A Chance to Forget

Bill and I, after a long night where we had played six quick games and were pretty loaded, started talking about life. He had been sipping whiskey all day and now with his lips liberated from a few more quick shots, told me about why he was out here in the woods alone.

"A man gets forgotten as he gets older," Bill quietly said, staring into the fire that warmed his small yurt. "The world needs strong young men. The ones that have passion, enthusiasm, drive, lust to chase skirts. Lust for life." No glasses anymore. We were past that. He took a drink from the bottle and passed it to me. The coals glowed. No other light entered our den.

"A man gets to where he hasn't cared about anything in so long, he no longer cares about himself either." Bill didn't load this comment with melancholy, despair, or a request for sympathy. This was not a comment you replied to. This was a truth, and a deep one.

The bottle changed hands continually. I was drunk. Silence as nature re-entered the yurt. A moonless, dark sky outside. Bill flipped something towards me. The coals, deep and choked out by the mounds of ash, barely illuminated the small black book.

"This is for you," Bill said. He stood. Awaited no reply. Bill walked off, bottle in hand, left me there by the fire. I looked at our chess game, discarded, pawns lining the way to take a bullet for their king.

I stood. I walked over to the chessboard, lifted the cover. Pawns, rooks, queens and kings were swept off their feet in a climactic earthquake, barreling towards their wooden home.

The pieces piled on top of the paper bag that held the money. $20,000. His monologue and departure had said nothing about it, but didn't need to. He was leaving it to me, and so now I had the only memento of Bill's wife's death.

I looked back at the light flickering off the little book Bill had thrown towards me. Miniscule, nondescript. I wondered what it would contain. I took it in hand and went to bed.

The sun peaked up late the next morning. Cold morning frost numbed my cheeks and settled into the yurt, swallowing up the heat from the fire. The bright sun was sharp in my eyes, yet it carried no heat. Deceptive, this light and vibrancy, for the temperature was rarely above ten degrees. The coldness everywhere was complete, and there was nothing to be done against it.

The yurt was dead silent. Bill was nowhere to be seen. His bed appeared to have not been slept in. His car was not in the driveway. Somehow it was clear that I would not see him again. My best friend, perhaps because he was my only friend in the last five years, had left without a single utterance of where he was going, what he was doing, and why.

The chess board sat bare, my gift, or maybe just something that Bill didn't want, left inside of it. He had told me about it once. The $20,000 he had gotten from the driver of the Chevy Tahoe. The bag of money thrust towards him, given at such a momentary and hurtful time that the grieving man who accepted it didn't even understand what was being given or what it meant that he was being given it.

"People can buy anything with cash," Bill had spoke as heat had filled his sweat lodge. Curling between the gusts of minute air movement, smoke wafted between us. Blistering heat and smoke, that was Bill's prescription to any worldly affliction.

The sweat lodge had been uncustomarily full of stuff. Bill had gathered together everything he had of Gloria's. Her high heels, her paintings, her favorite pillow, it was all there in the sweat lodge with us. He had the pile of money sitting in front of the door, where we had to step over it in order to get into the lodge. It was purposely in the way.

We had sat there with the fire glowing and the rocks getting red hot. The belongings sat, uncaring while we sweated in their presence.

When the accident happened, it just so happened that the other driver was a drug runner. He just so happened to be coming back from a drug trade and had cash in his car. He shoved the money into Bill's hands and took off. He did not do it to bribe Bill or because he cared about the car damage. It was because he hated inconveniencing people and knew the accident was his fault. $20,000 meant nothing to this man and money was given, and no thoughts were spent about the woman, dead inside the vehicle.

Bill was in a state of shock, the money sitting there in his hands. He didn't know what it was for, he didn't know who the man was, he didn't even know what the status of his wife was. He walked back to the car and lost consciousness shortly thereafter, the shock catching up with him.

Waking up, coming to terms, fighting and crying and forcing Gloria out of the car. Gloria, replaced with a bag of money, dead weight just like the bills in the bag. A bag full of blood money. Blood money that he kept, shoved in a corner somewhere usually. He knew that in the end, this man would never get justice for what he had done, and he would get no other compensation. So Bill tried to forget the money, he tried not to look it in the face.

Now the money was mine, left by a strange man I'd barely known.

I opened the black book. Gloria's journal. It fit that I should have the last two things that connected Bill to Gloria. I guess this was Bill's way of admitting, finally, it was over.