“Don’t I know it,” I said, flinching. How could I possibly forget that? It wasn’t possible. People would gossip for days as soon as anything bad happened to anyone who rode the bus a lot. There was a sort of bus community. When my younger sister was hospitalized I had to tell every other person who stepped on the bus for three days that she was going to be fine. I only wished good news traveled as quickly. I hadn’t heard that Henry Johnson’s daughter had had a healthy baby boy until three weeks after it had happened. I never did congratulate him on his new grandson, because I decided that I would feel like a fool talking about it three weeks after the fact.
I work you know, some of the time. I am a writer, just like I am doing at the moment I guess. Only this is for my own enjoyment, just like the old days. That’s one of the reasons I can excuse to people that I ride the bus all night most nights. I tell them that I am taking the opportunity to study humanity. That’s not really it, I just like it, but it means I don’t get locked up as a crazy man. It feels good to take the time to write my own thing again, rather then what I tell the editor that I will write.
“What about Mike, I haven’t seen him around for a long time either.”
“Didn’t you hear?” Paul asked, “He’s dead.”
“No, I didn’t hear that. What happened? I saw him last week and he looked fine.”
“That’s right, you haven’t been around for a few days,” Paul said, leaning back in his seat. I had been out of state to a conference which I had agreed to speak at as an up and coming author. I was now wishing that I had canceled or something. I could have at least gone to the funeral; Mike wasn’t really a friend of mine. He was unpleasant, and drunk, most of the time. However I had known him these last four years and I had grown used to his ways as unpleasant as they were. We talked often; I knew all about him, had met his wife, his daughter, his son. They were all rude, and crude people, they lived in a shack over by the river, but familiarity had bred fondness as well as contempt.
“He was murdered,” Paul commented, as if it wasn’t a big shocker. “It was all over the news here for a few days. Happened right after you left.”
“Do they know who did it?” I asked. The first thing I thought of was his wife. She would be justified in some respects; he was a very overbearing man, who couldn’t stand to see her talk to anyone else. “That family really does have bad luck doesn’t it?” I sighed. “First the son and now the father.”
“Oh they know who did it, it was their neighbor, they used to be such good friends but after that hunting accident that killed the son, the neighbor never forgave Mike. He always insisted that Mike had been drinking and that’s why he accidentally shot his son, but there was never any proof of it. Mike always swore up and down that he had been sober and that he had never meant to kill the boy. It half killed him with that boy died. But the neighbor wouldn’t leave him alone about it, kept pestering him about it. Well right after you left apparently they were drinking together when the subject was brought up again. Mike shouting that he had never done anything wrong, that he had never meant to kill the boy, and that he had been stone cold sober. Words got more heated and soon they came to blows. Well Mike was the stronger man and the neighbor got tired to getting punched so he grabs his hunting rifle. The neighbor was drunk and accidentally pulled the trigger. Confessed immediately, he was really shaken. He said that even with his dying breath Mike told him that he had never meant to kill his boy.”
To be continued....
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