The Voice

As a writer, no matter how old I get, every time it happens, it's like rediscovering a new mystery.
"The Voice"
Other writers have called it different things... but to me that's what it is. The Voice.
It speaks at strange times. It tells me things. Sometimes completely. Sometimes it just hints at thing.
For me, they normally translate to short stories.
Most recently one I wrote called: "With the Dead".... which was inspired by The Voice commenting to me one morning on the drive to work that "the winter is no place for hippies".
By the end of the day the whole story wrote itself without pause.

A couple of days ago, on the drive home... (I sense a theme)... an entire story spoke itself to me in a matter of 10 minutes. This one is harder to write because I don't like what it's about. It must be written. I'm compelled to write it.
Meanwhile, another story that was just a whisper and it's up to me what it's about.

The Voice speaks only when it wants to. I've learned to be content with its silence. My own voices are loud enough in the meantime.

Below is "With the Dead". It still needs editing... I'm lazy on that.
All rights reserved. Pendulum Press 2008.

With the Dead

“The winter is no place for hippies,” he said as he threw the blanket over the top of the razor-wire fence.
This was Tucker. It was his idea. The rest of us were reluctant accomplices.
“We all get old. That’s what’s called inevitability… but hippies, shit. We don’t get old; we petrify. We’re not built for this shit. The whole lot of us should be living in Florida somewhere, eating eggs and watching the goddamn Price is Right. I’ll tell you this, man: the sun has restorative properties- all reaching ones. I read about it.
“SUE! How’s it look?”
“Fine.” She said.
“Good. Now you, my man, are gunna go over first and see what you can do.”

The three of us stood on a patch of cracked cement. Behind us was a long stretch of forest, completely barren and still. It smelled like the middle of winter even if it was only the beginning. There were drifts of snow here and there, making tiny motionless waves against the fence and they crunched under foot. It reminded me of living out west and those long stretches of flat highway with ghost-swirls of white and pitched-gray skies.
Death highways my father called them. If your truck broke down it could be hours before anyone else would pass by to help. You hoped for another trucker. They would stop. Families with bloated screaming kids and masses of pillows and snacks would never stop, especially if you were a hippie and looked like the grim reaper wearing a lumber-jacket.

“Get up over now, Ted. I ain’t gunna last in this cold.”
“Ok, Tucker.” He smiled at me and for a moment he looked dead. He was right. Winter is no place at all.
When I jumped from the top of the fence I landed hard and turned my ankle a bit. I fell poorly. Like an old man. Jesus. I was an old man.
“Christ, Teddy, you ok?”
“Yeah. I guess. What now?”
“Get around the side and look for the blue ones. They should be labeled. Its gotta be heavy. Kinda shake it if you can. Compare a few so you don’t get an empty one.”
“Ok.”

Sue stood on the other side of the fence with Tucker. “I haven’t been outta my head in a long time, Tuck.”
“I hear that.”
“I wanna get fucked up and lay down in a bed in the Radisson.”
“The old man going with you?”
“Sure. We can take a long bath and plan our next step.”
Tucker looked vaguely amused. “What step is that?”
“I gotta figure out how to market him. He can do impressions: Homer Simpson, Dr. Phil, the Family Guy. He's an artist too. He draws. He’s really talented. AND he has a 13-inch cock.”
“Sounds like he’s got a lot going for him.”
“He really does. I never told you this, Tuck, but I'm a dancer: jazz, tap, ballet, I can do it all. I was a nurse too. Then I ran a landscaping company. After that I went to the haircutting school in Middleton.”
Tucker said nothing, and she stopped as suddenly as she started. He eyes began to well up, and she turned away and wiped them with her sleeve.
“I had pot in my bag at the bus station. I did four months. School was over by then. It was too late.”
Still nothing from Tucker. Just that fucking wind.
“I’m a good person.”
Finally, from him: “I know, Sue.”
“Just wanna get out of my head and lay down on a bed in the Radisson, you know.”
“Yep.”

