A question has plagued me for untold years. Does choice truly exist? Or is everything predestined? Are our fates sealed before we are even born? Are some of us doomed to be hurt? And are some of us doomed to hurt others?
I was an angry kid. Dad was drunk or high constantly. Mom was screeching and hollering, also constantly. You know, typical broken home shit. At age ten, dad’s constant disregard for his body finally caught up with him. I found him in his armchair. Pale, bloated, and breathless. His eyes bulged out of his sockets, and his foul tongue lolled out of his mouth, now desiccated and white. Despite the initial shock, I didn’t care that much and neither did my mother. He was buried with a tiny tombstone only bearing his last name, and my mother and I were the only attendants.
With my dad gone, my mother needed another man of the house. And of course, I was given the role. She stopped letting me out of the house. Slapped the shit out of me if she found out I’d spoken to anyone at school, specifically if it was a girl. Always showered with me in case I “had a seizure” as she so warned me. And she made me sleep in her bed every night. I can still remember the taste of her mouth. Ashy and slick with nicotine and grime. To this day, I still can’t bear to be touched by older women.
At fifteen, I threw her down the stairs. I’m not sure if I actually killed her. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. I just ran out the doorway and bolted off into the dry wilderness of Central Utah. Nobody ever came to look for me. No cops, no search parties, no broadcasted amber alerts. At least I don’t think so. Maybe people were searching for me, but they just never found me.
I lived as a nomadic vagrant along the remote dirt roads of the rural area that I lived in, scrounging up whatever I could. It was hard. Very, very hard. But, it was preferable to living in that shithole mud-hut with the whore I had the bad luck of being shat out by. The days were hot, and the nights were cold. It was always a huge pain in the ass looking for someplace to sleep during the night. Sometimes, I got lucky and found some old abandoned barns or cars to sleep in. Other times, I wasn’t so lucky and I had to sleep out in the open. God, those nights of laying underneath juniper trees and hearing coyotes screaming out in the distance still haunt my nightmares.
Just when I turned sixteen, I managed to acquire a companion. He was another vagrant, much older than me though. His name was Merle, and he was in his late fifties or early sixties. We didn’t like each other much. Well truthfully, I couldn’t stand the cunt. He was always complaining about this or that, and seemed to regard me as a lesser being, merely for being younger than he was and not as “out in the world”. He thought himself street smart and wise. He wasn’t. He was dumber than a horse who’d fucked a sack of bricks. I also think he might’ve had a predilection for young girls too. I’d once caught peeping on two junior high schoolers swimming in a pond. He reckoned he was just trying to see if they had anything valuable on them, but he had his fucking hand down his pants and was drooling like a rabid dog.
We only stayed together out of convenience. He knew the best sleeping and rummaging spots around our area, and I was a decently able-bodied young man who could get all the physical stuff done.
But our alliance wouldn’t last, and one day we’d pissed each other off so much that I “broke off” our association.
I found out that Merle had been hoarding things for himself. And when I confronted him about it, he pulled a penknife out on me and threatened to cut my throat. Seeing as he was a short, skinny geriatric with a limp, his little threat went as well as you’d expect. I slapped his hand away, got him by the throat, punched him twice in the stomach, and slammed his face into a trashcan about ten or twelve times. By then he was pretty much down for the count, but I was so enraged that I started seeing red and couldn’t stop myself. I grabbed a broken pipe and started going at him with it until his face broke apart.
When the rage left my mind, I was horrified. Being a teenager at the time, I didn’t know what the fuck to do. So, as I did with my mother, I just ran away and left the old piece of shit to choke on his blood. I wasn’t too concerned about being prosecuted. Homeless people died all the time, after all. He’d just be another statistic in some squalid little alleyway in some bumfuck nowhere town.
I stayed in the woods for days after the incident. And at that time, I was being followed. For three nights in a row, I heard footsteps and rustling branches in the darkness around me, something observing me unseen. Eyes in the dark tirelessly spying on me as I slept atop course soil. On the fourth night, my unseen watchers finally revealed themselves.
I awoke that night to find two men standing over me. One of the men was bearded and wore a dark overcoat, dusty trousers and steel-toe-capped boots, and a pair of sunglasses. The other man was shirtless, his only item of clothing being a pair of rugged, torn jeans, and he wore no shoes either. His black hair was long and shaggy, and his oval face was beardless. His eyes were strangely amber-coloured and bloodshot. I didn’t like the look of them.
