November

It snows hard in November, and every November, without fail.

The weather turns to an angry slumber, violent winds carrying softly sleeping snowflakes to the ground. Everything get’s white, and everyone either loves it or hates it. You don’t hear about someone not caring. You shovel and gripe, or just shut the hell up all together. That’s how things are around here. White.

It was ten o’clock, and the moon was full. When there’s a fresh coat of four inches of snow on the ground, it might as well be daylight. Everything just glows. So you walk with no smile, but you’re at rest anyway. You can’t be mad when it’s like this, I’ve heard some say. Its bullshit, really, because I’ve seen some folks so mad they’ve done worse things now than anyone around here’s ever done in the summertime, now matter how hot it gets. To me, these are bad times. These are the times when white turns red.

Cory Thompson died tonight, about seven minutes ago. He hadn’t done a damn thing wrong, but he was truly in the worst place at the worst time. He showed up at Davey’s Place, a frozen little icicle of a place down on Long Drive. No one goes there, because it’s so far from anywhere else around here. It’s the place you go to get drunk and forget you have a family and something to give a damn about it. I think that’s what Cory must have been doing, but who the hell really knows. No one will either, ‘cause he’s dead now.

He was drinking a shot of brandy, holding onto the tiny little glass for dear life. I was in the corner, minding my own. I don’t have many friends these days; they all moved onto to bigger and better places where the sun shows its face for at least six months out of the year.

His face was drawn and taught; he was in some sort of half drunken meditation, off in world even more desolate than the one he was residing in.

The bartender, Curt Grobin, was doing what he did best; washing glasses lazily, as if he used the polished mugs above the bar. He never made small talk with a soul, because it takes a soul to communicate with another.

This night, with the wind howling down from the far North, a new face arrived in the door. He was dressed all in black, carting a goose gun, with two barrels big enough to run a flag up.

“G’ evening, folks,” The man said. His voice was husky, and hickory smoked. He was gray and old, but to be honest my description could be wrong. He was blurry, to me… his features were all vague, ghostly, and indiscriminate. He was a nobody, but I knew he could be everybody.

Curt nodded, and eyed his gun coldly. “What’s the shotgun fer?” He continued polishing the novelty glass, not any faster or slower than he was before this guy came in.

“What does anybody use a shotgun for?” The guy had a good point.

“I don’t want that in here,” Curt said. “Case it, and put it back in your vehicle.”

“I don’t have a vehicle,” The man took a seat calmly at the bar beside Cory, and slid the shotgun up onto the table top. “And I don’t have any case, either.”

I waited, sipping my beer. My corner was dimly lit, and I pulled my cap down farther over my eyes. I had an uneasy feeling, and no gun. This guy had the upper hand on all of us.

Curt said, “I’m gonna have to ask you to leave then, sir.”

The man just shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think I will. But if you want to poor me a shot of Bourbon, I’d be mighty appreciative.”

Curt set his glass down, and wiped his hands with the rag. “No. You leave my bar right now.”

The man sighed, lifted up the twin barrels, and fired.

I jumped, coming a good foot off my chair. But what really got me was not the gunshot, but who the shot hit.

Instead of Curt being ripped apart by the pellets, poor Cory Thompson was sent spiraling across the bar floor, his middle crackling and sizzling from the load of 10 gauge pullets that had just entered and exited his body in a real hurry.

“Damn,” was all Curt said. “You’re hog mad.”

The man proceeded to smash old Curt upside the skull with the butt of the gun, and send him over his own feet to a heap out of my view, below the bar.

I watched the feller get up, and look at me with hazy gray eyes. They were cold, colder than the wind blowing through the willows outside.

“You better get yourself some free drinks while the bartender ain’t watching.” He didn’t smile, but I could catch his sarcasm at the next comment- “Besides, it’s on me.”

“You just shot Cory Thompson,” I said, my voice shaky and hoarse.

“Your right,” he snorted. “With that kind of witty observation, you must be stone sober. It’d do you some good to have a few with me, boy.”

I let him serve me some Captain, and then I asked him, “Why’d you shoot him?”

“It was his time,” he said. He downed a shot and slammed the little glass on the bartop.

“What do you mean?”

“I was passin’ through, and I saw him sitting there on that stool, miserable as hell and so I shot him.” He took another swig of the Captain and turned to me. “Do you think that’s a life worth living?”

I shrugged. “Whose to judge?”

He got up, and set the glass back down. “I am.”

That was a funny thing to say. It was downright hypocritical, really, like he thought he was some sort of god. “You’re to judge? How so?”

He put a five on the table and poured himself a shot of some dark whisky type drink that was lying half full on it’s side up against the rail of the bar. “Cause I’ve got a gun. He didn’t. So it was that simple. I pulled a trigger, he went down, and then he was dead. You know?” He looked at me, or I think he did, and smiled. Maybe he didn’t. I can’t really recall.

“I’m not sure I’m following. Just cause you shot him doesn’t mean it was okay.”

He nodded kind of, looked about him. “Yeah, I suppose you could say that but I’m not a God-fearing man so right or wrong have no real meaning to me.”

I nodded. “You don’t have a conscience?”

He chuckled. “What’s that? A voice inside your head? Do you do everything that voice tells you? Because mine went away. It just kind of realized I wasn’t listening to it anymore and it went off to badger some other poor man.”

I looked back at his shotgun. “You’re gonna get charged for that. Cory Thompson hadn’t done a thing.”

He shrugged. “Times are hard, I suppose. They’ll let me slip through the cracks and I’ll disappear just like I’ve done time and time before.”

“Who are you?” I said.

The man slung the ten gauge around his shoulder and downed the last bit of alcohol from his glass and made his way to the door. “I’m nobody,” he said. “I’m just nobody.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You’ve got to be somebody.”

“Nah,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that at all. As long as I don’t give a name, give a time, give anything, I can be a nothing just as much as air can.”

“But air is something,” I said. “It’s there, we just can’t see it.”

“Like a ghost,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Ghosts aren’t real. Air is.”

He opened up the door, and I felt a chill as the cold wind blew upon my shoulders. “Well,” he said. “If air is real, why can’t a ghost be?”

I thought about that for awhile, stared at his misshapen frame and cloudy face. “I don’t know,” I said.

He nodded. “Well, I’m kind of like that conversation right there. Those words. You saw me, but you won’t ever really know. Because once I walk out of here, that’s it. I’m nothing more and you will never hear a peep about me, never see so much as a glimpse of my hide again. I will be gone with whatever trace of me that was here.”

I gestured to Cory. “What about him?”

“What about him?” and he left, the door slamming behind him.

It snows hard in November, and every November, without fail.

The weather turns to an angry slumber, violent winds carrying softly sleeping snowflakes to the ground. Everything get’s white, and everyone either loves it or hates it. You don’t hear about someone not caring. You shovel and gripe, or just shut the hell up all together. That’s how things are around here. White.