I found the blue cylinders and inspected the labels. NO2. Nitrous. Medical Grade.
Perfect.
I tilted one toward me, then back, then did the same with 3 others. They all felt the same. I had no idea how Tucker expected me to know if the cylinders were full.
A gust of wind whipped across the outdoor bay, stopping me suddenly. Fucking winter.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What was I doing?

“You almost ready, Ted? My sweet-meats just crawled back up into my belly. Get movin’ back there.”

I didn’t answer. I just picked the middle cylinder randomly and began precariously rolling it, standing up, toward the fence.
You didn’t want to lay the fuckers down. Too heavy to get back up. All you did was tilt it back and kinda turn it while walking, back and forth, like a keg. I’d seen a guy in a warehouse do it once, and it looked easy. It wasn’t of course. Nothing like that ever was.

My father used to have a slingshot. He was a hippie too. We all were. The whole family. Hell, even the dog was a hippie. At least he squatted like one of us.
Dad said hippies were naturals with slingshots. The logic of this escapes me even today, but that’s what he said when he’d load a ball bearing and smash a bottle from near 50 yards. Then another. And another after that. I’d say he was a savant, but my mother AND both of my brothers could do the same.
Me? I don’t think I even scared one of those bottles. I’d try for hours, never with success, and end up shooting ball bearings at the sun instead, making brief eclipses just for me, and wondering if we were going to move again. That’s what we did. We moved. Every couple of months. None of the kids ever got a detailed explanation, though I don’t remember ever asking for one either. My father would just announce it in the morning.
He’d say the same thing every time: “Time to pull up posts. There’s a patch of heaven out there with our name on it, and this ain’t it.”

I finally rolled the cylinder to the part of the fence I climbed over. I was sweating by then and it chilled me in an ugly way. Fucking winter. Fucking Grateful Dead hippie assholes. (even if I was one)
This is what they did, and had been doing for as long as I could remember: they’d steal Nitrous cylinders, put em in their truck or van, and get fucked up on the nitrous while following the tour.
In certain stretches of the American highway, after a tour, you’d see the empties in the ditches by the side of the road, like one long chain of evidence to the crime- my generation’s crime. The companies who made the gas had 800 numbers on the side just for that reason alone. People could return the cylinder for a small reward. None of us ever did it, of course. We were long gone by then, getting fucked up in another city with The Dead.

“How are we going to get it over, Tucker?”
“Glad you asked.”
From beneath his large winter coat, Tucker produced a pair of bolt cutters and began working at the fence.
“Jesus, FUCK, Tucker, why did you make me climb the fence if you had those things?”
Sue was off somewhere in her own world, muttering about a continental breakfast and HBO. By now her tears had dried up and the skin under her eyes looked pinched and frozen. It probably was.
“If the fuzz had showed up while you were in there, we all would have been sunk. Now let’s just get a move on. This fucking wind is KILLING me, kid.”
He finished cutting the fence and we rolled the cylinder through it and to the pick-up.
After considerable effort and multiple attempts, we managed to get it in the back, nestled between a supply of wet fire-wood and a broken wheel-barrow. It was pretty snug. It might have been empty after all, but I didn’t care. I was bone-cold.

The three of us climbed into the truck and drove away.
Tucker jacked the heater to high. People who never really lived through winters wouldn’t understand the utter relief of a blasting heater and the camaraderie of people furiously rubbing their hands together in the space where the bottom of the windshield ends and the dash begins, grinning like loons and almost feeling drunk from that warmth.

After a while, we all began to thaw out and feel slightly human again.
We were at least 800 miles north of the tour, and had a long drive ahead of us.
Tucker was thinking of waffles, I was thinking about slingshots again, and Sue was thinking about that bed in the Radisson and watching re-runs of Family Feud, and waiting for the warm, clean bathtub to fill up.
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