The Iconoclast's Journal by Terry Griggs

Author:Terry Griggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2018-04-25T19:55:32+00:00

15

CALL US NOT WEEDS

If Grif were music, he’d be a dirge, moving down the road at a balked, funereal pace, a mourning tempo. Lento, retardando . . . fin. Anything in pursuit could easily have snatched him up and devoured him, and he would hardly have noticed. Or cared. He felt so weary and flightless, it was all he could do to move one dead man’s shoe, rotted as a face, in front of the other. He slurred his steps as he walked, and what filled his lungs was more lament than breath, what he exhaled a sorry and pointless tune. His life the theme of it.

He arrived in Little Current about the same time as the dawn, and descended a hill following the smell of water and wood, fresh-cut. A port and a mill town. He wandered by houses hushed and sleep-wrapped, past stores with boom-town fronts and signs in limb-high lettering that identified them as Carruthers’ Drugs, Turner’s Dry Goods, Vincent’s Bargain House. A store for everyone. His footsteps made hollow rattling sounds on the wooden sidewalk, and as he waded through patches of morning mist, his pant legs gathering damp, he might have been taken for a revenant, something flushed out of the night and about as substantial. A skunk ran toward him, and then straight across his foot. Even to the creatures he was nothing more than an unravelling patch of grey, fading like the dawn. If it were possible, he would do it—melt into the atmosphere, or become the day’s weather, or even that blasted skunk, if he could figure out how.

He passed by a blacksmith’s, a photography studio, a combination confectionery/butcher shop—another odd union. Outside of a barroom he saw a man curled up in a wheelbarrow, his digested dinner—or someone’s—from the night before piled deja spew in his outstretched hand. He walked quickly by; the man smelled rank.

The place was dead still, although surely not for long, unless it was Sunday. He pictured the bustle and surge of noon traffic in the street: wagons, horses, dust roiling up, people weaving in and out, a medley of voices, a joke tossed across the road and returned with a laugh. Farmers, fishermen, mill hands, Indians, tourists—more men than women. At present he appeared to be the only actor on this stage, and his performance wasn’t up to much, his soliloquy stuffed so far down his throat he’d never get it out. Someone likely was watching him, someone standing at a window washing his neck with Windsor soap, or sprucing up his hair with Butler and Crisp’s Pomade Divine. He could feel the eyes fixed on him like a gun’s sight, the crosshairs dividing his face like a pie. A drifter, a stranger, anonymous as dirt.

A wanted man. But only for a legal and concluding formality. He surveyed the facade of a large hotel on the corner. The Mansion House, it was called.

He scanned the windows to see if anyone was watching him and imagined a curtain twitching as a shadowy form stepped back out of sight.

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