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.