In progress manuscript for evaluation only. Please do not distribute without the author's permission

When we finished our soup and handfuls of fresh bread, he and I washed the dishes. No electric dishwasher in the place. Clothesline in back next to where my four friends kneeled and stood smoking their cigarettes.

As we finished, though, it became clear to both him and me that something would have to be done. And that something, I had decided, couldn’t be something that would put him or his property in harm’s way.

“Could you drive me a couple of miles away and drop me off next to the road?” I asked him.

“You sure?” he said.

“I’m sure.”

“What about the gun?”

“Keep the gun. I have a gun and point it at them the whole game changes. They have guns it’s four on one and who knows what’ll happen? I don't have a gun, it may stay civil. As long as they’re capable of standing upright.”

He looked me over again. Apparently uncertain that what I’d said was true or not. Then he wadded his shoulders together in a ‘guess you know what you’re doing’ gesture and off we went to his pickup and out of what passed for a garage.

We backed down his little dirt road back to the highway, and he turned toward Woodbridge and we drove awhile. Maybe a bit further than a couple of miles. Then he thanked me. Looked in my eyes to make sure I was sure, then let me off, made a U, and returned home.

I waited for about five minutes before they showed. Drove something not unlike by old benefactor had. Probably stolen. Parked about a hundred feet down the road from me. The slowly exited the car, and then stood there like monoliths, waiting for me to do something. Strangest activity I’d seen so far on my little vacation from North Dakota. Wanted to be seen. But no way were they going to approach me.

Let’s get this over with, I thought. I relaxed myself as before and proceeded to walk directly toward them. For the first time in our little relationship, to a one they looked confused. This apparently was not in their assignment book. What to do? But they stood their ground and waited for me to arrive.

I figured the closer I got the better chance I had. So I kept coming. They kept holding their ground.

When I got to about fifteen feet separation, I stopped and said, “How you guys doing?” A simple question. No simple answer apparently. No one said anything.

“Any of you guys can talk?”

Finally, the one to my far right said, “Yes.” That’s it. Nothing more need be said.

“So, you’re following me. Can I ask why?”

The one on the right turned and looked at the other three. Then back at me.

“You can ask,” he said. No acrimony in his voice. Maybe a little confusion. Not the sharpest tack in the corkboard.

“I want you to stop,” I said calmly.

“What?” the guy on my right said. Maybe the only one who could actually talk.

“I want you guys to stop following me. That means get in you old car here, turn around, and go back to wherever you came from. Leave me alone.”

This clearly caught him by surprise. Not in his lexicon of possible situations. He looked at his colleagues. Nothing there.

“No,” he finally said.

“As in no you won’t get the car and go back to wherever you came from, or no you won’t leave me alone, or no to something else?”

“Huh?” he said. All at once capturing the totality of his grasp of the situation. I had all the information I needed. I stepped inside the reach of the guy to the left of the guy who’d been talking, brought both my elbows directly up into his ribcage, and watched the look on his face as he fell back against the car and dropped to the ground. I thought I heard a couple of ribs break as I’d hit him.

Just as the talker, the one to my right put two and one together, I rammed my right shoe down on his right knee and it collapsed. And he joined his partner in crime on the ground.

I turned to the other two guys, but they were no longer there. Both had turned and ran across the street getting the hell away from me. Had I known it would be this easy, I’d have stayed in New Haven. Who the hell hired these guys? My four little stooges had been about as much trouble as helping the old man pull his tractor out of the mud. Not that much, actually.

Looking down at the minor damage I done to two of them, I bent down, reached into the talker’s suit to see if he was carrying. Damn. He was. He could have gunned me down at anytime during our little squabble. Why hadn’t he? No matter. I took whatever gun it was off him, and put it in my belt for possible further use. Hoped not, but who knew?

With that out of the way, I decided I might as well make it harder on them to try to follow me again, so I walked around the car, got in the front seat, and, with the key still in the ignition, took off still going away from the city. Woodbridge my first destination. Maybe I’d rob a bank just for the fun of it.

27.
My first job was to ditch the car. They’d probably stolen it and I couldn’t risk getting pulled over by a cop. While it would only add a stolen car and a gun to my record, I’d rather not get caught so easily as that.

I hadn’t worn gloves so I tried to touch as few things as possible so I could wipe what evidence I’d already given them off before abandoning the old crate. Actually hated to give her up. She ran well, at least a lot better than she looked, but I imagined the owner looking forward to getting her back in much the same condition as he’d seen her last.

Woodbridge gave me the first opportunity. A quaint village of New England charm slightly off the beaten path. And a number of dirt roads running perpendicular from the main drag. So I simply chose one at random, drove down it a mile or two, wiped the car down, and left it alongside the road. Seemed fairly safe. To be sure, however, I locked the keys inside.

