The Present: Chapter 1

The Present

By

Ryan Scales

The street was crowded as usual, hundreds, maybe thousands of pedestrians shoulder to shoulder. He hated it. He had always hated living in the city. He hated living anywhere with this many people. He moved here from a smalltown and making the adjustment to city life was becoming increasingly difficult. Day after day it was people on top of people and he found himself doing his best to find a moment to himself, but the instant he thought he had gotten away from it all, there he was in the middle of another swarm. It was like a zombie movie gone stale; mindless forms wandering aimlessly looking for their next cup of coffee or iTune to download. A rolling sea of overweight police officers, hipsters, hookers and yuppies.

He had been lost in the downtown area after getting off the bus too soon. He wandered around for 15 minutes before being approached by a scantily clad woman. She was average height, and looked to be only in her late twenties. However, there was maturity about her, a kind of demeanor that caused her to appear middle-aged. No doubt due to whatever life she was living in these streets. During his first few months here he had seen documentaries on cable telling stories about women who lead this kind of life, the consequences they suffer.

“I'm not gonna bite you baby,” she said placing a hand on his chest. “unless that's what you're into.”

“Not exactly lookin' for that kinda party miss, but I wouldn't mind a bit o'help locatin' Lynn-Baker Avenue.”

“It's about five or six blocks east of here.” She told him, “you hop the 840 and it should let you off a couple blocks shy of where you're headed.”

He thanked the woman and just as he began to walk off, he felt her slender fingers lightly clutch at the inside of his elbow. He turned to see the woman standing, hips cocked to one side with a single manicured hand held palm up.

“That'll be 30 bucks love.”

The look on his face was a not so subtle mix of outrage and bewilderment. “You want thirty bucks for giving directions?”

“Don't give away anything you can sell.” She told him with an arrogant smirk.

He looked at her in sheer disbelief, another thing to remind him of why he hated city life. He had missed his home in the country. The winters were harsh and the terrain could be brutal but it was just that, home. There were whores there too, but at least they were honest. If you weren't fucking you weren't paying, it was that simple. He could see by her expression that she took him for some Cow-tipping hick, not that his wardrobe didn't help that misconception. A yellow checkered shirt, a pair of wrangler jeans faded thanks to thousands of trips to the washing machine and his worn out work boots were screaming to the entire world, “REDNECK AND PROUD OF IT!” He decided today was not going to be the day he got the wool pulled over his eyes.

“10 bucks, seein' as touchin' my arm ain't much of thrill ride,” tossing her a smirk of his own he added, “for either of us.”

“Fine” the woman said, clearly annoyed that her ruse was a bust. He paid her and made his way back to the bus stop. Shaking his head he thought to himself `good thing she took that deal. Outside o' bus fair that was all the money I had on me, and I ain't particularly in the mood to be dealin' with anybody's pimp.'

This bus ride was a lot shorter than his last one. After about ten minutes he was dropped of exactly one block from Lynn-Baker Ave. He figured a little extra walking wouldn't hurt him, because being this close only reminded him why he was here. `My sister lives somewhere in this neighborhood,' he thought,`I gotta make sure she gets her gift.'

A few minutes later he was standing in front of the class door of a run-down apartment building. Up and down the street he could see the sidewalk littered with beer cans, juice bottles, and scraps of paper, peppered with spent syringes and gun shell casings. The building itself had seen better days. Much of the brickwork had been covered by layers of graffiti or streaked and eroded from decades of bad weather. It took him a full minute to take it all in, another minute to fathom how his sister could live in a place like this. Hopefully this present would help. He stepped up to the glass door and peered through the streaked, smudged window and saw that no one was in the hallway. Pressing the button on the intercom to his left, he called for his sister.

“Dana?”

“Who is it?”

“It's Evan.”

“Evan! Oh- -Oh my god! Hang on, I'll buzz you in!”

The inside of the building matched the outside for the most part, displaying a hard tapestry of chipped paint, bullet holes and dry rotted walls. He wasn't paying all that much attention to the squalor of the building, seeing as his upbringing was more or less the same. Other than the location, he saw no significant difference between this new environment, and the one he grew up in. He remembered a line from an old film he had seen as child, “Ghettos are the same all over the world…They stink.” That and the people who live there don't react very pleasantly to new faces, which was made abundantly clear as two young Puerto Rican boys made their way past him, making no attempt to hide the objectionable looks on their faces. Dana, his sister, resided on the 2nd floor of the building and so he was comforted by the fact that he didn't have very far to go.

He knocked at his sister's door twice and it quickly opened to reveal a middle-aged woman with brownish-blonde hair draped over a flush, thin face. Though the lighting in the hallway was poor, he could see the dull sleepy look in her eyes, and instant later he was attacked by the stink of canibus sticking to her clothes and hair.

“Don't just stand there, come on in!”

