Jesse Hooker

One.

Jesse is the only one.

Not the only one of his kind, he knows that mentally, but when he's the only one here, it's close enough as to not make any difference; he has no kind. The horses run from him and the shelter's scarce and the road is long, and he takes one every night. Three hundred and sixty five, sixty six in a year, that'd fill the basic need, but then there are those that get in the way, the times, many times, when it's just easier to take two then to try and get one alone - but call it three hundred and sixty five, give or take. In two years, seven hundred and thirty, more or less - well, no. Just more. Never less. Three years, over a thousand. Four years, that give-or-take is adding up. Five years. He stops trying to calculate it.

Jesse is the only one because he's never even considered an alternative, and then when he does consider it he thinks he doesn't know how to manage it, and then he thinks perhaps he does but the numbers alone-

-stop mattering that much.

Two.

( A numbers game. )

Once upon a time, Jesse could get pretty riled up over the wrong words. It's sometimes hard to remember why. He's sees the effect that a bit of casual conversation with him can have on people, no doubt there, and he's not underestimating that; half the time it's not the violence itself so much as the threat of it that terrifies, the confusion, the anticipation. But as far as he can tell, the actual words he says don't matter all that much. His tone does. The way he smiles, the way he stands. But as for the words themselves, there are times when talking about the rain on the road gets a better reaction than anything more direct could. While he's had some pretty foul language hurled back at him over the years, it doesn't phase him. They are, after all, just words; and when the speaker can't back those words up, they ring hollow.

Language has failed him. Jesse doesn't think in words, but in abstracts; he grabs the closest words that seem to fit, if there are any. He redefines home as something tied to time more than place. He uses wife, and sometimes brother, and those ones he means, those ones are straightforward; he calls Homer son and boy and old man, not always with a straight face. He runs into the same people on the roads over and over again and sometimes their words are a better fit; gadje, meaning not-one-of-us, meaning marks, it's not the right word, not his family's word. It's close enough. He steals it. He says dark and bright and dawn, and he thinks of eskimos and all the words they're supposed to have for snow. Darker, dark enough, black it out - he makes do with the words he knows, and he trusts his family to fill in the blanks.

Jesse hadn't been hit as badly as he'd thought. He blamed it on a trick of the moonlight and the darkness, that and the pain making him see things, making it look worse than it really was, mistaking splinters for bone. The pain had subsided, mostly, and in the pre-dawn light he could see hardly any real damage. Just a lot of dried blood.

Those people - things - that had invaded his ship, feeding on the dying, were gone. He thought maybe he'd been seeing things then, too. Hard to tell for sure what he'd seen, in the dark. By the time the sun rose he'd pulled himself together and had started checking the bodies. He already knew that was what they were, bodies, not wounded, but he had to be sure. There wasn't anyone else to do it.

It didn't burn at first. ( That first day. )

There are doubtless a few people who've met Jesse in passing, and only in passing, who might think he's got a habit of saying one thing and meaning another. Weird sense of humor, that guy. They can tell he must be making a joke because of the way he's flashing his teeth at them, and maybe they laugh along, even though they don't get it, just to show that yes, they realize he's making a joke, and then they hope he says something that makes more sense. He likes these people and he never bothers to correct them.

And then there's the people who can tell he's not joking because of the way he's flashing his teeth at them, but still like to pretend it's all a joke, because jokes are safe and sane, even the bad ones. He likes these people too. He corrects them eventually.

The fact of the matter is Jesse believes in the value of plain speaking. After all, there's nothing harder to believe than a man who says exactly what he means.

God bless President Herbert Hoover.

I'm not much for politics these days. I'll catch the odd radio host carrying on, the late-late-night news; but it all gets on the repetitive side. The war, the economy. Your mortgage. Taxes. Death. Can't say it all has the same impact on me that it used to. But even if I can't keep all the current crop of names and faces straight, it never does hurt to know which way the wind's blowing. Politics can do funny things to people. Enough disasters in the news, and people start getting downright nervous, start to take notice when a couple of strangers roll through their little town. But that goes both ways. And not all that long ago - just before I met my wife, matter of fact - me and Severen had some damn good times in Hooverville.

