Cacti Chapter Three

The clouds finally open up on Odessa, Texas, releasing thousands if not millions of tiny kamikaze droplets hurtling to the parched ground below. This is rain. Not a shower or a drizzle, but the rain that Odessa waits for every year. It will continue to fall for hours to come, and once back in '96 it lasted days. That was a particularly bad year. This year is a bit more mild, so people only expect about 10 to 15 hours of downpour. The amazing part is, as soon as you step out your door and open your screen, you would swear it hadn't bled an ounce.

The ground eats it all.

The Old Man sat and listened to the rain, even though there was no window to hear it fall against. There was no ventilation shaft through which any outside event could echo in. There was no orifice in the entire room, save for the door, which remained closed and did not even come close to fresh air when opened. The only piece of furniture was the chair, occupied by it's final resident. It was an old featherback chair, but no singular detail would constitute its age. There were no tears, and no patches. It did not complain when the Old Man shifted. The chair simply maintained its place and duty in the universe, not uttering a sound. Yet after constant exposure the chair seemed to almost scream old, and then drive whatever connoisseur that happened to be inspecting it mad from lack of reason.

But no one inspected the chair.

It was the Old Man's chair.

Ya dig?

White spotted fur from some larger feline ran up the sloping sides. Perhaps some barbarous caveman had slain its original owner high up on a mountain people now climbed for fun. Perhaps the caveman wasn't killing for food or defending himself either. Perhaps every other caveman, cavewoman, and cavechild had either left the mountain or starved. And perhaps this one man was left, blind by bloodlust, killing his opponent only to stand over the body and savor the steam rising from it.
The Old Man leaned forward. The red cushion underneath him bulged back but gave no sound. He rested his elbows just above his knees. and for but a moment froze. At only a glance it could have been possible that the end of those armrests were skulls and the Old Man some horrid cannibal king, but of course not. This is the new millennium, we have the Food Network to tell us what to eat. His left hand twitched once. Still.

Twice. Still.

Slowly his left hand glides through nothingness to his right, and begins to lightly trace the veins under the skin on top of his hand. His eyes begin to lose focus, and he feels every curve and rise. Back and forth his left hand scans the other. Up and down, back and forth. Eventually he turns his right hand over and begins tracing the veins under his forearm. Up and down. Back and forth.

The Old Man sat in the darkness, listening to the rain.

And waited.

---
The smell prevailed over all of Vincent's thoughts, and he barely made it through 2nd Period before he hung up on learning for the day. He cut out through the double doors with the crash bars in the back and halfway expected to see Tommy standing (or levitating) there like some cheap action movie scene where the gun-toting hero finds just the subtly-powerful monk he needs to stop the bald antagonist with all the financial connections.
Instead he found Todd. Again.
Todd Asnew had invited himself to replace Tommy after his disappearance. After all, their names were almost alike, right? That was his introduction. Vincent found that to be a profoundly rude thing to do, but discovered that in addition to a lack of manners, Todd also possessed an indefatigable will and refused to leave any situation he found himself a part in. He let Vincent by only to bounce around and badger him from every other direction as they strided down the sidewalk.
"Didja hear? Tommy's back! Can you believe it?"
"Yes."
"Well aren't you going to go see him?"
"That's just what I was getting around to."
"Oh, well I heard he was wearing some Dali-Llama cloak thing."
"Yep."
"What would he be doing with a cloak like that?"
"Wearing it I guess."
"Very funny. So, do you know where he is?"
"I figured he was still at Avery's."
"Yeah of course! You all used to go there almost every day! Good thinking!" Todd broke off into a run, his busted Keds creating little clouds on the ground like an astronaut with each landing.
That was a lie.
Vincent knew Tommy wasn't still at Mr. Avery's, he had visual proof of the fact. He didn't know where Tommy actually was, but felt confident that he had sent Todd to the one place he wasn't. Vincent thought that bringing Todd to Tommy might make him disappear again.

So he walked.
He walked up the main street in Cosavo with his hands in his pockets, departing only so he wouldn't pass in front of Avery's. As he left the store behind, he thought he saw Todd sitting on a stool drinking a chocolate shake. He knew he would not be bothered again.
His confidence in Tommy's locating powers began to waver once school let out and was almost gone around the time every other Cosavo family was sitting down to a Cosavo dinner of Hungry Man and the Wheel. The first stars were appearing in the pale sky when Vincent finally found Tommy not ten steps behind him, walking in his footprints.
"Did you find it?" Vincent heard himself ask almost involuntarily. He hadn't been thinking about it, but now the question seemed to seethe and writhe around in his mind as if he had been calculating it for years.
A smile began to spread across Tommy's face, one so obvious Vincent thought for an instant that Tommy may have returned crazier than before. Then:
"Yes."

