Part 2

Scary looking men had hissed from dark shadows and somewhere in the distance someone moaned and someone else shrieked. Rubber wheels squeaked and nurses attired all in white like ghosts silently padded up and down the halls. People sat still with dead eyes like zombies on the nearby benches. A very frightening place, with one exception.

He’d gotten a glimpse of the kids that made it their home. Josiah had spied a parched grassy square just outside of the glass paned doors opening out to the back of the massive building. There, beneath the Gothic arched overhangs of the immense granite building there’d been a playground enclosed with a rusting sagging chain length fence.

He’d not known at the time that the playground wasn’t much, a dilapidated swing set, a bent slide and a deflated tether ball at the end of a rope. Josiah had only seen playgrounds and hordes of playing children on television. Momma kept him at her side as much as she could, complaining copiously when he’d befriended the sharecroppers boy down the dirt track from their trailer. She’d walloped Josiah with an electrical cord and ranted loudly about the evils of race mixing, calling his new friend a ‘neeg-grah’ and ‘pick-a-ninny’, both words Josiah had never heard before. After that whipped Josiah learned to keep his companionship at playtime with The Dark Man.

But the sight of all those children playing tether ball, running, laughing, playing on the battered old seesaw and swings had thrilled Josiah to no end. And from the depths of his loneliness he dared give voice to his desires for friends. He turned to his Momma and begged, “Momma, please, please, can I go play wit’ those kids?”

His mother paused in her task of clumsily applying her new tube of lipstick before a cracked mirror in the lobby and turned to him, puzzled, “Whatever for, sugah?”

Josiah didn’t know exactly what was wrong with his question, with what he wanted but he could feel his mother’s disapproval already. He muttered out, “Because I want to..” looking miserable at the scuffed too big tennis shoes his Momma bought at the Salvation Army store.

“Iffen you wanted te go hop off the top of the Empire State Buildin’ do you think I oughta let you?” Momma had queried, a deep frown forming on the puffy surface of her moon shaped face.

He couldn’t speak, looking from his second hand shoes to the kids still capering about joyously just outside the doors.

Momma stood up straight, and placed her fisted hands on her hips before thundering, “You think I’ma gonna let you ass-so-cee-ate with a loada crack pot offspring and mental dee-feck-tiffs you gotta another thing comin’! You know why they put those kids ina here? They bad! They bad little kids nobody ever wanted. You wanna be like them? They evil rubs off on you, like cooties and the next thin’ you knows I’ll havta sign you in here for the rest of your LIFE! You wanna live here?”

People were starting to stare now. The snooty looking lady at the reception desk paused, telephone receiver forgotten in her hand, while still others visibly drew back from Josiah and his Momma. “No, Momma, No!” he whispered forcefully, silent tears sliding down his cheeks.

Caught in his long ago memories Josiah muttered, “No Momma, No!”

The elderly bus driver Mo turned around and gruffly barked, “What? What?? Do you need something Mr. Smith?” before snapping back forward, eyes to the road.

For one long moment Josiah Smith stared at the back of the bus driver, taking in the grizzled grey hair sheared Marine short. The more Josiah looked the more fixated he became with the pulsing vein on the side of Mo’s neck. Oh how easy it would be to reach over with an iron grip and squeeze, squeeze all the life of out Mo, watch as his face purpled and horror entered his dying eyes at the knowledge that this smiling genial younger man was robbing him of his very life.

“Do it, do it now. The bus will go out of control and kill all of them..” came from inside Josiah, whispers from The Dark Man. Equally quick came the calming voice calling, “This man only wants to help you. Don’t end his life, you’re better than that Josiah.”

Josiah sighed, giving in to his angel and he muttered, “No Mo.. Nothings wrong.. I was just napping and having a weird dream.. That’s all.”

Mo looked at him like he was insane before turning back to the road and lighting up another Marlboro, hacking a big nasty smokers cough. The cough of a lifetime sucking down filtered cigs.