Evan stepped through the door into the small apartment unit. His eyes swept over the living room to find the furniture well arranged, the walls virtually spotless, and at least three flower pots, all sporting a variety of healthy plants. He also noted the weed-stink that assaulted his nostrils at the door could not be detected anywhere else. `The girl may be a stoner, but she sure keeps a clean house.' He thought

“So what brings you to this neck of the woods, little brother?”

“Just wanted to see how you were.” He smiled at her. He felt a bit more comfortable now, but not because he was with a familiar face or safe behind a closed door. He had seen his sister high and strung out many times, and it always brought out the demon in her, especially in their youth whenever she got stuck babysitting him. But he could see from the look in her eye that her high was coming down. She was sober. He was safe.

They sat down and chatted for what felt like hours. He told her how he hated living here but his job is helping to smooth that out and she told him about C.J., a young man she had met during a stint in rehab and how they had seeing each other off and on.

“You seem like you're doin' alright sis.”

“Yeah…” She had started to respond but then trailed off as somber looked spread across her face.

Evan leaned in, curiously asking “What's wrong?”

“Nothing, it's just….” Tears began to well up in her eyes, “They're gonna kick me out of my apartment.”

Evan knew he should have felt sorry for her, but the instant those words left her mouth his temperament shifted from compassion, to flat out disgust. “What happened now?” His tone was now flat and condescending,

“It's just the same old shit. I keep coming up short!' She said through sobs and sniffles. “I'm only $160 dollars short. Why is this always happening to me?!”

Evan stood up out of his chair and folded his arms, sheer antipathy. “You wanna know why this happens to you? Why you're always late on rent, or short on your light bill, or always havin' to run and ask other folks money?” He felt his disdain turning to anger “You wanna know!” He stormed into the next room, which he guessed was her bedroom. By the stink of weed that hit him in his face, he knew he had guessed correctly.

“You were smokin' when I got here weren't you? WEREN'T YOU?!”

“So what if I was, I-I mean hell there's nothing wrong it, it's not like it can kill you.”

Dana was becoming agitated now, Evan could tell by the way everything out of her mouth became one long sentence.

“What the fuck are you doing in my room, get out!” She started batting at Evan with her small fist. “Why are you going through my stuff stop!”

Evan began pulling the drawers from her dresser, rifling through her belongings until he found what he knew was there all along. In the back corner of her middle underwear drawer was a plastic ziplock bag filled with marijuana. He held it up to her as if he had just found a precious jewel in the dirt.

“How much did this run you Dana? $200? $300?”

Dana was beside herself now, “You are not selling that!”

Evan shoved her to the floor with a single hand and made his way to her bathroom. He stood over the toilet with his hand gripping the bottom of the bag.

“And you ain't gonna smoke it.”

He turned the bag upside down, emptied its contents into the commode and flushed it.

Dana looked on in shock. A heart beat later she was in frenzy, displaying the depth of her four-letter word vocabulary

“What the fuck is your goddamn problem coming into my fucking house and snatching my weed and flushing it down the goddamn toilet? What the hell?!”

“Fuck you!” Evan boomed, causing his older sister to stop in tracks. “How long have I been sittin' back and takin' your shit?! Huh? Day in and day out ever since we were both kids! This is the first time I've ever seen you sober! Ever!”

Evan's face contorted into a scowl as he verbally tore into his sister after so many years. So many years since she used to babysit him. Since her friends used to bring over all kinds of drugs and she would get wasted and use him for a punching bag. Their parents came home early that night. She caught hell for what she'd done. She got a juvie record and months in rehab, but he didn't think it was enough. His parents tried to make him feel better. It wasn't enough. Even the following years when he had gone on to junior college, and she sank deeper and deeper into drugs, hitting rock bottom, below rock bottom. It wasn't enough for him. He thought about the gift he had brought for Dana, this was the perfect time.

He reached into his jacket and placed his hand on the cold metal object near his ribs. He's wanted to give this gift for a long time; not for her birthday, or for Christmas, but just out of the kindness of his heart. He slowly pulled it from his jacket making sure Dana could see it as it emerged, see the silvery glint of its nickel plating, the smooth metallic contours of the slide, the breach and the barrel. He wanted her to hear the click-clack sound that her present made when he took off the safety, pulled back the slide and slipped a round into the chamber. He wanted this present to show that he cared about her life and that he didn't want to see her live this way anymore.

“Evan, what are you doing with that?” Dana's voice had changed now. It was low, just above a whisper. Her face had changed too, she was no longer snarling and cursing. Instead she wore a mask of abject fear. “W-What are you doing?”

Evan raised Dana's present to her face as he stepped out of the bathroom, backing Dana up until she fell back on her own bed

“Evan---Put it down….please….”

“You gotta stop livin' like this sis.”

“Evan-Evan No! NO!”