Harmon VI - What to Do?

Harmon had to wait at the end of his potholed driveway. Right on top of the hill like it was, he couldn't see very well, either direction. Although, usually the traffic was mostly ever day people. The slew of police, fire and paramedics was surprising to him. But only on the surface, most of the galaxy of thought between Harmon's ears was a chaotic mess. What happened her? Where did she go? He knew Darrel was involved, but should he look for Amy? She wasn't at the house, he checked, nothing there but a bunch of broken things. So many questions, perhaps Harmon would have sat in his idling truck for a few minutes anyway.

He put the shifter in park and shut the engine off. Amy was messed up pretty bad. She was blind too, he tried not to think about that. He got out of the truck and scanned the front yard. The grove of pine trees, the overgrown fence row, the power-line pole with the ugly arc light on it - he remembered going to the store with Amy to pick out curtains, heavy ones, to shut out that ugly 'booger light', she called it.

Harmon had never been a Boy Scout and he wasn't a hunter. He'd read a few books and seen a few movies so he set out scanning the ground around the front door. Maybe a drop of blood or a footprint would be hidden there like the worst Where's Waldo picture. He looked, perhaps a little longer than his abilities warranted, he didn't see anything. No clue stuck out at him.

Harmon, terrified and guilty and grieving Harmon did give up him futile search of the front yard. The sick looking sun sat right in his eyes when he checked the road to the left. The nasty clouds moving in at the edges didn't help anything, he couldn't see shit. The motor gunned and rear wheels threw up some gravel.  As hard as it was for him to admit to himself, he had a better chance finding things out if he put his sights on Darrel. He never called Darrel anymore, no matter how mad Amy got. Darrel was bad news, Darrel was a parasite. Harmon never called him, but still had his number. Unless there's a big raid, the hangouts don't change much.

The old truck with the beat up shocks made its way west, towards town - the strip man, the main drag dude, where it's at - towards the sick setting sun. Harmon fished his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open. He'd have to open his 'Contacts' and scroll down to 'Darrel' - damnit - Harmon hated using his phone when he was driving, he'd always swerve and he just didn't like it. But after  a couple tries and curses the phone was ringing.

'remember, when you are suffering, I have betrayed you'

Great, Marilyn Manson, Darrel never did get out of high school. He dropped out in his senior - or was it Junior year? - Harmon couldn't remember. Judging by his choice in a 'ring back', or whatever it was called, and the life style he was living, Harmon guessed he held onto the dark stuff with a tight fist. Harmon didn't know Darrel as well as those other guys, Scotty - he was alright for a pot head, lazy as hell, but a cool dude - and Jack and Tony. Harmon knew the last two even less. He guessed they didn't get stuck in this little town. He had heard Jack went off to some big deal college or something.

He didn't think Darrel was going to answer, the song went on forever, it seemed. "Hello. Hello!"

"Hey, buddy. Hey, it's Harmon." Some things never change, Harmon thought.

"Oh, god. Thank god, man, I thought... I don't know, man, weird shit's been happening." Darrel paused for a few deep breaths, "What's up, dude?"

Okay, now we're on the cool wave. Now's my chance. "Nothing, man. Hey listen, you still staying at the same place?"

"Yeah, man. We're hanging in there. Hard times and all, you know."

"You mind if I come by? Kick it for a little while? You still got that racing game?"

"Uh... the umm... yeah, I still got that racing game. Unlocked everything, had to play for fifteen hours straight. But wait, shh, you wanted to come by. That's what it is isn't it." Oh no, I'm losing him, Harmon thought. Then Darrel went on, "Yeah, sure sure sure, come on by, wait. NO! I know. There's this party this weekend at the Old Jensen's Place. You remember where that's at right?"

Harmon remembered that place alright. Abandoned forever, over grown and rotted to the point no one really knew what the place used to be. That was place you went when you went looking for things. Things you couldn't buy in the stores. Things were a little further outside the law then a bag of grass. At one point, Harmon knew everyone that hung out there regularly. That was before the meeting and the chips and calling Abe everyday just to say he was still hanging in there.

With the phone pressed up to his ear going back toward those places, that place, Harmon felt fear rise in him.

"Yeah, I remember the place. But, uh -"

"I'm kind of busy until then," Darrel cut in. "Lindsey and me, I, shit it's 'I' not 'me'. I gotta go man."

Guess it was this weekend at that place. Harmon took a deep breath.

