These days Lou's a (lawmaker) wrote in repose, @ 2019-06-18 20:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, burden bell, lou reid |
Lou & Misha: the Capital
Who: Misha B and Lou R
What: Late-night bus-stops
Warnings: Let's go with TBD.
The runs to the Capital took time. Back-of-a-bus time, way back on sticky seats and with the rime of the city clinging to the windows, the heat heavy and oppressive in a tin can on wheels that didn't take the fast roads but the way back ones. Lou didn't drive. Could, but didn't. Learned in one of those big trucks, the kind used for hay and feed and supplies instead of riding around town. A then-boyfriend, his hand over hers to guide riding stick as she jolted forward on a sick mixture of the kind of escape only a vehicle could bring and fear that felt an awful lot like freedom and excitement. That was a long way back and Lou didn't own anything with wheels. Her credit was shot, missing piece on her resume and it was the first on her list for the kind of jobs that took you way, way out back on the farms where the guys who fled bail were stony-eyed and buried in farm-work and the hope they would just get missed.
Parole officer. Tired excuse for the trek to the Capital but the guy wasn't coming to her. Lou rode out once a week, mandated anger management class on plastic chairs crammed into a room that had piss-poor acoustics and equally dire coffee and clutched a paper-cup and tried to listen to a guy who couldn't relate to the clawing, wrenching id of a creature that didn't have a lot of higher brain function most of the time, and nodded at convenient intervals. She was tired. Long day and late finish, and it was dark, the kind of dark even early summer summoned up to settle down with by ten pm and it blanketed the bus-stop on the far edge of the Capital, the one that had the only line that went back to Repose.
Something about dark, something about late, attracted people. They said things they wouldn't when the sun was bright enough to reproach. They did things they wouldn't do if their mommas could see, or the town could talk about it. It was a passing comment, two men in work-worn denim, lurking like bad news nobody wanted to tell and who snickered like little kids on the tail-end of a slur Lou had heard time before. Wasn't any better or worse, or prettier than it had been the last time she'd lived somewhere small enough that anything that wasn't white was novelty.
She looked toward the road, shoved her hands in her jacket pockets and turned her head toward the empty place where the bus would come, eventually and thought deliberate about all the techniques a man with a thin voice had tried to convince a roomful of no-interests were workable, when the time came the desire rose to kick the shit out of someone who deserved it, bad. Saw the kid making his way down the road toward the shelter of the 'stop before he came all the way and hoped he'd walk on by.