Short Ride to Nowhere Read Online Free PDF Page A

lost.   You hadn’t given up but you may as well have.   You stared at your old man’s photos and felt the shame heat your belly until you tossed.   He’d been an ignorant mook but he’d taken care of his family.   You’d done your very best and still hadn’t come close.   The game was over.   No need to grind out the weekly paycheck or worry about the IRS or how much water and electricity you were wasting, or how you couldn’t afford kids, and how you were forced to try to explain to the wife, yet fucking again, not to go over the credit card limit, not to go over the debit card limit, not to write checks you couldn’t cover.   Compared to all that, there was no reason to get drunk anymore.   All that was left was filling the car’s gas tank and finding a park or beach to sleep in.  
    He sat in a bar and sipped his beer and tried to plan a next move but couldn’t find one.   He felt the same way as he had when he was sitting in his house holding the foreclosure papers in his hand.   This is it, the next step leads me to something completely new whether I’m ready for it or not.  
    After this, there’s no way back.
    He drew out the butterfly blade and toyed with it.   It really was just like the one his old man used to have.   Bobby had told Jenks to fuck off, but it wasn’t hard finding a weapons shop down one of the side streets leading from 42 nd Street.   Sure they’d cleaned up the area, but the seedier elements always had a way of seeping back in.   Nobody came to Times Square for Disney.
    In the window there’d been a nice array of blades.   Two-inchers, three-inchers, six-inchers, curved, double-edged, serrated, carbonized.   Samurai swords, throwing stars, even a goddamn Ali Baba-Hassan Chop scimitar.   No butterfly blades or switchblades out in front, but after the clerk showed up and learned Jenks was interested, he brought them out from the back.
    There seemed to be some kind of synchronicity happening.   Whatever happened from this point on, it was destined to occur.   He wasn’t fighting fate anymore but letting the current take him along.   It made him feel like he was a part of a greater whole, as if he wasn’t being ignored anymore by the machinery of the world.  
    He bought the knife and slipped it into his pocket with no idea what he might do with it afterwards.   Could he really kill someone?   Was that what Jenks had been waiting to do all this time?
    He sipped from his mug and played with the blade and thought about it some more.   He could’ve just as easily bought a gun off the street.   It probably would’ve been the smarter move to make.   Anyone could pull a trigger.   But stick a man with the point of a knife?   Ram it in there with blood spurting all over you?   The guy screaming, still reaching for your throat?   Jenks wondered if it was ever actually going to happen.  
    The beer went down smooth.   He had another and then another and then he quit counting.   The bartender kept checking him out, trying to see just how hammered Jenks was getting.   He’d give a long deep look in Jenks’ eyes and then pour another.   Jenks kept putting them away and never got drunk, not even when he started in on the whiskey.   His eyes were clear.   The bartender kept pouring.   Jenks kept drinking.   He didn’t have much anymore but he did have patience.   Plenty of that.   He had nothing else to do with the rest of his life.   He had all the time it would take.

5
     

    It took a day and a half before Jenks found Hale’s little cubby hole in Central Park.   He followed homeless men around to their little tent shanties hidden beside natural rock formations or part of old revolutionary war forts.   He asked them about Hale, described him, talked about books.   He was surprised that so many men wanted to discuss literature and art and women.   He no longer enjoyed conversation.   He looked around the park and saw himself living here the way Hale