About four in the afternoon by now, with the sky beginning to cloud up. I needed a place to stay and at least a small meal. Only the latter of which I could afford at this point. That is, unless the fine city of Woodbridge had a really cheap motel. Maybe I could sell the gun there. Add some spice to the village life.

The first motel I passed claimed fifty-dollar rooms for rent for the night. Appealing given the probably snow on its way. But it would leave me only a few bucks to eat on and then I’d be broke. Stealing guns was about as far as I would go at this point. Couldn’t see myself holding up a grocery store, no matter how bad things got.

At the end of a dead-end road I came across another shack of a place advertising rooms for let at thirty dollars a night, which included a full dinner and continental breakfast. I took one look at the sky and decided I’d better take advantage. No telling where they’d find me otherwise. A frozen Popsicle standing up against the outside wall of a diner in town? Not for me.

I went inside and asked if there had a room at the inn. The man behind the counter looked perplexed that I would ask. Then I noticed why. Of the twenty or so boxes behind him, all had keys in them. Had my pick. I picked a number at random, gave him the money for one night at random, and asked him when dinner would be ready. That caught him up short. Apparently not only was the place empty, but it had been so for some time.

“Eight o’clock sharp,” he said.

I nodded and let him get back to whatever he would get back to. Found my room, s single shack out back looking like the rest. An outhouse among outhouses. I’d brought nothing but my newly stolen gun and found the room had precious little space even for that. A bed, a small bathroom without a shower, and several hundred bug guests who ran for the holes in the walls when I turned on the light. Quite a sight. I guess I’d finally hit the low point. But it did have the bed I needed so much by this point. And I laid down on it. Or rather in it. The mattress had lost most of its giveback. But it was soft. And with a couple hours left before dinner I fell directly to sleep.

Standing up took a few seconds because for some reason, while not particularly adverse to killing insects, these little guys, small cockroaches I presumed that seemed so delicate and shy, I hated to diminish their population. So I waited until they’d found their various hiding places before setting my feet on the floor.

Jesus, this felt something like being in the alley that night while Cassie number two was getting her fix of crystal meth. A low point in my life. Though not so much this time since I’d had that to look back on. Getting to be a habit of sorts.

I headed for the door, into the storm, and on to the main headquarters for what I hoped would be something edible. The night was bitterly cold and the snow was coming down in buckets. Or was that only rain that did that? What did snow come down in? I tried to think of something clever, but couldn’t. Not the way I felt.

When I reached the main house, where the proprietor evidently lived, I entered the front door as I had earlier. Not knowing the exact time, I had no idea what to expect. But whatever, I didn’t expect what I found. The man who I’d barely spoken to just a few hours past had not fixed dinner. Nor was he going to fix any more dinners soon. At least not in this world.

He was lying on the counter face down with the back of his skull bashed in to the point that I barely could recognize its head-like shape. Given that, I didn’t bother to test his pulse or other signs of life. Someone had done a thorough job in ensuring that he wasn’t going to make me dinner. But without touching me. He would have certainly given them my name. Why not? Unless there was a law against such things and he’d rather give his life than break that law. Were New Englanders that stubborn? Certainly most North Dakotans were not.

I looked around for signs that they might have left as to their identity. Or whether they’d left another sign of my identity as the culprit. Add another murder to my sheet of offenses. Off course, I long since forgotten what I’d touched here when I’d registered. And, since I’d hadn’t been clever enough to fake my name, there’d be that. They would need to worry about it. I’d left plenty of evidence on my own.

Chicken soup had not been a very big lunch, and, for a second, I tested the idea of carrying my dead proprietor back to his kitchen and making myself the dinner I had been promised with my rent money. But that seemed particularly heartless. I did, however, relieve the man of my rent money itself. He’d no longer be needing it. And, of course, I might as well leave my fingerprints on the register as well. I knew I’d be charged with this crime as well. No need to be subtle about it.

But where to go? The storm had turned it up a notch further, and a check out the door made it clear, I wasn’t about to go far in the newly acquired inches of snow piling up everywhere. It was clear, however, it wouldn’t be a good idea to hide here with the dead body. So I turned off the lights. Maybe delay the discovery of the body for a while, closed the door carefully, and headed down the driveway for the empty main highway in hopes of finding some kind of shelter for the night. And the food I now desperately needed. If not to make the rumbling in my stomach stop, to keep by body temperature above the freezing point.