Everyone was on the move. Half the country, it seemed like. Men wandering from place to place looking like they hadn't had a meal or a shower or a full night's sleep in a lifetime. Freighthopping, hitching, tying horses to their cars when the gasoline ran out, walking down the street with a pack on their back - clothes usually, tools if they were optimists, money never. Everyone was looking for work. Everyone thought the next city would have it. None of the cities ever did. What the cities did have to offer were whole new societies sprung up in parks, growing under bridges, piles of cardboard and wood and metal leaning together and the whole mess named in honor of their esteemed founder: Hoovervilles.

Now, they weren't the safest place to spend your days. The local law tended to take issue, start tearing the place apart, letting the sun shine right on in on folks just trying to get a bit of sleep. Not the easiest place to survive, not if you had a choice in the matter. But there were worse places to spend your evenings. With the whole world being on the road those days, not a one of the folks there ever even noticed a few more strange faces in the mix. And people would just disappear, every day, every night. Moving on, I expect.

Good times.

You'd be hard pressed to find a group of people who cared more about politics than the folks down at Hooverville. Or the folks in the camps, not so long after. So while I'm not much for politics these days, there are times when it seems to be on everyone's tongue, and then it's best to listen. Tends to mean the wind's about to start blowing, one way or the other.

1. Own the territory.

Every creature's got a way of knowing just which plot of earth belongs to them, and where they're out of their depth. Not that all of them want to admit it, show a little weakness, bare a little throat - but you've got the home territory, you've got the advantage, doesn't take a genius to figure that one out. What surprises people, though, is when a complete stranger rolls into territory they thought was theirs - their own place of business, their regular Friday night hangout, their home with the locks on the doors - and reeducates them as to the nature of ownership.

So when you walk in, you throw your coat on a chair, you drop your bag on the floor, you put your feet up. This is your home right here, and maybe no one's ready to bare their throats just yet, but you've got time.

That's all territory is: time.


2. Keep them off balance.

Now I'm not saying scare the hell out of them. I said off balance. These gadje, you gotta take it easy on them, they tend to panic, they tend to bolt, and every once in a while they tend to bolt right into the middle of a crowd and then you have got yourself some real fast negotiating to do.

You know there are cops keeping video cameras in their cars now?

But you let them get too comfortable, well, then they start getting ideas. They start thinking this is still their territory, and then they think they can try to control the situation, they start picking up phones, they start with these fucking silent alarms... hell, it's easier when they panic.

So what you have right here is a chance for a little open and honest conversation. Confuses people.

Smiling helps.

So does covering all the exits.


3. Stick with them until you've reached a mutual agreement.

That'd be the part when you've had your fill and they've stopped complaining.


4. Tie up the details.

Staff rooms, bathrooms, security rooms, the kid sleeping on the other side of the house who's going to wake up just in time to see your license plate. Security cameras. Don't you worry too much about fingerprints, anyone taking the time to look at your hands is not a problem. Right now you've only got two problems: people who saw your face, and people looking for patterns. You're going to leave a trail here. You'd best be sure that trail looks like something different every night. Tragic accidents, tragic arguments, suicides, shooting sprees, they happen once and they're done, and no reason for anyone to go looking further. Not unless you're sloppy.

Maybe that's their friend out in the parking lot having a smoke, and maybe he's going to go looking for his pals soon as he finishes, and might be you made a bit of an impression when you passed by and next thing you know there are sketches of your face pasted all over the street.

And then again, maybe not; might be taking the time to wrap that detail up just gets you a whole new set of loose ends.

Best realize, you're never going to be able to plan everything.


5. Know your territory, and know where it ends.

You better run. Take advantage of your territory while you've got it, because a few hours difference and that territory is gone, that home team advantage is on the other side. So you tie up those details and you put a lot of miles behind you, or you are fucked my friend. Every move you make is for this: the hours when you're hiding, when you're sleeping in enemy territory.

It's the only way I know how to negotiate another night to live.

omgwtf_dfw asked about Jesse's take on principles. ( Read more... )

Request any fic/RP/drabble/random entry/whatever of mine and I will provide you with a commentary/annotations, like a DVD extra.

