ford campbell (wellearned) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-08-04 15:08:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | *narrative, ford campbell |
Narrative; Ford Campbell
Who: Ford Campbell
What: The State of the Ford
Where: Russell's place.
Rating: None, nice and safe squishy Ford
He hadn't called home in a long time. Not that he had ever been regular about it before, but it had been a little bit of a habit, drifting here and there until he found something that paid him two days in a row, and then finding a pay phone. As the years went on, it got harder to find a working pay phone, with everyone tapping away on their cellphones in their pockets, there weren't that many people like him who needed to call a mother they didn't really want to talk to with a couple quarters they didn't have.
Ford guessed it was probably Russell that made those phone calls into the void feel unnecessary. Russell was so big and loud, his beer-and-jean presence as full and certain to Ford as the sun rising these days. Ford had only had the time to miss his mother's whine on the miles of desert phone cable when he'd been cold and hungry back in that Prison door, and Russell hadn't been around then to open the fridge door or shout about buying new shoes. Even with all his big bear bellowing, Russell had never complained when Ford took too long to say things, never called him stupid, and never whined about how much money he sent home. There was little criticism from Russell even when Ford mixed up the numbers on the grocery sales signs and brought home ridiculously expensive toilet paper, and Ford grew complacent in the shade of that acceptance.
Ford had even managed to work some of the horrible Hotel trick out of his head. A few nightmares, a couple strange, thoughtless strolls in the middle of the night, and he felt a little better, a little more himself. He could still remember that horrible, easy aptitude for violence lurking around the edge of his mind, that feeling when he looked at passing people that they were nothing, or less than nothing. Ford hadn't realized that he was a nice person until the horror of Mason's mind and stained his own, and it took him a little while to get over it.
But then he started to, and things weren't so bad.
It was a little while more before he could stop thinking about how it felt to want death and receive it in that awful, disgusting, painful way, but soon enough, that too began to fade. He thought of "Sam W." as sort of like a Sam Winchester, who Ford had considered an angel on his shoulder back when he'd played host to the ghost hunter in his mind. It was easy to accept him as a person, and not the metal terminator hand guy, and it was all just a bad dream again.
Ford left the house. He went grocery shopping and guiltily stuck to the brands he knew after the first couple mistakes. He walked around the neighborhood and learned a little bit more about the dark place Russell had found a place in, and he sat in the back of a couple harmless bars and listened to the hushed/drunken chatter about the people he worked for.
It all seemed okay, though. Russell had good work and he wasn't hurting anybody, and he hadn't come home bloody or wasted in a while. From Ford's perspective, life was on a slow coast of good things, and he was sure he could find some manual labor thing he could do that didn't require talking. Talking was worse since the dead walking door and dying in the Hotel's horrible mall, and Ford wasn't sure why. Worse than before was pretty bad, and he was now dissecting and slaughtering words rather than just tripping over them. Sometimes he could get out a few sentences with Russell when he was really relaxed, but it wasn't often.
Ever positive, Ford tried to ignore the small blight on life. He got away without talking pretty well, like people visiting foreign countries, lots of smiling and pointing, and he stubbornly ignored any negative effects at the rough method of communication, no matter how frustrating it was to always get onions on his sandwiches when he didn't like onions, or how annoying it was when people thought he couldn't understand what they were saying about him, as if the ability to babble out what beer he wanted was the same thing as understanding what they were shouting at him.
Sometimes Ford wondered about other people who really couldn't talk, and he felt a little guilty about envying the ability to talk with your hands. Surely people who actually couldn't talk, not just ones that talked badly, would be angry to hear about somebody who was just too afraid to let people hear him fight through it. Hopefully he wouldn't run into anyone like that. They'd probably be right to be angry at him. It was a little cowardly, Ford admitted. Sometimes it was just easier to run away from stuff than try to fight it out. Avoiding the fight was even better. For everybody.
Eventually the guilt about calling mom caught up to him, though. He heard that you couldn't call other doors from different ones, and it took him a while to really worry about the one he'd originally come from. He didn't actually have a desire to go "home" and he didn't have any money to send mom so she could pour it into her habits. It was just that he wanted to talk to her, say hi, tell her he was fine, hear about her latest boyfriend, and just make sure she was okay. Or as okay as she was ever going to be, anyway.
Ford tried the lobby phone, the one you were supposed to be able to use to call home, but the number didn't work. It just died out, with that woman on there to tell him the number had been disconnected, leaving Ford frowning at the phone and wondering what that meant. Despite himself, he worried about it. He didn't know if he was worried enough yet to ask Russell. Russell would just be mad. Still, Ford was worried. He put the phone gently back on its ancient cradle and scratched at the curls on the crown of his head.
Maybe it was just broken. Old things broke.