The bearded man knelt to me.
“Hello.” He said.
I cautiously moved back a bit.
“What do you want?” I replied.
The shirtless man giggled hoarsely, and his lips opened a little into a half-smirk. Some of his teeth were filed into sharp points, like makeshift fangs. I was freaked out big time at this, and the bearded man appeared to glare at the shirtless man.
“Don’t mind him. My name is Weylin. What’s yours?”
I eyed the bearded man suspiciously. The shirtless fucker wasn’t making a good first impression.
“I’m… Ray.” I replied.
“Well, hello, Ray. You on your own out here?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“I’m not sure anymore. A few months? Or a year?”
“So, you’ve been on your own a long time, huh?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“What about the old man?”
I froze. How did he know about Merle?
“We’ve been watching you for a while.” Said Weylin.
“Yeah, we saw you crack the old cunt’s skull open.” Said the shirtless man.
I just sat there, not knowing what to do or say. I thought to just run away, not really trusting the two men, especially the shirtless one with the filed teeth and crazy eyes. It was unsettling enough to know that they’d been spying on me since at least the night I (probably) killed Merle.
Looking back, I now know that running away was what I should’ve done.
“It’s okay, boy. We won’t shame you for what you did.” Said Weylin.
“Yeah, that wrinkly cocksucker looked like he had it coming.” Said the shirtless man.
The bearded man’s voice had an oddly calming effect on me. I guess it was because I just wasn’t used to being talked to like that, with real, genuine niceness and concern. Not feigned and selfish affection like my mother.
“Well, yeah. He was a prick. Think he was a pedo too.” I replied to Weylin.
“Well then, you had every right to kill him then. Don’t feel guilty. It was just fate my friend. Karmic fate had used you to deliver justice upon that man.” Said Weylin.
“Uh, okay?” I replied, now feeling a bit weirded out. I started to think that guys were some kind of new-age hippies.
“You must be uncomfortable out here. C’mon, we’ve got food and shelter.” Said Weylin.
Weylin then stood up and reached out his hand. And I stared at his hand for a few seconds, weighing my options. Should I trust or should I not? I decided on the former and took hold of his hand and he pulled me to my feet.
“You won’t regret this.” He said to me.
The shirtless man then took my hand into his own, his nails long and sharp.
“I’m Jackal.” He said.
…
The two men lead me out of the woods and to their abode. It was an abandoned chapel. A skeletal little building sitting dusty and forgotten in the middle of nowhere. A leafless, gnarled oak tree its only companion. Behind it, there was a narrow creek, filled with willowy algae billowing beneath its surface. The interior of the church was mostly bare, save for three dilapidated pews.
In the centre of the chapel, there had been made a makeshift fire pit. Three gutted pigeon carcasses sat in a clay bowl right next to it. Our dinner for the night. Jackal started up a fire, and we roasted the pigeons on it and ate in silence. After our little feast, Weylin declared it was time to sleep to reserve our energy for the day ahead.
Weylin and Jackal both fell asleep quickly. I, however, found it difficult to sleep. The grimy floorboards were uncomfortable and I was feeling anxious. I was struggling with the certainty of whether I could trust Weylin and Jackal. Weylin so far had seemed okay, but Jackal, something was just off about him. The way he moved, the way he spoke, the way his eyes looked and lingered. He was fucking scary. And he was a big guy too, much bigger than I was, so if he tried something, I’d have had no chance of fighting him off. But he seemed to respect and listen to Weylin, so I didn’t feel too concerned about him at the time.
Although I’d only met him an hour before, I found myself cautiously attaching to Weylin. I think it was because, unlike the various other people in my life up to that point, he seemed like he was genuinely interested in getting to know me. And of course, I was desperate, lonely, angry, and although I didn’t like to admit it to myself at the time, a scared and uncertain teenager. A teenager in desperate need of someone more mature than I was to latch onto.
As I lay on the floor, listening to the guttural snores of Jackal, a strange smell suddenly entered my nostrils. It was a very stale and musky smell, and I soon realised that it was coming from underneath the floorboard that my head was laying on. I sat up and gave the floorboard a shake. It was loose, so out of morbid curiosity, I lifted it to find the source of the smell. The smell was coming from a weathered, white, floral-patterned blanket. It was wrapped around something, and I reached down and picked it up to see what it was.
