TFW CH 16 GET YOUR BOOT ON

Stealing All Day   by C.C. Adcock 

The hardest thing can be to admit when you are wrong, especially when it is because you are afraid of going forth.

Or turning around to face your fears.

There is no exit, there is no escape.  There is only the entrance to the next part of the tale in your own life.

Time flows in one direction.  There is no Delorian you can punch to 88 MPH and change things.

So what can you do?

Hindsight woulda shoulda is for chumps.

But if you can apprise a shitiation before you make a decision, and not base it solely upon fear, then that is a skill you might want to fine tune, like a carburetor.

I had no such skill.

But the decision would be made for me.

You see, I was haunted.

I was being chased by a demon.

And he wanted to be released.

He was the Fat Jerry punk rocker.

Joey followed me as we trudged up to the top of the ridge to head back down the other side.  My little sisters and my momma awaited my help.

Joey had his own family that were probably wondering where in the hell he was, and if he was OK.

The wind blew hard as them poor saps dug their little holes in the sand around the empty well. 

They cast their pitiful handfuls of sand at the well and the wind chust carried it up and all over the damn place.  What the fuck were they doing? 

I had no clue.  It was not the amount of sand that they threw.  There was no way in hell that they would be filling up that damned well.  It had to do with something else. 

It was about their faith in the old preacher, in his method.

He’d told them to help him raise something up, and they followed his lead.

The wind blew the sand up into the air and it became a cloud of sand that got in everyone’s face.  But they kept right digging and flinging sand in spite of that.

As the wind began to scream, the sand whipped me in the face and it felt like sandpaper on my cheeks.

I stopped to look over at Joey.

He was stopped too.  He looked back at me from under his cupped hand and nodded back at them other men.

From where we stood, them men almost made a circle around the empty well. 

It looked like they had made room for me and Joey to join them.  But no one shouted at us to come back down the hillside.

Only the wind did the talking.

I shrugged and turned to continue on.  Fuck that shit.  They were fools.

The wind buffeted me and then Joey fell backward and rolled down the hill.

I staggered over to him as the wind picked up and whistled in my ears.  What the hell was going on?

He rolled over on his knees and squinted up at me.  He said, “Weeeee-ill!  I can’t see!  I got…” 

I couldn’t hear the rest of his statement because the wind pushed him over from his knees and he began to roll down the hill.

I chased after him, yelling at him in the howling wind.  I said, “Don’t rub your eyes! Don’t fuck them up!”

Of course, he was not in any position to either hear me and heed or do anything other than flail about like a rag doll as he tumbled down the hillside.

He ended up at the well.

Well, so did I.  I wasn’t going to leave him behind.

I growled and then I shouted in my anger.

But ya see, anger can come from fear.  And I had it.

I was a fucking coward, running off.

You never leave a man behind.

You never leave anyone behind.

Like I had done to my little family in the wide valley of the desert of Fuckno.

I shouted at them men, and they were still casting their handfuls of sand at the well.

The ground rumbled.

The Glinty said, “Get down!  We need you here!  Start your digging!  Ain’t no way out but in doing this here thing!”

My skin crawled as I knelt there beside Joey.  I helped him up in the dust storm and shouted at his ear.  I said, “Don’t open your eyes!  Don’t rub them!  Can you dig?”

Joey was crying now, and I had never, ever seen him do this before.  He said, “I’m fucking blind!  I can’t see a thing!  Help!”

I grabbed him and held him close.  I said, “Fuck it!  Let’s throw some sand and then I’ll carry you up that fucking hillside back to the big truck!”

He shivered under my arm and nodded.

We set to digging and threw a couple of handfuls of sand at the general direction of the well.

It didn’t matter anymore.  No one had a clue, because no one could see anything anymore.

We each and all had our eyes closed, just tossing sand in the wind.

Can faith be forced upon you?

Well, I don’t know about that, but if you are forced to face your fear, then maybe that is a new religion.

At any rate, we dug the sand like them poor bastards and chucked it at the well.

The wind stopped.

Sand fell from the air above us with a loud “Harrumph!” sound and the desert was still.

The sun beat down upon us from the east, and Joey kept right on digging and tossing sand, tears streaming down from his eyes.

The rest of us sat back and wiped our faces.  We opened our eyes and looked around at each other.