The way people spoke of death changed during the war, inevitably. Not death but Old Man Death. Not it, the faceless force, but he, the passenger, the caller, the constant companion, the closest friend; her embrace. Corpses would lie sprawled out upon the earth, or picked up in your own two hands and carried over the edge of the ship, and death couldn't be relegated to the province of nightmares anymore. Nightmares are strange things, feared things, hidden things; this was not a time when death could be hidden from polite sensibilities. So death moved out of the nightmares and into the drinking songs.

It made Jesse sick to listen to.

If death had to have a face, fine. Let it be the Devil, then. Let it be the enemy, because that made a hell of a lot more sense than the enemies he was firing upon, a fair number of whom he was certain must be men he'd sailed with a few months back. It wasn't an old man come calling, it wasn't a lover's embrace, it sure as hell wasn't your friend; it was the thief and the murderer and the traitor and if you had a single scrap of pride as a soldier and as a man then it was your duty to fight the devil off with every breath you could drag into your lungs.

When he lay on his back listening to the sounds and screams of dying men rising even over the ringing in his ears, watching the lightning flashes of gunpowder, the steam rising into the night air from the twisted wreckage of blood and bone and skin that had been his ribcage, he had no doubt exactly what they were, the creatures that had crawled out of the marshes onto his ship, the woman-leech-thing that had attached itself to his quickly cooling flesh. She was Death. And although he knew he was dead, he still took his revolver and pressed it to her and fired.

He's taken enough bullets since to realize he couldn't have shaken her off if she'd really wanted to finish the meal. But whatever her reason, she left his ship; and some time later, so did he. And people's attempts to personify death suddenly became a lot less sickening and more, well, funny.

His own personifications of death, however, didn't much change. The forms it took might be a little different - wars weren't sources of strife and suffering, they were a free dinner; bullets were nice for party tricks; and anyone else's death, well, that was just good plain fun; but his own death, well, he was still just as ready to fight that devil off with every drop of blood in somebody else's veins. Only difference being, this time around, there was no guarantee that devil would ever win.

Jesse didn't have to think about happy endings, because Jesse didn't have to end. Wars might end, buildings might burn to the ground, people might bleed out into the dirt, nations might fall, stars might burn up and die; Jesse would still be there to see it.

Right about the time he realized that, happy endings started to grow on him.

Principles, huh.

All right. Let's start with respect. With tipping your hat to a lady, with taking it off in the church, with going to church. Where it stops being about principle and starts being about being manners, and when manners stop mattering so much, and start again, and stop again. Tiny little strip of fabric around a lady's ass and she calls it a skirt, it's not immodesty, it's not immoral, it's just fun, get with the times, times meaning ladies in the factories and the house is empty and shops selling canned fruit and a hundred gadgets I don't know how to work because no one's got the time to do the canning themselves, there's a war on don't you know, wars are important, the fighting and the dying, wars matter, hope you didn't believe us when we said that last one would be the last, and she doesn't want you to tip your hat to her anymore she wants the right to be drafted too while the boys have to be thrown into the front lines of a war in some jungle they never heard of and they don't know why, because it's not about duty, not about honor, not about principle, not about anything they can figure out and your descendants probably get their kicks playing out your old battles, going through a stranger's personal letters to figure out how he lived because they never talked to their own grandfather, that's what honor is, don't worry about honor when it comes to the country or the family name or the vows you've made but call this one honoring the memory, grown men in costumes pretending to die like it's cowboys and Indians. Only you can't say Indian anymore. That would be rude.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be. A man needs to learn how to stand on his own two feet. You work hard. You save some money. You buy some land. You always settle your debts.

You put everything you buy on credit because you think money's just too dangerous to carry around - and you're right - and then you pay the interest, if you've got the credit for it. You save some money and buy some land, except most of it belongs to the bank, but you'll have that paid just in time to retire and move to Florida and leave the place to your kid, who will sell it because he's busy paying rent on his city apartment and paying off the loans for a college degree he's never used, no need for a family home when your family's on the other side of the nation - hell, forget the condo in Florida, just put them in a nursing home, but hey, you've put up the money for it so you're still taking care of your own. This isn't about principle. This isn't something that matters. This is just how life works. Principles die.

Thou shalt not kill.

Heh.

