So, I was thinking about entering a short story contest (I probably won’t enter the contest; I won’t get this story done in time) on the theme of desert isolation. The story must take place in a desert location in the American Southwest, the setting must be a character, and have a scene of desert isolation.
So, I was thinking about what I would write, and I remembered an old idea I had (from way back in the 1990s). This led my creative memory to another story that was somehow connected to the first, but I don’t remember how. Remember, these ideas were from 30 years ago, but I had a first draft of that idea buried somewhere in old notes (I went and found it). This idea led me back to another idea (and another draft—all very bad and very juvenile. That's why they call it juvenilia).
So, I thought, for the desert isolation story I would put these ideas/remnants together, rewrite them into a coherent narrative, and make a new story.
So, I transcribed them. Here is the first one. I called it “Strangled.” If I remember right, the story was supposed to be about a Vietnam veteran who fathered an illegitimate son in Vietnam who illegally entered the country. His child was being deported because he could not prove he was the father. The son witnesses a murder, a woman strangled, but they don’t report the murder out of resentment over the deportation. I started to write a draft but never got any farther. This is the kind of story that could never be written today because of political correctness concerns. And also, the subject matter was way beyond my ability to write on such a theme at the time. I would not attempt it today. I would have been in my early twenties.
So, when I transcribed the story, I discovered that it was not what I thought I remembered. I was surprised to find the draft was written from the point of view of the murderer. I guess, I never got around to writing anything from the protagonist's point of view. And of course, there is a lot of bad writing. So, I will share it with you. We can cringe together.
I cleaned it up some and removed all the parentheses and dashes. I still overuse that punctuation to this day. There are also some racial slurs in the story that you can’t write because of Woke culture and a lot of misogyny that is verboten today. Some words I could not make out in my scribbly handwriting. I put them in brackets. It’s a little bit incoherent, but it is also an uncorrected fragment of a first draft. Maybe I can redeem this in the new story (if it gets finished).
Strangled (a fragment)
That was because the Chinaman (really Vietnamese) guy had saw him strangle the woman behind the bus terminal. Just what was he supposed to do? The broad had been coming onto him on the bus ever since they left Omaha. She sat next to him and kept crossing and uncrossing her legs, arching her back, showing her breasts, and giggling. She was sort of pretty, the usual blond hair blue eyes, kind of stuff. He would have laid her too, for fun. She seemed dumb enough, he had thought, and was getting a thrill out of making him sweat. As if it was not hot enough already with all that human flesh on the bus and the air conditioner was little help.
So that is what he was too, a waste of flesh. Sure, he knew it, and if he was so could they be also, just to name some. But why think about that now? The moronic old couple out touring the country in their retirement (he had already seen most of the country and was only in his 30s). Nothing really to see and then snapping pictures out of the bus windows and eating cookies out of plastic baggies, and the old man tried to get up a card game (rummy, God how lame) with people next to them.
There was the slant-eyed but American-looking gook with an old grouchy depressed guy. I would bet that was his dad and the kid a crossbred bastard. Who needs them? They should be deported. Maybe he was and that's what the dad was glum about, but he can't [that that] chance. The slant-eyes not talking out of spite to the authorities after seeing him kill the girl.
He had a fondness for military clothes. Maybe that's what made them the glum dude was a Viet vet who liked to do the natives over there. And had been wearing his fatigues pants with a black Budweiser T-shirt and black work boots. Presumably, the girls liked it too. When he was cleaned up he didn't look half bad, quite a stud really, but then he had been sweating, a drop of it stuck under his nose on his top lip, and his black hair was stuck to his forehead partly covering his bloodshot eyes. She must [thought] herself slowing and getting off on that sticky working-class type, day laborers, who like to do it rough. Admittedly, he did like doing it that way. Let her feel the breast rub his coarse chest hair on her sensitive breast and impale her, he liked that word, on the shaft.
He had thought she was dumb, her conversation was, not, well, interesting.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“John,” which interestingly was the name of the depressed man, who was the father of the Vietnamese man, who was being deported, and that is why he was depressed, and the son did not tell out of resentment, what happened to the girl, who he witnessed murdered. How “John,” not his real name, knew that unaware, is your guess, but the rest of what he thought was not true, even if they did play touch football bare-chested, it did not [cummer in inscches/culminate in?] mutual masturbation on each other’s chest! “John” was a pig who put everyone down.
“Well, John, what do you do for a living?”
“Kill nosey broads,” he answered back.
“What you being so snotty about? I'm only trying to be nice and kill some time. This is a bore.”
He smiled lightly, loosening the drop of sweat on his upper lip. “I'm sorry.” Why give her a reason to get shrill? “I don't feel very well,” and he did not. She was a bore. Her talk was a bore. Even her gagging as he choked her was a bore. That was at the next stop, where they got off to pee and stretch.
