“Hey,” the smaller kid said. Bill started to walk away but as he said what he did he put his hand on Bill’s shoulder.
Bill flipped. He was already in the red zone and he just went to fire.
In one motion, he turned, tackled the little mutt and pinned him on the ground. Without thought and as part of that same motion, he grabbed his hair and started banging his head on the cement sidewalk.
Over and over. He would have killed the kid if the kid’s friends hadn’t pulled him off. They literally had to pull him off. It was hard to do so because Bill’s hands were still grabbing the kid’s hair.
But for the grace of God.
No-good place three. There were many no-good places. About six weeks after he was out of the workhouse, the undercover cop who was in the back of the paddy wagon with him and the kid he had tried to defend, a cop who they didn’t know was a cop, who was handcuffed just as they were and who led the conversation which showed up verbatim at his trial, tried to sell him pot in an alley in Columbus.
Why was Bill in an alley? Because through the campus area, at least, and in many parts of Columbus, there was a back-street type network. They were like alleys behind the buildings but they were through streets in actuality and they had no traffic lights at all. They were faster and more direct in some cases, and when you were walking from one place to another, if you knew how to cut thought the alleys you could cut your walking distance considerably.
This was wrong-think because laying there in bed Bill got pissed off all over again. He could feel himself starting to fume. He felt himself clenching his fists and he wanted to get up and punch the wall.
He might have. He just might have if one of the cats had not jumped on the bed and rubbed her ears on his half—clenched fist. It was the spotted white one, Sylvie, and he rubbed her ears. Her purring started deescalating his rage, her rubbing on him and revving like a smoothly running engine made him feel almost happy, almost good.
Overall, Bill could not remember feeling happy. He couldn’t remember feeling good.
He petted Sylvie until she was done being petted. Like any self-respecting cat, when she’d had enough, she simply got up and jumped off the bed. That’s when Bill got up, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. He got up, went to the frig and got himself a beer.
He drank that first beer quickly, and then he took himself a second beer which he brought with him into the shower. This beer he drank slowly, sipped at it while he lingered under the hot water. A long time he spent under the hot water.
As he dressed to get ready to go to work, he considered the day. He did not have any banquets to work on but he would spend a few hours with the banquet chef and Victor doing the prep for the next day’s parties. The rest of the week had no banquets, but lots of little parties, New Years’ parties. There were some breakfasts too and he thought he might see Beverly one of the mornings that he was in very early. As he finished dressing, the way he was feeling, he hoped it was sooner than later.
The anger and the beer made him feel ornery. Ornery was another no-good place, a different kind of no-good place than a no-good thought place. Feeling ornery and being able to act on it was different than being in a bad place in thoughts.
The hell with it, he thought. Before he left for work he took a swig of vodka from the bottle in his liquor cabinet. Slightly buzzed, it crossed his mind that maybe he should take the bus to work.