His name was Bill. Not my kid brother; this was a different Bill. Funny how many of them I've known. If you had asked who scares me then this would have been a different story; but if we're talking about the past tonight, then it has to be Bill.

I headed out west just as soon as the war ended. Not the smartest of moves, not if you want to count on scaring up a good meal every night - but then, I wasn't always that smart. And I must have been bound and determined to prove it, back then, because I would stay in the same few towns and I'd talk to some of the same people night after night. Now, I wasn't that witless, I figured out real quick to be careful about where I found my meals, now that I couldn't count on the war wounded to give me handouts. But I figured, you play it careful enough, no harm staying put for a while. Safer, even, than spending every night on foot, and no guarantee at all of finding a roof to put over your head before morning. So I stayed put. And one of the troubles with staying put is, you start to get to know people. Cowboys, mostly. Ranchers. The kind of men who might come into town every so often, drink and gamble half the night, and then disappear for days, without anyone thinking anything of it.

I was paying real close attention to the news from back east in those days. Part of it was making sure my own trail was clean, but mostly I was looking out for other trails left by somebody like me. Never did hear anything worth a damn; but I did hear just about every other bit of useless gossip, and not too long after the war I hear about this trouble in New Orleans about the blacks wanting the vote. Now, the yankees had that place under military law even back while I was still fighting the war, so no surprise when it went to hell. Next thing you know it's all back to the violence and the blood; and seeing as no one wants to let such an entertaining story die, soon enough the whole thing winds up being the president's fault and they're talking impeachment. But the end result of all this politicizing is, the story stays on everyone's tongue for quite a while. Except most folk aren't so much talking about the president, they're talking about the colored folk and the vote and the blood.

If your idea of those old cowboys and ranchers came off the Wild West TV screen and Eastwood and Wayne, might be you're still not seeing the problem here; but half the cowboys I knew had skin as black as those rioters in New Orleans. Including that Bill I mentioned before. ( Now I think you see where I'm going with this. )

The family never had a discussion on the importance of changing with the times. Adjusting. Adapting. Blending in. Hadn't been necessary; a certain amount of that happens naturally. No permanent address, nothing to cling to, nothing that's physical. The cars, the electricity, the stores staying open later and every night of the week, all these little conveniences of life, some things come easy. Some don't. Doesn't matter. Once your home's been knocked down and paved over and replaced with a shopping center or a bypass or a parking lot, you can go ahead and feel homesick all you want, you still ain't going home again. That's true for the physical, almost true for the mental, and ought to be true for the emotional.

Adapting happens; learning to survive with the changing times, that's the natural drive, it's almost subconscious. Blending in, though, that has to be conscious. And Jesse's not always very good at it. Mostly because once you get past a certain degree, it's not all that important. The stranger passing through is allowed to be strange, expected to be. Provided he doesn't stand out in any way that'll show up in a police report.

Clothes change. Try clinging to the past that way, and it rots. Easy enough to keep up with fashion there, when shopping for clothes has less to do with style and cost and more to do with spotting folks about your size. (In some of the bigger cities, in some decades more often than others, and depending on how long it'd been since he found a set of clothes and retrieved them still relatively unstained, Jesse has been taken for a homeless vagrant - which is accurate enough - and he likes this. The homeless are strange and suspicious and commonplace and rarely looked at, certainly not looked at closely enough to give an accurate description later.)

It's harder to keep up with hair styles, but also less important, less likely to stand out. Which is perhaps why Jesse's family tend to be particularly lazy about blending in when it comes to their hair. For all of them, it's a little long, a little ragged - mostly the family cut their hair themselves, when they figure it's needed. There aren't that many all-night barbershops. So in this respect, they've tended to stick with the familiar. Diamondback had been a fan of peroxide before she met Jesse, and for all the fashions that had changed over the intervening years, she still did her damnedest to remain blonde, no matter how long they went before she had a chance for a touch up. And Jesse, before everything else, had been a sailing man. They didn't have too many barbers on those ships, either; so like most of the men he served with, he had been in the habit of keeping his hair long, of braiding that tail back out of the way, and slicking it down with a bit of tar. Tar might not be high on the list of hair products these days, but he's kept up that habit. There aren't that many old habits he gets to keep.

