddy.
He doesn't look murderous. Not especially.
And there's her. She's wearing a white summer dress with a slightly flared skirt, for which it'll be too cold in another few weeks, after early autumn rain gives way to chilly wind. Her hair is tied back except for the strands that hang around her face, already wet.
She looks happy.
He thinks - for a moment - about her in church, hymnal in hand, singing in that voice he got to hear the night before, and something in him twists into an ache he doesn't fully understand.
Families and friends and good Christians, and her.
She's heading toward the parking lot at the side of the church when she turns her head, looks across the street, and though she's at a good distance he feels her eyes lock onto his.
Her smile freezes for a second, but it doesn't fade.
This girl.
He taps ash onto the pavement and gives her a little nod. After a second or two she returns it, and it's slight because she probably doesn't want her family to see - he realizes suddenly - and she should be too far away for him to see it, but he does.
He wants...
Fuck, he doesn't know what he wants. To talk to her, maybe. Talking to her was... He has no idea when he last talked to someone like that. Just talking. She didn't want anything from him but a ride home, and she hadn't even really wanted that, initially, though she'd taken it when he offered. Talking to her about nothing at all had been nice, and talking to her about herself had been nice, and listening to her sing had been really nice.
And the kiss had been nice. That's yet another thing he genuinely doesn't know when he last had. And maybe never a kiss like that. Ever.
But mostly he just wants to talk to her.
He forgot, a long time ago, what lonely means. Mostly because you forget the words for things you feel all the time. You lose the ability to describe the basic elements of your own experience of existence.
But then you catch a glimpse of something else and suddenly articulation becomes possible.
So she nods, and just for the tiniest fraction of a second her smile actually widens.
Then she's gone.
He stands there for a while and smokes the cigarette down to the filter. Drops it into the gutter. Turns and heads back to the store, where Elmer will have deliveries of chicken feed to a couple of the more distant farms for him to make.
Not her farm.
But maybe soon.
Maybe that might be nice.