Nobody by Creston Mapes

Author:Creston Mapes [Mapes, Creston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adventure, thriller, action
Publisher: Green E-Books
Published: 2011-11-07T05:54:05+00:00

21

I had to get out of that hospital, breathe fresh air, drive. Something inside was calling me home. After the tedious process of signing paperwork and making arrangements about the transportation of my dad’s body with a quiet, compassionate hospital administrator named Hershel, I took off in my silver Ford rental car for San Antonio.

The drive went fast, my mind swirling with childhood memories of my dad laughing it up with patrons at the Cat’s Tail, and my mom hanging clean laundry to dry on the clothesline out back of our modest home, her soft hair blowing in the breeze. When the tears came, I concentrated on Holly, her joyful face and contagious laugh, but I couldn’t dodge nagging thoughts of her troubled past with Ken Van Dillon. Regrets about what I’d done to Chester plagued me. And through it all, I had the distinct impression I was being urged by some unseen force to surrender my life to God. But that was something I didn’t want to do, didn’t know how to do, and was determined to move right on past like the road beneath my wheels.

Arriving at RiverMist Cemetery, I determined that not much, if anything, had changed since I’d last been there. The jets descending on San Antonio International Airport roared several hundred yards overhead, and the smell of jet fuel permeated the hot Texas air like an invisible net.

On my knees, I yanked the long shoots of Bermuda grass that had crept across portions of my mother’s flat, rectangular tombstone. Brushing the grass from the raised, worn metal letters on the stone, I read the inscription: “Rita Lynn Ambrose, June 19, 1950 – August 13, 1987.”

Only thirty-seven. Not much older than me.

I’d ignored the cursive letters below Mom’s name but finally whispered them aloud: “Too Fine for This World.”

The old man’s words.

The dozen red roses I’d bought at Kroger were still cool and wet. I laid them just below Mom’s tombstone. Sweeping my hand over the short, brittle grass next to her plot, I envisioned the fresh dirt that would be turned and the matching headstone that would be placed there for my dad in a few days.

What would I have them write on it? Something about being reunited with Mom?

What would he want?

I wished desperately that I’d saved his letters. The fact that I hadn’t was just another guilty regret that I would force myself to block out. But that was becoming harder and harder to do as an overwhelming sense of remorse pressed in all around, threatening to suffocate me.

On my way to the River Walk downtown, I searched all the local AM radio stations for any trace of news about a homeless man’s disappearance in Las Vegas, but came up with nothing. What I needed was Internet access so I could go to the R-J home page and see if Suzette’s story had run.

Parking the Fusion outside an old billiards haunt called the Rack, a San Antonio landmark, I found the stairs I used to know so well and bounced downward, toward the River Walk.

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