The road, when I got there, was knee deep in newly fallen snow. Zero traffic and no plows or salt trucks making their rounds. Visibility had fallen to about ten feet or so. Even standing under a street lamp as I was now. It was beautiful and deadly at the same time. Beautiful as the snow swirled and changed directions with the varying wind. In the light of the lamp it often drove horizontal. Deadly as I soon became aware that I couldn’t last very long standing out here. And I wasn’t sure which direction to go given my lack of ability to see very far in any direction.

I turned left, just to keep my body parts moving. And because I thought I could see another light in the far distance. A hell of night. I thought back to seeing the motel manager dead in his office. Something that a couple of years ago might have been an occasion to feint or toss my cookies. Now it seemed no more than one more glitch in an otherwise nightmare of similar events so commonplace that it didn’t merit given as second thought to. Although I just had.

The light grew slowly bigger and I realized I’d struck gold. An all-night diner. Lights full on. And a few customers in seats with their cars and trucks in the parking area covered in deep snow. They’d not be going anyplace soon. I could at least get a good meal. And maybe, just maybe, find a place I could spend the night. Lots of coffee and I’d have no trouble not sleeping.

I made my way there and pulled the door open with some difficulty. The wind closed it behind me and I found myself in the little inner sanctums that such places have in the northern states. A two-door system to allow customers to brush off the detritus of outside living and enter the establishment clean and refreshed. And so I did.

One of the two waitresses showed me to a booth near the window and I asked her the question of the night. With a lie in there to boot.

“My car broke down a ways out of town. I wonder if I could hole up here for a while until they clear the road? I’ll buy the most expensive dinner in the house.”

“Sure. That’s what everybody else is doing. That’s even what I’m doing. That’s all anyone can do. And you don’t have to buy the most expensive dinner in the place either. Although it wouldn’t actually cost that much. We serve pretty cheap dinners here. All of them. But by cheap I don't mean they’re bad. Actually they’re very good.” And she kept on like that for as long as I could take it. As she talked I picked up the menu and pointed to what I wanted. She talked while she wrote the order down and finally left.

I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Probably a caffeine bender. I settled back in the leather-plastic seat and pulled my coat down around my waist and lay back. Maybe things were looking up.

Looking around, I noticed that most of the other people looked like truckers caught in the storm. Big heavy guys talking to one another like they all knew one another. Comparing stories of previous storms they’d endured.

Didn’t see any cops around. They’d most likely be tending the fire at headquarters, as held captive by the storm as the rest of us were. I reached over to the next table and grabbed a renegade newspaper left there by another customer. Hoping upon hope I wouldn’t find my picture on the front pate. I didn’t find it there or anywhere for that matter. My quick perusal didn’t reveal even a short column about the New York murder spree or my supposed involvement.

Relieved that my luck may have changed, I put my elbows on the table, the very ones I used earlier that day to disable one of the Buster Keaton-type characters who’d been following me, and let my head fall into the palms of my hands.

I daydreamed of sitting on the couch with Cassie number one beside me, watching the fire sparkle and pop in front of us, drinking a small glass of straight Beam, with no one trying to capture, follow, maim, or murder me. It was a nice daydream. I must have fallen asleep for the waitress, the one and same one that wouldn’t stop talking, tapped me gently in order to serve me my steak and eggs over easy with a large pot of coffee on the side and a generous portion of lemon pie as well. Maybe it wasn’t Cassie by my side or a fireplace, but suddenly life felt pretty good about then.

I dived into my generous meal with gusto as they say, and stopped thinking then about much of anything.

28.
I did watch the snow come down for a while. The wind had finally stopped blowing so hard and the always-different flakes just drifted down into the great dunes that lay below them. No letup in sight. Hour after hour. At one point I tried to make sense of what had happened to me since that fateful day when two men tried to attack me outside my apartment so long ago. But I quickly realized that except for a few threads, there were not many lines to tie together. Finally I decided to think about what I did for a living besides teach. Artificial life.

From von Neumann’s extraordinary concepts of machines begetting machines to John Conway’s wonderfully simple software solitaire game of life, of which many real-time sites on the Internet made it so popular. Of Chris Langton’s now famous but then controversial conferences at Los Alamos, ironic that, and later at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Of John Holland’s extraordinary work with genetic algorithms and complex adaptive systems. Karl Simms and his evolved creatures, now, of all things, a screen savor. And Aristad Lindenmayer’s L-systems, a simple algorithm that produces a perfect model of plant life evolution. All these biologists, computer scientists, and so on, plodding ever onward, stretching the boundaries of both our definition of life and, though few believed it, attempting to create what I believe I finally had, true life inside a computer. Aside from cosmology, the most exciting field in modern science. Waiting for new discoveries that seemed to occur every day.