"HEY! HARMON! HEY!"

He brought the phone back up to his ear. "What, man, what's up?"

"Amy said something about going. Maybe you guys could come together. Later." Click

Harmon looked around at the odd landscape. He'd seen it a hundred times, but this light. This sunset sucked. So did a party at the Old Jensen Place.

And, no, Darrel, Amy would not be coming.

Harmon V - While You Were Sleeping

Dirty feet padded softly across the bedroom floor. The sick light coming in through the window gave the nightmare bedroom a dressed look - or maybe the way a nightmare would look if the lights were turned suddenly on, with eyes open. Amy quietly made her way through the bedroom with purpose, certainly without a destination in sight. Amy's eyes were closed, and where the stitches had pulled, making the crude workmanship even cruder, the blood had dried. All of it, the scrapes and pieces of broken porcelain and glass she picked up when they didn't just slide through and let her pass, even where the truly stubborn pieces grabbed on and dug deeper into her foot with every step, none of these things caused a drop of blood. The broken scabs didn't glisten with the wet look of repair work in progress.

Harmon missed out, he really did. Amy was active while he slept, while the ugly clouds slinked into the sky. Just a little rest, that's all, just a little rest for Amy. But Amy wasn't Amy anymore. Amy was the name given what was now nothing but a mannequin. A shell, a body without a mind - there were things going on in there, no doubt, but they weren't Amy - rose from the bed as Harmon slept. The jerky movements of the new Amy bumped and crashed into what there was left to crash into. She made her way to the master bathroom, booting up perhaps, she spent a few minutes banging the forehead of her ruined face into the tile below the shower head. The puppeteer had gotten better by the time she got out of the shower stall and walked on legs that appeared severely asleep. There, she grabbed a brush after much fumbling around blindly. Her fingers gripped the handle of the brush until they popped and the skin around the bigger knuckles ripped open. The brush came down on the counter suddenly and Amy's teeth came together with her lips peeled back in a skull like grin. Pieces of tooth pinged off the mirror.

Now, she strode by Harmon with ease - maybe she didn't want to wake him - and without pause at the hurts the body sustained. Just past where Harmon's feet stuck out from between the end of the  bed and dresser she stopped. Pivoting on her right heel - twisting those stubborn hitch hikers even deeper - Amy reached out to the small TV on the dresser. She, or whatever controlled the things going on behind those stitches, found the power button with no fumbling. Amy was working better and better.

The same thing couldn't be said for the TV she left on as she went out the front door Harmon never got around to closing and went on her way into the pine grove ("Money in the bank son, money in the bank"). The news was on. The news was always on now. Every channel was cashing in on the bizarre spectacle of the ever increasing crime rates. Things were going pretty bad out there, not here in Collin's County - "Even more reason not to drink," Abe Kastel would say over coffee after a meeting. But the news caster spoke to deaf ears in this bedroom, Amy was gone and Harmon slept the sleep of the dead. She yammered on anyway, even though the little TV on the end of the dresser only allowed her to report as if she were speaking on a cell phone with bad service.

"This is June Amarta with...         World leaders convened today with the U.N....  President Ger... an unknown number, somewhere in the hundred-thousand range...                   U.S. troops to...                                If the required number of volunteers isn't reached... talk of a draft... Expected to start deployments in the next few months...              

And onto other news, in China..."

And on and on she went. June would be relieved by the next reporter in line and so on. But Harmon slept, rebooting perhaps.

Abe closed his phone and sighed after he read the text from his friend and pupil of sorts in the art of sober living. He sighed and leaned his head back and adjusted himself in the uncomfortable doctors office waiting room chair. Most things weren't okay, he hoped Harmon and Amy were. He hoped his Ruthie was okay, too.

Eve Artwork

"No Turning Back"

18x24 rough newsprint

graphite pencils, compressed charcoal, black ink, pastels

Artwork by: Paul Cowdrey

Adam Artwork

"Adam (about 4 years old"

14x17 heavy weight vellum

graphite pencils

Artwork by: Paul Cowdrey

Amy Artwork

"Amy"

18x24 rough news print

graphite, marker, pastels

Artwork by: Paul Cowdrey

Harmon IV - "You're late for work, baby"

Staring into the deep shadows and sunlight dancing on the shot glass and the bottle of whisky Harmon fell into a semiconscious - not quite dreaming - state of thought. The ruin of the house still lay before him and the sun would be in his eyes still. Those things were real, those things were true. But the part of him that fell into the shadows and colors of the self destruction button didn't see those things.