It seems I need to thank you guys for nominating Jesse biggest badass. (What, this ol' teddy bear?)

We're flattered. And... slightly baffled. Are there a bunch of you reading this that I don't know about or something?

Thanks for reading, folks; and do me a favor, if you're going to vote in the Tammys (Tammies? Tammy's?), be sure to vote for onewingbloody, ynez_castillo, john_h_holliday and their muns, because - though I sure don't say it anywhere near enough - it's muses like these that've kept me reading and loving TM. Congrats and good luck to all the nominees, you're awesome people.

Dust of the road and headlights in the dark and neon lights shaping beer bottles and naked thighs, dark windows reflecting mystic phrases in the night (TIXE. IXAT. Jesse thinks of old gods of the land still hungry). The leather of a wheel felt through the leather of his gloves felt through callused skin, thrice removed, windows rolled up and blacked out and an old pair of welder's goggles. That's safety. That's home.

When Jesse wakes up, he's in an unfamiliar place, lying on an unfamiliar bed - well. No. It's the first time he's slept in it. But unfamiliar's the wrong word. It's the same bed he slept in at the last motel, at the one before that.

Grab his bag from under the bed. He never has to pack because he never has to unpack because home-is-where-you-lay-your-hat, he's always home.

Or never. Same thing.

The car out back right now, that's not where he lives. He'd driven it the night before, it's been sitting behind the motel all day, and the plates have been switched but that's not good enough - time to ditch it. But he can't abandon the old car at the same motel where they spent the day, a place where someone might remember their faces. Put a few more miles on it first. Won't make much of a difference if anyone pulls them over right now, this early in the night - but leave a trail, and that was liable to come back to bite you on the ass. They have spent the past few hours not moving. But he's not edgy, driving away from the motel in that trackable car. Same as having a permanent address - familiarity and security look almost the same if you squint.

During the war home meant away from the war, meant his wife and his kids and a house and furniture and nieces and nephews just down the road and South Carolina and a flag and these fine states and The South. You could lay your hat wherever you liked, that didn't make it home. Home was where you came from. Home was where you'd be buried.

Home is a fresh set of wheels while the last one's burning, or sinking, or lost in the woods with the plates stripped. A bag full of thick blankets and black spray paint and sheets of tinfoil to black out the car as the light's on its way, to tack up over the motel windows. The same bed once again. One chair. A chest of drawers - particleboard. TV. Diamondback dyeing her hair over the sink, shower, closet, mirror, windows, curtains that aren't good enough, adjust token artwork to taste-or-lack-thereof.

The boardwalk at midnight.

The bar with only one exit.

The last bus.

The outskirts of a civilization.

Now and then.

Here and there.

Everywhere. Jesse Hooker has been traveling the same highways and backroads since the pavement hit the earth, jumping railway cars on the same old tracks, but this is what he'd tell you: he lives everywhere.

"Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live."
- Haruki Murakami

Jesse is one well-read man. Books pass the time during that long pre-dawn wait, or read aloud by Mae (who is best at it) on those roads when the radio's about to drive him to distraction. The omnipresent motel room Bible, of course. But also whatever's been left behind in backseats, on cafe tables, in pocketbooks. College textbooks and New York Times bestsellers and how-to manuals (car repair, mostly); pulps and comics and paperbacks all displaying lurid sci-fi monstrosities or swooning antebellum maids or vague images meant to titillate the browsing customer with the suggestion of murder.

Haruki Murakami's writing hasn't fallen across Jesse's path yet. But he'd recognize those words. He's said them, or something much like them, and believed them. The transports and the buildings and the fashions all change, but people are the same. People become headstones, but there are always memories, there are always dreams. The dreams the old generation fought to preserve for their children are laughed at and thrown away because their children couldn't care less, memories fade and die, and worlds become passages in textbooks, facts to be memorized and spat out and forgotten; but the stars still shine and the sea still churns and shit still stinks, the coyote still hunts and the rattler still bites, still the night, the road, the plains, like a pulse, the rhythm, steady, constant. And then he saw the Great Plains turned to dust and blown away.

He's learned this lesson as well as he can. And he talks about forever, and he believes that, too. It's not that the contradiction hasn't occurred to him. It just doesn't matter.