I unfurled the blanket and nearly had a heart attack when I saw what it contained. It was a mummified fetus. All curled up into itself as if it were still nested within the womb. Poor thing was probably dead before it was even born. I got up and carried the fetus outside. The sky was cloudy that night. No moon. No stars. There was only a sea of blackness above me. Impenetrable darkness surrounded me. I carried the fetus to the creek, and then I dropped it into the inky water and watched it float along a few ways before it finally submerged into the enwrapping tendrils of algae and finally faded from my sight into the darkness.
“Watcha just drop in the creek?” I heard Jackal’s hoarse voice behind me.
He was leaning against the wall of the church. Staring at me with a half grin that showed off his jagged teeth. He looked inhuman. I’d never seen a man like him before or since. Jackal was in a league of his own.
“I… found a fetus under the floorboards.”
“A fetus?”
I nodded at his question, and he walked over to me, his steps heavy and his back hunched, like a big bear. He walked to the edge of the creek and stared in the direction of the fetus, now drowned. And then he looked at me. His eyes looked almost red.
“A late baptism. But a baptism nonetheless.”
He went silent, contemplating something. Then he sighed and looked at me.
“You’re gonna be needing your initiation, now that you’re running with us.”
“What do I need to do?” I asked.
Jackal looked me over, and then he reached into one of the pockets of his jeans and produced a penknife. I winced slightly, and he smirked.
“You’re not a pussy are you, Ray? This world ain’t meant for pussies.” He said.
I looked up at him, and he looked down at me. I swallowed hard, and I clenched my eyes tightly as he dug the blade into the flesh of my forehead and cut a vertical seam down the middle of it. I hissed and felt a thin droplet of blood seep down my forehead and around my nose and then into my lips. I slowly opened my eyes, trying desperately to stop the tears from falling. Jackal grinned. He crouched down and dipped a single long-nailed finger into the creek and then he rubbed the water into the scar on my forehead.
“Your blood is now pure, Ray. Like mine, and Weylin’s. Welcome to a new way of seeing the world. Through our eyes, without all the bullshit.”
I smiled slightly at Jackal, and he wrapped his immense arm around my shoulder, and then we walked back into the chapel. I didn’t feel like sleeping. In addition to the sharp stinging on my forehead, I was also busy wrestling with my mind over my decision. This initiation seemed like a very important thing, something so binding that I couldn’t just back out of it at random. Had I made the right choice? At the time, I felt as if even if I hadn’t, it still seemed a better option than being out in that world all on my own. As strange as Weylin was and as wrong and terrifying as Jackal was, at least I wasn’t alone anymore.
At least now, I had something I could call a “family”.
…
I managed to get around an hour of sleep before Weylin woke me up in the early hours of the morning. It was twilight outside, and the sky looked grey and cold.
“C’mon, Ray. We’ve got to get moving. We can’t stay in one place for too long.” Said Weylin.
He noticed the scar Jackal had put on my forehead in the night.
“How’d that get there?” He asked.
“Jackal did it for my initiation.” I replied.
“What initiation?”
Jackal walked up to us and said, “I did it as a test. See if he’s tough enough to run with us.”
“Did you have to cut him so deep?”
“Yes. Yes I did.”
Jackal grinned after that, showing off his jagged, filed teeth. And he quietly chuckled before turning around and walking towards the creek. We followed him. We washed our faces and grease-slicked hair with the cool water, in preparation for the scorching day ahead of us.
We stuck to moving along the creek. The sun started to peer above the horizon and the rays began to creep over the brushland and scattered trees that surrounded us. In this better light, I was able to see Weylin and Jackal more clearly. Weylin was walking with a limp, and he was missing two fingers on his right hand as well. I also noticed a large patch of dried blood on his overcoat. When I asked him about it, he said it was from an “old injury” he had received in the past.
Jackal honestly looked even more intimidating. I never noticed how strange-looking his face was. It had an odd, baboon-like quality to it. He looked even bigger too. Everything about him, the way he moved, the way he looked about, the way he sniffed at the air. It was weird. The guy was like something else entirely, in both mind and body.
When the sun finally stood high in the sky, the heat fell upon us like a tidal wave. Jackal wasn’t too bothered, but Weylin and I could feel the sweat pouring off our skin. Eventually, we had take shelter in the shade of a rock outcropping at the base of a hill.