"You're late for work, baby,"

Harmon shook his head from side to side, his chin resting on his chest. That wasn't real, Amy was gone, she didn't think about things like work schedules and laundry. Amy didn't think about anything anymore, oddly, she was the only thing Harmon could think about. The early morning minutes stretched, oh yes, they stretched and stretched, and Harmon's heart follow suit. Stretched and stretched, from the worst anger he'd ever felt to the best memories of Amy. The memories hurt... bad, so bad a part of Harmon felt selfish and guilty for wanting them to stop. And they would, the memories would be replaced by the anger. The anger was soothing, he had a focal point, an enemy. A goal.

Just before the sun peaked its piercing rays above the tree line outside the screen door (he still hadn't shut that damn door) two things happened.

Harmon's rage consumed him and he stood with such force the chair not only fell over but slid on the linoleum  to crash into the cheap paneling. As his legs straitened his hands gripped the bottle and shot glass and added them to the mess around him. He added these things to the mess inside himself, as well.

"Pick up. Someone loves you. Pick up. Someone loves you" Amy's voice filled the air around him.

IT'S HER, IT'S REALLY HER! SHE JUST NEEDED SOME SLEEP. IT'S HER!

But Harmon was heartbreakingly mistaken. He knew it in an instant. He never hated a cell phone more than in that moment. A silly ringtone Amy put on the gadget. What was he thinking, he loved that ringtone. He'd never changed it. He put that on ever new phone he'd gotten in the last five years.

He looked down at cell phone on the table. The sun faded the screen slightly but he could see who it was. Pick up. Someone loves you, continued on and a part of Harmon soaked it up, every tone and pause. He never ignored his sponsor's calls. Never. But he let the phone sit. He let Amy go and tell him someone loved him. He let her live for a brief moment and he could hear her in the kitchen next to him, putting dishes away and telling him to get the phone. The life they would have, could've had.

When the phone quit and directed Nick's call to voicemail - where ever that was - Harmon picked the chair up and put it back in its place. With a heavy sigh he seated himself back in his place by the table. Reluctantly, he picked up his phone and opened his text messaging option. Through sobs and more tears darkening his shirt and places on his Dickie's work pants he fumbled through a text message to his contact Nick Sponsor.

'nick, i'm sober. i have to do something for a little while. i'll call you when i'm back in town. the coffee cups half full, always :)'

The cell phone chimed its message that the message had been sent. As if on cue Harmon got up from the table and made a left to the bathroom. He hadn't showered in what felt like weeks. The grease under his fingernails bothered him, it just never seemed to come out. Plus, he had the dried sweat to get rid of. He was okay, he talked to his sponsor - sort of - and smashed the bottle of liquor he fully intended to drown in. Time for a shower.

He always listened to the radio when he did his hygiene thing. Wearing a towel, Harmon came bopping out of the steamy bathroom. He had a big smile on his face. He wasn't going to work, he wasn't drunk and today, yes today, Amy would go to rehab. Then he opened the bedroom door.

Then he remembered Darrel. He remembered the voice that gave that name away. He remembered the rise in her still chest. Yes, yes today, right now, this very moment, Harmon remembered everything, but he saw nothing. Their bed was a mess, sheets everywhere. Their bed was empty.

First the towel fell from around him, then the floor and the debris fell up all around him. Harmon lay there in the floor. This time no dreams haunted him, just blackness. Nothing.

Harmon III - The Next Morning

Amy's chest rose and fell. Harmon stayed there in bed with her in the gray predawn, he cradled her with the care a lover shows their other. They were lovers of that sort. Fast and alive at first and totally 'in love' they began the seven year journey. Now slow and steady, like Amy's breathing, like Amy's heart beating, their journey still held together with the glue only that only those fabled 'soul mates' can get their hands on.

After Amy uttered those broken syllables, "Da... rrel", Harmon's body jolted into warp speed. His exhausted mind from the extra hours at work and the meetings whenever he could get to them, and of course the patience it took to watch and wait and hope for a sick person - no, not just a person, a best friend, a soul mate - to get the help, to find the happiness existing in a sober day, in relatively healthy body. The few moments of wide awake adrenaline fueled rage for Darrel were just that, a few moments. The constant slow rhythm of Amy's breathing and heart beating lulled him to sleep as surely as a mother's lullaby for a baby. But his sleep wasn't restorative, he found no peace there.

