Short Ride to Nowhere Read Online Free PDF Page B

the eye of the storm, a couple of crackheads watching like wolves, and he thought again of the child who had died with Hale.  
    Jenks filled out the forms, mostly writing in “N/A” where he figured the information wasn’t anybody’s business, even for a free bed.   As if you had no right to privacy anymore because you were down on your luck.   He finished the paperwork quickly and returned to the front desk and handed the clipboard back to Mike.  
    “What’s N/A?” Mike asked.
    “You really don’t know what N/A is?” Jenks said.
    “No.”
    “‘Not applicable.’”
    “That’s how you responded to most of the questions.”
    “That’s right.”
    “I don’t think you can do that.”
    “What time does Angela get in tomorrow?”
    “What?”
    “What time does her shift start?”
    “Eight a.m.”
    Mike went through the paperwork and typed it into the system.   Then he showed Jenks to a room that was like a hospital ward, a mental ward, a prison, full of beds already filled with other people.   All of us stacked up like cordwood, like the dead.   Mike walked him all the way to the back corner and did a little ta-da wave of the hand, preeee-senting your bed.   Jenks laid down wearing all of his clothes, even his shoes.
    He kept one hand in his jacket pocket toying with the butterfly blade.   It took him an hour to realize he was almost hoping that someone who try to jump him, rob him, start some kind of shit.   The American dream was dead but the American nightmare was still on the roll.  
    A bloodletting was bound to be next.   It had happened to Hale.   Most of what happened to Hale had or would soon happen to Jenks.   So this is probably what would go down next.  
    And so he flipped the blade open and then snapped it shut, again and again.   He fell asleep to the sound of children whimpering.

6
     

    Hours had passed.   There was grit in his eyes.   He came awake in the dim light to somebody trying to go through his pocket.  
    Instead of nabbing his wallet they’d cut themselves on the knife and had let out a hiss of pain.  
    Jenks rolled aside fully aware.   He wasn’t fat and lazy with a head full of classic literature anymore.   He was a constantly vibrating wire.
    A bald guy with a bristly horseshoe 70s porn mustache, his forearms thick, his breath dank as methane at the bottom of a crypt, sucked on his index finger.   The point of the blade had barely touched him, but it was sharp enough to prick him.  
    Jenks’s hand shot out and he gripped Baldy’s wrist tightly.   That mustache, Jesus.   You had to have balls to walk around with that thing crawling across your face.   Baldy was an individualist.   Baldy was a trend-setter, not a trend-follower.
    As Baldy tried to yank free, Jenks shifted his body weight and levered himself to his feet in one fluid motion.   They stood facing each other in the dark, in the silence.   Jenks waited to see if the guy would pull a weapon, if he’d have to now draw the butterfly blade, if this was the moment, finally, when something like this went down.  
    But instead Baldy just pulled away again, but he couldn’t break Jenks’s grip.
    The mustache, it had its own life, its own history.   It had fucked a lot of women and presented itself in porno theaters across the country.   It had signed autographs.    Your daddy used to sit in theaters and play pocket pool to the mustache’s exploits.
    “There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done,” Baldy said.
    “You’re probably right, but you still shouldn’t steal from one of your own kind.”
    “You aren’t my kind.”
    “I’m you, brother.”
    That got nothing but the sound of scoffing, maybe from the man, maybe from the mustache.   Jenks looked at Baldy’s pockets, which were so overstuffed with items that shit was hanging out and falling to the floor.   Candy, coins, a few dollar bills, a toy car, a dog biscuit, some string.
    “So this is how you