“How’d you come to be out here then, Ray?” Asked Weylin.
“I… had some problems at home. My dad died when I was ten or eleven, and well, my mom… she wasn’t good to me.” I replied, trying not to go into too much detail, like some of the crap she did to me and what I ended up doing to her.
They both eyed me suspiciously, perhaps knowing that I was hiding something. Jackal suddenly smiled, and his amber eyes narrowed.
“Ya kill her?”
I froze up at his words. I felt like a deer in headlights.
“Its okay. We won’t condemn you if you did.” Said Weylin with a small smile.
“I… um… I pushed her down the stairs. I don’t know if it killed her.” I said hesitantly.
“Well, don’t feel bad about it. I’m sure you had a good reason for it.” Said Weylin.
“I had a very good reason.”
“What does she look like? Describe her to me.” Asked Jackal.
“Jackal don’t.” Weylin growled.
“Go suck a horse’s cock, Weylin.” Jackal snapped back.
I giggled a little at their argument. Truth be told, I would’ve loved for her to have met Jackal. I know that might be a sick thing to say, but she treated me the same way Jackal would’ve treated her.
After our break, we set off again across the Utah brush-lands.
…
It was around early afternoon that we found a campsite. There was a single hiker there. We watched him from the cover of the bushes. Both Weylin and Jackal were as silent as foxes. Jackal spoke with his eyes, and Weylin spoke with his hands. I just watched them. The hiker disappeared into the brush, likely to collect water from the creek nearby. Jackal stalked into his camp with quietness and grace that seemed impossible for a man of his stature. I went to follow him, but Weylin stopped me and told me to just watch.
Jackal hid behind a thick patch of sagebrush and waited for the hiker to return. The man appeared from the brush, holding his canister in one hand. Weylin adjusted his sunglasses. Jackal leaped from the bushes, tackled the hiker to the floor, and stabbed him four or five times in the neck. When he was done, one of the man’s arteries was lashing about, spraying warm blood everywhere.
I watched the scene unfold in front of me in a mixture of disgust, terror, and awe. Jackal looked terrifying, yet, oddly majestic. As if this action was something integral to his nature. Seemingly sensing my emotions, Weylin put his hand on my shoulder and gave me an encouraging shake.
“Remember what I said. Things happen because they were meant to.”
Jackal left the man where he was, twitching and spluttering on the ground, and walked up to us. His bare torso and face were splattered with blood, and he lapped at the blood around his mouth with his tongue. The blood and his own sweat made his swarthy skin shimmer beneath the sun.
“You could’ve done him in a bit quicker than that, Jackal. Some of that ferocity was a bit needless.” Said Weylin.
Jackal ignored him and turned to me.
“Wanna help me hack his head off? Then we’ll do his feet and hands.” He offered.
I thought over his offer. But, Weylin stepped in before I could give the big man an answer.
“Jackal, I think Ray’s a bit too… novice for that right now.” Said Weylin.
“Yeah. I don’t feel ready for that sort of… lesson.” I replied.
Jackal eyed me carefully. And then he glanced over at Weylin, and I noticed a subtle narrowing of his eyes. I then noticed Weylin move back slightly. I didn’t know whether he was glaring back at Jackal, his shades were so damn dark. Everything was quiet, the only sound being the distant trickling of the creek. The tension was awful. Jackal’s eyes were just so intense, they felt like they were burning straight into our souls.
“Don’t go coddling him, Weylin.” He said before lifting the dead hiker’s body over his shoulder and disappearing into the brush.
“C’mon, Ray. Let’s go look through this guy’s stuff and see if he has anything we need.”
I watched Weylin as he walked to the hiker’s tent. And then I looked in the direction Jackal had gone in.
I started thinking that Weylin might not have been the one in charge after all.
…
When evening came, and the sparsely clouded sky started to darken, we made camp in a wide, tree-rimmed gully, about a fifty-minute walk away from the creek. There was a faint orange glow lingering on the rolling hills in the distance, and the moon was massive and round and the colour of amber. Bats were fluttering about underneath the stars, and a Great Horned Owl was singing somewhere off in the distance. I also heard the distance yips of a Grey Fox.
Jackal and I were seated at the fire, watching the flames licking at the nocturnal air. Weylin had gone down to the creek to collect more water. Jackal was laying on his side, gnawing on a chicken bone, and occasionally glancing at me across the fire. I still felt kind of uneasy around him, but not as intensely as I had when we first met.
