They Know Me Everywhere



2.



cold cold in the feet a creeping cold cold creeping feeling in his feet sneaking up his leg cold

and wet a hard cold sleet like tiny arrows ringing and zinging



Billy Tate woke and opened his eyes. His hangover was a Newton's Cradle with 80 lb. lead

spheres smashing against his temples, his head comprising the central globe.



He was lying at a skewed angle upon his bed clad only his briefs and a thin flannel shirt with

2 buttons remaining. The window, smashed, had arranged itself into a blanket of shards

strewn across his bare legs. The thin white drapes billowed out toward him with the wind,

which gusted at intervals to rattle the aluminium sides of the trailer.



The sky was white iron and sleeting upon his lower extremity.



He felt or tried to feel with his mind backwards along the tether of the recent past leading back to last night beyond the whiteout blizzard of alcohol that had finally put him down.



ah shit Buddy what did you do?



Then catapaulting himself in a panic up off the bed unconsciously brushing with both his hands the window shards from his thighs and splintering his palms with glass needles in the process no matter he stepped then ran in his bare feet across the broken glass and into the front room where the TV played and blared incomprehensibly bright images and loud screaming and laughing and his things had been turned over and stomped on. furniture had been toppled: newspapers magazines and bottles and clothes littered the floor as did his greens and grays his shoes his hat his belt his badge his holster



oh fuck



what Buddy had done was break in and ransack and where the fuck is my gun?



blind panic now on his knees sifting through the wreck of his things. he had lost a lot this past year: lost Emily, lost the boys,



and now he was going to lose his mind



because what Buddy had done was break in and steal his service revolver while he, Billy, lay passed out blacked out drunk on the bed



oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck



a whole universe of new possibilities opened up now and not one of them didn't seem like black and killing disaster, not a one



he thought: this is gonna end like Cain and fucking Abel. I wonder: which one am I?