---
The light continued to fade as the two friends stood like gunslingers at showdown. Slowly the smile left Tommy's face. What replaced it was a look of dawning urgency, and as he drew Vincent through the night his eyes began to betray the same darting attention field rabbits exhibit all their short lives. Vincent hoped that all the random directions would eventually lead them to one of their homes. Instead what came up before him in a surprising shaft of open moonlight where they stopped was another flat patch that would normally be passed over like every other square inch of public Cosavo, save for the little white flag flapping with the night breeze.
It was the place where they had buried the bird all those seasons back. It seemed impossible that the little white marker Vincent had stolen from someone's property line was still in the ground, but there it was, shooting back and forth in it's small patch of free motion with the speed of a hummingbird. Tommy seemed to wait for the location to drip its meaning into Vincent's mind, then pulled him down to sit opposite him a little ways away from the flag.
He hadn't noticed just how haggard Tommy had become until they both sat Indian-style on the hard earth. There were lines on his face that should not predominate so much on someone his age. His eyes still had that genius gleam and secrecy, but now they were laced with an expression of unwinding, of pushing a degree that you can't keep up and know you won't have to. If only he had stuck with the oboe.
"Clarence."
"Clarence?"
"The bird. I forgot to tell you but I named him Clarence before I killed him. I don't know if he had a bird name among his bird friends, but I called him Clarence. It would've been a terrible thing to die without having a name, don't you think?"
"Terrible thing, " was all Vincent could reply. Now Tommy's whole body seemed to shake with its condition.
"You...You have to go to. You have to s-. You have to see it, " sweat began to trickle down his cheeks but his eyes never left Vincent's face, save one glance into the night. Then his next train of thought came to him, " I don't mean to say that you have a choice really, that I'm asking you to go wondering into the desert and disappear like I did. No, no, I highly doubt yours will be the same as mine."
"My what?"
"-All I'm saying is that you need to get ready. Prepared, mentally. I'd wager that some pretty messed up stuff is going to happen soon, and I-" again a glance over his shoulder, outside their oval of communication, "You just need to be ready. For anything." Something from his unknown past reawakened in Tommy, and his face cracked a wry smile. "Just remember, 'At the end of the world is a bundle of sticks.' "
"What?"
"A bundle of sticks."
Tommy let his body relax and fall back a bit, and even let out a few chirps of laughter. Vincent was, like most of his recent history, at a loss. At least one of them got it.
"Okay, can you find your way home from here?"
"Yeah. Remember, I've had another three years in this town while you've been off destinying or whatever."
"Very true. " He smiled, and they parted.

---
Tommy didn't linger on his way home, but his didn't sprint there either. He took time to catch a glimpse of the moon through the cloud cover, and once he paused to peek in on a family that still had their lights on. He let his hands rest in the numerous folds of his most recent attire, and anyone that saw him (though no one did) would've pegged him as content in an instant. And all the time under his breath he muttered with that same unbelieving smile, " A bundle of sticks. "
He was waiting on the steps when Tommy came in sight of his house. He had removed his sunglasses and slid them into his shirt pocket, though it was safe to assume that he had worn them until the last shed of sunlight had been phased out. Now his dust-powdered shoes kicked a bit as he sat up, for he had been laying with his upper body on the porch. Then he was fully upright, and saved Tommy the last few feet by calmly coming up to meet him.
" I'm sorry. I know people must be thrilled that I'm back, but I still don't play oboe for strangers."
"I don't want to hear you or your stinking oboe. You know good and well why I'm here."
"Nooo, I know good and well what you're going to do, but I haven't the slightest clue why you're here. Do you see the difference?"
"There is no difference."
Tommy let out a sigh and acquiesced to the moment. He lifted his hands, palm-up, in front of the man and smirked mildly.
"A bundle of sticks."
His parents found his limp body a few feet from their steps in the morning, his necked snapped. There was no trace of the man that nobody saw. When Vincent heard, because everything travels fast in a small town, he wasn't prepared. He wasn't ready. He sat and cried, and thought about Clarence.