D.E. Bartley Scifi sunday's with the Hipriestess

Beginnings
--- In this life there are no beginnings, only departures

After killing a little time shooting 8-ball and discussing God around a beer-soaked bar with a bunch of Yuppies and bikers, I drift out of the Irish American club and into the dull, rainy streets of a Kearny Saturday night. The town is silent at 2 am in the morning.

My name is Swifty. I drive a taxi for Schuyler cab, the graveyard shift, on the weekends. When I was a kid I wanted to be a pilot, but just the thought of flying, brought on a dizziness I still don't understand. My mind simply could not picture things from a great height. So I drive. Leaping back and forth across town mile after mile of relentless driving until my mind shuts down and I work myself into some kind of altered state where something clean and untainted begins to appear; a kind of curtain that temporarily separates my empty life from chaos, the motion keeping me alive. Day after day of playing out the fucked-up implications of a normal life destination, even someone elses, giving me a purpose to live another day.

My cab is just up the street, and when I walk back to where its parked, there's a guy waiting in the rain. A dark apparition carrying a beat-up old briefcase, emaciated, wearing a stained black raincoat about two sizes too big, blank eyes sunk back in his skull, totally oblivious to the shitty weather conditions. With his long hair and beard, he reminds me of one of those pathetic pictures of Jesus I used to see in Sunday school when I was a kid.

"Are you waiting for me?", I ask.

Yeah, can we get in out of the rain? he says.

Sure thing., I say, and press the remote device on my key ring to unlock the doors.

As soon as we're inside, I start the engine and turn on the windshield wipers. When I glance in the rearview mirror, I catch a good look at the man's face as he lights a cigarette. There's a tattoo on the back of his hand, I cant quite make out. It looks like some kind of reptile. I usually don't allow smoking in the cab, but something about this guy makes me fore-go the rules.

When he gets the cigarette lit, he leans back in the seat, catches my eye in the mirror, and says, "Swifty, Ive got five hundred dollars in my pocket, and its all your's if youll drive me to New York, to the Tapan zee bridge."

Using my first name catches me by surprise, until it occurs to me he's noticed my name on the hacks license posted on the dash. Upstate New York is about 90 miles from Kearny, but five hundred dollars is a lot of cash, and I don't mind the drive. I reach over, turn off the meter, and say, "Dude, you just bought yourself a driver."

“How long to get there?” he asks.

“In this rain, about an hour or so.”
_____

I take rt -21 North to I-95 starting to feel pretty good about heading somewhere out of the ordinary, meantime Jesus hasn't said a word. So just to break the ice, I ask where he lives in New York , and he tells me he keeps a room downtown. When I ask about family, he just sits and stares out the window.

The only other words spoken over the next fifty miles was when he leaned up and asked if I would turn down the radio. I bit my tongue, turned the radio off, and drove on through the rainy night toward our destination, wondering what kind of misery and squalor could account for this pitiful pilgrim.
_____

About a mile from the bridge, on highway 9 , I ask Mr. Jesus where he wants to go when we get there, and he says, Take me to the top of the Tapan Zee Bridge..

"Did you say the top?"

"That's what I said, Swifty."

"What the fuck for!"

He looks out the window for a couple of seconds then says, "To kill the snake."

"What goddamn snake? Are you mad?"

What's madness, Swifty, but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? The snake has gone with me everywhere I go., he says, …and tonight I have a special place to take him.

"Fuck this man, Im not taking you up there.," I say.

At which point he produces a pistol from his coat pocket, leans forward, points it directly toward my right ear and says, “Swifty my old friend, we made a deal.”
_____

As soon as we reach a spot somewhere close to the highest point of the bridge, he leans forward, drops the five hundred dollar fare onto the front seat, and says, "Right here is good enough. I stop the cab, he opens the backdoor, gets out and walks directly to the railing. He climbs up, looks once, straight up into sky, and dives up and out as far as his scrawny legs will push him, a kind of clumsy swan dive. He seems almost to be flying for a second. Then the outward motion stops and he falls suddenly and silently along with a million raindrops toward the Hudson River as it goes about its watery business below.

Meanwhile, I've been sitting, mesmerized, watching the whole thing unfold through the passenger window of my cab, living every second of what seems to be a new kind of extremely realistic television. I consider going to the police, but quickly change my mind.

I know I'm not up to coming back across this bridge again tonight, so I decide to get a room in a motel on the other side, and lay low until morning.
_____

I pull into a parking spot in front of the Tarrytown Motel, switch off the engine, open the door and start to get out. That's when I notice the briefcase in the backseat. I get back in the cab, close the door and turn on the inside light. I reach over the seat, retrieve the beat-up briefcase, and slide open the zipper inside, a stack of papers held together with a metal fastener.

I remove the clip and read the first page. As I browse through the sheets, I discover that each one is a part of the same unfinished story. One after another, the tale of a decorated Vietnam war veteran and his exploits in 'Nam, and whole chapters about our group of guys, stories about our troop, stories of the day I died. At the very bottom of the briefcase, I find a wrinkled photograph. It shows a group of very young guys standing in front of a sandbagged bunker in what had to be Vietnam.

Suddenly, a fit of nausea washes over me as the blood rushes to my head. My mind runs like a wild dog as I struggle to hold the picture steady in my shaking hand. Standing at the center of the photo trying to look dangerous, is Lance Corporal Edward Renshaw surrounded by a group of guys he once knew and loved as brothers: Outcasts, poor white trash, unfortunate sons, and comrades-in-arms.

As I scan the faces of these mannish-boys, the names come spinning back. Forty years fall away like so much mold and mildew. And there, standing at the far right, looking off into the distance the lost old man I'd just watched go over the rail.

Our savior, the one person in that long forgotten place we had all looked up to. He was on his third tour of duty in that unimaginable shithole, and he knew how to stay alive. We called him the snake because of the way he could slither through the jungle without making a sound. We hung on every word he had to say, and when the shit hit the fan we stuck to him like blood-sucking leeches. The snake was untouchable, a goddamn voodoo man.
_____

I put the papers and photo back into the briefcase and closed it up. Holding it under my arm, I open the door, and step out into the early-morning drizzle. I look up toward the sky, and watch the gray clouds pushing past. Tiny rain-rivers wash the tears down my face as I stand in the perfect quiet, and try to work some angle of reference.

I should have recognized him, even after all the sorry-ass years had taken their toll. I should have noticed the eyes. But if I had, would I have tried to stop him, or just let him go on and do what he had to do drag that gigantic snake over the edge.

Waves of confusion break against my brain, and I wonder if the same madness that took him is waiting in the wings for all of us. I could only hope that he too went to that universal love at the end of the tunnel and found his own redemption... But here at last, is what
I had always been waiting for...the manuscript, in my hands waiting to be completed. Funny I too, had started and stopped many times my own rendition of fighting and dying in the Jungles of 'Nam. The Snake's gift to me was learning to survive in the worst of situations, and now I would do him justice and finish this book, for him, for me, for all of us.

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