A normal life

A normal life

He stood out, a lot. For one thing, I didn’t know him. For another, he was standing in the middle of the street looking at the ground admist a wee commotion. Third, he was fucking beau-ti-ful. Not the type that we usually get in Martinsville, South Dakota, pop. 550.

A bit about Martinsville and that spot he was looking at. This town happens to be the geographic center of North America, the spot where a certain very large tree was growing. The spot also happens to be the exact geographic center of North America. There’s a little plaque there. I should know, my great-grandfather cut the tree down and put it there. He suffered ever after.

About my great-grandfather, he founded this town. He was apparently a lively, charismatic man who wanted to live in the exact center of North America. After the civil war ended he collected a bunch of other soldiers and their families to go do that. He lived alone but happy for twenty-some years before he established where was the exact center, to the inch. He went there and there was a tree. A big one. Not one to be easily barred, he cut it down and plopped his plaque down right there and then. He then quickly got someone elses wife pregnant and not-so-quietly went mad.

We’ve been outcast and crazy ever since, though always perfectly capable of tempting some woman into adultry before we give up the ghost. I’m the exception in three ways, the first girl, the first sane, and the first born after the 100-something bastard finally died. My dad was in his sixties, actually. Never knew what mom was thinking. Only mildly sensible explanation she’s been able to give was that she was comforting him in his grief, not that the wrinkled bastard grieved. And my mom was twenty, too.

Enough about me, back to the events at hand. Here was this beautiful little teenager standing in the middle of the street with Bob yelling at him and paying little mind. And you don’t ignore Bob. Bob is a six foot five ex-con with the ugliest face you’ve ever seen and the voice of a demon. He works at the high school as a security guard because they pay him to keep the drugs clean.
See, we used to have a drug problem before Bob showed up. Bob marched up to the school and told the principal and board flat out that he could stop the drug flow if they hired him. They did and he did. Then he predicted that the druggies would turn to other things, like spray paint. And they did. Two died from it. Finally he said that if they paid him the extra from the text-book budget (Half of the officially enrolled students don’t bother showing up and so they don’t bother buying stuff for them) he would bring the drugs back. He’d make sure that there was only the relatively harmless stuff and that it wouldn’t be cut with bad shit. They dithered a bit then did it, feeling bad the entire time.

He came here for some sort of crime rehab program, I think. Bob once beat up the entire football team when they were drunk and tearing up the school. He’s not someone you ignore. And this kid, maybe five foot three and kinda girly, just looked at him and said shut up. And Bob turns white, shuts up, and drives around him. Then the kid sighs, mutters something about hicks and cutting things down, turns to me and says “Show me the bar and I’ll buy you a drink.”

Thirty people standing around (We’re kinda starved for exitement here) and he turns right to me, unerring. It was really creepy. Combine all that with the fact that those green eyes of his are amazing, and I wasn’t going to argue. That’s how it all started. How it ends with me, one month later, tied to a stake in the middle of some sort of magic circle about to be sacrificed for the recreation of Yggdrasil is something that I’m trying to remember.