Mr. Ed had been in Martossa for three days, helping those that were in need of wisdom. There had been that young kid on Wednesday, then Thursday there was that young guy up in The West via the VR. Today there hadn’t been anything for Mr. Ed though: he had stayed locked up in the hotel room and hadn’t done too much. It wasn’t much like him to stay in and do nothing, but as it was, he had come from Moac and when the train had rolled into Martossa it had hit him that he was dead tired.
Moac was the name of the big city with the hustle and bustle. It was a metropole by any traditional standard and it literally was far away from the small fisher man’s town by the name of Martossa that he had found himself in now.
There was a rail connection between Moac and Martossa. It was a high speed connection with few stops in between, but still the travel took a good four hours. There was always a transition from the city scape, to the jungle outside, then the large plains that turned into deserts and finally another jungle, a good hour before the train would arrive in Martossa.
*
When night fell Mr. Ed went out for a stroll and he ended up in some bar in the bay. It was a rugged bar and the bar keep kept a vigilant eye on Mr. Ed the minute he stepped in. Some people just have that strong intuitive understanding of other human beings and to the barkeep it seemed that Mr. Ed might be trouble. He was probably one of those that would much later refer to Mr. Ed as that monster on two legs.
Mr. Ed took a seat at the bar and he had ordered a plate and a beer. There were about eight or nine lone warriors like him and they all ate their meals, while the juke box was blaring and they guzzled watery tap beer. Perhaps misfits was a more proper term for the likes of them. Or maybe they were all just men without women to keep them from destroying themselves. On the low tables there were a few couples, although to Mr. Ed it didn’t look like the kind of place where he would take his lady for a night on the town.
The food was simple, but good: a steak that covered half the plate, some fries and a cob of corn. Mr. Ed took his time with his dinner, since he was always told that eating slowly promotes good digestion. When he was younger he took that as the sole reason why he wasn’t fat, but then later on he learned that it has more to do with not being a lazy ass, and with having lean genes. Mr. Ed couldn’t stand laziness.
After finishing his plate, Mr. Ed looked up to see if there was anyone to strike a conversation with.
“Cheers,” Mr. Ed says to the guy next to him.
“Likewise,” the guy next to him says, “You had a good appetite there, chief.”
“I did,” Mr. Ed says, “Must be the fresh air or something like that.”
“It can make a man hungry indeed.”
“It sure did,” Mr. Ed says.
Marty takes a look at Mr. Ed, to see if he knows him from someplace.
“I’m not from here,” Mr. Ed says, as if reading Marty’s thoughts.
“Import myself,” Marty says, “A little over ten years.”
“That’s a good long time,” Mr. Ed says.
“It is,” Marty says, “But it went by just like 1, 2, 3….”
“When times are good, they usually do.”
“They were,” Marty says, “I guess.”
“You’re from the big city?” Marty asks.
“Moac,” Mr. Ed says, “So it’s kind of a life-line to come out here when things get a little too hectic. But you must have heard that one before.”
“Moac is one hell of a town,” Marty says, “I myself lived there for about five years. Five good years, but then at some point I was done with it: I had done enough boozing, I had picked up enough women, I had gone to enough parties.”
“I get the feeling,” Mr. Ed says.
“And there was nothing holding me there,” Marty says, “At least not that I can think of.”
“You just got a place here and moved out?”
“Sometimes it works just like that.”
“I wish I could make a fresh start like that.”
Marty takes a sip from his beer.
“Well, it wasn’t just thatsimple,” Marty explains, “The prices here are high, I mean, who wouldn’t want to live up here, right?”
“On the coast, with beaches and more moderate climate than the big city: I can imagine.”
“Little by little, you know.”
Mr. Ed isn’t too interested in those kinds of details.
“Not much crime here either, I suppose.”
“Break and entry, theft, that kind of thing,” Marty says, “Accidents.”
“But it’s mostly rumors,” Marty says, “Every year we have some folks dying on the bends when they come up from the deep too fast, because there are no decompression tanks here. Some people drown when they go out for a swim. Some car crashes. We had an electrocution some years ago.”
“In Moac those things aren’t really talked about, nor do they appear in the papers,” Mr. Ed says and he thinks it over, “In a way it’s like those kind of things never happened.”
“And that’s just the thing:” Marty says, “Because these things aren’t talked about some crazy lunatic is more likely to go out on some crazy spree.”
“You’re right,” Mr. Ed says, “Even though we have law and order, and they’re verythorough.”
“You know, talk, stories: it tells us who we are,” Marty says, “The good and the bad, just like life itself: good and bad are a pair. And in a way stories about that inoculate us against doing those bad things ourselves.”
“So that’s how it is with all the bad in the city?”
“If you were to ask me….”
Mr. Ed takes a moment to think that statement of Marty over. Mr. Ed thinks: he’s oversimplifying.
“You do know what they say in the city right:” Mr. Ed says, “The real big monsters live out in the country.”
“Then you must know as well that we say that the monsters come from the city to buy a cabin out in the woods or up in the mountains,” Marty says, “Then they go into the city to do their bad thing and then head back out to the country when it gets too hot under their feet.”
“The other way round wouldn’t work….” Mr. Ed says, conniving.
“Unless you have like a whole town that conspires together to do some kind of bad thing,” Marty says, “But that’s still out in the country.”
“Right.”
“We need some more beers,” Marty says.
*
The small talk continues, until they have determined a common ground: the service. It turns out that they were both drafted for the Gulf war and they had both seen things that a man shouldn’t see too much of: brutality, raping, killing, death. When they were there they understood jack-shit of the conflict and they basically winged it day by day in a hot desert hell, while every few days or so one or more men from their platoon were killed.