I kept slamming down the coffee that the all-night talkathon waitress kept bringing me. Across the room I noticed that many of the truckers had called it a night. Sleeping in their chairs as they probably had so often done in their truck seats parked alongside a highway somewhere. I would have done the same had it not been for the aforementioned amounts of caffeine I’d injected into my body.

Finally, a second waitress, obviously bored with the lack of anything but the snoring and the white stuff softly dropping outside the window decided to join me.

“Quite a night,” she said.

“Beautiful isn’t it?”

“Jesus. You call this beautiful. I call it a pain in the ass. Can’t go anywhere. Holed up in this all nighter with no one to talk to. What a bore.”

“There’s that,” I said.

“Where you from?” she asked.

“Midwest,” I answered, trying not to be specific. “Small college town,” I added before she had a chance to follow up.

“What are you? A Professor or something.”

“I’m a Professor or something.”

“You teach then.”

“I do.”

“Small college in the Midwest, I’m sure you’ve never heard of it.”

“Try me. You never know.”

I gave it some thought and then borrowed a college and town from a friend of mine. A place I’d been to and could actually describe if need be. “De Pauw. It’s in Greencastle. In Indiana.”

“See. Now I have heard of that school.”

“You have?”

“Sure, but I thought it was in Chicago. Small Catholic school isn’t it?”

“No. That one’s called DePaul. Mine’s called De Pauw.” And I spelled if for her.

She knotted up her forehead. Too much to get her mind around.

“You like it there?”

“The school’s great. The town’s a lot like this one is. Small, and at least fifty minutes from anywhere of any size. But there’s not much crime. Great place to raise a family.”

“You got a family.”

I looked down at my left hand. Hard to lie without a ring.

“Not yet,” I said. “Maybe soon.”

“So you’re engaged.”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“She’s thinking it over.”

“Like that, eh.”

“Like that.”

“What do you teach?”

Goody. Now what.

“Computer science.”

“Whoa,” she said. “Too much for me. Can’t stand the things. That’s why Dorothy over there does all the bookwork. Too many rules to learn. Whoever invents the software just doesn’t understand us common folk. Know what I mean?”

I did. “I agree.”

“And what brings you to Woodbridge?”

“Just a vacation.”

“In the winter? You kidding me?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

She looked at me like I’d just fallen out of a Harold Lloyd film. But then again, she probably had never heard of him or his films.

“Lived here all your life?” I asked her. More to bring the questions toward her rather than me for a change.

“Born here. Wish I hadn’t been. I’d prefer Florida or California. But this is where it happened and this is where I stayed at least so far.”

“Looking for a way to escape?”

“Sure. All the time. But the job keeps me busy and nobody’s asked me.”

“Asked you?”

“To marry him. You know. The question. And then taken me off to some exotic place to live our life in luxury.”

“That how it’s done?”

“That’s how it’s done around here. Some single guy comes through town on vacation, falls in love with me, takes me hone. And there you go.”

Just like me, I thought. Is that why she came over? Was I going to be her meal ticket out of Woodbridge? My silence was golden.

“So,” I said, “which direction’s best for me to get the lay of the land in Connecticut?”

“Sight seeing, huh?”

“Actually on my way west. What’s out in that direction that I might find interesting?”

“There’s Danbury. Lots of lakes up that way. If you like ice-skating. There’s lots of that.”

“Anything else?”

“Not much.”

“How about around here then?”

“There’s the Alice Newton Memorial Park just north of town here. Beautiful forests, waterfalls, wood bridges, things like that. But not much good covered in all of that though. My dad had a cabin up there near the boundary of the place. Actually, that’s my place up there now. Inherited it. Don’t think about it much since he died.”

“What kind of place?”

“Just a cabin. You know. Rustic. Does have an indoor bathroom, electricity, and a fireplace. Sort of a kitchen. He stayed up there when us kids got too much for him.”

“Rent it out?”

“Never thought about it. During the winter it’s hard to get to. No roads really. During the summer there’s really nothing but solitude. No fishing, hunting, or anything else there. Not with the park just next door.”

I let that roll around in my caffeinated mind for a minute.

“You thinking you’d like to rent it?”

“Maybe.”

We went quiet then. She had a pleasant face. And a demeanor only slightly bruised by the real world of an all night shift in a main street diner. I didn’t want her to think she’d caught her prize. At the same time, maybe the place could serve as a temporary place for me to get my legs back. No road in. All my needs except food, which I could buy in town. A perfect place?

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just wondering what it would be like to spend some time away from everything. Might be just the thing.”

“What’s your name?” she asked out of the blue.

I had to think of one. Certainly by real name would soon become a dirty word around here if it hadn’t already.