In the men's room, he wiped his face with a wet paper towel, which he threw into a toilet and pissed on it leaving it unflushed. He had 30 minutes. Most of the [owtoles/assholes?] went to the coffee shop to fuel up on more piss for the next stop. He wanted to avoid all of them and walked around the terminal to stretch.
He was debating whether to get off here, thought it was far enough, and take to hitchhiking. No destination in mind just a good place to hide out for a while till things cooled down. He had killed a girl in Iowa and now another one when she caught up to him by some foul smelly dumpsters, being friendly and wanting to know if he was going any further.
It was a hot summer day in Nebraska, and he felt faint and annoyed at her and testily told her not to follow him.
“What you got up your ass,” she retorted.
“Go away you bitch.”
“Yea, yea, I know your type, sorry ass loser.”
“Fuck you.”
“You wish.”
That decided it, he would not go any further, not with her on board.
He started to walk away.
“Yeah, true to your type. I know what you are. I also know what you did.”
Whether she really knew or not is debatable. Just one of those phrases you say to pretend you know more than you do. In any case, he grasped her by the throat and strangled her.
Clutched her throat for a long time to be sure, then threw her body into a dumpster. When he turned to see if there were any witnesses, he saw the slant-eyed duck around the corner of the building and backed inside the terminal.
He had pretty much been a vagrant since he turned 18 and left the foster home, taking odd jobs here and there, and then moving on. He rarely thought about his past. The present was as much as he could deal with and not always well. When he did think of his youth, he thought about the time when his foster father was hit by a car, which he had thought was funny. His foster father had cared about him, which he did not want him to.
His foster father was a good man, not a waste of flesh. But only in adulthood could he see it. His foster father had taken him into his home with his wife. They had no children of their own. At the time, he thought it was to score social points with his neighbors. See, I can raise a kid without them being my own. He perceived his foster parent as saying. And so, he felt resentful and used. That attitude made it easy to use his foster parents as well.
He was constantly surprised at them saying “yes” to his request. “Did you say yes,” was a refrain he found himself saying a lot. They even gave him compliments which he never had. But they made him feel like he was being placated so as to head off one really demanding request. So, he would feel guilty about making them since he had already received so much. He suspected now that he was really afraid of being cared for. It hurt to get close and then be disposable as would always eventually happen. So, he pushed them away. He took as many of the “yeses” and raised them for, first, be allowed time to be alone to himself. His only space which he took to run away from home.
When they tracked him down and brought him back, he told them that they really could not want him and that's why he left again. They gave him the guilty compliments and pizza, his pick. So, if they would just bring him back, he thought they would force him out if he caused too much trouble by picking fights with the legitimate kids on the block. One of the kids told him he was illegitimate and that was bad, but that the other kids were legitimate and that was good. So now he understood his problem, that he had a congenital defect of some kind, illness to his legitimacy. He searched his body trying to find it, but did not. In any case, he was right. His foster parents were scoring points with the neighbors by raising a defective child and showing him off like a token of their good works. So, he fought the healthy neighbor kids and if he got hurt, what did it matter? He was already sick.
That was how he was feeling on that day when his foster father was hit by the car, which was so funny at the time. It was to be a fine father-son day, a Saturday. First a movie. It was a bore. He did not remember it. Just his uncomfortableness of having to play son to a fake father, but pleased when he was allowed to pick a seat up front. Next lunch and more: “did you say yes?” when his dad let him order whatever he wanted off the menu. Chili dogs and banana splits, and finally a trip to the video arcade. It was noisy and full of inattentive parents with their normal children. The day made him feel bad, a servant taking guilty pleasure, sleeping in the master's bed while they were away on holiday; forced by the master to sleep in it, even though it was too soft to be really comfortable, like satin that cuts your fingers. So, he picked a man, a father of a normal child, and too good-looking and well-dressed father, like his own, and lifted his wallet, not a pickpocket, just walked over and pulled it out of his back pocket.
He would be seen and caught, that was the point. He grabbed it and ran. The man yelled disagreeable things at him and chased him. So did the arcade manager, and a mall security guard, and his fake dad. The other ran to cut him off and his father directly followed him. He ran into traffic; so, did his dad. The car missed him, but not his dad, and he thought it was funny.
He stopped and looked at his “dad,” unconscious on the pavement. The driver, frantic, making excuses for himself: did not see him, happened too fast. It was funny to watch a grown-up squirm, gotcha, he recalled thinking. The guard caught up and took back the man's wallet, but did not press charges because, as he heard later, the family had too much to deal with now. The police took him home. The ambulance took his father to the hospital. A neighbor took his mother to meet his dad. And later, a social worker took him to a boy's home. He had won that game. For a while, he tried to take the Bible seriously, but it only caused him to be more suspicious of others, more than he was before.
So, there you go. I don’t even remember writing most of that. It surprised me. I will post the other draft when I get it transcribed. I am nervous about what I will find that my twenty-something self wrote. It’s titled: “The Dissection.”