This is where Jesse exists:

He never hurries. And he has a deadline every night. He is free. He spends his days hiding from the light and his nights running from people who might bring that light shining through his door and trying to keep a family of different people going in different directions together long enough and acting smart enough not to get themselves dead. He can go anywhere he wants. He's going in circles.

He says, everything tires out, given enough time. He says, I have all the time in the world.

Real short answer to this one: that'd be myself, and not a damn thing. Just spend the night letting the world go away. I wouldn't mind the break.

The longer answer is, when Jesse Hooker had been a living man, he didn't drink. He wasn't good at it.

There'd been something of a misconception about the Hooker brothers, growing up. Bill was the leader. You could tell because he was loud and he was wild, and any trouble stirred up by the brothers could be laid squarely at Bill's feet. Jesse, older, quieter, was the one keeping the pair on the relatively straight and narrow. Jesse was the responsible one, the nice boy. Jesse had good sense. This was all true as far as it went, but it went as far as appearances and that was all.

Jesse was not one to back down from a fight, stone cold sober, but neither was he one to pick one. Given the right situation he would quite happily egg his brother on, and Bill would obligingly rise to the occasion, and Jesse would then proceed to back up that fool little brother of his - but that, he'd felt, was relatively good fun.

What Jesse had was restraint. And after a few drinks, he didn't. That there was violence in him was not a surprise, and both the Hooker brothers knew well how to handle themselves in a fight; but there was a meanness in him that he did not much like. And a lack of concern as to who got in his way.

The living man Jesse Hooker had never harmed a woman. The reason this is true is that he stopped drinking, and he took care not to start again until the day he died.

Now Jesse always drinks.

The world never goes away.

At seven there are kids hanging around the boardwalk, the campus, the strip mall. At ten there are couples moving from dinner to movie. At midnight shifts are changing. At one or two, it's last call.

By three AM, there's nothing. The truckers have pulled over. The drunks have stumbled home. The bus stop is empty. The hitchers have given up for the night.

Now, that does depend on where you are and when you are, God bless electricity. Wal-Mart! Fast-food! Twenty-four-hour-service. But that's not always, and that's not everywhere. The cities have never slept; it's those long stretches between them, from tiny prairie town to tiny prairie town, where the deep night streets are well and truly empty. Because the miracle of the all-night Wal-Mart might seem universal, but it isn't. Not quite. Just close enough to be taken for granted, to let yourself get lazy.

At around three, when I've been lazy, I start knocking on doors. I don't generally get invited inside, but then, I don't need to be.

I once spent near an hour sitting in traffic on this Pennsylvania road, inching along in line, and far as I could tell the only cause of the holdup was a single solitary stop sign. Eternity's too short for that shit. But tonight, in the familiar ritual of horns and headlights, there was the cheerful sound of sirens in the distance. There's something about an accident.

I wasn't in a hurry. Never am, not that early in the night. We were on one of those stretches of road where the radio is more static than not, and the collection of cassettes in tonight's car hadn't looked to be of much interest; but Mae still worked her way through them one by one, as good a way to kill time as any. Our friendly neighbors on the road were mostly killing time by leaning on their horns. That unfailing optimism just warms the heart. As if somehow, somewhere in the three lanes of unmoving hunks of steel, someone just needed to snap to attention and we'd all be on our way. One determined soul cut out to the right, making a mad dash to freedom in the narrow stretch of earth between the breakdown lane and the trees; he even made it a few yards before two equally determined souls in a pickup and a van, apparently offended by this violation of the natural order, broke ranks just enough to block his path; the three played a brief game of tag that we watched with some interest, but didn't wind up causing any property damage, and the rebellion was swiftly put down just in time for another fire truck to bull through. Hands were raised in the traditional one-fingered greeting or drummed on the side of the door. Sleepy children in backseats waved or pulled faces.