We saw Joey the Little lion man who kept right on with his chores, and then the ground began to hum.

I laid my hands down on Joey’s arm to make him stop.  He sat back and turned to me.  He said, “Weee-ill.  I think I’m blind.”  His tears came harder.

I said, “Let me take a look.  Open your eyes.”

He did, and they were red.  He said, “I can see!”

I looked at his corneas and did not see a single speck of sand on them.  His tears had flushed the desert silt from them.

The ground began to rumble.

Came Back Haunted   by Nine Inch Nails  

The Glinty got up off his knees and sand poured down off his shoulders and his cowboy hat.  He took his hat off and shook it.  He looked over and pointed at the well.

He said, “Look!”

The well overflowed with sand.

It was full.

Hah?

Yup.  The well was full.

How could something like that have happened?

The ground trembled like the earth was awaking from a nightmare and it was in bad mood.

Joey squinted up at me and he said, “I’m so happy that I ain’t blind!”

I was going to tell him how happy I was for him, and then I got shook off my knees.

We all did.

The Glinty shouted.  “Get away!  Get away NOW!”

I scrambled away in a panic and shouted back at him.  “What the hell?!”

He rolled away and said, “I ain’t never done this before!”

What the-

The well began to rise up.  Swear to Lawd Almighty, the stone walls of the well rose up, and they split apart from each other, rolling away from the rising mound of desert silt.

The ground raised higher like a pregnant belly full of anger.

This was not going to be pretty.

Indeed, the sand purged out of the well and then a boot stuck out of the ground.  It was covered on the front by a gleaming shin guard made from chrome.

It glinted in the sunlight, and it blinded my eyes.

The Glinty shouted at us as the earth beneath us settled back down. He said, “Breach!”

He scrambled up the small hill to the well and said, “Come help me dig him out!  Hurry!”

Eeee.

Big Bryan followed his orders, and so did Tellesco.

I looked over at Joey, and he nodded.  He said, “I can see, Weeee-ill!”  He ran up to the top of the little hole.

Well, fuck it.  I scrambled up the side of the hill from my own landing spot and all together, we left streaks in the wet sand from five points of a star, to the point at the top of the hill.

Water ran down from the top of the hill, from the well.

We had dug up something indeed.  But it was a breach birth.

We had to do us some digging again.

We pulled sand away from the top of the hill, and it was much easier this time to dig in the desert, because there was no wind, and the mud fell away and couldn’t get up into the air.

As we got down to the knee, Big Bryan stood up and grabbed that boot.  He put all his back into his bent knees and then he began to stand up straight and tall, as we kept right on digging, pulling mud away, and panicking.

It made no sense at all.

The Glinty said, “Faster!  Ain’t got much time!”

The boot in Big Bryan’s arms wriggled, and he let it go.

He stretched back and said, “Arrgh!  Cramping up!”

We dug down until we got to the waist of the upside-down figure in the well, and the cowboy preacher Glinty shouted.  ”Grab anything you can!  Get this boy out!”

I reached down and grabbed a boot.  Joey grabbed the other one.

We pulled, and them boots came right the hell off, and we tumbled down the hillside.

Tellesco knelt and wrapped his huge arms around one leg, and Big Bryan muckled right onto the other one. 

The Glinty reached in and grabbed ahold of the studded belt on them leather pants, and they all pulled at the same time.

Well, mister, the desert mud from the new well had not much give, and so it was all took.

They stood up at the same time and that fat bastard came out of the desert mud without his clothes on.

His leather came off and his shirt as well, stuck in the hole.

Tellesco and Big Bryan fell back with them leather pants, which tore apart as them two tumbled down the hill.

The Glinty had enough presence of mind to let go before he fell, and he grabbed the scrambling hand of the man who had chust been born breach out of the wet desert muck.

He dragged this large man out and fell back.

The man from the well coughed and gasped, and he tried to catch his breath.

His shaved head was the last thing to come out of the birth canal, and so his bright pink, wet mohawk stood straight up.

He sat on the top of the well hill, and he was a giant naked baby.

Fat Jerry had been borne of the desert in an ungraceful manner, and boy, was he angry.

He fucking roared in his fury.

Oh, shit.

God Help You.

God Help Us All.

---willies out.

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