Eventually, he bit the bone in half and threw either side of it away into the darkness. Then he got into a sitting position and studied me quietly. And then he scratched his nose and sighed.
“You popped your cherry with some lucky lady yet, Ray?” He asked.
“No. Don’t think I ever will.” I replied.
“Well, you ever have a girlfriend?”
“Not really.” I replied.
Jackal stretched and loudly yawned, and then he stoked the fire with a gnarled stick. Putting the stick down, he once again looked at me.
“Ray, I’m gonna to share with you something enlightening that happened to me when I was your age.” He said.
My interest piqued, I leaned forward to listen closer. He spat into the fire, cleared his throat, and then went about relaying his experience to me.
“When I was a boy, this tot went missing from his parents backyard. A hole in the fence, they weren’t looking. His mother sounded the alarm, and a posse came running. They scoured the bushland and the woods for days, but they never found the boy. No matter how hard they looked, no matter the scent of the bloodhounds, the boy had been eaten away from sight.”
Jackal closed his eyes as if trying to recollect the details. And then he opened them and continued.
“So, the search was called off. Everyone assumed the little bastard had been carried off by some creep or eaten by some animal. They weren’t wrong on the latter. One morning, I was out in the woods hunting with my bowie knife. And this putrid smell wafted out of a ditch close by. I followed the smell, and I found the boy laying there. Everything below his neck was gone, nothing but yellowing bone with little scraps of meat attached. There were coyote footprints, bobcat footprints, fox footprints. They’d picked him clean. But his head was still intact. They’d left it alone for some reason. Well, except for his eyes. They were gone. Probably plucked out by some crows.”
He paused. The fire glinted in his eyes, making them look like embering coals.
“I sat beside the boy. And I began mulling over his last moments. Laying there, crying out for his parents or anyone to help him. And his cries were answered by Coyotes and scavengers. I guess they did help him, in a way. They stopped his suffering. Without eyes and without flesh, you couldn’t feel pain nor see pain.”
He briefly looked up at the star-encrusted sky and lingered on the moon for a second before looking back at me.
“And there, staring into that boy’s empty eye sockets, I finally saw the truth of the world.”
“What was it?” I asked
He smiled at me.
“Dozens of people were looking for that boy, scouring every nook and cranny of those woods. They should’ve found him, but they didn’t. They should’ve heard his cries, but they didn’t. Only the beasts did. So, was it all just a horrible result of oversight? Or was that boy simply fated to die that day? And various forces worked in tandem to make it happen?”
Jackal grabbed the hiker’s canister, took a great gulp of water, and then poured the rest of it down into his hair, and his black strands hung loosely across his shoulders, like gangly spider legs. Dropping the canister, he stared deep into my eyes.
“The truth is, Ray, some things are just inevitable, predestined. Nature simply sets out our paths for us, and we must follow them unquestioningly. Nature can’t thrive on chaos alone. There must be a bit of order to balance things out. And fate is that order.”
Jackal’s words slithered into my ears and took root in my mind.
“So, was I destined to end up like this?”
“Yes. You were. When we, well, I, first saw you, I knew it was fate doing its thing. Don’t feel sadness or shame for your life, Ray. Fate has set you on a good path. A very good path. The predator path. Out here, in the wild. The true world. Far away from all those pansy-ass degenerates.”
Jackal then fell onto his back and gazed up at the stars flickering all around the moon like countless eyes. He inhaled and exhaled.
“Just go with the flow, Ray. Accept your situation and your inner nature, and embrace it. No point in fighting it. Everything has its reason. Everything has its fate.”
Weylin returned soon after Jackal’s monologue. He had two bucketfuls of water, the buckets once being the property of the hiker who was now laying in some thicket out there in the scrub, headless, handless, and footless. I don’t like to think about it. Although I didn’t give a shit about Merle, and still don’t, that hiker’s death and another one that occurred soon after, still weigh down on my mind.
As he lay there, staring up at the sky, Jackal quietly sang to himself.
“Oh the vultures come and scrape the flesh, and the wolves gnash their teeth so fresh with blood old and new. She sings the song of the scavengers, o lady of the outsiders, o sing to us, we few riders upon this plain of blood and woe. Give us your love and grace, let me feel your bloody embrace, and I will hold you well.”
Those words still echo in my head, late at night.
