Turning and turning finally surmised into giving up and finding a place on the side of the road to just rest for a while and that had led to a long slumber. Dale remained on the sidewalk, with his head placed in the middle of his laps and his eyes shut for hours despite the loud zooming of cars past him every passing minute. It was until the sun had gone down and dusk had arrived completely that he had raised his head up again, in total surprise that he had actually been sleeping on the road. The road was still busy but the night’s darkness was prominent everywhere. He had the assurance in his mind that he was going to stay shelterless for the night-time and possibly for the first few days before he got his bearing and could get his foot in this new place.
Dale stood up and gave a loud yawn. No matter what the case was, no situation could beat staying in a little room, ordered around by whistles. Even though it meant sleeping on the street or wandering throughout the night or staying hungry till the next day. He remained on his feet smiling and watching the cars move, the passengers joking with one another, horns blaring, everyone was eager to go home to a good night rest. There was no fear of death in here, it was the USA. No fear of bombs or suicide bombers, no fear of masked armed men in black visiting one’s house, killing the parents and abducting the children. Dale sighed and shook his head as he started to move.
He walked one step at a time and shut his eyes because he knew that flashbacks were bound to return and they did in a grim procession. Now, Dale moved even slower as if the thoughts were clouding his way.
No fear of Thursdays, no fear of your name being called out from a plank, no fear of near cold death but there was one fear that lingered and one fear that was going to linger ultimately.
Dale brought his face down, narrowing his sight to the tarred ground that was a luxury for him to walk on. He could feel his eyes itch and he knew what was to follow. Tears stung him at once and even though he knew there was no need to cry, he blinked and he saw his tear drop hit the ground before him. He blinked again hoping to blink off the tears, instead the tears clouded his sight, leaving him to a blurred vision. He didn’t attempt to clean it off, he just kept moving along, trying to keep his legs steady and free of the influence of his struggling mind.
The heavens soon joined, dropping raindrops to the pedestrian pavement that Dale was treading. It was silent and it was now coming in trickles, wetting the grounds and dropping like hails on Dale’s clothes. Dale started jogging as the rain started moving down in more volume and intensity. He moved quickly with the rest of the few pedestrians who mostly had umbrellas. Dale’s speed lowered a little when he realised that there was no need for speed. The others were moving with a purpose knowing that they had a shelter but he was an ex-convict who was still trying to get used to the overwhelming façade of freedom, like a fish with legs learning how to walk on land. He wanted to, in fact, remain in the rain and savour that moment and cry in the rain; to let his eyes bleed out profusely and mimic the pour-down of the clouds because it was the one thing that provided him the intense clarity, in its most unalloyed and expressive forms that he was free not only from chains and bars and orange uniforms but from the very jaws of death.
Dale sat down under a bus-stop’s canopy where so many other people had settled down. The black clothes he was dressed in was soaked on every side, making it gummed to his skin. He shoved his hand through his wet hair and raised his face up. Everyone was picking their seats, some singularly, some in twos, some in threes; heaving sighs, giving remarks about the rain and pulling off their raincoats. The person who sat directly beside Dale was an old man with heavy creases across his face and he had no rain coats on, he was talking to a little girl that he placed on his lap.
‘You are going to have a cup when you get home, huh?’, he said.
‘No. Two’, the little girl who didn’t appear to have such a sharp voice replied.
‘Oh! Two’, he replied after her and chuckled. ‘So, you are going to have two cups of coffee and what about me, what am I going to get?’
‘You’re gonna get two’, she said. The girl was more focused on a toy doll that she wrapped in the four fingers of her right hand.
‘Wow! Grandpa is going to get two’, the old man said, thrilled by the voice and cleverness that typical little girls had or appeared to have. He was so excited that he didn’t care about keeping his voice down. ‘But Grandpa doesn’t take coffee, what are we going to do?’, he asked.
Dale placed his hand in his left pocket and the first thing he produced was the pendant that held the pictures of the people whom he had once shared those kinds of thrills with. With his eyes on their faces, he wished he could visualise their time together at Crawdown or the wild laughs that their drunken bodies rattled to as they were travelling back home but all he could see were the bullets’ sound from the other room as they ended Michael’s life, the slow-motioned pace of Pierson working unto the execution room after his name was called out and dropping the pendant to the ground as Dale cried on.
