Urban Waite - Far Cry - Absolution

He walked to the end of the block then stopped and stared into an empty window. He placed his hands to the glass and peered inside: dust and empty booths and barren tables. There had been a café here only a year before and he wondered now when it had closed and where the people who had owned it had gone. He walked a little more, then crossed the street. The bar sat there in front of him, just the same as it had always looked.

He walked up and saw the beer lights were off, a “Closed” sign sitting in the window. He set his bag down to the side of the door then walked along the outside. He could see only shadow and outlines of things through the dark windows. He stood there and thought it through. He was no fool and he’d never been one.

Holly had told him that Mary May and her brother had come down that very morning and he had sat and thought about that and he had thought about the fresh paint he’d seen there on the side of the small house. Wondering the whole while if it was the same house he had asked about the day before—the house in which Mary May had been.

Will also thought about how the bullshit alone could only be piled so high before one thing or another broke beneath its weight. He turned and looked back across the town. He saw that many of the buildings were boarded up now and he remembered a time when every one of them had been open and behind every door and every window was a business or a neighbor. He did not know when that had changed, and he did not know when he had stopped noticing, though he certainly noticed it now.

He put his hands to the window again and tried to see inside. There was nothing to see except his own mirrored face looking back at him. He moved back to where his bag sat. He put a hand out and tried the door. It was locked. He stepped back a little, turned again and walked the length of the bar and then, at the corner, he went down the side of the bar and came around the back.

There were trashcans there and a storage shed and halfway down he saw the wooden service door. He walked past the trashcans and tried the door. He was surprised at first when he found it was unlocked. He still carried his rifle with him and he took it off his shoulder now and held it in his hand. In no way did he think that he would use it, but he also was aware that he was going into someone else’s bar, that there might be some consequences for his actions.

He cracked the door and looked in on the kitchen that sat just behind the bar. Close by, just at the point where the white linoleum ended, he could see the wooden barroom floor. He could see chairs atop tables and the shadowed light that was let in through the darkened windows.

He could hear voices now and he stopped with his hand still on the doorknob. Inside and very close there was a man’s voice and then, softer now, a woman’s voice responding. Will leaned and pushed the door open then went inside.

Sitting at a stainless-steel prep table was a man, stocky, wearing a white chef’s coat, stained in many places. Just beside him, around the adjoining corner of the table was a young girl, who Will guessed could be no more than twenty-one. Both turned and stared at him, their conversation cut short.

The chef stood and Will shifted and moved the rifle, but then thought better of it, knowing now who stood before him, “Hello, Casey,” Will said. “You cook here now?”

The cook, who had been a few years behind Will at high school, took a step then stopped just at the head of the table. It was obvious he was still trying to determine what this was. A half second passed while the girl looked to Will then back at Casey. Finally, Casey said, “Will?”

THE ARTICLE WAS ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE LOCAL NEWSpaper. A paper that held little content usually, and that most in town stockpiled and simply used as fuel for their wood-burning stoves. The back section of The Chronicle was for selling tractors or fly-casting lessons, and the front section was mostly just pieces regarding the local weather, or the annual log jamboree, or what was going on that week at the VFW. Casey handed him the paper. He stood behind the bar and Janet, the waitress, sat a couple stools down and looked Will’s way.

“Saloon owner found dead,” Will said, reading the headline of the article aloud. He looked up at Casey. “Gary died?”

“Irene died two weeks before him.”

Will’s mind raced. He was thinking about them both. Gary and Irene. They were parents to Mary May and Drew. They were the owners of this bar. They were friends, or they had been until Will had gone and disappeared twelve years before.

“Last week we had the funeral for Gary,” Casey said. “A week before we had one for Irene. They’re out there in the cemetery, side by side. The grass hasn’t even had a chance to root.”

Will read the article. He looked back up at Casey then looked down the bar to Janet. “Where’s Mary May?” he asked. “Or Drew?”

“Drew?” Casey said. “We haven’t seen Drew in months, maybe even longer.”

“And Mary May?”

Janet spoke up, she was watching Casey as if maybe she should get permission, but then she ran her eyes to Will and said, “We haven’t seen her in a couple days. She closed the bar. She said for us to come back in and see her today and that’s what we were doing when you came in. We were waiting. We thought maybe it was time to get back to work.”

Will looked from Janet to Casey, then he turned and looked around the bar. He hadn’t been in here in twelve years, but nothing that he could see had changed. The same dark paint, wood paneling, and beer signs, the same dust in the corners of the room.

He brought his eyes back around on Casey. “Gary and Irene are buried over at the cemetery? The one here in town?”

WILL LOOKED DOWN AT THE GRAVESTONES. HE HELD HIS HAT INone hand and his rifle in the other. The earth had barely even sunk in, mounded and fresh there atop the graves. He scanned his eyes out across the rest. Names he’d known. Names he recognized. He stared off toward the two he knew, his wife and daughter. It seemed to him that this place was dying. It seemed to him that every soul he’d known was here.

“They asked for help but no one listened.”

Will turned now and saw the pastor standing there. He was dressed the same as Will had always remembered him, in his black suit and white collar. And though there was white in the black curl of his hair, he was younger than Will by at least twenty years. And, as far as Will remembered, he’d been a gunnery sergeant in the first Gulf War before he’d found God and then brought his faith here.

“ I did not listen,” the pastor said, as if he wanted to offer clarification for his sin.

Will ran his eyes across the man. The cemetery sat before the church and behind, seen across the graves, a single door was open and Will could faintly see the pews and window glass beyond.

“I thought maybe you had come to burn me down, to harass me, and to hurt the church. But I think now that you are here to see for yourself what your church has done. And I wonder now, seeing you here again, whether the things you see before you have left the same mark on you that they have left on me.”

“Jerome,” Will said. “How are you?”

“Tired. Mostly tired all the time now. Mostly sick and tired of the shit that goes on.”

Will had taken his backpack up as he’d come out of the saloon and he’d walked the length of the town with the rifle held in his hands. He held it still and he looked Jerome over and said, “I didn’t come to shoot you, or harass you, or to burn you down. I came for answers.”

Jerome laughed. He was not prone to it and he looked at Will and said, “Eden’s Gate has many answers. The Father has many answers for those who seek his shelter. But I do not have the answers. I am not the prophet The Father wants us to believe he is. I am a follower of God. I am a reader of the Bible. I do not change the words to suit my own delusion.”