…
We woke up early again in the morning, and we again washed in the creek. We also abandoned the creek that day. Jackal felt it too risky with the body nearby. He chose to move eastward. There was more tree cover in that direction too, so we would be shielded from the sun better. We traveled beneath the shadows of great pines, spruces, and junipers. As we walked, a cool, southwesterly wind blew through the woods, rustling the branches. Jackal sniffed at the wind vigorously, and his great, shaggy mane billowed like wisps of smoke. He led us downwind, and we stumbled upon a car sitting with its bonnet up at the side of a dirt road. An oldish man was hunched beneath the bonnet, so engrossed in his work that he didn’t notice us watching him from the treeline.
Jackal looked at the old man, and then looked at me, and then looked at the old man again. Weylin put his hand on my shoulder. Jackal retrieved his knife from his pocket and looked down at me.
“Your time to become a man.” He said with a smile.
Weylin pulled me back slightly.
“Jackal, he’s not ready yet. Besides, that old men doesn’t look like he has anything we need. Let’s leave him be.”
Jackal glared daggers at Weylin. Although he tried not to show it, I could tell he was intimidated. Jackal leaned down close to his face, his voice a hissing whisper.
“You’re on thin ice, Weylin. Really thin ice.”
Jackal grabbed my arm, put the knife in my hand, and then took me by the arm towards the old man. The old man heard our approach and turned to face us, and his eyes widened as they laid upon the huge form of Jackal. Jackal grinned and let go of my arm.
“Hello man. Are you in need of assistance?” He asked.
The old man stood there in an anxious stupor. He looked upon Jackal in a way that one might look upon a snarling bear. Jackal was grinning like a madman, loving every second of it. Although I hate to admit it, I was kind of amused by it all too. Well, until what happened next that is.
“N-no. I… I’m okay.” Stammered the man.
“No, you’re not okay.” Replied Jackal.
“Please… I… don’t want any trouble.”
Jackal smiled.
“Trouble you will have. This day was always coming, whether you wanted it to or not.”
Jackal charged forward and punched the old man across the face, and his jaw cracked like a stick being snapped, and several of his teeth flew out of his mouth. He then slammed hard onto the ground, and Jackal lifted him by the back of his neck and held him up in front of me, and pulled his head back to expose his neck.
“Slit his throat.”
I stood there, watching the old man groan and splutter as blood poured out of his shattered jaw. I didn’t know what to do.
“Ray, cut his throat open.” Jackal said again.
I wanted to cut the man’s throat open, yet at the same time, I didn’t. Something held me back. Something, a voice, though dim, urged me not to do it. I glanced over at the trees. Weylin wasn’t there anymore.
“I’m not gonna ask you again, Ray.”
I stared up into Jackal’s firey eyes. They seemed to take hold of my mind, and I found myself leaning forward, inch by inch. He grinned.
“Remember what I told you. All things are meant to happen.”
Shakily, I put the knife up against the old man’s throat. And I opened it up, and his blood sprayed out all over me. On my hand, on my chest, on my face. God, the gasp he let out as all life dissipated from his being. I will always remember that gasp and Jackal’s laughter. It sounded like a Hyena’s. Wild, and blood-hungry.
Jackal threw the old man’s body away and picked me up in a tight embrace. Like a proud father. He festooned me with praise, and I couldn’t help but smile. I’d never been hugged like that before. I’d never been praised like that before.
But, I didn’t feel any pride for what I had just done. I didn’t know what to feel.
I helped Jackal decapitate the old man, and remove his hands and feet. He gently guided me all the way. After we disposed of them and the old man’s body, we searched for Weylin and we found him sitting by a shallow pool. He didn’t have his sunglasses on. I was finally able to see his eyes. They were olive-green, and just so… sad. Weary, tired, and sad. When he saw us, well when he saw me, he smiled.
“Get up you geriatric pig scrotum. Our boy’s just had his rite of passage.” Beamed Jackal.
“Good job, Ray. Good job.” Said Weylin.
Although he was smiling, I could tell it wasn’t a genuine smile. Eyes often speak much louder than lips. And his eyes were far from happy.
…
That night, it was just me and Weylin at the fire. Jackal had gone off to hunt, to find something worthy enough for a “celebration”. Weylin had left his eyes bare, the sunglasses nestled within his jacket pocket. He sat across from me, staring into the fire unblinkingly.
