Unspeakable Dan

by

Hank Kirton

Dan clapped his dentures into his mouth and the taste of last night’s fried clams brought the entire terrible evening into sudden sunspot focus. He’d made a pitiful, painful mistake and now awaited his arrest. It was all he could do. His back hurt too much to start hiding evidence. Burying secrets in the backyard. He hadn’t handled a shovel in years. His old bones. They hurt.

          He was far too hobbled for fugitive flight. His fake ID’s depicted a much younger man. He couldn’t afford to start all over again. He’d have to make a stand. He had stubborn American values. Outlaw values.

He collapsed into his plaid recliner and turned on the television. Maybe he’d catch a warning on the local news. 

He didn’t. The news was all bad but none of it pertained to him. Or last night’s disastrous date.

Maybe the woman he’d mishandled couldn’t recall where he lived. Or maybe she was too frightened to report him to the authorities. She’d seemed pretty scared when she ran out of his trailer. But not scared shitless.

Dan enjoyed the term “scared shitless.” He’d seen it actually happen a couple of times. It used to make him laugh. He’d always had a juvenile sense of humor.

Dan felt his age like a granite slab lashed to his back. He was working himself into the ground merely by completing his life. Reaching the final cycle. Buttoning things up existence-wise.  

Next to his chair was a wooden box. He pulled it up with a weary groan and settled it over his lap.

He lifted the lid.

The earrings. The licenses. The cute little locks of hair bound with brown twine.

He had lived a long time. Too many memories. Troubling little snapshots cascaded across his aging brain. It all added up to a rough, lived wisdom. He knew himself all too well. He was friends with himself. Friends sometimes fought. Familiarity breeds contempt.

The woman last night was named Meredith. “But everybody calls me Merry,” she’d said, and Dan smiled.

Not for long.

He lifted a license from the box and gazed at it. Kimberly Shaw smiled at him from the tiny square. She was from Missoula, Montana, a place he was sure he’d never been. Kimberly got around. Her birth date was August 22nd, 1956. He remembered she liked rum and Coke. Spiced rum. It was the last drink she ever drank. In 1988. He remembered she preferred “new” Coke to “classic” Coke, which demonstrated a dumb lack of class.

He lifted a ring from the box. It was a mood ring. Unfortunately, it was too small to fit any of his fingers. He had his father’s fingers. They felt like tentacles. The gemstone would probably turn black and shatter if he wore it. He did not have a quiet mind. Not everything reacted favorably to his moods.

As evidenced by evidence.

He picked up a tuft of blond hair and stroked it with his index finger, as if petting a wooly caterpillar. The hair was still soft after thirty-six years. He remembered things.

A truck stop in Albuquerque. An old decrepit barn. The smell of damp hay and rope. Empty miles around him. Screams and pleading. 

He dropped the hair sample back in the box. He could no longer match the jewelry with the hair with the licenses. It was strange. It had seemed so important once.

Frayed connections in a tired mind. Maybe he was slipping into senility. Maybe his memories had an expiration date. Maybe his past had gone sour.

 He kept his mother’s hair in a separate box. He didn’t want to mix things together. It would be sacrilegious to a certain extent. He really believed that.

A man must forge his own belief system and reject Iron Age handouts. 

He’d ordered seafood from The Saltbox Grotto last night. “Merry” had a lobster roll and wolfed it down. Dan had the clams. They were pretty tasty. Meredith had looked disgusted when he smothered them in tartar sauce. She didn’t know what was good.

He plucked another tuft of hair from the trophy box. It was black and a flash of Kansas City passed through his mind. He’d been sleeping and eating at Louie’s place at the time. Going out at night. He was healthy then. Strong. And a stealthy cat burglar. He paid for Louie’s hospitality with jewelry and electronics.

The name Amy occurred to him, but he couldn’t be sure anymore. Sometimes names eluded him.

Louie had expressed amazement that Dan had the nerve to break into occupied homes. He said it would worry him. People owned guns. They had dogs. Alarms. It was something he’d never attempt, so he had to hand it to Dan. “You got ice water in your balls,” he’d said.

Dan remembered the incident with the scissors. It was one of the few actions he regretted. Louie was a bag of rancid crap but he’d enjoyed his company. They played cards sometimes. He shouldn’t have done what he did. But Louie brought it on himself.

He released Amy’s hair sample and it fell back in the box.

The news still hadn’t said anything. About him. About Meredith. People died in a foreign war. Ice cream sales were down. The Dolphins lost. Rain tomorrow.

Nothing that mattered. Nothing that was important to him anymore.

He lifted a locket from the box. It was gold and handmade. An engraved heart hung from the delicate yellow chain. He couldn’t recall where it came from. Arizona perhaps? That family in Phoenix? The girl. That girl. Aiming all those edged questions at him in a time of crisis. He was moved by her bravery. She had heart.

He looked at another lock of hair. It was red. Dan had poor color sense. Some people could differentiate the various shades: scarlet, maroon, ruby and the rest. Dan just saw red. Plain red. The name Janet entered his mind and he scrounged through the box contents, looking for the matching license. There was an urgency to his movements.

When he found it, he congratulated his memory. Janet Pough. From St. Louis, Missouri. Born July 10th, 1965. Oh boy, did she put up a fuss when he cut her hair. Made her wear the red dress. She really hated that dress. It didn’t fit her but why would it? It was the only one he owned.

He heard a siren in the distance. He clapped the box shut and placed it back on the floor. He waited for the sound to either fade or gain.

So many incriminating heirlooms surrounded him. There would be no point in denying anything. The box. The scrapbooks. His artifacts told the tale, stretching back to his confused teenage years.

People complain that life is too short. That it passes too fast.

Dan disagreed. Life was long. It moved like erosion.

The sirens multiplied and increased in volume. He was sure they were heading to him now. Merry Meredith had made good after all. Good for her. That took guts.

The sounds gathered around his house.

It was done. It was finally over.

But he couldn’t let his life end with the indignity of an arrest.

He pushed himself off the chair and hobbled to the cabinet where he kept his gun.