Please see original story (www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/rural/lake-desolation/) for warnings and copyright. Highlights: All fiction. All rights reserved. Includes sex between adult men. Go away if any of that is against your local rules. Practice safer sex than my characters. Write if you like, but flamers end up in the nasty bits of future stories. Donate to Nifty TODAY at donate.nifty.org/donate.html to keep the cum coming.
SPECIAL NOTE: This series is written from the POV of an older American man. He is the product of his times, complete with serious baggage about race, age, sexuality and socioeconomic status. He is not a raving bigot, but he's certainly not enlightened. Please don't think that I agree with him.
"I-I-I was more sc-scared than the guy behind the counter. There were a couple of other people in the store, a girl and her grandmother, a construction guy getting beers. The clerk popped the drawer and handed me all the bills. I was shaking so hard. I was jonesing soooo hard, and soooo scared, and just utterly ashamed. I couldn't believe what... scum I'd become. As I took the money, my other hand shook so bad that I d-d-dropped the g-g-gun. I didn't know! I swear to God I didn't! I d-didn't know it w-was loaded. It, it f-fell and went off. The grandma screamed and fell." His trembling voice fell to nothing. "I. I-I think I, I k-k-killed her." In a flash, Maria's face and fate exploded in my mind. The stray drug-gang bullet that killed her as she sat in traffic. The grandmother falling dead in the convenience store... instantly wore Maria's face.
***** Lake Desolation 5: Maria Speaks
By Bear Pup
M/M; no real sex this chapter
The howling wind rattles the windowpanes with freezing rain and snow, and something inside me tries to match that howl, that fury, that cold, explosive power. Half of me boils with rage, the other half is so cold it burns even worse. I calmly and carefully move the crying murderer to the side and stand.
"It is time for you to leave." I clearly and carefully enunciate.
Logan's tear-streaked face looks to mine, then the window, then my face again.
"Leave. Now." My voice is as steady and cold as a frozen lake. "Get out of my home."
Logan looks to the floor and starts to shake with sobs.
"NOW!" I roar, all that hot rage finally bursting forth in a barrage of sound.
Logan jumps in fear and shame. Fuck that. He'd asked me to kill him the day I found him. Asked again twice since -- at least! Freezing to death is said to be like falling asleep, never to wake. A death far better than this drugged-out wetback murderer deserves. I look down and realise his feet are bare, as they've been since I pulled him into the cabin. Never turning my back to this killer, this viper, I find my Wellingtons and throw them to the floor in front of him.
"You will leave. You will leave now." My voice is back to the frozen calm. I pull my shotgun from its rack above the door and walk backwards toward the bedroom end of the cabin, barrel never wavering from him. "You will leave now. It is your choice if you do so with or without an ass full of rock salt." I had been truthful when I told him that I had no deadly firearms; a face-full of rock salt is about as strong a deterrent to a bear (or intruder) as buckshot.
He pulls on the boots, resigned and defeated. I watch him walk to the door and turn, those melted-chocolate eyes seeking some sort of remorse or regret in my own. I feel nothing but vindication. The low-life scum who murdered my wife... who might just as well have murdered my wife... will not warm himself at my hearth.
I smile as I watch Logan turn the handle and walk into the vestibule. When the door snicks closed, I rush forward and shoot the bolt home. I hold tight to the gun and carefully watch each window. I stay like that for perhaps twenty minutes, alert for the sound of the little spic's attempt to break in.
A soft cough makes me nearly piss myself. I spin to find my soulmate, my Maria, sitting in her favourite hearth-side chair, looking at me with a small, tight smile. My jaw drops and I shake my head. The apparition stays. I take a step forward. Maria uses the voice I'd learned to associate to 'Discussion with Relevant Moral'.
"Stay over there, Jacob. You might need to defend us from that fragile little child if he comes back. I want to talk about a movie, Jacob.
"Do you remember A Clockwork Orange, dear?" I nod mutely. "I recall it as if we saw it yesterday. How we grieved for that poor boy, tormented nearly to death for what he'd done. How you berated that wicked man who tried to kill the boy, to drive him to suicide?
"I can't recall, Jacob. What was the boy's name?" I shake my head; the movie was so long ago and it troubled us both even then. "Tell me, Jacob, was the boy's name Alex or Joseph? Or, maybe, was it Logan?"
