Conrad Jones

Conrad Jones sat in his prospector canoe. The calluses on his palms armored his hands against the sharp blades of wood that flaked off the weather-beaten paddles; each slow rhythmic stroke brought him closer to campsite 80. Bob, who was resting peacefully at his feet, sighed as she moved her slightly squashed muzzle from the edge of the canoe to Conrad’s knee. His gaze traveled down to her aging face covered in white fur and a once-black blotch encasing her left eye. Upon looking up, the old man spotted two canoes, each with two figures in them. The laughter of a child rang sharply in Conrad’s ears despite the spider web of long white hairs that grew within them. Bob, who long ago would have jumped to her feet, wiggling her rump in place of a docked tail, capsizing the canoe and sending both herself and Conrad into the chilly water, merely raised her eyebrows and twitched her right ear. The child’s laughter sounded again, carried by a zephyr across pulsing water. It was the laughter of a young girl. The man in the canoe with her was saying something inaudible to Conrad but that was making it impossible for the child to row, for she was double over her paddles in fits of hysteria.

An image, dusty with lack of use, floated to the frontal cortex of Conrad’s mind; a small head, covered in tangled blonde hair, uneven with her discovery of a pair of scissors Conrad had kept in the top right drawer of his mahogany desk. Arms, no thicker than the sapling of a maple tree, protruded from a bright orange life jacket.The small muscles in her shoulders moved under her young, sunblock lathered skin as she rowed. Her shining face turned back to look at Conrad; her lips parted to expose one front tooth much too large for her small innocent face and the other missing completely. Her light blue eyes gleamed with excitement as she pointed at a heron flying low over the water.

Suddenly, the sky went dark, the air was cold, and stars popped out above houses far too big for anyone’s good. Street lamps flooded a freshly plowed suburban road, shedding light upon the corpses of deflated snowmen and reindeer. The skeletons of string lights turned off for the night hung like giant cobwebs across bay windows and around brightly colored front doors. The face that now swam in front of Conrad’s vision through the clouds of condensation exhaled from his lungs was that of a young woman. The excitement in her eyes was replaced with terror; her hair, darkened with age, was matted with something black and wet, her festive red dress which had stretched to her chin mere hours earlier was now torn and held up only by one bloodstained and shaking hand.

The weight of Bob’s head on Conrad’s thigh lifted, jarring him out of his thoughts. She was looking at him with her mismatched eyes, her irises contracted with the sunlight that now streamed through her pupils which sent the image of an old man with rough hands and a scratchy beard to her brain. Conrad shook himself; Bob always knew when he got lost in his mind. In his moment of lapsed attention, Conrad had veered slightly off his course to campsite 80. He altered his direction and before long was pulling his canoe up the muddy bank. Bob stood at precisely the moment the bow of the boat scraped the lake bed and leaped with surprising vitality into the shallow water. She trotted to the edge of the twenty-two foot radius carved out from the woods for human comfort, pressing her snout to the ground in search of the appropriate place to squat. Once the canoe was safely grounded, Conrad began to unload his gear; a two-man tent from a manufacturer that had long since been out of business, a battered portaging pack filled with clothes, a water purifier, a headlamp, a sleeping bag and pad, canned beans, dog food, and an old yellowing copy of the children's book “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster.

After the last stake was hammered into the forest floor, the sleeping bag laid out over the uneven ground, and the tree from which the old man would hang his food was chosen, Conrad parked his tired backside on the largest, flattest boulder at the water's edge. He liked to imagine that it had become flatter over the years from the weight of his slight frame and the friction from his worn jeans slowly eroding its surface. Bob, who had found a particularly comfortable spot on the needle-covered earth to rest her old bones, raised her body from the ground with a sigh and walked over to sit next to Conrad, resting her right cheek against his hip. Conrad’s hand floated down absently to scratch behind Bob’s ear which stood on end moments after the weathered fingers rested upon the aging fur. The family with the young girl (which had been out of sight for some time now) were coming around the bend of the inlet in which campsite 80 was situated. Conrad now saw that the second canoe held a woman and a teenage boy; the man in the boat with the young girl tipped his head in greeting to Conrad, who in turn raised the hand that was not preoccupied by Bob’s ear before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a heavily squashed pack of American Spirits. He placed a bent and wrinkled cigarette between his yellowing teeth, lit a match torn for a book shoved into the cigarette pack, and gazed across the glassy water as he took a long drag. The conifer trees stretched taller in their wonky reflections than the original documents that stood before him. How odd and deceiving the world could be; the tallest mountain could appear as an ant hill, an imposing cityscape nothing more than lumps of concrete and steel.

