NaNoWriMo: Murder in Wilson Park, Chapter 14

“Hey there, Jerky, how are you?”

Charlie 8 talked even though Jerky couldn’t hear. She seemed to understand a lot by reading his lips or maybe she was reading his mind. Jerky got the gist of most things, he’d figured that out right away. You just couldn’t get real detailed in what you were saying. No long explanations of stuff. No complicated descriptions. Just a lot of good facial expressions and pointing.

It was easy for Charlie 8 to communicate with Jerky. Growing up, he’d had a deaf friend who lived down the bayou. Sometimes, he’d take him fishing in the beat-up skiff his family used to run to the gas station and the market. Talking was an interruption to fishing anyway so somebody being deaf wasn’t an impediment to bringing in a mess of good-size catfish. Charlie 8’s friend, whose name was Cisco, wasn’t nearly the hideaway person that Jerky was but he stayed out of school pretty much, only going when the police came to give his mother a ticket for him being truant. Then he’d go for a few days before he disappeared again. It was just too hard to be there. Charlie 8 understood that, but most people just thought Cisco was deaf and weird.

Jerky stepped out from behind the low bushes and gave Charlie 8 just the slightest smile of greeting. Then, she gave a thumbs up and pointed at him as if to say, “You?”

“Okay.” And then he looked to the skies and shook his hands around his head, trying to act out things being crazy and Jerky nodded.

They sat down on logs that had been arranged for form a V around a makeshift firepit. It was quiet while Charlie 8 took his tarp out of his pack. He looked around to find the best spot to construct his shelter for the night. He didn’t know where Jerky stayed. He was pretty sure she wouldn’t stay near him. Just hang for a while and then leave. That’s what she did. Although once in a while she told him things, gave him little tips that helped him, gave him tiny presents, like cookies she’d found left behind by picnickers.

Jerky knew Charlie 8 had been arrested. She’d been watching from her perch above the encampment where he was staying with the four regulars. She figured it had to do with Jacob getting killed. She thought the cops might try to blame her. She’d had run-ins with Jacob, mostly when she snuck into one of the bathrooms in the park and tried to stay there overnight. She just needed to get inside sometimes, especially in January when that wind came whipping across the plains and the snow was piled up in the woods.

Jerky, still sitting on the log, folded her hands on her lap and watched Charlie 8 tie up his tarp to make a shelter for the night. She had a whole tent, but he didn’t know that. Everyone thought she just flitted around but, no, she had a place. They just didn’t know where it was. Even the Sheriff. Even Jacob.

She had been in the woods for years. She was fifty now, she thought, so it had to be at least ten years, maybe fifteen. It was so hard to keep track. The early years especially were a blur. That was when she was still using. Those times were evil and wicked, the things she had to do to get what she needed so she resolved long ago to erase all of it from her mind and had largely succeeded. One could refuse to think of certain things. That’s what she trained herself to do.

Getting clean wasn’t a choice. She just ran out of options. She couldn’t get the money she had to buy any junk. No heroin dealer would even look at her. So, her friend at the time, Gus Blue, sat her down and told her she’d have to stop. That was before she went deaf, when she could still talk and listen and have a conversation.

Gus took her into the woods and sat with her for days while she puked and thrashed around and yelled out that she was dying. She begged him to find her a hit – of anything – but he just sat stirring a fire and bringing her cups of tea he made from boxes the senior center had thrown out when they redid their kitchen. Tea doesn’t go stale, he said.

Jerky tapped Charlie 8 on the shoulder. He stopped tying his tarp and turned. She pointed at Ace’s camp across the lake. Both of them watched the four men – Ace, Beverly, Johnson, and Clark – moving around the camp, talking loud enough so the sounds of their voices carried across the water. And the two women were still there, sitting on camp chairs chatting like they were at a family barbecue. Those must be the two extra people he’d seen earlier. Two women – who the heck were they?

Jerky pointed again. Motioned with her fingers someone walking into camp. Charlie 8 shook his head. If his phone was charged, he could write her a question and she could answer. But the phone had gone dead sitting on the shelf at the jail and it would take all day tomorrow to find a place to charge it.

“What, Jerky?” he asked, drawing a question mark in the air.

Jerky grabbed a long stick, knelt down and smoothed a space in the dirt. In the dirt she drew the four tents across the lake and the six people who were there right now. And then she drew a moon and stars and a seventh person standing next to one of the tents.

“Who’s that?” Charlie 8 pointed to the seventh man.

Jerky wrote B-A-D in the dirt.

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NaNoWriMo is a national novel writing challenge. 50,000 words by the end of November. This year, my husband, Howard Snyder, and I are collaborating on a mystery novel. You are invited to read, comment, suggest plot lines, laugh at our folly, or cover your eyes and run to the next blog to read. Either way, we’re going to keep at it this November until we run out of gas, which could be tomorrow. We can only hope.