“No problems going back to civilian life when you came back?” Mr. Ed asks.
“I guess life just went on, but something inside of me was gone,” Marty says, “I worked to forget and then at night I drank to forget more.”
“I hear you,” Mr. Ed says, “There were weeks when I downed a whole bottle of whiskey, a few six packs, I popped pills. I did it all.”
“No pills. That’s for lab rats, we used to say,” Marty says, “Looking back I don’t understand that I wasn’t fired.”
“I feel worse for the wive,” Mr. Ed says, “I was on bound on self-destruction and there was nothing she could do.”
Marty thinks: he has a wife,thatguy?
“Well,” Marty says, “My wife had split before I joined the service.”
“Was that why you joined?” Mr. Ed asks, “You had nothing left to loose?”
“I needed to drag myself through some desert hell, like a dog that has lost his mind,” Marty says, “Emotionally I was a wreck and on some level I figured that I would find some sort of balance if I would wreck myself physically. I wanted to feel pain and grind my bones.”
“Booze can do that just fine,” Mr. Ed says.
“It wasn’t like that: the ex had left me emotionally humiliated and I wanted the same, but on physical level.”
The bartender puts two more beers in front of them.
“Jesus,” Mr. Ed says, “That’s about the worst pre-army story I ever heard. And I heard a lot of them.”
“Then what’s yours?”
“I needed adventure,” Mr. Ed says, “And maybe I needed a break.”
“What did your girl think of that?”
“She was upset, obviously,” Mr. Ed says, “I mean I could understand that: we just about made it and I had some dough stashed away.”
“Then why did you go?”
“Just one of those things, I guess,” Mr. Ed says, “Ever since I was a kid I wanted to hold a gun and to kill some bad guys.”
“Well,” Marty says, “I myself have only been in a handful of gunpoint situations and I thank the Big Man for that.”
“Ahuh,” Mr. Ed says, “Between you and me: I thrived on that, but now that you mention it: most guys weren’t like that. They just wanted to get it over with and go home.”
“Most guys don’t draw just like that,” Marty says, “Many times it’s because things are tight. Nothing better to do or a man is strapped for cash.”
Mr. Ed didn’t register the last thing Marty said, but instead he thought back at those combat situations when he had held that heavy gun in his hand and it had just trumped everyone around him down. Mr. Ed still remembers the feeling: damn good.
“We had one guy in our platoon who was just like what you claimed: he loved the thrill,” Marty says, “One day he had gone missing, until we had found him in the middle of a village of women and children. That bastard had killed every single one of them. The guy had such a smug look on his face. He fucking enjoyed it.”
“What happened then?” Mr. Ed asks, but Marty is too stuck on his story to stray off just like that.
“There’s certain things you don’t do, especially in war. We were all men with women and children. To have seen this guy do something like this: it was too much for us,” Marty says, “So we tied this guy down and debated what we should do to him, until one of the other guys found a woman that had gone into hiding. I know what we’re gonna do one of the guys said. We all understood what he meant: we tied the crazy fucker to a tree and let this lady have her way with him. At first she was so scared that she couldn’t even get to her feet and in all honesty she must have believed that we were as sick as that guy, but after some minutes she understood it. She took the knife and started butchering, but she made sure that that sick fuck didn’t die too soon, but that he suffered. All the way through what lasted maybe 30-40 minutes that sick smug grin stayed on his face.”
“Jesus.”
“We weren’t proud of what we did,” Marty says, “But we just couldn’t let that fucker get away with it.”
“No shit.”
“We returned with five out of a platoon of 24,” Marty says.
“I was the only one,” Mr. Ed says in a cold voice and it gave Marty a chill down his spine. For split second Marty thought: this fella is like that guy.
Marty didn’t want to know what happened, but he still asked: “What happened?”
“There was an altercation,” Mr. Ed says, and his face looses all expression and his eyes get this blind stare, that makes the other man look right down the abyss and beyond good or evil, “I was like the stranger that came to town and who drew faster than anyone else.”
“That sounds like an old Western,” Marty says, “And you know that those always have a silver lining.”
“This was no such story,” Mr. Ed says, “This was real life.”
“You killed them all….” Marty says.
“I sure did,” Mr. Ed says.
“Jesus….” Marty says and he thinks: so that’s what he did when he was all by himself in some God forsaken hell hole. That’s the measure of this man.
The barkeep announces the last round.
“Maybe we should call it a night,” Marty says.
“Maybe we should,” Mr. Ed says, and for a moment it looks like he was looking for his cowboy hat, although it might just as well have been the men’s room.
Mr. Ed slammed a twenty dollar bill on the counter and Marty doubled it.
“Until next time, partner,” Marty says, “The war made a lot of good guys crazy.”
“It sure did,” Mr. Ed says, while gesturing so longand he walked right out of the door.
*
That night Marty double checked the doors and he let the dog loose in the house. He wasn’t one to get scared too easily, but this guy was plane crazy. Marty figured that he was capable of acting erratic once he realized that he might have disclosed just about too much.
It was all easy enough though: in a way what makes a man is what he does when he thinks that no one is looking. That’s exactly what makes Mr. Ed so dangerous, because it makes sense to reason that he will act alike when someone crosses his path. This is the kind of man who will stab another in the back, or maybe more in line with this character, he will use a shotgun with a big caliber.
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NEXT WEEK THE MR. ED MEETS SOMEONE THAT WE ALL KNOW FROM WEST END MANSION: PHYLLIS....
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