Conrad sat on his boulder. His fingers, which appeared permanently dirty from the wood stain that had embedded itself in the deep cracks within his calluses, rhythmically scratched at Bob’s ear. She closed her eyes against the tie dye sky and pressed into her partner's bony hip. The sun had sunk below the trees, casting them into deep shadow. A mass of darkness topped by spiky needles silhouetted against a watermelon tangerine oasis. Conrad inhaled the scent of the cooling air and stale smoke wafting from the half burnt cigarette that rested slackly between the index and middle fingers on his right hand. His eyelids gently closed and his head tilted ever so slightly up toward the darkening sky, allowing the soft breeze to caress the wrinkled leathery skin on his tired face.

Conrad’s hands, now young and soft, were covered in the man's blood. The object that sat limply in his left palm was small and wormlike. His black leather chair, that he used to love to sit in, doing work he used to think was important, held the naked, lifeless figure of Keith Monroe. Keith was the son of Herold Monroe, a well known attorney in the state of Colorado. Subsequently, in spite of insurmountable evidence, previous accusations, and the fact that Keith was an all around entitled cocksucker, the young man was never tried for the death of a young woman by the name of Elizabeth Jones. Blood pooled in Keith’s lap. The look of terror Conrad had witnessed in his daughter's eyes fourteen months, one week, and three days ago, was still etched in the lineless face of the wretched man. Conrad gripped the vile object in his hand so tightly it might have popped before he leaned over and forced it down the young man’s throat. Now he really was a cocksucker. Conrad turned and strolled toward the doorway of his office, placing a steady hand on the black metal knob before turning around to survey the scene he had created. The mahogany desk was in disarray, papers and blood covered its surface and in the center sat a pair of blood soaked scissors, taken from the top drawer on the right hand side. The light blue carpet, chosen by Conrad’s now ex-wife (and disliked strongly by Conrad himself) was irreversibly stained by large dark splotches. Conrad grinned, turned the knob of the office door and exited for what he knew would be the last time.

Bob’s rough, wet tongue lapped at Conrad’s cheek. He had not responded to the weight of her two front paws on his upper thigh or her warm breath on his ear. He opened his eyes, the sky was dark although the sun had not completely set. He could still see the soft blue glow of the large star arching above the treetops like a halo. He looked into Bob’s concerned face; she really was such a good dog. He smiled and said to her in a low voice, scratchy and grizzled from lack of use, “let’s go to bed”. Conrad crossed the campsites and unzipped the fly surrounding his tent. With his feet in the small vestibule created by the space between the fly and the entrance, he removed his old boots and slipped his long, spindly legs inside before zipping both the fly and the tent shut. He crawled into his sleeping bag and fitted his headlamp over his thick, graying hair. He flicked on the light and picked up the copy of “The Phantom Tollbooth”; it had been Elizabeth's favorite. Conrad rested his weary head on the pile of clothes he had brought for the week. He closed his eyes and allowed himself one more memory of a child with straight blonde hair, so unlike his own, with her light blue eyes trying to stay open for just one more chapter as she lay snuggled in her sleeping bag beside him. As he opened his eyes from the bittersweet twinge of memory, he opened the book and read aloud to Bob, who had stretched out on the sleeping pad Conrad had laid for her.

Hours went by and Conrad had long since removed his headlamp and closed his deep brown eyes to rest. No more faces or blood-soaked chairs stained his eyelids; his time for remembering had passed. A barn owl, searching for companionship, hooted softly in the distance. Conrad Jones, now known by very few in a little town outside of Hamilton Ontario as Terrance Monroe, slept peacefully in an old-two man tent in the center of Campsite 80. Bob, who had always been Bob, snored gently beside him.