He dreamed of the first time he told Amy he loved her. Out on the State land where the caves sat just off the hiking trail. They would go there on Fridays in the summer time and watch rented canoes float down the river he and Amy would swim in sometimes. They'd sit up high on the cliff face behind some brush and make up lives for the people down in the canoes and smoke pot and laugh and kiss - and everyone knows what that leads teenagers to do next. Happy times on the hiking trail. One day in mid August, when the temperatures seldom dropped below 90, they sat up on their perch behind the brush and discussed what a bummer it was to not have any weed. Harmon spread his arms wide, "Hey, babe, there's weed everywhere!" And she laughed - without the aid of grass. When their eyes met again Harmon slipped those three little words into Amy's ears. Those words that are so dear when they're meant went straight to Amy's veins and into her heart forever.

"I love you, too," she said and wiped a small tear from the corner of her eye.

Suddenly, Harmon felt older.  His back hurt as he climbed out his old truck. When he pushed the latch on the screen door his thumb throbbed from a missed strike with a hammer earlier that day at work. His mind throbbed with excitement and worry. He knew there what was in the fridge, several cool delicious cans of self destruction.  He had it all planned out though, despite the tugging in his gut to go get a beer before he did anything else. First he'd enter like Ricky Ricardo, "Amy, I'm home!" only he'd go on, "Honey, today I'm a camel." Then she'd laugh and he'd explain what his buddy at work told him about camels going twenty-four hours without a drink. And she'd get it, she'd totally get it. The bells that chimed in his head, would chime in hers. They'd hold hands by the sink and pour it all out. Life would be great, maybe they'd talk about kids. Maybe, but Harmon was nervous it wouldn't go like that.

As he stepped across the front door threshold all the picture glass cracked in its frame. The juice glasses on the coffee table beside the ash tray fell into pieces with loud cracks of thunder. He could hear cabinet doors slamming open and closed, open, closed. An endless stream of dishes flew out of the broken cabinet doors and smashed over and over again against the far wall of the kitchen. And all at once the bedroom door came off its hinges and there was Amy. Only Amy's hair was a mesh of bloody, ratted dread locks hanging askew, pointing this way and that.

She slid across the carpet to where Harmon stood. The ends of big toes the only part of her that touched the ground, the chaos of breaking things and ear shattering noise had no effect on her. She just slid closer and closer to him and now she was nose to nose with him. He could see the sunken cheeks, the corpse like bluing of her face, the empty places behind her stitched closed eyelids. Harmon could see the tiny places where the stitches had pulled through from over stressing the stitches when they were fresh.

Her mouth came open and her lips cracked. Suddenly, the sound of the wreckage of the house was muted as if cotton balls were stuffed in Harmon's ears and then sound came from her mouth. From between Amy's cracked lips. At first Harmon only heard the constant deep boom of a bass drum. The sound changed and with each change he saw the stitches in her eyes ripping a little further.

Harmon sat straight up in bed, it was dark outside and his clothes clung to him from his sweat. His ears rang with the last of what nightmare Amy said - DARREL.

The horror of the dream faded the way dreams do, only to be replaced with a new one. Amy's chest didn't rise anymore, really it looked as if she were holding her breath, her chest and breasts pushed up and her mouth hung open in a silent scream. He saw with perfect clarity the cracked lips forming this eternal final terror.

Tears fell from his eyes making dark spots on the pillow they had shared while he dreamed and her mind burned bright like the sun before going dark like a snuffed out candle. Then he got up out of bed and went to the kitchen, cheeks wet and getting wetter by the moment. By the time he was seated at the kitchen table the sun was just peeking above the trees he could see through the screen door - he never did get around to closing the front door properly. And the sun made shadows on the blond scarred wooden table top. A short shadow trailed behind the short glass sitting in front of Harmon, a longer shadow stretched out to the left of the short one. The light coming through distorted into a darker, almost coffee color before it reached the table top next to its cleaner shorter companion.

Idly, Harmon wondered why the alarm clock wasn't going off. If the sun was coming up he must be running late for work. Then his absent wondering eyes found the ends of the shadows on the table in front of him. Through his sorrow, his pain, his rage, Harmon eye balled the glass - made to hold just an ounce and a half - and the bottle of Kessler's whisky.