I spin toward the door as her words sink in. I had sentenced a murderer to death. But, in fact, how did that make me any less a murderer? Logan had killed by accident, never thinking the gun was loaded and never intending to shoot at all. I had sent him out knowing beyond doubt he would be dead in hours. What had I done? What had I become?
I turn back to argue that Joseph had never murdered anyone and that Logan admitted to killing a woman just like Maria, just like my greatest love, just like the person whose voice just spoke to me... only to find the chair empty. I rack the gun and wrench open the door. The snake is pushed back from the outer door, so I know he's gone outside. I wrench that one open and am blinded instantly by the blowing pellets. I take a minute to let my eyes adjust to the strange half-light of the storm. I think I can see a pile at the edge of vision, quickly covering with snow.
I run out, scattering the snow and feeling the fabric, now going cold, of the hoodie I'd dressed him in. I drag him by the collar back to the glow of the open door; I'd left both inner and outer doors open. I get him onto the porch, through the vestibule, into the cabin. I drop him and spin to close and seal the outer then inner doors. He has not stirred. He is not shivering. I turn his head and blow across his face, and see his eyelid twitch. Alive then.
I leap to the bathroom, running water just slightly below hot, then back to Logan's inert form. I strip him effortlessly, unfolding his stiff limbs, and lift his frail form into the filling tub. He lets out something like a kitten's scream as the water hits him. Alive but not aware, then.
I begin to rub his hands, the part most likely to have started toward frostbite. Each finger is stiff and as cold as the snow I'd brushed from them. Maria's voice echoes, "So you're not a murderer, Jacob, just someone who mains his victims. It's that nice?" I rub his upper arms, forearms then back to the hands, trying to force the circulation back before it's too late. I repeat the cycle on each side over and over until I feel warmth in each section. About this time, the tub reaches a fill level and I kick the faucets shut.
It is perhaps another five minutes before his fragile frame begins to shiver, then shake, then quake uncontrollably. I can do nothing now but make sure his head is both above water and protected from the hard porcelain of the tub. This phase passes as well. I pull the bung and turn on the tap, reheating the cooling water. He rocks back and forth between deathlike stillness and whole-body shivers for another ten minutes. He finally slips into what I believe may well be genuine sleep. I drain the tub and do my best to dry him. I lay him in the bed and tuck covers around him, and turn to the fridge.
I dump the leftover chicken and rice into a Dutch oven, add a couple of cans of broth and hang it in front of the hearth, not directly in the heat. I add several more logs to bring the cabin back to warmth after I'd dumped the previously-built heat by leaving both doors open. I move to the bed and put my hand to Logan's chest. His temperature is dropping again now that the bath is gone. I quickly dowse the lamps and drag every blanket onto the bed. I strip to my boxers and crawl in, cradling this large man-child to me and doing what I can to wrap him in my body heat.
Slowly he warms, again going through the layers of shivering before, again, dropping into real sleep. The dim storm-light, crackling hearth and pelting wind create their own lullaby and I begin to drowse as well.
I slip into sleep to be greet at the doorway by Maria, again in that chair by the hearth.
"Jacob Schweitzer, from the day I passed on, I never thought you would need me to lecture you again. Why, Jacob, why did you do that?"
"He k-killed a woman, Maria, a woman just like you who had done n-nothing to him. He's a druggie and a degenerate and low-life and he killed a woman Just Like YOU!" I weep in my dream and, like dreams do, she is now standing over me as I sit in a school-chair.
"If we had been gone and there was no money, Jacob, what would Joseph have done to make the pain stop?"
I wail, with a voice I recognise as my own from childhood when I'd railed at the injustice of playground life. "It's not the SAME! Joseph was precious! He was hooked by ACCIDENT! He never HURT anyone. And he wasn't some drugged-out wetback punk looking for the next fix."
"Yes, Logan looks like some 'wetback punk' to you and I think you called him a spic as well? Your grandfather, Jacob Schweitzer, if I recall, was worked to death in Majdanek? My aunt and uncle died in Warsaw for the crime of being a Jew. Mozal Tov, Jacob, I assume you've decided to build a wall across our border to keep the -- what was it? -- lowlifes like Jacob out of 'our' country? I could honestly not be more proud."
"NO! He, he touched me! He is not just filth, but a degenerate as well."
