"When you're laying there on that floor and they're counting, for nine seconds, all you can think is how free you are. But then you know, you gotta get up, and you gotta fight some more, cause if you don't, they're gonna kill you."
Dalton West is lost. Not in a physical sense, much deeper than that. From the time he'd awakened on the side of the road in an old pickup truck six months back, until today, was all he could remember. Even the name he carries is borrowed from a sticker on the back of that truck.
A fading polaroid image of a young boy, with a big, antique teddy bear that he somehow knows is him, and a small, silver medallion on a string around his wrist, are the only clues he has to who he might be, and what happened to make him forget everything else. Everything except an urge that keeps telling him someone's life depends on him remembering.
When he meets Leeanne, a small town girl, with even bigger problems, he'll put his search on hold to make sure she gets more than nine seconds of freedom.
I’d been in town all of five minutes and already people were asking my name. I wondered if I’d had this trouble before. Before I’d lost my name, I mean. Before everything that had happened to me from a smack on the butt in a brightly lit hospital room, until I was woken up by a sheriff’s deputy sleeping in a red Chevy truck on the side of the road about six months ago had disappeared.
“Uh, it’s Dalton,” I said. “Dalton West.” I hated the name, but when you’re being grilled by a farm fed cop at four AM, behind the tailgate of a truck you don’t recognize, you give the first answer that comes to you.
So, when I’d been stuck in that same situation, six month’s before, I’d given the first name that occurred to me. I read it from a chrome dealer’s emblem on the back of that same truck. Now, I figured I was stuck with it, until I got mine back.
Now, I was feeding this same lie to a perfectly nice woman, tending bar in a tumbledown roadhouse, somewhere in the vast darkness of a rural Oklahoma winter's night.
The bartender looked at the polaroid again. “No, can’t say as I have seen a teddy bear like that.” She said. “Cute kid, though.”
“Thanks,” I smiled, pulling my lips back from the icy cold neck of the beer bottle she’d slid over the counter not five minutes before.
“Is that you?” she laughed. “Well, you were cute then, and I can see not much has changed.”
Was I cute? I honestly didn’t know. I understood the concept, but I had no frame of reference. Losing your mind will do that to you.
“Might check with Vern,” a beefy man, wearing a trucker hat with the sleeves torn off his western shirt said.
“Oh, yeah, yeah, he might know,” the woman said, squinting down the bar at the sleeveless man.
“Who’s Vern?” I asked.
“Fella runs a antique shop down the road, bout half way to Frederick,” the sleeveless man said. He uprooted his beer and strode toward me along the bar, his belly got there first. “Name’s Hal,” he stuck out a big meaty hand.
His hand was warm and broad. He sat down.
“Vern’s a interesting character,” Hal said. He took the polaroid from the woman behind the bar and pushed his hat back for a closer look. “Yeah, if anybody around here can help a man find a teddy bear…” He took a long draw from his Bud Light and set the empty bottle down. Slapped the photo on the counter. Stood up and walked out.
I took my picture back, slid it into the wallet I’d been carrying it in for six months. Dropped a twenty on the bar and followed Hal out.
“Hey! What’s your name?” A skinny guy with a rodeo buckle the size of a dinner plate sized me up from the grill of his Dodge ram. Hal stood beside him, with a shit eating grin.
Being nice. “Dalton West,” I said. Not moving toward him.
“Heard you’re looking for a teddy bear. Did you lose your binkie too?” The cowboy spat in the dirt. They both laughed at something. I turned toward my truck.
If I didn’t need to be there. I’d walk calmly to the truck, put the key in, and not look back. But, I did need to be there. That was the third time I'd been told to talk to Vern in the past four days, I didn't let on. But Vern might very hold the only link I knew of to my identity. It was crucial. I wondered how long I could ignore the cowboy before he took offense. Too late.
The man led with his knees, spread wide. Reminded me of an old joke about a guy too bowlegged to stop a pig in an alley. He didn’t look smart, but cowboys were tough. I wondered if I could fight. I glanced down at my hands, thought about making a fist, but from experience, it’s damn near impossible to beat sense into a bull rider.
“Did you hear me friend?” He’d covered the ground between us in quick, crablike steps. His hat brim brushed my forehead. He leaned in. I had a good five inches on him.
I smiled. Being nice. “Well, see, I thought that was a rhetorical question. Obviously, a grown man doesn’t need a pacifier, so, I didn’t think it required an answer.”
“Rough him up, Ty,” Hal said, from the safety of the Dodge’s grill.
“Shut up Hal, I got this.” Ty looked up at me, blue eyes narrowing.
I guessed I should have been feeling something, but I wasn’t.
“We don’t really like weirdos around here. You a weirdo, boy?” Ty asked.
