Nowhere Man - 13. Chapter 13: American Flags

There’s a silence that follows death. A hush. A stillness. In that moment, looking down at Wade’s lifeless, hushed body, I felt that silence louder than anything I’d ever felt before in my life.

My nerves, every last one of them, stood on end. The adrenaline in me pumped faster and harder. There was nothing I couldn’t have done.

Silence.

I looked around the room for a sign of my next move. What do I do now? I wondered, unable to form a coherent thought, let alone string enough together to make a plan.

The room was quiet. The television lay in a million pieces in the corner. A dim, overcast sky, forced everything in the trailer to take on a grey hue. I closed my eyes, lifted my head, and shook it.

What the fuck did I just do?

I put my arms around Wade and pulled, but he didn’t budge. He was too heavy.

I pulled him by the shoulders so that he was lying flat, his legs no longer dangling over. I rolled the blanket over him so that I didn’t have to look at his lifeless form and be reminded of what I had done.

When my handiwork was hidden in a big lump on the side of the bed, sat down on the stoop outside and waited for a man who could have been anywhere and nowhere at the same time.

As I sat there, watching the sun move overhead, I considered just how far I’d fallen.

Protect love at any cost.

That mantra had me swimming in some pretty deep shit as of late. Six feet deep. I was facing jail time. I was facing the electric chair for premeditated murder. I was sitting on a stoop, waiting for my partner in crime, with absolutely no clue how I’d ended up in this place.

“Hey there killer,” I heard a cheery voice call after me. I looked up and met Tyler’s glare as he walked down the trail. I brushed the tear that had been inching its’ way down my face and smiled weakly at him.

“What’s the matter?”

I shook my head. The trigger had been set. I couldn’t speak. I simply sobbed. Tyler sat beside me and held me close while the other hand squeezed my knee.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” he comforted. “Here. Let’s go inside.”

“No,” I said, catching him as he stood. He sat beside me with a quizzical look. “You don’t want to go inside.”

“Travis, babe, what did you do?” his voice was low and stern. I couldn’t tell him. I shook my head, and cried some more. Tyler stood and this time, I didn’t stop him. He needed to see for himself the damage inside. He needed to assess the situation and come up with a plan. He would come up with a plan.

I’ll take care of Wade. I needed that to be true now more than ever.

Two minutes later, Tyler reappeared holding two ice cold beers. He sat beside me, cracked one open, and handed it to me.

“Tell me what happened.” he said, opening his own can and taking a long, slow draw.

“It just happened.”

“How?”

“Do I have to?”

He glared at me with a hovering intensity in his eyes. I had to.

“He showed up, Tyler, out of nowhere. And he started spewing these hateful things towards me. He asked me what I have that he never had. Why you were with me. Warned me that you would hurt me.”

“And you believed him?” his voice was low and scary. He wasn’t thrilled, but I couldn’t pinpoint the reason. If he was angry, I would have preferred a yell.

“God no,” I replied quickly. “But he was in attack mode. He would have hurt me.”

“Wade would never…” he started, his voice raised. He took a deep breath and returned to his even tone. “Wade would never hurt you.”

I glared at him with a squint. What was he saying? How could he be upset with me over this? He was the one who told me to stay away from Wade. That stupid clown was clearly trouble, and Tyler was sticking up for him. The man whose idea of problem solving included matches and gasoline tanks, was sticking up for a deranged stalker who had karma knocking at his back door?

“Excuse me?”

“I told you, Trav, that I would handle this. I told you that I would take care of Wade.”

“And what exactly did you plan on doing?”

“That’s none of your business.”

I didn’t believe what I was hearing. I did this for him. For us. I thought that if I did this, there would be a stronger bond, a more connected us. I finally understood what it is that drives a man to send copper shots through the body of someone, and he was turning this around on me. It was clear there was no us.

“Were you seeing him?”

“Come on, Trav.”

“Answer me! I don’t know what you do when you sketch off for hours, but I know that a rodeo clown is on your trail the whole time. A rodeo clown I didn’t meet until you showed up. A clown whose idea of a fun time is fucking with me like a child, Tyler. Because of you. He was here in Wellmington for you. He was in Easton for you. He fucked me to get to you. What the fuck did you two have?”

I realized that I was yelling. I was outside, anyone could hear, and I was yelling. I felt like the trash I’d grown to hate at Easton who always aired their dirty laundry out for anyone and everyone to hear. But I didn’t care. I was trash.

“Calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm the fuck down,” I rose, glaring at Tyler the entire time. “I did this for us, I hope you know that.”

He bit his bottom lip and shook his head.

“He would have hurt me,” I added.

Tyler squinted at me as if he’d never seen me before. I licked my lips and asked the question that had raced through my mind a million and one times since I’d committed my first act of murder.