And then, when they finally fought their way to the front of the line, those children just stared, and so did their parents. This is what I like about an accident. The road stretched out ahead of them, three lanes practically empty and theirs for the taking after hours of frustration, and yet they were hitting the brakes, gaping at the flashing lights. Cop cars parked sideways across the highway, flares carving space out of the road, EMTs clustered around the back of an ambulance, the lucky shell-shocked survivors talking to the officer to one side of the road while firefighters went after the less lucky with the Jaws of Life, and one solitary cop blankly facing the rows of headlights, smoking a cigarette. All very fascinating, maybe, to the little boy in the backseat who maybe wanted to be a firefighter when he grew up, but that's not why Daddy stomped on the brakes, hours late and with his head hurting from the demands of bored and tired children. And he wasn't looking to see if there was something he could do to help, no, and he wasn't looking to see if maybe it was someone he knew, he wasn't concerned. He just wanted to see. He wanted to see what was in the back of that ambulance, if the EMTs would just stop blocking the view. He wanted to see what was in that fire. He wanted to see if the kid the paramedic was pumping oxygen into was going to die. (The kid was already dead, just as dead as whatever was in the body bag being zipped up beside him, and the paramedic must have known this, but she put on a good show for the crowd. She would waste half the night pounding on the chest of a corpse until all its ribs were broken, just as long as she didn't have to admit she let a child die.) He'd never seen anyone die before. So he stomped on the brakes, and he stared, and let's face it, the little boy in the backseat wasn't looking at the shiny red firetruck either. He looked to the fire.

If I ever started to doubt the madness of human nature, spectacles like these would restore my faith; not the death and the flames, which are just life, but the crowds that gather. I know hunger when I see it. They're carrion hunters.

Jesse and Diamondback have dibs on the bed, when there's a bed. There wasn't any discussion about this. Jesse's never much cared where he sleeps - chairs, floors, hotel bathtubs, propped up against the wall; long as the sun is shining it doesn't make a bit of difference - but the lady gets the bed. Principle. And when it comes to sleeping arrangement, Jesse and Diamondback are a matched set. They don't fight, not much, not really. There's disagreements. They discuss. But Jesse doesn't spend many nights alone on the couch, when there's a couch, and there is a limit to just how intense those discussions can be allowed to get.

Neither one of them is going to leave, because neither one of them can leave.

Homer's first day was spent curled up in bed between them. The kid probably hadn't crawled into his real parents' bed for years, if ever, but Diamondback had him glued to her side and Homer didn't seem inclined to budge. Not for that first week, anyhow. Not for those first few years. He'd wander off, when the life stopped being scary and started being a game; he'd stake out his own territory for the day in a hotel chair, a tub, a backseat. But sooner or later the kid would wake up at high noon, and he'd crawl into bed, and Diamondback would shift over, make room for him. And it wasn't that Jesse minded playing the father figure. Not that he minded having a family again, not at all. Those first few years.

What he minded was seeing the way Homer started watching the teenage girls he killed. The way he'd snap at Diamondback, at Severen, at Jesse. The way he'd play with his food. Nothing wrong with a little good-hearted viciousness now and then, keeps things interesting; but it wasn't kids' games their Homer was playing. Yet when push came to shove, the little man crumpled, ran back to hide behind Mama, kept on crawling into bed with Diamondback and Jesse to make the bad dreams go away. And she'd keep on making room.

More often than not, those are the days that Jesse spends on the couch.

Justice means deciding who has the right to live, and who doesn't. So on the face of it you might think the concept would be downright homey for me. Might say the way I make a living is in the same vein.

But life and death's easy. Anyone can pick one over the other. An idiot with a gun can manage that. Forget the gun - a fist. A sloppy repair job. A couple bottles of beer. Doesn't take much. What makes death by justice special, what makes it matter, is that question of right. You see a corpse strung up on the hanging tree, you know this was a man who didn't deserve to live. He did terrible, very bad things.

Now, say someone's gotta die tonight. Anybody. And you're the one who gets to pick the lucky winner. Wouldn't you pick out someone who really deserves it? The immoral scum of this world; do everyone a favor and get rid of them. Then you wouldn't be a killer yourself, you understand, you would be justice. Sounds grand. Real nice words. Dress up all the blood and death pretty enough, and it might take you a while to notice that those ideals you're clinging to, they don't work quite so well as they used to. Starting to lose some of that shine. And the harder you cling, the sicker you get.

I don't do grand too well. Blood and death, those are real, those I can put my hands on. They're honest. But you start talking about right... That's out of my grasp.