I thought about it. I had no name, no idea who I was, and I was roaming the countryside looking for a teddy bear in a faded polaroid. I honestly didn’t know. Being nice.
“Maybe,” I said.
Cowboy sniffed, sucked his teeth and spat. “Well,” he said. He rolled his neck and bowed his arms back, rolling his hands closed. I was about to find out if I could fight.
A car turned off the blacktop into the gravel lot. A spotlight came on. The engine idled smoothly as the cruiser rolled up, nosing in between us. The windows rolled down.
“Junior, go home,” the cop inside said.
The cowboy swore under his breath and scuffed boots back toward the big Dodge. It roared to life and he left, pinging gravel off the side of the cruiser. Hal disappeared back into the bar.
The spotlight turned off and in the blue neon light of a Bud Light sign, I met Big Daddy Crawford. The man unfolded from the car. He adjusted his holster and nightstick as he stood.
“Sorry about my son. He gets a little carried away sometime,” the big man said.
I looked up at him.
“So, what’s this I hear about you looking for some kid?”
Being nice. “Uh, no sir, a teddy bear,” I said. I held out the polaroid.
He pulled out a flashlight. Shone it on the photo.
“So, who’s the kid?” the cop asked.
“That’s me,” I said.
He looked at me. Squinted. “What kind of weirdo are you?”
What was it with people in small towns? Everyone wanted to know your name. Or they wanted to call you a weirdo. This guy had both going for him.
“What’s your name son?”
“Dalton West,” I said. Throwing in, “Sir”, for good measure.
“Well, I’m Sheriff Crawford. People call me Big Daddy. Where you from son?”
“Nowhere in particular sir. Just moving around,” I said.
He squinted harder. “Alright, well, let me see some ID, if that checks out, you can get on down the road, okay?” He flipped the photo over, checked the back for incriminating information, and handed it back.
“Well, sir,” I said. “I don’t have my ID on me.”
The sheriff’s head lolled back. He made an exasperated sound in his throat. “You have got to be kidding me. Why does this always happen on my bowling night?”
“Alright, you seem like a nice kid, show me your insurance form and we’ll call it a night. I got the league championship next week, can’t miss bowling,” he smiled. It creeped me out.
“Well, I got robbed a few weeks back. Don’t have that either,” I said.
He didn’t say a word. I figured that was bad. He picked up his radio.
“Skinner, get out here to Boots’s place. Got a drifter here asking questions about a kid in a picture. Got a truck, but no insurance form and no ID. We’re gonna need to search this damn truck,” he barked.
There was static. Then a sigh. Then a whiny voice came back over the radio. “Seriously? Sheriff, we got the league championship next week, we cannot miss tonight.”
“I know it, Skinner. But if one of them kids ends up missing because of this weirdo, the whole damn championship’s down the drain. We’ll be dragging ponds, and searching woods, and you know how much I love that. Now, get your ass down here to Boots’s place, now!”
The sheriff threw the radio into the car. It bounced off the windshield.
“HEY!” The whiner was back. “Turn your mic off before you throw your headset, sheriff, or it feeds back. We talked about this, my tinnitus…”
The sheriff snorted. He leaned in and picked up the radio.
“Screw your tinnitus, Skinner, get down here now!”
“Look, it’s a serious disability, sheriff. Millions of…”
With a click, the sheriff turned the whiner off. He took off his hat and rubbed his hand across his face.
“Okay kid, you sure you want to do this? You didn’t suddenly remember where your license is, did you?”
There’s something you don’t learn from watching TV.
Handcuffs hurt. Sitting on handcuffs on the hard plastic bench of a sheriff’s backseat is painful, and humiliating. When you’re not guilty, it’s also frustrating. I hadn’t done anything. At least, not that I could remember.
I’d been sitting the car for the better part of a half hour while they searched the cab, when Skinner called out.
“Sheriff, you’re gonna wanna see this,” he said. He stood at the tailgate of the truck. He was lifting the rubberized canvas cover, playing his flashlight inside the bed.
I sighed. This had been coming for a while. I couldn’t keep those bodies hidden forever and now things were going to get really interesting.
Big Daddy Crawford sidled impatiently over to Skinner. He took a look. He whistled.
“What the actual hell’m I lookin at Bert?” the sheriff said. He took the flashlight and pulled the cover up higher. “What? There’s more of them.”
“Well, sir, they’re decapitated,sir,” Skinner said, glaring at me.
“Damn straight they are Skinner. What kind of a sick nut hauls this around in the back of his truck?”
Boots crunched on the gravel, the rear door opened on the cruiser and I was eye level with the sheriff’s crotch.
He dragged me out of the car, my arms twisting up painfully in their sockets as he lifted me at my elbow. We marched to the back of the truck. He played his flashlight over the carnage inside.
“Son, I’m gonna ask you one more time, what kind of a weirdo are you?"