“Weylin, how did you and Jackal meet?”
He looked up at me, and paused, mulling over his answer. He seemed reluctant. But then, he smiled a small smile and obliged to tell me of his past and his meeting with the wild man. I can’t remember it all to the smallest details, but I think it went like this.
“After my service,, I came home and married the love of my life. Lisa was her name. I loved her to death, and I always will. She was just an incredible person. We had ourselves a boy. Bright eyes, a smile like the sun. We loved him. Seeing him happy helped make all the things I’d seen when I had a rifle in my hand, more bearable.”
He laughed sadly and rubbed the side of his face.
“One night, when he was sixteen, he went over to his friend’s house. And, well, his friend had a big bottle of bourbon on him. Now my boy, he always listened to my advice. Or at least tried to. But, peer pressure is a virus even the most iron-willed have trouble shaking off. The bottle was empty in seconds, and his friend suggested they take his new car out for a spin. They didn’t put their seat belts on. His friend went straight into a big old oak tree, and my boy went through the windshield.”
He clenched his eyes tightly shut. And he took a look breath. And then he opened his eyes again, and they seemed to overflow with sorrow.
“It skinned him. His face and shoulders were completely shredded. They couldn’t identify him. Even we couldn’t when he saw him in the morgue. We didn’t want to identify him. We didn’t want to believe it was our boy. But it was. He was gone. Gone forever.”
His tears were small but shimmered in the firelight. His eyes seemed to be unraveling.
“My wife and I separated soon after. We just couldn’t go on. Too many memories. Too much pain, eating away at us each time we looked into each other’s eyes. When she left, I couldn’t live any longer. I ended up hitting the bottle. But it didn’t get rid of the pain. It just blinded me to it. I lost my job, and then I lost my home. Didn’t have anywhere else to go. My folks had been dead for years, and I didn’t have any siblings.”
He rubbed away his tears and took a deep breath, and then continued.
“So I just wandered. Didn’t care where I was going, or what would happen. I just walked out into the wilds, and quietly hoped I would meet my end out there. But instead, I met Jackal. I found him sitting on a tree stump next to a brook. He was eating a bird. He hadn’t cooked it or anything. He was just tearing into it raw, like an animal. He scared the shit out of me. He looked like a fucking werewolf. He stopped eating then and looked over at me, glared for a second, and then smiled. He beckoned me over to him and we talked. And what he said to me, it really swayed me. And well, here we are now. He was a tiny bit nicer back then though.”
Now I knew Weylin. He’d exposed all of his pain to me, all that hellish hurt contained within his mind. And yet, he didn’t breakdown. He didn’t seek for comfort. Probably because he knew I was hurting as well. He knew I was born into shit, unlike himself. Bad things only happened to him when he was already a man. Bad things had happened to me since the first time I opened my eyes.
He didn’t want me to bare the weight of his pain. Probably because he felt his pain was minuscule compared to mine. Looking back, I think he wanted me to open up about my own pain. But, only at my own readiness. Now, I wish I had opened up.
“Um, Weylin, did you really believe the things that Jackal told you? You know, fate and pre-destiny? He talked about it with me the other night and well, I’m kinda rocking the boat with it.”
Weylin was silent for a short while. His weary eyes were in deep thought. Then he breathed and answered my inquiry.
“To be truthful, I’m still kind of rocking the boat with it too, Ray. But, I do find it to be a better alternative to seeing things as happening for no real reason. I just sleep better that way.”
“Yeah. I guess I can get on board with that.” I replied with a small smile. And Weylin smiled warmly back at me.
“Say, Weylin, why do you always wear those shades?”
“I don’t like watching Jackal do his thing when my eyes are bare. The sunglasses, they help shield me away from it. I’ve killed men, yes, but, watching others do it… it just… I just can’t disassociate from it as much. The sunglasses help me disassociate.”
We heard Jackal’s heavy footsteps, and Weylin swiftly retrieved his sunglasses and placed them over his eyes. Jackal materialised out of the darkness, holding a dead fawn. Its neck had been snapped, and his head swayed loosely in Jackal’s grip.
“Got some good meat tonight, boys.” He said with a bloody grin.
I leave it here for now. I’ve got some things to do, let my mind and memories rest for a little while. I just gotta recharge and then I’ll be back.
I will say one thing though. Me and Weylin were being played as fiddles. But not at the hands of fate.