I stand swaying in the boxcar as the freight pulls into the railyard.

It’s ten years since I left.

Two hitches in jail, one of them on an honest-to-God chain gang.

One near-marriage, which was almost worse than jail.

Nobody is going to recognize me.

I’m thirty pounds down in weight, my once-black hair shot with gray and matted with my beard into a greasy tangle that covers most of my shirt.

I feel the weight of a.38 revolver in one pocket of my ragged jeans, a mostly-drunk pint of whiskey in the other.

They won’t be expecting me, anyway.

Friday Fictioneers

 

 

Both sides of the highway showed dense forest, the hillside vistas crowded with trees.

I couldn’t see what he was talking about, and said so.

He shook his head and chuckled.

“That forest you’re looking at is about this thick,” he said, taking one hand off the wheel and holding up thumb and forefinger. “Bastards clearcut every hillside except the ones you can see from the road. You look down on this from an airplane and it’s like a goddamn bomb hit it. Nothing but stumps from here to McMinnville.”

“Why do they do that?”

“People need their paper towels.”

Friday Fictioneers