It seemed like much of Josiah’s life had been spent in a haze of cigarette smoke that was not his own. Sometimes, like now, the smell became overwhelming, reminding him of the years he spent in that stinking cramped mobile home with his grotesque mother. He remembered how it had permeated all of his clothing and books. Sometimes the kids at school had teased him, called him the Marlboro Man. He bet they were all sorry now, sorry they’d been so mean to him through the years now that he was a tv star and musical artist. How many of them had purchased his freshman CD after he won the American Star competition and bragged that they went to school with him? How many pretended to strangers to be best buds with him? Fuckin’ Marlboro Man.

One of the later episodes of “American Star” had been filmed in his home town of Chattawah, Mississippi. Cheering crowds with signs greeted him and for one small instant Josiah knew something of what the Beatles must have felt when they first deplaned in New York city for their first American Tour. No one called him any of the names they’d have for him through the years, no shouts of Freak, no gibes about his mother being fatter than Elvis, no reminders of his years being tormented by the town bullies. For once he was the returning prodigal son arriving in triumph. Josiah didn’t know if he should laugh or rale at these freaking hypocrites. Instead he’d simply smiled and waved for the crowds and the cameras of “American Star”

Even Josie Tutwiler, the prom queen who’d laughed in his face the one time he’d dared to speak to her, was gushing about how great he was. The moronic cretins on the football squad were filmed telling all of America that Josiah Smith was their best friend and the pride of Chattawah, a favorite son.

The mayor presented him with a key to this shit hole burg before giving a speech expressing civic pride in Josiah. The same mayor who’d called him a ‘snot nosed punk’ back when he was working at the local barbeque juke joint bussing tables. Another hypocrite.

That night as the mayor slept Josiah had done a very bad thing. But he’d done it so skillfully that the local cops and coroner ruled that the mayor had died of cardiac arrest in the night.

It wasn’t the first time Josiah had given in to the voice of The Dark Man in his mind and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. But he had to admit the little episode had been vastly satisfying, powerful even. Certainly he’d felt powerful when he’d been astride the mayor’s prone body as the older heavier man had been bucking like a sunfish on a lure. As Josiah pressed the feather pillow over the other man’s face he’d felt like God. It was the ultimate high he felt when suddenly the large man stopped fighting and went utterly limp.

Afterward he’d lifted a beer from the fridge of his victim and he’d savored his payback. Josiah sat across the room from the bed in a floral sprigged wingback chair, drinking in not just the beer but all that he’d done that night.

He never could sleep after gigs and sometimes this was the perfect nightcap. As Josiah slipped out of the back door he could feel tiredness starting to overtake him. He’d sleep well for the first time in months tonight. Evading his handlers and keepers for a final visit with an old enemy was the tricky part.

Josiah chuckled at the look of surprise on the mayor’s face when he’d tickled the other man awake with a feather under his nose before proceeding to kill him. The man’s last words had been a surprised, “You!” Laughing Josiah had lowered his handsome face even closer to Mayor Jenkins and said, “Surprised? Payback is a big dirty bitch.”

The truth was that during his late high school years when Josiah had been bussing tables Mayor Jenkins had made The Squeal his regular stop. Jenkins been sleeping with one of the waitresses, smutty and middle aged Bernice, since before he’d placed his long suffering wife Millie in a rest home. Jenkins would show up at The Squeal and hang around man handling the waitresses, pinching butts and lording it over everyone there that he was the richest guy in town and the mayor. Josiah had been on the receiving end of Mayor Jenkin’s jokes and rants too many times as the only son of the town’s poorest oddballs. Many, many times Josiah had dreamed of what it would be like to choke the life out of Mayor Jenkins.

A methodic search of the late mayor’s home had only turned up some ancient porn and worthless mementos of a life lived in this tiny burg. It was one of the few times Josiah took no souvenir of his kill. He laughed at the thought of the silly looking Playboys from the 1960s he’d found in the mayor’s closet.

Mo turned back again and said to Josiah, “You oughtta try to hit the rack for awhile. You’re in for a long drive today.”

Nodding his agreement Josiah got up and made his way back to the small private bedroom in the very back of the bus. His privileged status as the headliner earned him his own tiny room instead of a single bunk with only a curtain separating him from the drummers farts and the snores of the others.