“Tyler, do you love me?”

His eyes lowered. He pursed his lips. When he looked back up at me, his answer was clear.

“I can’t do this right now,” he walked into the trailer, leaving me standing there with a full can of beer and nowhere to go.

I walked into the trailer with confidence. Tyler lay in the bedroom, perpendicular to Wade’s body, his hands behind his head. He was deep in thought, probably wondering what to do with me.

I grabbed my lunch box and the keys to the truck off the dresser and mumbled something about being back.

Ten seconds later, I slammed the door to the truck. A second after that, I sped up the dirt trail with nowhere to go.

I considered driving back to Easton, but realized there was nothing left of that place. That much was perfectly clear. I didn’t know how to do this on my own. I didn’t know how to be on the run.

I drove around town for an hour, waiting for an idea to strike me, but nothing came. I thought about leaving. I had the truck. I could be in Oklahoma by midnight, across the Mississippi by morning. I could go north and be in Seattle in a day and a half. Montana, North Dakota, Michigan. I had enough cash to tide me over with very few luxuries for several days.

But I couldn’t leave. As much sense as it made, the opposite force, the one drawing me to Tyler, told me that leaving wasn’t an option. I loved him. I needed him and he needed me. He was upset at that point, but he wasn’t done. I had no clue what Wade meant to him, but it couldn’t have been more than what Tyler meant to me.

The prospect that I was wrong nagged at me something awful. Maybe Wade did mean something special to Tyler. Why a man would follow someone, first to Easton and then to Wellmington, made no sense to me. Why Tyler was so vague about his knowledge of Wade made no sense to me, either.

I thought back to the second day I knew Tyler Lafferty. It was the same day I met Wade for the first time and fucked the daylights out of him in his truck. Tyler was waiting there when I got back home.

And then last night after my ill-advised affair with Wade, Tyler was up and knew that I’d seen him. This morning, after Tyler left to run his errands, it hadn’t been ten minutes before Wade showed up and walked through a locked door to surprise me.

I didn’t know what exactly was going on, but I knew better than to trust it.

An hour after driving around aimlessly, my stomach began to eat in on itself from hunger. I stopped at a diner just south of the center of town, not far from the one traffic light. Eerily calm for someone who had just committed murder, I walked inside and sat down at a table near the back.

A cute waitress asked what I wanted to drink through gum smacking teeth. I told her I needed a coffee.

A few minutes later, too consumed with making life decisions to decide what to order, I told her to give me whatever the special of the day was.

“You look like you’re having a rough day,” a deep voice said to me. I turned to see an older gentleman smile at me through a handle bar mustache. If he only knew. He looked distinguished and official. He wore a sports coat with a small American flag pin on his lapel. I tensed up. He reminded me of the attractive police chiefs in old television shows. I gave him my weakest smile.

“I’ll survive,” I said, turning back to my coffee.

“Well I’m a good ear, in case you care to share,” he drawled.

It was clear that I was wearing my emotions on my sleeve and even a man who’d never seen or met me before could tell that I was a wreck. I needed a plan.

I thought about my next move over an omelet and toast. I weighed the fallout of staying over the fallout of leaving. I loved Tyler, but could I live like this forever? Watching my back? Afraid that it would one day catch up with me? Unaware of what the man I was sleeping with was thinking or feeling?

Finally, after a full meal and a piece of pie, I made a decision.

Unlike my last decision, I didn’t pray to God to make sure it was the correct one. I assumed God had stopped listening to my prayers somewhere between torching Easton and strangling a clown. I didn’t pray. I left the diner and I drove.

Every town has three or four essential buildings. A gas station, a library, a school building, and a police station with an American flag in the parking lot. Those four were the bare minimum, with the library being the only disposable one of those essential locations.

Finding any and all of those buildings usually isn’t too difficult. Wellmington was like every town.

I drove up the main street, towards the highway, until I spotted an American flag. I turned right, drove up a slight hill, and parked in the small gravel parking lot. Mine was the only truck in sight. I stepped out and walked into the cool, sterile looking building, waiting for someone to acknowledge me.

Protect love at all cost. You’ll die before you’re dead without it.

I walked to the back of the small lobby where an older woman sat behind a protective glass barrier, looking at me judgingly from behind horn-rimmed glasses.

This was the proper decision. This would be painful, but it would bring an end to the running and hiding and trying to figure out exactly what Tyler wanted. This decision would change the course of my life. There was no turning back at that point. I was already dead.

“Can I help you this afternoon?” she asked in one of those sweet, condescending voices.

“Yes ma’am,” I said, surprisingly self-assured. “I would like to report a murder. I would like to report several murders.”

I sat down on the plastic bench in the lobby and waited as the woman in horn-rimmed glasses fetched a man with an American flag on his lapel.