‘…do not worry, while you’re taking your own coffee. I will be in the other room taking my two cigarettes’, he said and laughed very out loud, proud of his joke even though the little girl was just busy jiggling her doll and pulling its hair. ‘Do not tell your mum I said that, okay? She is going to seize the lighter’
The old man sighed and turned his face away, he had his teeth gritting against each other in reaction to the cold. ‘That’s what I call a heavy downpour that no one sees coming’, he said to no one exactly.
He looked over at Dale, awaiting him to respond to what he was saying.
‘Are you okay, lad?’, he said to Dale having noticed the grave edginess of his face and even more obvious, his teary eyes. Dale didn’t respond and just moved his face away from him. Yet, he could still feel the man, who when looked at critically was in his early sixties, still running his eyes over him like a sniffing dog.
Garrulous people never knew when to stop talking, Dale snorted as he heard the man’s raspy voice.
‘It’s going to be okay, young lad’, he said and then fell silent. ‘There you go’, the man said to the girl as he helped her pick her fallen doll.
Dale took a peep at him to see if he was still going to speak. ‘Whatever it is, your girlfriend broke up with you or you got expelled from school or you ain’t go money. You will survive it’
The man itched his head and looked at Dale again. ‘You know something, your attire makes me remember sometime in the past, of someone. Myself actually’, he said and chuckled. ‘It was just like the same cloth, same attire, same pattern. You know what, never mind. That’s not something any person around here should know about. Good stories must be told always. If you don’t tell the bad ones, they will wither away’
Dale found himself listening ardently to what he was saying. ‘And for me that was a really bad story and also a really long time ago. I followed my rule, I didn’t tell it anyone, I didn’t dwell on it, it withered away. And look at me, I am like a little kid in his skivvies, moving around in a pond because that’s how you feel when you’re happy. You forget every other thing. I will just go home, smoke my cigar until I start to cough and then remember that I have lung cancer and I might die pretty soon’, he said and Dale looked at him.
‘Oh yes, I have lung cancer but it’s no big deal. I will use my cigarette to puff it out’, he laughed rowdily albeit Dale couldn’t find the joke. He has cancer! And grasping that made Dale’s brain rattle in disbelief and the fact that he was joking about it made Dale look him over.
‘But I…I don’t think about it and that’s why it never actually affects me. I dance every day to my barber shop along Alliston Avenue. Once I grab the clipper and dip into someone’s hair, I am happy. So, that’s what I will tell you today, forget your trouble. No matter how terrible it is, I tell you it is no match to what has happened to me’
At that, a bus arrives and screeches to a stop in front of them. ‘Common, Princess, we have got to go’, he said to the girl who was asleep already. ‘Let’s go home’, he said and carried her sleeping self over his shoulder. He stood up and was about to start moving to the bus when he took one last peer at Dale.
‘You are lucky to be from here. The nation is a bright place to find hope and be as happy as you can be. I once lived in a place that is the dark side of the world’s moon. There is no happiness back there but I am here now. So, you go find your happiness and change your clothes. It’s soaked’. ‘My name is Mark, you want to tell me what your name is?’
Dale turned his face from him and the next time he looked up, he saw the man in the bus mouthing Good night. Dale remained mute as his eyes watched the bus rev into motion and Mark go out of sight. Even when the man had left, the man’s smile lingered in his mind.
The night had come in all its darkness and it appeared as if there was no moon or stars in the sky. The roads were empty and Dale’s solitary dark shadow was the confirmation that he was the only one left outside. There were no cars at all, no distant movement of car tyres against the highway, no flashlights penetrating the darkness.
There was only Dale, hungry, soporific, shivering in the cold and moving through the night looking for somewhere to lay his head.
That somewhere was going to turn out to be under an old presumably abandoned bridge that he stumbled onto. It was dark but all he needed was a place with a shed that he could lay under; a criterion that the place duly provided.
The ground was wet and marshy but it didn’t stop Dale from spreading his body over it. Exile was meant to depict woe but if extradition meant leaving Dexter, it was a whole different meaning and there was nothing more favourable than escaping such a snare. A one-in-a-thousand chance, Dale thought with a stodgy gust of triumph wash over him. Exile is a blessing.
Or so he thought because a whole kilometre from where Dale was dozing, was a man crouched hiding behind the curtains of the darkness with a sniper rifle in his hands whose target was Dale’s head.