"Oh! Degenerate! Well, that makes everything right! Degenerate, like all the Entartete Kunst that our relatives owned! Burn him on the same bonfire as Kirchner, Chagall, Matisse and Beckman. I'm not sure, though, that there is enough of that thin and fragile frame to stoke the flames, Jacob. Perhaps throw a few volumes of Kafka and Hesse on the bonfire to make sure Logan burns as well?"
"NO!"
The scream emerges in a groaned-shout with no form or sense, but it wakes me, shaking and crying from the nightmare. Logan is twitching and thrashing in his sleep, his body still re-learning how to heat itself. I pull myself away and out, checking his chest and thigh. His flesh is warm; his body recovering. I gently hold his hands in mine, praying that they would not be frostbitten. Except for the very tips, they are warm and pink.
I move to the hearth and am surprised to find the rice close to being warm. I stir gently. Apparently, I was out far longer than the dream-torment suggested. I find I'm shaking as badly as Logan had been. Maria had always been my anchor and my truth. My mind whirls with the question of whether my own soul is rejecting my acts or Maria sent me that message to mend my own thoughts and ways. Both ideas clench my gut and send me reeling.
One thing is undeniable: I cannot sentence this man-child to death no matter his crimes. It is beyond wrong. It is the very evil I've spent a lifetime fighting. He is more my Joseph than an alien murderer. I look at his face, sunken cheeks and blackened eyes. I see Joseph there and, inexplicably, Maria as well. I spoon the dish that, now reheated, more resembles gruel than rice into a bowl and eat it slowly, watching. I watch in the fading light and the glow of the hearth, nothing else, for an hour.
When he starts to stir, I fill a bowl with more broth than anything else and sit at the bedside. I prop him up, not really awake or aware, and spoon the warm soup into him. He swallows and I alternate between warm rice-broth and cool water for several minutes. I let him slip back into sleep and wait another hour, watching again as his colour comes up.
I wake him fully. He remains dazed, unsure of where he is, but I feed him some of the more-solid rice and chicken this time. He never complains, never speaks, but he looks at me, clearly confused at what has been real and what has, perhaps, been a withdrawal-induced dream. I pray that my own ignoble acts will never return to him, a prayer that will go unanswered.
I sleep against him again, adding my warmth to his body as it shivers and sweats through the night. His withdrawal and near-hypothermia battle over which will wrack his body most strongly. He is awake and laying, exhausted, when I slowly drift from sleep the next morning. Assuming that he still sleeps, I carefully extricate myself. It is then that I see those milk-chocolate eyes following me.
I cannot take his look of confusion, pain and resignation, so I turn to making a breakfast, a different gruel for each of us. When I go to the bedside and ask him to come to the table, he does not move.
"Why do you keep not letting me die?" His question is simple, direct and devastating.
"I don't want you to die, Logan."
"You sent me out there, Jacob. Out there to die. Why not... let me? It was... it IS what I want. Why DO this? Why keep bringing me back? Did I... did I hurt you so much?" He is not accusatory, but puzzled as if he would suffer these tortures willingly if that is what I think he deserves.
"Logan, when you robbed that store, were you the Logan I'm talking to right now?"
His eyes leak tears and his voice quavers. "No. No. No, I was someone I hated."
"And I was someone I hate now when I sent you out there, Logan. My... my wife died... was killed... by a, a, a stray bullet from a drug gang. When y-you said what happened, I-I-I th-thought... felt like you had k-killed my wife, Logan. It hurts, Logan, but you didn't do it. I... I don't know how I can live with this, but I know it's not you that is to blame and I was, w-was ev-vil to punish y-you for Maria's death." I turn and take two paces, sinking into a chair at the table, letting the sobs come as they will. I feel Logan's hand at my shoulder and I jump and shrug him off.
"DON'T COMFORT ME! Just, just, just let me be. Eat your crap. Um, your Cream of Wheat."
Logan's voice is a small thing, but firm. "Only if you eat your shit-um-oatmeal, Jake."
I look up through my tears and see him crying and smiling at once. What the fuck am I doing, I ask. Maria's voice answers unexpectedly, "Becoming human, my love. All these years later, you're growing up."
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Active storelines, all at www.nifty.org/nifty/gay... Canvas Hell: 19 chapters .../camping/canvas-hell/ Beaux Thibodaux: 11 chapters .../adult-youth/beaux-thibodaux/ The Heathens: 12 chapters .../historical/the-heathens/ Off the Magic Carpet: 6 chapters .../military/off-the-magic-carpet/ Lake Desolation: 5 chapters .../rural/lake-desolation/
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